By George Galloway
March 10, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"
-- The finest of all journalists in the
English-speaking world, Claud Cockburn, said:
“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”
This basic rubric of the trade was all but abandoned a
decade ago in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when every
official claim was assumed to be true and those who
denied it were treated as bad, or even mad. One
honourable exception was
Cockburn’s son, Patrick, in The Independent,
an exception continued in his magisterial look back in
anger in this newspaper over the past week. If
journalism is history’s first draft, then Patrick
Cockburn’s work on Iraq will prove to be close to the
finished article.
I
mention this not just because I remain bitter at the
role of the fourth estate in helping to bring about such
slaughter and, a decade later, such ongoing misery in
Iraq. But because virtually nothing has been learned,
and history is repeating itself over and over again – in
Libya, Mali, Syria.
Bob Dylan said in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the
Memphis Blues Again” that “you have to pay to get out
of, going through all this twice...”. For the most part,
the bill continues to be paid by others, and elsewhere.
For now.
Even for someone with my experience, such militarised
mendacity can still take the breath away. How many times
did you read and listen in the past few days to
pontificating pundits tell you that
Hugo Chavez had “wrecked” the Venezuelan economy,
without a whiff of self-consciousness about the state of
our own and that of the United States? That Chavez’s
Venezuela was a “divided” society; as if Bush, Obama,
Cameron, and Osborne led governments of national unity?
To
briefly recap; a huge right-wing conspiracy was mounted
10 years ago to manufacture a case to wage aggressive
war (pace Nuremberg, the “ultimate crime”)
upon Iraq. It involved government ministers (some
still swilling around profitably in the detritus they
created); intelligence agencies and the spin doctors
controlling them; craven parliamentarians scarcely
worthy of the name; and a veritable army of scribblers,
autocue readers, laptop bombardiers and think-tankers.
Add a sprinkling of useful idiots calling themselves
“liberals”, and the blue touchpaper was lit. A million
died, thousands of them British and American. Millions
spread as refugees around the world. A country was
dismembered, never to be reassembled. Extremism cascaded
around the world, blowing itself up even aboard London
buses.
The whole “humanitarian” show is best remembered in the
pictures from
Abu Ghraib. A female American soldier, cigarette
dangling from her curling lip, leading a hooded naked
Iraqi prisoner like a dog on a chain. Piling naked
helpless Iraqi prisoners on top of each other and
forcing them to commit indecent acts, videoing it all
for the entertainment of the barracks later. Those
tempted to imagine this was American exceptionalism
should read the proceedings of the London court this
week where, inter alia, we learned of the Iraqi corpse
who may or may not have walked into British custody
alive, but who surely was handed back to his family
minus his penis. It doesn’t get much uglier than this,
especially when it’s all dressed up in the livery of
liberal “intervention”.
Millions of us knew that it would end this way, even
before it became clear that the entire conspiracy was
built on the tower – bigger than Babel – of lies around
“weapons of mass destruction”. There were none. But the
weapons of mass deception deployed by the conspirators
remain in fine fettle. And none of them has even been
properly inspected yet. No one has been held to account;
not a single head has rolled. Except those of a million
Iraqis.
When the
Chilcot Inquiry was announced, I denounced it in
Parliament as a parade of establishment duffers, two of
whom at least had been among the intellectual authors of
the disaster, one of whom had described Bush and Blair
as the Roosevelt and Churchill de nos jours. I pointed
out that there was not a single legal personality on the
Inquiry, or a soldier. And not a Douglas Hurd or a
Menzies Campbell among them either. That no one could be
summoned, nor their papers either. That no one would be
testifying under oath. That must have been three years
ago now. Little did I know that the Chilcot report would
be as slow in coming as the judgement day.
Iraq is broken now, and as Cockburn’s recent reports
show, Iraqi hearts haven’t mended either. It was a
disaster, the greatest British policy failure since the
First World War.
But for as long as its lessons are not learned, the
Iraqis will not be the last such victims. The Iraq war
bankrupted the British and American political class.
They no longer speak for the people they claim to
represent. Few believe any longer anything they say.
Long before Leveson summed up the venality of much of
the media – the echo chamber of that class – the people
were abandoning that media in droves. Like our other
institutions – the banks and the police, to name but two
– their credibility stands in ruins. Devastated even
more starkly than were Fallujah, Amariyah and Baghdad.
Saddam’s presidential palaces turned out to be bare, but
not as bereft as the democratic political leaders who
propelled him to the gallows. The trap door has opened
for them. And they are still falling.
George Galloway is
the Respect MP for Bradford West
Twitter:
@georgegalloway
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