Saturday, February 24, 2001
http://www.orientmagazine.co.uk/article.php3?article=180
GEORGE GALLOWAY witnesses, at first hand, the victims of the Baghdad bombing the British and Americans say don't exist
Iraqis are very pro-British people. Surprising given the tortured history of colonisation, regicide - Britain arranged the murder of the Iraqi king Ghazi in the thirties - war and sanctions. Everyone listens to the BBC, all the plugs are three-pin, every lavatory was made in Barrhead, measurements are imperial, engineers work to "British Standards" and the label "British Made" means more there than probably anywhere else in the world.
Just before the war with Ayatollah Khomeini in1980 - a grotesque blunder by Saddam Hussein though one in which he was encouraged mightily by Britain and the United States - Iraq had 14,000 full-time students in the UK, mainly Phd and MSCs, paying top dollar tuition fees and spending big. The same year the British embassy in Baghdad issued over one million visitors visas mainly to shoppers who trudged Oxford Street until they dropped.
And last week, in a private dinner with Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz I watched in amazement as he - in between bitter denunciation of our country's part in the bombing of Baghdad - smothered his kebabs in H.P sauce, with its logo of the mother of parliaments marking the spot where Robin Cook et al planned their participation in the bombing of the Iraqi capital.
"It's my favourite tipple" Aziz confided and the sauce of choice of most Iraqis he explained.
"Of course it's hard to get now during the embargo, for most people, but a measure of it's popularity is
that all the cheap imitations try hard to look like H.P."
All of which made last weekend's bolts from the blue skies over Baghdad, and particularly British participation in the raids, all the harder to swallow.
Of course much worse has befallen Iraq than the eighty strong aerial armada delivered in this latest attack. But those previous bombardments were expected and had a context within which people had prepared themselves. This one could not have been more shocking.
For a start all the mood music suggested an atmosphere of possible compromise. General Colin Powell was due in the region, with his work more than cut out to smooth the tremors in the camps of his Arab allies at the re-emergence of that other bull in the china shop Aerial Sharon at their gates.And the Iraqi Foreign Minister was already packing his suitcase for New York for this weekend's meetings with Koffi Annan - talks "without preconditions" - which Iraqis hoped privately might lead somewhere
The summit of Arab presidents and kings too, expected to further the growing rapprochement between Iraq and it's erstwhile enemies, was imminent.
Last week I was in the Iraqi capital while they swept up the pieces of those shattered hopes. I visited the wounded people - 22- most of them women and children, and the bereaved families of the two who died. I also visited - without publicity- some of the wreckage, in the ritzy up-market residential district of Mansur in downtown Baghdad, the district of Al-Shullah in the city and two sites, on the city's outskirts, Al Rashidia and its nearby village of Sajhir Zabair around five kilometres from the centre of Baghdad.
Disaster had come suddenly. 14 year old Munder had been kicking a ball along the street when the sirens began to wail. Leaving his ball he fled in terror towards his nearby house. He saw something fall from the sky towards the ground, then a flash, a blast which knocked him flat and then, oblivion.
He woke up in the Yarmouk hospital his two ankles shattered, one of his wrists and shrapnel in his chest and face. His greatest concern was whether he'd ever be able to play football again. He supports Arsenal and his favourite player is Thierry Henri - 'the French don't hate us like the English'- he explained.
Eighteen year old XXX was surprised to see me as she lay in her hospital bed, wearing her black hejab long emerald green dress and black underskirt.
"Thank God for your safe arrival" she said - to the astonishment of my media entourage, 'we heard that you were being held in a prison in Scotland' a reference to my arrest at the anti-nuclear weapons demonstration at Faslane.
It had certainly been quite a week I explained, starting behind bars in Greenock gaol and ending amongst the human wreckage wrought by my own government.
Her doctor explained that "Iraqi women are shy to show their legs" but XXX said "it's ok he's like my uncle" though I'd never seen her before.
XXX hitched her skirts to show me a hideous still gaping wound on her upper right thigh. It was star shaped.
She too remembered nothing, saw no planes, just heard terrifying noises and woke up in hospital. She had been on the roof of her house trying to catch hold of her baby sister, in a panic from the sirens.
From bed to bed I moved. Here a baker hit standing at his oven while his shop disintegrated around him. There a labourer blown off his bicycle. The most serious casualty a woman in her forties had to be operated on immediately to remove a massive shard of steel from her abdomen.In the next bed to her was her 18 year old son his mutilated elbow leaving his right arm hideously twisted.Next to him had been his sister, discharged that day with less serious shoulder and arm injuries. Both are college students, and right handed.
"Will we be able to write again" the boy asked me. "What will happen about my exams?"
The deceased, an eighteen year old girl and an old man had died in a different hospital. They were already in the cold earth by the time I arrived, in accordance with their religious tradition. Both had been killed by Christian soldiers on a Friday the Muslim holy day.
No western journalist had been allowed to visit the areas blasted in the raids. An exception had been made for me on the condition that I went without cameras.Clearly the Iraqis wished to mask the extent of the damage to their anti-aircraft capacity and there is no doubt that significant damage had been done to buildings I was not allowed to enter. "They are not safe to enter" said my military escort.
"We did have radar facilities" he told me "but they are mobile, and were moved to safety..as your planes will find out if they come back again"
The officer explained that Iraq's improved air defences had forced British and American planes to fly higher and higher "fifteen kilometres and higher"he said"I think it was beginning to bruise their egos".
Bruised egos or not it remains a fact that not a scratch has been inflicted on any British or American plane during the entire ten years of the unilaterally imposed "no-fly zones" which France described last week as "completely illegal".
The wreckage I was allowed pick my way through vividly illustrated the farce of 'precision bombing' within cities.Despite the multitude of examples to the contrary, from the Al-Ameriha air raid shelter in Baghdad during the Gulf War to the blazing ruins of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it is astounding that brasshats can still run the "laser guided accuracy line" on these occasions and even more astounding that swathes of the news-media swallow the canard whole.
I visited the bakery, as flat as a pancake, and at least twelve collapsed dwellings - it was impossible to say where one house became another or how many families had been rendered homeless, though the number must have been substantial. I saw two separate large round blood stains on the street, a wrecked children's tricycle and two burst footballs. I saw a dead dog, skinny with a bloated stomach its face black with a million buzzing flies.
It too presumably had fallen victim to what the Washington Post called "software problems" which had meant the bombers had "missed perhaps half of their intended targets". Unless they were aiming for the dog the baker the mother her son her daughter and the others.
But whatever damage was done to the denizens of Baghdad is as nothing compared to the carnage caused to the political position of the gruesome twosome who wrought it. It is not an exaggeration to say that British and American policy towards Iraq now lies in smoking ruins.
Fifty six countries denounced the attack on Baghdad while three supported it, Israel Poland and Canada. The latter two of these withdrew their support like scalded cats when Iraq promptly blacklisted them from all future business contracts. A "grand coalition" of just us the Americans and Sharon's Israel is doomed to be sure.
The gulf between Britain and most of NATO, all of the European Union three of the big five on the Security Council and all of the Arab countries including those - Kuwait and Saudi Arabia- whose territory was used in the raids and Turkey whose normally compliant regime refused facilities could not be deeper.
Koffi Annan in his usual courteous way spoke volumes when he said last week that he "could not but regret" that two members of the security council had attacked a member state of the UN, with whom he was about to negotiate, without "even informing" him.
Like the proud mother watching her son cause havoc on the parade ground at the passing out ceremony British ministers are reduced to claiming everyone else is out of step except "our Join".
The Pentagon to their credit have admitted that the Washington Post story about their "computer errors" is more accurate than their rockets had been. As usual Whitehall is less candid. But last Friday I had a remarkable off the record conversation with a senior source. He could not have been angrier.
"What a fiasco" he said. "Unexpected?...it was more unexpected to more people than you could possibly guess at" he said as exasperated as I've ever heard him.My source, who admittedly has a vested interest in diverting attention said he was telling me "candidly and honestly"
"This was a cock-up from first to last.... right down to killing Muslims on a Friday" he said
"It seems to have been something the military wanted, primarily the US military. They were sketchy about the details and failed to convey to ministers the tremendous fuss this would cause. Above all they did not make it clear that these targets would, successfully be able to be claimed by Iraq as "in Baghdad"...the brass talked only in terms of the parallels of the no-fly zones. Of course we knew the targets were outside the zones by several degrees but no one seemed to know the significance of those degrees" he said
"Even President Bush was taken by surprise by the bang this all made, which is why he stumbled around calling it "routine" until that got laughed out of court. Colin Powell is apparently raging...there will be hell to pay over this." he added.
Of course this is self-serving nonsense. Soldiers are not paid to calibrate the political fall out of their actions. There's is not to reason why but just to do or die.And a foreign office which does not know the map references of Baghdad is not worth paying for. But above all,in the words of the Italian statesman Togliatti, "Defence is the daughter of foreign policy, not the other away around".
And that is why, after what is a foreign policy failure as great as any since the invasion of the Falklands nearly twenty years ago, the Foreign Secretary should now do the honourable thing and submit his resignation.