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
Obviously, over twenty years of tyrannical rule by a homicidal Stalinist have done nothing to incinerate or humiliate. No, only westerners can do that.Arundhati Roy
I don't think that's quite true. The poll she refers to did not show that "42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks". It showed that many Americans believed that many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqis. That is wrong but is a slightly different thing. Unfortunately I can't find a link to the poll or its results - I'll keep digging to try and find it it. As far as Saddam Hussein supporting Al-Qaida is concerned, we know for a fact that he supports the likes of Islamic Jihad and Hamas so the idea of him supporting another islamist terror group isn't particularly far fetched.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.
I feel confident they do know and if you were to ask them they'd say "What fools we were to support him, so let's do something about him now." Also, the British and American governments didn't support Saddam Hussein nearly as much as the Russians, French and Chinese. Look at the volumes of arms shipments coming from each country in the 1980's.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
Ahem. Sorry to sound pedantic, but the plural of "aircraft" is "aircraft", not "aircrafts". I'd have thought a famous novelist would know that sort of thing.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.
...which could have been avoided had Mr Hussein just complied with the 1991 cease-fire conditions and the umpteen following resolutions instead of digging his heels in...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!
My god, an invading army! Perhaps a further 12 years of sanctions, starvation, dead children and Mr Hussein digging his heels in would be preferable.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.
Your point being? Would Ms Roy prefer for the Iraqi army to be larger and better equipped, like it was in 1991? Would she prefer it if we sent a much smaller and worse equipped force in order to give the Iraqi army a better chance of victory?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".
Oh, come now. Hardly "outmanoeuvre". Not unless the definition of "outmanoeuvre" has changed to include "run away and hide in residential districts".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.)
I really don't think we can dismiss it as a failure. Two whole weeks have passed now in which Saddam has not appeared on TV saying anything unambiguously contemporary. There's been generic footage of him meeting with minions and we've seen announcers reading statements on his behalf, but we haven't seen so much as a twitch out of Saddam himself. Not even a brief "I'm still here, you infidel dogs, you'll NEVER kill me. Ner ner!"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."
A marketplace. One. Singular. Thousands of bombs, very few civilian casualties. Fewer civilians, after nearly two weeks of fighting, than are killed in two days by the government of Saddam Hussein. But of course those killed by the government of Saddam Hussein don't get shown on TV, so we don't really need to care about them.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?
She now goes on to denounce the allied attack on Iraqi TV as a "violation of the Geneva convention", which is a very arguable point seeing as how it was hardly a purely civilian enterprise and was being used as a means of supporting and encouraging Iraqi troops in the field. But she doesn't mention any of the Iraqi military actions which certainly are clear and unambiguous and huge breaches of the convention, such as placing anti-aircraft guns on top of medical clinics, storing weapons and ammunition inside hospitals, firing from inside ambulances, shielding themselves with children to avoid allied fire , things like that...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.
Maybe Ms Roy hasn't heard, but the reports from embedded reporters with allied forces are preceded with a similar disclaimer about them having been compiled under military reporting restrictions.Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie: rabble).
Wow. Yet another redefinition. First "outmanoeuvre" gets redefined as "run away and hide", now "militia" gets redefined from "An army composed of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers" or "A military force that is not part of a regular army and is subject to call for service in an emergency" to "rabble". I obviously need to get a new dictionary.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.
No. Nobody is saying they should line up and be mown down. Attacking us is fine. Defending is fine. Shooting up our supply convoys is fine. All we ask is that the people doing that wear uniforms and don't position themselves among crowds of civilians, and the reason we don't want them to do that is so that as few civilians as possible get killed. That's really all we ask for. Is that too much?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.)
That's probably because they get shot at when they approach any closer. Just a wild guess.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.)
The water is not being sold by us. If anybody's selling it it's being done after it's left our hands. What the hell would we want to do with trying to sell water - our soldiers aren't shopkeepers.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.
She now goes on to quote selectively from a thirty year old document, as if to imply that what it says is in some way relevant now.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'."
Well, great, there we have a quote from a thirty year old document written under a completely different president during a completely different war in a different part of the world. Make of it what you will.Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".
That must add up to about a million Iraqis killed by the direct actions of their current government. Quite a compelling argument to topple said government. Say a total absolute maximum of 10,000 civilan casualties in this war, leading to a saving of maybe 100,000 lives per year thereafter - that's a net saving of life after just 5 weeks. That's the moral maths.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.
It's not used for fun. It's used because it makes really good anti-tank ammunition. To destroy those Iraqi army tanks with. The Iraqi army tanks which wouldn't have had any DU shells fired at them in the first place if not for that little jaunt across the border into Kuwait.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.
The sanctions are not "US led". They are imposed by the UN. If they were "US led" and the rest of the world thought they were so vile then the rest of the world would just ignore them and trade with Iraq. The US has sanctions on Cuba but that doesn't stop anyone else trading with Cuba. The sanctions on Iraq are so crippling because every country in the world is imposing them. The war is 'illegal' because it doesn't have the backing of the UN and as far as I can tell, if it had UN backing it would be 'legal'. The sanctions do have UN backing, so they must be 'legal', okay? Either complain about the sanctions OR complain about the US acting without UN authorisation, but you can't have both.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.
Sorry, but you'll have to find a different conspiracy theory. Halliburton isn't bidding for Iraqi reconstruction contracts.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.
Ooooh... the internet is abuzz with elaborate lists of products to boycott.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.
So what she's saying is that the Scary Global Capitalist Oppressors can be brought crashing down by (gasp!) people just not buying their stuff. My God, it's a revelation! That's what McDonalds, Nike and Reebok have been saying for years - "So if you don't like it then just don't buy it". It's hardly an oppressive force if it's so vulnerable to action.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.
So actually completely different processes.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?
Maybe it would, but maybe it would not. We simply do not know, but I imagine it would depend on the circumstances at the time, such as whether using them would achieve any practical aim, whether it was possible to move and target them, and how much risk using them would entail. Many imponderables.Excuse me while I laugh.
Hahahaha. Ha ha ha. Funny, isn't it? No.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.
There is another explanation, which is that the Iraqis can't deploy and target the weapons because the allies have cut their communications to shreds so they can't physically move them, can't make the decision to use them, and can't fire them at us. Maybe Saddam is dead and nobody else dares to issue that sort of order. Also, the soldiers holding them know that if they use them now the response will be massive violence inflicted on them personally, which could be a distinct disincentive.Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.
Indeed, what about "arsenal of tactics"? I've just searched google news for "arsenal of tactics" and the only article it found was Arundhati Roy on 2nd April, complaining about the use of "arsenal of tactics".In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war.
Yes, due in no small part to journalists continually yelling "This war is racist!" "This war is racist!"The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators.
So she means that the US government is a "racist regime"? Despite the fact that the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State are black, and that a senior general commanding the US forces in Iraq is of Lebanese descent. It is true that America (a "white-skinned" country) is currently invading an Arab ("brown-skinned") country. But that hardly means the war is racist. There just aren't any homicidal tyrannical "white-skinned" despotisms around at the moment. When there were (USSR and the Eastern Bloc) the US spent 50 years engaged in a huge military confrontation with them which only just stopped short of actual shooting. I also seem to remember the US wildly flouting UN and European opinion to fight a war against the white-skinned Miloscevic government at the end of 1990's. In fact the only white-skinned tyrannical despotism I can think of which the US didn't confront militarily was apartheid-era South Africa, and I seem to remember there were some sort of sanctions imposed there. South American despots don't count - they're "ethnic" too (Latino) so an attack on them would have counted as a racist war.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.
Oh come off it. There is no comparison in bravery between someone risking death in battle and someone risking a mild ticking-off and a few disapproving looks by waving a placard adorned with some indignant slogan. No comparison at all. None.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.
Again: she states that the 'most courageous of all' are people daring to take the entirely undangerous action of waving banners and shouting slogans in the country which has probably got the world's strongest constitutional protections of the rights of assembly and expression. That's insane.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".)
Installing democracy is 'dreamy'? Stamping out terrorism is 'dreamy'? I tell you what is dreamy: believing that 'strengthening the hand of civil society' in Iraq (whatever that means) would deal with a tyrant who can people whisked off to the nearest execution chamber as soon as they utter a disrepectful word.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.
Oh...kay. So apparently the greatest threat of all is not crazy tyrants armed with massively destructive weapons and the will to use them. Oh no. A far greater threat is the locomotive force of the US government. Unfortunately Ms Roy does not elaborate on what this locomotive force is, but I'm guessing she'd say it's capitalism. Unregulated economic transactions: they're scarier than nerve gas and torture chambers, folks!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.
Rise up, brothers and sisters, smash the system! You have nothing to lose but your jobs, homes and pension funds!