"The Unthinkable Is Becoming Normal"

 John Pilger, The Independent,
UK, 03.05.2003 [13:10]

Last Sunday, seated in the audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony,
I was struck by the silence. Here were many of the most influential members
of the liberal elite, the writers, producers, dramatists, journalists and
managers of our main source of information, television; and not one broke
the silence. It was as though we were disconnected from the world outside: a
world of rampant, rapacious power and great crimes committed in our name by
our government and its foreign master. Iraq is the "test case", says the
Bush regime, which every day sails closer to Mussolini's definition of
fascism: the merger of a militarist state with corporate power. Iraq is a
test case for western liberals, too. As the suffering mounts in that
stricken country, with Red Cross doctors describing "incredible levels of
civilian casualties," the choice of the next conquest, Syria or Iran, is
debated on the BBC, as if it were a World Cup venue.

The unthinkable is being normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman
wrote: "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the
unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of
individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better crematory
gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that
penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the
experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the
general public.''

Herman wrote that following the 1991 Gulf War, whose nocturnal images of
American bulldozers burying thousands of teenage Iraqi conscripts, many of
them alive and trying to surrender, were never shown. Thus, the slaughter
was normalised. A study released just before Christmas 1991 by the Medical
Educational Trust revealed that more than 200,000 Iraqi men, women and children
were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack. This was
barely reported, and the homicidal nature of the "war'' never entered public
consciousness in this country, let alone America.

The Pentagon's deliberate destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure,
such as power sources and water and sewage plants, together with the
imposition of an embargo as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a degree
of suffering never fully comprehended in the West. Documented evidence was
available, volumes of it; by the late 1990s, more than 6,000 infants were
dying every month, and the two senior United Nations officials responsible
for humanitarian relief in Iraq, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck,
resigned, protesting the embargo's hidden agenda. Halliday called it
"genocide".

As of last July, the United States, backed by the Blair government, was
wilfully blocking humanitarian supplies worth $5.4bn, everything from
vaccines and plasma bags to simple painkillers, all of which Iraq had paid
for and the Security Council had approved.

Last month's attack by the two greatest military powers on a demoralised,
sick and largely defenceless population was the logical extension of this
barbarism. This is now called a "victory", and the flags are coming out.
Last week, the submarine HMS Turbulent returned to Plymouth, flying the
Jolly Roger, the pirates' emblem. How appropriate. This nuclear-powered
machine fired some 30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq. Each
missile cost £700,000: a total of £21m. That alone would provide desperate
Basra with food, water and medicines.

Imagine: what did Commander Andrew McKendrick's 30 missiles hit? How many
people did they kill or maim in a population nearly half of which are
children? Maybe, Commander, you targeted a palace with gold taps in the
bathroom, or a "command and control facility", as the Americans and Geoffrey
Hoon like to lie. Or perhaps each of your missiles had a sensory device that
could distinguish George Bush's "evil-doers'' from toddlers. What is certain
is that your targets did not include the Ministry of Oil.

When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to "support
troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had
no quarrel."  The ultimate test of our professionalism is how Commander
McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no
navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and,
in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs
shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in
the patient's mouth.

One child, Ali Ismaeel Abbas, the boy who lost his parents and his arms in a
missile attack, has been flown to a modern hospital in Kuwait. Publicity has
saved him. Tony Blair says he will "do everything he can'' to help him. This
must be the ultimate insult to the memory of all the children of Iraq who
have died violently in Blair's war, and as a result of the embargo that
Blair enthusiastically endorsed. The saving of Ali substitutes a media
spectacle of charity for our right to knowledge of the extent of the crime
committed against the young in our name. Let us now see the pictures of the
"truckload of dozens of dismembered women and children'' that the Red Cross
doctors saw.

As Ali was flown to Kuwait, the Americans were preventing Save The Children
from sending a plane with medical supplies into northern Iraq, where 40,000
are desperate. According to the UN, half the population of Iraq has only
enough food to last a few weeks. The head of the World Food Programme says
that 40 million people around the world are now seriously at risk because of
the distraction of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq.

And this is "liberation"? No, it is bloody conquest, witnessed by America's
mass theft of Iraq's resources and natural wealth. Ask the crowds in the
streets, for whom the fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein have been
transferred, virtually overnight, to Bush and Blair and perhaps to "us''.

Such is the magnitude of Blair's folly and crime that the contrivance of his
vindication is urgent. As if speaking for the vindicators, Andrew Marr, the
BBC's political editor, reported: "[Blair] 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.''

What constitutes a bloodbath to the BBC's man in Downing Street? Did the
murder of the 3,000 people in New York's Twin Towers qualify? If his answer
is yes, then the thousands killed in Iraq during the past month is a
bloodbath. One report says that more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed within 24
hours or less. Or are the vindicators saying that the lives of one set of
human beings have less value than those recognisable to us? Devaluation of
human life has always been essential to the pursuit of imperial power, from
the Congo to Vietnam, from Chechnya to Iraq.

If, as Milan Kundera wrote, "the struggle of people against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting", then we must not forget. We must not
forget Blair's lies about weapons of mass destruction which, as Hans Blix
now says, were based on "fabricated evidence". We must not forget his
callous attempts to deny that an American missile killed 62 people in a
Baghdad market. And we must not forget the reason for the bloodbath. Last
September, in announcing its National Security Strategy, Bush served notice
that America intended to dominate the world by force. Iraq was indeed the
"test case". The rest was a charade.

We must not forget that a British defence secretary has announced, for the
first time, that his government is prepared to launch an attack with nuclear
weapons. He echoes Bush, of course. An ascendant mafia now rules the United
States, and the Prime Minister is in thrall to it. Together, they empty
noble words "liberation, freedom and democracy" of their true meaning. The
unspoken truth is that behind the bloody conquest of Iraq is the conquest of
us all: of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect at the very least.
If we say and do nothing, victory over us is assured.