Kdo rozumí, ať si přečte
Tohle jsem zrovna dostal e-mailem. Je to bohuzel velmi dlouhe (impending znamená hrozící).
If you ever had any doubt about this impending war,
or if you know anyone who does, read this to the end.
Blood On His Hands'
By John Pilger ITV.com 1-30-03
William Russell, the great correspondent who
reported the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression
"blood on his hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe
distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially
to those modern political
leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who
managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the
man who causes death and
suffering not by his own hand but through a chain
of command that affirms his "authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi
leaders for war
crimes
left no doubt about what they regarded as the
gravest crimes against
humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a
sovereign state that
offered
no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the
murder of civilians, for
which responsibility rested with the "highest
authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for
which he is being denied
even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that
the weapons inspectors
have
found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no
democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not
consult parliament or
the
people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships
and aircraft to the
Gulf;
he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George
W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism
and ambitions of
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a
matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld,
Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney
and
Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State
of the Union speech
last
night was reminiscent of that other great moment in
1938 when Hitler
called
his generals together and told them: "I must have
war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him
distance from the killing
of
innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he
will share
responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous
appeasement humanity has
known
since the 1930s. The current American elite is the
Third Reich of our
times,
although this distinction ought not to let us
forget that they have
merely
accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting
American state
terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically
on Japan as a signal
of
their new power to the dozens of countries invaded,
directly or by
proxy, to
destroy democracy wherever it collided with
American "interests", such
as a
voracious appetite for the world's resources, like
oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk
about "bringing democracy
to
the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA
that installed the
Ba'ath
Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.
"That was my favourite coup," said the CIA man
responsible. When you
next
hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun"
in Iraq, ask why the
US
government last December confiscated the 12,000
pages of Iraq's weapons
declaration, saying they contained "sensitive
information" which needed
"a
little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents
listed 150 American,
British
and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with
its nuclear,
chemical
and missile technology, many of them in illegal
transactions. In 2000
Peter
Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a
parliamentary request to
publish the full list of lawbreaking British
companies. He has never
explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware
that words on the page
like
these can seem almost abstract, part of a great
chess game unconnected
to
people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection.
They are the end
result
of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and
Blair, who never see,
or
would have the courage to see, the effect of their
actions on ordinary
lives: the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52
bombers will be used in
the
attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a
million people were killed
in
the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched
three ladders of
bombs
curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in
formation, unseen above
the
clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day
in what was known as
the
"long box" pattern, the military term for carpet
bombing. Everything
inside
a "box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the
street had been replaced
by a
crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and
fell hard into a ditch
filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies
of children thrown
into
the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like
parchment, revealing veins and
burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes,
intact, stared straight
ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the
blast that the foot
seemed
to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw,
and often; yet even in
that "media war" I never saw images of these
grotesque sights on
television
or in the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency
offices in Saigon as a
kind of freaks' gallery.
SOME years later I often came upon terribly
deformed Vietnamese children
in
villages where American aircraft had sprayed a
herbicide called Agent
Orange.
It was banned in the United States, not
surprisingly for it con