I our society, choices decrease to the extent that they matter. When it comes to chocolate bars, the options are impressive - supermarket shelves are filled with them. When it comes to political parties, foreign policy and the media, choices merge, narrow and disappear to nothing. Defenders of then mainstream media tell us there is a wide spectrum of
views - we have, for example, a choice between the 'right-wing' Times and
the 'left-wing' Observer, they say. George Orwell took a different view:
"I really don't know which is more stinking, the Sunday Times or The
Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turning from side to
side in bed and getting no comfort which ever way he turns." (George Orwell,
quoted, Bernard Crick, George Orwell, A Life, p.233, Penguin Books, 1992).
As regular readers of our Media Alerts will know, the bedsores are as
irksome now as ever they were in Orwell's day.
In his outstanding work, The Ambiguities of Power - British Foreign Policy
Since 1945 - historian Mark Curtis tells us a little about our choices when
it comes to deciding who to kill and exploit in foreign countries:
"Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of
peace, democracy human rights and economic development in the Third World,
British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them,
whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been
in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of
Western policies abroad." (Curtis, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)
Selecting freely from options pre-selected to serve the same interests
+is+ a choice but it is a meaningless one.
Today, Tony Blair and Tory leader Ian Duncan-Smith are as one in lining up
with George Bush in pushing for "action" against Iraq. Blair insists that
"Iraq poses a real and unique threat to the security of the region and the
rest of the world." (Patrick Wintour, 'Blair: Saddam has to go', The
Guardian, September 4, 2002)
This is the same Iraq that had its infrastructure systematically
demolished by 88,500 tons of bombs - the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-size
atomic bombs - during the Gulf War. The infrastructure has continued to
collapse and decay, along with its suffering people, under a decade of
murderous sanctions. We are expected to believe that the West's thousands of
nuclear warheads were sufficient to deter the Soviet superpower for forty
years, but not a smashed Third World nation.
Duncan-Smith informs us that Iraq has ballistic missiles with the capacity
to strike Europe, the UK included. This is part of what he describes as the
"clear and growing danger" represented by Saddam Hussein.
A permanent feature of media reporting is that the words of Western
leaders are reported at face value, while the hidden agendas behind the
words of our 'enemies' are remorselessly sought out and exposed. On BBC's
News At Ten O'Clock, John Simpson (of Kabul) described a visit to
Johannesburg by Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. Simpson said:
"What they [the Iraqis] want to do is to give the impression that they are
being reasonable and sensible... in order to show that they are innocent.
Because they know that works, that really does schmooz people here. Tariq
Aziz has been schmoozing people ever since he arrived, and doing it very
satisfactorily from his point of view." (Simpson, September 3, 2002)
This was delivered by the urbane Simpson in his usual self-assured,
well-educated voice - we would not readily associate him or his words with
burned and mutilated bodies. But consider this: would Simpson or any other
BBC or ITN reporter +ever+ describe Colin Powell or Jack Straw, or Bush or
Blair, as trying hard "to give the impression that they are being reasonable
and sensible... Because they know that works, that really does schmooz
people here"?
The answer is a flat 'no' - Western leaders must always be treated with
due deference and respect. It is because of this deep bias (unnoticed
because
omnipresent) presenting the reasonable good guys, 'us', pitted against the
ludicrous bad guys, 'them', that Western nations are able to kill and maim
thousands of Third World people with massive military violence,
comparatively unhindered by public dissent. Our point is not that the
Iraqi's are reasonable; it is that our leaders should not be reflexively
portrayed as reasonable.
Also on BBC News, Matt Frei described Tariq Aziz as Saddam's "chief
lieutenant", who was tirelessly "trying to woo the world", and that he had
just that day "popped up on Good Morning America". (Frei, BBC1 News At Ten O
'Clock, September 3, 2002) Again, the Iraqi's are painted as absurd comedy
figures crudely trying to trick the world into taking them seriously - 'But
we won't fall for that!' is the message being subliminally delivered to the
public. When the bombs start to fall, the public will likely be convinced
that the Iraqis had it coming to them.
Again, Frei does not appear to have much to do with violence and death -
like most TV reporters, he is a well-dressed, well-spoken, educated, middle
class white man (the epitome of 'respectability' in our society). But,
again, we should make the association, because words of this kind are
crucial in making violence possible.
Consider, by contrast, a recent report by ITN's Washington Correspondent,
Robert Moore. Concluding his report, Moore referred to Bush's urgent need to
make a decision on whether to attack Iraq, adding ominously:
"As Dick Cheney, his vice president warned, Iraq may soon be armed with a
nuclear weapon." (August 27, 2002)
No sense here that Cheney and Bush are "trying to give the impression that
they are being reasonable and sensible... Because they know that works, that
really does schmooz people here".
It is impossible to imagine that Moore might refer to the response of
Scott Ritter, senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, to the
comments Cheney made that day:
"That's a deeply disturbing comment that the vice president made because
it reflects either the fact that he's totally ignorant of the reality of
what was transpiring, or if he is truly cognizant of what happened, he lied
to the American public. And I'd hate to think the vice president is lying."
(National Public Radio (NPR) Show: Talk of the Nation, NPR August 28, 2002
Wednesday. Headline: 'Threat that Iraq poses to the United States')
There was no prospect of Moore seeking a hidden agenda behind Cheney's
allegations. We cannot conceive of ITN or the BBC mentioning that Vice
President Cheney has intimate ties with Lockheed Martin, the largest US
defence contractor, and that his wife Lynne Cheney served on the Lockheed
Martin board from 1994 through January 2001, accumulating more than $500,000
in deferred director's fees in the process. Hidden agendas are fine for
official 'enemies', but the good guys can be taken at their word, no matter
how absurd and compromised their word might be, no matter how awful their
actions.
We have to go to war with Iraq, we are told, because Saddam Hussein is a
monster - no right thinking person could stand by while he lives to threaten
the world. Hiding in the shadow of the media's 'big question' - should we or
shouldn't we attack Iraq? - lies a second, forbidden question consigned to
the margins of debate. The question is this: What actually is the moral
track record of the Western powers claiming that they intend to use mass
violence to make the world a better place? Let's consider some of the
evidence.
We have to attack Iraq, we are told, because Saddam Hussein is a man who
gassed his own people at Halabja. William Shawcross writes in The Guardian:
"The last time Iraq was open to the outside world in the 1980s opposition
to Saddam was brutally repressed - who can forget Halabja?" ('Let's take him
out - The threat to the world posed by Saddam Hussein's rule of terror is
too great to ignore any longer. There is only one solution, argues William
Shawcross - military action', August 1, 2002)
Who can forget Halabja? The true question is: Who can remember the West's
role in Halabja? Dilip Hiro fills in some of the missing details about what
actually happened, and about the 'us' of Shawcross' title, "Let's take him
out":
"To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it
in March, Iraq's air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective
was to take out the occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the
town); instead, the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of
men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian
media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington...
[I}nstead of pressuring him [Saddam] to reverse his stand, or face a ban on
the sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by
the revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose
to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other
sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical
agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This
was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If
conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have
not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a
further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished." ('When US turned a
blind eye to poison gas', The Observer, 1 September, 2002)
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,784125,00.html
On August 18, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined,
'Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas'. Quoting anonymous US
"senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the
administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical
battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that
Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive
battles of the Iran-Iraq war".
It may have occurred to readers that the use of poison gas is not uniquely
awful; not significantly worse than, for example, carpet bombing peasant
villages in Vietnam, or spraying depleted uranium around Southern Iraq.
Beyond the propaganda, we find that this obvious thought has also occurred
to the warriors against terrorism. Retired US Defence Intelligence Agency
(DIA) officer Walter Lang, told the New York Times that "the use of gas on
the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern".
Rather, what concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was
halting the spread of Iran's Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Who can forget Halabja? Almost everyone.
The background to Washington's support of Iraq was the January 1979
popular uprising that overthrew the pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian
revolution threatened the West's control of oil. This brings us to another
aspect of our second question regarding the West's moral track record: the
issue of "regime change" in Iraq. What kind of regime would our 'moral
crusaders' likely install after the fall of Saddam? Journalists take it for
granted that it would be a major improvement. Writing in 1999, John Sweeney
declared:
"Life will only get better for ordinary Iraqis once the West finally stops
dithering and commits to a clear, unambiguous policy of snuffing out Saddam.
And when he falls the people of Iraq will say: 'What kept you? Why did it
take you so long?' (Sweeney, 'The West created a monster. Now it's time to
destroy him. As a good liberal, I personally vote for obliterating Saddam',
The Observer, January 10, 1999)
That was not quite what the people of Iran cried out when US-supplied
armoured cars took to the streets of Iran, Iraq's neighbour, in 1953,
deposing the nationalist Mussadiq and replacing him with the Shah. According
to then CIA agent Richard Cottam, "...that mob that came into north Teheran
and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology.
That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was
used has to have been very large". (Quoted, Curtis, op., cit, p.93)
Under the Shah, Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the
world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" which
was "beyond belief", in a system in which "the entire population was
subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror", according to Amnesty
International. (Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International,
cited in an Amnesty Publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976)
After the CIA's coup in Iran, total US and multinational aid and credits
to the Iranian monster it had created increased nine-fold: "The more
dictatorial his regime became," US Iran specialist Eric Hoogland comments,
"the closer the US-Iran relationship became." (Quoted, Curtis, op.,cit,
p.95)
This does not bode well for a 'liberated' Iraq.
A rational discussion of the reasons for and against going to war must be
based on the likely beneficial and adverse human consequences both for
ourselves and others. Quite obviously, this question cannot be discussed
seriously unless we are willing to discuss the nature and motives of the
dominant political, corporate and military forces wielding Western military
power. Marginal hints at the existence of enormous forbidden truths aside
(the article by Dilip Hiro, for example), this is a question our media will
not allow us to address because the media are part of the establishment
status quo that has evolved to support, and benefits from, the silence.
David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens. He can be contacted at
editor@medialens.org. Sign up for free Media Alerts at: www.medialens.org
Start Date: 2002-09-13 01:00:00-04
End Date: 2002-10-13 01:00:00-04
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