Posted on 31-1-2003

Blair Is A Coward
by John Pilger, Mirror UK, 29 Jan03

William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of
imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to
describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass
killing of ordinary people.

In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern
political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W
Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair. There
is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and
suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms
his "authority".

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes
left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against
humanity. The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state
that offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of
civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".

Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied
even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors
have found, as one put it, "zilch". Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he
has no democratic cover. Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not
consult parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships
and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington
regime. Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.

All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney
and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech
last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler
called his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it.

To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of
innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share
responsibility. He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement
humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third
Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget
that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting
American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan
as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly
or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American
"interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like
oil.

When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing democracy to
the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath
Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein. "That was my favourite
coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush
talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US government last
December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons declaration, saying
they contained "sensitive information" which needed "a little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British
and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical
and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter
Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to
publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never
explained why.

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page
like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected
to people's lives. The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They
are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair,
who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their
actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands. Let me give a couple
of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In
Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American
invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the
sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the
"long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside
a "box" was presumed destroyed. When I reached a village within the "box",
the street had been replaced by a crater. I slipped on the severed shank of
a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the
intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's
skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that
seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg
had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from
a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in
that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television
or in the pages of a newspaper. I saw them only pinned on the wall of news
agency offices in Saigon as a kind of freaks' gallery.

Some years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in
villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent
Orange. It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it
contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison. This terrible chemical
weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now call a weapon of mass
destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam. Today, as the
poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue
to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many
have leukaemia. You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were
too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be
pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.

That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq
is attacked? I doubt it.

I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I travelled in Iraq
two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children
similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey
little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.

More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction,
were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British. Many
of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer.
In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and
playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable. For 12 years Iraq has been
denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate
its southern battlefields. It has also been denied equipment and drugs that
would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect
almost half the population in the south.

Last November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence Minister Adam
Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by
British forces operating in Iraq. His robotic reply was: "I am withholding
details in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to
Government Information."

Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow
human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and
Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who
are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in
Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq
"physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people
800 cruise missiles in two days. This will be more than twice the number of
missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. A
military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: "There
will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been
seen before, never been contemplated before." The strategy is known as
Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: "You
have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at
Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes."

What will his "Hiroshima effect" actually do to a population of whom almost
half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found in a
"confidential" UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates,
which says that "as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a
result of direct and indirect injuries". A Bush-Blair attack will destroy
"a functioning primary health care system" and deny clean water to 39 per
cent of the population. There is "likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in
epidemic if not pandemic proportions".

It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with
Blair's lies that have turned most people in this country against them,
including people who have not protested before.

Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to
find a "smoking gun" for Iraq to be attacked. Compare that with his
reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no "wider war" against Iraq
unless there was "absolute evidence" of Iraqi complicity in September 11.
And there has been no evidence.

Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the
nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that
Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more than $5billion
worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council. He has
lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament were
"needed to enrich uranium". The International Atomic Energy Agency has
denied this outright. He has lied about an Iraqi "threat", which he
discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a
gratuitous target of his "war on terror". Blair's "Iraq dossier" has been
mocked by human rights groups.

However, what is wonderful is that across the world the sheer force of
public opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming, John Howard in
Australia. So few people believe them and support them that The Guardian
this week went in search of the few who do - "the hawks". The paper
published a list of celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy at describing
their contortion of intellect and morality. It is a small list.

IN CONTRAST the majority of people in the West, including the United
States, are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers grow every
day. It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed the true
authority of parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy Corbyn
and George Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue and there
have been too many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street. If, as
Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers are against an attack, let
them speak up now.

Blair's figleaf of a "coalition" is very important to Bush and only the
moral power of the British people can bring the troops home without them
firing a shot. The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an
attack on Iraq. Washington will effectively take over the Middle East,
ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.

The next American attack is likely to be Iran. The Israelis want this - and
their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it may be China's turn.
"Endless war" is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding.
Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons "if necessary". On March 26 last
Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries "can be absolutely confident that
in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons".

Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is right here at home and
you, the British people, can stop it.