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CounterPunch
September
16, 2002
Bush's & Rumsfeld's War
Dossier:
Blindness,
Hypocrisy and Lies
by
Robert Fisk
The Independent
Years ago, in a snug underground restaurant in
downtown Tehran, drinking duq--an Iranian beverage of mint and
yoghurt--Saddam Hussein's former head of nuclear research told
me what happened when he made a personal appeal for the release
of a friend from prison. "I was taken directly from my Baghdad
office to the director of state security," he said. "I
was thrown down the stairs to an underground cell and then stripped
and trussed up on a wheel attached to the ceiling. Then the director
came to see me.
" 'You will tell us all about your
friends--everything,' he said. 'In your field of research, you
are an expert, the best. In my field of research, I am the best
man.' That's when the whipping and the electrodes began."
All this happened, of course, when Saddam
Hussein was still our friend, when we were encouraging him to
go on killing Iranians in his 1980-88 war against Tehran, when
the US government--under President Bush Snr--was giving Iraq
preferential agricultural assistance funding. Not long before,
Saddam's pilots had fired a missile into an American warship
called the Stark and almost sunk it. Pilot error, claimed Saddam--the
American vessel had been mistaken for an Iranian oil tanker--and
the US government cheerfully forgave the Iraqi dictator.
Those were the days. But sitting in the
United Nations General Assembly last week, watching President
Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion about the beatings
and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq, you would have thought
they'd just been discovered. For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy,
it would have been difficult to beat that part of the President's
speech. Saddam, it appears, turned into a bad guy when he invaded
Kuwait in 1990. Before that, he was just a loyal ally of the
United States, a "strong man"--as the news agency boys
like to call our dictators--rather than a tyrant.
But the real lie in the President's speech--that
which has dominated American political discourse since the crimes
against humanity on 11 September last year--was the virtual absence
of any attempt to explain the real reasons why the United States
has found itself under attack.
In his mendacious article in this newspaper
last week, President Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
also attempted to mask this reality. The 11 September assault,
he announced, was an attack on people "who believe in freedom,
who practise tolerance and who defend the inalienable rights
of man". He made, as usual, absolutely no reference to the
Middle East, to America's woeful, biased policies in that region,
to its ruthless support for Arab dictators who do its bidding--for
Saddam Hussein, for example, at a time when the head of Iraqi
nuclear research was undergoing his Calvary--nor to America's
military presence in the holiest of Muslim lands, nor to its
unconditional support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian
land in the West Bank and Gaza.
Oddly, a very faint ghost of this reality
did creep into the start of the President's UN address last week.
It was contained in two sentences whose importance was totally
ignored by the American press--and whose true meaning might have
been lost on Mr Bush himself, given that he did not write his
speech--but it was revealing nonetheless. "Our common security,"
he said, "is challenged by regional conflicts--ethnic and
religious strife that is ancient but not inevitable. In the Middle
East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for
both sides." Then he repeated his old line about the need
for "an independent and democratic Palestine".
This was perhaps as close as we've got,
so far, to an official admission that this whole terrible crisis
is about the Middle East. If this is a simple war for civilisation
against "evil"--the line that Mr Bush was so cruelly
peddling again to the survivors of 11 September and the victims'
relatives last week--then what are these "regional challenges"?
Why did Palestine insinuate its way into the text of President
Bush's UN speech? Needless to say, this strange, uncomfortable
little truth was of no interest to the New York and Washington
media, whose wilful refusal to investigate the real political
causes of this whole catastrophe has led to a news coverage that
is as bizarre as it is schizophrenic.
Before dawn on 11 September last week,
I watched six American television channels and saw the twin towers
fall to the ground 18 times. The few references to the suicide
killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of
the fact that they were Arabs. Last week, The Washington Post
and The New York Times went to agonising lengths to separate
their Middle East coverage from the 11 September commemorations,
as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting
in bad taste if they did not. "The challenge for the administration
is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the
Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks" is about as
far as The Washington Post got in smelling a rat, and that only
dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial.
All references to Palestine or illegal
Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply
erased from the public conscience last week. When Hannan Ashrawi,
that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at Colorado
university on 11 September, Jewish groups organised a massive
demonstration against her. US television simply did not acknowledge
the Palestinian tragedy. It is a tribute to our own reporting
that at least John Pilger's trenchant programme--Palestine is
Still the Issue--is being shown on ITV tomorrow night, although
at the disgracefully late time of 11.05pm.
But maybe all this no longer matters.
When Mr Rumsfeld can claim so outrageously--as he did when asked
for proof of Iraq's nuclear potential--that the "absence
of evidence doesn't mean the evidence of absence", we might
as well end all moral debate. When Mr Rumsfeld refers to the
"so-called occupied West Bank", he reveals himself
to be a very disreputable man. When he advances the policy of
a pre-emptive "act" of war--as he did in The Independent
on Sunday last week--he forgets Israel's "pre-emptive"
1982 invasion of Lebanon which cost 17,500 Arab lives and 22
years of occupation, and ended in retreat and military defeat
for Israel.
Strange things are going on in the Middle
East right now. Arab military intelligence reports the shifting
of massive US arms shipments around the region--not just to Qatar
and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern
Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence
analysts are said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the
potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction
of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia--a likely scenario
if Iraq crumbles--have long been two Israeli dreams. As the United
States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between
1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Is that what
is going on today--the preparation of a war to refloat the US
economy?
My Israeli colleague Amira Haas once
defined to me our job as journalists: "to monitor the centres
of power". Never has it been so important for us to do just
that. For if we fail, we will become the mouthpiece of power.
So a few thoughts for the coming weeks: remember the days when
Saddam was America's friend; remember that Arabs committed the
crimes against humanity of 11 September last year and that they
came from a place called the Middle East, a place of injustice
and occupation and torture; remember "Palestine"; remember
that, a year ago, no one spoke of Iraq, only of al-Qa'ida and
Osama bin Laden. And, I suppose, remember that "evil"
is a good crowd-puller but a mighty hard enemy to shoot down
with a missile.
Today's Features
Ben Tripp
Notes for
Future Historians:
The Bush Administration Explained
Tom Crumpacker
Democracy & US Policy on Cuba
David Vest
Neither-Handed
Behzad Yaghmaian
A Letter
from Istanbul
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fire Next Time:
Nuclear Plants & Terrorism
Anis Shivani
The Warped
World of
Bernard Lewis
Uri Avnery
A Witness from the Past
Robert Fisk
Bush Across
the Rubicon
Josh Frank
Lacking Tenacity
Christini, Alam, & Krieger
Poems
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
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September
14 / 15, 2002
Ben Tripp
Notes for
Future Historians:
The Bush Administration Explained
Tom Crumpacker
Democracy & US Policy on Cuba
David Vest
Neither-Handed
Behzad Yaghmaian
A Letter
from Istanbul
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fire Next Time:
Nuclear Plants & Terrorism
Anis Shivani
The Warped
World of
Bernard Lewis
Uri Avnery
A Witness from the Past
Robert Fisk
Bush Across
the Rubicon
Josh Frank
Lacking Tenacity
Christini, Alam, & Krieger
Poems
September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
September
11, 2002
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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