THE AGE (Australia)
Sunday 23 August 1998

The REAL evil empire

By JOHN PILGER

IT doesn't matter whether or not President Clinton fired his missiles in order to distract attention from his troubles with Monica Lewinsky. He would have done it, anyway. Apart from the assured loss of innocent lives in faraway, impoverished countries, it is our informed reaction that matters now.

We have been through this many times before, with the lies echoed predictably from London and Canberra and by too many of those of us paid to keep the public record straight. "Evil" is the word they use about the terrorists. It was Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's word, and George Bush's and John Major's, and is now Bill Clinton's and Tony Blair's word. In 1986, there was the "evil" Colonel Gaddafi, whose country President Reagan bombed from bases in Britain, killing mostly women and children, including Gaddafi's 16-month-old daughter. In 1990, there was the "evil" General Noriega, said to be a dangerous drugs trafficker, whose capture by US Marines required a full-scale invasion of his country and the death by bombing of at least 2000 Panamanians, mainly the poorest of the poor in their barrios. Noriega and drugs had precious little to do with it. President Bush had been director of the CIA when Noriega was their man; and drugs have long been a CIA currency. The aim was to put Panama, its canal and its US base under direct American sovereignty, managed by other Noriegas.

In the same year, there was, as George Bush put it, "the truly evil" Saddam Hussein, another one of his and Reagan's old pals, whose regional adventures they had armed and backed (along with Margaret Thatcher, who sent most of her cabinet to Baghdad as supplicants or arms salesmen). Saddam's use of American and British weapons in his attack on the "evil" mullahs in Iran in 1980 was perfectly acceptable; a million people died in that "forgotten" war, and the American and British arms industries never looked back.

Alas, Saddam, the nominal victor, then attacked another country, the wrong country, Kuwait, which is effectively an Anglo-American oil protectorate. He was clearly unreliable: "an uppity bastard", as one State Department briefer described him more in sorrow than anger. Punishing the uppity bastard cost as many as a quarter of a million Iraqi lives, according to a study by the Medical Educational Trust. These were ordinary Iraqis who died during and immediately after a period of carnage whose true scale was never appreciated outside the Middle East.

This old fashioned colonial massacre was known as the Gulf war. The dead included thousands of Kurdish and Shi'a people who were Saddam's bitter opponents and whom Bush had called upon to rise up against their oppressor. Long after it was over, New York Newsday revealed, from official sources, that three brigades of the US 1st Mechanised Infantry Division - "the Big Red One" - had used snow plows mounted on tanks to bury alive Iraqi conscripts in more than 100 kilometres of trenches. A brigade commander, Colonel Anthony Moreno, said, "For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

These were mostly soldiers on the verge of surrender or in retreat; others were hunted down by American helicopter gunships whose bored crews described "shooting fish in a barrel". According to the Geneva Convention, these are war crimes.

Yep. Clinton's hardly a saint, eh?

Not nearly as bad as Bush, though.

Don't think really any American president is much of a saint, except Kennedy... And Lincoln.

Find it funny how they kill the good ones.

Kennedy was sort of a prick, too. Needlessly dragging the world to the brink of WWIII.