The Bush/Blair attack on Iraq has brought death, destruction and great bitterness to Iraq. Every indication is that most Iraqis now regard their lives as immeasurably worse than during Saddam Hussein’s rule. More than 13,000 people are held in concentration camps in their own country.
This is many more than were incarcerated in Saddam’s political prisons in recent years. None has been charged; most cannot see their families; the allegations of torture and brutality by the occupiers grow by the day. As the US-based Human Rights Watch reported last week, the worst atrocities were in the 1980s – when he was backed by America and Britain.
The uprising in Iraq has accelerated and almost certainly strengthened since the capture of Saddam. Drawn from 12 different groups, including those that were always anti-Saddam, the resistance is well organised and will not stop until the ‘coalition’ leaves. The setting up of a puppet ‘democracy’ will merely increase the number of targets. As Blair’s knowledge of imperial history will tell him, this is precisely what happened in Britain’s other colonies before they threw out their occupiers, and in Vietnam.
One piece of intelligence which was true and which we know Blair received is a report that warned him that an attack on Iraq would only increase worldwide terrorism, especially against British interests and citizens. He chose to ignore it.
Two weeks ago a panel of jurists called on the International Criminal Court to investigate the British government for war crimes in Iraq. Whether or not that succeeds, it is clear the Prime Minister will need to find another Hutton, and quickly. John Pilger, article February 2004 ‘Another Hutton Whitewash’
Blair – this little tin-pot messiah wandering around the world, plastic Mussolini without his balcony. This is a man who is reviled in Britain ... The hatred for him is like a presence. They hate him ... There is something about Blair particularly – the embodiment of all the worst of the class system in Britain. John Pilger, lecture Freedom Next Time
How contrite their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on ‘media training’, called on MPs to ‘rebuild cross-party trust’. The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago – cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a ‘revolt’ among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new female MPs, who had been elected ‘to end male-dominated, Conservative policies’, spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.
The same was true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party Establishment and the political media rallied. Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told BBC viewers that Blair had ‘said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.’ When Blair’s army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.
As for the ‘celebrating’ Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall’s own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation – they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.
Such venality goes far beyond the greed of the uppity Hazel Blears.
‘Normalising the unthinkable’, Edward Herman’s phrase from his essay ‘The Banality of Evil’, about the division of labour in state crime, is applicable here. On 18 May, The Guardian devoted the top of one page to a report headlined, ‘Blair awarded $1m prize for international relations work’. This prize, announced in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, was for his ‘cultural and social impact on the world’. You looked in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the truth. Instead, there was his ‘optimism about the chance of bringing peace’ and his work ‘designed to forge peace’.
This was the same Blair who committed the same crime – deliberately planning the invasion of a country, ‘the supreme international crime’ – for which the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg after proof of his guilt was located in German cabinet documents. Last February, Britain’s ‘Justice’ Secretary, Jack Straw, blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes from March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered their release. For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalised and celebrated.
‘How our corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists,’ said the cover of last week’s New Statesman. But is not their support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the government’s collusion with torture?
It is as if our public language has finally become Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to combat democratic dissent they call ‘extremism’. Their de facto partners are ‘security’ journalists, a recent breed of state or ‘lobby’ propagandist. On 9 April, the BBC’s Newsnight promoted the guilt of 12 ‘terrorists’ arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the Prime Minister himself. All were later released without charge.
Something is changing in Britain that gives cause for optimism. The British people have probably never been more politically aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullshit. John Pilger, article May 2009, ‘Britain: The Depth of Corruption’
Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now consider Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenceless country, which the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the ‘paramount war crime’. This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.
In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter ‘liberated’ by the British) are now revealed as higher than those at Hiroshima. ‘UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,’ the Defence Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic ‘anti-personnel’ weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and American forces.
Such carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed. On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, ‘We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq’ ... Last month, the former head of the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot inquiry, ‘There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad’. Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, ‘Substantially’. The bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s actions.
Documents released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the ‘best way’ to ensure UK nationals were ‘securely held’.
Instead of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed. Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated an estimated £20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s ‘consultancy’ deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets £2 million a year ‘advising’ the American investment bank JP Morgan and undisclosed sums from financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.
In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s ‘peace envoy’ in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which awarded him a $1 million ‘peace prize’. In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W Bush, the bloodbath in Iraq.
His collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed ‘justice secretary’, suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband, sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran as the next ‘threat’.
Journalists who once fawned on Blair as ‘mystical’ and amplified his vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along. As for the media’s gulling of the public, only The Observer’s David Rose, to his great credit, has apologised. The Wikileaks’ exposes, released with a moral objective of truth with justice, have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism. Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in Blair’s rejuvenation of ‘enlightened’ imperialism, remain silent on the ‘moral truancy’, as Pankaj Mishra wrote, ‘of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary world’.
Is it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron government understands the ‘threat’ of a law that makes Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger, who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the care of a fugitive.
Two recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a ‘crime committed by a political or military leader which by its character, gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United Nations] Charter’. International lawyers described this as a ‘giant leap’. Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute that created the court and is bound by its decisions.