Lest We Forget; These Were Blair's Bombs

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071005X.shtml

 

Lest We Forget; These Were Blair's Bombs

By John Pilger

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Sunday 10 July 2005

 

In all the coverage of last week's bombing of London, a basic

truth is struggling to be heard. It is this: no one doubts the

atrocious inhumanity of those who planted the bombs, but no one should

also doubt that this has been coming since the day Tony Blair joined

George Bush in their bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are

" Blair's bombs " , and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with

yet another unctuous speech about " our way of life " , which his own

rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.

 

Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the

run-up to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp

increase in terrorism " with Britain and Britons a target " . A House of

Commons committee has since verified this warning. Had Blair heeded it

instead of conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq offered a threat

the Londoners who died on Thursday might be alive today, along with

tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

 

Three weeks ago, a classified CIA report revealed that the

Anglo-American invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a focal

point of terrorism. None of the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as

such a flashpoint before the invasion, however tyrannical the regime.

On the contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq " exported no

terrorist threat to his neighbours " and that Saddam Hussein was

" implacably hostile to Al-Qaeda " .

 

Blair's and Bush's invasion changed all that. In invading a

stricken and defenceless country at the heart of the Islamic and Arab

world, their adventure became self-fulfilling; Blair's epic

irresponsibility has brought the daily horrors of Iraq home to

Britain. For more than a year, he has urged the British to " move on "

from Iraq, and last week it seemed that his spinmeisters and good

fortune had joined hands. The awarding of the 2012 Olympics to London

created the fleeting illusion that all was well, regardless of messy

events in a faraway country.

 

Moreover, the G8 meeting in Scotland and its accompanying " Make

Poverty History " campaign and circus of celebrities served as a

temporary cover for what is arguably the greatest political scandal of

modern times: an illegal, brutal and craven invasion conceived in lies

and which, under the system of international law established at

Nuremberg, represented a " paramount war crime " .

 

Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the

G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another " global " event has been

striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no

coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date,

has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.

 

The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the

invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its

expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a

tribunal jury member, " demonstrate that even those of us who have

tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the

horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq. " The most shocking was given

by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq.

He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected

to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines

assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American

snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency

blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot

dead in front of their families, in cold blood.

 

Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed

on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's

bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of

whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about

this at one of the staged " press conferences " at which Blair is

allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about " our values outlast [ing]

theirs " ? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know " our

values " only too well.

 

While the two men responsible for the carnage in Iraq, Bush and

Blair, were side by side at Gleneagles, why wasn't the connection of

their fraudulent " war on terror " made with the bombing in London? And

when will someone in the political class say that Blair's

smoke-and-mirrors " debt cancellation " at best amounts to less than the

money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British

and American violence is the cause of the doubling of child poverty

and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).

 

The truth is that the debt relief the G8 is offering is lethal

because its ruthless " conditionalities " of captive economies far

outweigh any tenuous benefit. This was taboo during the G8 week, whose

theme was not so much making poverty history as the silencing and

pacifying and co-opting dissent and truth. The mawkish images on giant

screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park included no pictures of

murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut

down by Bush's snipers. Real life became more satirical than satire

could ever be.

 

There was Bob Geldoff on the front pages resting his smiling face

on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his knighted jester.

There was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like

Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding

" compassionate " George Bush's " war on terror " as one of his

generation's greatest achievements; and there was Paul Wolfowitz,

beaming and promising to make poverty history: this is the man who,

before he was handed control of the World Bank, was an apologist for

Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia, who was one of the architects

of Bush's " neo-con " putsch and of the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion

of " endless war " .For the politicians and pop stars and church leaders

and polite people who believed Blair and Gordon Brown when they

declared their " great moral crusade " against poverty, Iraq was an

embarrassment. The killing of more than 100,000 Iraqis mostly by

American gunfire and bombs -- a figure reported in a comprehensive

peer-reviewed study in The Lancet -- was airbrushed from mainstream

debate.

 

In our free societies, the unmentionable is that " the state has

lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people " , as Arthur

Miller once wrote, " and so the evidence has to be internally denied. "

Not only denied, but distracted by an entire court: Geldoff, Bono,

Madonna, McCartney et al, whose " Live 8 " was the very antithesis of 15

February 2003 when two million people brought their hearts and brains

and anger to the streets of London. Blair will almost certainly use

last week's atrocity and tragedy to further deplete basic human rights

in Britain, as Bush has done in America. The goal is not security, but

greater control. Above all this, the memory of their victims, " our "

victims, in Iraq demands the return of our anger. And nothing less is

owed to those who died and suffered in London last week, unnecessarily.

 

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