MER
America's case for war is built on blindness
Tue Sep 17 02:07:01 2002
208.152.73.123

Fisk's speech at George Mason University last Tuesday evening, on the
eve of the 9/11 anniversary, was a tour de force of both the region's
history and problems as well as of the real roles played by the U.S. and
Israel in attempting to continually manipulate and control the region.
That speech, featured this week by MER, can be watched at
http://www.MiddleEast.Org/feature . And an exclusive 2-hour interview of
Fisk by MER's Mark Bruzonsky a few years ago is available in the MERTV
archives at www.MERTV.Org .


........America's case for war is built on blindness,
........hypocrisy and lies. George Bush and Donald
........Rumsfeld are wilfully ignoring the realities of the
........Middle East. The result can only be catastrophic

By Robert Fisk

[The Independent - 15 September 2002]: 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.




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• ashenazi use hasbara to hide war crimes — rcplank, Tue Sep 17 06:44