[PEN-L:30707] Pilger on why the more things change...

[Charles Jannuzi <b_rieux@xxxxxxxxx>]

While US journalists prove again and again to be
pantywaist liberals, war wimps and personality
politics obscurantists, the UK (by way of
Australia) gives us one of the few journalists
with a mainstream audience who is consistently
worth reading. This appeared in the New Statesman
(he is one of the few reasons to read that mag),
but I got it from his Carlton site (which
curiously enough lead me to mailorder Captain
Scarlet and Project UFO on DVD).

Posted by CJ

http://pilger.carlton.com/print

The making of a United Nations fig leaf, designed
to cover an Anglo-American attack on Iraq, has a
revealing past. In 1990, a version of George W
Bush's mafia diplomacy was conducted by his
father, then president. The aim was to "contain"
America's former regional favourite, Saddam
Hussein, whose invasion of Kuwait ended his
usefulness to Washington.

Forgotten facts tell us how George Bush Sr's war
plans gained the "legitimacy" of a United Nations
resolution, as well as a "coalition" of Arab
governments. Like his son's undisguised threats
to the General Assembly, Bush challenged the
United Nations to "live up to its
responsibilities" and condone an all-out assault
on Iraq. On 29 October 1990, James Baker, the
secretary of state, declared: "After a long
period of stagnation, the United Nations is
becoming a more effective organisation."

Just as Colin Powell, the present secretary of
state, is busily doing today, Baker met the
foreign minister of each of the 14 member
countries of the UN Security Council and
persuaded the majority to vote for an "attack
resolution" - 678 - which had no basis in the UN
Charter.

It was one of the most shameful chapters in the
history of the United Nations, and is about to be
repeated. For the first time, the full UN
Security Council capitulated to an American-led
war party and abandoned its legal responsibility
to advance peaceful and diplomatic solutions. On
29 November, the United States got its war
resolution. This was made possible by a campaign
of bribery, blackmail and threats, of which a
repetition is currently under way, especially in
countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In
1990, Egypt was the most indebted country in
Africa. Baker bribed President Mubarak with $14bn
in "debt forgiveness" and all opposition to the
attack on Iraq faded away. Syria's bribe was
different; Washington gave President Hafez
al-Assad the green light to wipe out all
opposition to Syria's rule in Lebanon. To help
him achieve this, a billion dollars' worth of
arms was made available through a variety of back
doors, mostly Gulf states.

Iran was bribed with an American promise to drop
its opposition to a series of World Bank loans.
The bank approved the first loan of $250m on the
day before the ground attack on Iraq. Bribing the
Soviet Union was especially urgent, as Moscow was
close to pulling off a deal that would allow
Saddam to extricate himself from Kuwait
peacefully. However, with its wrecked economy,
the Soviet Union was easy prey for a bribe.
President Bush sent the Saudi foreign minister to
Moscow to offer a billion-dollar bribe before the
Russian winter set in. He succeeded. Once
Gorbachev had agreed to the war resolution,
another $3bn materialised from other Gulf states.

The votes of the non-permanent members of the
Security Council were crucial. Zaire was offered
undisclosed "debt forgiveness" and military
equipment in return for silencing the Security
Council when the attack was under way. Occupying
the rotating presidency of the council, Zaire
refused requests from Cuba, Yemen and India to
convene an emergency meeting of the council, even
though it had no authority to refuse them under
the UN Charter.

Only Cuba and Yemen held out. Minutes after Yemen
voted against the resolution to attack Iraq, a
senior American diplomat told the Yemeni
ambassador: "That was the most expensive 'no'
vote you ever cast." Within three days, a US aid
programme of $70m to one of the world's poorest
countries was stopped. Yemen suddenly had
problems with the World Bank and the IMF; and
800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi
Arabia. The ferocity of the American-led attack
far exceeded the mandate of Security Council
Resolution 678, which did not allow for the
destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and economy.
When the United States sought another resolution
to blockade Iraq, two new members of the Security
Council were duly coerced. Ecuador was warned by
the US ambassador in Quito about the "devastating
economic consequences" of a No vote. Zimbabwe was
threatened with new IMF conditions for its debt.

The punishment of impoverished countries that
opposed the attack was severe. Sudan, in the grip
of a famine, was denied a shipment of food aid.
None of this was reported at the time. By now,
news organisations had one objective: to secure a
place close to the US command in Saudi Arabia. At
the same time, Amnesty International published a
searing account of torture, detention and
arbitrary arrest by the Saudi regime. Twenty
thousand Yemenis were being deported every day
and as many as 800 had been tortured and
ill-treated.

Neither the BBC nor ITN reported a word about
this. "It is common knowledge in television,"
wrote Peter Lennon in the Guardian, "that fear of
not being granted visas was the only
consideration in withholding coverage of that
embarrassing story." When the attack was over,
the full cost was summarised in a report
published by the Medical Education Trust in
London. More than 200,000 people were killed or
had died during and in the months after the
attack. This also was not news. Neither was a
report that child mortality in Iraq had
multiplied as the effects of the economic embargo
intensified. Extrapolating from all the
statistics of Iraq's suffering, the American
researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller have
since concluded that the subsequent economic
punishment of the Iraqis has "probably taken the
lives of more people in Iraq than have been
killed by all weapons of mass destruction in
history".

Today, the media's war drums are beating to the
rhythm of Bush's totally manufactured crisis,
which, if allowed to proceed, will kill untold
numbers of innocent people.

Little has changed, and humanity deserves better.


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