THE HANDSTAND
august 2005
Blair Is Unfit to Be Prime Minister
By John Pilger
The New Statesman, UK
25 July 2005 Issue
Terror and the UK - The senseless repercussions of interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine demand that we renew our anger at ourleaders. Our troops must come home. We owe it to all those who died in London on 7 July.
In all the coverage of the bombing of London, a truth has struggled to be heard. With honourable exceptions, it has been said guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the silence, as an east Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera
crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on, say it."
Alex Salmond tried to say it on Today on Radio 4. He was told he was speaking "in poor taste . . . before the bodies are even buried". George Galloway was lectured on Newsnight (BBC2) that he was being "crass". The inimitable Ken Livingstone contradicted his previous statement, which was that the invasion of Iraq would come home to London. With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called anti-war MP spoke out in clear, unequivocal English. The warmongers were allowed to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in the Guardian, called Blair "the world's leading statesman".
And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair is a liar. This frightens the British political elite. At a large media party I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind
of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs.
Blair brought home to this country his and Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus almost certainly would be alive today. This is what Livingstone ought to have said. To paraphrase perhaps the only challenging question put to Blair on the eve of the invasion, it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is unfit to be prime minister.
How much more evidence is needed? Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest terrorist threat" to this country would be "heightened by military action against Iraq". He was warned by 79 per cent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". A month ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the invasion had turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism. Before the invasion, said the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbors" because Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to al-Qaeda".
Now, an 18 July report by the Chatham House organization, a "think tank" deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de grāce. It says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising" while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. "Riding pillion with a powerful ally" has cost Iraqi, American and British lives. The right-wing academic, Paul Wilkinson, a voice of western power, was the principal author. Read between the lines and it says the prime minister is now a serious liability. Those who run this country know he has committed a great crime; the "link" has been made.
Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the invasion, notably 11 September. Anyone with an understanding of the painful history of the Middle East would not have been surprised by 11 September or by the bombing of Madrid and London, only that they had not happened earlier. I have reported the region for 35 years, and if I could describe in a word how millions of Arab and Muslim people felt, I would say "humiliated". When Egypt looked like winning back its captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through jubilant crowds in Cairo: it
felt as if the weight of history's humiliation had lifted. In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to me, "We once chased cricket balls at the British club. Now we are free."
They were not free, of course. The Americans re-supplied the Israeli army and they almost lost everything again. In Palestine, the humiliation of a captive people is Israeli policy. How many Palestinian babies have died at Israeli checkpoints after their mothers, bleeding and screaming in premature labor, have been forced to give birth beside the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a hospital in the distance? How many old men have been forced to show obeisance to young Israeli conscripts? How many families have been blown to bits by America-supplied F-16s with British-supplied parts?
The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be measured by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide bombing". What about Iraq? There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power. In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations. The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food allowance, called it "genocidal".
I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted uranium and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I watched dying children, some of the half a million infants whose deaths Unicef attributed to the embargo - deaths which US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said were "worth it". In the west, this was hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the London Guardian and was never news, to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable: the latter "in response to the massacres carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan ...", claimed a group called the Organization for El Qaeda in Europe. Whether or not the claim was genuine, the reason was. Bush and Blair wanted a "war on terror" and they got it.
Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al-Qaeda's appear miniscule by comparison. More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed, not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
In his poem "From Iraq", Michael Rosen wrote:
We are the unfound
We are uncounted
You don't see the homes we made
We're not even the small print or the bit in brackets . . .
because we lived far from you,
because you have cameras that point the other way . . .
Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It is an American police state, like a vast penned ghetto. Since April last year, the hospitals there have been subjected to an American policy of collective punishment. Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors have been shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been murdered in front of their families.
Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of the bombing. When will someone draw this parallel at one of Blair's staged "press conferences", at which he is allowed to emote for the cameras about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. And when will someone invite the obsequious Bob Geldoff to explain why his hero, Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week, brutalizing Iraq?
The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul" is another distraction. Christianity leaves Islam for dead as an industrial killer. The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life". It is political, requiring a political solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the deepest grievances. That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the "cameras that point the other way", are the core of it.
On 19 July, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general meeting at Television Centre, an inspired group of British documentary filmmakers met outside the main gates and conducted a series of news reports of the kind you do not see on television. Actors played famous
reporters doing their "camera pieces". The "stories" they reported included the targeting of the civilian population of Iraq, the application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, America's illegal rewriting of the laws of Iraq and theft of its resources through privatization, the everyday torture
and humiliation of ordinary people and the failure to protect Iraqis archaeological and cultural heritage.
Blair is using the London bombing to further deplete our rights and those of others, as Bush has done in America. Their goal is not security, but greater control. The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the renewal of our anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in London on 7 July, unnecessarily, and nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
Fighting Fascism Then, and
Now
By John Pilger© 07/17/05
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9493.htm
It was the International Brigades' Memorial Day in
Jubilee Park beside the Thames in London. It was a hot
day with no breeze, "a Spanish day", one of the
Brigaders said. Like the others, all in their eighties
and older, he took shelter in the shade and rested on his
walking stick. He wore his red beret. Twenty yards away,
tourists waiting to board the London Eye, the great
ferris wheel built for the Milennium, looked bemused at
the elderly men in their berets, and the rest of us,
without knowing who we were, what the men had done and
why we were celebrating them.
Between 1936 and 1939, the International Brigade fought
in Spain on the side of the Republican government against
the fascist forces of General Franco. There were British,
Americans, Irish, Canadians, Australians and others. They
were very young and all volunteers, determined to stop
fascism in its tracks. They made a difference.
Although the government eventually fell, in February
1937, the 600-strong British Battalion of the XVth
International Brigade stopped Franco's advance on Madrid.
Four hundred were killed, wounded or captured in four
days' bloody battle, Madrid was spared. There were many
battles like that. Sam Russell, a Brigader, described
eloquently how on the Sierra del Pandols, "there was
not enough soil to bury the dead, so we covered them with
stones". The poet Martin Green who had written of
his father, George Green, stood at the edge of the crowd.
George was killed when Martin was four years old. For his
father, he wrote:
You had no funeral nor hearse
No grave except the place you fell
No dirge but a soldier's curse And an explosion tolled
your knell …
I was a boy too young
To take the blow that felled
The tree that was your man.
On this warm Saturday 67 years on, we stood and sang a
tribute to them. To the tune of "Red River
Valley", we sang the song of their battle for Madrid
and to which they marched and rallied:
There's a valley in Spain called Jarama
It's a place that we all know so well
It is there that we gave of our manhood
And so many of our brave comrades fell.
We are proud of the British Battalion
And the stand for Madrid that they made
There we fought like true sons of the people
As part of the Fifteenth Brigade
Now that we've left that dark valley of sorrow
And its memories we ne'er shall forget
So before we continue to this reunion
Let us stand to our glorious dead.
And we stood and remembered them. Jack Jones, the
president of the International Brigade Memorial Trust,
read out the names of his comrades who had died since
their last reunion: Charlie Matthews (who had been
reported killed on the battlefield in 1939 and whose
obituary had appeared his local paper) and Cyril Sexton,
who was wounded at Jarama and went on to fight at Aragon,
Belchite, Gandesa and Ebro where he was wounded again.
Last April, he died at the age of 91.
I was given the honour of describing the meaning of the
Brigaders' heroism today. I thanked David Marshall, an
International Brigader who had put my name forward and
whose poetry had been an inspiration for what I wanted to
say. This is what I said:
I first understood the importance of the struggle in
Spain from Martha Gellhorn. Martha was one of my oldest
friends. She was one of the greatest war correspondents
and is remembered for her dispatches from Spain during
the Civil War. In November 1938, she wrote this:
"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The
cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing
much to drink: a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and
a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of
course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out, enjoying the
cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come for at least
two hours. The flower stalls look bright and pretty along
the promenade. 'The flowers are all sold, Senores. For
the funerals of those killed in the eleven o'clock
bombing, poor souls'. It had been a clear and cold day
all yesterday …'What beautiful weather', a woman
said, and she stood, holding her shawl around her,
staring at the sky. 'And the nights are as fine as the
days. A catastrophe,' she said … everyone listened
for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers,
they were like tiny silver bullets, moving forever up,
across the sky."
How familiar that sounds. Barcelona. Guernica. Hiroshima.
Vietnam. Cambodia. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq.
Martha never tired of explaining why people fought for
the Republic, "the Causa", and why going to
Spain was so important. She wrote of the International
Brigade: "Whatever their nationality, whether they
were Communists, anarchists, socialists, poets, plumbers,
middle-class professional men, or the one Abyssinian
prince … they were fighting for us all in
Spain."
The enemy then was fascism, out-and-out fascism. Armband
wearing, strutting, ranting fascism.
The enemy then was a great world power, rapacious, with
plans of domination, of capturing the world's natural
resources: the oil fields of the Caspian and the Middle
east, the mineral riches of Africa. They seemed
invincible.
The enemy then was also lies. Deceit. News dressed up as
propaganda. Appeasement. A large section of the British
establishment saw fascism as its friend. Their voice was
a section of the British press: The Times, the Daily
Mail.
To them, the real threat was from ordinary people, who
were dreamers, many of them, who imagined a new world in
which the dignity of ordinary life was respected and
celebrated. Some were wise dreamers and some were foolish
dreamers, but they understood the nature of fascism, and
they saw through the lies ands the deceit and the
appeasement.
They also knew that the true enemy didn't always wear arm
bands, and didn't always strut, or command great rallies,
but were impeccable English gentlemen who supported
ruthless power behind a smokescreen of propaganda that
appropriated noble concepts like "democracy"
and "freedom" and "our way of life"
and "our values".
Does all this sound familiar?
I ask that question, because when I read the aims of the
International Brigade Memorial Trust, I was struck by a
reference to "the historical legacy of the men and
women who fought with the International Brigades against
fascism …"
The "historical legacy" of the International
Brigade, as Martha Gellhorn wrote, is that they were
fighting for us all. For me, that means a legacy of truth
- a way of seeing through the smokescreen of propaganda,
including and especially the propaganda of our own
governments: a legacy of confronting great and rapacious
power in whatever form it appears.
That legacy is needed today more than ever. Impeccable
gentlemen now invade defenceless countries in our name.
They speak of freedom and democracy, and our way of life
and our values. They don't wear armbands and they don't
strut. They are different from fascists. But their goals
are not different. Conquest, domination, the control of
vital resources.
When the judges at Nuremberg laid down the ground rules
of international law following the Second World War, they
described an unprovoked, violent invasion of a
defenceless country as "a crime against humanity,
the paramount war crime."
The world is a very different place from Barcelona in
1938, and from the Sierra del Pandols, and the Valley of
Jarama, and all the battlefields of Spain, but the legacy
of those who confronted fascism then endures as a warning
to us all today.
It is a warning about sinister power behind democratic
facades that uses the battle cries of democracy. It is a
warning about messianic politicians, apparently touched
by God, and about appeasement and truth. And it is about
moral courage: about speaking out, breaking a silence. I
salute those of you International Brigaders who are here
today, who did more than speak out. I thank you and your
fallen comrades for what you did for us all, and for your
legacy of truth and your moral courage. La Lucha con
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