The wartime deceptions...

[Gość: Tomasz]

Artykuł Roberta Fisk'a w "The Independent"
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=373102
Robert Fisk: The wartime
deceptions: Saddam is
Hitler and it's not about oil

27 January 2003
The Israeli writer Uri Avnery once delivered
a wickedly sharp open letter to Menachem
Begin, the Israeli prime minister who sent
his army to defeat in Lebanon. Enraged by
Begin's constant evocation of the Second
World War � likening Yasser Arafat in
Beirut to Hitler in his Berlin bunker in 1945
� Avnery entitled his letter: "Mr Prime
Minister, Hitler is Dead."
How often I have wanted to repeat his
advice to Bush and Blair. Obsessed with
their own demonisation of Saddam
Hussein, both are now reminding us of the
price of appeasement. Bush thinks that he
is the Churchill of America, refusing the
appeasement of Saddam. Now the US
ambassador to the European Union,
Rockwell Schnabel, has compared
Saddam to Hitler. "You had Hitler in Europe
and no one really did anything about him,"
Schnabel lectured the Europeans in
Brussels a week ago: "We knew he could
be dangerous but nothing was done. The
same type of person [is in Baghdad] and
it's there that our concern lies." Mr
Schnabel ended this infantile parallel by
adding unconvincingly that "this has
nothing to do with oil".
How can the sane human being react to
this pitiful stuff? One of the principal
nations which "did nothing about Hitler"
was the US, which enjoyed a profitable
period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and
most of 1941 until it was attacked by the
Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the
Churchill-Roosevelt alliance decided that it
would only accept Germany's
unconditional surrender � a demand that
shocked even Churchill when Roosevelt
suddenly announced the terms at
Casablanca � Hitler was doomed.
Not so Saddam it seems. For last week
Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of
Baghdad a way out: exile, with a suitcase
full of cash and an armful of family
members if that is what he wished. Funny,
but I don't recall Churchill or Roosevelt ever
suggesting that the Nazi führer should be
allowed to escape. Saddam is Hitler � but
then suddenly, he's not Hitler after all. He
is � said TheNew York Times � to be put
before a war crimes tribunal. But then he's
not. He can scoot off to Saudi Arabia or
Latin America. In other words, he's not
Hitler.
But even if he were, are we prepared to pay
the price of so promiscuous a war? Arabs
who admire Saddam � and there are
plenty in Jordan � believe Iraq cannot hold
out for more than a week. Some are
convinced the US 3rd Infantry Division will be in Baghdad in three days,
the British with them. It's a fair bet that hundreds, if not thousands, of
Iraqis will die. But in the civil unrest that follows, what are we going to do?
Are American and British troops to defend the homes of Baath party
officials whom the mobs want to hang?
Far more seriously, what happens after that? What do we do when Iraqis
� not ex-Baathists but anti-Saddam Iraqis � demand our withdrawal? For
be sure this will happen. In the Shia mosques of Kerbala and An Najaf,
they are not going to welcome Anglo-American forces. The Kurds will
want a price for their co-operation. A state perhaps? A federation? The
Sunnis will need our protection. They will also, in due time, demand our
withdrawal. Iraq is a tough, violent state and General Tommy Franks is no
General MacArthur.
For we will be in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of
Iraq as surely as Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And
with Saddam gone, the way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the
liberation of Iraq as another of his objectives. How easily he will be able
to slot Iraq into the fabric of American occupation across the Gulf. Are we
then ready to fight al-Qa'ida in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan
and countless other countries? It seems that the peoples of the Middle
East � and the West � realise these dangers, but that their leaders do
not, or do not want to.
Travelling to the US more than once a month, visiting Britain at the
weekend, moving around the Middle East, I have never been so struck by
the absolute, unwavering determination of so many Arabs and
Europeans and Americans to oppose a war. Did Tony Blair really need
that gloriously pertinacious student at the Labour Party meeting on Friday
to prove to him what so many Britons feel: that this proposed Iraqi war is
a lie, that the reasons for this conflict have nothing to do with weapons of
mass destruction, that Blair has no business following Bush into the
America-Israeli war? Never before have I received so many readers'
letters expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow � because
of Labour's huge majority, because of the Tory party's effective
disappearance as an opposition, because of parliamentary cynicism �
British democracy is not permitting British people to stop a war for which
most of them have nothing but contempt. From Washington's pathetic
attempt to link Saddam to al-Qa'ida, to Blair's childish "dossier" on
weapons of mass destruction, to the whole tragic farce of UN
inspections, people are just no longer fooled.
The denials that this war has anything to do with oil are as unconvincing
as Colin Powell's claim last week that Iraq's oil would be held in
trusteeship for the Iraqi people. Trusteeship was exactly what the League
of Nations offered the Levant when it allowed Britain and France to adopt
mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and Syria and Lebanon after the
First World War. Who will run the oil wells and explore Iraqi oil reserves
during this generous period of trusteeship? American companies,
perhaps? No, people are not fooled.
Take the inspectors. George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld and now, alas, Colin Powell don't want to give the inspectors
more time. Why not, for God's sake? L