There is no "war on terrorism". If there was, the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more terrorists, tyrants and torturers are given refuge than anywhere in the world. If the precocious Blair was really hostile to terrorism, he would do everything in his power to pursue policies that lifted the threat of violent death from people in his own country and third world countries alike, instead of escalating terrorism, as he and Bush are doing. But these are violent men, regardless of their distance from the mayhem they initiate. Blair's enthusiastic part in the cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq and Serbia, and the killing of tens of thousands of children in Iraq, is documented. The Bush family's violence, from Nicaragua to Panama, the Gulf to the death rows of Texas, is a matter of record. Their war on terrorism is no more than the continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden imperatives, new lies.
The problem for people in the west who do not see the violence of Bush and Blair and their predecessors is that they cannot appreciate the reaction. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, "and all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the pressure upon them [and] the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror."
The great people's historian Howard Zinn, Boston University professor and former Second World War bomber pilot, helps us to understand this in his new book, Howard Zinn on War. The attack on the twin towers in New York, he writes, has a moral relation to American and Israeli attacks on the Arab Middle East. If the actions of the west's official enemies receive enormous attention as terrorist atrocities while the terrorist atrocities of the US and its allies and clients are starved of political and press attention, "it is impossible to make a balanced moral judgement", to find solutions to the cycle of revenge and reprisal and to address the underlying issue of global economic inequality and oppression.
Propaganda is the enemy within. "By volume and repetition", a barrage of selective, limited information is turned out by tame media, information isolated from political context (such as the bloody record of the superpower throughout the world). In the absence of alternative views, it is no surprise that people's "reasonable reaction" is that "we must do something". This leads to the quick conclusion that "we" must bomb "them". And when it is over, and the corpses are piled high, "only Milosevic stands in the dock, not Clinton. Only Saddam Hussein is outlawed, not Bush Senior. Only Bin Laden has a $50m price on his head, not Bush Junior and his predecessors." It is, says Zinn, "a tribute to the humanity of ordinary people that horrible acts must be camouflaged [with words] like security, peace, freedom, democracy, the 'national interest'."
One of Bush and Blair's oft-repeated lies is that "world opinion is with us". No, it is not. Out of 30 countries surveyed by Gallup International, only in Israel and the United States does a majority of people agree that military attacks are preferable to pursuing justice non-violently through international law, however long it takes. That is the good news.
This week saw the end of an exhibition I helped put on at the Barbican in London, devoted to photojournalism that makes sense of terrible events. Brilliant, subversive pictures from Vietnam show the systematic rape of a country with weapons designed to spread terror. The exhibition ranged from Hiroshima to two final, haunting images of sisters, aged 10 and 12, their bodies engraved in the rubble of the Iraqi city of Basra, where American missiles destroyed their street two years ago: part of a current Anglo-American bombing campaign that is almost never reported.
Since the outrages in America on September 11, the exhibition has been packed, mostly with young people. Many accused the media and politicians of misrepresenting public opinion and of obscuring the reasons behind the fanaticism of the attackers. For them, the most telling pictures are of "unworthy victims". Let me explain. The 6,000 people who died in America on September 11 are worthy victims: that is, they are worthy of our honour and a relentless pursuit of justice, which is right. In contrast, the 6,000 people who die every month in Iraq, the victims of a medieval siege devised and imposed by Washington and Whitehall, are, like the little sisters bombed to death in their sleep in Basra, unworthy victims - unworthy of even acknowledgement in the "civilised" west.
Ten years ago, when 200,000 Iraqis died during and immediately after the slaughter known as the Gulf war, the scale of this massacre was never allowed to enter public consciousness in the west. Many were buried alive at night by armoured American snowploughs and murdered while retreating. Colin Powell, then US military chief, who 22 years earlier was assigned to cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and is currently being elevated to hero status in the western media, said: "It's really not numbers I'm terribly interested in."
An American letter writer to the Guardian last week, in admonishing the writer Arundhati Roy for producing a "laundry list" of American terror around the world, revealed how the blinkered think. The lives of millions of people extinguished as a consequence of American policies, be they Iraqis or Palestinians, Timorese or Congolese, belong not in our living memory, but on a "list". Apply that dismissive abstraction to the Holocaust, and imagine the profanity.
The job of disassociating the September 11 atrocities from the source of half a century of American crusades, economic wars and homicidal adventures, is understandably urgent. For Bush and Blair to "wage war against terrorism", assaulting countries, killing innocents and creating famine, international law must be set aside and a monomania must take over politics and the "free" media. Fortunately public opinion is not yet fully Murdochised and is already uneasy and suspicious; 60% oppose massive bombing, says an Observer poll. And the more Blair, our little Lord Palmerston, opens his mouth on the subject the more suspicions will grow and the crusaders' contortions of intellect and morality will show. When Blair tells David Frost that his war plans are aimed at "the people who gave [the terrorists] the weapons", can he mean we are about to attack America? For it was mostly America that destroyed a moderate regime in Afghanistan and created a fanatical one.
On the day of the twin towers attack, an arms fair, selling weapons of terror to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the backing of the Blair government. Now Bush and Blair have created what the UN calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis", with up to 7m people facing starvation. The initial American reaction was to demand that Pakistan stop supplying food to the starving who, of course, fail to qualify as worthy victims.
The bombing intelligentsia (the New Humanitarians, as Edward Herman calls them) are doing their bit, blaming September 11 on "an evil hatred of modernity" and something called "apocalyptic nihilism". There are no reasons why; the Barbican pictures are fake. Aside from a few "errors", Anglo-American actions are redeemed, and those who produce the "laundry list" of a blood-soaked historical record are "anti American", which apparently is similar to the "anti-Semitism" of those who dare to point out the atrocious activities of the Israeli state.
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez lost their son Greg in the World Trade Centre. They said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go... not in our son's name."
During the Falklands war in 1982, the BBC's Weekly Review Board met to discuss how the war should be presented to the public. The minutes show that senior executives decided that the news ought to be shaped to suit "the emotional sensibilities of the public" and that the weight of BBC coverage would be concerned with government statements of policy. An "impartial style" was felt to be "an unnecessary irritation".
The BBC ignored Argentina’s acceptance, bar three minor amendments, of a Peruvian peace plan. The Thatcher government was not interested; BBC news reflected this, along with the deception that Argentina was to blame for the plan's "failure". ITN, whose reporting was little different, claimed, "70 per cent [of the British public] want to launch an invasion". However, the same poll showed that 76 per cent of those questioned wanted the United Nations to occupy the Falklands while Britain and Argentina negotiated. This was never reported. Instead, the poll results were interpreted on the news as showing that British public opinion was "hardening".
Here we go again. Last Sunday, the Observer reported, "65 per cent [of the public] support the use of targeted 'surgical' air strikes against countries harbouring terrorists". The paper's poll did not say what "surgical" air strikes were. It did not say whether its pollsters had explained to people that, during the Gulf war, 70 per cent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait missed their targets completely, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths, or that in Nato's attack on Yugoslavia two years ago, the majority of targets were also missed. "Surgical strike" is a misleading term. So why did they use it?
The same poll, however, disclosed that 60 per cent of people opposed "massive air strikes". MOST BRITONS OPPOSE AIR STRIKES was the banner headline that the Observer failed to publish, yet, by any true journalistic standard, that was the headline story. Instead, the front page was given over to "the net tightening on Osama Bin Laden" and Britain's role as America's "most potent war partner". There was a breathless tone of "pressing ahead". The sources were British and American intelligence and the Ministry of Defence.
Journalism sourced to unnamed officials whose job in these circumstances is to manipulate the news has a history. Pick any one of "our" recent wars or slaughters and write down the "intelligence" and "diplomatic" lies that emerged later. The list is long. Take George Bush Senior's attacks on Panama and Somalia just over ten years ago. Both were promoted as Wild West pursuits of bad guys, General Noriega in Panama and General Aidid in Somalia. "Sources" were quoted as saying that few civilians had been killed. In fact, more than 2,000 civilians were killed by American helicopter gunships in the shanties of Panama City and, according to a CIA estimate, between 7,000 and 10,000 were killed in Somalia in what the Pentagon called "Operation Restore Hope". This was not reported.
In 1998, President Clinton destroyed a harmless pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles. "Intelligence sources" were widely quoted in the American and British media as being "beyond doubt" that this was where Osama Bin Laden's organisation was making nerve gas. Clinton's attack killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people. There is said to be a UN report on how many were killed and which is suppressed under pressure from Washington. The sum of the dead from all these attacks is several times that of the number killed in America on 11 September.
Regardless of an admirable strain of dissent in the Guardian and Independent, the overriding impression given by television and the press is that of a familiar rush to war. There is the same old footage of ships and planes against the sunrise, the same old "experts", the same old Boy's Own maps, the same old instant "evidence", the same old military jargon used by reporters ("surgical strikes" and "assets" are favourites), the same old warm-up stories about SAS derring-do, the same old demonising of nations and cultures, the same old nonsense about anti-Americanism (now in the realm of self-parody, with criticism of American policy described as "racist") and the same old "approval rating" polls drawn from a public denied credible information from independent sources, not to mention the perspective that Washington is using the 11 September disaster to accelerate American control over much of humanity, with immediate dangers for all of us.
Surely, journalists must ask themselves: is it not possible to break away from the pack? And do the media courses turning out the next generation examine and analyse such institutional failure (honourable exceptions aside) to keep the record straight? Are media students warned that true journalists must be sceptical of all authority, and that their job is to push back screens and lift rocks, especially at a time like this? It seems that the mantra "giving the public what it wants", meaning giving the public no choice, has bred those who believe cynicism of the public, not their masters, ordains them as journalists. Long ago, John Milton put it succinctly: "They who put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness."
Nothing justified the murder of innocent people in America, and nothing justifies the murder of innocent people anywhere else. That is the unassailable truth in this surreal time. Those who contribute to the current propaganda that says there is no other way but war might reflect that they, too, are likely to end up with blood on their hands.
