[News] From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried

[Anti-Imperialist News]

November 17, 2015


   From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried
  <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/from-pol-pot-to-isis-the-blood-never-dried/>

by John Pilger <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/john-pilger/>
*http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/from-pol-pot-to-isis-the-blood-never-dried/*

    /Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John Pilger
    updates this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and
    what we can do about it./

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing 
of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on 
everything that moves”.  As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against 
the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and 
Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that the rubble of 
Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for 
Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including 
the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am 
not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A 
telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who 
had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 
They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, 
too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 
poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty 
and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work 
as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe 
his luck. The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on 
rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, 
returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant 
necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was 
unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors 
“froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. 
Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they 
were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the 
people over.” A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 
600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the 
bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and 
Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their 
bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and 
Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 
people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had 
done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and 
sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. 
Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without 
fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs 
of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. 
Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided 
by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. 
“Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state 
ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The 
arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, 
Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the 
example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign 
Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our 
Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of 
Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in 
conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime 
against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the 
mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite 
undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in 
distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” 
societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the 
first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations 
Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi 
population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam 
Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained 
a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making 
the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, 
common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers 
carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with 
Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade 
and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to 
protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, 
parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, 
explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of 
being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could 
get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of 
it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted 
for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the 
entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power 
and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von 
Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean 
water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford 
treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have 
a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I 
have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is 
unavoidable.” Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian 
Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally 
distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” 
Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of 
genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a 
million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that 
between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 
“excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV 
reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United 
Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We 
think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, 
Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection 
committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire 
population a means to live.”  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years 
later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he 
said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how 
a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining 
the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised 
intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not 
untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis 
we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the 
suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or 
shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign 
Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis 
Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the 
Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the 
BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed 
Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a 
subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a 
“fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and 
other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will 
further “the imperative of a political solution”. The day Hain’s article 
appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London 
and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a 
politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of 
intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the 
world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as 
terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not 
now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic 
verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the 
willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on 
places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to 
relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow 
their one potentially valuable ally,  the government in Syria.

This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file 
illustrates:

    “In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a
    special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals
    [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is
    prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and
    coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts
    with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged]
    border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA
    and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action
    fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. 
In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, the former 
French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the 
Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I 
am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French 
TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria 
on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that 
they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an 
invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no 
longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… 
This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – 
Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” 
and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf 
medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those 
now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition 
for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a 
major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most 
ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way 
out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be 
repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers 
of violence in the Middle East  — the Americans and Europeans – must 
themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated 
Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home. There should be 
an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and 
recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the 
region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for 
the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. 
Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you 
begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia 
unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never 
recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the 
Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, 
Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its 
satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is 
described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a 
quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, 
Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. 
  Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop 
denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

/*John Pilger *can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com 
<http://www.johnpilger.com/>/

-- 
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