The war against terrorism is a
fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the
attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.
Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the
most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious
"military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red
Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.
Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of
this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven
in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.
And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about
these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have
only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the
ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.
If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I
have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as
the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off.
Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.
None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most
were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the
United States.
The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago.
Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In
the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained
by the SAS to fight the Russians.
The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996,
Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to
Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.
With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of
the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans
wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.
A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis
did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony,
there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal
persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.
Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the
administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's
concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin,
the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to
one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only
if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.
So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to
"moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose
federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a
cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind
the flag-waving facade of great power.
The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than
mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the
extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for
terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense,
he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so
uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict
"could last 50 years".
The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone
could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having
reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians
eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo
to a Taliban goose.
In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the
"morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his
selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing
of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the
killing of innocent people anywhere else.
By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the
criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and
"blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether
you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval
Office and Downing Street.
If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out
of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms
fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to
assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with
the full backing of the Blair government.
Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads
heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.
If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain",
Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those
parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.
He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its
illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967
war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent
member.
He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality,
America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than
a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.
That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World
Trade Center.
There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war"
to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft
already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news.
This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World
War Two.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a
"dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain".
"We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two
years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? £800
million so far.
According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent
of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband
and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a
shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children
when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley;
there were no military targets nearby.
"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the
graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's
Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.
The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth
that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the
Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims -
victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or
near their countries.
There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would
be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin
American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.
There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with
new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently,
or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east
and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard
and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative
non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.
The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World
Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our
government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of
sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and
nursing further grievances against us.
"It
is not the way to go...not in our son's name."
EX-MIRRORMAN John Pilger is an award-winning journalist and film-maker, best
known for revealing to the world the genocide in Cambodia.
Pilger has covered conflict worldwide, reporting from across the Middle
East, Asia and South Africa and often questioning the West's involvement.
A dispatch from Cambodia in September 1979 - where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge
regime left 1.7million people executed or dead from starvation - produced a
memorable Daily Mirror shock edition.
He worked for the paper between 1963 and 1986 as a reporter, sub-editor,
feature writer and chief foreign correspondent.
Pilger, 62, has also filmed more than 15 hard-hitting documentaries, most of
which highlight the injustices of recent wars.
His latest investigation, titled The New Rulers of the World and addressing
the problem of globalisation, was released in July to great acclaim.
Australian Pilger, who has a son and daughter, began his career in Sydney,
then became Reuters' Middle East correspondent.
He worked for Granada's World in Action, BBC TV and radio, and ABC News.
Pilger has a double-figure tally of awards, including Journalist of the Year
in 1967 and 1979, International Reporter of the Year in 1970 and Campaigning
Journalist of 1979.
He was a winner two years running of the UN Media Peace Prize and in 1991
collected an Emmy for his documentary-making.
http://www.johnpilger.com/
Copyright 2001 The Mirror/UK