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<font size=3><br><br>
<br>
</font><h1><font face="verdana" size=2><b><a href="http://www.counterpunch.com/">http://www.counterpunch.com</a></b>
<br><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5><b>September 28,
2004<br><br>
<br>
Why Have We Suddenly Forgotten Abu Ghraib?<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">"Children,
Ardent for Some Desperate
Glory"</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By
ROBERT FISK<br>
</font><font size=2 color="#990000"><b>The Independent<br><br>
</b></font><font face="verdana" size=5 color="#990000">W</font><font face="verdana" size=2>e
are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That’s how
we run the Iraq waror the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara
would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to
remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held
prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu
Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little
snapshots? But don’t worry. This wasn’t the America George Bush
recognised, and besides we’re punishing the bad apples, aren’t we? Women?
Why, there are only a couple of dames leftand they are “Dr Germ” and “Dr
Anthrax”.<br><br>
But Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese woman, Samia Melki,
who first understood the true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs
for the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body smeared with excrement,
back to the camera, arms stretched out before the butch and blond
American with a stick, possessed, she wrote in<i> CounterPunch</i>,
“<a href="http://www.counterpunch.com/melki06032004.html">all the drama
and contrasting colours of a Caravaggio painting</a>”.<br><br>
The best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be part of the artwork.
“Forced to walk in a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso
slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance, the Iraqi prisoner’s
toned body, accentuated by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches
out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long denied, the Arab is
suffering for the world’s sins.”<br><br>
And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu
Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress
were allowed to watch in secret and which wethe publicwere not
permitted to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib storyand one of
the only journalists in America who is doing his jobhas spoken publicly
about what else happened in that terrible jail.<br><br>
I’m indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh
lecture: “Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know
about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that
they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is
at Abu Ghraib... The women were passing messages out saying please come
and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is
that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases
that have been recorded, the boys were sodomised, with the cameras
rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys
shrieking...”<br><br>
Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk
about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of
the desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent
nasties, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. US mobile site survey
teams managed, at one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret police
headquarters in Baghdad, only to find a padlocked inner door. Here, they
believed, they would find the horrors that Bush and Blair were praying
for. And what did they find behind the second door? A vast emporium of
brand new vacuum cleaners. At Ba’ath party headquarters, another teamled
by a Major Kenneth Dealbelieved they had discovered secret documents
which would reveal Saddam’s weapons’ programme. The papers turned out to
be an Arabic translation of A J P Taylor’s<i> The Struggle for Mastery in
Europe</i>. Perhaps Bush and Blair should read it.<br><br>
So as we continue to stagger down the crumbling stairway of our own
ghastly making, we must listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad
Allawi, the puppet prime ministerstill deferentially called “interim
prime minister” by many of my reporter chumsinsists that elections will
be held in January even though he has less control of the Iraqi capital
(let alone the rest of the country) than the mayor of Baghdad. The ex-CIA
agent, who obediently refused to free the two women prisoners the moment
Washington gave him instructions not to do so, dutifully trots over to
London and on to Washington to shore up more of the Blair-Bush
lies.<br><br>
Second Iraq War indeed. How much more of this tomfoolery are we, the
public, expected to stomach? We are fighting in “the crucible of global
terrorism”, according to Lord Blair of Kut. What are we to make of this
nonsense? Of course, he didn’t tell us we were going to have a Second
Iraq War when he helped to start the First Iraq War, did he? And he
didn’t tell the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come to “liberate” them.
So let’s just remember the crisis before the crisis before the crisis.
Let’s go back to last November when our Prime Minister was addressing the
Lord Mayor’s banquet. The Iraq war, he informed us thenand presumably he
was still referring to the First Iraq Warwas “the battle of seminal
importance for the early 21<sup>st</sup> century”.<br><br>
Well, he can say that again. But just listen to what else Lord Blair of
Kut informed us about the war. “It will define relations between the
Muslim world and the West. It will influence profoundly the development
of Arab states and the Middle East. It will have far-reaching
implications for the future of American and Western diplomacy.”<br><br>
And he can say that again, can’t he? For it is difficult to think of
anything more profoundly dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle
East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second World Warthe real
second war, that isthan Blair’s war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember, was
going to be the model for the whole Middle East. Every Arab state would
want to be like Iraq. Iraq would be the catalystperhaps even the
“crucible”of the new Middle East. Spare me the hollow
laughter.<br><br>
I have been struck these past few weeks how very many of the letters I’ve
received from readers come from men and women who fought in the Second
World War, who argue ferociously that Blair and Bush should never be
allowed to compare this quagmire with the real struggle against evil
which they waged more than half a century ago.<br><br>
“I, now 90, remember the men maimed in body and mind who haunted the
lanes in rural Wales where I grew up in the years after 1918,” Robert
Parry wrote to me. “For this reason, Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est’
remains for me the ultimate expression of the reality of death in war,
made now more horrific by American ‘targeted’ bombing and the suicide
bombers. We need a new Wilfred Owen to open our eyes and consciences, but
until one appears this great poem must be given space to speak again.” It
would be difficult to find a more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile
nonsense now being peddled by our Prime Minister.<br><br>
Not for many years has there been such a gapin America as well as
Britainbetween the people and the government they elected. Blair’s most
recent remarks are speeches madeto quote that Owen poem“to children
ardent for some desperate glory”. Ken Bigley’s blindfolded face is our
latest greatest crisis. But let’s not forget what went before.<br><br>
<b><i>Robert Fisk </b>is a reporter for The Independent and author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560254424/counterpunchmaga"><b>Pity
the Nation</a></b>. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new
book,
<a href="http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html"><b>The
Politics of Anti-Semitism</a></b>. <br>
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