Pilger: Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic

[Tony Gosling]

 From Pol Pot to ISIS: "Anything that flies on everything that moves"


8 October 2014

http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=168335#168335
http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-everything-that-moves

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" 
bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that 
flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh 
war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace 
Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic 
for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including 
the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I 
am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A 
telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, 
who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria 
(ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small 
sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, 
this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 
poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, 
loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had 
gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon 
could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural 
Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, 
returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous 
necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was 
unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the 
survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or 
four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe 
what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer 
Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 
Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as 
the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger 
began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the 
Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush 
and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 
700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The 
Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had 
class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; 
intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove 
the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above 
all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, 
a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. 
Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "jihadists" - seized the opportunity 
provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that 
followed. "Rebel" Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and 
Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through 
Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former 
British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, "The [Cameron] 
government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who 
ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that 
our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars - had 
been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for 
terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in 
destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an 
epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS 
are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal 
imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at 
great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is 
unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after 
the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United 
Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the 
Iraqi population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of 
Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that 
sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from 
chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts 
for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously 
unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields 
contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in 
London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi 
children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, 
parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, 
explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of 
being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government 
could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - 
much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein 
for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was 
allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay 
for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such 
as power and water. "Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, 
Hans Von Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of 
clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot 
afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, 
and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is 
deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, 
but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in 
Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished 
senior UN official, had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday 
said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of 
genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a 
million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that 
between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 
"excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American 
TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the 
United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright 
replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, 
Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection 
committee, "[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire 
population a means to live."  When I interviewed Carne Ross three 
years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. "I feel 
ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments 
deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in 
disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed 
[journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd 
freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the 
horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a 
warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned 
and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the 
former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 
1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in 
Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, 
Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". 
In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis 
of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he 
dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and 
other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This 
will further "the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the 
same in mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US 
bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound 
bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing 
without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as 
they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk 
cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as 
many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a 
black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck 
happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked 
by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, 
almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a 
semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, 
those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each 
other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has 
crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the 
British military, wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, 
almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their 
"coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird 
Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 
feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. 
They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they 
want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. 
This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file 
illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a 
special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals 
[and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is 
prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup 
de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with 
individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] 
border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA 
and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action 
fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written 
yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last 
year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that 
"two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war 
on Syria was planned. "I am going to tell you something," he said in 
an interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two 
years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top 
British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing 
something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels 
into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for 
Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation 
goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the 
west - Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and 
a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf 
medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including 
those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held 
ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government 
beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of 
the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this 
imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine 
negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the 
Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among 
those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, 
but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all 
shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of 
Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open 
wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic 
extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers 
hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the 
world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia 
unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never 
recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With 
impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has 
just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one 
fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world 
order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to 
the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the 
other victims of his "statecraft".  Only when "we" recognise the war 
criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

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