Evading the Invasion
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 7 October
Who’s being invaded by whom?
From the headlines in Britain’s most popular newspapers, and statements from politicians, not least government ministers, you’d think the country was about to be swamped by an alien horde, a wave of immigrants threatening its culture, public services and safety.
In his speech to the ruling Labour party’s annual conference – one of the set-pieces of the British political calendar – new prime minister Gordon Brown used the words “Britain” and “British” more than eighty times (including the dubious soundbite “British jobs for British workers”), while Iraq and Afghanistan each received no more than a single passing reference.
It was a prime example of the insidious unreality that pervades the conduct of both the war abroad and the war at home. As anyone acquainted with daily life in Britain knows, the country is dependent on immigrants for essential services, not least health care, as well as cheap labour in construction and agriculture. Britain is also, of course, a massive recipient, globally and historically, of benefits from overseas. Despite the numbers that have entered in recent years, Britain still does not admit its proportionate share of those seeking to exercise their human right of refuge from repression and violence. Instead, our press and politicians depict them as importers of alien values, bearers of the plagues of fundamentalism and terrorism.
It is now British policy to deport asylum seekers back to Iraq and Afghanistan, places British-US invasions have made among the most unsafe in the world. Ministers and immigrant-baiters alike appear impervious to the irony.
Despite our supposed great leap forward in global communications, Iraq and Afghanistan are among the most poorly reported conflicts in living memory. At least 112 journalists have been killed in Iraq (more than in the Vietnam war). Hardly any reporters venture outside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad unless they are “embedded” with occupying troops. As a result the reality of invasion is obscured. There is a vague apprehension that violence, presumed to be sectarian or criminal, has engulfed the country, and that “we” can’t do much about it.
This reflects not only the absence of on-the-scenes reportage, but also the enslavement of the British and US media to the myths of Western beneficence. No one doubts or denies that “mistakes” have been made in Iraq; the war may even, as many pundits assert, constitute a “debacle”. But rarely is this tragedy traced to the source that gave it birth and sustains it to this day: the imperatives of vested interests and imperial presumptions.
When, earlier this year, Bush’s “surge” brought 30,000 additional US troops on to the streets of Baghdad and other restive areas, this was not portrayed as an act of violence but an attempt to stop violence. In fact, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the surge resulted in the displacement of another 600,000 Iraqis from their homes; one opinion poll showed 70% of Iraqis thought the “surge” had made them less secure.
The single most shamefully under-reported reality of Iraq is the death toll – and our role in it. A recent report by the firm Opinion Research Business (ORB) says that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion of 2003. That extends and confirms the findings of a survey published last year in The Lancet, a widely respected medical journal, that estimated the dead at 655,000 – at least 30% of them at the hands of occupying forces. The ORB report indicates that most violent deaths are from gunshot wounds (not suicide bombers) and most occur outside Baghdad (and therefore go unreported).
Though these figures are grounded in research and have been supported by independent experts, they are scarcely mentioned in the British media and when they are, their credibility is doubted. (Surely “we” could not have perpetrated this sort of atrocity? Numbers like these belong to places like Rwanda). Nonetheless, facts about the horror in Iraq do leak through, though you might miss them if you blink while watching the BBC. 2.2 million out of population of 27 million have fled the country; another 1.9 million are internally displaced. According to the charity Oxfam, 28% of Iraqi children are now malnourished, compared to 19% before the invasion. 43% of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty”. Half the population is unemployed. 70% are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% in 2003.
Although Iraq today is the site of many conflicts, the core contest remains that between the occupying forces and Iraqis resisting them. US aircraft dropped five times as many bombs and missiles (437 in total) in Iraq during the first six months of this year as in the first half of 2006. In June, attacks on US and allied forces were up to 177.8 per day (about one fifth of which were roadside bombs), the highest since 2003.
Opinion polls in both Britain and the US continue to show majorities favouring withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Partly because of the veil that has been drawn over the ugliness of occupation, these majorities are, however, neither impassioned nor active. Crucially, they are politically dispossessed. The Democrats owed their victory in the November 2006 mid-term elections to discontent over Iraq; but since then they have dismally failed to restrain Bush’s war or push US withdrawal one step closer. In Britain, if there is a general election in the coming months, as rumoured, Iraq will not be among the issues. The elite consensus here – that withdrawal is not an acceptable option – is shared by Labour and Conservative, which will keep the matter safely distant from the ballot box.
What’s behind this sclerosis of democracy, this continuing pursuit of draining, unpopular, apparently unwinnable wars? A significant clue can be found in the recent announcement from BAE, one of Britain’s largest corporations, that profits this year would double to more than ?500 million, thanks largely to Iraq and Afghanistan. However costly for others, these conflicts have proved immensely profitable for British and US security and defence contractors. If the new foreign investor friendly oil law – designed by and for multinationals, with the assistance of British and US governments – is ensconced in Iraq, two giant British businesses, BP and Shell, are poised to join the massive plunder.
As Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, observed in his recently published memoirs, “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war was largely about oil.” What is common sense nearly everywhere is treated as far-fetched conspiracy theory by the mainstream media in Britain and the US. For Iraqis, however, it is lived experience. Which is why, also under-reported to the point of oblivion, opposition to the oil law has proved widespread and stubborn. Unions, academics, civil society and religious organisations as well as political parties have joined forces, across those boundaries that are said to have made Iraq ungovernable or unsustainable. Behind them, opinion polls indicate, are the majority of Iraqis, who strongly favour retaining control of the nation’s oil wealth, and for whom the oil law is confirmation that the invasion was never intended for their benefit.
