Watch Their Lips

Now that their long-cherished war has started, Bush and Blair feel they no longer need to spit and polishtheir carefully fabricated moral arguments any more. The boys have gone in. The ‘shock and awe’ is beingdelivered after the surgical strikes. The battleground has been prepared to Pentagon’s satisfaction. So whybother with arguments?

Jingoism will have its own momentum, as banners carried in counter-demonstrations against the anti-waractivists in San Fransisco showed yesterday - "Support the US or Shut up". Here in Britain, I watched aveteran of WW2 being heckled as a traitor as he spoke about why he was against this war. As my studentsoccupied the centre of Newcastle yesterday, I saw their fellow students abuse them and proclaim "How do youthink Britain got to where it is now? We need war to show them who is boss."

Misinformation, fear and a potent mix of racist supremacism have been stoked carefully. No wonder theaggressors have abandoned the arguments for a while. Instead, they gloat openly about their true aims.

Take the US defence analyst assessing the action on BBC on the morning of March 21. He ended by saying hecouldn’t see how Iraq’s army could stop the Anglo-American, sorry,‘coalition’ troops from taking Basraand Baghdad shortly. The Iraqi force, he said, was mediocre and had been cut off from military technology for12 years while the US had invested more than any country in the world in hardware for the new millennium. Itcould not be a contest.

So true, and everything that the anti-war activists have been saying all along. That Iraq is not a militarythreat to its own neighbours, let alone Britain and the US. But did we see the analyst in the countlessdebates held on television and radio in the six-month build up to war? No. then we were treated with thespectacle of sometime-historians like Andrew Roberts in Britain who said on Newsnight programme that Iraq wasa greater military threat to the West than Soviet Union ever been (admittedly to guffaws by Jeremy Paxman andBritish army officials).

So, if Iraq is not a military threat, then maybe it had to be attacked to uphold the authority of the UN?Have we not been told, till we were sick, that Tony Blair had tried to drag the US down the UN route? If onlyit weren’t for those cheese-eaters across the channel? Now we must support the US attack because it was inthe interest of the UN and resolution 1441? 

But here comes Richard Perle in the Guardian on March 21stwith 20 point bold headline above his article - ‘Thank God the UN is dead’. Perle, to his credit, hasnever hidden the fact that one of the aims of this American war is to kill the UN in its current form. In thearticle he gives a succinct summing of the views of this American administration - that it refuses to be boundby international treaties, to tolerate any rivalry from ‘friendly powers’, that it will use military mightand initiate regime change whenever it feels like, that it will use its position to buy off nations toconstruct the figment of coalitions of the willing.

All this, of course, has been public knowledge and clearlyoutlined on the website of the Project for the New American Century - the think-tank of which Perle and mostof Bush’s inner circle were founding members. It fell to poor Tony Blair to try and sell it to the rest ofthe world that US and Britain were attacking Iraq to uphold UN authority. Within a week, first Rumsfeld andnow Perle has not even pretended to be aware of Blair’s lies.

So, not about military threat and not about the UN. Perhaps the war is about ‘liberating’ andrestructuring Iraq then? Handing over the administration of the country to its people? Affirming Kurdishautonomy? Along comes the vote in Turkish parliament on the 20th . The long-awaited agreement to let USaircrafts use Turkish airspace is achieved. Now the B-52s taking off from Britain don’t have to go overAfrica and mess up their lethal timetable. In exchange, of course, the Turkish troops get ready to move intonorthern Iraq to secure the Kurdish autonomous area against disturbances. 

The Pentagon has initiated ‘surrendertalks’ that will spare the Iraqi regular army and the Generals, as well as key members of the Ba’athparty. They will be needed as the new collaborators who will assist General Tommy Franks in his occupation ofthe country. Dick Cheney’s brazen lies about his company Halliburton’s trade with Iraq from 1998-2001 haverecently exposed in Counterpunch and other US newspapers. Surprise, surprise, the company is now at theforefront of the foreign company’s rushing in to ‘hold the oilfields of Iraq in custody for its people’. 

Tony is still trying, of course. 

In last night’s laughable and irrelevant declaration of war (the war hadstarted the night before with the US ‘surgical’ strikes, and Blair was awakened from his sleep after beingalerted by a ITV reporter), he gave us his solemn word that the oil revenues of a free Iraq would be held in aUN trust fund for its people. Listen to your American controllers, Prime Minister, the UN is dead. 

Tony hasalso promised the Iraqis, those who can still hear after tonight’s episode of ‘shock and awe’, that theywill have democracy. Just like Afghanistan, where since yesterday, the US stepped up its air campaign ofbombing ‘suspected Taliban villages’ on behalf of the extremely popular and freely elected leader HamidKarzai.

One by one, the empty shells of Bush and Blair’s moral arguments are being casually ejected from theirsmoking guns. The calculation is they need not bother anymore. The lies now shine bright. And they wonder whythe protests show no sign of ending!

Dr. Pablo Mukherjee teaches at the University of Newcastle.