Distant Voices (25 page)

This no more than mirrors the cover-up by those who ran the war in Washington. Thanks mostly to one maverick Congressman, Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, we now have detail of how George Bush, as president and vice-president, secretly and illegally set out to support and placate Saddam Hussein right up to the invasion. According to classified documents, Bush personally directed the appeasement of Saddam and misled Congress, and US intelligence was secretly fed to Saddam. ‘Behind closed doors,' says the Gonzalez indictment,

Bush courted Saddam Hussein with a reckless abandon that ended in war and the deaths of dozens of our brave soldiers and over 200,000 Muslims, Iraqis and others. With the backing of the President, the State Department and National Security Council staff conspired in 1989 and 1990 to keep the flow of US credit, technology and intelligence information flowing to Iraq despite repeated warnings by several other agencies and the availability of abundant evidence that Iraq used [US bank] loans to pay for US technology destined for Iraq's missile, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes.
¹¹⁶

It is clear that in the summer of 1990 George Bush believed that Saddam Hussein – his ‘man', the dictator he backed against the mullahs in Iran and trusted to guard America's interests – had betrayed him. It also seems clear Bush believed that if his appeasement of Saddam ever got out, the invasion of Kuwait might be blamed on him personally – hence the magnitude of his military response. To cover himself, the price was carnage, which he described as ‘the greatest moral crusade since World War Two'.

January 17, 1992 to May 1992

DURING THE FIRST
session of Parliament following the 1992 general election Britain is threatening to take part in an attack on two countries with which it is not at war. This has provoked almost no interest at Westminster, prompting the serious question: What is Parliament for? It is a question I shall return to. Meanwhile, some background:

Prime Minister Major has told President Bush that the United States is free to use British air bases to attack Libya, and that Britain will take part in a renewed American assault on Iraq ‘if necessary'.
¹¹⁷
The contingency for these attacks is justified with a UN resolution whose legitimacy rests on Article 51 of the UN Charter. This says that a member can defend itself, but in no sense does it endorse a prolonged campaign of counter-attack. Since the Gulf War, the United States and Britain have used the United Nations to conduct a campaign of attrition against Iraq, bleeding it; the sufferers have been primarily children, whose death-rate is said to have increased by an estimated 400 per cent.
¹¹⁸

Now the United States and Britain are on the verge of bombing Iraq on the pretext that Iraq refuses to destroy its ‘weapons of mass destruction' – when, in fact, Iraq has asked that some of its military industry be converted to civilian production laid waste by Allied bombing. The bombing would probably finish off Iraq's industrial base.

A similar attack is likely against Libya. American and British domination of the United Nations on this issue has produced yet another ‘high noon' deadline by which Libya must surrender two men accused of the Lockerbie bombing,
or face sanctions and worse. That the evidence against the two is, at best, circumstantial, and their prospects of a fair trial in Scotland or the United States remote, are not considered relevant factors.

The Scottish Prime Minister (John Major) has told Parliament that the accused Libyans are ‘the perpetrators' of the outrage. Alex Carlile, MP has similarly described them as ‘these two mass murderers', who should be brought here for ‘a fair trial'.
¹¹⁹
As numerous fitted-up Irishmen can bear witness, the fairness of British justice can no longer be guaranteed.

The American campaign against Libya, like its counterpart against Iraq, relies on the obsolescence of history. In the United States this is guaranteed by a standard assumption that the Libyans are guilty, thus providing the Bush administration with the kind of support it needs in an uncertain election year.

Few can doubt that Colonel Gaddafi runs an odious autocracy. However, if this was justification for blockading and bombing his country, most of the regimes propped up by the United States would be awaiting a similar fate. The truth is that Libya has been stitched up on several occasions since Libyan oil was nationalised in 1969 and Gaddafi refused to behave like the American client his predecessors used to be. In 1981, he was accused of sending a team of assassins to America, armed with surface-to-air missiles and led by ‘East German terror experts' under orders from the colonel to kill Ronald Reagan, the secretary of state and secretary of defence. The Soviet Union was said to be behind it. Comic-book sketches of the would-be assassins were published.
¹²⁰

None of it was true. In 1986,
TV Guide
published a cover story entitled ‘Why American TV is So Vulnerable to Foreign Propaganda', in which it claimed that the Libyan hit team story was really a figment of a KGB campaign to spread alarm and ‘to destabilise public opinion in the West'.
¹²¹
The admission came shortly after American warplanes had bombed Libyan civilians from British bases. Libya's ‘crime' then was a terrorist bombing in Berlin that was later traced
to the Assad regime in Syria. In 1990, the same Syrian regime was rewarded with millions of dollars' worth of arms credits.
¹²²
‘We have problems with their support of terrorism,' said Secretary of State James Baker, ‘but we share a common goal.'
¹²³
The goal was the destruction of Syria's old foe, Iraq.

That goal is now drawing closer, along with the goal of finishing off the uppity Gaddafi, a perfect hate figure in an election year. The United Nations will provide legitimacy for what are little more than acts of international piracy. As Francis Boyle, the distinguished American authority on international law, has pointed out, the US and Britain have violated both the Montreal Sabotage Convention and the UN Charter. ‘The conclusion is unescapable', he wrote, ‘that the reason why the US and UK have illegally rejected all means for the peaceful resolution of this dispute with Libya is that both states know full well that Libya was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.'
¹²⁴

The ‘new world order' strategists may, however, come unstuck in Libya. Arab hostility towards American dominance in Middle Eastern affairs has sharpened since the destruction of Iraq. The ripple effect on economic and political life in the region has reinforced fundamentalism, as recent events in Algeria demonstrate. The Arab world has identified the essential hypocrisy of UN pressure on Iraq and Libya. Israel, having repeatedly thumbed its nose at UN resolutions, is under no such pressure.

As for Britain, it is the tenth anniversary of the Falklands War and the British foreign policy establishment is reminding itself of the debt it owes to Washington, without whose satellite intelligence Margaret Thatcher might not have been able to call upon us to ‘rejoice'. However, Britain's role during the past decade has been more active than that of indebted loyal lieutenant. As John Gittings has pointed out, the British have ‘exalted the values of war over peace, of unilateral settling of scores rather than multilateral negotiations of differences'.
¹²⁵
It was Thatcher who promoted these values more than Reagan or Bush. In accepting cruise missiles in Britain, she single-handedly accelerated the nuclear arms race.

Great power nostalgia and pretensions are always close at hand in Britain. The Conservative election manifesto emphasised the need for Britain ‘to regain . . . rightful influence' and to ‘lead the world'. Labour wanted to ‘partner' the United States in reducing nuclear weapons. Instead of calling for a total moratorium on arms sales to the Middle East, Labour wanted to ‘control' the arms bazaar. Like John Major's ‘arms register', this would have merely screened the scandals and corruption of the British arms industry. So the question is put: What is Parliament for?

In supporting the slaughter during the Gulf War – Tory and Labour together – Parliament failed in one of its primary obligations: to represent and articulate the misgivings of a large section of the population. Since then, Parliament has been instrumental in the covering up of a report into Britain's biggest arms contract with one of the beneficiaries of the war and the principal Western client in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia.

Parliament's public-spending ‘watchdog', the Public Accounts Committee, has refused to publish the results of a three-year enquiry into the Saudi deal, which is for British Tornado aircraft worth £20 billion. The chairman, Robert Sheldon, a Labour MP, says that he has spent ‘many hours worrying about this decision, but there really are enormous amounts of jobs at stake'.
¹²⁶
He says that there is ‘no evidence of corruption or of public money being used improperly'.
¹²⁷
If this is true, why can't the report be released? What are parliamentary committees for if not to shed light on that which officialdom wishes to conceal?

In the case of the Saudi deal, like so much to do with British ‘interests' in the Gulf, secrecy and stink go together. The National Audit Office, which refused to show its own report to Sheldon's committee, has found that the Saudi contract was written in such a way that huge ‘commissions' running into hundreds of millions of pounds may have been paid by British Aerospace to Saudi and British middlemen.
¹²⁸
How does this square with Sheldon's statement that there is ‘no evidence of corruption'? And is it not true that when the National Audit Office announced that it was to hold an
enquiry, the Saudis threatened to pull out of the Tornado deal?
¹²⁹

According to the
Observer
, Mark Thatcher may have received as much as £10 million from one of the main British Aerospace agents involved in the Saudi deal, which was negotiated while his mother was prime minister.
¹³⁰
He has been named in a civil action in the United States as having helped British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce to win a helicopter defence contract in Saudi Arabia. A confidential memorandum refers to $4 billion ‘mentioned in connection with M. Thatcher's son'.
¹³¹
If none of this is in the public interest, what is? Parliament should find out the facts and tell us. That is what it's for.

April to May 1992

JOHN MAJOR'S SKILFULLY
managed tour of the Far East recalls to mind the anonymous radical song
circa
1820: ‘What land has not seen Britain's crimson flying, the meteor of murder, but justice the plea.' Major's toasting of Li Peng, the accredited mass murderer, was in keeping both with British imperialist tradition and present-day Western Stalinism. True, Major's career has been mostly as an apparatchik, although the keenness with which he engaged in the recolonisation of the Middle East and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians suggested he was made of stronger stuff. His journey to China for the purpose of offering alliance and reassurance to those who ordered the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the crushing of the democracy movement, guarantees his prominent place above the mausoleum of the ‘new world order'.

None of this is surprising. The symbiosis of the actions and endorsements of grey men with bloody repression is well documented. Chamberlain fawned over Hitler; Kissinger unleashed the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on Cambodia; Bush dispatched several thousand Panamanians as the precursor of his ‘famous victory' in the Gulf. And all were attended by a fellow-travelling media. Major's Chinese exercise, amoral by any normal standards of human behaviour, was routinely misrepresented as an heroic ‘bullying stand' on behalf of human rights. That Major's concern for human rights did not extend to Hong Kong, where he has the power directly to influence policy on democratisation, was not considered important and was widely suppressed. The posturing
of the old Soviet Stalinists was celebrated within similar fixed boundaries of public discourse.

Western Stalinism is by far the most insidious variety. In a democracy, manipulation of public perception and opinion is, by necessity, more subtle and thorough than in a tyranny. Major's China trip is a case in point. Contrary to the managed headlines, its aim was to reassure the Beijing regime that the Western imperialist powers had no intention of disturbing the state of capitalism in Hong Kong by allowing genuine democracy to take root. China, after all, is the paragon of what the dissident Russian writer Boris Kagarlitsky has called ‘market Stalinism'; that is, an economic state in which there are consumer goods in the shop windows, growing unemployment, depleted public services and a totalitarian regime. Even that most inspirational of China's revolutionary achievements – its system of barefoot doctors – is being swept aside by privatisation drawn from the same Thatcherite model that is undermining the National Health Service in Britain.

The new propaganda differs from the old only in the technology of its conveyance. It says that, following events in the Soviet Union, a market economy and democracy are indivisible and that the unrestrained forces of Western (and Japanese) capitalism equal freedom and life. This supersedes the Cold War refrain of the Russian Threat, which allowed the United States to construct its economic and strategic empire following 1945.