[Media-watch] Of Mesopotamia & Babylon...The Tigris & the Euphrates

[rhona baptiste]

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates 

How many children, in how many classrooms, over how
many centuries, have hang-glided through the past,
transported on the wings of these words? And now the
bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that
ancient civilisation 

Arundhati Roy
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian (UK)

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent
American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in
childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy
Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A
girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to
play with his older brother's marbles. 
On March 21, the day after American and British troops
began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq,
an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an
American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my
nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge
for 9/11." 

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was
"embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far
there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi
government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ
stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the
end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my
head," he said. 

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per
cent of the American public believes that Saddam
Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of
Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly
supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed
forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess. 

It is unlikely that British and American troops
fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments
supported Saddam Hussein both politically and
financially through his worst excesses. 

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be
burdened with these details? It does not matter any
more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks,
ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks,
high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet
paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral
water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of
Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto
itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any
more. It exists. It is. 

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US
army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear
instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he
means that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed,
their souls will be liberated.) American and British
citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake
thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries
are at war. And what a war it is. 

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy
(economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure
that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people
starved, half a million of its children killed, its
infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure
that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an
act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in
history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the
Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied
and Bought) - sent in an invading army! 

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more
like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me
Break Your Knees. 

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped
soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow
managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even
outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with the richest,
best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world
has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and
has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a
defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have
immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But
then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When
we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all
dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.) 

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies"
are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their
media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the
point of being counterproductive to their own
objectives. 

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address
the Iraqi people after the failure of the most
elaborate assassination attempt in history -
"Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the
British defence secretary, deriding him for not having
the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a
coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of
Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it
his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it
pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic?
Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want
it to? 

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on
Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up
and civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied
that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They're
using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come
down." 

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation
that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis
of Evil and a threat to world peace? 

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian
casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda
aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies",
as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the
"Allies" look bad. Even French television has come in
for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed,
breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth
bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert
sky on American and British TV is described as the
"terrible beauty" of war. 

When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's
only here to help") are taken prisoner and shown on
Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva
convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the
regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US
television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners
being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay,
kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind
their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with
earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete
visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about
the treatment of these prisoners, US Government
officials don't deny that they're being being
ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of
war"! They call them "unlawful combatants", implying
that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the
party line on the massacre of prisoners in
Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And
what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special
forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have
formally called it homicide.) 

When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station
(also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva
convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the
American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for
the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous
blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American
and British TV continue to advertise themselves as
"balanced" when their propaganda has achieved
hallucinatory levels. 

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the
western media? Just because they do it better? Western
journalists "embedded" with troops are given the
status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war.
Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh
Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad,
witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of
bodies of burned children and wounded people) are
undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We
have to tell you that he is being monitored by the
Iraqi authorities." 

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi
soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie:
rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred
to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is
"resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance",
Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government
bugging the phone lines of UN security council
delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed
pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only
morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue
is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s
or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short
of that is cheating. 

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million
and a half people, 40 per cent of them children.
Without clean water, and with very little food. We're
still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for
the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain
roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where
are the hordes? Don't they know that television
productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be
that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on
the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime
were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets
the world over.) 

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the
citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought in a few
trucks of food and water and positioned them
tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate
people flock to the trucks and fight each other for
food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise
the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the
trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to
get pictures of desperate people fighting each other
for food. Those pictures will go out through photo
agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay
extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at
hand, distributing fishes and loaves. 

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of
supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair.
It didn't really make the news. But now under the
loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian
aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually needed
(call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship,
the "Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr
merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag,
anyone? 

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid,
writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it
would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount
of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began. 

We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics.
They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate
proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers,
published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes at
population targets (per se) are likely not only to
create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad
and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of
enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled
right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied.
Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By
shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to
widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless
food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the
conference table'." 

Times haven't changed very much. The technique has
evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts
and Minds". 

So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000
Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf
war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the
economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved
from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day.
Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991
war officially declared "disabled" by a disease called
the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused
by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the
"Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium. 

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the
picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she
just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been
demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now
she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino
cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride
from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the
Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other
peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will. 

Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his
fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play
no independent part in the administration of postwar
Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy
"reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to
the international community not to "politicise" the
issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush
called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oil
for food programme, the UN security council voted
unanimously for the resolution. This means that
everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of
Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are
starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal
US-led war. 

Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told,
in discussions on the business news, could jump-start
the world economy. It's funny how the interests of
American corporations are so often, so successfully
and so deliberately confused with the interests of the
world economy. While the American people will end up
paying for the war, oil companies, weapons
manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved
in "reconstruction" work will make direct gains from
the war. Many of them are old friends and former
employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal.
Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts
for "re-construction" are already being negotiated.
The news doesn't hit the stands because much of the US
corporate media is owned and managed by the same
interests. 

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is
about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That
is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via
corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron,
like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here?
Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company?
Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former
director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi? 

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there
are signs that the world could be entering a new era
of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are
emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "We don't
want your stinking wine." We've heard about the
re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're
called now. There's news trickling in about Americans
boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the
fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who
will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by
border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is
strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are
exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction.
Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists
of American and British government products and
companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the
usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government
agencies such as USAID, the British department for
international development, British and American banks,
Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express,
corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and
companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find
themselves under siege. These lists are being honed
and re fined by activists across the world. They could
become a practical guide that directs and channels the
amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly,
the "inevitability" of the project of corporate
globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little
evitable. 

It's become clear that the war against terror is not
really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only
about oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive
impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global
hegemony. The argument is being made that the people
of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the
same process. Only the weapons used against them
differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In the
other, cruise missiles. 

Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot
about those!) 

In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam
's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it
is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and
restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under
similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were
bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC)
could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it
keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their
wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological
weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve
gas? Would it? 

Excuse me while I laugh. 

In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either
Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he
simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction.
Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq
comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US
government. 

So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world
peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's
Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its
sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers,
its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of
us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night.
Here's all of us, enduring the horror of the war,
enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the
slaughter of language as we know and understand it.
Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried
potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we
automatically go looking for induced starvation.
"Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what
it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?"
Nice! 

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is
being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a
racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it
engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims,
spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it
lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking.
There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from
the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin
America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every
day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely
sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and
they bring to it all the crassness of their
conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd
inability to separate governments from people: America
is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they
say, (with the same carelessness with which they say,
"All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque
universe of racist insult, the British make their
entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called. 

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being
"anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself in the
extraordinary position of defending the people of
America. And Britain. 

Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist
abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of
thousands of American and British citizens who
protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear
weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters
who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam.
They should know that the most scholarly, scathing,
hilarious critiques of the US government and the
"American way of life" comes from American citizens.
And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of
their prime minister comes from the British media.
Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds
of thousands of British and American citizens are on
the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the
Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not
people. More than one third of America's citizens have
survived the relentless propaganda they've been
subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting
their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate
that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi
fighting for his or her homeland. 

While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising
of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real
uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across
the world. It has been the most spectacular display of
public morality ever seen. 

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands
of American people on the streets of America's great
cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco.
The fact is that the only institution in the world
today that is more powerful than the American
government, is American civil society. American
citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their
shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who
not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility?
They are our allies, our friends. 

At the end of it all, it remains to be said that
dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other
despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian
republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them
installed, supported and financed by the US
government, are a menace to their own people. Other
than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead
of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq),
there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them.
(It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as
utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly
dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out
terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and
most entertainingly, to "rid the world of
evil-doers".) 

Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us,
these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to
the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest
threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the
political and economic engine of the US government,
currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun,
because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's
true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot,
but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than
the man himself. 

Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today,
I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of
war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his
forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that.
Any other even averagely intelligent US president
would have probably done the very same things, but
would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse
the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him.
Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that
he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the
opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and
scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has
exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view
the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the
apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire. 

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to
Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could
be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted. 

Bring on the spanners. 






Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never
regains its original dimensions.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes






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