Six Days Of Shame

TODAY is a day of shame for the British military as it declares the Iraqi city of Basra, with a strickenpopulation of 600,000, a "military target".

You will not read or hear those words in the establishment media that claims to speak for Britain.

But they are true. With Basra, shame is now our signature, forged by Blair and Bush.

Having destroyed its water and power supplies, cut off food supply routes and having failed to crack itshuman defences, they are now preparing to lay siege to Iraq's second city which is more than 40 per centchildren.

What an ignominious moment in British history. Here is an impoverished country under attack by asuperpower, the United States, which has unimaginable wealth and the world's most destructive weapons, and its"coalition" accomplice, Britain, which boasts one of the world's best "professional"armies.

Believing their own propaganda, the military brass has been stunned by the Iraqi resistance.

They have tried to belittle the militia defending Basra with lurid stories that its fighters are killingeach other.

The truth is that the Iraqis are fighting like lions to defend not a tyrant but their homeland. It is atruth the overwhelming majority of decent Britons will admire.

The historical comparison Tony Blair and his propagandists fear is that of the British defending themselvesagainst invasion. That happened 60 years ago and now "we" are the rapacious invaders.

Yesterday, Blair said that 400,000 Iraqi children had died in the past five years from malnutrition andrelated causes. He said "huge stockpiles of humanitarian aid" and clean water awaited them inKuwait, if only the Iraqi regime would allow safe passage.

In fact, voluminous evidence, including that published by the United Nations Children's Fund, makes clearthat the main reason these children have died is an enduring siege, a 12-year embargo driven by America andBritain.

As of last July, $5.4billion worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN and paid for by the Iraqigovernment, were blocked by Washington, with the Blair government's approval. The former assistant secretarygeneral of the UN, Denis Halliday, who was sent to Iraq to set up the "oil for food programme",described the effects of the embargo as "nothing less than genocide". Similar words have been usedby his successor, Hans Von Sponeck.

Both men resigned in protest, saying the embargo merely reinforced the power of Saddam.

Both called Blair a liar.

And now Blair's troops are firing their wire-guided missiles to "soften up" Basra.

I have walked the city's streets, along a road blown to pieces by a US missile. The casualties werechildren, of course, because children are everywhere. I held a handkerchief over my face as I stood in aschool playground with a teacher and several hundred malnourished youngsters.

The dust blew in from the southern battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War, which have never been cleaned upbecause the US and British governments have denied Iraq the specialist equipment.

The dust, Dr Jawad Al-Ali told me, carries "the seeds of our death". In the children's wards ofBasra's main hospital, deaths from a range of hitherto unseen cancers are common and specialists have littledoubt that up to half the population of southern Iraq will die from cancers linked to the use of a weapon ofmass destruction used by the Americans and British - uranium tipped shells and missiles.

ONCE again, the Americans are deploying what Professor Doug Rokke, a former US Army physicist, calls"a form of nuclear weapon that contaminates everything and everyone".

Today, each round fired by US tanks contains 4,500 grams of solid uranium, whose particles, breathed oringested, can cause cancer.

This, and the use by both the Allies of new kinds of cluster bombs, is being covered up.

Once again, the British public is being denied the reality of war.

Images of bandaged children in hospital wards are appearing on TV but you do not see the result of aTornado's cluster bombing.

You are not being shown children scalped by shrapnel, with legs reduced to bloody pieces of string.

Such images are "not acceptable", because they will disturb viewers - and the authorities do notwant that. These "unseen" images are the truth. Iraqi parents have to look at their mutilatedchildren, so why shouldn't those of us, in whose name they were slaughtered, see what they see?

Why shouldn't we share their pain? Why shouldn't we see the true nature of this criminal invasion?

Other wars were sanitised, allowing them to be repeated.

If you have satellite TV, try to find the Al Jazeera channel, which has distinguished itself with itscoverage. When the Americans bombed Afghanistan, one of their "smart" bombs destroyed the Al Jazeeraoffice in Kabul. Few believe it was an accident. Rather, it was a testimony to the channel's independentjournalism.

Remember, it is not those who oppose this war who need to justify themselves, regardless of Blair's callsto "support our troops". There is only one way to support them - bring them home without delay.

In 1932, Iraqis threw out their British colonial rulers. In 1958, they got rid of the Hashemite monarchy.

Iraqis have shown they can overthrow dictators against the odds. So why have they not been able to throwout Saddam?

Because the US and Britain armed him and propped him up while it suited them, making sure that when theytired of him, they would be the only alternative to his rule and the profiteers of his nation's resources.Imperialism has always functioned like that.

The "new Iraq", as Blair calls it, will have many models, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republicand Nicaragua, all of them American conquests and American ruled until Washington allowed a viciousdictatorship to take over.

Saddam only came to power after the Americans helped install his Ba'ath Party in 1979. "That was myfavourite coup," said the CIA officer in charge.

Keep in mind the cynicism behind these truths when you next hear Blair's impassioned insincerity - and whenyou glimpse, if you can, the "unacceptable" images of children killed and mangled in your name, andin the cause of what the Prime Minister calls "our simple patriotism".

It's the kind of patriotism, wrote Tolstoy, "that is nothing else but a means of obtaining for therulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason andconscience."

Znet