In liberation's name Iraq is being crushed, by Linda S Heard aljazeerah.info

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In liberation's name Iraq is being crushed,

by Linda S Heard
Gulf News, 4/8/03

"Village by village, city by city, liberation is coming," said George W. Bush during a recent radio address. I assume this was designed to suffuse the listening American public with pride in the "altruistic" war being waged on behalf of the Iraqi people. It chilled me to the core.

This invasion was never previously touted as one of liberation. It was supposed to be about the disarming of Saddam Hussain from his weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush/Blair combo is already hedging its bets.

A U.S. government spokesperson said that it could take months to unearth proscribed weapons. Britain's Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that they may never be found. The Iraqi leadership fears that chemical or biological weapons may be planted to discredit the regime.

As for the Iraqi leader, himself, after he has been painted by the American government as a cross between Attila the Hun and Jack the Ripper for months, we are suddenly being told that he is "irrelevant" - shades of the bin Laden saga. I suspect that if he's found, his relevance will be shouted from the White House rooftops. In the meantime the puerile toppling of his statues will do.

Bush's address to the nation continued: "American forces and our allies are treating innocent civilians with kindness." I would guess that the families of the 1,200 dead civilians and the 5,000 plus maimed or wounded would beg to differ.

Call me naïve, but in my book bombing electricity stations, markets and civilian neighbourhoods are hardly acts of kindness. Red-ucing a proud people - descendents of the peoples of Nineveh, Babylon and Sumer - to having to beg for water is far from being a friendly overture.

"The citizens of Iraq are coming to know what kind of people we have sent to liberate them," said Bush. Now here we can agree. They certainly are.

Bush's "kind of people" scrawl gung-ho messages on their missiles and complain because there are no McDonalds. These are people who shoot first and ask questions later, as seven women and children found to their cost. Bush's boys and girls are dropping cluster bombs and firing tank shells.

These are people who, when arresting a middle-aged suspect, forced him to the ground and repeatedly yanked off his kuffiyeh (Arab headdress). This was an appalling insult to that man's dignity and his heritage, done without any respect to the traditions of the people Bush and Blair claim to befriend.

We have seen the way that prisoners are handcuffed and hooded by this "liberating army". There is a photograph doing the rounds of one of a hooded man cuddling his terrified infant behind coils of barbed wire. One can only wonder what that boy will think of his "liberators" when he grows up.

In Najaf, American soldiers headed towards the golden-domed Imam Ali Mosque, one of the most sacred Shia sites, and were kept back by sheer people power. Hundreds of unarmed men steadfastly marched towards those armoured servants of the U.S. military machine shaking their fists in a rare display of courage. The confused soldiers were ordered to step back... and smile.

Yet, the American president believes that his boys and girls are out there winning over the Iraqis with their apple pie charm, probably because, as his spokesman Arie Fleischer says, he rarely watches television.

Sterile conflict

But most of us do watch television and not just the Western media, much of which is currently colluding with the coalition during these Orwellian times.

CNN, Fox News, NBC, the BBC and Sky News are trying to sell us an antiseptic war, one in which there are no torn and bleeding victims. In their war the enemy is destroyed in its thousands while the coalition suffers only those losses which are inescapably witnessed by the cameras of independent journalists - reporters like ITV's Terry Lloyd who was allegedly killed by American bullets and Baghdad-based Robert Fisk, unfairly discredited by Britain's Defence Secretary Jeff Hoon. Truth stands little chance.

A BBC spokesman, when asked why the British network was portraying such a sterile conflict, said that people with children wouldn't like to see such gory images coming into their living rooms. In other words, it's fine for those sensitive souls to support their nation's finest, but not to see the obscene results of their handiwork.

The Anglo-American media hasn't shrunk from distorting the truth and putting out disinformation in its scrambling to prove which one of its outlets can serve as the most effective propaganda arm.

If the media comes across some bottles of liquid, these are painted as possible chemical weapons. Boxes of white powder are turned into anthrax. A meat hook hangs from a ceiling and that room must have been a torture chamber. The finding of some 200 decomposed bodies in southern Iraq is touted as a sinister find.

Late on Saturday night, a Sky News anchor interviewed one of the inevitable "experts" about this discovery. "How can we know who these people are?" she asked. The pathologist said that they would have to take samples of DNA and search for dental records.

Did he imagine that these unfortunates were discovered near Harley Street instead of in the middle of a desert? Dental records indeed! We saw a British soldier flicking through a file on which was written "Iran" in Arabic and inside were photographs and names of the victims. Sky's southern Iraq-based reporter hinted darkly that this discovery could only mean one thing.

What it did, in fact, mean was that Iran and Iraq had been in the process of exchanging corpses of soldiers who lost their lives during the Iran-Iraq war - now confirmed by state-run Tehran Radio. Sky News once again proved that the unrelenting vilification of the Iraqi regime is part of its agenda with the facts not being allowed to get in the way of a good story.

The Qatar-based Arabic network Al Jazeera has been accused of following an agenda too and this is why it has been evicted from the New York stock exchange, the victim of professional hackers, and has had to look for a new server for its website. Once again its office has been bombed by the U.S. just as it was in Kabul.

While it is true that Al Jazeera is certainly playing to its outraged Arab audience, it does show graphic videos, worth more than a million words. It didn't concoct those images of ashen-faced, lifeless babies, victims of carpet bombs in Hilla or those heartrending scenes of the victims of man's inhumanity to man, filling the beds and covering the floors of Iraqi hospitals.

Iraqi television has an agenda too. It's called showing your side of the story against all odds. It made the mistake of screening a downed Apache helicopter and was bombed. It later ran images of captured American service personnel and dead British pilots and the Ministry of Information was promptly targeted.

Broadcasting out of the Palestine Hotel - temporary home of foreign journalists - Iraqi television still won't do as it's told. After it showed footage of a burning American vehicle, the coalition promptly unleashed a warning bomb just 100 yards from the hotel. According to a coalition spokesman pressure is being put on those companies which sell satellite time to Iraqi TV to desist.

Who can blame the coalition for being desperate to silence Iraqi television? The genial Iraqi Information Minister Moha-mmed Saeed Al Sahaf comes across as a lot more cultured and informative than many of those in Central Command.

Al Sahaf gives us facts - admittedly not always correct and often embellished - interspersed with a colourful turn of phrase, and then takes members of the international media on jaunts to back up his claims.

The best that Centcom can come up with are predictable statements, formatted speeches which all point to "Victory is Nigh".

As I write, the stubborn Baghdadi people have yet to welcome the liberating armies, with the exception of around 20 waving to U.S. tanks in front of a backdrop of scorched and half-demolished homes and shops on the outskirts of their city. Great photo-op!

Iraq's new interim rulers - led by Viceroy-Designate pro-Likud for-mer U.S. General Jay Garner with links to SY Coleman, a company specialising in weapons guidance systems - are patiently awaiting their glorious destiny in a luxury Kuwaiti beach resort. Fat-cat Iraqi exiles hope for some crumbs.

American oil companies wait for this war to receive a stamp of legality from the United Nations before they can draw up lucrative contracts. U.S. companies look forward to being recipients of bounty from Iraq's reconstruction and the Israelis hope for a long-awaited oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa.

And the Iraqis? What do they get? Why! Liberation, of course. The Saddam regime is coming to an end. The pro-Israel American neo-cons are about to take its place, while the Arab world shakes its collective head with dismay.

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. The writer can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com

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