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<span class="post_date" title="2015-11-17">November 17, 2015</span>
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="name"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/from-pol-pot-to-isis-the-blood-never-dried/"
rel="bookmark">From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried</a></h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/john-pilger/"
rel="nofollow">John Pilger</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/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/</a></small></small></b><br>
</span></p>
<div class="post_content" itemprop="articleBody">
<blockquote>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence
file illustrates:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
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<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>John Pilger </strong>can
be reached through his website: <a
href="http://www.johnpilger.com/"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.johnpilger.com">www.johnpilger.com</a></a></em>
</p>
</div>
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