LONDON, 13 August 2004 — Most legends contain a small grain of truth, but none is to be found in the fraudulent images being presented each day by the BBC (and the US networks). The print media is not much better. Official propaganda is constantly repeated in sentences such as: “On June 28 the United States and its coalition partners transferred sovereign control of Iraq to an interim government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The transfer of sovereignty ended more than a year of American-led occupation”.
Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies admit that the size of the resistance increases every day. If Moqtada Al-Sadr were to be captured or killed in the fighting taking place in Najaf, the steady trickle of recruits could become a flood.
The notion that Iraq today is a sovereign state governed by Iraqis is a grotesque fiction. Every Iraqi citizen, regardless of political views or religious affiliation, is aware of the actual status of the country. The “handover”, designed largely to convince US citizens that they could now relax and re-elect Bush, was also an invitation to the Western media to downgrade coverage of Iraq, which it dutifully did.
Of the two Iraqis plucked from obscurity to be the front men for the occupation, “President” Yawar is a relatively harmless telecoms manager. He was perfectly happy to don tribal gear for official functions and photo ops with Rumsfeld and the boys. “Prime Minister” Allawi was at one time a low-grade intelligence employee for Saddam, reporting on dissident Iraqis in London. Subsequently, Anglo-American intelligence outfits recruited him. After the first Gulf War he was sent to destabilize the regime. His hirelings bombed a cinema and a bus carrying children.
Before the war Allawi helped manufacture the 45-minute WMD delivery systems warning for the dodgy dossier men in No 10. After the occupation he was rewarded and put on the “Governing Council”.
He then hired a lobbying firm, which spent $370,000 campaigning in Washington for him to be made prime minister, and also got him a column in the Washington Post.
As “prime minister” he cultivates a thuggish image. On July 17 in a remarkable despatch from Baghdad, Paul McGeough, the Australian correspondent, (and former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) alleged: “Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.”
McGeough appears regularly on TV and radio to defend his story, which does not go away.
The fact is that Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war. The situation was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison: “We want electricity in our homes, not up the arse.”
The citizens of the aggressor states can see this for themselves and regardless of the media will, one must hope, punish their leaders for taking them to war — regardless of the fact that the alternatives on offer are so weak.
In the US, Sen. Kerry is an unconvincing politician. Unlike some of his liberal apologists, he does not like to portray the Democrats as the consistently less aggressive of the two parties. It was, after all, Democratic — not Republican — presidents who launched the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Republican Eisenhower’s electoral appeal in 1952 was based on being the more peaceful of the two candidates. In 1960 Kennedy attacked the Republicans for the “missile gap”, denouncing their weakness before the Soviet threat. Carter, not Reagan, launched the second Cold War. And in 1992 Clinton was thundering against Bush senior’s weakness on Cuba and China. Now Bush junior has outpaced any Democratic rival in accelerated militarism.
It is necessary to bear this record in mind, as pressure has built up for the US left to fall into line behind Kerry. Many will, understandably enough, vote for him to get rid of a warmonger government. If they succeed, he must be put under immediate pressure to withdraw from Iraq.
If there had been no resistance in Iraq, the triumphalism of warmongers would have drowned out oppositions of every hue.
The defeat of the warmongers, if it happens, will be the outcome of what is happening in Baghdad and Basra, Fallujah and Najaf. Even if they try and brush aside the 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in this conflict, according to a recent estimate by an Iraq-based NGO, Bush and Blair will not forget the names of the cities whose people refuse to surrender. There is only one serious option: The unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
