Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Letter To The Guardian... posted by Richard Seymour
Someone has fired off a rather brilliant response to Ann Clwyd's Guardian article today. The Grauniad probably won't publish it, but as it's already on the MediaLens message board, I'll publish it myself:Sir,
Ann Clwyd’s apparent sincerity is fatally undermined by her either naïve or mendacious elision of western complicity in Saddam’s atrocities.
Her lament, that the west should have acted sooner, belies the reality that the US and UK did act: they consistently provided financial aid, military intelligence, and planning advice to Saddam, while fully aware that he was using chemical weapons against Iran. As one insider recounted, the Pentagon ‘wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas. It was just another way of killing people — whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference.’ (NYT 18/08/2002). Reagan blocked the US Senate from punishing Iraq for violating the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons and, after Halabja, the US refused to pressure its client to cooperate with UN investigators (The Nation, 26/08/2002). ‘The U.S.-Iraqi relationship,’ wrote Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy at the time, ‘is ... important to our long-term political and economic objectives’ (Washington Post, 30/12/2002). Likewise, those mass graves of Marsh Arabs were filled with US and UK help; since we disarmed rebelling generals and allowed Iraqi forces to pass through allied lines and massacre the Shi’a, rather than let them overthrow Saddam (Spectator, 10/08/1991) .
Finally, Clwyd may ‘understand’ that a war crimes tribunal for Iraq was blocked by China, Russia, and France, but she is wrong. The US officially anticipated that such moves would be blocked but this was never tested and is hardly plausible, given that Russia, for example, never vetoed such moves against Serbia – its former close ally.
Ann Clwyd may genuinely care but, if she wants to be seen as anything other than Blair’s ‘useful idiot’, she must condemn our own crimes as well as those of Saddam.
10:13:00 pm |
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