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© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

15
September 2002 05:16 BDST

Home   > Argument  > Commentators

Robert Fisk: 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

15 September 2002

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Robert
Fisk: America's case for war is built on blindness, hypocrisy and
lies

The
case for attacking Iraq is still not made

Neutral?
Not on your life!

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.

Also from the Commentators section.
Clive
Anderson: The first rule for TV is, never let content get in the way
of a good title
Paul
Barker: Shame on how Britain treats its children
Robert
Fisk: Glimmers of hope and decency during a bad week for Arabs in
America
Rupert
Cornwell: Be warned, this President means what he says
Robert
Fisk: The mantra that means this time it's serious

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