Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman empire - then at its zenith of power - remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans. The history plays are replete with these fears, albeit that they are also a product of propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth and, later, James. In Henry IV, Part I, the king is to set out on the Crusades:

As far as to the sepulchre of Christ . . .
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet.

Rhetoric is no one’s prerogative - compare King Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech with Saddam’s prelude to the ‘Mother of All Battles’ where Prospero-like purity is espoused for the Arab ‘side’. This is Saddam: ‘Standing at one side of this confrontation are peoples and sincere leaders and rulers, and on the other are those who stole the rights of God and the tyrants who were renounced by God after they renounced all that was right, honourable, decent and solemn and strayed from the path of God until . . . they became obsessed by the devil from head to toe.’

Similar sentiments are espoused by Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play. Tamburlaine is the archetypal Muslim conqueror, the ‘scourge of God’ who found it passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis.

But Othello remains the most obvious, tragic narrative of our Middle Eastern fears. He is a Muslim in the service of Venice - close neighbour to the Ottoman empire - and is sent to Cyprus to battle the Turkish fleet. He is a mercenary whose self-hatred contaminates the play and eventually leads to his own death. Racially abused by both Iago and Roderigo, he lives in a world where there are men whose heads supposedly grow beneath their shoulders, where he is black - most Arabs are not black, although Olivier faithfully followed this notion - and where, just before killing himself, he compares his terrible stabbing of Desdemona to the work of a ‘base Indian’ who:

... threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes,
... Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
... Set you down this:
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus.

That, I fear, is the dagger that we now feel in all our hearts.

The Independent Magazine, 30 March 2007

Flirting with the enemy

After the Second World War, Palestine was crumbling. Menachem Begin’s Irgun had blown up British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British were executing Jewish ‘terrorists’, and the Jews had hanged two kidnapped British army sergeants. The Arabs were determined to destroy the future Jewish state of Israel. The old imperial mandate was in a state of incipient civil war. You have only to open Colonial Office file 537/2643 to understand why, in their moment of agony, the British toyed with the idea of negotiating with an Arab cleric whom they had, only two years earlier, tried to extradite as a war criminal.

Indeed, in 1941 Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had been chatting to Hitler in Berlin, urging the Reich to prevent the departure of European Jews to Palestine; and two years later he had been helping to raise a Muslim SS battalion in Sarajevo to fight on the Russian front. Later on, in 1944 claiming ignorance of the Jewish Holocaust, he told the German foreign minister Ribbentrop that if Jews were to be ‘removed’ from Germany, ‘it would be infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control [sic], as for example, Poland . . .’

When he attempted to flee Germany in 1945, the French captured the Grand Mufti, but allowed him to escape to Egypt. In 1947 he turned up in Lebanon as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, a powerful and influential voice that could pacify - or provoke - an Arab uprising against Britain in its last days of rule in Palestine. No wonder, then, that the old Colonial Office file was not released under the usual thirty-year rule, but kept secret for half a century. Its contents - astonishingly, they were overlooked by historians on their release last month - speak not only of hidden contacts between the Grand Mufti and British diplomats in Cairo, but also of imperial despair in Palestine and, most dramatically, of outrage at Jewish ‘reprisals’ against Arab civilians which constituted, according to the British High Commissioner, ‘an offence to civilisation’. Indignation and fury permeate the file. So does defeat.

On 15 December 1947, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham sent a top-secret memorandum to the British colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, outlining the civil war in Palestine in fearful detail. ‘Situation now is deteriorating,’ he wrote,

into a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals between Jews and Arabs, in which many innocent lives are being lost, the tempo of which may accelerate . . . I have been considering what steps could be taken to mitigate this dangerous situation. As far as the Arabs are concerned it is undoubtedly a fact that word from the Mufti in the right quarter is probably now the only chance of inducing them to hold their hand until we have gone.

Haj Amin had arrived in newly independent Lebanon in early October 1947, and the British Legation in Beirut immediately set out to discover how much freedom he would be given. The Grand Mufti’s sudden appearance, the legation noted, had not surprised the Lebanese prime minister, Riad Solh,³ but the Lebanese insisted that ‘a member of the Sûreté’ was in constant attendance on Haj Amin, that his activities would be ‘controlled and restricted’ by the Lebanese and that he ‘would not be allowed to indulge in any activities directed against British interests’. As our diplomats in Beirut were well aware, however, the British Middle East Office in Cairo had already made contact with the man whom Britain and the Allied Forces Command in Europe regarded as a war criminal.

On 29 September, our man in Cairo had sent a secret note to the Foreign Office enclosing the report of an interview with the Mufti from ‘an unimpeachable source’. The carefully typed notes - presumably from a British intelligence officer - portray a man who realised that disaster faced the Arabs of Palestine. The Mufti refused to contemplate the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. ‘He was not bargaining with the Zionists about a possession in dispute,’ says the report. ‘Palestine, including Jaffa and the Negev, belonged to the Arabs, and he did not recognise the right of anyone to “offer” them what was theirs as a condition of consent to partition. ‘It was like a robber trying to make conditions on which he would return stolen property.’ Besides, Haj Amin said, ‘no form of partition ... would finally satisfy the Zionists. Whatever they got would merely be a springboard from which to leap on more.’

The Grand Mufti, who had supported the Arab revolt against British rule in the Thirties and had subsequently sought refuge in Iraq after a pro-German coup, then lectured his interviewee in words that must have taken the Briton’s breath away. ‘Put yourselves in the Arabs’ place,’ Haj Amin advised. ‘Remember yourselves in 1940. Did you ever think of offering the Germans part of Britain on condition that they let you alone in the rest? Of course not, and you never would.’ The answer to partition or a federal Palestine was ‘NO, categorically NO.’ Jews would have the same rights as Arabs in a Palestinian nation ‘but the Arabs would never agree to any bestowal on the Zionists of political power or privilege that put them above ... the Palestinian state government’.

There was no reason why Arabs and the British should not cooperate, Haj Amin said. But common interests ‘should not deceive the British into thinking that any Arab leader would weaken where Palestine was concerned . . . Palestinian Arab enmity towards the British was purely political - they hated the policy that had founded . . . the Zionist national home.’ If Britain did not support Zionist claims to Palestine, and rejected partition, ‘she would gain Arab friendship in a moment’. But if the British continued their support, ‘they could never hope for Arab co-operation, for the Arabs would then be co-operating in bringing about their own destruction’.

Then, in words which have an ironic historical resonance, the Grand Mufti talked of the future. ‘He did not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah [gangs]. The Arabs might lose at first, they would have many losses, but in the end they must win.’ The Zionists ‘will eventually crumble into nothing, and he did not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America ... intervened, and even then the Arabs would fight and the Arab world would be perpetually hostile’. When his British visitor suggested that the Arabs might do better to accept part of Palestine rather than risk losing all, Haj Amin replied: ‘Who are we? A handful of exiles. Nothing. But we shall never give in or surrender our principles no matter what bribe is offered.’

Should the British talk directly to Haj Amin? As fighting continued in Palestine, the British Legation in Beirut reported to the Foreign Office on 27 November that Haj Amin ‘no longer regards us as Arab Public Enemy No 1’. But ‘if a decision unfavourable to the Arabs is reached at the United Nations . . . it is probable that the ex-Mufti [sic] will be exposed to pressure from his extremist followers . . . Contact even of a most informal sort with British officials might serve as a safety valve.’ The British memorandum, marked ‘Secret’, adds that although Haj Amin’s ‘dubious past renders the prospect of even unofficial contact with him distasteful’, it could not be denied ‘that he enjoys very considerable prestige and influence and he may still play a part in the future government of Palestine’. The Mufti had ‘learnt a lesson through backing the wrong side in the last war,’ and ‘advantage might be taken of his anti-Communist leanings’.

Riad Solh, the Lebanese prime minister, had already offered to arrange a meeting between the Mufti and a Beirut-based British diplomat called Evans, over cups of tea - Evans had been ‘non-committal’ to the idea - but ‘I think it would be all to the good for a member of my staff to see him occasionally,’ the Legation head wrote. It would now pay the British ‘hand over fist’ to exert any influence to avoid a wholesale clash with Palestinian Arabs. Meeting the Mufti as ‘an individual’ would not mean ‘that His Majesty’s Government had abandoned their principles or condoned the Mufti’s misguided [sic] past . . . if ... he has had a change of heart, mild and discreet contacts with the British might give him a chance to prove it. If the leopard is still the same we shall soon find the spots under his henna.’

Beneath this eloquent letter, the British diplomat added in his own hand the damning remark that the US assistant military attaché in Lebanon had already paid a visit to the Mufti. By mid-December, General Cunningham was pleading from Jerusalem for pressure on Haj Amin ‘to get him to dissuade local Arabs from further violence . . . while we are still here’. But, the High Commissioner noted, ‘it is clear that we cannot approach the Arabs without taking parallel action against the Jews. We are, of course, doing all we can to point out to Jews the unmitigated folly of their actions which can only end in future bitterness which may well in the end mean disaster for their new State.’ Jewish claims that their actions were carried out by ‘dissident groups’ had proved to be untrue and ‘it can be seen that the Jews have inflicted many more casualties on the Arabs than the reverse. Practically all [Jewish] attacks have been against buses or in civilian centres.’ In a remarkable moment of anger, Cunningham concluded that ‘we have never at any time on the slightest excuse escaped vociferous and hysterical accusations by Jews that we were a people who were prone to brutal reprisals. Now they [the Jews] have themselves come out with reprisals of a kind which would not have crossed the mind of any soldier here, and which are an offence to civilisation.’

Cunningham’s plea for discussions with the Mufti was forwarded to the Foreign Office. Within days, however, the Legation in Beirut was ordered to make no contact with Haj Amin. British MPs had long demanded his trial for war crimes, and our ally King Abdullah of Jordan - the late King Hussein’s grandfather - hated the Mufti. The British departed from Palestine in disgrace, leaving Arab and Jew to fight for the land. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. The Arabs did not eventually win, as Haj Amin had predicted, and the Israeli state did not end in disaster as Cunningham suggested it might. Israeli spokesmen regularly condemn the Mufti for his flirtation with Nazism, and have sought to demonise the Palestinians with his name. But recent research suggests that he was an Arab nationalist rather than a national socialist - his fairest biographer is a former Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank.⁴

The Mufti died in Beirut in 1974, ignored and largely forgotten even in Lebanon. Among the mourners at his funeral was Yasser Arafat.

The Independent, 20 February 1999

‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’

In August, 1998, following attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam and at the height of the scandal over his affair with intern Monica Lewinski, President Bill Clinton launched a cruise missile attack on Sudan and on a base in Afghanistan at which Osama bin Laden was supposed to be living. In Khartoum, the missiles destroyed a factory which the Americans claimed was producing chemical warfare components. They later admitted that it was manufacturing medicine for Sudan’s deprived population. Several al-Qaeda supporters - including two British citizens - were killed in the Afghan raid. But bin Laden was not there.

If there is one thing that enrages the Arab world about the United States government - apart from its betrayal of the principles of the peace process, its unconditional support for Israel, its enthusiasm for sanctions that are killing thousands of Iraqi civilians and its continued presence in Saudi Arabia - it is the administration’s habit of telling Arabs how much it loves them.

Before every air strike, the President assures his future victims how much he admires them. Ronald Reagan told the Libyan people that America regarded them as friends - then he unleashed his bombers on Tripoli and Benghazi. George Bush waffled on about Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation and America’s friendship for ordinary Iraqis - before bombing every town and city in Iraq. And this week, as his missiles had just left their ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, there was Bill Clinton telling the people of the Middle East that Islam was one of the world’s great religions.

As my Beirut grocer put it to me yesterday - his smile as crooked as his message - ‘it’s good of Mr Clinton to tell me about my religion. It’s always nice to be informed that religion doesn’t condone murder. Thank you, Mr Clinton.’ My grocer was not being polite. Clinton’s admonition from the White House - ‘no religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children’ - came across in the Middle East as patronising as well as insulting, coming as it did from a man who is embroiled in a sex scandal. ‘That filthy man’ is how he was called by an Egyptian over the phone to me yesterday, although the Arabs have not grasped the complexities of Mr Clinton’s adventures with Miss Lewinsky (mercifully, there is no word for ‘oral sex’ in Arabic).

What was immediately grasped in the region yesterday, however, was the ease with which the Americans could once again choose an enemy without disclosing any evidence for his guilt and then turn journalists and television commentators into their cheerleaders. ‘I was so sickened by the constant use of the word “terrorism” that I turned to French radio,’ a Palestinian acquaintance told me at midday. ‘And what happened? All I heard in French was “terroristes, terroristes, terroristes”.’ He was right. Almost all the reporting out of America was based on the accuracy of the ‘compelling evidence’ - so “compelling” that we haven’t been vouchsafed a clue as to what it is - that links Osama bin Laden to the ferocious bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Several times yesterday, I had to interrupt live radio interviews to point out that the journalists in London and Washington were adopting the US government’s claims without question.

The plots in which bin Laden is now supposed to have been involved, according to the Americans, are now taking on Gone with the Wind proportions. Bin Laden, we are told, was behind not only the US embassy bombings, but also the earlier bombing of US troops in Dhahran, anti-government violence in Egypt, the 1993 New York bombing of the World Trade Center, and now - wait for it - an attempt to kill the Pope. Is this really conceivable? The fact that all this was taken at face value by so many reporters probably says as much about the state of journalism as it does about American paranoia.

The use of the word ‘terrorist’ - Arabs who murder the innocent are always ‘terrorists’ but Israeli killers who slaughter twenty-nine Palestinians in a Hebron mosque or assassinate their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, are called ‘extremists’ - is only part of the problem. ‘Terrorist’ is a word that avoids all meaning. The who and the how are of essential importance. But the ‘why’ is something the West usually prefers to avoid. Not once yesterday - not in a single press statement, press conference or interview - did a US leader or diplomat explain why the enemies of America hate America. Why is bin Laden so angry with the United States? Why - not just who and how - but why did anyone commit the terrible atrocities in Africa?

Clearly, someone blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. They may have been suicide bombers, but they must have known that they were slaughtering the innocent. Their deeds were wicked. But they were not, as one US diplomat called them, mindless. Whether or not bin Laden was involved, there was a reason for these dreadful deeds. And the reason almost certainly lies with US policy - or lack of policy - towards the Middle East. ‘How can America protect its embassies?’ a US radio station asked me last week. When I suggested it could adopt fairer policies in the region, I was admonished for not answering a question about ‘terrorism’.

For what really lies at the root of Arab reaction to the US attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan is that they come when America’s word has never been so low; when the Arab sense of betrayal has never been greater. America’s continued military presence in Saudi Arabia, its refusal to bring Israel to heel as it continues to build Jewish settlements on Arab land in violation of the Oslo agreement, its almost lip-smacking agreement to continue sanctions which are clearly culling the civilian population of Iraq; Arab fury at this catastrophe is one reason why a normally compassionate people responded with so little sympathy to the bombing of the US embassies. After all this, being lectured by Mr Clinton and then bombed by him was like getting a kick in the teeth from a man who has already stabbed you in the back.

Bin Laden or not, it is a fair and fearful bet that the embassy bombings were organised by - or at the least involved - Arabs. And the culprits should be found and brought to justice. But Cruise missiles do not represent due process, as Mr Clinton knows all too well. Talk of a massive ‘international terrorist conspiracy’ is as exotic as the perennial Arab belief in the ‘international Zionist conspiracy’. Bin Laden is protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban. But the Taliban are paid, armed and inspired by Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is supposed to be America’s best friend in the Gulf, so close an ally that US troops are still stationed there (which is, of course, bin Laden’s grouse). Could it be that powerful people in Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist and undemocratic state if ever there was one, support bin Laden and share his desire for a ‘jihad’ against America? This is one question the Americans should be asking.

Bin Laden himself was obsessed for many months with the massacre of Lebanese civilians by the Israelis at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in April 1996. Why had Clinton not condemned this ‘terrorist act’, he asked. (In fact, Bill Clinton called it a ‘tragedy’, as if it was some form of natural disaster - the Israelis said it was a ‘mistake’ but the UN concluded it wasn’t). Why had the perpetrators not been brought to justice, bin Laden wanted to know? It is odd now to compare bin Laden’s words with those of Bill Clinton just forty-eight hours ago. They talked much the same language. And now their language has grown far more ferocious. ‘The United States wants peace, not conflict,’ Clinton said. He is likely to find little peace in the Middle East for the rest of his presidency.

The Independent, 22 August 1998

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

It needed my old Irish journalist colleague Vincent Browne to point out the obvious to me. With a headache as big as Afghanistan, reading through a thousand newspaper reports on the supposed ‘aftermath’ of the Afghan war, I’d become drugged by the lies. Afghan women were free at last, ‘our’ peacekeeping force was on its way, the Taliban were crushed. Anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan had collapsed - we’ll forget my little brush with some real Afghans there a couple of weeks ago. Al-Qaeda was being ‘smoked out’ of its cave. Osama bin Laden was - well, not captured or even dead; but - well, the Americans had a videotape, incomprehensible to every Arab I’ve met, which ‘proves’ that our latest monster planned the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington.

So it needed Vincent, breathing like a steam engine as he always does when he’s angry, to point to the papers in Gemma’s, my favourite Dublin newsagents. ‘What in Christ’s sake is going on, Bob?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen the headlines of all this shite?’ and he pulled Newsweek from the shelf. The headline: ‘After The Evil’. ‘What is this biblical bollocks?’ Vincent asked me. Osama bin Laden’s overgrained, videotaped face stared from the cover of the magazine, a dark, devilish image from Dante’s circles of hell. When he captured Berlin, Stalin announced that his troops had entered ‘the lair of the fascist beast’. But the Second World War has nothing on this.

So let’s do a ‘story-so-far’. After Arab mass-murderers crashed four hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, a crime against humanity which cost more than 4,000 innocent lives, President Bush announced a crusade for infinite ‘justice’ - later downgraded to infinite freedom - and bombed Afghanistan. Using the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Northern Alliance to destroy the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Taliban, the Americans bombed bin Laden’s cave fortresses and killed hundreds of Afghan and Arab fighters, not including the prisoners executed after the Anglo-US-Northern Alliance suppression of the Mazar prison revolt.

The production of the bin Laden videotape - utterly convincing evidence of his guilt to the international press, largely, if wilfully, ignored by the Muslim world - helped to obscure the fact that Mr Evil seemed to have disappeared. It also helped to airbrush a few other facts away. We could forget that US air strikes, according to statistics compiled by a New Hampshire university professor, have now killed more innocent Afghans than the hijackers killed Westerners and others in the World Trade Center.⁵ We could forget that Mullah Omar, the mysterious leader of the Taliban, has also got away. We could ignore the fact that, save for a few brave female souls, almost all Afghan women continued to wear the burqa. We could certainly close our eyes to the massive preponderance of Northern Alliance killers represented in the new UN-supported, pro-Western government in Kabul. We could clap our hands when a mere fifty Royal Marines arrived in Afghanistan this weekend to support a UN-mandated British-led ‘peace’ force of only a few thousand men who will need the Kabul government’s permission to operate in the city and which, in numbers, will come to about one-third of the complement of the British army destroyed in the Kabul Gorge in 1842. The ‘peace’ force thinks it will have to defend humanitarian aid convoys from robbers and dissident Taliban. In fact, it will have to fight off the Northern Alliance mafia and drug-growers and warlords, as well as the vicious guerrillas sent out to strike them by bin Laden’s survivors. If nothing else, the Taliban made the roads and villages of Afghanistan safe for Afghans and foreigners alike. Now, you can scarcely drive from Kabul to Jalalabad.

Presumably, the CIA will let us pay the Alliance mobsters for their war in Afghanistan. One of the untold stories of this conflict is the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the US. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance - which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier - could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a fire-fight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province are now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. I wasn’t surprised to read that a Somali warlord is now offering his cash-for-hire services to the US for the next round of the War for Civilisation.

Fortunately for us, the civilian victims of America’s B-52s will remain unknown in their newly dug graves. Even before the war ended, around 3,700 of them - not counting Mullah Omar’s and bin Laden’s gunmen - had been ripped to pieces in our War for Civilisation. A few scattered signs of discontent - the crowd that assaulted me two weeks ago, for example, outraged at the killing of their families - can be quickly erased from the record.

It is obviously perverse to note that I haven’t met a single ordinary Muslim or, indeed, many Westerners - Pakistani, Afghan, Arab, British, French, American - who actually believe all this guff. Let’s just remember that the new Kabul government is as committed to support ‘Islam, democracy, pluralism [sic] and social justice’ as George W. Bush is to Good and the Destruction of Evil. Roll on next year, and don’t worry about bin Laden - he may be back just in time to participate in Part Two of the War for Civilisation.

The Independent, 22 December 2001

By the autumn of 2007, thousands of Western troops had been fought to a standstill outside Kandahar by a resurgent Taliban. Hamid Karzai’s Afghan ‘government’ controlled little more than its own ministries in Kabul as dozens of suicide bombers assaulted, Iraq-style, his forces and those of his Western allies.

The pit of desperation

A few days ago, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ⁶ called upon the ‘conscience’ of the American people to help the Palestinians. The Emir of Qatar went one step further in self-abasement. The Arabs, he said - and he apologised for using the word - had to ‘beg’ the United States to use its influence on the Israelis. Truly, when such words are uttered, it is the very pit of Arab desperation. Beg? Conscience? Washington may still turn down Ariel Sharon’s request to break all relations with Yasser Arafat, but President Bush has long ago forgotten his ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state - produced when he needed Arab acquiescence in the bombardment of Afghanistan but swiftly buried once it had served its purpose - and Arafat’s role now is to remember his job: to protect Israel from his own people.

From his office in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, Arafat fantasises about his derring-do during Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, but it is diffficult to underestimate the degree of shame with which many Palestinians now regard him. Last Christmas, Arafat insisted that he would march to Bethlehem to attend church services. But when the Israelis refused him permission, he merely appeared on Palestinian television and preposterously claimed that Israel’s refusal was a ‘crime’ and an act of ‘terrorism’. Why, the Arabic daily Al Quds al-Arabi asked, was there no explanation for this ‘bizarre and incomprehensible’ performance by Arafat? Why did he not march out of Ramallah with the Christian clerics who had come to give their support until physically stopped by Israeli troops in front of the television cameras? The more he talks about Israel’s ‘terrorism’, the less we examine his own record of corruption, cronyism and brutality.

In the meantime, Israel’s own mythmaking goes on apace. In New York, Shimon Peres announces the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and the arrival of 8,000 long-range missiles for Hizballah; now there hasn’t been an Iranian militiaman in Lebanon for fifteen years, and the ‘new’ missiles don’t exist⁷ - but this nonsense is reported in the US media without the slightest attempt to check the facts. The latest whopper came from Sharon.† He regretted, he said, that he had not ‘liquidated’ Arafat during the 1982 siege of Beirut, but there had been an agreement not to do so. This is rubbish; during the siege, Israeli jets five times bombed the buildings in which Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister, believed Arafat to be hiding, on two occasions destroying whole apartment blocks - along, of course, with all the civilians living in them - only minutes after Arafat had left. Again, Sharon’s untrue version of history was reported in the American press as fact.

Indeed, all the participants in the Middle East conflict are now engaged in a game of self-deception, a massive and fraudulent attempt to avoid any examination of the critical issues that lie behind the tragedy. The Saudis want to appeal to America’s ‘conscience’, not because they are upset at Arafat’s predicament but because fifteen of the 11 September hijackers were themselves Saudis. Sharon’s attempt to join in the ‘war against terror’ - the manufacturing of non-existent Iranian enemies in Lebanon, for example, along with some very real enemies in the West Bank and Gaza - is a blatant attempt to ensure American support for his crushing of the Palestinian intifada and for the continuation of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land.

Similarly, Mr Bush’s messianic claim that he is fighting ‘evil’ - ‘evil’ now apparently being a fully-fledged nation-state - and that America’s al-Qaeda enemies hate America because they are ‘against democracy’ is poppycock. Most of America’s Muslim enemies don’t know what democracy is - they have certainly never enjoyed it - and their deeds, which are indeed wicked, have motives. Mr Bush knows - and certainly his secretary of state, Colin Powell, does - that there is an intimate link between the crimes against humanity of 11 September and the Middle East. After all, the killers were all Arabs, they wrote and spoke Arabic, they came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. This much we are allowed to reflect upon.

But the moment anyone takes the next logical step and looks at the Arab world itself, we tread on forbidden territory. For any analysis of the current Middle East will encounter injustice and violence and death, often the result - directly or indirectly - of the policies of the United States and its regional allies (Arab as well as Israeli). At this point, all discussion must cease. Because if America’s own involvement in the region - its unconditional support for Israel, its acquiescence in the Jewish colonisation of Arab land, the sanctions against Iraq that have killed so many tens of thousands of children - and the very lack of that democracy that Bush thinks is under attack suggest that America’s own actions might have something to do with the rage and fury that generated the mass murders of 11 September, then we are on very dangerous territory indeed.

And oddly, the Arab regimes go along with all this. The Arab people do not - they know full well what lies behind the dreadful deeds of 11 September - but the leadership has to pretend ignorance. It supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then asks - begs - America to recognise a difference between ‘terrorism’ and ‘national resistance’. The Saudis wilfully ignore the implications of their own citizens’ involvement, howling instead about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Saudi Arabia. Arafat says he supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then - let us not kid ourselves - permits his acolytes to try a gun-running operation on the Karine A.⁸ And Sharon, hopelessly unable to protect his people from the cruel Palestinian suicide bombers, concentrates on presenting the intifada as ‘world terror’ rather than the nationalist uprising that it represents. After all, if it’s about nationalism, it’s also about Israeli occupation and, like American policy in the region, that is not to be discussed.

At the end of next month, the Arab presidents and princes are to hold a summit in Beirut. They will issue ringing declarations of support for the Palestinians and almost equally earnest support for a war against ‘terrorism’. They cannot criticise US policy, however outrageous they believe it to be, because they are almost all beholden to it. So they will appeal again to America’s conscience. And they will do what the Emir of Qatar did a few days ago. They will beg. And they will get nothing.

The Independent, 14 February 2002

At the March 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, Saudi Arabia offered Israel recognition by the Arab states, including peace agreements and normalisation, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war, a ‘just solution’ to the Palestinian refugee problem and recognition of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel rejected the proposal. Washington showed no interest.

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

In the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults on the US, Israel tried to bind its continuing colonial war with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians into the same narrative. Israeli diplomats referred to Arafat - transmogrified from ‘super-terrorist’ to ‘super-statesman’ under the Oslo agreement - as ‘our bin Laden’ in the hope that Americans would see Israel’s conflict with its colonised Arabs as part of the same battle against ‘terrorism’ that George W. Bush thought he was fighting.

How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past twenty-four hours. ‘Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.’ That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, Sharon’s killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this. No, of course he doesn’t send the bombers off on their cruel missions to restaurants and supermarkets. But he does know that every suicide bombing destroys Sharon’s credibility and proves that the Israeli leader’s promises of security are false. Arafat is well aware that the ferocious bombers are serving his purpose - however much he may condemn them in public.

But he - like Sharon - also believes his enemies can be broken by fire. He thinks that the Israelis can be frightened into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. Ultimately, the Israelis probably will have to give up their occupation. But the Jews of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition. Even if Sharon is voted out of power - a prospect for which many Israelis pray - the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out of fear of the suicide bomber.

Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys’, while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as ‘serpents’, ‘crocodiles’, ‘beasts’ and ‘cockroaches’. Now we have an Israeli officer - according to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv - advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. ‘If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even - shocking though this might appear - to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.’

Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans - which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?

Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence, in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called ‘illegal combatants’ and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory - and then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other ‘fronts’ in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by ‘terrorists’. Washington has also said that its intelligence agencies - the heroes who failed to discover the 11 September plot - have proof (undisclosed, of course) that Arafat has ‘a new alliance’ with Iran, which brings the Palestinians into the ‘axis of evil’.

Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. ‘Contacts and linkages’ have been established, he told us. And that’s what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qaeda and Iraq towards America and Saudi Arabia ‘suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible’. ‘Suggests?’ ‘Possible?’ Is that what Mr Tenet calls proof?

But now everyone is cashing in on the ‘war against terror’. When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce that they are participating in the global ‘war on terror’. When Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the ‘war on terror’. When Israel fires at Arafat’s headquarters, it says it is participating in the ‘war on terror’. Must we all be hijacked into America’s dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September? Must this vile war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?

The Independent, 30 March 2002

George Tenet resigned as CIA director on 3 June 2004, to be replaced by former Soviet analyst Robert Gates, who had joined the intelligence organisation while still a student at Indiana University.

‘You are not welcome’

President George W. Bush addressed the German Bundestag on 23 May 2002.

So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin - his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, ‘Hitler’ being the pathetic Arafat - have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday - and, for the most part, in respectful silence - was extraordinary. Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? ‘He’s a dictator who gassed his own people,’ Bush reminded us of Saddam Hussein for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam’s side.

But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to lean on the northern bit of the ‘axis of evil’, the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Bush’s rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West’s enemies hated ‘justice and democracy’, even though most of America’s Muslim enemies wouldn’t know what democracy was.

In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts - note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America’s ever weirder ‘war on terror’ - and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous ‘national security adviser’, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you’ll find they’ve issued more threats against Americans than bin Laden. But let’s get to the point. The growing evidence that Israel’s policies are America’s policies in the Middle East - or, more accurately, vice versa - is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizballah - the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel’s demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 - is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network ‘revealing’ that Hizballah, Hamas and al-Qaeda have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.

American journalists insist on quoting ‘sources’ but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the ‘Syrian Accountability Act’ that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel’s friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘operate freely’ on the southern Lebanese border. And I repeat: there haven’t been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon - let alone the south of the country - for fifteen years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?

Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat - its ‘terrorism’ status has been heightened by the State Department - and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister held personally responsible by Israel’s own inquiry for the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is - according to Mr Bush - ‘a man of peace’. How much further can this go? A long way, I fear. The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don’t come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US consul Roberto Powers out of her husband’s downtown restaurant on 7 April. ‘I went over to him,’ she said, ‘and told him, “Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome - please get out”.’ Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.

How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistani president Musharraf for his support in the ‘war on terror’, but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial ‘referendum’ to keep him in power. America’s enemies, remember, hate the US for its ‘democracy’. So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan’s importance in the famous ‘war on terror’ - or ‘war for civilisation’ as, we should remember, it was originally called - is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I’ll wager a lot that Washington will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.

Now here’s pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no one would have believed them. ‘We would have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and Muslims,’ he wrote. And rightly so. But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs greatly fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want: to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East. Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.

The Independent, 25 May 2002

Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action

I have always been a sucker for wide-screen epics. Ever since my dad took me to see Quo Vadis - which ends with centurion Robert Taylor heading off to his execution with his bride on his arm - I’ve been on the movie roller-coaster. My dad didn’t make a great distinction between the big pictures and B-movies; he managed to squeeze Hercules Unchained in between Ben Hur and Spartacus. But the extraordinary suspension of disbelief provided by the cinema carried me right through to Titanic, Pearl Harbor and Gladiator. Awful they may be. Spectacular they are.

Yet the important thing, as my dad used to tell me, was to remember that the cinema did not really imitate reality. Newly converted Christian centurions did not go so blithely to their deaths, nor did love reign supreme on the Titanic. The fighter pilots of Pearl Harbor did not perform so heroically, nor did wicked Roman emperors die so young. From John Wayne’s The Green Berets, war films have lied to us about life and death. After the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington last September, I suppose it was inevitable that the Pentagon and the CIA would call on Hollywood for ideas - yes, the movie boys actually did go to Washington to do a little synergy with the local princes of darkness. But when Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld turned up together for the premiere of Black Hawk Down, I began to get worried.

After all, if the Bush administration is so keen on war, it better work out the difference between Hollywood and the real thing. Yet what we’ve been getting is a movie version of reality, a work of fiction to justify the prospect of ‘war without end’. It started, of course, with all the drivel about ‘crusades’ and ‘war against terror’ and ‘war against evil’, the now famous ‘they hate us because we are a democracy’, the ‘axis of evil’ and most recently - it would be outlandishly funny if this trash hadn’t come from the Rand Corporation - the ‘kernel of evil’. The latter, by the way, is supposed to be Saudi Arabia, but it might just as well have been Iran, Iraq, Syria or anywhere west of the Pecos. Along with this tosh, history is being falsified. Even a crime movie supplies a motive for the crime, but after 11 September Bush Productions would allow no motives to be discussed. The identity and religion of the perpetrators was permissible information: they were Arabs, Muslims. But the moment any of us suggested glancing towards the area from which these Arabs came - an area rich in injustice, oppression, occupation and UN-sanctioned child death - we were subjected to a campaign of calumny.

As Bush’s regional enemies grew in number to include not just al-Qaeda but Iraq and Iran and their allies, a fabric of stories began to be woven. Last June, for example, we had Donald Rumsfeld spinning tales about Iran. At a press conference in Qatar - these lies can be spun, please note, just as well in the Arab world as in the West - Rumsfeld told us that Iranians ‘are engaging in terrorist activities and transporting people down through Damascus and into the Bekaa Valley. They have harboured al-Qaeda and served as a facilitator for the movement of al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan down through Iran.’ Now the implication of all this is that al-Qaeda men were being funnelled into Lebanon with the help of Iran and Syria. Yet we know that Iran, far from ‘transporting’ al-Qaeda men to Syria, has been packing them off to Saudi Arabia for imprisonment and possible death. We know that the Syrians have locked up an important al-Qaeda official. The Americans have since acknowledged all this. And, save for ten Lebanese men hiding in a Palestinian camp - who may have no contact with al-Qaeda - there isn’t a single Osama bin Laden follower in Lebanon.⁹

So Hizballah had to be lined up for attack. The Washington Post did the trick with the following last month: ‘The Lebanon-based Hezbollah organisation, one of the world’s most formidable terrorist groups, is increasingly teaming up with al-Qa’ida on logistics and training for terrorist operations, according to US and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.’ This tomfoolery was abetted by Steven Simon, who once worked for the US National Security Council and who announced that ‘there’s a convergence of objectives. There’s something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now.’ Except, of course - zeitgeist notwithstanding - it is simply untrue. The Washington Post had already lined up the Palestinians as America’s enemies - again, ‘terrorism experts’ were the source of this story - by telling its readers in May that ‘the sheer number of suicide belt-bombers attacking Israel this spring has increased fear among terrorism experts that the tactic will be exported to the United States.’

A similar theme was originally used to set up Saddam Hussein as an al-Qaeda ally. Back in March, George Tenet, the CIA director, stated that Baghdad ‘has also had contacts with al-Qaeda’, although he somewhat diluted this bald statement by adding that ‘the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible.’ Note the discrepancy here between ‘has also had contacts’ and ‘is possible’. On the West Bank, Rumsfeld has already talked about the ‘so-called occupied’ territories, a step down from William Safire’s outrageous column in the New York Times last March in which he admonished us not to call the occupied territories occupied. ‘To call them “occupied” reveals a prejudice against Israel’s right to what were supposed to be “secure and defensible” borders,’ he wrote. Now we have Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, telling us that ‘Arafat is somebody who failed to lead when he had a chance. Ehud Barak gave him a terrific opportunity to lead. And what did they get in return? Arafat started the second intifada instead and rejected that offered hand of friendship.’

Now it’s true that Ms Rice’s knowledge of the Middle East gets dimmer by the week, but this palpable falsification is now the Washington ‘line’. No mention, you’ll note, that Arafat was supposed to ‘lead’ by accepting Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, no mention of a ‘right of return’ for a single refugee, of the settlements built illegally outside east Jerusalem, of the ten-mile-wide Israeli buffer zone round ‘Palestine’, of scarcely 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine under negotiation to be given to Palestinians.

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on. It’s not just al-Qaeda who are the ‘enemy’. It’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia. Bush Productions are setting up the Arab world. We are being prepared for a wide-screen epic, a spectacle supported by Hollywood fiction and a plot of lies. Alas, my dad is no longer with us to remind them all that cinema does not imitate reality, that war films lie about life and death.

The Independent, 17 August 2002

‘Our guys may kick them around a little . . .’

I think I’m getting the picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make a bomb a year, and President Bush says it’s ‘a diplomatic issue’. Iraq hands over a 12,000-page account of its weapons production and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country, and - after they’ve found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals in 230 raids - President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America, has not disarmed and may have to be invaded. So that’s it, then.

How, readers keep asking me in the most eloquent of letters, does he get away with it? Indeed, how does Tony Blair get away with it? Not long ago in the House of Commons, our dear prime minister was announcing in his usual schoolmasterly tones - the ones used on particularly inattentive or dim boys in class - that Saddam’s factories of mass destruction were ‘up [pause] and running [pause] now’. But the Dear Leader in Pyongyang does have factories that are up [pause] and running [pause] now. And Tony Blair is silent.

Why do we tolerate this? Why do Americans? Over the past few days there has been just the smallest of hints that the American media - the biggest and most culpable backer of the White House’s campaign of mendacity - has been, ever so timidly, asking a few questions. Months after The Independent first began to draw its readers’ attention to Donald Rumsfeld’s chummy personal visits to Saddam in Baghdad at the height of Iraq’s use of poison gas against Iran in 1983, the Washington Post has at last decided to tell its own readers a bit of what was going on. Reporter Michael Dobbs included the usual weasel clauses (‘opinions differ among Middle East experts . . . whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction’), but the thrust is there: we created the monster and Mr Rumsfeld played his part in doing so.

But no American - or British - newspaper has dared to investigate another, almost equally dangerous, relationship that the present US administration is forging behind our backs: with the military-supported regime in Algeria. For ten years now, one of the world’s dirtiest wars has been fought out in this country, supposedly between ‘Islamists’ and ‘security forces’, in which almost 200,000 people - mostly civilians - have been killed. But over the past five years there has been growing evidence that elements of those same security forces were involved in some of the bloodiest massacres, including the throat-cutting of babies. The Independent has published the most detailed reports of Algerian police torture and of the extrajudicial executions of women as well as men. Yet the US, as part of its obscene ‘war on terror’, has cosied up to the Algerian regime. It is helping to rearm Algeria’s army and promised more assistance. William Burns, the US assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, announced that Washington ‘has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism’.

And he’s right. The Algerian security forces can instruct the Americans on how to make a male or female prisoner believe that they are going to suffocate. The method - US personnel can find the experts in this particular torture technique working in the basement of the Châteauneuf police station in central Algiers - is to cover the trussed-up victim’s mouth with a rag and then soak it with cleaning fluid.¹⁰ The prisoner slowly suffocates. There’s also the usual nail-pulling and the usual wires attached to penises and vaginas and - I’ll always remember the eyewitness description - the rape of an old woman in a police station, from which she emerged, covered in blood, urging other prisoners to resist.

Some of the witnesses to these abominations were Algerian police officers who had sought sanctuary in London. But rest assured, Mr Burns is right, America has much to learn from the Algerians. Already, for example - don’t ask why this never reached the newspapers - the Algerian army chief of staff has been warmly welcomed at Nato’s southern command headquarters at Naples. And the Americans are learning. A national security official attached to the CIA divulged last month that when it came to prisoners, ‘Our guys may kick them around a little in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath’. Another US ‘national security’ official announced that ‘pain control in wounded patients is a very subjective thing’. But let’s be fair. The Americans may have learned this wickedness from the Algerians. They could just as well have learned it from the Taliban.

Meanwhile, inside the US, the profiling of Muslims goes on apace. On 17 November, thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Bahrainis, Eritreans, Lebanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, Somalis, Tunisians, Yemenis and Emiratis turned up at federal offices to be fingerprinted. The New York Times - the most chicken of all the American papers in covering the post-9/11 story - revealed (only in paragraph 5 of its report, of course) that ‘over the past week, agency officials . . . have handcuffed and detained hundreds of men who showed up to be finger-printed. In some cases the men had expired student or work visas; in other cases, the men could not provide adequate documentation of their immigration status.’ In Los Angeles, the cops ran out of plastic handcuffs as they herded men off to the lockup. Of the 1,000 men arrested without trial or charges after 11 September, many were native-born Americans.

Indeed, many Americans don’t even know what the chilling acronym of the ‘US Patriot Act’ even stands for. ‘Patriot’ is not a reference to patriotism. The name stands for the ‘United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’. America’s $200 m ‘Total Awareness Program’ will permit the US government to monitor citizens’ e-mail and internet activity and collect data on the movement of all Americans. And although we have not been told about this by our journalists, the US administration is now pestering European governments for the contents of their own citizens’ data files. The most recent - and most preposterous - of these claims came in a US demand for access to the computer records of the French national airline, Air France, so that it could ‘profile’ thousands of its passengers. All this is beyond the wildest dreams of Saddam and the Dear Leader Kim.

The new rules even worm their way into academia. Take the friendly little university of Purdue in Indiana, where I lectured a few weeks ago. With federal funds, it’s now setting up an ‘Institute for Homeland Security’, whose eighteen ‘experts’ will include executives from Boeing and Hewlett-Packard and US Defense and State Department officials, to organise ‘research programmes’ around ‘critical mission areas’. What, I wonder, are these areas to be? Surely nothing to do with injustice in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the presence of thousands of US troops on Muslim lands. After all, it was Richard Perle, the most sinister of George Bush’s pro-Israeli advisers, who stated last year that ‘terrorism must be decontextualised’.

Meanwhile, we are - on that very basis - ploughing on to war in Iraq, which has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does not have oil. And our leaders are getting away with it. In doing so, we are threatening the innocent, torturing our prisoners and ‘learning’ from men who should be in the dock for war crimes. This, then, is our true memorial to the men and women so cruelly murdered in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.

The Independent, 4 January 2003

The wind from the East

I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from Maan - the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan - sat around me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging me to eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past hundred years that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers until an old man replied. ‘The Americans eat us now,’ he said.

Through the open door, where rain splashed on the paving stones, a sharp wind howled in from the east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil. Indeed, every Arab I’ve met in the past six months believes that this - and this alone - explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world’s total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week, ‘US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many other non-Opec fields are beginning to run dry. The bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region.’ No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is based on the increasing consumption of oil. Some 70 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve to oil production - the number of years that reserves of oil will last at current production rates - compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1. In Kuwait, it’s 116:1. But in Iraq it’s 526:1. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Even if Donald Rumsfeld’s hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 didn’t show how little the present master of the Pentagon cares about human rights or crimes against humanity, along comes Joost Hilterman’s analysis of what was really going on in the Pentagon back in the late 1980s. Hilterman, who is preparing a book on the US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified US government documents, only to discover that after Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that’s well over twice the total of the World Trade Center dead of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out to defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the atrocity. A newly declassified State Department document proves that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon - who had all along backed Saddam - and states that US diplomats received instructions to push the line of Iran’s culpability, but not to discuss details. No details, of course, because the story was a lie. This, remember, followed five years after US National Security Decision Directive 114 - concluded in 1983, the same year as Rumsfeld’s friendly visit to Baghdad - gave formal sanction to billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Baghdad. And this forthcoming war is about human rights?

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men - most involved in the oil business - created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding ‘regime change’ in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that ‘we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power’. The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s under-secretary at the State Department - who called last year for America to take up its ‘blood debt’ with the Lebanese Hizballah. They also included Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence, currently chairman of the defence science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan - where Unocal once tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory - and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a special Bush official for Iraq.

The signatories also included our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill. So this forthcoming war - the whole shooting match, along with that concern for ‘vital interests’ (i.e. oil) in the Gulf - was concocted five years ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured fingertips.

In fact, I’m getting heartily sick of hearing the Second World War being dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It’s not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the appeasement of the no-war-in-Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush’s whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korean regime - the ‘excellent’ talks which US diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader’s Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass destruction - reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence to go to war: eleven empty chemical warheads that just may be twenty years old.

The world went to war eighty-eight years ago because an archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world went to war sixty-three years ago because a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But for eleven empty warheads? Give me oil any day. Even the old men sitting around the feast of mutton and rice would agree with that.

The Independent, 18 January 2003