Robert Fisk | ukwatch.net

Six Years In Guantanamo

Tim Holmes — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:17:06 +0000

Sami al-Haj walks with pain on his steel crutch; almost six years in the nightmare of Guantanamo have taken their toll on the Al Jazeera journalist and, now in the safety of a hotel in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, he is a figure of both dignity and shame. The Americans told him they were sorry when they eventually freed him this year – after the beatings he says he suffered, and the force-feeding, the humiliations and interrogations by British, American and Canadian intelligence officers – and now he hopes one day he’ll be able to walk without his stick.

The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years – repeatedly beaten and force-fed – not because he was a suspected “terrorist” but because he refused to become an American spy. From the moment Sami al-Haj arrived at Guantanamo, flown there from the brutal US prison camp at Kandahar, his captors demanded that he work for them. The cruelty visited upon him – constantly interrupted by American admissions of his innocence – seemed designed to turnal-Haj into a US intelligence “asset”.

“We know you are innocent, you are here by mistake,” he says he was told in more than 200 interrogations. “All they wanted was for me to be a spy for them. They said they would give me US citizenship, that my wife and child could live in America, that they would protect me. But I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job and because I fear for myself and my family. In war, I can be wounded and I can die or survive. But if I work with you, al-Qa’ida will eliminate me. And if I don’t work with you, you will kill me’.”

The grotesque saga began for al-Haj on 15 December, 2001, when he was on his way from the Pakistani capital Islamabad to Kandahar in Afghanistan with Sadah al-Haq, a fellow correspondent from the Arab satellite TV channel, to cover the new regional government. At least 70 other journalists were on their way through the Pakistani border post at Chaman, but an officer stopped al-Haj. “He told me there was a paper from the Pakistani intelligence service for my arrest. My name was misspelled, my passport number was incorrect, it said I was born in 1964 – the right date is 1969. I said I had renewed my visa in Islamabad and asked why, if I was wanted, they had not arrested me there?”

Sami al-Haj speaks slowly and with care, each detail of his suffering and of others’ suffering of equal importance to him. He still cannot believe that he is free, able to attend a conference in Norway, to return to his new job as news producer at Al Jazeera, to live once more with his Azeri wife Asma and their eight-year old son Mohamed; when Sami al-Haj disappeared down the black hole of America’s secret prisons the boy was only 14 months’ old.

Al-Haj’s story has a familiar ring to anyone who has investigated the rendition of prisoners from Pakistan to US bases in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. His aircraft flew for an hour and a half and then landed to collect more captives – this may have been in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital – before flying on to the big American base at Bagram.

“We arrived in the early hours of the morning and they took the shackles off our feet and pushed us out of the plane. They hit me and pushed me down on the asphalt. We heard screams and dogs barking. I collapsed with my right leg under me, and I felt the ligaments tearing. When I fell, the soldiers started treading on me. First, they walked on my back, then – when they saw me looking at my leg – they started kicking my leg. One soldier shouted at me: ‘Why did you come to fight Americans?’ I had a number – I was No 35 and this is how they addressed me, as a number – and the first American shouted at me: ‘You filmed Bin Laden.’ I said I did not film Bin Laden but that I was a journalist. I again gave my name, my age, my nationality.”

After 16 days at Bagram, another aircraft took him to the US base at Kandahar where on arrival the prisoners were again made to lie on the ground. “We were cursed – they said ‘fuck your mother’ – and again the Americans walked on our backs. Why? Why did they do this? I was taken to a tent and stripped and they pulled hairs out of my beard. They photographed the pupils of my eyes. A doctor found blood on my back and asked me why it was there. I asked him how he thought it was there?”

The same dreary round of interrogations recommenced – he was now “Prisoner No 448” – and yet again, al-Haj says he was told he was being held by mistake. “Then another man – he was in civilian clothes and I think he was from Egyptian intelligence – wanted to know who was the “leader” of the detainees who was with me. The Americans asked: ‘Who is the most respected of the prisoners? Who killed [Ahmed Shah] Massoud ([the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance Afghan militia]?’ I said this was not my business and an American soldier said: ‘Co-operate with us, and you will be released.’ They meant I had to work for them. There was another man who spoke perfect English. I thought he was British. He was young, good-looking, about 35-years-old, no moustache, blond hair, very polite in a white shirt, no tie. He brought me chocolate – it was Kit Kat—and I was so hungry I could have eaten the wrapping.”

On 13 June, al-Haj was put on board a jet aircraft. He was given yet another prison number – No 345 – and once more his head was covered with a black bag. He was forced to take two tablets before he was gagged and his bag replaced by goggles with the eye-pieces painted black. The flight to Guantanamo took 12 to 14 hours.

“They took us on a boat from the Guantanamo runways to the prison, a journey that took an hour.” Al-Haj was escorted to a medical clinic and then at once to another interrogation. “They said they’d compared my answers with my original statement and one of them said: ‘You are here by mistake. You will be released. You will be the first to be released.’ They gave me a picture of my son, which had been taken from my wallet. They asked me if I needed anything. I asked for books. One said he had a copy of One Thousand and One Nights in Arabic. He copied it for me. During this interview, they asked me: ‘Why did you talk to the British intelligence man so much in Kandahar?’ I said I didn’t know if he was from British intelligence. They said he was.

“Then after two months, two more British men came to see me. They said they were from UK intelligence. They wanted to know who I knew, who I’d met. I said I couldn’t help them.” The Americans later referred to one of them as “Martin” and they did not impress al-Haj’s senior interrogator at Guantanamo, Stephen Rodriguez, who wanted again to seek al-Haj’s help. “He said to me: ‘Our job is to prevent “things” happening. I’ll give you a chance to think about this. You can have US citizenship, your family will be looked after, you’ll have a villa in the US, we’ll look after your son’s education, you’ll have a bank account’. He had brought with him some Arabic magazines and told me I could read them. In those 10 minutes, I felt I had gone back to being a human being again. Then soldiers came to take me back to my cell – and the magazines were taken away.”

By the summer of 2003, al-Haj was receiving other strange visitors. “Two Canadian intelligence officers came and they showed me lots of photos of people and wanted to know if I recognised them. I knew none of them.”

In more than 200 interrogations, al-Haj was asked about his employers the Al Jazeera television channel in Qatar. In one session, he says another American said to him: “After you get out of here, al-Qa’ida will recruit you and we want to know who you meet. You could become an analyst, we can train you to store information, to sketch people. There is a link between Al Jazeera and al-Qa’ida. How much does al-Qa’ida pay Al Jazeera?”

“I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job. Also because I fear for my life and my family.’”

Many beatings followed – not from the interrogators but from other US guards. “They would slam my head into the ground, cut off all my hair. They put me into the isolation block – we called it the ‘November Block’ – for two years. They made my life torture. I wanted to bring it to an end. There were continual punishments without reason. In interrogations, they would tighten the shackles so it hurt. They hadn’t allowed me to receive letters for 10 months – even then, they erased words in them, even from my son. Again, Rodriguez demanded I work for the Americans.”

In January of last year, Sami al-Haj started a hunger strike – and began the worst months of his imprisonment. “I wanted my rights in the civil courts. The US Supreme Court said I should have my rights. I wanted the right to worship properly. They let me go 30 days without food – then I was tied to a chair with metal shackles and they force-fed me. They would insert a tube through my nose into my stomach. They chose large tubes so that it hurt and sometimes it went into the lung. They used the same tube they had used on other prisoners with muck still on it and then they pumped more food into me than it was possible to absorb. They told us the people administering this were doctors – but they were torturers, not doctors. They forced 24 cans of food into us so we threw up and then gave us laxatives to defecate. My pancreas was affected and I had stomach problems. Then they would forbid us from drinking water.”

Al-Haj says he completed 480 days of hunger strike by which time his medical condition had deteriorated and he was bleeding from his anus. That was the moment his interrogators decided to release him.

“There were new interrogators now, but they tried once more with me. ‘Will you work with us?’ they asked me again. I said ‘no’ again – but I thanked them for their years of hospitality and for giving me the chance to live among them as a journalist. I said this way I could get the truth to the outside world, that I was not in a hurry to get out because there were a lot more reporters’ stories in there.” They said: ‘You think we did you a favour?’ I said: ‘You turned me from zero into a hero.’ They said: ‘We are 100 per cent sure that Bin Laden will be in touch with you…’ That night, I was taken to the plane. The interrogators were watching me, hiding behind a tennis net. I waved at them, those four pairs of eyes.”

The British authorities have never admitted talking to Sami al-Haj. Nor have the Canadians. Al Jazeera, whose headquarters George Bush wanted to bomb after the invasion of Iraq, kept a job open for Sami al-Haj. But Prisoner No 345 never received an official apology from the Americans. He says he does not expect one.

The Only Lesson We Ever Learn...

Ellie Keen — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:06:11 +0000

...is that we never learn

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

“They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – “Mission Accomplished” – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or “terrorism” – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”.

Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”.

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.

America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.

'Abu Henry' and the Mysterious Silence

eddie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:45:34 +0000

“Abu Henry” says we may have to remain in Afghanistan for decades to protect Afghans from the Taliban. Our ambassador in Kabul—Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, KCMG, LVO, to be precise—apparently sees no contradiction in this extraordinary prediction.

The Taliban are themselves mostly Afghans, and the idea that the British Army is in Afghanistan to protect the locals from each other is a truly colonial proposition. It’s what we said about the Northern Irish in 1969. Anyway, I thought we destroyed the Taliban in 2001. Wasn’t that the idea at the time? Isn’t that what Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, our new man in the Middle East—who will grace us with his first visit next month—said back then?

Abu Henry—and I am indebted to one of the Saudi government’s house magazines for telling me that this is how he “is affectionately called by his Saudi friends”—left Riyadh in some haste, a “surprise” as he put it, since he expected to spend another year there. And presumably, he has not been able to take the Cowper-Coles family’s pet falcons—Nour and Alwaleed—with him to Kabul. But before he left, Abu Henry had some warm praise for the notoriously third-rate intelligence services in the kingdom. “I’ve been hugely impressed by the way in which the Saudi Arabian authorities have tackled and contained what was (sic) a serious terrorist threat,” he announced. “They’ve shrunk the pool of support for terrorism … “

No word, of course, of the Saudis’ habit of chopping off the heads of “criminals” after grotesquely unfair trials. In an unprecedented year for executions, the kingdom’s swordsmen—the job is sometimes passed on father to son as was once the case in Britain—managed to hack off 100 heads by the middle of this month. But then again, you’d have to avoid any such references when British investment in Saudi Arabia is worth at least £6b. That, no doubt, is one reason why Abu Henry boasted to his Saudi friends—according to the same government magazine—that in Riyadh “we’ve been proud of our visa policy, where 95 per cent of Saudis applying for a visa before 9am on a workday obtain their visas by 2pm the same working day”. Phew. Now that is something. The Saudis, you may remember, provided 14 of the 19 killers of 11 September, 2001; quite a record for a little kingdom, and one which in other circumstances—had the murderers been from Chad, say, or Mali—would not have been rewarde
d with quite so generous a visa policy.

And no word from Abu Henry, of course, about that other little matter of the alleged bribery of Saudi officials by the British BAE Systems arms group. Here, however, there is much more to say—courtesy, I admit at once, of a delightfully written article by Michael Peel in the Financial Times last February. In the paper, Peel describes how Robert Wardle, director of the Serious Fraud Office, had “much to ponder” after three London meetings with Cowper-Coles, “Britain’s urbane ambassador to Saudi Arabia”. Mr Wardle, it seems, was “coming around to the view” that he might have to scrap his enquiry since it could damage “national security”. Wardle told Peel that “the matter was difficult and really I found it very helpful to have, as it were, the ambassador flesh out the position. It helped my understanding of the risks and very much helped me to make my decision to discontinue the investigation”.

Abu Henry, it seems, “told how the probe might cause Riyadh to cancel security and intelligence co-operation, potentially depriving London of access to vital surveillance of terror suspects during the haj pilgrimage to Mecca… The ambassador had even suggested (that) persisting with the SFO probe could endanger lives in Britain”. According to a person “closely involved in the events”, wrote Peel—and I suspect the “person” was probably Wardle—Cowper-Coles “didn’t overelaborate, but he spelt out in very clear terms, in specifics, what he believed the consequences would be … including that people could die”. Two days later, the bribery investigation was scrapped.

So no wonder the Saudis affectionately called him “Abu Henry”.

Given some of his remarks during a recent visit to Oxford, however, Abu Henry must himself have been surprised that he could persuade Lord Blair of the wisdom of dumping that all-important bribery investigation. Among academics, he did not hide his cynicism of our former prime minister, complaining that despite exhaustive Foreign Office briefing notes and proposed speeches, Blair scarcely seemed to read them and sometimes used only a single line from their contents.

But then again, I guess that’s what diplomacy is all about, persuading here, pleading there, trying to get what you want by a few off-the-record comments to officials of the Serious Fraud Office, even to journalists I have no doubt.

Indeed, I remember way back in the late 1970s—when I was Middle East correspondent for The Lond Times—how a British diplomat in Cairo tried to persuade me to fire my local “stringer”, an Egyptian Coptic woman who also worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press and who provided a competent coverage of the country when I was in Beirut. “She isn’t much good,” he said, and suggested I hire a young Englishwoman whom he knew and who—so I later heard—had close contacts in the Foreign Office.

I refused this spooky proposal. Indeed, I told The Times that I thought it was outrageous that a British diplomat should have tried to engineer the sacking of our part-timer in Cairo. The Times’s foreign editor agreed.

But it just shows what diplomats can get up to.

And the name of that young British diplomat in Cairo back in the late 1970s? Why, Sherard Cowper-Coles, of course.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk’s new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Blair as Middle East Envoy?

Tim Holmes — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 13:43:44 +0000

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create “Palestine”. I checked the date – no, it was not 1 April – but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being “our” Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region – he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail – is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world’s last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

Of course, he’ll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will try to marginalise Hamas, will talk endlessly about “moderates”; and we’ll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he’s absolutely and completely confident that he’s doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush’s ridiculous hope of an Israeli victory over Hizbollah) in bringing peace to the Middle East…

Not once – ever – has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Lord Blair actually believes – in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” – that he can do good in the Middle East.

For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region – a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East – now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up “Palestine”.

In the hunt for quislings to do our bidding – ie accept even less of Mandate Palestine than Arafat would stomach – I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

And I have a suspicion – always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue – that Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for “peace”, thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq. But “Palestine”?

The Palestinians held elections – real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety – and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He’ll need to talk only to Abbas’s flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a “government of the imagination”.

The Americans are talking – and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack – about an envoy who can work “with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system” to develop institutions for a “well-governed state”. Oh yes, I can see how that would appeal to Lord Blair. He likes well-governed states, lots of “terror laws”, plenty of security – though I’m still a bit puzzled about what the “Palestinian system” is meant to be.

It was James Wolfensohn who was originally “our” Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct Gaza nor work with a “peace process” that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlement and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel. Does Blair think he can do better? What honeyed words will we hear?

I bet he doesn’t mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a “security barrier” or a “fence” (like the famous Berlin “fence” which was actually called a “security barrier” by those generous East German Vopo cops of the time).

There will be appeals for restraint “on all sides”, endless calls for “moderation”, none at all for justice (which is all the people of the Middle East have been pleading for over the past 100 years).

And Israel likes Lord Blair. Indeed, Blair’s slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land for Jews and Jews only as he waits to discover a Palestinian with whom he can “negotiate”, Mahmoud Abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza.

Which of “Palestine”‘s two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more “security”, tougher laws, less democracy.

I have never been able to figure out why the Middle East draws the Balfours and the Sykeses and the Blairs into its maw. Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker – who worked for George W’s father until the Israelis got tired of him – and before that we had a whole list of UN Secretary Generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not soon come.

I recall another man with Blair’s pomposity, a certain Kurt Waldheim, who – no longer the UN’s boss – actually believed he could be an “envoy” for peace in the Middle East, despite his little wartime career as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group “E”.

His visits – especially to the late King Hussein – came to nothing, of course. But Waldheim’s ability to draw a curtain over his wartime past does have one thing in common with Blair. For Waldheim steadfastly, pointedly, repeatedly, refused to acknowledge – ever – that he had ever done anything wrong. Now who does that remind you of?

Welcome to 'Palestine'

jeppe — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 17:34:14 +0000

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party – Hamas – and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” – and let’s keep those quotation marks in place – has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked – on our side – which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds – and goes on building – vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the “moderate” (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word “occupation”, who always referred to Israeli “redeployment” rather than “withdrawal”, a “leader” we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic – which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented – but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the “Palestinian Authority”.

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps – or variations of them – were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption – the cancer of the Arab world – and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer “Palestine” EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our “war on terror” in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs – yes Mrs – George W Bush – and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair’s recent visit to Tripoli – Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a “statesman” by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions – and whose “democracy” is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the “war on terror”.

Yes, and we love King Abdullah’s unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister – and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn’t like our coverage of what he quaintly calls “the Middle East”. If only the Arabs – and the Iranians – would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the “Middle East” would be to control.

For that is what it is about – control – and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It’s easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that’s what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn’t President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn’t in control of Iran (even if he doesn’t actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries – Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don’t behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say – as we are already saying of the Iraqis – that they don’t deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d‘état by an elected government?

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent

Blair's Lies and Linguistic Manipulations

Alex Doherty — Sat, 19 May 2007 11:45:58 +0000

By great good fortune, I studied linguistics at Lancaster University. Indeed, I read the books of Noam Chomsky, many years before he became a good friend of mine; to be honest, when I read his work, I thought Chomsky was dead. What a pleasure, therefore, to discover that he shared my world – and my views on Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.

But I have to admit a moment of regret this weekend. Lord Blair is going from us. His self-serving memoirs will, of course, remind us of his God-like view of himself (and, heaven spare me, we share the same publishers) but I doubt if Chomsky’s “foregrounded elements” will save him. A “foregrounded element” was something unusual, a phrase placed in such a way that it warned us of a lie to come.

Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell when the US Secretary of State was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn’t refer to evidence of WMD as a “slam dunk”, he says – a basketball phrase which I don’t need to explain. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn’t lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Blair’s lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read “Saudi reforms lose momentum” – surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press – it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a “different political system”. The “foregrounded” element, of course, is the word “different”. This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not – as Blair well knew – because Algeria possesses a “different” political system but because the Algerian “system” allows it to torture to death its prisoners.

I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers – where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui whose foot was broken under torture. She was a “terrorist”, this man announced. This is the “different” political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the “different” political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A “different” political system indeed.

And now I have before me Blair’s repulsive “goodbye” speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn’t mean “doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom” (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the “prevailing consensus: (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant “what you genuinely believe to be right” (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Britain’s oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) “I did so out of belief,” he told us. Foregrounded element: belief.

Am I alone in being repulsed by this? “Politics may be the art of the possible (foregrounded element: may) but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.” What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? “Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” Excuse me? Is that Blair’s message to the families of all those dead soldiers – and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an “honour” to “serve” Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo-Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour – and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

My Dad used to call people like Blair a “twerp” which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell’s statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated – with such wisdom – by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

War of Humiliation

Alex Doherty — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:46:04 +0000

Our Marines are hostages. Two more were shown on Iranian TV. Petrol bombs burst behind the walls of the British embassy in Tehran. But it’s definitely not the war on terror. It’s the war of humiliation. The humiliation of Britain, the humiliation of Tony Blair, of the British military, of George Bush and the whole Iraqi shooting match. And the master of humiliation—even if Tony Blair doesn’t realise it—is Iran, a nation which feels itself forever humiliated by the West.

Oh how pleased the Iranians must have been to hear Messers Blair and Bush shout for the “immediate” release of the luckless 15—this Blair-Bush insistence has assuredly locked them up for weeks—because it is a demand that can be so easily ignored. And will be.
“Inexcusable behaviour,” roared Bush on Saturday—and the Iranians loved it. The Iranian Minister meanwhile waited for a change in Britain’s “behaviour”.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying President from hell, calls Blair “arrogant and selfish”—and so say all of us, by the way—after refusing to play to the crowd at the United Nations. They’ll release “serviceperson” Faye Turney. Then they won’t release her.

Veiled Faye with her cigarette and her backcloth of cheaply flowered curtains, producing those preposterous letters of cloying friendship towards the “Iranian people” while abjectly apologising for the British snoop into Iranian waters—written, I strongly suspect, by the lads from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance—is the star of the Iranian show.

Back in 1980, when Tehran staged its much more ambitious takeover of the US embassy, the star was a blubbering marine—a certain Sergeant Ladell Maples—who was induced to express his appreciation for Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution just before America’s prime-time television news.

The Iranians, you see, understand the West. And they understand it much better than we understand—or bother to understand—Iran.

We have forgotten the years of Allied occupation in the Second World War, the deposition of the pro-German Shah and then, humiliation of humiliations, the overthrow of the democratic Prime Minister, Mohamed Mossadeq, engineered by the CIA’s Allen Dulles and an eccentric British scholar of Greek, an ex-Special Operations Executive operative—“Monty” Woodhouse by name—with a few guns and a pile of dollars. And the Iranians remember well, how back came the Shah of Iran, our “policeman” in the Gulf, the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, descendant of Cyrus the Great, to stretch out the young Iranian men and women of the resistance on the toasting racks of their Savak torturers.

Nor have the Iranians any real intention of putting Faye and her chums in front of any court. They’d far rather have the Brits chomping through their “nan” bread on Sky TV, courtesy, of course, of Tehran’s Arabic “Al-Alam” channel. And did you notice that little “exclusive” label in the top left-hand corner of the screen when Rifleman Nathan Summers decided to go public?

How the Iranians love mimicking their oppressors. When the gold braid of the Ministry of Defence produce a complexity of maps to prove our boys were in Iraqi waters, the Iranians produce a humble coastguard with a Minotaur map to show that they were in the Iranian briney.

The Union Jack still flies on their rubber boat—but the Iranian banner floats above it. No one has yet explained, I notice, why our boys and girls in blue carry rifles on their sailing adventures if their duty is to hand them over when attacked. Are we actually trying to supply the Revolutionary Guards with more weapons?

But behind all this lie some dark questions—with, I fear, some still unknown but dark answers. The Iranian security services are convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the Arabs of Iran’s Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5. Outrageous, they said. Inexcusable.

The Brits made no comment, even when the Iranians hanged a man accused of the killings from a crane; he had, they said, been working for London.

Are the SAS in south-western Iran, just as the British claim the Iranians are in south-eastern Iraq, harassing the boys in Basra with new-fangled bombs? Will the Americans release the five Iranians issuing visas to Kurds in Arbil whom they locked up a couple of months ago. No, says Bush. Well, we shall see.

There is a lot we do not know—or care to know—about all this. In the meantime, however, it will be left to Blair, Bush and the merchants of the SKY-BBC-CNN-FOX-CBS-NBC-ABC axis of shlock-and-awe to play the Iranian game. Will they put Faye on trial? Will our boys be threatened with execution? Answer: no, but be sure we’ll soon be told by the Iranians that they are all spies. A lie, needless to say. But Blair will fulminate and Bush will roar and the Iranians will sit back and enjoy every second of it.

The Iranians died in their tens of thousands to destroy Saddam’s legions. And now they watch us wringing our hands over 15 lost souls. This is a big-time movie, the cinemascope of political humiliation. And the Iranians not only know how to stage the drama. They’ve even written Blair’s script.

And he obligingly reads it to cue.

Shakespeare and War

Tim Holmes — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:38:56 +0000

Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after he’s avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing—in every sense of the word—when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, “pour encourager les autres”. “Bardolph,” laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen,

“a soldier firm and sound of heart,
...hanged must a’ be
A damned death!

“Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free,
And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate:
But Exeter hath given the doom of death…
Therefore go speak, the duke will hear thy voice;
And let not Bardolph’s vital thread be cut…
Speak, captain, for his life…”

How many such military executions have been recorded in the past 30 years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolph’s cause—not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said—to Henry himself.

“ ... I /
think the duke hath lost never a man, but one that
is like to be executed for robbing a church, one
Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is
all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’
fire, and his lips blow at his nose…”

But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:

“We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we
give express charge that in our marches through the
country there be nothing compelled from the
villages; nothing taken but paid for; none of the
French upbraided or abused in disdainful language…”

In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell. I have my notes of a meeting with Fathi Daoud Mouffak, one of Saddam Hussein’s military cameramen during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, a sensitive man, a mere Pistol in the great retreat around Basra where a reservist was accused of desertion by an officer of the Iraqi “Popular Army”. He was a very young man, Mouffak was to recall:

“And the reporter from Jumhuriya newspaper tried to save him. He said to the commander: ‘This is an Iraqi citizen. He should not die.’ But the commander said: ‘This is none of your business—stay out of this.’ And so it was the young man’s fate to be shot by a firing squad… before he was executed, he said he was the father of four children. And he begged to live. ‘Who will look after my wife and my children?’ he asked. ‘I am a Muslim. Please think of Allah—for Saddam, for God, please help me… I am not a conscript, I am a reservist. I did not run away from the battle—my battalion was destroyed.’ But the commander shot him personally—in the head and in the chest.”

My own father, 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk of the 12th Battalion, the King’s Liverpool Regiment, a soldier of the 1914-18 war, was ordered to command a firing party, to execute a 19-year old Australian soldier, Gunner Frank Wills of the Royal Field Artillery, who had murdered a military policeman in Paris. Bill refused to carry out this instruction, only to be put on a court martial charge for refusing to obey an order. Someone else dispatched Bill Fisk’s Bardolph. “I ask the Court to take into consideration my youth and to give me a chance of leading an upright and straightforward life in the future,” Wills wrote in his miserable plea for mercy. British officers turned it down, arguing that an example should be made of Wills to prevent further indiscipline. The war had long been over when he was shot at dawn at Le Havre. Bill served in the Third Battle of the Somme in 1918 and I never pass the moment when Shakespeare’s French king asks if Henry’s army “hath passed the river Somme” without drawing in my breath. Did some faint moment of Renaissance prescience touch the dramatist in 1599?

I am still to be convinced that Shakespeare saw war in service in the army of Elizabeth. “Say’st thou me so?” Pistol asks of a cringing French prisoner who does not speak English. “Come hither, boy, ask me this slave in French / What is his name.” I heard an almost identical quotation in Baghdad, shorn of its 16th-century English, when a US Marine confronted an Iraqi soldier-demonstrator in 2003. “Shut the fuck up,” he screamed at the Iraqi. Then he turned to his translator. “What the fuck’s he saying?” At the siege of Harfleur, the soldier Boy wishes he was far from battle—“Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give / all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety”—and Henry’s walk through his camp in disguise on the eve of Agincourt evokes some truly modern reflections on battle. The soldier Bates suggests to him that if the king had come on his own to Agincourt, he would be safely ransomed “and a many poor men’s lives saved”.

The equally distressed soldier Williams argues that if the English cause is doubtful:

“...the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and
arms, and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join
together at the latter day, and cry all ‘We died at /
such a place’; some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon; some upon their wives, left poor behind
them; some upon the debts they owe; some upon their
children rawly left…”

This bloody accounting would be familiar to any combat soldier, but Shakespeare could have heard these stories from the English who had been fighting on the Continent in the 16th century. I’ve seen those chopped-off legs and arms and heads on the battlefields of the Middle East, in southern Iraq in 1991 when the eviscerated corpses of Iraqi soldiers and refugee women and children were lying across the desert, their limbs afterwards torn apart by ravenous dogs. And I’ve talked to Serb soldiers who fought Bosnian Muslims in the battle for the Bihac pocket, men who were so short of water that they drank their own urine.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s censorious Caesar Augustus contemplates Antony’s pre-Cleopatran courage:

“...When thou once
Wast beaten from Modena,
...at thy heel
Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against
...with patience more
Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at…”

Yet Wilfred Owen’s poetry on the “pity of war”—his description, say, of the gassed soldier coughing his life away, the blood gargling “from the froth-corrupted lungs”—has much greater immediacy.

True, death was ever present in the life of any Tudor man or woman; the Plague that sometimes closed down the Globe Theatre, the hecatomb of child mortality, the overflowing, pestilent graveyards, united all mankind in the proximity of death. Understand death and you understand war, which is primarily about the extinction of human life rather than victory or defeat. And despite constant repetition, Hamlet’s soliloquy over poor Yorick’s skull remains a deeply disturbing contemplation of death:

“My gorge rises at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfall’n?”

And here is Omar Khayyam’s contemplation of a king’s skull at Tus—near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashad—written more than 400 years before Shakespeare’s Hamlet stood in the churchyard at Elsinore:

“I saw a bird alighted on the city walls of Tus
Grasping in its claws Kaika’us’s head:
It was saying to that head, ‘Shame! Shame!
Where now the sound of the bells and the boom of the drum?’”

The swiftness with which disease struck the living in previous centuries was truly murderous. And I have my own testimony at how quickly violent death can approach. Assaulted by a crowd of Afghans in a Pakistani border village in 2001—their families had just been slaughtered in an American B-52 air raid on Kandahar—an ever-growing crowd of young men were banging stones on to my head, smashing my glasses into my face, cutting my skin open until I could smell my own blood. And, just for a moment, I caught sight of myself in the laminated side of a parked bus. I was crimson with blood, my face was bright red with the stuff and it was slopping down my shirt and on to my bag and my trousers and shoes; I was all gore from head to foot. And I distinctly remember, at that very moment—I suppose it was a subconscious attempt to give meaning to my own self-disgust—the fearful ravings of the insane Lady Macbeth as she contemplates the stabbing of King Duncan: “...who would have thought the old man / to have had so much blood in him?”

Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones. But who cannot contemplate Saddam’s hanging—the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going “to hell”—without remembering “that most disloyal traitor”, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that “nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it.” Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors—“to the hell that is Iraq?”—was truly Shakespearean.

How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. “Hang those that talk of fear!” must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where “mouth-honour” had long ago become the custom, where—as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran—a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was “in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”. The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which—if David Damrosch is right—was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast:

“Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets…”

In an age when we are supposed to believe in the “War on Terror”, we may quarry our way through Shakespeare’s folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing. Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And it’s not difficult to find a parallel with Bush’s disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq—and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran—in Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:

“...Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out
May waste the memory of the former days.”

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad. Here’s the father, for example, on discovering that he has killed his own child in Henry VI, Part III:

“O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!”

Our treachery towards the Shi’ites and Kurds of Iraq in 1991—when we encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then allowed the butcher of Baghdad to destroy them—was set against the genuine cries for freedom that those doomed people uttered in the days before their betrayal. “...waving our red weapons o’er our heads,” as Brutus cried seconds after Julius Caesar’s murder, “Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty’.”

My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare’s characters. The good guys in Shakespeare’s plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by. Henry V seems more than ever a butcher. “Now, herald, are the dead number’d?” he asks.

“This note doth tell me of ten thousand French
That in the field lie slain: of princes, in this number,
And nobles bearing banners, there lie dead / One hundred twenty six: added to these
Of knights, esquires, and gallant gentlemen,
Eight thousand and four hundred…”

Henry is doing “body counts”. When the herald presents another list—this time of the English dead, Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:

“None else of name: and, of all other men,
but five and twenty… O God, thy arm was here…
Was ever known so great and little loss,
On one part and on th’other?”

This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures—while claiming, of course, that he was “not in the business of body counts”—while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.

Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, “safer” (if nonexistent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivier’s Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastard’s final promise in King John is simple enough:

“Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”

But the true believers—the Osamas and Bushes—probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear—betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance—shouts that he will:

“...do such things,
What they are yet, I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!”

Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a “terrorist” conspiracy with potential September 11 consequences. Similarly, the saintly Prospero in The Tempest contains both the self-righteousness and ruthlessness of bin Laden and the covert racism of Bush. When he sends Ariel to wreck the usurping King Alonso’s ship on his island, the airy spirit returns with an account of his success which—despite his subsequent saving of lives—is of near-Twin Towers dimensions:

“Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam’d amazement, sometime I’ld divide
And burn in many places …
Not a soul / But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d
Some tricks of desperation; all but mariners
Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel;
Then all afire with me the King’s son Ferdinand
With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair) /
Was the first man that leap’d; cried Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.”

In almost the same year, John Donne was using equally terrifying imagery, of a “fired ship” from which “by no way / But drowning, could be rescued from the flame, / Some men leap’d forth…”

Prospero’s cruelty towards Caliban becomes more frightening each time I read of it, not least because The Tempest is one of four Shakespeare plays in which Muslims appear and because Caliban is himself an Arab, born of an Algerian mother.

“This damned Witch Sycorax
For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier
Thou know’st was banish’d…”

Prospero tells us.

“This blue-ey’d hag, was hither brought with child…
A freckl’d whelp, hag-born… not honour’d with
A human shape.”

Caliban is the “terrorist” on the island, first innocently nurtured by Prospero and then condemned to slavery after trying to rape Prospero’s daughter, the colonial slave who turns against the fruits of civilisation that were offered him.

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you
For learning me your language.”

Yet Caliban must “obey” Prospero because “his art is of such power”. Prospero may not have F-18s or bunker-busters, but Caliban is able to play out a familiar Western narrative; he teams up with the bad guys, offering his help to Trinculo—“I’ll show you the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; / I’ll fish for thee…”—making the essential linkage between evil and terror that Bush vainly tried to claim between al-Qa’ida and Saddam. Caliban is an animal, unworthy of pity, not honoured with a “human shape”. Compare this with a recent article in the newspaper USA Today, in which a former American military officer, Ralph Peters—arguing that Washington should withdraw from Iraq because its people are no longer worthy of our Western sacrifice—refers to “the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organised human endeavour”. Prospero, of course, prevails and Caliban survives to grovel to his colonial master:

“How fine my master is! I am afraid
He will chastise me
...I’ll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace…”

The war of terror has been won!

Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman empire—then at its zenith of power—remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans. The history plays are replete with these fears, albeit that they are also a product of propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth and, later, James. In Henry IV: Part I, the king is to set out on the Crusades:

“As far as to the sepulchre of Christ…
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet.”

Rhetoric is no one’s prerogative—compare King Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech with Saddam’s prelude to the “Mother of All Battles” where Prospero-like purity is espoused for the Arab “side”. This is Saddam: “Standing at one side of this confrontation are peoples and sincere leaders and rulers, and on the other are those who stole the rights of God and the tyrants who were renounced by God after they renounced all that was right, honourable, decent and solemn and strayed from the path of God until… they became obsessed by the devil from head to toe.”

Similar sentiments are espoused by Tamberlaine in Marlowe’s play. Tamberlaine is the archetypal Muslim conqueror, the “scourge of God” who found it passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis.

But Othello remains the most obvious, tragic narrative of our Middle Eastern fears. He is a Muslim in the service of Venice—close neighbour to the Ottoman empire—and is sent to Cyprus to battle the Turkish fleet. He is a mercenary whose self-hatred contaminates the play and eventually leads to his own death. Racially abused by both Iago and Roderigo, he lives in a world where there are men whose heads supposedly hang beneath their shoulders, where he is black—most Arabs are not black, although Olivier faithfully followed this notion—and where, just before killing himself, he refers to his terrible stabbing of Desdemona as the work of a “base Indian” who:

“...threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe, of one whose subdued eyes,
...Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
...Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus.”

That, I fear, is the dagger that we now feel in all our hearts.

Justice and Hypocrisy

Alex Doherty — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 01:20:34 +0000

So America’s one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington’s best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas—along with the British, of course—yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House’s words, another “great day for Iraq”. That’s what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we’re going to string him up, and it’s another great day.

Of course, it couldn’t happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn’t be a more just verdict—nor a more hypocritical one. It’s difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in
1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man.

But we can’t mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam’s trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope—don’t we?—to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and—yes, in Fallujah of all places—his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam’s immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives (“more or less”, as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can’t be put on trial. We can’t be hanged.

“Allahu Akbar,” the awful man shouted—God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush’s Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President’s father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be “smoking rope”. Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict—not the trial itself, please note—was “scrupulous and fair”. The judges will publish “everything they used to come to their verdict.”

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant—so appalling—that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003—or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam’s pesticides came from Germany (of course).

But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled “United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War”.

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn’t permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam’s hanging “was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation”. Thank heavens he didn’t mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country—Britain—that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for—you guessed it—“weapons of mass destruction”.

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA—in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja—told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And—dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country?—then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request—thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam’s brutal hordes on their own. “Rioting,” is how Lord Blair’s meretricious “dodgy dossier” described these atrocities in 2002—because, of course, to call them an “uprising” (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn’t want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn’t want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn’t care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. “President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,” Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. “He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave.” It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our “liberation” of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?