Bush's Vietnam

America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 areunravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and wouldcollapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless ofshowcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai'scabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant fear ofher life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuseare committed with impunity by the private armies of America's "friends", the warlords whomWashington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.

"We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base," anAmerican colonel told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several times aday." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect the people, he belly-laughed.

American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort USofficials at high speed in armoured vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted withmachine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was considered too insecure for the defencesecretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that a few weeksago they "accidentally" shot dead four government soldiers in the centre of Kabul, igniting thesecond major street protest against their presence in a week.

On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport,killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force Isaf. The Germans' bus was liftedinto the air; human flesh lay on the roadside. When British soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area,they were watched by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide as wide as that whichseparated British troops from Afghans in the 19th century, and the French from Algerians and Americans fromVietnamese.

In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two opensecrets. The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation force represent anarmed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-warpropaganda, opposed their enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003,www.guardian.co.uk).The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointingto the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied.

Comparisons with Vietnam have been made so often over the years that Ihesitate to draw another. However, the similarities are striking: for example, the return of expressions suchas "sucked into a quagmire". This suggests, once again, that the Americans are victims, notinvaders: the approved Hollywood version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong. Since Saddam Hussein's statuewas toppled almost three months ago, more Americans have been killed than during the war. Ten have been killedand 25 wounded in classic guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as many as a dozena day.

The Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athistfighters", in the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as "communists". Recently, inFalluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it was clearly not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but thebrutal behaviour of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired the resistance. TheAmerican tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is reminiscent of the gunning down of a shepherd, his familyand sheep by "coalition" aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose aftermath Ifilmed and which evoked, for me, the murderous games American aircraft used to play in Vietnam, gunning downfarmers in their fields, children on their buffaloes.

On 12 June, a large American force attacked a "terrorist base"north of Baghdad and left more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term "terrorist" isimportant, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda are attacking the liberators, and so the connectionbetween Iraq and 11 September is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made.

More than 400 prisoners were taken in this operation. The majority havereportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at Baghdad airport: a concentrationcamp along the lines of Bagram, from where people are shipped to Guantanamo Bay. In Afghanistan, the Americanspick up taxi drivers and send them into oblivion, via Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in Chile, they are makingtheir perceived enemies "disappear".

"Search and destroy", the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, isback. In the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no longer stands. Americanairborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December 2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party.Villagers said that women and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from the gunfire, and wereshot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left. According to a United Nationsinvestigation, 52 people were killed, including 25 children. "We identified it as a militarytarget," says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre 35 years ago.

The targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic taboo in the west.Accredited monsters did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of the 1991 Gulf war was wildlyunderestimated. Almost a year later, a comprehensive study by the Medical Education Trust in London estimatedthat more than 200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately after the war, as a direct or indirectconsequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. The report was all but ignored. This month, Iraq BodyCount, a group of American and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians mayhave been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on Baghdad alone. And this is likely to bean extremely conservative figure.

In Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May last year, JonathanSteele extrapolated all the available field evidence of the human cost of the US bombing and concluded that asmany as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of themdrought victims denied relief.

This "hidden" effect is hardly new. A recent study at ColumbiaUniversity in New York has found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam was up tofour times as great as previously estimated. Agent Orange contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisonsknown. In what they first called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, theAmericans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000 "missions" to spray Agent Orange, almost half theforests of southern Vietnam, and countless human lives. It was the most insidious and perhaps the mostdevastating use of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever. Today, Vietnamese children continue to be bornwith a range of deformities, or they are stillborn, or the foetuses are aborted.

The use of uranium-tipped munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange.In the first Gulf war in 1991, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of depleted uranium. According to theUnited Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, quoting an international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled oringested, would cause 500,000 deaths. Most of the victims are civilians in southern Iraq. It is estimated that2,000 tonnes were used during the latest attack.

In a remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science Monitor, theinvestigative reporter Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the streets of Baghdad andradiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without warning. Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic haveappeared: "Danger - Get away from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium MedicalResearch Centre, based in Canada, has made two field studies, with the results described as"shocking". "Without exception," it reported, "at every bomb site investigated,people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internalcontamination by uranium."

An official map distributed to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that theAmerican and British military have plastered urban areas with cluster bombs, many of which will have failed todetonate on impact. These usually lie unnoticed until children pick them up, then they explode.

In the centre of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning people that therubble of their homes, and streets, contained unexploded cluster bombs "made in USA". Who readsthem? Small children? The day I watched children skipping through what might have been an urban minefield, Isaw Tony Blair on CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his arms, in aschool that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had been prepared in his honour, in a city wherebasic services such as education, food and water remain a shambles under the British occupation.

It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill anddying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced withenthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was - shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not ofthe people - lifting a toddler into his arms for the cameras.

When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter,from a new collection of his called War (Faber & Faber).

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come To sniff among the dead Andhave their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck The swollen avocados from thedust And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch They loll and lounge about Decanting claret in convenientskulls

John Pilger is a renowned journalist and documentary film-maker. A war correspondent and ZNet- courtesy which this appears here - Commentator, his writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and newspapers such as the Daily Mirror, the Guardian,the Independent, New Statesman, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation,and other newspapers and periodicals around the world. His books include Heroes (2001) HiddenAgendas (1998) and Distant Voices (1994).