Читать книгу The Revenge of History - Seumas Milne - Страница 7
ОглавлениеAGGRESSION, OCCUPATION AND DELUSION (2002–05)
The US–British invasion and occupation of Iraq on a false pretext was the most devastating outcome of the neoconservative project to reorder the Middle East in the American image. But it also proved to be its spectacular undoing. The failed attempt to legitimise an unprovoked attack against a broken-backed oil state on the basis of deception fatally undermined the credibility of the Blair government – while the plan to create a Western regional bridgehead out of what rapidly became a catastrophic occupation was derailed by the scale of Iraqi resistance. What was intended to be a demonstration of unassailable global power turned into its opposite. And the US administration’s promise of democracy, it was once again rammed home, would only apply to the right kind of leaders and states.
They are fighting for their independence, not Saddam
The Anglo-American war now being fought in the Middle East is without question the most flagrant act of aggression carried out by a British government in modern times. The assault on Iraq which began a week ago, in the teeth of global and national opinion, was launched without even the flimsiest Iraqi provocation or threat to Britain or the US, in breach of the UN charter and international law, and in defiance of the majority of states represented on the UN Security Council.
It is necessary to descend deep into the mire of the colonial era to find some sort of precedent or parallel for this piratical onslaught. However wrong or unnecessary, every previous British war for the past eighty years or more has been fought in response to some invasion, rebellion, civil war or emergency. Even in the most crudely rapacious case of Suez, there was at least a challenge in the form of the nationalisation of the canal. Not so with Iraq, where the regime was actually destroying missiles with which it might have hoped to defend itself only a couple of days before the start of the US-led attack.
But there is little reflection of this reality, or of Anglo-American isolation in the world over the war, in either the bulk of the British media coverage or the response from most politicians and public figures. Little is now heard of the original pretext for war, Iraq’s much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction, and regime change – that lodestar of the US hawks which Tony Blair struggled to dissociate himself from for so long – is now the uncontested mission of the campaign.
Having lost the public debate on the war, Blair has demanded that a divided nation rally round British troops carrying out his policy of aggression in the Gulf. And under a barrage of war propaganda, the soft centre of public opinion has dutifully shifted – in the wake of those MPs who put their careers before constituents and conscience once Blair had failed to secure UN authorisation. Many balk at criticising the war when British soldiers are in action, but it’s hardly a position that can be defended as moral or principled when the action they are taking part in arguably constitutes a war crime. And whether public support holds up under the pressure of events – such as yesterday’s civilian carnage in a Baghdad market – remains to be seen.
Events have, of course, signally failed to follow their expected course. The pre-invasion spin couldn’t have been clearer. The Iraqis would not fight, we were told, but would welcome US and British invaders with open arms. The bulk of the regular army would capitulate as soon as they saw the glint on the columns of American armour. The war might only last six days, Donald Rumsfeld suggested, in a contemptuous evocation of the Arabs’ humiliation in the six-day war of 1967. His hard-right Republican allies insisted it would be a ‘cakewalk’. British ministers, as ever, took their cue from across the Atlantic, while the intelligence agencies and US-financed Iraqi opposition groups reinforced their arrogant assumptions.
But Rumsfeld’s six days have been and gone, and resistance to the most powerful military machine in history continues to be fierce across Iraq – in and around the very Shi’ite-dominated towns and cities, such as Najaf and Nasiriyah, that the US and Britain expected to be least willing to fight. Nor has the Iraqi army yet collapsed or surrendered in large numbers, while regular units are harrying US and British forces along with loyalist militias. One senior US commander told the New York Times yesterday that ‘we did not put enough credence in their abilities’, while another conceded: ‘We did not expect them to attack.’ The International Herald Tribune recorded dolefully that ‘the people greeting American troops have been much cooler than many had hoped.’
There was little public preparation for the resistance that is now taking place. Third-world peoples have after all been allocated a largely passive role in the security arrangements of the New World Order; the best they can hope for is to be ‘liberated’ and be grateful for it. There has been little understanding that, however much many Iraqis want to see the back of Saddam Hussein, they also – like any other people – don’t want their country occupied by foreign powers. No doubt Ba’athist militias are playing a coercive role in stiffening resistance. There are also those who cannot expect to survive the fall of the dictatorship, and therefore have nothing to lose. But the scale and commitment of the resistance – along with reports of hundreds of Iraqis attempting to return from Syria and Jordan to fight – suggest that it is driven far more by national and religious pride. Most of these people are not fighting for Saddam Hussein, but for the independence of their homeland.
To fail to recognise this now obvious reality is not only condescending, but stupid. But then we have been subjected to such a blizzard of disinformation in recent days – from the reported deaths of Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein to the non-existent chemical weapons plant and Tuesday’s uprising in Basra – that it should come as no surprise to hear everyone from British and US defence ministers to BBC television presenters refer to Iraqis defending their own country as ‘terrorists’.
Of course, the US has the military might to break Iraqi conventional resistance and impose a puppet administration in Baghdad in order to change the regional balance of power, oversee the privatisation of Iraq’s oil and parcel out reconstruction contracts to itself and its friends. But the course of this war will also have a huge political impact, in Iraq and throughout the world. This is after all a demonstration war, designed to cow and discipline both the enemies and allies of the US. The tougher the Iraqi resistance, the more difficult it will be for the US to impose its will in the country, and move on to the next target in the never-ending war on terror. The longer Iraqis are able and choose to resist, the more the pressure will build against the war in the rest of the world.
Almost eighty-six years ago to the day, the British commander Lieutenant General Stanley Maude issued a proclamation to the people of Baghdad, whose city his forces had just occupied. ‘Our armies,’ he declared, ‘do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators.’ Within three years, 10,000 had died in a national Iraqi uprising against the British rulers, who gassed and bombed the insurgents. On the eve of last week’s invasion Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins echoed Maude in a speech to British troops. ‘We go to liberate, not to conquer’, he told them. All the signs from the past few days are that a new colonial occupation of Iraq – however it is dressed up – will face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone; and that the occupiers will once again be driven out.
(27/3/03)
The recolonisation of Iraq cannot be sold as liberation
Tony Blair’s government is running scared of the British people and their stubborn opposition to war on Iraq. The latest panic measure is to try to ban what has been trailed as the biggest demonstration in British political history from Hyde Park, where a giant anti-war rally is planned for 15 February.1 As the US administration accelerates its drive to war, its most faithful cheerleader is having to run ever faster to keep up.
Never mind that every single alleged chemical or biological weapons storage site mentioned in Blair’s dossier last year has been inspected and found to have been clean; or that the weapons inspectors reported this week that Iraq had cooperated ‘rather well’; or that most UN member states regard Hans Blix’s unanswered questions as a reason to keep inspecting, rather than launch an unprovoked attack. Jack Straw nevertheless rushed to declare Iraq in material breach of its UN obligations and fair game for the 82nd airborne.
Most people have by now grasped that regime change, rather than disarmament, is the real aim of this exercise and that whatever residual ‘weapons of mass destruction’ Iraq retains are evidently not sufficient to deter an attack – as they appear to be in North Korea. Since both the US and Britain have said they will use force with or without United Nations backing, the greatest impact of any new resolution blackmailed out of the Security Council is likely to be damage to the UN’s own credibility.
To harden up public support, the US has now promised ‘intelligence’ to demonstrate the supposed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, along with evidence that the Iraqis have been secretly moving weapons to outwit the inspectors. Since this will depend entirely on US sources and prisoners – including those we now know have been tortured at the US internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – it may not prove quite the breakthrough ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’ the US is hoping for.
But if none of this seems likely to make a decisive difference to public attitudes to an invasion of Iraq, there is one argument which is bound to resonate more widely in the weeks to come. This is the case made by President Bush in his state of the union speech on Tuesday that war against Iraq would mean the country’s ‘day of liberation’ from a tyrannical regime. A similar point was made by a British soldier heading for the Gulf, when asked whether he wasn’t concerned about the lack of public support for war.
‘Once people know what Saddam has done to his own people,’ Lance Corporal Daniel Buist replied, ‘they will be fully behind us.’ It is a theme taken up most forcefully by liberal war supporters in Britain and the US – the celebrated laptop bombardiers – who developed a taste for ‘humanitarian intervention’ during the Yugoslav maelstrom. The Iraqi people want a US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, they claim, while the anti-war movement is indifferent to their fate. Where was the ‘left movement against Saddam’ twenty years ago? one critic demanded recently.
In fact, left-wingers were pretty well the only people in the West campaigning against the Iraqi regime two decades ago (left activists were being imprisoned and executed in their hundreds by Saddam Hussein at the time), while the US and British political establishments were busy arming Iraq in its war against Iran and turning a blind eye to his worst human rights abuses, including the gas attacks on the Kurds in the late 1980s.
What changed after 1991 was that the greatest suffering endured by Iraqis was no longer at the hands of the regime, but the result of Western-enforced sanctions which, according to Unicef estimates, have killed at least 500,000 children over the past decade. Nor is there any evidence that most Iraqis, either inside or outside the country, want their country attacked and occupied by the US and Britain, however much they would like to see the back of the Iraqi dictator. Assessing the real state of opinion among Iraqis in exile is difficult enough, let alone in Iraq itself. But there are telling pointers that the licensed intellectuals and club-class politicians routinely quoted in the Western media enthusing about US plans for their country are thoroughly unrepresentative of the Iraqi people as a whole.
Even the main US-sponsored organisations such as the Iraqi National Congress and Iraqi National Accord, which are being groomed to be part of a puppet administration, find it impossible directly to voice support for a US invasion, suggesting little enthusiasm among their potential constituency. Laith Hayali – an Iraqi opposition activist who helped found the British-based solidarity group Cardri in the late 1970s, and later fought against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kurdistan – is one of many independent voices who insist that a large majority of Iraqi exiles are opposed to war. Anecdotal evidence from those coming in and out of Iraq itself tell a similar story, which is hardly surprising given the expected scale of casualties and destruction.
The Iraqi regime’s human rights record has been grim – though not uniquely so – over more than thirty years. If and when US and British occupation forces march down Baghdad’s Rashid Street, we will doubtless be treated to footage of spontaneous celebrations and GIs being embraced as they hand out sweets. There will be no shortage of people keen to collaborate with the new power; relief among many Iraqis, not least because occupation will mean an end to the misery of sanctions; revelations of atrocities; and war crimes trials.
All this will be used to justify what is about to take place. But a foreign invasion which is endorsed by only a small minority of Iraqis and which seems certain to lead to long-term occupation, loss of independence and effective foreign control of the country’s oil can scarcely be regarded as national liberation. It is also difficult to imagine the US accepting anything but the most ‘managed’ democracy, given the kind of government genuine elections might well throw up.
The danger of military interventions in the name of ‘human rights’ is that they are inevitably selective and used to promote the interests of those intervening – just as when they were made in the name of ‘civilisation’ and Christianity. If war goes ahead, the prospect for Iraq must be of a kind of return to the semi-colonial era before 1958, when the country was the pivot of Western power in the region, Britain maintained military bases and an ‘adviser’ in every ministry, and landowning families (like Ahmed Chalabi of the INC’s) were a law unto themselves. There were also thousands of political prisoners, parties were banned, the press censored and torture commonplace. As President Bush would say, it looks like the re-run of a bad movie.
(30/1/03)
Opponents of war on Iraq are not the appeasers
The split at the heart of Nato over George Bush’s plans to invade Iraq has triggered an outpouring of charges of 1930s-style appeasement against those resisting the rush to war. A line of attack hitherto largely confined to US neoconservatives has now been taken up by their increasingly desperate fellow travellers on this side of the Atlantic.
On Tuesday, Jack Straw warned that if the West failed to use force against Iraq it would be following ‘one of the most catastrophic precedents in history’, when Britain and France ‘turned a blind eye’ to the fascist dictators’ subversion of international law. Tony Blair alluded to the same period when he insisted that ‘all our history, especially British history’ points to the lesson that if international demands are not backed up with force, the result is greater insecurity. Both were taking their cue from US hawks like Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed millions died in the 1940s because some countries had thought there wasn’t ‘enough evidence’ to be sure about Hitler’s intentions.
Right-wing tabloids in both Britain and the US – where France and Germany’s bid to avert war has aroused something close to political hysteria – have now gone even further in their determination to see the current crisis through a second-world-war prism. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post demanded to know: ‘Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today’s Hitler, Saddam Hussein?’ In Britain, the Daily Mail accused France and Germany of ‘unforgivable betrayal’, while the Tory defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin declared that, without the US, ‘we would not have won the Second World War’.
Hitler analogies have long been the stock-in-trade of Anglo-American war propaganda – perhaps not surprisingly, since the second world war still retains near-universal legitimacy, just as Nazi Germany remains the archetype of an aggressive, genocidal state. Nasser was the first to be branded the new Hitler in the 1950s, while those who opposed the Suez war were damned as appeasers. But there have been a string of others, from Ho Chi Minh to Gaddafi, Milošević to Mullah Omar. All were compared to Hitler while British or US bombs rained down on their countries. Just how devalued this currency has become was on show this week, when the Tory historian Andrew Roberts argued that the Iraqi regime should be equated with the Nazis because both had ‘gassed their racial and political enemies’, and because Iraq fires at British and US aircraft patrolling the illegal no-fly zones over its territory.
It would be tempting to put these latest invocations of the second world war down to ignorance, if it wasn’t that those making them clearly know better. What they are in fact engaged in is a crude attempt to rewrite twentieth-century European history to justify a war of aggression in the Middle East. The parallel between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Nazi Germany is transparently ridiculous. In the late 1930s, Hitler’s Germany was the world’s second largest industrial economy and commanded its most powerful military machine. It openly espoused an ideology of territorial expansion, had annexed the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia in rapid succession and posed a direct threat to its neighbours. It would go on to enslave most of Europe and carry out an industrial genocide unparallelled in human history.
Iraq is, by contrast, a broken-backed developing country, with a single-commodity economy and a devastated infrastructure, which doesn’t even control all its own territory and has posed no credible threat to its neighbours, let alone Britain or the US, for more than a decade. Whatever residual chemical or biological weapons Iraq may retain, they are clearly no deterrent; its armed forces have been massively weakened and face the most powerful military force in history – Iraq’s military spending is estimated to be about 1 per cent of the US’s $380 billion budget. The attempt to equate the Iraqis’ horrific gas attacks on Kurds and Iranians during the Iran–Iraq war with the Nazi Holocaust is particularly grotesque. A better analogy would be the British gassing of Iraqi Kurds in the 1920s, or the US use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.
Appeasement is in any case a misnomer for the attempt by right-wing governments in Britain and France in the 1930s to befriend Germany and accommodate Nazi expansion. There was certainly a widespread yearning for peace in the aftermath of the butchery of the first world war. But the appeasers were something else: effectively a pro-German fifth column at the heart of the conservative elite, who warmed to Hitler’s militant anti-communism and sought to encourage him to turn on the Soviet Union. Chamberlain even hoped for an alliance with Nazi Germany. Fascist sympathies were rampant throughout the establishment, from Edward VIII to newspapers like the Mail which now denounce opponents of war on Iraq as traitors – while mavericks like Churchill and what would now be called the hard left resisted the Munich sell-out. In none of this is there the remotest analogy with current efforts to prevent an unprovoked attack on sanctions-drained Iraq. And of course none of the opponents of appeasement in the 1930s ever argued for pre-emptive war on Nazi Germany, but for deterrence and self-defence.
Just as absurd, against the background of the European–US standoff, is the increasingly strident insistence of the war party that it was the US which saved Europe from Nazi tyranny in the 1940s. It isn’t necessary in any way to minimise the heroism of US soldiers to balk at such a retrospective reworking of the facts. Quite what the Russians are supposed to make of this fable is anyone’s guess, when the Soviet Union lost perhaps 27 million people in the second world war (compared with 135,576 US deaths in Europe), bore the brunt of the European fighting and, in Churchill’s words, ‘tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine’. Particularly when Russia – along with France, Germany and China – is opposing the current war drive and is presumably therefore regarded by war supporters as ranked among the appeasers.
The idea that those opposed to US aggression against Iraq can be compared to the appeasers of the 1930s is simply risible. But if appeasement – unlike the form it took in the 1930s – is regarded as an attempt to pacify a powerful and potentially dangerous power, it sounds far more like the behaviour of Tony Blair’s government towards the Bush administration. Of course, Bush’s America cannot be compared with Nazi Germany: it is far more in the traditional imperial mould. But Britain’s apparent attempt to steer the US away from unilateral action, if that is what it has been, shows every sign of failing. Instead, Blair has lined up behind a hard-right US Republican administration with the political heirs of Mussolini and Franco, in the teeth of British and global opinion – and helped to fracture the US-dominated post-1991 global order into the bargain.
(13/2/03)
A crisis of democracy and the necessity of direct action
If anyone could sell George Bush’s planned war of aggression against Iraq, surely it should be Tony Blair, a politician whose career has been built on his ability to smooth-talk his way out of a crisis. The latest sales drive began with the prime minister’s attempt to link the alleged ricin find above a North London chemist’s shop with ‘weapons of mass destruction’. And it culminated with his imaginative effort to construct a link between ‘rogue states’ such as Iraq and Islamist terrorism.
But all the signs are that his spin offensive simply isn’t working. Such tales may find more of an echo in the United States, where half the population believes Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks, according to some polls. But in Britain – and even more so in the rest of the world – most people are now convinced that the opposite is the case: that the best way to boost support for al-Qaida and Islamist attacks on Western targets is precisely to launch an Anglo-American crusade to invade and occupy Arab, Muslim Iraq.
Not only is public opinion – along with key sections of the civil service, military, churches and trade unions – hardening against the expected war, but the Labour party itself shows signs of risking rupture if that war goes badly. That process will only have been heightened by the announcement yesterday of a ‘preliminary’ decision to accept the US request to use the Fylingdales base in Yorkshire for Bush’s Son of Star Wars missile programme – a move which can confidently be expected to boost the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The same goes for the comments from Bush, the man who will actually make the decision about war, that he is ‘tired’ of Saddam Hussein’s ‘games’ and ‘time is running out’.
