The Five Iraqs by Scott Ritter

It has become a mantra of sorts among the faltering Republican candidates: Victory is at hand in Iraq. Mitt Romney, in particular, has taken to so openly embracing the “success” of the U.S. troop “surge” that it has become the centerpiece of his litany of attacks on the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

“Think of what’s happened this year,” Romney recently implored a crowd in Iowa. “General [David] Petraeus came in to report to Congress and Hillary Clinton said she couldn’t believe him. She said she just couldn’t believe General Petraeus. Now think about that. He’s been proven to be right. He should be on the cover, by the way, of Time magazine, and not Putin.”

Clinton, for her part, has stood her ground. Addressing a crowd of voters in Iowa, she took a swipe back at Romney: “We all know the Republican candidates are just plain wrong when they declare mission accomplished about the troop surge.” She went on to note that U.S. casualty figures in Iraq for 2007 were at an all-time high, and that for all of the positive reports concerning the surge, Iraq remains a nation on the verge of a civil war, no closer today to a political solution than it was before the escalation. She promised that, if nominated, “I will not hesitate to go toe to toe with Republicans in the debates to end the war as quickly and responsibly as possible.”

Therein lies the catch. How does Clinton explain her commitment to quick and responsible withdrawal in the context of the short-term reduction of violence in Iraq achieved by the surge? How does she propose to rectify the admitted internal shortcomings inside Iraq, which she likens to near-civil war conditions, with her pledge for a “responsible” withdrawal? If one takes at face value the alleged successes of the surge, it is difficult to justify the embrace of an alternative policy option. Likewise, if one chooses to criticize the surge as all smoke and mirrors, as Clinton has, and yet argues for a quick and responsible end to the war in Iraq without revealing the details of how this would be accomplished, the rhetoric comes across as remarkably shallow.

I’m not one inclined to speak out in support of Hillary Clinton. She made her bed with Iraq, and she should now be forced to sleep in it. However, she is right that nothing the surge has accomplished so far remotely approaches a solution to these enormously destabilizing realities: a largely disaffected Sunni population which finds the current Shiite-dominated government of Iraq fundamentally unacceptable; a decisively fractured Shiite population torn between an Iranian-dominated government on the one hand (controlled by the political proxies of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, itself an Iranian proxy) or an indigenous firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a false paradise in Kurdistan, where the dream of an independent Kurdish homeland corrupts a viable Kurdish autonomy and threatens regional instability by provoking Turkish military intervention.

“Quickly and responsibly”? The problem with Clinton is that when it comes to Iraq, she is as shallow as the next candidate, and once one gets past her flowery rhetoric and protestations of expertise, it becomes crystal clear that she, like almost everyone else in the presidential race from either party, hasn’t a clue about what is really happening on the ground in Iraq.

There are, in fact, five Iraqs that must be dealt with by a singular American policy. The first is the Iraq of the Green Zone, and by that I mean the Iraqi government brought about by the “purple finger revolution” of January 2005. Those sham elections produced a sham democracy which lacks any viability outside of the never-never land of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. This lack of centralized authority has led some, like Sen. Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate, to advocate the division of Iraq into three de facto states, one Sunni, one Shiite and one Kurdish, lumped together in a loose federation overseen by a weak central authority. Given that the 2005 elections were designed to prevent this very sort of Iraqi breakup to begin with, one can begin to understand the fallacy of any policy that contradicts the very foundation upon which it is built. But this sort of behavior defines the entire Iraq fiasco, one contradiction built upon another, until there has been woven a web of contradictions from which no clarity can ever be found. That, in a sentence, is the reality of the current Iraqi government. It is almost as if by design the Bush administration has cobbled together a wreck incapable of governance. How does Hillary Clinton propose to deal “quickly and responsibly” with such a mess?

The second Iraq is the one being managed from Tehran. This Iraq, stretching from Basra in the south up into Baghdad, exists outside of the reach of the compromised disaster that is the current government of Iraq, and is instead dominated by SCIRI and its military wing, the Badr Brigade. Here one finds the unvarnished reality of the dream of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites, those who reached political maturity festering in the anti-Saddam ideology cooked up in the theocracy of Iran. Given the roots of this political movement, bred and paid for by the reactionary mullahs of Iran, the politics of revenge that it embraces should come as no surprise. However, whereas the mullahs in Tehran seek long-term political stability guaranteed by a friendly, compliant government in Baghdad, the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiites seem more focused on rapidly reversing decades of inequities, real and perceived. Revenge is not a policy that breeds stability, and yet it is the politics of revenge that dominates the mind-set of SCIRI.

Serving as a major domestic counterweight to SCIRI is the indigenous grass-roots Iraqi Shiite movement controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, the third Iraq. Possessing similar geographic reach as SCIRI, the Iraq of the “Mahdi Army” is one which rejects the SCIRI proxy government operating out of the Green Zone as but a tool of the American occupation, and the SCIRI movement itself as a tool of Iran. While maintaining close relations with Tehran, al-Sadr mocks those who would govern in south Iraq as having Farsi, vice Arabic, as their first tongue. The movement headed by al-Sadr bases its credibility on its pure Iraqi roots, derived as it is from the Shiites of Iraq who actually lived under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Surprisingly, these Shiites are more inclined to find common cause with their fellow Iraqis, including Sunnis who are disaffected with the current government, than with their SCIRI co-religionists. While much has been made of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the fact is that one of the most serious threats to stability in Iraq is the emerging Shiite-versus-Shiite conflict between al-Sadr and SCIRI.

The fourth Iraq is the Iraq of the Sunni. The first three years of the American occupation were dominated by violence emanating from the Sunni heartland as those elements loyal to Saddam, and those opposed to Shiite domination, worked together to make the American occupation, and any affiliated post-Saddam government derived from the occupation, a failure. To this extent, elements of the Sunni of Iraq, drawn primarily from the intelligence services of the Hussein regime, facilitated the creation and operation of al-Qaida in Iraq. The work of this Iraqi al-Qaida has been successful in destabilizing the country to the point that the United States has been compelled to fund, equip and train Sunni militias in an effort to confront al-Qaida, as well as to make up for the real shortfalls of the central Iraqi government when it comes to security and stability in the Sunni areas. The newfound relationship between the Sunni and the United States, especially in Anbar province, is cited as a major factor in the success of the surge.

The fifth Iraq is that of the Kurds. Long hailed as a poster child of stability and prosperity, the fundamental problems inherent in post-Saddam Kurdistan are coming to a head. The inherent incompatibility between the “sanctuary” created by the United States through the northern “no-fly zone” and post-Saddam Iraq is more evident today than ever. The Kurds, pleased with their status as a “special case” in the eyes of the Bush administration, have made no honest effort to assimilate into a centralized system of government. Furthermore, the false dream of an independent Kurdish homeland has not only poisoned relations with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad (witness the conflict over oil deals in Kurdistan and the Iraqi national oil law), but also between the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds’ ongoing support of Kurdish nationalist groups in Turkey and Iran has led to increased instability, the most current manifestation of which are the ongoing cross-border attacks into Iraqi territory by the Turkish military. And, given the high level of emotion attached to matters pertaining to Kurdish nationalism, the likelihood of the situation de-escalating anytime soon is remote.

Five Iraqs, and one Iraq policy ill-suited to the reality of any single situation, yet alone the whole. The success of the surge is pure fantasy, a fancy bit of illusion that would do David Copperfield proud, but not the people of Iraq or the United States. The surge addresses events in Iraq based upon short-term objectives (i.e., reducing the immediate level of violence) without resolving any of the deep-seated, long-term issues that promote the violence to begin with. It is like placing a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound. The pink, frothy blood may not be visible on the surface, but the wound remains as grave as ever, and because it is not being directly attended to, it only gets worse. Eventually the lungs will collapse and the body will die. This is the reality of Iraq today. Thanks to the surge, we do not see the horrific wound that is Iraq for what it truly is. As such, our policies do nothing to cure the problem, and in doing nothing, only make the matter worse.

History will show that this period of relative “calm” we attribute to the surge is but the pause before the storm. Hillary Clinton is correct to label the surge a failed strategy. But her motivation for doing so rests more with her desire to position herself politically on the domestic front than it is a reflection of a thoughtful Iraq policy. So long as American politicians, regardless of political affiliation, seek to solve the problem of Iraq from a domestic political perspective, then the problem that is Iraq will never be resolved, either “quickly” or “responsibly.” Iraq is an unpopular war. There are, therefore, no “popular” solutions, only realistic ones.

The five-dimensional problem embodied in post-Saddam Iraq cannot be bundled up into a neat package. America, and its leaders, must do the right thing in Iraq, not for Iraq, but for America, even when doing so requires making some tough decisions. Narrow the problem set from five dimensions to two, and the problem becomes more manageable. For my money, I choose working with the Sunnis and al-Sadr to create a viable coalition, and then cutting a deal with Iran that trades off better relations in exchange for encouraging the current failed Iraqi government to step aside in favor of new elections. And the Kurds? Autonomy or nothing.

My loyalty is first and foremost to the United States, and when we look at the situation in Iraq from a genuine national security perspective, there is no threat worthy of the continued sacrifice being asked of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. As such, the only policy option worthy of consideration is that which brings our troops home as expeditiously as possible. Politicians who embrace a different policy are simply using the sacrifice of our service members as a shield behind which to hide their ignorance of Iraqi issues, and their personal cowardice, which manifests itself any time brave young men and women are allowed to die in order to preserve someone’s political viability.

As we in the United States celebrate this holiday season, let us not forget those who serve overseas in uniform, and the sacrifices they make in our name. And as we approach the coming election season, let us never forget those politicians who would have these sacrifices continue in order to safeguard their individual political fortune. This applies to all who seek the nomination for the office of the presidency, even those like Hillary Clinton who claim to embrace an anti-war position but whose words and actions strongly suggest something else.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) , “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).

Published on Monday, December 31, 2007 by TruthDig.com

Unprecedented mass reaction to assassination of Benazir Bhutto By Farooq Tariq

Pakistan has never seen so many people protesting in streets all over the country as been the case during the last two days. They were all united across Pakistan to condemn the brutal murder of Benazir Bhutto. The news was heard with a great shock and there was immediate mass anger that erupted in all parts of Pakistan. December 28 was the first day of a general strike called by many groups, ranging from political parties to various professional groups.

Most of election posters, banners, flags and billboards of the Pakistan Muslim League (PMLQ) were the first victim of the mass anger. The PMLQ is a creation of General Musharaf, created after 1999; a major split of Pakistan Muslim League. The rest is headed by Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister. PMLQ has been sharing power with Musharaf after 2002 and is comprised of the most corrupt feudals, capitalists, former army generals and black marketeers.

The PMLQ had spent billions of these advertising material and all that was gone within a few hours of mass reaction. The work to remove all these anti-people election materials was done with utmost sophistication. None of the Pakistan Peoples Party's election material or that of the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz was removed.

Then it was the banks mainly in Sind. They were attacked and the buildings were burned in many cities of Sind. Most of ATM machines were destroyed. In some places, people were lucky to bring some money home. Banks had made unprecedented profits during the last few years. There is no free banking anymore, as was the case earlier from sixties.

Hundreds of private buses were burned in all parts of the country. The fares have gone too high during Musharaf's eight years of rule. There were no more public buses. Most of PMLQ government ministers had their own bus companies and were making huge gains out of mass poverty.

There were also incidents of burning of trains in Sind. According to the Daily Jang, 28 railway stations, 13 railway engines and seven trains have been burnt resulting over three billion rupees loss. The rail fares were increased many fold by the Musharaf regime in a bid to reduce the railway losses. It has been partly privatised as well. The whole rail system has collapsed since the night of December 27. Thousands of passengers are on the railway stations waiting for restoration. There is no sign of restoration for some days. Pakistan International Airlines PIA and two private airlines, Air Blue and Shaheen Air, have cancelled all their domestic flights on the name of “rescheduling”. The staff did not turn up.

Thousands of private cars have been damaged all over Pakistan by the angry mobs, mainly youth. They were showing their anger on the car companies' (mainly Toyota, Suzuki and Honda) unprecedented profits during the last few years. Many leasing companies have robbed the growing middle classes by offering cars with abnormal prices. While the massive majority of population have no more subsidised public transport.

The houses and offices of PMLQ politicians, local government mayors and administration are the other victims of the mass reaction. They have either been burnt or damaged.

Over 100 people have so far died in the incidents related to mass protest, either by police or in the crossfire of different groups during the last 40 hours.

Thousands and thousands have raised slogans against the Musharaf regime and US imperialism after the death of Benazir Bhutto. The anger was accumulated during the last eight years and was manifested after this unthinkable incident. This was a response of the masses to the strict implementation of the neoliberal agenda which has resulted in unprecedented price hikes, unemployment and poverty. The anger that was to be shown in boycotting or participating in the elections has come out early after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

There is a great anti-Musharaf consciousness all over. It is been shown in different ways in different parts of the country in different degrees. The so-called capitalist economical growth under Musharaf has left millions in absolute poverty. There was no Pakistan shining as was propagated by the dictatorship all the times.
Year of mass awakening

2007 has been a year of mass awakening. It started with the advocates [lawyers] movement after the removal of the chief justice of Supreme Court of Pakistan. The chief justice Iftikhar Choudry said a big “No” to resigning under pressure by the generals. He was removed only to be reinstated on July 20 after a massive movement of 80,000 lawyers. They were joined by political activists from almost all political parties but not by the masses. The masses only welcomed the chief justice from the side roads and did not participate in the movement in real terms.

Musharaf got himself elected as president for the second five-year term in a “democratic manner” by a parliament elected for one five-year term. He was still wearing military uniform when elected as a “civilian” president. His theme was “elect me president for the second term and I will take off uniform after taking oath as civilian president”.

The November 2007 imposition of martial law on the name of emergency was used to remove the rather independent top judges of Pakistan. It put restrictions on the media and over 10,000 people were arrested. Musharaf got himself duly “elected president” and took off uniform after removing the top judges. His hand-picked judges gave him all the necessary backing.

He was helped in this process by Benazir Bhutto, who was -- in Tariq Ali's words -- into a “forced arranged marriage” by US and British imperialism. In this unholy alliance, every one was cheating everyone with utmost honestly.

The general elections were announced for January 8, 2008, and the emergency lifted after the large-scale repression and the removal of an independent judiciary. The regime was happy that everything was going according to “plan”. The Pakistan Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto, the Muslim League Nawaz and Quid Azam (PMLQ), the three major parties, had agreed to participate in these fraudulent elections. The religious fundamentalist political alliance MMA had split on the question of participation. One major part of MMA had decided to contest the elections.

A campaign for a boycott of the election had started when the religious fundamentalists struck and killed Benazir Bhutto on December 27 evening. The “plan” was shattered into pieces. It was big blow to agreed terms and conditions of various participating parties in the elections. It was not a bump on the road but the total destruction of the road of conciliations and compromises.

The murder of Benazir Bhutto is a double-edge sword. While it is a big blow to the plans of British and US imperialism, it will also be no celebration for the religious fundamentalist forces. The initial anger has gone against the military regime and its crony politicians. It can go against the both. No party will be able to celebrate the shocking killing.

But the Musharaf regime has understood this clearly and now is trying consciously to put the direction of the movement against the religious fundamentalists. Last night, December 28, in a two-hour press conference, a military brigadier representing the government named Baitullah Mehsud, an Al Qaeda associate in the tribal areas of Pakistan, as the one who carried out the attack.

Foolishly he tried his best to prove that Benazir Bhutto was not killed by a bullet but by her head hitting the lever of the sunroof of the bulletproof car as she ducked after the bomb blast. What difference does it make, if it is proved that Bhutto was killed not by the bullet but by another way? Not much.

The brigadier's explanation did not satisfy the angry journalists, who asked him again and again about the connections of the secret intelligence agencies of Pakistan with Abdullah Mahsood. The question, Why had Mahsood released quietly more than 200 Pakistan army men on the day of the imposition of emergency, who were kidnapped by his group a week earlier, went unanswered. The military's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has a long relationship with the religious fundamentalists groups dating back to the eighties when the imperialists and the fundamentalists were close friends.
Volatile situation

It is a very volatile, unstable, unpredictable, explosive, dangerous, impulsive, fickle and capricious political situation. It never happened before in many years that mass reaction has erupted to this degree.

The general strike was a total success. All roads were empty. No traffic at all. All shops were closed. All industrial and other institutions were completely shut down.

After an initial inhibition to curb the strike, the regime has now issued strict orders to kill anyone on the spot who is “looting”. It has called the regular army in 16 districts of Sind and paramilitary forces elsewhere in Pakistan.

The regime has so far not postponed the scheduled elections but it will be very difficult to hold elections in this situation. The Muslim League Nawaz and several other political parties have already announced they will boycott the fraudulent elections.

The Labour Party Pakistan is demanding the immediate resignation of the Musharaf dictatorship and the formation of an interim government comprising of civil society organisations, trade unions and peasant organisations. This interim government would hold free and fair general elections under an independent election commission.

The LPP is demanding an immediate restoration of the top judges and investigations of Benazir's and others' murder in this and previous bomb blasts. As part of the All Parties Democratic Movement, LPP is supporting a three-day general strike and linking it to the overthrow of the military dictatorship. It is asking all parties to reject the general elections fraud on January 8 and not to participate in these elections.

[Farooq Tariq is general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan. Email labourpartypk@yahoo.com, visit http://www.laborpakistan.org or http://www.jeddojuhd.com.]

From Links

Military Despotism and Anarchy Created the Conditions for Bhutto's Assassination-Indignation and Fear Stalk Pakistan By TARIQ ALI

Tariq Ali
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto's behaviour and policies - both while she was in office and more recently - are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.

An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country's supreme court for attempting to hold the government's intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.

How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?

Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People's party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.

Pakistan's turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government's foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.

It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.

What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It's a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.

I first met Benazir at her father's house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father's death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.

She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn't be on the "wrong side" of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

Benazir's horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People's party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

from CounterPunch

They Don’t Blame Al-Qa’ida. They Blame Musharraf. They Don’t Blame Al-Qa’ida.-They Blame Musharraf by Robert Fisk

Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi - attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives - and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.

But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa’ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy - and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr - it’s not surprising that the “good-versus-evil” donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight - which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.

Only a few days ago - in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year - Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: “Daughter of the West”. In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.

Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister - and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir’s appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir’s murder, the report continues: “The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated - a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.”

When Murtaza’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested - rather than her father’s killers - she says Benazir told her: “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Or so Tariq Ali’s exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.

This vast institution - corrupt, venal and brutal - works for Musharraf.

But it also worked - and still works - for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America’s enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the ” extremists” and “terrorists” who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander’s office. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI’s web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.

But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was “looking forward” to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance - a certain Mr Khan - who supplied all Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let’s not bring that bit of the “axis of evil” into this.

So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those ” extremists” and “terrorists”, not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir’s assassination.

It doesn’t, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.

So let’s run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman’s notebook before he became the top cop in London.

Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir’s supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.

Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?

Er. Yes. Well quite.

You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a “murderer” were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
Published on Saturday, December 29, 2007 by The Independent/UK

Will Bhutto's Death Boost Her Party's Chances? A Tragedy Foretold By DILIP HIRO

With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, her family will go down in history as one where everyone, except the mother, Nusrat, died a violent death.

Her father, Zulfikar Ali, former prime minister of Pakistan, was hanged in 1979 during the rule of his successor, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who had overthrown his civilian government two years earlier. Then Benazir's younger brother, Shah Nawaz, died of poisoning in mysterious circumstances in 1985 in the south of France. And in 1996, her elder brother, Murtaza, was gunned down in a street by unknown assailants.

Given the atrocious suicide bombings of Benazir Bhutto's tumultuous homecoming procession in the port city of Karachi in October, with her open-top bus as the main target, which claimed 140 lives, further attempts on her life were not unexpected.

Since she was determined to campaign widely and openly for the upcoming parliamentary poll on January 8, she exposed herself to a violent attack. Only a tight ring of professionally trained bodyguards that protect the likes of US presidents could have safeguarded her while allowing her the luxury of mixing with ordinary folks gathered in unruly crowds.

Bhutto's security adviser, Rahman Malik, was quick to blame the government of President Pervez Musharraf. "We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment including [electronic] jammers, but they paid no heed to our requests," he said.

But more than electronic jammers are needed to protect VIPs in this age of suicide bombers and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

On returning to Pakistan after an eight-year exile, Bhutto bravely announced that the workers and officials of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) would protect her. In any case, having official bodyguards would have cramped her style, inhibited her movements and personal conversations - a political price she was probably not prepared to pay.

Although no group has claimed responsibility for killing her, it does not require much political savvy to guess. It is the Islamist extremists operating from the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. As ultra-orthodox Muslims, they loathe governance by a woman. For them, Benazir Bhutto was not only a woman politician but was also "a slave of America".

The way she was shoe-horned into Pakistani politics by the Bush administration left little doubt about her pro-American proclivities in a country, where anti-Americanism is running deep.

While Bhutto's assassination is a shock to the ongoing general election campaign, it is unlikely that the poll will be postponed. That would not be beneficial to her Pakistan People's Party.

History shows that a sensational political murder usually brings out a sympathy vote for the party that lost its leader. Such was the case with Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party in India. After her assassination in October 1984, her son, Rajiv Gandhi, an erstwhile junior MP, led the Congress party to a victory at the polls. (Seven years later he too was assassinated by a woman suicide bomber during an election campaign.)

History is likely to repeat itself, with the PPP doing better than it would have done with Benazir Bhutto at the helm.

Dilip Hiro writes for the The Guardian.

from CounterPunch

Rebuilding Violent Tyranny in Iraq-From One Saddam to Fifty By CHARLES TRIPP

Now that the first phase of the Iraqi civil war seems to have ended, it is time to consider the political processes it may have left in its bloody wake. It is crucial for Iraqis and others to get a sense of the stability and durability of present arrangements. Are they a mechanism for reconciling the ferocious enmities of the past five years in Iraq, or likely to lead to a more violent second phase of the civil war?

There have been two main patterns during these years of violence and massive population displacement.

One is the localization of politics, grounded in the insecurities, fears and ambitions of ruthless local leaders across Iraq. This thrives on community feeling, which is sometimes tribal, sometimes ethnic and sectarian; it also springs from rivalry and jostling for power within a provincial arena.

The other pattern is the emergence of a politics at national level under US auspices, which has much in common with the politics of a protectorate. Both are dangerous for the future, but both may contribute to the emergence of a distinctive, likely troubled, Iraqi politics.

As an Iraqi put it, "the United States got rid of one Saddam only to replace him with 50". For many people, negotiating their way around and through the little Saddams with their militias, detention centres, local courts and taxes has become a fact of life. Some accept this as the price of increased security for their community, neighbourhood or even street. Others who refused to conform, but knew the price in blood for dissent, have fled--abroad if they could or to a part of Iraq where they may be less visible

"National institutions" have little or no authority to temper the effects of this on the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Some, such as the police, are often enmeshed in local power and the extortion and repression with which they are associated. Even when officers are not implicated (as with the police chief of Basra, Major-General Khallaf) they can do nothing but lament the fact that in the past three months some 40 women have been killed in Basra for wearing make-up, not veiling or otherwise failing to observe the narrow rulings of the repressive local militias.

When national politicians do try to take on this entrenched and violent local power, the chances are that they will lose. This was shown in a recent account of Abu Abed's "Knights of Ameriya". He felt that the followers of the vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, were trying to muscle in on the area of West Baghdad that was his fiefdom. His local militia was able to flex its muscles so effectively because it had been drawn into the US plan for the pacification of Baghdad. His "knights", and other militias, incongruously called "concerned citizens" by the US authorities, had received US money, weapons and protection in the name of the fight against "al-Qaida in Iraq". (See Ghaith Abd al-Ahad, "Meet Abu Abed: the US's new ally against al-Qaida", The Guardian, November 10, 2007.)

The politics of the local, however fractious, uncertain and grim for many Iraqis, have been much encouraged by the US authorities. This may be due in part to the example of Kurdistan, where the US has been intimately involved since 1991. It is now held up as the only stable and prosperous region of Iraq, but peace there was preceded by years of violence as the two major parties battled each other for supremacy. Cajoled by the US into settling their differences in 2000, political leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani soon realized there was a greater game and did what they could to speed the downfall of the Baghdad regime in 2003. However, as their subsequent stance has shown, despite Talabani's assumption of the presidency of Iraq, their politics have remained resolutely and defiantly local, symbolized by the refusal even to fly the Iraqi flag over official buildings.

This turning to local figures of authority and power is also the outcome of a belief that political order, like the insurgency, must be rooted in local communities if it is to spread. Using the language deployed over a hundred years before by the French colonial general, Joseph Galliéni, in his campaigns in Tonkin and Madagascar, the US high command enthusiastically adopted his strategy of les taches d'huile (oil spots--create many of them and they will seep outwards and eventually join together) as a way to combat both the insurgency and the efforts by "al-Qaida in Iraq" to create no-go areas.

But the use of local strongmen, however repellent their methods, is also due to the illiteracy of US and allied forces in "reading" Iraqi society. This left them relying on an assortment of exiles who inserted themselves into new US-sponsored forms of power and who have been consistently unable make a truly national government happen. In its absence, the US and its partners, having dismantled the last public vestiges of the old centralized Iraqi state, had no choice but to work with those who could command force on the ground, provide intelligence in specific localities and willingly accept the sponsorship and patronage of the real power in Baghdad, as they had always accepted it from the predecessors of the US in the republican or royal palace.

The politicians of the national government, desperate to replace the US as chief patrons of Iraq's politics, but divided among themselves and uncertain of their power beyond the Green Zone, have embodied sectarian and communal politics. They believe these can be a way of connecting with many Iraqis and can provide an escape from a domineering US presence. To resist US demands in the name of an Iraqi sovereignty to which the US pays only lip service has proved fruitless and humiliating. However, communal politics, with all its complexities, networks and layers, has proved impenetrable to the US and to the secular Iraqis whom the US has favored.

Communalism and sectarianism became a bulwark against an overbearing patron, but as the events of 2006-7 showed they can carry terrible risks. They do not lessen the dependency of these recently promoted elites upon the power of the US in Iraq. This applies to the Kurdish leaders, who need it to protect them from Turkish intervention, as well as to the insecure leaders who came to office as a result of the victory of the United Iraqi Alliance in the elections of 2005.

These elections produced the formal institutions of representative life--parliament, elected offices of state, constitution--but, as most Iraqis are well aware, real power lies elsewhere. Unresponsive to the concerns of many, used to passing laws that confirm the privileges of those who have succeeded in manipulating the system, the Iraqi parliament is losing whatever authority it had. For many, cynicism has replaced the enthusiasm generated by the elections. In its place is a recognition that it is helping to entrench an order of privilege, a new class-based dispensation which is a driving force behind the politics of communities across the country . (See "Shi'ite Politics in Iraq--the role of the Supreme Council", Middle East Report n° 70, International Crisis Group, 15 November 2007.)

This too is part of a strategy designed to reinforce the hold of favored leaders over the economy, providing them with the means to service their client followings, and to encourage the spots to join up, driven by the common economic interests of the powerful. Competition for these resources is more troublesome than this picture of progressive pacification might suggest. But it could be argued that the oil law currently before the parliament is, at least in its distributive clauses, an attempt to address this, since it seeks a formula for the distribution of Iraq's oil revenues to make it acceptable to all those in a position to profit, whatever their regional or communal base.

The intention in the long run is not to let "a thousand flowers bloom" but to bring the many forms of local power into the orbit of those with major resources at the centre. This could recreate a national politics in Iraq. It might not reproduce the old centralized state, but it would establish a clear hierarchy, from the provinces to the "club of patrons" who will determine the future from Baghdad. Much about this model resembles the imperial protectorates that shaped the politics of the Middle East for much of the first half of the 20th century.

Al-Maliki heads an insecure, dependent government, resentful of foreign protection but unable to survive without it; this government protests feebly at repeated infringements of Iraqi sovereignty and is subjected to the patronizing imposition of benchmarks by the US Congress as part of a domestic political game within the US. Meanwhile the protecting power, as well as sponsoring local militias and asking few questions if they seem to be keeping the supposed threat from al-Qaida in Iraq at bay, is also forging a close relationship with the Iraqi armed forces.

This is reminiscent of the close and often sinister relationship between Latin American military institutions and the US military, and is set against a backdrop of insecure and corrupt political elites, sham representative institutions, restive provinces and the potentially violent politics of a class-divided society. Some may use anti-Americanism to overcome these differences, particularly if this can be focused on the continued presence of US military bases. This has the potential to set up a dangerous schizophrenia within the Iraqi armed forces. In a recent report on the rebuilding of the ministry of the interior Andrew Rathmell of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described it as "a heavily-muscled and well-armed individual with extremely poor physical coordination who suffers from multiple personality disorder" .

Any officer wanting to get ahead must play by US rules, at the same time negotiating with local political elites eager to exploit the force which the army will represent in domestic politics. Yet he is almost certain to come to resent all of these external demands, laying the groundwork for a politics of the military and of military assertion which may be nationalist, contemptuous of civilian politics and ruthless in its methods. Iraq, like many other states, has been here before.
These potentially troubling trends may be a basis for the emergence of Iraqi politics, rather than the collapse and disintegration of the state. However, given the passions, the interests at stake and the vulnerability of Iraqi politics to regional influence and intervention, there is fragility. It comes from the realization that all parties have no intention of renouncing violence as a means of realizing their aims. And the local leaderships may not have as strong a hold over their constituencies as they would want others to believe. A second phase of the civil war is easily imaginable therefore, especially if critical regional events, such as a US-Iran confrontation, are replicated through clients and protégés in Iraq.

Charles Tripp is professor of Middle East politics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and author, among other works, of A History of Iraq, Cambridge, new edition 2007, and Islam and the Moral Economy: the challenge of capitalism, Cambridge, 2006.

This article first appeared in the new January edition of excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com The full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique and CounterPunch will feature one or two articles from LMD every month.

How One Diplomat Fought Against Rendition-Conscience and Empire By PATRICK COCKBURN

As a child the only interesting fact that I knew about my grandfather Henry Cockburn was that he had read his own obituary in The Times. This happened because he was a diplomat in the British legation during the siege of Peking in 1900 during which the Chinese Boxer rebels were wrongly reported to have stormed the legation quarter and slaughtered its defenders.

When I was a little older my father Claud Cockburn told me that after the siege Henry had gone on to become British Consul General in Seoul in Korea. He was the senior British diplomat in the country as Japan took control. 'Quite suddenly,' my father related, 'he announced he was weary of the whole business and retired, saying that at forty-nine it was high time to start leading an entirely new sort of life.'

It seemed a whimsical reason for an Edwardian diplomat to resign, especially as he had little money and no other career to look forward to. In fact, I discovered a century later. that that there was a very precise reason for Henry Cockburn's retirement which followed a prolonged and furious row within the Foreign Office over an issue which reverberates more than ever in British foreign policy today.

My father had written in his autobiography 'In Time of Trouble' that Henry 'thought the whole British agreement with the Japanese on the Korean issue disastrous.' I was curious about this sentence. One day I was in the National Archives at Kew looking some old MI-5 files about Claud, when it crossed my mind that it might be interesting to look at the Foreign Office papers marked 'Corea' for the relevant period to see if they contained any clue as to what happened.

As soon as I started reading the ancient files I saw a word which has become familiar since President Bush launched his war on terror after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001. I had previously thought that 'rendition', meaning the handing over of prisoners by one country to another in the knowledge that they are going to be tortured, was a modern use of the term. Over the last five years 'rendition' has acquired an infamous meaning since it was revealed that the CIA had been covertly flying political prisoners to countries like Egypt, Afghanistan and Syria to which the ghastly business of torture had been farmed out by the US.

But in the aging Foreign Office files I was surprised to find the very same word used in exactly the same sense as we use it today. It turned out that my grandfather's differences with the Foreign Office were not about British policy in general, but over the specific issue of the rendition of a Korean journalist called Yang Ki-tak, a vocal and effective critic of the Japanese occupation. After being tortured in a Japanese-run prison he had taken refuge on British-owned property. The Japanese wanted to re-arrest him but, under the terms of a treaty with Britain, Japanese police could not enter premises owned by a British subject without the authority of the British consul. This my grandfather refused to give.

One of the first papers I found in Kew is the transcript of a telegram entitled 'Rendition of Corean' dated 20 August, 1908 from Henry Cockburn to Sir Claude MacDonald, the British ambassador in Tokyo, warning that 'if it became known that we had handed over a prisoner to the Japanese & that he had subsequently been subjected to conditions similar to those which obtained in the case of Yang, the worst impression would be created.'

My grandfather by this time had a very clear idea what happened to political prisoners held in jail in Seoul. In a long telegram to Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, in London he describes how a British visitor to Yang while he was still in jail 'had been startled by the prisoner's appearance and by the cowering timid air with which he looked nervously at prison officials before he answered.' At first Yang said listlessly that he had nothing to complain off, but then suddenly added in a low, agitated voice, 'I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can get no air.' He explained he was held with twenty men in a room measuring 14 feet by 12 feet. Henry had no doubt that his mistreatment also included physical torture.

The reaction of the Foreign Office mandarins was a little more robust than its attitude a century later when the CIA was landing planes in Britain with hooded and drugged prisoners on board on their way to secret prisons in eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who copiously annotated Cockburn's dispatches in red ink, asked for assurances that Yang would not be further mistreated if he was handed over, though he also made clear that fostering good relations with Japan was his priority. In Tokyo Sir Claude MacDonald, a soldier turned diplomat who had been the military commander during the siege of Peking, sounds bemused by the fuss being made by my grandfather in Seoul over the rendition of a single Korean journalist. He downplayed Henry's account of the grim conditions in Japanese prisons in Korea saying he had seen worse in prisons in Egypt after Britain had taken control. 'I am seriously of the opinion,' he wrote 'that Yang should be given up immediately and unconditionally.'

By then other Foreign Office mandarins were becoming increasingly irritated by what they saw as Henry Cockburn's unnecessary quarrel with the Japanese over a single dissenting Korean journalist that was beginning to endanger relations with a potent new ally. Japan had shown its strength by defeating China in 1894 and Russia in 1904. Henry was later to complain that he felt let down by his superiors on several occasions when they ordered him to comply with Japanese demands that he had previously rejected.

In trying to save Yang Henry did not have a very strong hand, but he played his cards with skill. He was the senior British diplomat in Korea, but he was outranked by MacDonald in Tokyo and had to obey what Grey and senior officials in London told him to do. At the same time the British had their own imperial prestige to consider and could not allow the Japanese to have everything their own way, once the issue had been raised, over Yang.

The Japanese for their part were anxious to avoid an open rupture with Britain over the fate of a single torture victim and were prepared, under British pressure, to promise to treat him more humanely. They were also mystified because they wholly disbelieved that a British diplomat could have had any disinterested objection to Yang's mistreatment. Henry caustically noted that the Japanese officials with whom he was dealing were convinced that 'if I persisted in dwelling on so trivial a side issue, it must be because I was inspired by an unfriendly wish to interpose obstacles in the Japanese path.'

My grandfather seems to have expected that he would ultimately be forced to surrender Yang to the Japanese. But by then he had kicked up such a row that the Japanese agreed to various conditions such as keeping Yang in hospital and allowing him a fair trial so that they were ultimately forced to release him. It was four years before they caught up with him again when he was once more imprisoned after a trial in which his co-defendants described how they had been hung by their thumbs from the ceiling, savagely beaten and burned with cigarettes until they confessed.

My grand father's career as a diplomat was ended by his defense of Yang. A week after handing over the journalist to the Japanese on August 19, 1908 he announced he was going on leave and returned to Britain via the trans-Siberian railway. He never went back to Korea and resigned from the Foreign Office six months later. He died several years before the Second World War when tens of thousands of captured British soldiers and civilians discovered that the Japanese treatment of prisoners could be just as horrific as he had described.


Reading through the voluminous Foreign Office files on the Yang case I felt proud of my grandfather's behavior. He was one of those self-confident high Tories who, like Lord Gilmour who died a few months ago, prove to be the staunchest opponents of oppression because they do what they themselves, and not their government or their employer, think to be right.

He never had any doubts about the virtues of imperialism as a system quite separate from the motives, which he often derided as pathetic or sordid, of those who ran it. In my father's view Henry saw the British Empire as if it was like a strange symphony. The failings of the individuals involved in running it were 'as irrelevant as would be the fact that the composer took dope and conductor lived off the immoral earnings of women.'

My grandfather spent almost thirty years in the Far East, almost all of them in China, though he had originally intended to live in India. Born in 1859, he was the son of Francis Jeffrey Cockburn, a British judge in India mainly notable for having blown off his right hand as a boy when experimenting with a gunpowder flask. His family kept the mangled hand preserved in a jar of spirits on the mantelpiece and would show it to interested guests. The lad's uncles, being practical Scotchmen, sent the maimed lad a profusion of small desks so he could learn to write with his left hand.

Henry expressed an early desire to enter the Indian Civil Service and, since he was highly intelligent, seemed likely to pass the entrance examination with ease. Unfortunately for him, however, shortly before taking it, he confided to his father that under the influence of German philosophy he had become an atheist. This was unwise because his father viewed religion as part of the essential cement of the British Empire and hurried to London to pull all available strings at the Indian Office to make sure that they never gave his son a job.

Henry did not hold it against his father for acting thus on an issue of principle, but nonetheless sold his books and all but one suit and disappeared from home. When next heard of he had entered the Eastern Consular Service from which he knew he could later pass into the diplomatic service without taking a further examination. He learned Chinese and became British vice consul in Chunking, an isolated city on the upper Yangtse, in 1880 at the start of the quarter of a century he lived in China. His final post was as 'Chinese Secretary' in the Peking legation where he was trapped during the famous siege.

On moving to Seoul in 1906 he expressed no particular objection to the Japanese take over of Korea which he saw as 'a pawn in a game of chess that has been the centre of interest solely by reason of its position relative to the pieces of the great powers.' Not that the Foreign Office had any doubts that the Koreans regarded the Japanese with anything other than visceral hatred. The forced abdication of the Korean Emperor led to an uprising in 1907 which Japanese troops bloodily repressed.

Henry's early dispatches are coolly written accounts of the Korean rebellion and Japan's efforts to suppress it. In their military operations against the guerrillas, he wrote, there had 'certainly been no indiscriminate laying waste the country and many of the houses and villages of which the destruction is laid to the account of Japanese troops were in fact burned by the insurgents as a punishment for harbouring the troops.'

One Britons in Korea who took a much more critical view of Japanese repression was a journalist called Ernest Bethell who owned a newspaper, The Korea Daily News, which had a Korean edition called Dai Han Mai Il Shinpo. It printed graphic stories about atrocities which were all the more deeply resented by the Japanese authorities, because they could not legally close down Bethell's newspapers because of Britain's extra-territorial rights in Korea.

Unable to act themselves, the Japanese persuaded the British to act for them and on 12 October 2007 Bethell was summoned to appear before a specially appointed Consular Court charged with action likely to cause a breach of the peace. 'The trial,' wrote Fred McKenzie, a pro-Korean observer, 'took place in the Consular building, Mr Cockburn, the very able British Consul-General acting as judge.' He convicted the editor and ordered him to enter into recognizances of sterling 300 for his good behavior for six months. This effectively gagged the newspaper
.
The trial turned out to be only the first round of a triangular battle between Bethell, the Japanese authorities and Henry. In March 2008 a Korean nationalist shot and killed in San Francisco an American adviser to the Japanese administration called D.W.Stevens. The assassination was covered by Bethell's Korean paper which printed a eulogy to the assassins under the headline: 'Particulars of the attack upon the the scoundrel Stevens.'

The Japanese supreme authority in Korea, Prince Ito, in charge of turning the country into a Japanese protectorate, asked Sir Claude MacDonald in Tokyo for the British to deal with Bethell and his newspaper, claiming he held them partly responsible for the assassination of Stevens. MacDonald agreed with him. On May 7 Henry wrote a memo sympathetic to the Japanese case and castigated Bethell, saying that 'an analogous case [to that of Stevens] would be the assassination of a prominent Anglo-Indian official on his arrival in England by a native of Bengal.'

As regards my grandfather's actions what happened next falls into two distinct halves. In the first he did everything he could to close down Bethell and his newspaper on the grounds that they threatened public order and disturbed Britain's alliance with Japan. In the second half he tried to prevent the Japanese imprisoning and torturing Yang Ki-tak, the heroic nationalist editor of the Korean edition of Bethell's paper. The previously calm tone of his diplomatic dispatches is replaced by outrage at the brutal methods and contempt for legality of the Japanese occupation.

Bethell was summoned before a British consular court in Seoul for a second time accused of causing tumult in a country which was 'under the de facto protectorate of Japan.' He was sentenced to three weeks imprisonment, bound over for six months and deported on a British naval vessel to Shanghai where there was a British prison.

Henry soon found out that this was not the end of the affair. The chief defence witness at Bethell's trial was his editor Yang. So long as he remained in his British owned newspaper office he was safe, but on July 13 he was tricked by the Japanese police into leaving the office and arrested. Henry protested at the arrest of the chief witness at the trial he had organized, but was blandly assured that Yang had been detained for embezzlement. He was bitterly scornful at the Japanese excuse for the arrest since the funds Yang was accused of embezzling were in a fund 'instituted for the purpose of freeing Corea from the Protectorate of Japan.' He thought it unlikely that Japanese were truly interested in safeguarding subscribers.

In jail in Seoul Yang's health rapidly collapsed. He was kept in a crowded cell which was too small to lie down and too low to stand up. He was evidently tortured. When a British visitor called Mr Marnham saw him three weeks after his arrest he described him as 'looking like a skeleton' and in a state of nervous collapse because of his visible terror of his Japanese guards. When Henry protested to a senior Japanese official about these inhumane conditions he was told that Yang was being treated just the same as other untried prisoners.

The Japanese also disbelieved his claim of humanitarian concern for the prisoner. 'It is,' he wrote, 'this callousness and this failure to recognize that to the English mind such slow torture of unconvicted prisoners is abhorrent, that has constituted one of the great obstacles in dealing with this case.' He protested vigorously to London and Tokyo and with some effect since Prince Ito, a powerful and sophisticated statesman, ordered that Yang be moved to hospital.

The case now took a peculiar twist. The Japanese prison governor misunderstood his instructions. Instead of being sent to hospital Yang was released onto the street and he promptly fled back to his newspaper. He was still in a very bad state. A British consular official confirmed that he still looked like a skeleton and the consul had been 'struck by the frightened look on his face, as of a hunted creature, and by his nervousness in answering even a simple question.'

My grandfather struggled not to return Yang to Japanese custody despite increasingly peremptory instructions from London and Tokyo. He was refusing to speak to the Japanese official in charge of the case whom he said had lied to him. He did extract promises from the Japanese that Yang would be hospitalized, tried in open court and be represented by a Korean lawyer. On August 20 he received a telegram from Sir Edward Grey in London ordering him to hand over Yang to the Japanese. In reply he sent 'an account of the rendition of the prisoner with a description of his appearance [bearing marks of his mistreatment].

In the short term Henry's protests were surprisingly effective. The case had become so well publicized that Yang was released on September 25, though he was imprisoned and tortured again in later years. Bethell returned to Korea in 1909 but almost immediately died of natural causes. In 1960 he was retrospectively declared 'a Hero of the Korean Revolution.'

My grandfather left Korea even before Yang was released, privately claiming that the Foreign Office had not given him sufficient support. In resigning the following July he does not mention this but says 'it is with some sense of humiliation that one admits oneself to have broken down at an earlier age than usual.' Probably he was being circumspect about his motives because he was applying for a full pension and he lived for another 27 years. His protests against rendition read as fresh today as when they were written, as does his half-spoken suspicion that the torture chamber might be an essential foundation of foreign occupation and not one of its excesses.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His forthcoming book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner in April. Next spring CounterPunch Books / AK Press will republish the memoirs of Claud Cockburn, I Claud, long regarded as among the classic memoirs of the twentieth century.

from CounterPunch

A Fierce Independent Against Despotisms of Every Sort-Thinking of Edward Said by Tariq Ali

I think of Edward Said often, especially, but not only, when I read of the sordid deals in which the PLO is engaged with Israel and its US backers. I miss Edward's impetuosity and righteous indignation. He would have had no truck with the shrivelled little Bantustans that the PLO wants to accept and would have morally destroyed the apologists for such a scheme or those intellectual fellow-travellers who think that defending the idea of a secular Palestine means remaining silent on the US-EU embargo on Hamas and who, exhausted by years of struggle and the receipt of handsome cheques from some corrupt NGO, are yearning for an accommodation with the enemy on almost any terms.

Already in his last writings Edward Said had supported the idea of a single state in Israel-Palestine and a break with the corruption and bankruptcy of the PLO. He may not have agreed with every dot and comma in Mearsheimer and Walt's magisterial work, 'The Israel Lobby', but he would have loudly applauded its publication for breaking a sacred taboo. His voice is greatly missed in these bad times.

That Said was an implacable opponent of the Zionist project and US imperial policies is not in doubt, but he was not a mindless opponent of all things American. He loved New York. It was his home and he knew it and it was no small matter. He would often talk about the city with great passion and humour.

Edward's colleagues at Columbia used to refer to his large office as the 'West Bank' and he appreciated the humour. Visiting Britain or France he was both enthusiastic on some levels (French intellectual history, for instance) and detached. He was an inquisitive tourist, a bon vivant fitting well Edward Gibbon's description of such a person who possesses a 'virtue which borders on a vice; the flexible temper which can assimilate itself to every tone of society from the court to the cottage; the happy flow of spirits which can amuse and be amused in every company and situation.'

Edward engaged with contemporary ideas happily but unlike some of his fans he did not try and compensate for the hollowness of a hole by constructing a hollow dome over it to both frame and enlarge the original. At the same time he was not one of those who feel that the 20th century had erred in attaching too much importance to intellect and reason, conviction and character.

Horrible mistakes had been made by 'our side', crimes had been committed by Western civilization in the Congo and the judeocide of the Second World War which had made Western public opinion, belatedly regretting the genocide, now indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Sometimes in melancholic mood and feeling more insecure than usual he would need to be reassured that what he was doing was worthwhile. Posterity's tributes would have pleased him greatly.

The best way to honour his memory is to preserve a fierce independence against despotisms of every variety regardless of whether they clothe themselves in the uniform of democracy or bludgeon people into submission with a field-marshal's baton.

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

Nothing is Resolved in Iraq-What's Really Happened During the Surge?By PATRICK COCKBURN

Has the US turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilizing after more than four years of war or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?

American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there.

The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but it is by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics have changed over the last year though for reasons that have little to do with 'the Surge'--the 30,000 US troop reinforcements -- and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia communities.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it tried to monopolize power but primarily because it had brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against the US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing with disastrous results for themselves.

"The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars--against the occupation and the government--at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment."

This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military--the State Department has been very much marginalized in decision making in Baghdad--does not want to emphasize that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll and misleadingly called 'Concerned Citizens' until recently belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and US soldiers on their hands.

The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.

At first the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people.

The bombers came from al-Qa'ida, but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.

The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni which became known in Iraq as 'the battle for Baghdad'. This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital, but by the end of 2006 they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

In the wake of this defeat there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialized.

It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti al-Qa'ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilizing is the presence of a large US army in Iraqi and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His forthcoming book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner in April.

from CounterPunch

Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday by By Col. DAN SMITH

Today is the anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy. For the individuals who died, for their families, it was a day in which the personal worlds of thousands were suddenly turned upside down. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war, the entire country’s political, economic, and social worlds turned upside down as 12 million men and women donned uniforms and women entered new jobs on the home front.

As I write this Thursday morning, December 6, it has been about 100 hours since excerpts from the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear capabilities became public knowledge around the world.

It is also about 75 hours since President Bush’s news conference on December 3 during which he declared the NIE’s findings changed nothing. Quite the contrary, Bush insisted that the NIE reinforced the administration’s approach: hold low-level discussions in Bagdad between the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq; insist that Iran comply with UN Security Council demands that Tehran halt uranium enrichment as a precondition for any high-level direct negotiations with Washington; and impose another round of stiff international sanctions on Tehran.

And it is roughly 50 hours since President Bush arrived in Omaha, Nebraska Tuesday and declared that Tehran must “come clean” about its nuclear weapons ambitions and programs.

The phrase “come clean” recalled to mind two essays written in July and September 2003. Unbeknownst to the public, press, and pundits at the time, this was the transitional period for the invading forces. In these three months, the foreign soldiers lost the image of liberators and were saddled with the stigma of occupiers – their world turned upside down. It was also the period during which the full extent of the administration’s tampering with intelligence began to be apparent to all but the most doctrinaire observers.

Next door in Iran, the ayatollahs saw new instability in an already instable region of the world. Afghanistan and Iraq, two neighbors, had been invaded by U.S. forces, their governments overthrown and replaced by pro-western regimes, and now hosted 160,000 U.S. troops.. And while the Afghanistan venture was obviously retaliation for the al-Qaeda terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the March 2003 assault on Iraq was an example of the “Bush Doctrine” of “preventive war” applied to regimes that, in addition to secretly pursuing nuclear technology and knowledge, were deemed by Washington to be unfriendly.

The challenge for the ayatollahs in 2007 is in many ways the same one that Saddam had faced in 2003: how to prove a negative – that there were no weapons or programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. government incessantly insisted that there were. The only way to do this was to expose the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush White House as it sought congressional support against first Iraq and now against Iran.

All the ayatollahs can offer in defense are the lessons of the Iraq confrontation. In the four months before the invasion, UN inspectors had found no weapons and no programs for acquiring weapons of mass destruction – facts that at least denied the administration any official UN backing for attacking Iraq. Similarly, during the six months after the invasion, the 1,400 hand-picked inspectors of the U.S. Iraq Survey Team also failed to find any of the nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons the Bush administration alleged Saddam possessed.

So it seems that Saddam had been playing an elaborate shell game right up to the end. His nuclear weapons ploy not only kept regional enemies at bay but was convincing enough to fool western analysts that Iraq’s nuclear program remained potentially active. Analysts succumbed to classic mirror imaging because they simply could not imagine why Saddam would endure harsh UN sanctions and scores of foreigners running around his country unless he had a hidden program he planned to restart after inspections ended.

Whether it’s about Iraq in 2003 or Iran in 2007, the Middle East is a rough neighborhood. Any perception of weakness risks another country taking advantage of the situation. Thus the best defense is the appearance of a strong offense, which Saddam tried to portray – and did until his son-in-law, Hussein Kemal, “betrayed” him to western and UN intelligence agents. These, unfortunately, simply did not believe that the weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in 1991 and programs stopped.

As is clearly evident with this new NIE on Iran, the intelligence professionals have relearned something about their craft: when everyone agrees on everything, start over and find the contradiction or the omission that, if pursued, “turns the world upside down.”

That is the message of the key findings of the NIE: the Intelligence Community finds with “high confidence” that Tehran “halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003” and further finds with “moderate confidence” that this program has not been restarted.” The question remaining is for how long Tehran will sustain this hiatus – especially if the Bush administration refuses to change its stance.

The other fact -- highly dangerous -- the ayatollahs must weigh is Bush’s insistence that Iran “come clean,” a demand that indicates that Bush, unlike the Intelligence Community, still has learned nothing of the psychology of the Middle East. In the end, it is the political professionals, not the intelligence analysts, who make policy and implement programs. When the politicians let ideology override the facts, the mistakes of the past inevitably become the mistakes of the future. How else can one explain the efforts by conservative fear-mongering pundits to embrace a tortured interpretation of the latest report of the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear programs?

The moral is simple. If one believes in witches and warlocks, one will be able to find evidence they exist and eventually the actual beings. The administration and the world believed Saddam had weapons, and he obliged by dropping hints and acting as if he were hiding something.

The White House is trying to convince the public that Iran is another Iraq and is an imminent danger to the world. But this time, the world is not buying. The administration’s ploy this time will not turn anyone’s world upside down.

Col. Dan Smith, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Email at dan@fcnl.org.

from CounterPunch

Darkness Falls on the Middle East by Robert Fisk

So where do we go from here? I am talking into blackness because there is no electricity in Beirut. And everyone, of course, is frightened. A president was supposed to be elected today. He was not elected. The corniche outside my home is empty. No one wants to walk beside the sea.

When I went to get my usual breakfast cheese manouche there were no other guests in the café. We are all afraid. My driver, Abed, who has loyally travelled with me across all the war zones of Lebanon, is frightened to drive by night. I was supposed to go to Rome yesterday. I spared him the journey to the airport.

It's difficult to describe what it's like to be in a country that sits on plate glass. It is impossible to be certain if the glass will break. When a constitution breaks--as it is beginning to break in Lebanon--you never know when the glass will give way.

People are moving out of their homes, just as they have moved out of their homes in Baghdad. I may not be frightened, because I'm a foreigner. But the Lebanese are frightened. I was not in Lebanon in 1975 when the civil war began, but I was in Lebanon in 1976 when it was under way. I see many young Lebanese who want to invest their lives in this country, who are frightened, and they are right to frightened. What can we do?

Last week, I had lunch at Giovanni's, one of the best restaurants in Beirut, and took out as my companion Sherif Samaha, who is the owner of the Mayflower Hotel. Many of the guests I've had over the past 31 years I have sent to the Mayflower. But Sherif was worried because I suggested that his guests had included militia working for Saad Hariri, who is the son of the former prime minister, murdered--if you believe most Lebanese--by the Syrians on 14 February 2005.

Poor Sherif. He never had the militia men in his hotel. They were in a neighbouring building. But so Lebanese is Sherif that he even offered to pick me up in his car to have lunch. He is right to be worried.

A woman friend of mine, married to a doctor at the American University Hospital, called me two days before. "Robert, come and see the building they are making next to us," she said. And I took Abed and we went to see this awful building. It has almost no windows. All its installations are plumbing. It is virtually a militia prison. And I'm sure that's what it is meant to be. This evening I sit on my balcony, in a power cut, as I dictate this column. And there is no one in the street. Because they are all frightened.

So what can a Middle East correspondent write on a Saturday morning except that the world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. "Palestine". Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we--we Westerners that is--are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colourless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon.

And what hell disasters are we creating? Let me quote a letter from a reader in Bristol. She asks me to quote a professor at Baghdad University, a respected man in his community who tells a story of real hell; you should read it. Here are his own words:

"'A'adhamiya Knights' is a new force that has started its task with the Americans to lead them to al-Qa'ida and Tawheed and Jihad militants. This 300-fighter force started their raids very early at dawn wearing their black uniform and black masks to hide their faces. Their tours started three days ago, arresting about 150 citizens from A'adhamiya. The 'Knight' leads the Americans to a citizen who might be one of his colleagues who used to fight the Americans with him. These acts resulted in violent reactions of al-Qa'ida. Its militants and the militants of Tawheed and Jihad distributed banners on mosques' walls, especially on Imam Abu Hanifa mosque, threatening the Islamic Party, al-Ishreen revolution groups and Sunni endowment Diwan with death because these three groups took part in establishing 'A'adhamiya Knights'. Some crimes happened accordingly, targeting two from Sunni Diwan staff and one from the Islamic Party.

"Al-Qa'ida militants are distributed through the streets, stopping the people and asking about their IDs ... they carry lists of names. Anyone whose name is on these lists is kidnapped and taken to an unknown place. Eleven persons have been kidnapped up to now from Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Street."

The writer describes how her professor friend was kidnapped and taken to a prison. "They helped me sit on a chair (I was blindfolded) and someone came and held my hand saying, 'We are Muhajeen, we know you but we don't know where you are from.' They did not take my wallet nor did they search me. They only asked me if I have a gun. An hour or so later, one of them came and asked me to come with them. They drove me towards where my car was in the street and they said no more." So who are the A'adhamiya Knights? Who is paying them? What are we doing in the Middle East?

And how can we even conceive of a moral stand in the Middle East when we still we refuse to accept the fact--reiterated by Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and all the details of US diplomats in the First World War--that the Armenian genocide occurred in 1915? Here is the official British government position on the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. "Officially, the Government acknowledges the strength of feeling [note, reader, the 'strength of feeling'] about what it describes as a terrible episode of history and recognises the massacres of 1915-16 as a tragedy. However, neither the current Government nor previous British governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to be persuaded that these events should be categorised as genocide as it is defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide." When we can't get the First World War right, how in God's name can we get World War III right?

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

From CounterPunch

No tears, no remorse for the fallen of Iraq by John Pilger

In the New Statesman, John Pilger looks back on Remembrance Day - Veterans Day in the US - and describes the presence of hypocrisy as the bowed heads of the establishment mourned none of the million dead of Iraq and the destruction of their society.

On Remembrance Day 2007, the great and the good bowed their heads at the Cenotaph. Generals, politicians, newsreaders, football managers and stock-market traders wore their poppies. Hypocrisy was a presence. No one mentioned Iraq. No one uttered the slightest remorse for the fallen of that country. No one read the forbidden list.

The forbidden list documents, without favour, the part the British state and its court have played in the destruction of Iraq. Here it is:

1. Holocaust denial
On 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq. Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied: “We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003.” This was a deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods “robust” and “close to best practice”. Other senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey’s “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”. Since then, the British research polling agency, Opinion Research Business, has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Thus, the scale of death caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century.

2. Looting
The undeclared reason for the invasion of Iraq was the convergent ambitions of the neocons, or neo-fascists, in Washington and the far-right regimes of Israel. Both groups had long wanted Iraq crushed and the Middle East colonised to US and Israeli designs. The initial blueprint for this was the 1992 “Defence Planning Guidance”, which outlined America’s post-Cold War plans to dominate the Middle East and beyond. Its authors included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, architects of the 2003 invasion. Following the invasion, Paul Bremer, a neocon fanatic, was given absolute civil authority in Baghdad and in a series of decrees turned the entire future Iraqi economy over to US corporations. As this was lawless, the corporate plunderers were given immunity from all forms of prosecution. The Blair government was fully complicit and even objected when it looked as if UK companies might be excluded from the most profitable looting. British officials were awarded functionary colonial posts. A petroleum “law” will allow, in effect, foreign oil companies to approve their own contracts over Iraq’s vast energy resources. This will complete the greatest theft since Hitler stripped his European conquests.

3. Destroying a nation’s health
In 1999, I interviewed Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at Basra city hospital. “Before the Gulf War,” he said, “we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer. Now it’s 30 to 35 patients dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer.” Iraq was then in the grip of an economic and humanitarian siege, initiated and driven by the US and Britain. The result, wrote Hans von Sponeck, the then chief UN humanitarian official in Baghdad, was “genocidal... practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its physical and mental foundations”. Most of southern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic debris of British and American explosives, including uranium- 238 shells. Iraqi doctors pleaded in vain for help, citing the levels of leukaemia among children as the highest seen since Hiroshima. Professor Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme, wrote in the BMJ: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemo-therapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee].” In 1999, Kim Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the export to Iraq of vaccines that would protect mostly children from diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever, which, he said, “are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.

Since 2003, apart from PR exercises for the embedded media, the British occupiers have made no attempt to re-equip and resupply hospitals that, prior to 1991, were regarded as the best in the Middle East. In July, Oxfam reported that 43 per cent of Iraqis were living in “absolute poverty”. Under the occupation, malnutrition rates among children have spiralled to 28 per cent. A secret Defence Intelligence Agency document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities”, reveals that the civilian water supply was deliberately targeted. As a result, the great majority of the population has neither access to running water nor sanitation – in a country where such basic services were once as universal as in Britain. “The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30 per cent compared to the Saddam Hussein era,” said Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children’s hospital. “Children are dying daily and no one is doing anything to help them.” In January this year, nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations as an occupying power under UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Benn refused to see them.

4. Destroying a society
The UN estimates that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month. The refugee crisis has now overtaken that of Darfur as the most catastrophic on earth. Half of Iraq’s doctors have gone, along with engineers and teachers. The most literate society in the Middle East is being dismantled, piece by piece. Out of more than four million displaced people, Britain last year refused the majority of more than 1,000 Iraqis who applied to come here, while removing more “illegal” Iraqi refugees than any other European country. Thanks to tabloid-inspired legislation, Iraqis in Britain are often destitute, with no right to work and no support. They sleep and scavenge in parks. The government, says Amnesty, “is trying to starve them out of the country".

5. Propaganda
“See in my line of work,” said George W Bush, “you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Standing outside 10 Downing Street on 9 April 2003, the BBC’s then political editor, Andrew Marr, reported the fall of Baghdad as a victory speech. Tony Blair, he told viewers, “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. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” In the United States, similar travesties passed as journalism. The difference was that leading American journalists began to consider the consequences of the role they had played in the build-up to the invasion. Several told me they believed that had the media challenged and investigated Bush’s and Blair’s lies, instead of echoing and amplifying them, the invasion might not have happened. A European study found that, of the major western television networks, the BBC permitted less coverage of dissent than all of them. A second study found that the BBC consistently gave credence to government propaganda that weapons of mass destruction existed. Unlike the Sun, the BBC has credibility – as does, or did, the Observer.

On 14 October 2001, the London Observer’s front page said: “US hawks accuse Iraq over anthrax”. This was entirely false. Supplied by US intelligence, it was part of the Observer’s staunchly pro-war coverage, which included claiming a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, for which there was no credible evidence and which betrayed the paper’s honourable past. One report over two pages was headlined: “The Iraqi connection”. It, too, came from “intelligence sources” and was rubbish. The reporter, David Rose, concluded his barren inquiry with a heartfelt plea for an invasion. “There are occasions in history,” he wrote, “when the use of force is both right and sensible.” Rose has since written his mea culpa, including in these pages, confessing how he was used. Other journalists have still to admit how they were manipulated by their own credulous relationship with established power.

These days, Iraq is reported as if it is exclusively a civil war, with a US military “surge” aimed at bringing peace to the scrapping natives. The perversity of this is breathtaking. That sectarian violence is the product of a vicious divide-and-conquer policy is beyond doubt. As for the largely media myth of al-Qaeda, “most of the [American] pros will tell you”, wrote Seymour Hersh, “that the foreign fighters are a couple per cent, and then they’re sort of leaderless”. That a poorly armed, audacious resistance has not only pinned down the world’s most powerful army but has agreed an anti-sectarian, anti al-Qaeda agenda, which opposes attacks on civilians and calls for free elections, is not news.

6. The next blood letting
In the 1960s and 1970s, British governments secretly expelled the population of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean whose people have British nationality. Women and children were loaded on to vessels resembling slave ships and dumped in the slums of Mauritius, after their homeland was given to the Americans for a military base. Three times, the High Court has found this atrocity illegal, calling it a defiance of the Magna Carta and the Blair government’s refusal to allow the people to go home “outrageous” and “repugnant”. The government continues to use endless recourse to appeal, at the taxpayers’ expense, to prevent upsetting Bush. The cruelty of this matches the fact that not only has the US repeatedly bombed Iraq from Diego Garcia, but at “Camp Justice”, on the island, “al-Qaeda suspects” are “rendered” and “tortured”, according to the Washington Post. Now the US Air Force is rushing to upgrade hangar facilities on the island so that stealth bombers can carry 14-tonne “bunker busting” bombs in an attack on Iran. Orchestrated propaganda in the media is critical to the success of this act of international piracy.

On 22 May, the front page of the London Guardian carried the banner headline: “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”. This was a tract of unalloyed propaganda based entirely on anonymous US official sources. Through-out the media, other drums have taken up the beat. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” slips effortlessly from newsreaders’ lips, no matter that the International Atomic Energy Agency refuted Washington’s lies, no matter the echo of “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction”, no matter that another bloodbath beckons.

Lest we forget.