Defeat Is Victory. Death Is Life
by Robert Fisk
The Independent, 02/26/06
www.zmag.org/, February 27, 2006
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history,
but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully,
dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success,
defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the
compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam
as of the British and French commanders of the First World War
who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as
they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers'
shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference
now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though
the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of
the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza
Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington.
She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies"
of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq
and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi
Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her
evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where
she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge"
facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict
the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".
BUSH BELIEVES IN SELF-DETERMINATION ONLY
IF HE'S DOING THE DETERMINING...
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest
of Syria's not always very bright team of government ministers,
noted: "What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought
by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves
to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the
best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York
Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination
only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed
with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think
and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might
have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible
man who helped to kick off the "shock and awe" mess
that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes
of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa
to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret
service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the
best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists":
to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths
until they have almost drowned.
RAPED BEFORE BEING DISPATCHED BY AN EXECUTION
SQUAD
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat
cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death
squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent
war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed
a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum
in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if
the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube
down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner
swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at
the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants
to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before
being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's
also been cosying up to the Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this
month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have
a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic
as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much
value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..."
Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn,
the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example,
which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than
America's thugs.
Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have
included a defence of the Pentagon's system of buying favourable
news stories in Iraq with bribes - "non-traditional means
to provide accurate information" was his fantasy description
of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American
regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu
Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity
of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee
abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage
and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam
Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqis."
Let's expose this whopping lie. We were
exposing Saddam's vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long
ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam's satraps
for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was
Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam,
to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which
he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen
the US embassy in Iraq.
With the usual press courtiers in tow,
Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan's recent interview
with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: "He generously
spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight
streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at
a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this
modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal
to the tasks ahead."
And so myth-making and tragedy go hand
in hand. Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless,
an incipient "civil war". Note how the American framework
of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as
if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the
appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques?
They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian
government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out
line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.
Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged
their insurgency against British rule in 1920, called Iraq "an
ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back and enjoy the
view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are enjoying
more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the
future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and
bloodier by the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove"
is up to his job when all that bright sunlight streams in and
lights his face.
Robert
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