In all the coverage of the bombing of London,
a truth has struggled to be heard. With honorable exceptions, it has been said
guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the
silence, as an east Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew
and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq and what did
we expect? Go on, say it."
Alex Salmond tried to say it on Today on Radio 4. He was told he was
speaking "in poor taste … before the bodies are even buried." George Galloway
was lectured on Newsnight (BBC2) that he was being "crass." The inimitable
Ken Livingstone contradicted his previous statement, which was that the invasion
of Iraq would come home to London. With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called
antiwar MP spoke out in clear, unequivocal English. The warmongers were allowed
to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in the Guardian,
called Blair "the world's leading statesman."
And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know
why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair is a liar.
This frightens the political elite. At a large media party I attended, many of
the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that
which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
The bombs of 7
July were Blair's bombs.
Blair brought home to this country his and George W. Bush's illegal, unprovoked,
and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility,
the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No. 30 bus almost certainly would
be alive today. This is what Livingstone ought to have said. To paraphrase perhaps
the only challenging question put to Blair on the eve of the invasion (by John
Humphrys), it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is unfit to be prime
minister.
How much more evidence is needed? Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the
Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest terrorist threat" to
this country would be "heightened by military action against Iraq." He was warned
by 79 percent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003,
believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London
more likely." A month ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the
invasion had turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism. Before the invasion,
said the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbors" because Saddam
Hussein was "implacably hostile to al-Qaeda."
Now, a report by the Chatham House organization, a "think-tank" deep within
the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de grace. Published
on July 18, it says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost
to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment, and fundraising" while
providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. "Riding pillion
with a powerful ally" has cost Iraqi, American and British lives. The right-wing
academic Paul Wilkinson, a voice of Western power, was the principal author.
Read between the lines, and it says the prime minister is now a serious liability.
Those who run this country know he has committed a great crime; the "link"
has been made.
Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the invasion,
notably Sept. 11, 2001. Anyone with an understanding of the painful history
of the Middle East would not have been surprised by Sept. 11 or by the bombings
of Madrid and London, only that they had not happened earlier. I have reported
the region for 35 years, and if I could describe in a word how millions of Arab
and Muslim people felt, I would say "humiliated." When Egypt looked like winning
back its captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through jubilant
crowds in Cairo: it felt as if the weight of history's humiliation had lifted.
In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to me, "We once chased cricket balls
at the British Club. Now we are free."
They were not free, of course. The Americans resupplied the Israeli army and
they almost lost everything again. In Palestine, the humiliation of a captive
people is Israeli policy. How many Palestinian babies have died at Israeli checkpoints
after their mothers, bleeding and screaming in premature labor, have been forced
to give birth beside the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a
hospital in the distance? How many old men have been forced to make obeisance
to young Israeli conscripts? How many families have been blown to bits by American-supplied
F-16s using British-supplied parts?
The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be measured
by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide bombing." What about Iraq?
There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about
Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an
accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power. In the 1991
Gulf "War," American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and
injured, and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state,"
according to the United Nations. The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted
by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis
Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation
food allowance, called it "genocidal."
I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted
uranium, and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I watched dying children,
some of the half a million infants whose deaths UNICEF attributed to the embargo
– deaths that the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were
"worth it." In the West, this was hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world,
the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born
Muslims.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the twin towers, more
than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This
was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian but never became news,
to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against
Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable: this last "in response
to the massacres carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan," claimed the
Secret Organization Group of al-Qaeda in Europe. Whether or not the claim was
genuine, the reason was. Bush and Blair wanted a "war on terror," and they got
it. Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al-Qaeda's
appear minuscule by comparison. More than 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children
have been killed not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition,"
says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
In his poem "From Iraq," Michael
Rosen wrote:
"We are the unfound
We are uncounted
You don't see
the homes we made
We're not even the small print or the bit in brackets…
because we lived far from you…
because you have cameras that point the other way…."
Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It is an American
police state, like a vast penned ghetto. Since April last year, the hospitals
there have been subjected to an American policy of collective punishment. Staff
have been attacked by U.S. Marines, doctors have been shot, emergency medicines
blocked. Children have been murdered in front of their families.
Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received
the victims of the bombing. When will someone draw this parallel at one of Blair's
staged "press conferences," at which he is allowed to emote for the cameras
about "our values outlast[ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah,
the people know "our values" only too well. And when will someone invite the
obsequious Bob Geldof to explain why his hero's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation"
amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week brutalizing
Iraq?
The hand-wringing over
"whither Islam's soul" is another distraction. As an industrial killer,
Christianity leaves Islam for dead. The cause of the current terrorism is
neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life": it is political, requiring a
political solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the
deepest grievances. That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the "cameras
that point the other way," are the core of it.
On July 19, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general meeting
at Television Center, an inspired group of British documentary filmmakers met
outside the main gates and conducted a series of news reports of the kind you
do not see on television. Actors played famous reporters doing their "pieces
to camera." The "stories" they reported included the targeting of the civilian
population of Iraq, the application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, America's
illegal rewriting of the laws of Iraq, the everyday torture and humiliation
of ordinary people, and the failure to protect Iraqis' archaeological and cultural
heritage.
Blair is using the London bombings to further deplete our rights and those of
others, as Bush has done in America. Their goal is not security, but greater
control. The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere
demands the renewal of our anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is
owed to those who died and suffered in London on July 7, unnecessarily, and
nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
