No. 597  



TRANSHISTORIC EVERGREEN
EDITORIAL:

Orwellian Emancipatory Jewels
How Also To Read Nineteen Eighty-four Critically Today?
by Franz J. T. Lee

Written: 22nd September, 2000. 

http://www.geocities.com/maymartin2001/carl_00006.html

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                                If I had a hammer
            (sung by Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary
                                      in the 1960's)

                  Ballad of the Illuminati

"I have many hammers, and I hammer with no compassion.
 I hammer with no warnings all over this world.
 I hammer out power,
 I hammer out horror,
 I'll hammer the heads of my fellow Big Brothers and Sisters
  all over this world. "

(Thanks to Carl Zimmerman for this emancipatory "ballad", proposed as heading. )
 
 

Having studied this "classic", let us now page willy-nilly through Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and here and there reflect on some of his "utopian" thoughts.

We visit Winston, who like an orthodox Marxist, scribbles the following on a paper:

"If there was hope it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. " (p. 60)

Winston still dreams about educating, about conscientizing the proletariat, the working classes, the poor, the masses:

" ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet - !"  (p. 60)

Nonetheless, he is aware of the opinions of the ruling classes across the ages, of what they understood by "slave emancipation" and "liberation", and what our scholars repeat in their academic text-books:

"The Party claimed, of course, they have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the revolution they had been hideously repressed by the capitalists, they have been starved and flogged, women have been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six." (p. 61)

And what did Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Montesquieu and all power-hungry rulers really think about the "mob", about the "crowd", about the "man-in-the-street"?

"But, simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink , the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors, who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose on the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."  (p. 61-62)

In comparison, Winston read Mrs. Parson's "children's history text-book" that explained what was happening in Britain, at the time of the "Glorious Revolution", at the eve of capitalism, long before the coming into existence of the "Globe",  of "Oceania":

"In the old days ..., London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters, who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.  But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. ...
The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and ... "  (p. 62-63)

Now, we ask: what happens when one tries to act and think independently? How does one feel? How is one being seen by the rest of the world? What happens when one challenges "time", the Past, indicating that it has nothing to do with total emancipatory transcendence,  that divine Chronos is simply an ideological instrument, the formal  logical guarantee for perpetual mental and bodily slavery. Who dares to challenge "Time", Father Time? Of course, only a lunatic!! Are we perhaps flying too high? Too near to the sun? Will our fragile, waxy wings melt away? Simply because we do not think and write within the straight-jacket of generally accepted, ordained, academic rules and regulations?

Winston "wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong." (p. 68)

Here, Winston challenged "absolute truths", even his very own ones, and he thought  that it would be better for the clandestine "brotherhood", if he should be mistaken. As madman, he would be the first to recognize his own mistakes. Long live the lonely, lonesome lunatics!

Now, rectifying myopic eyes of loyal, affirmative, systemic ideologues, that just associate Orwell's critique exclusively with Stalinists and Nazis, let us look at O'Brien's views concerning Winston's Newspeak articles in the "Times"? Not in the "Pravda" or the "Volkszeitung"! Questioningly, O'Brien, the mouthpiece of "Big Brother" said to Winston: "You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak I believe?" He continued: " ... in your article I noticed you had used two words which have became obsolete. "

What follows now is of great interest to those who love to declare anything that  displeases them, or that does not fit in their world outlook or life style, as "obsolete".
O'Brien continued: "Some of the new developments are ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs - that is the point that will appeal to you." Later conversing with Winston and Julia, O'Brien explained what this was all about, what "doublethink", mind and thought control, eventually would achieve. Of course, Orwell camouflaged
these objectives, directing them towards the "Party". In reality, across the 20th century, this is precisely what the GESTAPO, KGB, M15, CIA, etc. were doing, and also what is being practised today, more than ever, across the globe, using most sophisticated technology and methods. Anybody who already had applied for a job at any Secret Intelligence Agency, surely would know how to cite the following routine questions and answers by heart.

"You are prepared to give your lives?
Yes.
You are prepared to commit murder?
Yes.
To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death
of hundreds of innocent people?
Yes.
You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt
the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs,
to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases --
to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and
weaken the power of the Party?
Yes.  ...
You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your
life as a waiter or clock worker?
Yes.
You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?
Yes. " (p. 142)

Concerning the everlasting existence of Labour, of "Big Brother", who can only be changed from within, in total desperation, Winston asks O'Brien the following questions:

"Does Big Brother exist?

Of course, he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother
is the embodiment of the Party.

Does he exist in the same way as I exist?

You do not exist. ...

I think I exist. ...

It is of no importance. He exists.

Will Big Brother ever die?

Of course not. How could he die?" (p. 214)

He, it will never die. This is exactly the opinion of all staunch believers in the system  that fervently believe in the current New World Order, in Globalization; in "welfare", "good will" and "commonwealth". They believe that "Power", "Labour Power", would never die. But let us allow O'Brien to explain "Power", i.e., Labour alias Capital, to Winston:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. "

And then O'Brien let Schrödinger’s Cat out of the Pandora Box:

"The German Nazis and the Russian Communists
came very close to us
in their methods, but they never had the courage to 
ecognize their own
motives.  ... Power is not a means, it is an end. ...
The object of torture is
torture. The object of power is power. " (p. 217)

Then O'Brien informed Winston about the future projects of "Big Brother":

"We control matter because we control the mind.
Reality is inside the skull.
You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing
that we could not do.
Invisibility, levitation - anything. I could float off this floor
like a soap bubble
if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. ... We make the laws of nature." (p. 218)

This is not a crazy Hitler or a mad Stalin speaking here. Generally as such, because we were "educated" to do so, we just fly over such statements, not giving them a second thought. However, this only seems to be science fiction, craziness or nonsense. In reality, it is stark, dark reality. Hence, Orwell has warned us about our limited knowledge concerning our "reality", about our "Governments", about our "Party", about the "Illuminati" and about the level of contemporary scientific-technological secret projects. He also indicated why then, in the 1940's, the Party did not wish to make public Tesla and Reich Technology. Also note that Big Brother or the Party are neither "Communist" nor "Nazi"; they are global; "Brotherhood" is not obsolete "Civilization", it is "Globalization": "Oceania is the World"! (p. 218)

Finally, already applying Tesla Technology, O'Brien let more cats out of his bag, concerning space travel and colonization: 

"What are the stars? ... They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. or we could blot them out. ... The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. ... Have you forgotten doublethink? " (p. 219) 

In total capitulation, finally Winston asks:

"Tell me, how soon will they shoot me?"

Cynically, O'Brien answers:

"...Don't give up hope, ... in the end, we shall shoot you."
(p.226).

This is the essence of patrian "Hope"; in the end, at the end of Hope, "we shall shoot you."

Then, Orwell explains the crucial moment in Winstons life:

"Everything was all right. The struggle was finished. He 
Winston) had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.  

THE  END. "

Instantly, the bullet whizzes through the air and penetrates Winston's BRAIN.

Dear Friends, all this is not just "wishful thinking", "utopian dreaming" or "science fiction" writing, sad to say, this is Science Writing, Science  a n d  Philosophy Writing; we are not on our way to the "Promised Land", to World Fascism or to Neo-Barbarism, we are already in the epicenter of the American Dream of Globalization.We are standing at our very own tombs, at "1984".

We are living on the Eve of the Orwellian Present! In Big Brother's Present Millennium! Nobody needs to dream anymore about any "Orwellian Future"! For that matter, about any Future at all! Big Brother, the Illuminati, the Rulers, the World State, the New World Order, All-In-One, "controls the past, controls the future; (and) who controls the present, controls the past."

And Mind and Thought Control are essential parts of this Total Control, Totalitarian Control.

What Is To be Done? First understand what we have just exposed, and only then, we could talk further, could do  a n d  think  AND  excel, of, by and for ourselves, here  a n d  now! This is a conditio sine qua non for any further deliberations.
 

At present, as stated by Orwell, we are already living  in

"a world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon ... Never again will we be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity ".
 

In many things, Marx might have been proven wrong, but in one thing, he certainly hit the nail on the head: he himself had predicted today's Barbarism.

How many millions have read Orwell's book, and how many of them could read between the lines that what we have spotlighted above? Many things Orwell himself could not have seen, could not have understood, in his very own intellectual production. Meanwhile, they are there, have always been there. Strange things happen, but on the spur of the moment they should not be disqualified, just like that; recklessly, they should not be identified as pure madness and nonsense. Give the mind a small opportunity to re-flect, re-think, re-vise all those "crazy" events. Who knows, perhaps they are true, could be true, or be too "good" not to be "true".  In this case,  we would have a tweeny-weeny chance to become wise, exempted from any folly whatsoever.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, The New American Library of World Literature, New York, 1961.

ENGLISH & SPANISH:


*** EDITORIAL -- Orwellian Emancipatory Jewels
How Also To Read Nineteen Eighty-four Critically Today?

By Franz J. T. Lee  
22nd September, 2000. 

** Vicepresidente Rangel: Chavez, no pierde un referendo revocatorio en el momento que sea.

** Rodrigo Cháves en Washington: El 11 de abril fue una fecha determinante en la conformación de los Círculos Bolivarianos.
 

** Final countdown for Baghdad

By Donald Macintyre in Qatar and Robert Fisk in Baghdad. 

** Washington’s warnings to Iran and Syria part of a broader agenda

By Peter Symonds. 

** 'You've Just Killed a Family Because You Didn't Fire a Warning Shot Soon Enough'
By Raymond Whitaker
Independent UK.

** Iraq checkpoint killings—the ugly face of imperialist war

By Bill Vann.

** UK Troops Sent Home for Questioning War
Reuters
By Andrew Hay.

 02/04/03. 

Vicepresidente Rangel: Chavez, no pierde un referendo revocatorio en el momento que sea Por: Venpres Publicado: 01/04/03				imprímelo mándaselo a tus panas

Rodrigo Cháves en Washington: El 11 de abril fue una fecha determinante en la conformación de los Círculos Bolivarianos Por: Prensa Embajada de Venezuela en EE.UU. Publicado: 02/04/03				imprímelo mándaselo a tus panas

Final countdown for Baghdad By Donald Macintyre in Qatar and Robert Fisk in Baghdad. 02 April 2003 American forces are on the brink of the decisive push to Baghdad as the 3rd Infantry Division engaged in its first full-scale ground battle with the Republican Guard's Medina Division south-west of the Iraqi capital. After more than a week of massive aerial bombardments on heavily dug-in Republican Guard positions ringing Baghdad, the ground advance by US forces from their front line around 50 miles south of the city was said by sources at US Central Command in Qatar to be under way. US ground troops engaged in intense battles with the Republican Guard near the holy Shia city of Karbala, which is strategically critical to the assault on the capital. If they win this battle, the way to Baghdad is open. "This is the big battle," a US military official said. Asked if the fighting represented a new push towards the Iraqi capital, the official said: "It well could be." Ground skirmishes with the Medina Division over the previous 24 hours launched by American "probing patrols" were described by US commanders in Iraq as the first engagements in the battle for Baghdad. Overnight a battle raged around Karbala, as American forces sought to encirlce the town. East of Baghdad, a force of US marines was also advancing rapidly towards the capital, according to a BBC journalist who was travelling with them. The US is expected to surround the capital. Troops from the Nebuchadnezzar Division of the Republican Guard have already moved south from Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. High-ranking US officers said this was a reinforcing move because of the "rapid depletion" of the Medina Division. Some of the division's troops were captured on Monday in fierce fighting across the Euphrates at Hindiyah. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington that "serious combat" was already under way. There would be "bigger pushes that will be underway as soon as we're ready" he said. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary added: "The circle is closing." The Medina Division, one of the best trained and equipped in the Iraqi army, was claimed by Allied sources to be "50 per cent degraded" by daily bombing and missile attacks, which reached their climax at the beginning of this week. Last night warplanes also bombed targets in the capital including one of President Saddam's palaces and Iraq's Olympic headquarters, also thought to house a torture centre run by one of his sons. The decision to advance on Baghdad came as a call for an Iraqi "jihad" ­ presumed to be from President Saddam ­ was read out on Iraqi state television by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, his Information Minister. The statement declared that "those who are martyred will be rewarded in heaven". It also described the Allied forces as "aggressors, evil, accursed by God". The ground advance on Baghdad is expected to be covered by air support from RAF and US Marine Harriers, and US Apache and US Marine Cobra attack helicopters. The push forward will probably include units of US Marines that have advanced to the east of the 3rd Infantry. Its pace may partly be dictated by the level of resistance encountered by troops in the gap of about 20 miles between the Allied front line and the Republican Guard positions. Specialist biological and chemical detection and decontamination units from the British Army are known to be with US troops in the advance. Reuters reporters travelling with troops close to the head of the military advance reported that US forces had resumed their northwards push after a pause of several days. One correspondent, Sean Maguire, said: "It seems as though the operational pause in our sector is over. We've swung from passivity to activity quite quickly." He said advancing troops had reported "some contact" with Iraqi forces but not "major opposition so far". His colleague Luke Baker, travelling with other divisions, said: "We are definitely on the move." Earlier, the day had been dominated by the backlash after Monday's fatal shooting of a group of women and children at a US Army checkpoint near Najaf. And at least 11 more people, nine of them children, were killed in the central town of Hillah yesterday. Iraqis said they were the victims of American bombing. Shocking television images from the scene, of babies cut in half and children with amputation wounds, were filmed by Reuters and Associated Press after the Iraqis allowed them to take cameras into the town. Fears were growing last night for up to 10 British soldiers who the Iraqis claimed had been killed in northern Iraq near Mosul. Mr Sahaf said Iraqi forces had thwarted a British landing in the Baaj district west of the city. Pictures of Iraqis apparently driving a British Land Rover were shown on the al-Jazeera television network. Mr Sahaf said the Fedayeen militia "captured most of their equipment, their weapons, their armoured cars and vehicles".

2 April 2003 10:42 Search this site:  Printable Story

Washington’s warnings to Iran and Syria part of a broader agenda

By Peter Symonds
2 April 2003

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

Within two weeks of launching its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has issued bellicose warnings to Iran and Syria, effectively putting them on notice that they could be the next targets.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lashed out at Syria last Friday, accusing it of supplying sensitive military technology to the Iraqi army, night-vision goggles in particular. Such equipment “poses a direct threat to coalition forces,” he said. “We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government responsible.”

He provided no evidence of any shipments nor could he point to any involvement by the Syrian government. “They control the border,” he declared, and “to the extent that military supplies or equipment or people are moving across the borders between Iraq and Syria, it vastly complicates our situation.” In other words, shut the border or face the consequences.

Asked if he was threatening Damascus with military action, Rumsfeld did not rule out the option. “I’m saying exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “It was carefully phrased.”

Turning his attention to Iran, Rumsfeld demanded that Tehran rein in the Badr Corps, the armed militia of the Shiite-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He alleged that the fighters, who are Iraqi exiles, were not only armed and trained by Iran but under its control. To the extent that they interfere with the US military, he said, “they would have to be considered [hostile] combatants”.

Rumsfeld’s remarks about the Badr Corps were somewhat unexpected, given that SCIRI is one of six Iraqi opposition groups officially recognised by Washington. Its leaders have held talks with senior White House officials and it has been strongly represented at US-sponsored meetings of Iraqi exiles over the past year. Rumsfeld’s objection seems to be that SCIRI, unlike the two pro-US Kurdish groups in northern Iraq, has refused to directly subordinate its fighters to the US military.

Both Syria and Iran reacted angrily to Rumsfeld’s remarks. Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said the “comments are baseless”. He reiterated Iran’s policy of formal neutrality in the conflict, declaring: “Tehran does not allow any military activities on its border [with Iraq] in favour or against any of the belligerent parties.”

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Bouthaine Shaban said Rumsfeld had made “an absolutely unfounded, irresponsible statement”. Information Minister Adnan Omran went further, warning: “It takes only a madman to widen the circle of war. The Pentagon is in real difficulties. He [Rumsfeld] has to throw the blame here and there.”

No one believes that Rumsfeld’s comments were simply about night-goggles from Syria or Iran’s connections to the Badr Corps. They were meant as a warning to governments throughout the Middle East against providing any assistance to Iraq and as a means to step up pressure on Damascus and Tehran in particular. His remarks underscore the fact that the war in Iraq is part of broader US plans to politically reorganise the Middle East and subordinate the region to US interests.

In January 2002, President Bush branded Iran as part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea. Last May, US Undersecretary of State John Bolton accused Syria of pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs, declaring it was one step away from joining the “axis of evil”. In recent weeks, Washington has reiterated warnings over Iran’s nuclear program and its alleged “weapons of mass destruction”.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell reinforced the message last Sunday in a speech to a prominent pro-Israel lobby group—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Speaking alongside Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Powell accused Syria and Iran of providing support for terrorist groups in the Middle East and bluntly warned that there would be consequences.

“Syria now faces a critical choice,” Powell declared. “Syria can continue to support terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course... Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences.” He demanded that Iran “end its support for terrorists, including groups violently opposed to Israel and to the Middle East peace process” and “stop pursuing weapons of mass destruction”.

Like other countries in the region, Iran and Syria are involved in delicate balancing acts. Confronted with growing antiwar protests at home, both governments have been publicly critical of the US-led assault on Iraq. At the same time, however, they are anxious to reach an accommodation with Washington to head off a direct confrontation and to defend their own interests in the region.

Despite its position of “neutrality” on the war, Tehran has been tacitly assisting US military forces. According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, US special envoy Zalmay Khalilizad met Iranian officials in Geneva on March 16 to reach an arrangement for the handing back of any US pilots shot down over Iran. The newspaper explained: “Iran also agreed not to send any military forces across the border,” including those of the Badr Corps.

Last week, as US special forces and Kurdish militias in northern Iraq were pounding the positions of Ansar al-Islam, a group alleged to have ties with Al Qaeda, Iran sealed the border. Even wounded Ansar fighters were denied access to medical treatment. As a result, Washington has been able to claim a success, killing some 200 out of an estimated 700 Ansar members.

In the case of Syria, President Bashar Assad has described the US-led invasion as “a clear occupation and a flagrant aggression against a United Nations member state”. But for all its proclamations of support for its Arab brothers in Iraq, the Ba’ath regime in Damascus has been a long-time rival of its counterpart in Bagdhad and lined up to support the original UN Security Council resolution allowing UN inspectors back into Iraq.

While it subsequently joined France, Germany, Russia and other members in blocking a second resolution authorising a US war on Iraq, Syria’s main preoccupation is with the impact of the war on its economy. Damascus made a healthy profit out of circumventing the UN embargo by selling goods to Iraq in return for heavily discounted oil. According to a report by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain, the lucrative trade was worth around $2 billion a year.

It is not only Tehran and Damascus that have reacted sharply to the comments of Rumsfeld and Powell. Washington’s threats against Syria and Iran cut directly across the plans of European powers in the Middle East, including America’s closest ally Britain.

Commenting in the London-based Times, the newspaper’s foreign editor Bronwen Maddox noted the dismay among British officials, particularly over the remarks of Powell, who has been viewed in European ruling circles as something of a counterweight to the hardliners in the Bush administration.

“From Donald Rumsfeld, it was not surprising; from Colin Powell, it was astounding,” she declared. The location of Powell’s speech—before “Israel’s most powerful lobby group in the United States”—will be “inflammatory to Arab countries already contemptuous of the Bush administration’s claim to be fighting this war for their advancement,” she warned.

“But the real significance [of the speech] is the breach it heralds with Downing Street,” Maddox wrote, pointing out that it cut across Washington’s “commitment to a Israeli-Palestinian ‘road map’ that the Prime Minister [Blair] wants—and needs.” Moreover the “twin bombardment” undermined British attempts to keep “lines open to at least part of the deeply divided leadership in Tehran. British diplomats argue that Iran could be extremely useful in winning the Iraq war—adding that, as a matter of fact, it already has been, albeit in covert ways.”

There is not the slightest indication, however, that Washington will alter its course, even if that means a break with the Blair government in Britain. The Bush administration is now putting into practice in Iraq and the Middle East plans that were drawn up and pushed by rightwing ideologues and conservative thinktanks from the beginning of the 1990s.

The reasoning behind the current threats against Syria and Iran is outlined in a policy document written by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in 1996 for the incoming Netanyahu government in Israel. Among the authors were Richard Perle and Herbert Feith, both of whom have been prominent “neo-conservatives” in the Bush administration. The document argued for a “clean break” with the “land for peace” strategy of the previous Labour government and a far more aggressive policy toward Israel’s Arab neighbours.

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effect can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions... Damascus fears that the ‘natural axis’ with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan in the centre would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.”

These sweeping plans for redrawing the Middle East map were conceived, of course, to be in the interests of Washington as well as Israel. Seven years later, these same figures wield extensive influence in the White House and are pressing ahead with their reckless strategy—with breakneck speed and scant regard for the consequences.

'You've Just Killed a Family Because You Didn't Fire a Warning Shot Soon Enough'
By Raymond Whitaker
Independent UK

Wednesday 2 April 2003

Conflicting accounts of the deaths of at least seven Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint were still circulating yesterday when American troops shot dead another civilian at a roadblock. He was unarmed.

American commanders admitted US soldiers killed seven women and children at a checkpoint near Najaf on Monday, but their first reaction was to defend their troops, saying they opened fire after warning shots were ignored. The men involved did "absolutely the right thing", said General Peter Pace. "Our soldiers on the ground have an absolute right to defend themselves."

But William Branigin, a journalist for The Washington Post who witnessed the incident, said 10 people were killed, including five small children, and that the first shots fired included 25mm high-explosive cannon shells from one or more Bradley fighting vehicles, which tore into the four-wheel-drive Toyota. He said the troops' commander, Capt Ronny Johnson, shouted to his platoon leader: "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"

As the vehicle raced towards an intersection held by troops of the US 3rd Infantry Division, Mr Branigin reported, Capt Johnson grew increasingly alarmed. "From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.

"'Fire a warning shot,' he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. 'Stop [messing] around!' Capt Johnson yelled into the radio when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, 'Stop him, Red 1, stop him!' That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all."

Afterwards, reported Mr Branigin, the soldiers gave the survivors 10 body bags for their loved ones, and offered them money in compensation.

US Central Command said Monday's killings and yesterday's shooting, which happened when a white pick-up truck failed to stop at a checkpoint 20 miles from Nasiriyah, were being investigated. But it was maintaining its unapologetic stance. "There will be occasions where civilians will be put in harm's way," said Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks. Another spokesman blamed the Najaf deaths on Saddam Hussein.

"This is yet another incident in a trend of this regime using civilians, in this case innocent women and children, in order to cause harm to coalition forces," said Capt Frank Thorp. "The blood of this incident is on the hands of this regime."

To others, however, the deaths indicate how jittery and trigger-happy US troops have become since an Iraqi soldier blew himself up at a roadblock last Saturday, killing four Americans. "I thought it was a suicide bomb," said one of the soldiers who opened fire.

These are the first civilian deaths for which the Anglo-American forces have admitted responsibility, but "embedded" journalists have seen evidence of several more, usually when Iraqis have approached troop positions at night.

Predictions that the Iraqi population would welcome British and American troops have proved wide of the mark. A Pentagon spokesman's comment that "everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven otherwise" means gaining civilian support will be harder than ever. Asked if the checkpoint killings undermined attempts to win over locals, a British Army spokesman said: "It does indeed."

Commanders say the rules of engagement have not changed, but new procedures have been ordered in the wake of the suicide bombing. Drivers and passengers at checkpoints will be ordered out of vehicles with their hands raised, and will be searched. Cars and trucks will no longer be permitted to cross through American and British convoys; any vehicle blocking traffic will be pushed aside.

And if civilians approach troops with their hands in their pockets and fail to respond, first to a shouted command and then to a warning shot, they will be killed, US officials say.

American forces have traditionally taken a more aggressive approach towards civilian populations than other Western armies. This conflicts with their desire to appear as "liberators" in Iraq. On peacekeeping duties in Kosovo, for example, US troops were ordered to wear full battle gear at all times, unlike every other national contingent.

James Dingley, a lecturer on terrorism at the University of Ulster, contrasted the US approach with that of the British, whose Northern Ireland experience means they are accustomed to closer contact with civilians. "Americans never mixed with anybody [in the Balkans]," he said. "They had virtually no comprehension of the locals ... and developing empathy with them".

Although British troops did not face suicide bombers in Northern Ireland, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said American forces would draw on their experience. Paul Beaver, a defence analyst, emphasised the need for a new approach. "The Americans have to look again at the rules of engagement and just see what they're doing at these checkpoints," he said. "They are shooting first and asking questions later." 
  

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A Gruesome Scene on Highway 9
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday 1 April 2003

10 Dead After Vehicle Shelled at Checkpoint

NEAR KARBALA, Iraq, March 31 -- As an unidentified four-wheel-drive vehicle came barreling toward an intersection held by troops of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, Capt. Ronny Johnson grew increasingly alarmed. From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons of M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.

"Fire a warning shot," he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. "Stop [messing] around!" Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"

That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.

"Cease fire!" Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"

So it was that on a warm, hazy day in central Iraq, the fog of war descended on Bravo Company.

Fifteen Iraqi civilians were packed inside the Toyota, officers said, along with as many of their possessions as the jammed vehicle could hold. Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under 5 years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.

"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sgt. Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, said later in an interview. He said one of the wounded women sat in the vehicle holding the mangled bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car," he said.

The tragedy cast a pall over the company as it sat in positions it had occupied Sunday on this key stretch of Highway 9 at the intersection of a road leading to the town of Hilla, about 14 miles to the east, near the Euphrates River. The Toyota was coming from that direction when it was fired on.

Dealing with the gruesome scene was a new experience for many of the U.S. soldiers deployed here, and they debated how the tragedy could have been avoided. Several said they accepted the platoon leader's explanation to Johnson on the military radio that he had, in fact, fired two warning shots, but that the driver failed to stop. And everybody was edgy, they realized, since four U.S. soldiers were blown up by a suicide bomber Saturday at a checkpoint much like theirs, only 20 miles to the south.

On a day of sporadic fighting on the roads and in the farms and wooded areas around the intersection, the soldiers of Bravo Company had their own reasons to be edgy. The Bradley of the 3rd Battalion's operations officer, Maj. Roger Shuck, was fired on with a rocket-propelled grenade a couple of miles south of Karbala. No one in the vehicle was seriously injured, but Shuck had difficulty breathing afterward and had to be treated with oxygen, medics said.

That happened after a column of M1 Abrams tanks headed north to Karbala in the early afternoon and returned a couple of hours later. Throughout the day, Iraqis lobbed periodic mortar volleys at the U.S. troops, and Iraqi militiamen and soldiers tried to penetrate the U.S. lines. Later, U.S. multiple-launcher vehicles fired rockets to try to take out the mortar batteries as AH-64 Apache helicopters swooped low over the arid terrain in search of other enemy gun emplacements.

It was in the late afternoon, after this day defending their positions, that the men of Bravo Company saw the blue Toyota coming down the road and reacted. After the shooting, U.S. medics evacuated survivors to U.S. lines south of here. One woman escaped without a scratch. Another, who had superficial head wounds, was flown by helicopter to a field hospital when it was learned she was pregnant.

Johnson said afterward that he initially suspected the driver might have been a suicide bomber, because he did not behave like others who approached the intersection.

"All the other vehicles stopped and turned around when they saw us," he said. "But this one kept on coming." Two days earlier, four 3rd Infantry Division soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in his car at a checkpoint.

Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, the 3rd Battalion commander, gave permission for three of the survivors to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones. Medics gave the group 10 body bags. U.S. officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.

"They wanted to bury them before the dogs got to them," said Cpl. Brian Truenow, 28, of Townsend, Mass.

[In Washington, the Pentagon issued a statement saying the vehicle was fired on after the driver ignored shouted orders and warning shots. The shooting, it said, is under investigation. According to the Pentagon account, the vehicle was a van carrying 13 women and children. Seven were killed, two were injured and four were unharmed, it said, without mentioning any men.]

To try to prevent a recurrence, Johnson ordered that signs be posted in Arabic to warn people to stop well short of the Bradleys guarding the eastern approach to the intersection. Before they could be erected, 10 people carrying white flags walked down the same road. They were seven children, an old man, a woman and a boy in his teens.

"Tell them to go away," Johnson ordered. But he reconsidered when told that the family said their house had been blown up and that they were trying to reach the home of relatives in a safer area.

"They look like they pose no threat at this time," one of the Bradley platoons radioed.

Johnson, a former Army Ranger who parachuted into Panama in 1989, fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and rose through the ranks, relented. He ordered his troops to tell the old man that the group could walk around the Bradleys.

Iraq checkpoint killings—the ugly face of imperialist war

By Bill Vann
2 April 2003

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The killing of seven women and children by US troops who poured cannon fire into a vehicle approaching a checkpoint near the embattled Iraqi town of Karbala has sparked outrage throughout the Middle East and beyond. Pentagon officials have dismissed the incident as an unfortunate accident, while insisting that the soldiers involved behaved appropriately.

The company commander of the 3rd Infantry Division unit manning the roadblock ordered his troops to fire a warning shot, but, according to a graphic account published in the Washington Post Tuesday, saw no action taken. As the four-wheel-drive Toyota drew closer he ordered the soldiers to “Stop him.” At least one Bradley Fighting Vehicle opened up on the vehicle with 25mm cannon fire.

“You just f—-ing killed a family because you didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough,” the Captain reportedly yelled over a radio to his platoon leader. Packed inside the vehicle was an entire family, 13 people in all, who were fleeing the fighting. The victims included five children age five or under. At least one of the wounded was not expected to survive.

“It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen, and I hope I never see it again,” Sgt. Mario Manzano, an Army medic, told the Post. He described how one of the women who survived the attack sat in the vehicle clutching the mangled bodies of two of her children. “She didn’t want to get out of the car,” he said.

The horrific incident was by no means unique. Several hours later, an unarmed Iraqi was shot and killed and his passenger badly wounded by US Marines at another roadblock outside the southern town of Shatra on the main road to Nasiriyah. An elderly man and his two grandsons were killed on another road. As US soldiers helped to bury the dead, one commented to French television, “It is terrible what we are doing to these people.” There was yet another incident at a nearby checkpoint in which a driver was shot and wounded.

Meanwhile, the Agence France-Presse reported that 15 members of a family were killed late Monday when an Apache helicopter fired a rocket into their pickup truck. The family had been fleeing the combat in Nasiriyah. The survivor of the attack showed an AFP photographer coffins containing the bodies of his wife and six children, his father and mother, and three of his brothers and their wives.

In the same area, a US warplane dropped fragmentation bombs on the farming town of Hilla Tuesday, killing 33 people, most of them women and children, and wounding another 310. Local hospital director Murtada Abbas appealed to his “former colleagues” at the hospital where he studied and worked in Britain to do something to stop the bloodshed.

These killings are in the immediate sense the working out of new “rules of engagement” set by the Pentagon in the aftermath of a deadly suicide bomb attack carried out by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint near Nasiriyah on Saturday. Four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division died when a man, identified as 50-year-old Iraqi army sergeant and a veteran of both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Gulf War, opened the trunk of his car as ordered by the US soldiers, triggering a bomb blast.

The Iraqi regime claims that 4,000 men from other Arab countries have already arrived in Iraq to volunteer for similar suicide missions against US forces. While this number cannot be confirmed, newspapers in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere report large numbers of young men have crossed the border with the aim of joining the resistance.

“We are going to fight the Americans, the British and the Zionists who want to take over our land,” 24-year-old Nourredine al Sayyed, one of about forty men who boarded a bus in Lebanon bound for Iraq, told the Lebanese Daily Star. “This will not be allowed except over our dead bodies. We are going to die. We know we will not come back,” said Sayyed, who leaves behind three children.

“When we see women and children being slaughtered in front of us, would we be men if we didn’t go?” asked another of those on the bus.

The threat of suicide attack is part of the mounting resistance of Iraqi soldiers, militiamen and resistance, who have adopted classic guerrilla tactics as the only means of fighting back against the overwhelming firepower of the US-British invaders.

In response, US and British officials have denounced the Iraqi fighters as “terrorists,” “thugs” and “death squads,” blaming them for any civilian deaths. Indeed, even cruise missile attacks on civilian neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere have been blamed on the Iraqis, with fantastic claims that Saddam Hussein has ordered explosions to discredit the macabrely named “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

The British newspaper the Guardian debunked this last claim Tuesday, revealing that a piece of metal found at the site of one of the worst of these incidents—the bombing of a market in the working class Baghdad suburb of Al Sha’ab—contained a manufacturer’s serial number traced back to a Raytheon Co. plant in Texas that produces cruise missiles for the US Air Force.

In a broader sense, the new massacres of civilians are a byproduct of the abject failure of the Pentagon leadership’s war strategy. Having promised to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein and terrorize the population into submission with its vaunted “shock and awe” plan of “precision” bombings, the US military now finds itself face-to-face with a hostile people prepared to fight and die to defend their country. In light of the stunning setbacks for the US war effort, the Pentagon has shifted to a strategy that far more directly targets Iraq’s civilian population.

From well before the launching of the aggression against Iraq, both the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaderships testily dismissed any parallels between the war in Iraq and the debacle suffered by US forces in Vietnam. Yet as the conflict goes on, the echoes from that ill-fated intervention of three decades ago grow ever louder.

Military planners speak of winning the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people while ordering nightly bombing campaigns that have claimed the lives of several hundred and filled Iraq’s ill-equipped hospitals with maimed and screaming children. Iraqi resisters, like the National Liberation Front fighters before them, are described as “terrorists” for hiding among civilians and supposedly lacking any concern for human life. US-British forces, meanwhile, lay siege to Basra, cutting off its electricity and water supply and lobbing high explosives into its crowded streets. All that is needed is for a general to tell the press assembled at the Centcom headquarters in Qatar that the military had to “destroy the city to save it.”

The echo of Vietnam becomes most clear in the complaints by US soldiers, dismayed that they are meeting stiff resistance instead of the cheering crowds that they were promised. Under these conditions, frightened troops, many of them shy of their twentieth birthday, are capable of carrying out terrible crimes in the name of self-defense.

“This is a completely new dimension,” said Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division. “It is very difficult to distinguish civilians from possible fighters.” In short, it must be assumed that any Iraqi is the enemy.

Now his troops, exhausted from the stalled race for Baghdad and fearful after nearly continuous hostile fire, man roadblocks that have shut every road surrounding the strategic city of Najaf with orders to shoot on sight any driver approaching a checkpoint. The effect has been to impose a virtual state of siege on the entire region, forcing civilians fleeing bombardment and battle back into conflagration.

In a passage in her book about the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald attempted to explain the conditions that gave rise to the war’s atrocities, particularly the My Lai massacre of 1969 in which US soldiers herded several hundred women and children into a ditch and mowed them down with automatic weapons fire.

“Young men from the small towns of America, the GI’s who came to Vietnam found themselves in a place halfway around the earth among people with whom they could make no human contact,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Like an Orwellian army, they knew everything about military tactics, but nothing about where they were or who the enemy was. And they found themselves not attacking fixed positions but walking through the jungle or through villages among small yellow people, as strange and exposed among them as if they were Martians.”

Once again, the US soldier is as “strange and exposed” as any extraterrestrial. Unable to speak Arabic—only one in four soldiers, it is reported, even have Arabic-English translation guides, and far fewer still know how to use them—and knowing next to nothing of Iraq’s complicated history and culture, American soldiers are being thrust into a vicious spiral. Acts of Iraqi resistance trigger retaliation, which in turn engender even greater popular anger and resistance.

It is a type of warfare for which the Pentagon’s civilian leadership in its arrogance failed to consider. Massive firepower and advanced technology, they insisted, would turn the Iraqi intervention into a “cakewalk.”

Now the Pentagon freely acknowledges that the Iraqi resistance will be no pushover. Indeed, a senior military commander speaking not for attribution told the media that Washington is prepared to pay “a very high price” to accomplish its goal.

“We’re prepared for this as we’re not going to do anything other than ensure this regime goes away,” he said. “If that means a lot of casualties, there’ll be a lot of casualties.” Referring to World War II, in which he said the US military could lose “1,000 people” in a day, the commander added, “There may come a time when things are going to be much more shocking.”

No one has bothered to give any estimate of how many Iraqis must die to achieve the Bush administration’s aims, but if the Pentagon is prepared to lose thousands of troops, it is doubtless prepared to kill one hundred times as many civilians.

Nor has the Pentagon returned to the vexed subject of what level of force and how many years will be required to occupy this country of 23 million, assuming the US and British invaders succeed in taking Baghdad. When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told a US Senate panel on the eve of the war that “something on the order of several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to control the country, he came under withering criticism from the Defense Department’s civilian leadership. “Wildly off the mark,” was the reaction of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The general “misspoke,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Given that these were the same strategists who predicted that the Iraqi regime would crumble under the first US air strikes and that Iraqis would line the road to scatter flowers in the path of advancing US tanks, Shinseki’s estimate appears all the more credible.

Thus, the military aggression that the Bush administration has launched against Iraq could well tie down most of the deployable force of both the US Army and the Marine Corps for the foreseeable future, with continuing “pacification” efforts yielding fresh casualties among both US soldiers and Iraqi civilians for years to come.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the impending battle for Baghdad—and a US, British victory is by no means assured—the present intervention can only end in catastrophe for the corrupt ruling elite in Washington. It has already become clear that the masses of Iraq and indeed the entire Middle East have no intention of allowing Bush and his cronies to turn the clock back to the days of colonialism.

Nor, in the end, will American working people continue allowing their sons and daughters to be sacrificed as cannon fodder in a war to secure US control of Iraqi oil reserves. The diversion of huge sums to pay for this war and for the occupation of Iraq will only widen the immense gulf between the wealthy oligarchy represented by the Bush administration and the vast majority, those who work for a living. Combined with the revulsion felt by millions over the slaughter in Iraq, the inevitable result of growing social inequality at home will be political upheavals in the US itself.

UK Troops Sent Home for Questioning War
Reuters
By Andrew Hay

Tuesday 1 April 2003

LONDON, April 1 (Reuters) - Two British soldiers who questioned the legality of the U.S.-led war in Iraq have been sent home from the Gulf and may now face disciplinary action, their lawyer said on Tuesday.

The soldiers were returned to Britain on the eve of the war when they expressed concerns the offensive was in breach of the United Nations charter and it might be illegal for them to follow certain orders, their lawyer Gilbert Blades said.

"They expressed doubts about the legality of the war, about whether they should be called upon to shoot innocent civilians," Blades, a Lincolnshire-based military lawyer, told Reuters. "As soon as they expressed these views to other soldiers they were then removed."

The case could prove embarrassing to the government, which ordered the military into action in the face of heavy public opposition and without a clear mandate from the United Nations.

British authorities in Qatar on Sunday said two of their soldiers were sent home from Kuwait in February on "medical and/or compassionate grounds" but denied the two had refused to fight.

The Ministry of Defence in London said on Tuesday it was not aware of any British soldiers who had expressed concerns about the legality of the war and had been sent home as a result.

"I know the number of people who've been sent back and the reasons for it and that doesn't tie in with any of them," an MoD spokeswoman said.

Blades said the two soldiers had been returned to normal duties at Colchester garrison in southern England and were waiting to hear from the MoD whether they would be charged.

"I don't suppose for one moment when they joined the services they thought they might have to obey an order which might be illegal," Blades said. "The question is whether the order is illegal or not."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair waged a campaign to convince Britons it was legal to enter a U.S.-led war in Iraq without an express resolution from the U.N. Security Council.

Blades said the soldiers had not refused a specific order because they had been removed from the campaign before they were put in a position where they might have to take such an action.

"Naturally the MoD would want to nip in the bud any dissident voices within the service," Blades said.

British newspapers have identified the soldiers as a private and an air technician from 16 Air Assault Brigade -- a frontline unit that has been engaged in heavy fighting in southern Iraq. Blades declined to identify the soldiers.

An official at 16 Air Assault Brigade, which is garrisoned in Colchester, declined to comment on the case.