[progchat_action] Iran May be the Greatest Crisis of Modern Times
Steven L. Robinson
by John Pilger
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 12, 2007
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah,
was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my
mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This
image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from
the side'."
It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from
the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern
history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no
reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The
safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and
his rivals (with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the
Ministry of Defence -- until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a
distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has
spent four years preparing for "Operation Iranian Freedom." Forty-five
cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading
strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be
secondary targets . . . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed.
Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive
contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."
And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of "news" in which
our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not
make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the
consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be
revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently
spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East
is an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension. In other words,
bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to Iraq, but he also
meant Iran.
One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair
get out of their homeland -- that is the real news: not our nabbed
sailor-spies, nor the political dance macabre of the pretenders to Blair's
Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the
Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in
Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing
that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual
distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush.
They knew about the fake 45-minute "warning". They knew about the fitting up
of Iran as the next "enemy".
Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to apologise
for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past
rather than apologise for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian
Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily
in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since
the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it
clear that British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for
the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people
throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes
strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims
"unpeople". Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the
difference.
Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other
warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on
Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" -- and
Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed
Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose
regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid
system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief"
(Amnesty).
Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite
elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy.
They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to
mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a
high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set
out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in
the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair
dealt his coup de grbce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from
their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and
Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.
In the second example, only the degree of suffering is different. Last
October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US
and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, which calculated that 655,000
Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing
Street officials derided the study as "flawed". They were lying. They knew
that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy
Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as "robust" and
"close to best practice," and other government officials had secretly
approved the "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict
zones". The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a
million -- carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic
siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million
infants under the age of five, verified by UNICEF. That, too, was dismissed
contemptuously by Blair.
"This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony
Blair," wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime
of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial
or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference."
Such is the scale of the crime and of our "looking from the side." According
to the Observer of 8 April, the voters' "damning verdict" on the Blair
regime is expressed by a majority who have "lost faith" in their government.
No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair,
demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest
turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own
contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of
liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in
1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's
lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles
falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks -- claims now regarded even by
the Pentagon as fake.
As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the
former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack
Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001.
The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which outlined the carve-up
of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law
written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to
hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to
Anglo-American companies.
Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East,
where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across
the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as
non-existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy
had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons
have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel
and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has
allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International
Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian program
to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they
have been allowed to "go anywhere." The recent UN Security Council sanctions
against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.
Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of
the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state
terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of
al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically
destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British
Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against
the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone." In 2001, few Britons knew
that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the
attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to
Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as
never before. When homegrown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few
doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs
that killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.
In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of
the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and
intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil,
of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the
lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The
sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004
tsunami, shaming that of the government.
Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of
counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the
end of the Second World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the
United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not
prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be
willing to have invoked against us."
As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain
countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private
citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzsn, the
tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments
against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable
episodes in recent human history" -- Iraq. Five days later, the chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a
signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.
These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks -- again, thanks
to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of
times. On 6 April, Blair accused "elements of the Iranian regime" of
"backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq." He offered no
evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same
Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included,
brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue
looking from the side?
John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and
documentary filmmaker. His newest book is Freedom Next Time (Bantam Press,
June 2006). Visit John Pilger's website: www.johnpilger.com.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr07/Pilger12.htm
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