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WAR ON TERROR: THE OTHER VICTIMS: The irresponsibility of this
conflict is breathtaking. It is not about terrorism. As Blair and
Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York, British
forces are little more than mercenaries for the hidden agenda of U.S.
imperial ambitions
Oct 29 2001
By John Pilger Former Mirror Chief Foreign Correspondent
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 explo
de 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, U
nocal.
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 persecut
ion 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 ba
sin, 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 h
ope 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 mea
ns 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 "coul
d 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 abs
urdity 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 cras
h 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 assor
ted 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 religi
ous 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 perman
ent 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 t
he 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 new
s. 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. T
he cost to the British taxpayer? £800million 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 resourc
es 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 anywhe
re 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 i
n 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."
Top
End<{{{
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