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CounterPunch
February
20, 2003
Answering the Moral Warriors
The Fatal Game
of Unending War
by PABLO MUKHERJEE
This is an open letter in response to David Aaronovitch's
invitation in The Guardian (G2 18.02.03) to the peace marchers
of London to answer a few questions. But it is also an answer
to his more evangelical colleagues like Christopher Hitchens,
whose piece in The Mirror on Tuesday (18.02.03) came closest
to giving the fundamentalist rantings of the Bush cabinet some
rhetorical coherence. They are the moral warriors who consciously
or otherwise have become apologists for George Bush's new world
order and welcome the proposed full spectrum dominance of the
United States. They constitute a minority, but a minority in
positions of disproportionate power, both in media and politics.
Their invitations to engage in debate must not, and have not,
be neglected.
So this is to you David, an old marcher,
from a marginally younger one. You ask a hell of a lot of questions,
but I hope this answers their general drift. You pretend to
misunderstand Tony Benn when he calls for inspections in USA,
Israel and Britain. But surely a person of your intelligence
and moral integrity cannot deny that these states have stockpiles
of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, WMDs like 'bunker
buster', cluster bombs and Depleted Uranium shells and a history
of using them directly as in Hiroshima,Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq. More sinisterly, they actively encourage the exporting
of these weapons and technologies globally. I cannot name a
Welsh village that ahs been chemically attacked by Britain but
I can name Britain and USA as being the chief suppliers of Saddam's
arsenal in his war against Iran and his massacre of Kurds. So
pardon me if I don't swallow the line about this war being against
the proliferation of WMDs. If you think war is a sound strategy
of containment of aggressive states with a track record of using
WMDs, are you prepared to back the invasions of India, Pakistan,
and North Korea?
No court in the world is powerful to
try those in power. But you seem to find the fact that we find
people like Richard Perle, John Negroponte and Donald Rumsfeld
little better than criminals astonishing. As an advisor to the
extremist Netanyahu government in Israel, Perle advocated a no-negotiation
policy with Palestinians and forcible expulsion of civilians
from West bank and Gaza. Negroponte personally oversaw covert
anti-democratic operations in Nicaragua and Honduras. They are
responsible for aiding, planning and abetting the murder, torture
and expulsion of civilians in the middle east and Latin
America, these individuals are criminals in our books. Are we
wrong to be sceptical of their proposed role in Iraq? That their
ousting of Saddam Hussein will lead to the appointment of a similar
anti-democratic regime, but this time a pro-U.S. one? This is
already the fears of Iraqis in exile like Kanaan Makiya, whose
cause you pretend to champion.
You sneer at us for being the majority.
To illustrate fears of mob rule, you cite the case of anti-asylum
hysteria in Britain. This, David, is a clear but clever case
of false analogy. Some of us have been working against the BNP
and tabloid- engineered lies about illegal immigrants in poor
deprived British cities. You should come and see us sometime
in places like Sunderland and Burnley. So we don't actually
need a warning about mob hysteria. Especially since, contrary
to what The Sun would like to believe, the majority of people
in Britain are tolerant and welcoming of the multi-racial society
and sympathetic to the plight of the refugees when they are not
being constantly misinformed. I defy the BNP and the Sun to
muster up not 2 million, but half that number, to demonstrate
in favour of keeping refugees out of Britain. They are not the
majority. Why doesn't Blair demonstrate his moral courage against
them? Why back down and appease them all the time? Why withdraw
the plans for asylum centres when a misinformed third of some
small town carry placards when he is determined not to listen
to millions on Iraq? Do you detect hypocrisy there and how wrong
you are to compare us to them?
We are against war and not containment.
The total volume of surveillance on Iraq is among the heaviest
in the world. Today (18.02.), Iraq has agreed to let U2 spy
planes to fly into its airspace. By all means let us keep up
the scrutiny. Let us support permanent inspections and let us
actively discourage any arms trade with the regime. Let human
rights monitoring be a permanent part of the inspection regime.
A vast majority of us are in favour of all this. What we are
not in favour of, and what people like CASI and ARROW have been
tirelessly campaigning for more than a decade now, is to end
the sanctions that play directly into the hand of Saddam Hussein
and has led to the unimaginable sufferings of the Iraqi civilians.
To now argue that only a war can end that suffering that USA
and Britain have actively promoted in the first place is not
only morally repugnant, but strategically disastrous. We have
no doubts that France and Russia have their own agendas in their
opposition to war. But at least the fallout of that policy is
far less destructive for Iraq that the Blair-Bush doctrine.
This position, whether you agree with
it or not, is much more cohesive and thought out than your portrait
of us as confused collaborators of Saddam Hussein suggests.
I have been in Britain for six years now, and been teaching in
a British university for the last three years. For much of this
time I have been wailing at the political apathy of Britons young
and old. But I have never been as proud to be in this country
as I was on Saturday when I saw school kids marching with CND
veterans of the 60s, and when my students ran out of coaches
to come down from Newcastle to London because every single one
of them had been booked already. What we are saying is that
we will not play this fatal game of Bush and Bin Laden and the
doctrine of unending war anymore. Have a look at Afghanistan
where things have now reverted to warlords and fiefdoms and Pashtun
discontent. Where attacks on UN and US forces are growing by
the month and where members of the unpopular (and as yet unelected)
government have routinely suffered assassination attempts. Is
this what you call hopeful? Instead of scorning us and supporting
the anti-democratic diktats of Britain and US, I wish you could
have been there, free of fear and mistrust, just like you were
in the days when you marched against the killings in Soweto.
Dr Pablo Mukherjee teaches in the school of english at University
of Newcastle. He can be reached at: pablo.mukherjee@ncl.ac.uk
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
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Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
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
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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