Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris And Euphrates

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childishhandwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who lovesa boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq,an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and getmy nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest thatso far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJstuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way overmy head," he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that SaddamHussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Andan ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida.What percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.

It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supportedSaddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more,does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-proteinfood, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on themove. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn't need tojustify its existence any more. It exists. It is.

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clearinstructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's bodies arekilled, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander toforsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) toensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, itsinfrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act ofcowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of theWilling"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let MeBreak Your Knees.

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehowmanaged to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with therichest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courageand has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair haveimmediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When weare invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the"Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of beingcounterproductive to their own objectives.

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the mostelaborate assassination attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, theBritish defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him acoward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it hisdouble? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turninto a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown upand civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They'reusing very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down."

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of theAxis of Evil and a threat to world peace?

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arabpropaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only inorder to make the "Allies" look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similarreasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcingacross the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the "terrible beauty" of war.

When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's only here to help") are taken prisoner andshown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heartof the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds ofprisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tiedbehind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure completevisual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government officialsdon't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! Theycall them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's theparty line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of theprisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called ithomicide.)

When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of theGeneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying forthe attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American andBritish TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has achievedhallucinatory levels.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better?Western journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from thefrontlines of war. Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting frombesieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children andwounded people) are undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he isbeing monitored by the Iraqi authorities."

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie:rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is"resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit.(The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, ishard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqiarmy can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire.Anything short of that is cheating.

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children.Without clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia"uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the"liberating" army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to tightschedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. Butthen, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought ina few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperatepeople flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise thedying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to getpictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agenciesto newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand,distributing fishes and loaves.

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair.It didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - aminuscule fraction of what's actually needed (call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the"Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barfbag, anyone?

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that itwould take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.

We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderateproposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes atpopulation targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and athome, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction oflocks and dams, however - if handled right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destructiondoes not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation(more than a million?) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'."

Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "WinningHearts and Minds".

So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulfwar. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved fromSaddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 warofficially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to becaused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to usedepleted uranium.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that shejust ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she'sthe world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand,the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used andabused at will.

Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play noindependent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy"reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to "politicise"the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oilfor food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybodyagrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starvingbecause of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.

Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the business news, couldjump-start the world economy. It's funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, sosuccessfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American peoplewill end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involvedin "reconstruction" work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends andformer employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contractsfor "re-construction" are already being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands because much ofthe US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is,returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, likeHalliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps USvice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new eraof economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "Wedon't want your stinking wine." We've heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they'recalled now.There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if thefallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended byborder patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts areexposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists ofAmerican and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets,Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government agencies such as USAID, the British department for internationaldevelopment, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations suchas Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege.These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guidethat directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the"inevitability" of the project of corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a littleevitable.

It's become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not onlyabout oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, globalhegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by thesame process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In the other,cruise missiles.

Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot aboutthose!)

In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, itis showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Undersimilar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could weexpect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper?What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?

Excuse me while I laugh.

In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - hesimply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comesout of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.

So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq,invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its peopleblown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all ofus, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter oflanguage as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). Whensomeone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking for induced starvation."Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds like.And what about "arsenalof tactics?" Nice!

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racistwar unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators.It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidalwave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe,Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen,yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurdinability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say,(with the same carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in thegrotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", findmyself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.