The Case Against War:
A conflict driven by the
self-interest of America
by Robert Fisk
The Independent newspaper
(UK), February 15, 2003
In the end, I think we are just tired
of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded
with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information
and student essays dressed up as "intelligence". We
are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack
Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative
henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle
East to their advantage.
No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt
refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday
warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world
could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies"
they have become.
The British don't like Hussein any more
than they liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair
does not, the Second World War; they are not conned by childish
parables of Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement. They
do not like being lectured and whined at by men whose experience
of war is Hollywood and television.
Still less do they wish to embark on endless
wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam
draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending America's
poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has nothing at all to do
with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Jack Straw,
the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with
Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that
Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a dictatorship
that America and Britain sustained when Saddam was "one of
ours". But he and Blair cannot discuss the dark political
agenda behind George Bush's government, nor the "sinister
men" (the words of a very senior UN official) around the
President.
Those who oppose war are not cowards.
Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims,
Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations,
Iraqis included though we play down the RAF's use of gas
on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when the British are asked
to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror
stories, Britons and many Americans are a lot braver
than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell
in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.
Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that
play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do
they take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans,
are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this obscene
war may make them feel more, not less, European.
Palestine has much to do with it. Brits
have no love for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and
are outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians
by a nation that is now in effect running US policy in the Middle
East. We are told that our invasion of Iraq has nothing to do
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a burning, fearsome
wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his meretricious
State of the Union speech but even Blair can't get away
with that one; hence his "conference" for Palestinian
reform at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link
because Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let
them travel to London.
So much for Blair's influence over Washington
the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted"
that he couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least
one has to acknowledge that Sharon war criminal though he
may be for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres treated
Blair with the contempt he deserves. Nor can the Americans hide
the link between Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious
address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the
three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings so
cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.
Just as he told us about the mysterious
al-Qa'ida men who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi
gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a
free hand again in his campaign of rape and murder against the
Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to the UN General Assembly
last 12 September about the need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only
becomes clear when one realises that Turkomans make up two thirds
of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil fields.
The men driving Bush to war are mostly
former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they
have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard
Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith,
Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning
for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected
if he was elected US President. And they weren't doing
so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm)
called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for
the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and
produced by a group headed by yes, Richard Perle. The destruction
of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear
weapons and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever
colonial settlement Sharon has in store.
Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss
this with us a war for Israel is not going to have our boys
lining up at the recruiting offices Jewish American leaders
talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed,
those very courageous Jewish American groups who so bravely oppose
this madness have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli
organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil but
of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to
the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this
topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins
University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after
Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections
to the war might yet again be ascribed to "anti-Semitism
of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes
to Jews a malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said,
is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery,
argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with even more Arab enemies,
especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon then joins the US
battle against the Arabs.
The slur of "anti-Semitism"
also lies behind Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe".
He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and
the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and
Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the
continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the innocent.
It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America;
not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F D
Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise the old America that killed
its native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures. It is
"old" America we are being asked to fight for
linked to a new form of colonialism an America that first
threatens the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the
same to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor for
Nato. But it may well be the last chance for America to be taken
seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.
In these last days of peace the British
should not be tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution.
UN permission for America's war will not make the war legitimate;
it merely proves that the Council can be controlled with bribes,
threats or abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention,
after all, which allowed America to fight the savage Korean war
under the UN flag. And we should not doubt that after a
quick US military conquest of Iraq and providing 'they" die
more than we die there will be plenty of anti-war protesters
who will claim they were pro-war all along. The first pictures
of "liberated" Baghdad will show Iraqi children making
victory signs to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and
cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon as the "war"
ends, when our colonial occupation of a Muslim nation for the
US and Israel begins.
There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon
a "man of peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial
over Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just withdrawn
its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see Saddam in the same
court. And Rifaat Assad for his 1982 massacre in the Syrian city
of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.
Israeli and US ambitions in the region
are now entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and
regional control. It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who
is treacherously telling us that this is part of an eternal war
against "terror". And the British and most Europeans
don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America.
They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if
that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for
Blair either.
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