Iran May Be The Greatest Crisis Of Modern
Times
By John Pilger
04/12/07 "ICH"
--- - In a cover piece for the New Statesman, John Pilger
evokes the memory of Germans 'looking from the side' at
Bergen-Belsen to describe the challenge facing us in the West as
the Bush/Blair 'long war' becomes 'perhaps the greatest crisis
of modern times'.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her
mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi
concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some
were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German women
looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very
formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the
side'."
It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped
looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most
serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long
war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's
independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15
British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals
(with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the
Ministry of Defence – until it got the wind up) is both a farce
and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance
with Blair, has spent four years preparing for "Operation
Iranian Freedom". Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to
strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General
Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets...
at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear
weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive
contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."
And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of "news"
in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the
obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral
screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial
foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton,
formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently spelled out
the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East
is an agenda to maintain division and instability. In other
words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to
Iraq, but he also meant Iran.
One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush
and Blair get out of their homeland – that is the real news: not
our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the
pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer
Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid,
who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or
any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that
Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only
mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's
plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute
"warning". They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next
"enemy".
Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to
apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate
much of our past rather than apologise for it." In Late
Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as
many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines
criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since
the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files
make it clear that British governments have borne "significant
responsibility" for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6
million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from
military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly
supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these
victims "unpeople". Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate!
says Brown. Spot the difference.
Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the
other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an
unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation
of the Middle East to "our interests" – and Israel's, of course.
Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's
democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi,
whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the
world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of
torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).
Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish
the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that
mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but
no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the
secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment
that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in
Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British
colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as
any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless
expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US
military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan
and will bomb Iran.
In the second example, only the degree of suffering is
different. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns
Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in
Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a
direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street
officials derided the study as "flawed". They were lying. They
knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of
Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its
methods as "robust" and "close to best practice", and other
government officials had secretly approved the "tried and tested
way of measuring mortality in conflict zones". The figure for
Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million – carnage
equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege
of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a
million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That,
too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.
"This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as
it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet,
"is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our
political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society
response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference."
Such is the scale of the crime and of our "looking from the
side". According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters'
"damning verdict" on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority
who have "lost faith" in their government. No surprise there.
Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair,
demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the
second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made
of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of
faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood
against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new
right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's
lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major
articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks – claims now
regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.
As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According
to the former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal
decided to attack Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration,
long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill
was shown a Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors for
Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's
oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law
written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is
about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration
of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.
Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern
Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil business is
conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is
another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as non-existent
weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had
nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear
weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on
Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by
the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it
was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections
under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy
Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian programme
to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have
said they have been allowed to "go anywhere". The recent UN
Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of
Washington's bribery.
Until recently, the British were unaware that their government
was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights
and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim
Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by
British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying
secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British
Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed
jihad against the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone". In
2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were
bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No
Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to Bush and Blair,
awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never
before. When home-grown terrorists struck London in July 2005,
few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity
and that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect,
Blair's bombs.
In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and
cruelty of the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort
their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and
the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims.
They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families,
careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure
evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the
2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.
Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H
Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg
trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War.
"Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the United States does
them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to
lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be
willing to have invoked against us."
As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel
to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war
criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be
untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish
judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments
against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and
unjustifiable episodes in recent human history" – Iraq. Five
days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal
Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could
one day face war-crimes charges.
These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks –
again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live
in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused
"elements of the Iranian regime" of "backing, financing, arming
and supporting terrorism in Iraq". He offered no evidence, and
the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same Goebbels-like
refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included,
brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of
us continue looking from the side?
First published in the New Statesman
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