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Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics

Baghdad

Western killers, please, spare us your disgusting ethics.

The United States and United Kingdom, two of the pillars of Christianity, civilisation and modernity in the World, are shedding some crocodile tears these days. Recent photographs of US and UK military torturing Iraqi prisoners, do not quite match the rhetoric of democracy and liberation used to justify the continuing occupation of Iraq. The reality exhibited by those photos is at variance with the stated objectives and the rabid portrayal of the Muslim extremists or terrorists.

These countries subjected Iraq to criminal sanctions for more than a decade; as a consequence more than a million and a half Iraqis, half a million of them children, died. They have bombarded Iraq countless and merciless times, compounding the killings with the destruction of property and infrastructure. Iraq also faces further consequences of the unending wars and sanctions. For example, new forms of terrible cancers attributable to the poisonous depleted uranium ammunition used.

After these most civilised and devout actions, they prepared themselves to reap the fruits of their conquest: oil extraction, strategic land for military bases, tax-free business by US and UK companies, a foothold for new robberies in other Middle East countries and so on.

Now, Bush and Blair want the rest of the world to believe they are distressed and concerned because the soldiers they sent to an illegal and inhumane war have engaged in some public display of sadism and tyranny. Never mind the mass killings, devastation of the country, mass imprisonment, and the subjugation of the country.

What kind of religion does the president of the most powerful country in the Western world claim to follow that allows the killing of half a million Muslim children? What kind of Western secular values are those which permit the destruction of a country in the name of liberation and democracy? What is the use of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when they just mean death, destruction and plunder for non-Western peoples?

The aims for the US and UK led war against Iraq are totally corrupt, as was plainly visible before it started and as the events are stubbornly showing dead after dead. There is no reason to believe that its means and developments were going to be pure. The purity of arms can only be applied to defensive wars, never to wars of aggression. Torture of prisoners is simply war of aggression by other means.

Most Arabs and Muslims think that Bush and Blair are despicable human beings. They are right in this regard and also in rejecting those leader’s corruption of Christian and Western values. Many Westerners concur with this assessment, only that we are to blame for not impeding the actions of those who purport to speak in our name.

AGUSTIN VELLOSO is a lecturer at the Spanish National University for Distance Learning. He can be reached at: a.velloso@reading.ac.uk