The withdrawal of foreign troops is the only solution

The withdrawal of foreign troops is the only solution

The media-hyped fiction of a handover of power in Iraq is designed for US voters

Tariq Ali
Thursday August 12, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1281453,00.html

Most legends contain a small grain of truth, but none is to be found in the
fraudulent images being presented each day by the BBC (and the US networks).
The print media is not much better. Official propaganda is constantly
repeated in sentences such as: "On June 28 the United States and its
coalition partners transferred sovereign control of Iraq to an interim
government headed by prime minister Ayad Allawi. The transfer of sovereignty
ended more than a year of American-led occupation".

Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies admit that the size of the resistance
increases every day. If Moqtada al-Sadr were to be captured or killed in the
fighting taking place in Najaf, the steady trickle of recruits could become
a flood. In such a situation and with no official opposition to the
occupation in the Commons it should be the responsibility of the media to
ensure that some truth, at least, is regularly reported.

The capitulation of the BBC has been in evidence ever since the Hutton
whitewash. This is not just a question of journalists censoring themselves.
Earlier this summer the new director-general Mark Thompson reportedly told a
meeting of the corporation's news board there was a "perception" that BBC
news was too leftwing and critical of the government - a perception which
needed to be corrected. He must be happy now.

The notion that Iraq today is a sovereign state governed by Iraqis is a
grotesque fiction. Every Iraqi citizen, regardless of political views or
religious affiliation, is aware of the actual status of the country. And if
the BBC carries on in this fashion, its credibility, already at an all-time
low, could disappear altogether. Condoleezza Rice, the US national security
adviser, declared some months back: "We want to change the Iraqi mind." But
the US-funded Arab TV channel called Truth has proved a dismal failure. And
now, to prevent any alternative images from reaching Iraqis and the rest of
the world, a plucky puppet at the "ministry of information" has banned
al-Jazeera TV from reporting out of Iraq - a traditional recipe from an
oppressive cookbook.

The "handover", designed largely to convince US citizens that they could now
relax and re-elect Bush, was also an invitation to the western media to
downgrade coverage of Iraq, which it dutifully did. As Paul Krugman noted in
the New York Times last week: "Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of
newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that
things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: newspaper stories
asserted that the rate of US losses there fell after the hand-off. (Actual
figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July)."

Like previous confections to justify the war, this one is not working
either. Of the two Iraqis plucked from obscurity to be the front men for the
occupation, "President" Yawar is a relatively harmless telecoms manager from
Saudi Arabia. He was perfectly happy to don tribal gear for official
functions and photo ops with Rumsfeld and the boys. "Prime minister" Allawi
was at one time a low-grade intelligence employee for Saddam, reporting on
dissident Iraqis in London. Subsequently, Anglo-American intelligence
outfits recruited him. After the first Gulf war he was sent to destabilise
the regime. His hirelings bombed a cinema and a bus carrying children.

Before the war Allawi helped manufacture the 45-minute WMD delivery systems
warning for the dodgy dossier men in No 10. After the occupation he was
rewarded and put on the "governing council". He then hired a lobbying firm,
which spent $370,000 campaigning in Washington for him to be made prime
minister, and also got him a column in the Washington Post.

As "prime minister" he cultivates a thuggish image. On July 17 in a
remarkable despatch from Baghdad, Paul McGeough, the Australian
correspondent, (and former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) alleged:
"Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed
as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days
before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government,
according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

"They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against
a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which
they were held at the al-Amariyah security centre ... They say Dr Allawi
told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they
'deserved worse than death'."

McGeough's report continued: "The prime minister's office has denied the
entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement ... saying Dr Allawi
had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun. But the informants
told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a
dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the prime minister's personal
security team watched in stunned silence." McGeough appears regularly on TV
and radio to defend his story, which does not go away.

The fact is that Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war.
The situation was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison: "We
want electricity in our homes, not up the arse."

The citizens of the aggressor states can see this for themselves and
regardless of the media will, one must hope, punish their leaders for taking
them to war - regardless of the fact that the alternatives on offer are so
weak. In the US, Senator Kerry is an unconvincing politician. Unlike some of
his liberal apologists, he does not like to portray the Democrats as the
consistently less aggressive of the two parties. It was, after all,
Democratic - not Republican - presidents who launched the wars in Korea and
Vietnam. The Republican Eisenhower's electoral appeal in 1952 was based on
being the more peaceful of the two candidates. In 1960 Kennedy attacked the
Republi cans for the "missile gap", denouncing their weakness before the
Soviet threat. Carter, not Reagan, launched the second cold war. And in 1992
Clinton was thundering against Bush senior's weakness on Cuba and China. Now
Bush junior has outpaced any Democratic rival in accelerated militarism. But
it is enough to remember that on the eve of 9/11, Hillary Clinton and Joseph
Lieberman organised a letter, signed by nearly every Democratic senator,
denouncing Bush's Middle East policies. They wanted more support for Israel.

It is necessary to bear this record in mind, as pressure has built up for
the US left to fall into line behind Kerry. Many will, understandably
enough, vote for him to get rid of a warmonger government. If they succeed,
he must be put under immediate pressure to withdraw from Iraq. If there had
been no resistance in Iraq, the triumphalism of warmongers would have
drowned out oppositions of every hue. The defeat of the warmongers, if it
happens, will be the outcome of what is happening in Baghdad and Basra,
Falluja and Najaf. Even if they try and brush aside the 37,000 Iraqi
civilians killed in this conflict, according to a recent estimate by an
Iraq-based NGO, Bush and Blair will not forget the names of the cities whose
people refuse to surrender. There is only one serious option: the
unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.

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