[Peace-discuss] From Pol Pot to ISIS: "Anything that flies on everything that moves"

[David Johnson]

 <http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/> Facts For Working People

Monday, November 16, 2015

>From Pol Pot to ISIS: "Anything that flies on everything that moves" 

 
<http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-
everything-that-moves> From John Pilger.com

8 October 2014

 
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In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of
Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything
that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim
world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria
and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the
beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not
surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling
example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in
common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were
ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product
of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly
armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and
leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part
of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia
during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the
rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still
visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge
official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around
mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready
to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the
Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians
died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage
in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their
beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a
formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and
Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people -
in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial
and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but
they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the
invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people
proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for
them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism.
Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by
the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. "Rebel"
Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of
weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign
recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote
recently, "The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of
Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and
MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars -
had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for
terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying
Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime
against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations
of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by
the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture.
Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the
first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security
Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population -
ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was
like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was,
in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to
school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to
combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern
battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London
restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against
diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of
State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he
said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The
British Government could get away with such an outrage because media
reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed
Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for
each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire
society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water.
"Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me,
"setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that
the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of
getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make
no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the
word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His
predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official,
had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday said, "to implement a policy
that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has
effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between
1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 "excess"
deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put
this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her,
"Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne
Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, "[The
US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to
live."  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by
regret and contrition. "I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare
truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a
critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed
[journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze
them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of
Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the
suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame.
The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister
responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the
extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared
primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an
"apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken
Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party
conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other
support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will further
"the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the same in mind as he
lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. This
means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant
people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23
September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in
Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children.
None waved a black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck
happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the
lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost
inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of
truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding
each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table.
Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed
the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military,
wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic
verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" -
notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more
violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous
adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently
love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable
ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US
intelligence file illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special
effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed
with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will
attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within
Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of
fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for
intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both
psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In
the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last year, the former
French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the
Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. "I am
going to tell you something," he said in an interview with the French TV
channel LPC, "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on
other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they
were preparing something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of
rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for
Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation goes way
back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west -
Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a member of
Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to
channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those now calling
themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional
dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional
war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in
the Middle East.

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this
imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine
negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the
Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who
supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all
shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of
Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open wound,
and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama
bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the
Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a
torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same
is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry
Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its
satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is
described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a
quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos,
Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  Only when
"we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

 

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