NP? the glories of American aerial bombardment

[pynchonoid]

Published on Wednesday, January 29, 2003 by the Daily
Mirror/UK 

Blair is a Coward 
by John Pilger

William Russell, the great correspondent who reported
the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the
expression "blood on his hands" to describe impeccable
politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass
killing of ordinary people.

In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to
those modern political leaders who have had no
personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who
managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony
Blair.

There is about them the essential cowardice of the man
who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but
through a chain of command that affirms his
"authority".

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi
leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they
regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.

The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a
sovereign state that offered no threat to one's
homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for
which responsibility rested with the "highest
authority".

Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which
he is being denied even the flimsiest United Nations
cover now that the weapons inspectors have found, as
one put it, "zilch".

Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no
democratic cover.

Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not
consult parliament or the people when he dispatched
35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he
consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.

Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W
Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose
fanaticism and ambitions of "endless war" and "full
spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.

All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice,
Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false
liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech last night
was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938
when Hitler called his generals together and told
them: "I must have war." He then had it.

To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance
from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and
children for which he will share responsibility.

He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement
humanity has known since the 1930s. The current
American elite is the Third Reich of our times,
although this distinction ought not to let us forget
that they have merely accelerated more than half a
century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from
the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a
signal of their new power to the dozens of countries
invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy
wherever it collided with American "interests", such
as a voracious appetite for the world's resources,
like oil.

When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about
"bringing democracy to the people of Iraq", remember
that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath Party in
Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.

"That was my favorite coup," said the CIA man
responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush talking
about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US
government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages
of Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained
"sensitive information" which needed "a little
editing".

Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed
150 American, British and other foreign companies that
supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical and missile
technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In
2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister,
blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full
list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never
explained why.

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that
words on the page like these can seem almost abstract,
part of a great chess game unconnected to people's
lives.

The most vivid images I carry make that connection.
They are the end result of orders given far away by
the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would
have the courage to see, the effect of their actions
on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.

Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers
will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where
more than a million people were killed in the American
invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of
bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in
formation, unseen above the clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in
what was known as the "long box" pattern, the military
term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a "box" was
presumed destroyed.

When I reached a village within the "box", the street
had been replaced by a crater.

I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell
hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the
intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the
blast.

The children's skin had folded back, like parchment,
revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood,
while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small
leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot
seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and
often; yet even in that "media war" I never saw images
of these grotesque sights on television or in the
pages of a newspaper. [...] 


continues:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0129-12.htm

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