Distant Voices (18 page)

In a genuinely free society, there needs to be unrestricted debate, drawing on a diversity of sources that reflect the complexion of a society that is not one nation. As the
Daily Mirror
has pointed out, it will be the sick and old who will pay the bill for this war. So whose ‘national interest' is at stake?

Is the build-up to war really a demonstration of America's world ‘leadership' at a time of deepening recession and diminishing sources of raw materials and opportunities for ‘free trade'? Why have sanctions not been allowed time to succeed? We all, it seems, live by the January 15 deadline. Saddam must leave Kuwait by that date. But the facts are not as they have been represented. At his news conference on November 30, Bush actually hoped Saddam would meet James Baker ‘at a mutually convenient time' between December 15 and January 15. He did not name a specific date. The Iraqis may be awkward about the date, but so is Bush; and why should life and death for thousands of innocent people, who do not appreciate the ‘values' of
High Noon
, hang upon it?

The
Observer
recently illustrated an article about the British Army in the Gulf, with a picture of a Colonel Denaro blowing a hunting horn to summon his driver. The colonel was described as ‘an extravagant character with an attractive swashbuckling manner'. His regiment, the Hussars, ‘are sometimes to be found wearing their big Browning automatics in shoulder holsters over tank crew's overalls, which gives them a rakish appearance'. Some of the officers come from ‘the same stock as Wellington', and are heirs to the Light Brigade, ‘the same gallant six hundred . . .'
¹⁹
The Charge of the Light Brigade was one of the most pointless imperial disasters in history.

The national newspaper editors being called to discuss war coverage at the Ministry of Defence should read the Crimea diaries of perhaps the greatest of all British war reporters,
William Howard Russell, of
The Times.
Not for him propaganda in the ‘national interest'. He reported the sacrificial battles, the waste, the blunders. ‘Am I to tell these things?' he wrote to his editor, John Delane, ‘or am I to hold my tongue?' To which Delane replied: ‘Continue as you have done, to tell the truth, as much of it as you can.'
²⁰
Both were described as ‘treasonous', having incurred the wrath of the monarch, the prime minister and the rest of the establishment. This, of course, ought to be no more than an occupational hazard.

January 7, 1991

IN 1972, I
watched American B52s bombing southern Vietnam, near the ashes of a town called An Loc. From a distance of two miles, I could see three ladders of bombs curved in the sky; and, as each rung reached the ground, there was a plume of fire and a sound that welled and rippled, then quaked the ground beneath me.

This was Operation Arc Light, described by the Pentagon as ‘high performance denial interdiction, with minimised collateral damage': jargon that echoes today. The B52s were unseen above the clouds; between them they dropped seventy tons of explosives in a ‘long-box' pattern that extended several miles. Almost everything that moved inside the box was deemed ‘redundant'.

On inspection, a road that connected two villages had been replaced by craters, one of them almost a quarter of a mile wide. Houses had vanished. There was no life; cooking pots lay strewn in a ditch, no doubt dropped in haste. People a hundred yards from the point of contact had not left even their scorched shadows, which the dead had left at Hiroshima. Visitors to Indo-China today are shocked by the moonscape of craters in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where people lived.

The B52s now operating over Iraq are the same type of thirty-year-old aircraft. We are told they are bombing Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, and the ‘outskirts' of Baghdad. Before the introduction in Vietnam of military euphemisms designed to make palatable to Congress new hitech ‘anti-people' weapons, the term used was
carpet-bombing. This was vivid and accurate, for these aircraft lay carpets of death, killing and destroying comprehensively and indiscriminately. This is what they were built to do; and that is what they are no doubt doing in a country where most people neither have shelters nor are ‘dug in'.

The other night, on television, a senior ex-RAF officer included the current B52 raids in his description of ‘pinpoint strikes . . . part of the extraordinary precision work of the Allies'. John Major and Tom King constantly refer to this ‘remarkable precision' and, by clear implication, the equally remarkable humanitarian benefits this brings to the innocent people of Iraq, although further information about these benefits is curiously unforthcoming.

The British media amplify this. Indeed, so zealously have the London-based ‘media response teams' spread the authorised word that the controllers of information in Whitehall have had to rein them in, rather like the sorcerer and his apprentice. George Bush has wagged his finger. Come on guys, let's not be ‘overly euphoric'. John Major's autocue has said as much.

The first authorised version of the war was the Euphoria Version, put out by Bush himself and the Major autocue. This has now been replaced by the It Won't Be Easy Version. According to the Controllers of Information, the ‘phenomenal surgery' of Allied technology, alas, failed to ‘take out' most of the Iraqi Air Force and the Scud missiles. The echoes from Vietnam grow louder. The fabled ‘tunnel' has returned. Wait now for the ‘light'.

Protesting far too much, Bush says comparisons with the Vietnam War are inappropriate. Listen carefully to General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and himself a product of the Vietnam War, and the vocabulary and attitude are the same. The principal weapons used against Iraq, such as the Tomahawk cruise missile, have a ‘circular error probability'. This means they are targeted to fall within a circle, like a dart landing anywhere on a dart board. They do not have to hit, or even damage, the bull's-eye to be considered ‘effective' or ‘successful'. Some have hit
the bull's-eye – the Tomahawk that demolished the Ministry of Defence building in Baghdad is the most famous – but many, if not most, clearly have not. What else have they hit? What else is within the circle? People, maybe? The numerous autocues say nothing.

General Powell has also referred to ‘minimised collateral damage'. Like ‘circular error probability', this term was invented in Vietnam. It means dead civilians: men, women and children. Their number is ‘minimised', of course, although we are not told against what benchmark this is measured. Of course, the Iraqis have no wish to admit they are bleeding badly, preferring to exaggerate the numbers of enemy planes brought down: just as the British did during the Battle of Britain.

The common feature of the Euphoria Version and the It Won't Be Easy Version is manipulation. What is distinctive about this war, compared with even the Falklands War, is that media scepticism has been surrendered without a whimper. There are rare exceptions, notably in the
Guardian.
Lies dished out are lies swallowed whole. Video-game pictures are believed by intelligent people; no context is called for. John Major's congratulatory message to the BBC was affirmation of the public broadcaster's role.

Television's satellite and video-game wizardry merely reinforces our illusions. The system of ‘sound bites', perfected by the Cable News Network (CNN), means that if truth intrudes, it is quickly rendered obsolete. Genuine, informed analysis is out of the question. There is no blood. An emotional screen is erected between us and reality, and our sensibilities are adjusted accordingly.

Pilots are represented as heroic, as heirs of ‘the few' who faced the
Luftwaffe.
Truth is turned on its head. No one doubts the pilots' courage; but the original ‘few' were up against equals, not those of a Third World country – regardless of propaganda about a ‘massive Iraqi machine'. The Israelis are also described as showing ‘extraordinary courage' in the face of ‘this outrageous attack' on them, while the people of Iraq are devoid of human form, let alone courage.
Unlike the Vietnamese, they are not even stick figures allowed to flit like phantoms across the screen.

Long before the war started, in order to prepare them, the British people were denied an understanding of the complexity of reasons behind the crisis in the Gulf. It was not mentioned that Britain virtually invented Iraq and divested it of Kuwait in order to divide and rule the region, laying the roots of this war. That the Americans had helped to put Saddam Hussein in power, providing him with a hit list of his opponents, was regarded as irrelevant. That Britain, America and other ‘allies' sustained his murderous regime was relegated to the letters pages.

Remember the United Nations? The UN role is now hardly mentioned. Once the countdown to January 15 had begun, sanctions, the fraudulence of the American deadline and the dubious legality of Resolution 678, in relation to the UN Charter, were issues apparently unworthy of impartial scrutiny by those who wear their impartiality where others are said to wear their heart.

Beware, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, of ‘your sham impartialists, wolves in sheep's clothing, simpering honestly as they suppress'.

January 25, 1991

I ONCE GLIMPSED
Henry Kissinger in Bangladesh when he was Richard Nixon's secretary of state. His visit was described by the American Embassy as a ‘hardship stopover'; and he was driven in haste to the ambassador's residence, where he spent the night before being delivered back to the airport.

Bangladesh was then in the grip of flood and famine; and I, and other reporters, enquired if Kissinger's motorcade might be diverted a few miles to a camp where tens of thousands of desperate people had been herded. This seemed especially relevant, as Kissinger had earlier dismissed Bangladesh as a ‘basket-case' and had established in the State Department the Office of Multilateral Diplomacy, better known as the ‘Zap Office'. It was here that the voting patterns of Third World members of the United Nations were scrutinised so that those countries which voted against US motions could be identified and warned and, if need be, ‘zapped' – that is, their US food ‘concessions' would be cut off.

In a land of starving people, Kissinger probably saw not one. I mention this because Kissinger has always exemplified for me those who exercise imperial power and seldom see the consequences of their actions. There is also the ingredient of hypocrisy.

Latter-day Kissingers, ‘statesmanlike' men of equally impeccable manner if not repute, are prosecuting the colonial war in the Gulf without the slightest risk of confronting the consequences of their actions, such as human beings ‘zapped'
by British and American cluster bombs. I once saw a rare survivor of a cluster attack; minute shrapnel, like needles, were ‘swimming' through her organs, according to a doctor, torturing her to death.

Latter-day Kissingers often use a language few people speak: a semantic syrup that reveals nothing, omits a great deal and dispenses words like ‘principles'. In an article in the
Guardian
last week, Douglas Hurd managed to mention ‘principle' and ‘oil' in the same column. Addressing critics of the war, and those he described as ‘cynics', Hurd wrote, ‘What of the charge that the problem of Saddam Hussein is of the West's own creating? Critics claim we supported and armed him during the Iran–Iraq War. But . . . we refused to sell armaments to either side'.
²¹

In July 1981 Hurd, then a foreign office minister, flew to Baghdad as a ‘high level salesman' (
Guardian
, July 17, 1981). His mission was to court Saddam; what he was hoping to sell, once the Iran–Iraq War was over, was a British Aerospace air defence system: a sale that ‘would be the biggest of its kind ever achieved'. Ostensibly, Hurd was in Baghdad to ‘celebrate' with Saddam the coming to power of the Iraqi Ba'athists in 1968, one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Middle Eastern history, which, with Washington's help, extinguished all hope of a pluralistic Iraq. Hurd would have known that the man whose hand he shook, the man to whom he came as a ‘super salesman' of British technology, was renowned as an interrogator and torturer of Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the ‘Palace of the End'.

Far from ‘refusing to sell armaments' to Iraq, the British Government has played a critical role in building what Hurd now constantly refers to as ‘the massive Iraqi military machine'. This has been done by subterfuge and sleight of hand. According to a report soon to be released by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, at least 20 British companies have been allowed to supply Saddam Hussein with missile technology, radar and computerised machine tools. Although ‘lethal defence equipment' to Iraq has been banned, ‘existing contracts' have been honoured. A number of British
companies, including at least one owned outright by Iraqis tied to the Iraqi military, have exported equipment that has gone straight to weapons and ammunition factories. The ‘super gun' is the most famous example. Others have exported machine tools said to have been designed for civilian production, which have ‘dual use'. Indeed, ‘lethal defence equipment' apparently does not include British-machined shells, British-designed bomb shelters, British-made anti-gas kits, British uniforms and the training of Iraqi fighter pilots in the Lake District.
²²

Following Saddam Hussein's genocidal gassing of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Trade Minister Tony Newton flew out with 20 British officials and offered ‘the Butcher of Baghdad' £340 million worth of British trade credit – more than double that of the previous year. The flow of British largesse was not interrupted by Saddam Hussein's murder of the
Observer
journalist Farzad Bazoft.