Telling it like it isn’t

It is five days into the War On Iraq as I write and it is impossible not to be thoroughly sickened by the hypocrisy and deceit with which the whole charade has been and is being orchestrated. This is humanity at its lowest ebb, with greed and expediency being dressed as principle, murder and brutality as heroism.

The war was to begin with what the US sickeningly dubbed ‘Shock and Awe’ – codename for a ferocious blitz on Baghdad, and other targets in Iraq. But before zero hour dawned, someone in the CIA had a better idea. Word came through from their headquarters in Langley that there was a ‘Target of Opportunity’. What they meant was that they believed they had tracked the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, and that it might be possible to assassinate him.

To describe what they had in mind, they came up with another of those twisted metaphors so beloved of army generals, security forces and police lulas. Their aim now, in this late change of plan, was to “Decapitate The Regime”. To achieve this, before war had officially been declared, they bombarded a building in which they believed Saddam Hussein and his sons were meeting, with 40 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles and 8,000 lbs worth of bombs, which were carried to the scene by F-117 fighter aircraft.

By the following morning, George Bush and his cronies seemed to accept that the assassination attempt had failed and they proceeded with the main campaign of pounding so-called strategic targets in Baghdad, Basra and other parts of Iraq. It was brutal stuff.

At first the US and the British spokespeople presented a thoroughly gung-ho account of how the assault was progressing and their friends in the media played along, giving a nauseatingly sanitised version of the horrible reality that was being visited on a country and its people.

By the fourth day, however, too many things had gone wrong to make it possible for the jolly tone to persist. The British had apparently shot at an ITV news crew, killing the reporter Terry Lloyd and almost certainly two other ITN workers. A British plane was blown out of the sky by a US Patriot missile, taking two members of the RAF with it. Another six men were killed when two Royal Navy helicopters collided.

Meanwhile the Iraqis were playing a far smarter game than had been anticipated, letting the British and US armies progress to cities and towns and then using surprise and guerilla tactics to inflict casualties.

Clearly, there is little hope in this war for the Iraqis. The resources available to them, in terms of military hardware, are less than a hundredth of what the US and the British can bring into play between them. They are being pulverised mercilessly from the safety of ships parked in the Gulf. Weapons of enormous destructive capability are being rained down on them. But so far, they have put up a better fight than the architects of the Bush war had assumed they would.

There is room for a ritual condemnation of Saddam Hussein here. He is a vicious dictator, who has been responsible for heinous acts – notably the gassing of the Kurds – for which there is not now, and never can be, any justification. But that on the other hand does not justify the invasion of Iraq on which the US has embarked without the support of the UN. Nor does it justify the enormous force that is being used and the inevitable civilian casualties which have already, and will continue to, result.

Watching the spectacle on television, it was easy to understand just why Saddam Hussein had been unwilling to part with whatever weapons remained at his disposal.

In position papers, senior Bush advisers, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, had advocated a policy of pre-emptive action against States considered to be opposed to US interests. The plan to engineer a regime change in Iraq had been on the table within the inner circle of the Republican Party in the US since the Gulf War. The US was perfectly happy to attack Iraq to achieve this, and to get a hold of Iraqi oil. Faced with that knowledge, if you were in Saddam’s boots would you willingly give up your weapons?

As the war exploded into action, there was a surreal quality to the way in which news about Iraqi resistance was reported. On Sky, the feeling seemed to be that they didn’t really have the right to use anti-aircraft missiles in an attempt to shoot down the brave British and US soldiers flying above, and unleashing thousands of bombs on, them.

Amid the high-tech mayhem, there was something madly misplaced and disproportionate too about the faux outrage of the US at the fact that prisoners of war had been paraded on Iraqi State television.

We are shown pictures of Iraqi soldiers surrendering daily. Often, we see them in close-up. We are treated to displays on television of missiles landing in Baghdad, as if it was a fireworks show. We are fed propaganda (Day one: Saddam has fired Scud missiles at Kuwait – we told you he still had weapons of mass destruction. Day three: Confirmation that Saddam did not fire any Scuds – but not before stupid newspaper columnists have gone into print proclaiming this as a justification for war).

Of course, it would be better if the Iraqis had stuck strictly to the terms of the Geneva Convention and not shown pictures of the five US soldiers being ‘interviewed’. But, set against all that is being visited on them by an invading force, it is a relatively minor transgression. And besides, what of the treatment by the United States of prisoners in Guatanamo Bay? As ever, the Bush administration uses internationally approved instruments when it suits them, and flouts the same instruments at will.

Which brings us back to hypocrisy and deceit. The world being engineered by George Bush is one in which truth is turned on its head. It is a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party where language is twisted and turned and bent out of shape, so that we are best to believe that everything means the opposite of what is being said.

There is no knowing where this madman and the crazies that surround him will take us before his time is up.