WHILE AN ESTIMATED fifty children die each day as a result of the deliberate bombing of Iraq’s water, power and sewage systems, the triumphalists claim their place in the victory parade. Some do not want to be seen in the streets shoulder to shoulder with the ‘boys’. This is understandable. They prefer to march gently in print, not as Worsthornes and other Kitcheners reincarnate, but as the liberal shareholders of Just War PLC (shortly to display its ‘combat-proven’ wares at the Dubai Arms Fair).
So they are triumphant, yes, but confused, alas. They describe as a ‘famous victory’ the crushing of a small Third World country and the killing of the equivalent of the population of Norwich: mostly conscripted soldiers running away, and civilians. But their use of the term ‘victory’ is puzzling, though it is not as mysterious as their correlation of a triumphant moral and intellectual position with triumphant onesided slaughter. So there is a nervousness about their triumphalism, as if they are concerned that the ‘famous victory’ will not endure and their supporting role will be fully acknowledged.
Liberal triumphalism is as important after this war as liberal defeatism was after Vietnam. Both serve to protect the nobility of the cause and the rightness of the war aims, and especially to state repeatedly the purity of ‘our civilised values’. Following the Vietnam War, the United States’ ‘honest mistake’ and ‘tragic innocence’ were promoted in the liberal media. There are many examples. For me, the finest is Stanley Karnow’s 700-page Vietnam: A History, which describes the war as a ‘failed crusade’ fought for the ‘loftiest of intentions’. To Karnow, the Vietnamese were ‘terrorists’ who were ‘merciless’ and ‘brutal’ in contrast to the Americans, who were ‘sincere’ and ‘earnest’ and whose ‘instincts were liberal’. Good guy Lyndon Johnson ‘mistakenly imputed [American] values to the communists’, believing ‘they would respond like reasonable people’ (to US threats to destroy their towns) but they were ‘rarely troubled by heavy human tolls’. Karnow gives the My Lai massacre one line, and other atrocities not a word. His book is one of the most widely read histories of the war.59
The protection of the West’s ‘civilised values’, as expressed in the conduct of the Gulf War, is well in hand. Reading the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic, John Bunyan’s Mister Facing-Both-Ways seems to be everywhere. The war was horrible, the massacre on the Basra road especially so, yet we are assured the West is growing ‘more squeamish’ about this sort of thing. One of the reasons for the ceasefire on February 28 was ‘the genuine panic of Western political leaders at the scale of the killing. They had caused it, even willed it. But they had not imagined what it would be like.’ It was the ‘stain’ on their otherwise ‘clean fighting record’.60 When Phillip Knightley was asked on BBC Radio about the ‘news blackout’ at the start of the land war, he replied that its aim was clearly to prevent the outside world knowing the ferocious nature of the Allied assault. The BBC dropped the programme. Not ‘imagining’ what 500-pound bombs do in populated areas, what B52s do, what ‘daisy cutters’ do, what ‘fuel air explosion’ bombs do, what Rockeye clusters do (used to great effect on the Basra highway) is akin to not imagining what a bullet does when it is fired point blank at the human brain.
Without a hint of irony, Adrian Hamilton wrote in last week’s Observer, ‘To accept that US intentions in the Gulf may be well meant is not to say they are innocent . . .’ As part of these ‘well-meant intentions’ America’s ‘domestic political aim’ in the war was ‘to win a decisive victory that would erase the memory of Vietnam, with the lowest possible Allied casualties’. Thus, tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children were obliterated in order to ‘erase the memory of Vietnam’.61
What is so horrific about this is that the ‘memory of Vietnam’ – that of defeat and a ‘failed crusade’, as reflected in the angst-ridden Hollywood movies – is a Big Lie. Central to this Big Lie is that the war was a ‘quagmire’ into which the United States ‘stumbled’, for which there are not so faint echoes in current assessments of the Gulf War. In truth, the Vietnam War was waged by America against Vietnam, North and South. The massive official documentation of the Pentagon Papers, leaked in the early 1970s, alone confirms this. Far from being vanquished, the United States succeeded in devastating, blockading and isolating Vietnam and its ‘virus’ and subordinating to American interests most regimes in the region. In fact, Washington had a significant victory. Not even Hollywood has understood the scope of this achievement.
The logic follows that the slaughter of people in the Gulf War – people who had nothing to do with the American adventure in Vietnam or its ‘memory’ – was entirely unnecessary as a ‘domestic political aim’. Indeed, their deaths have merely allowed one Big Lie to follow another.
The new Big Lie has many components. For example, it is said to be the first war of ‘smart’ weapons whose ‘precision’ and ‘reliability’ make possible ‘short, sharp wars of the future’. One story never published in the British press was reported recently in the International Herald Tribune. It said that ‘estimates of the accuracy of US bombs dropped on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait suggest that hundreds of precision-guided munitions as well as thousands of “dumb bombs” have missed their targets and in some cases struck unintended sites, according to US officials.’ The report described these ‘dumb bombs’ as ‘simple shell-encased explosives, including some with designs dating back to World War II that follow unguided trajectories to their targets, usually hitting within 50 to 100 feet but sometimes missing by much greater distances.’ ‘Dumb bombs’ were used against targets in populated areas.62
Perhaps the most important element in the new Big Lie concerns sanctions – the preferred alternative to killing tens of thousands of Iraqis. In a new study, the Glasgow University Media Group has found that ‘ironically, as the war drew nearer, evidence of the power of sanctions was just beginning to emerge’, but at the same time the option of sanctions ‘effectively disappeared as a news story’.63
During this critical period, found the researchers, clear evidence was available that the effect of sanctions was ‘devastating’; but only the Guardian and the Morning Star argued against force; the Guardian quoted a CIA report that sanctions had stopped 97 per cent of Iraqi exports. The rest of the press associated sanctions with ‘appeasement’ (‘Spineless appeasers’ – the Sun). Television news contributed: ‘All efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Gulf crisis seemed to have ended in failure tonight’ (BBC, January 15) and ‘War in the Gulf looks unavoidable . . .’ (ITN).64
Under the new Big Lie, Iraqis, Palestinians and Arabs in general are to be demonised by Hollywood, as the Vietnamese were. Gulf War movies on the way include: Desert Shield, in which the US Navy heroically destroys chemical warheads in Iraq (no mention, of course, that the United States gave Iraq much of its chemical warfare technology); Desert Storm, in which Iraqis plot to wipe out Israel (originally this one was called Shield of Honour and the forces of evil were Libyan); The Human Shield, which depicts an Iraqi officer attempting to murder an old woman and child and kidnapping the brother of a US colonel; and Target USA, in which US heroes unravel an Iraqi terrorist plot . . .
In his speech to Congress last week President Bush said the United States would maintain forces in the Gulf for years. This was not envisaged by those who believed, with invincible naivety, the yarns about ‘defending Saudi Arabia’ and ‘liberating Kuwait’. Perhaps they should have listened to authentic establishment voices.
Interviewing the American ambassador to Britain at the outbreak of the war, David Dimbleby said, ‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman? You may have to operate under the United Nations, but it’s beginning to look as though you’re going to have to be in the Middle East just as, in the previous part of this century, we and the French were in the Middle East.’65
Quite so.
March 15, 1991