August 6 And The Barbarians Of The Dark Ages
Every death is a tragedy to be mourned. August 6 marked the 60th anniversary of the agonizing deaths of 140,000 Japanese people in the city of Hiroshima. In her article, ‘Eight Hundred Metres From The Hypocentre,’ Yamaoka Michiko described her experience as a fifteen year-old high school student:
“My clothes were burnt and so was my skin. I was in rags. I had braided my hair, but now it was like a lion’s mane. There were people, barely breathing, trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape. The scene I saw was a living hell.” (Michiko, in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove eds., Voices of a People’s History, Seven Stories, 2004, p.365)
The deliberate targeting of civilians in war is deemed a heinous crime by most sane people. Few would seek to justify the incineration and dismemberment of 52 civilians in London on July 7 on the grounds that, as Bush and Blair insist, it was an engagement in the “war on terror”. Who, then, would seek to justify the burning to death of an entire city of civilians in Hiroshima, the equivalent of nearly 2,700 July 7 attacks? Most journalists, it turns out.
The BBC reported blandly:
“There is continuing controversy over whether the bomb constituted a war crime, but many commentators believe the US attack helped bring an early end to World War II in the Pacific.” (‘Hiroshima remembers atomic bomb,’ August 6, 2005; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4748027.stm)
In a Daily Mail article with the obscene title, ‘Why this was a good day for mankind,’ Andrew Kenny wrote of the bombing:
“Was US President Harry Truman right to drop it? I have no doubt he was. However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese. All British combatants in World War II that I have ever spoken to, including my parents, described the same reaction when they heard of the Hiroshima bomb: tremendous relief.” (Kenny, ‘Why this was a good day for mankind,’ Daily Mail, July 30, 2005)
How suddenly black and white the choices, how obviously necessary the evil, how readily the shoulders shrug, when the incinerated infants, pregnant women, hospitalised, infirm and aged are labelled with a different nationality to our own. But suffering has no nationality and nor does compassion.
Kenny is presumably unaware that president Truman’s chief of staff, admiral William D. Leahy, wrote that using the “barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons”. He lamented that the US government “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages”. (Quoted, Anthony Gregory, ‘Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ August 6, 2004, http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp)
The US Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war, came to this conclusion:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” (Quoted, Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, Seven Stories, 1997, p.350)
In 1963, former US president Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. (Gregory, op. cit)
Brigadier general Carter Clarke, the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables for president Truman and his advisors, commented:
“…when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.” (Gregory, ibid)
Only one of these quotations appeared anywhere in the UK national press over the last six months (Eisenhower’s in the Independent).
Robin Cook – Ethical Revolutionary?
August 6 also saw the untimely death of former foreign secretary Robin Cook. This tragedy “provoked reminiscences and appreciations of a kind usually reserved for a head of state or former prime minister“, the New Statesman observed. (Leader, ‘That missing voice of the future,’ New Statesman, August 15, 2005)
This was true enough, with one important caveat. Cook’s death provoked the kind of reminiscences reserved for +favoured+ heads of state and allies of the West, not for the heads of “rogue states”, or for leaders of the vast mass of “unpeople” in the Third World. Death among the former is deemed particularly tragic – sufficiently so, indeed, to preclude honest analysis and critical thought as unacceptable breaches of taste.
Even the most basic standards of honesty were unthinkable when former president Ronald Reagan died in June 2004. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, presenter Gavin Esler described Reagan as “a man who was loved even by his political opponents in this country [America] and abroad“. (Esler, Newsnight, June 9, 2004)
In a Leader entitled, ‘A rose-tinted president,’ the Guardian editors wrote:
“What is beyond doubt is that Mr Reagan made America feel good about itself again. He was… ‘the first truly cheerful conservative‘. He gave American conservatism a humanity and hope that it never had in the Goldwater or Nixon eras.” (Leader, ‘A rose-tinted president,’ The Guardian, June 7, 2004)
This was an interesting, but hardly sane, comment on a man who had brought unimaginable suffering to Latin America, among other places. (See our two-part Media Alert: Reagan Visions Part 1 and Reagan Visions Part 2)
Tony Blair’s New Labour project has always been about selling a ruthless, right-wing corporate agenda as something called “centre-left” politics. A founding architect of this deceptive strategy was Robin Cook. As Blair took office in 1997, Cook famously promised a new, ethical foreign policy:
“We will not permit the sale of arms to regimes that might use them for internal repression or international aggression.” (Quoted, Ian Black, ‘Cook gives ethics priority,’ The Guardian, May 13, 1997)
This would be part of New Labour’s determination to do nothing less than “put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy,” Cook claimed. (Ibid)
This was a hugely influential component of Blair’s “new dawn” of enlightened politics, one that would indeed have represented a revolutionary departure from tradition. The historical record shows that since 1945 Conservative and Labour governments have pursued almost identical foreign policies, with all consistently subordinating human rights to profit and power.
Cook was the ideal person to sell Blair’s ‘vision’. In 1978, a young Robin Cook had lambasted the British arms trade, noting that “it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries”. (Quoted, John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.140)
He added:
“The current sale of [British] Hawk aircraft to Indonesia is particularly disturbing as the purchasing regime is not only repressive but actually at war on two fronts” in East Timor and West Papua. And as the Hawk could “carry a weapon load of 5,600 lb no one need pretend that such a plane will not have a devastating potential against secessionist movements who have no air cover of their own”. (Ibid, p.140 and 141)
These were admirable comments – armed by Britain and the United States, the Indonesian government was in the process of committing genocide in East Timor. It was a slaughter that would eventually claim the lives of 200,000 people, or one-third of the population.
Sixteen years later, on May 11 1994, Cook was still attacking the Tory government, asking trade minister, Richard Needham, to provide “assurances“ that Hawks approved for sale would not be used in East Timor. (Ibid, p.142) Cook reminded Needham:
“He will be aware that Hawk aircraft have been observed on bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984.” (Quoted, Pilger, ‘A worse slaughter,’ New Statesman, June 1, 1999)
Remarkably, just six months later (November 17, 1994), the verbatim parliamentary report, Hansard, records Cook defending Labour’s decision to sell Hawks to the Indonesian regime under prime minister Harold Wilson. These were, after all, “trainers” Cook said, sold “on the clear understanding” that they would not be used for any other purpose. Moreover, there was no evidence “whatever“ that they had been used in East Timor. (Quoted, Pilger, Hidden Agendas, op. cit, p.142)
The difference was that in the intervening months Cook had been made shadow foreign secretary.
In September 1999, Cook continued with the same line of deception in a speech to a British audience:
“Let’s put a myth to rest. Your government has not sold weapons that would suppress democracy or freedom. We rejected every licence to Indonesia when the weapons might have been used for suppression.” (‘Robin Cook’s full speech,’ The Guardian, September 28, 1999)
Even as he spoke, three more Hawks were being delivered to Jakarta. In New Labour’s first year in office, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to Indonesia, with Blair approving eleven arms deals.
Complicity In Mass Killing
This same disconnect between lethal reality and benign propaganda is found wherever we look in Cook’s career as foreign secretary. Of Blair’s and Clinton’s assault on Serbia in 1999, he said:
“In Kosovo Europe witnessed the greatest persecution of a whole people since the days of Hitler or Stalin. We acted because the age of mass deportation and ethnic cleansing belongs to Europe‘s past.” (Cook, ibid)
This was a grotesque distortion. Following the assault, NATO sources reported that not more than 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo on all sides in the year prior to bombing. Indeed, far from averting a mass humanitarian crisis, it is clear that the NATO attack +caused+ a major escalation of killings and expulsions. The flood of refugees from Kosovo began immediately after NATO launched its attack.
Cook appears to have had sincere reservations about the results of his actions, but was willing to continue when his protests were swept aside. According to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, at one point Cook “questioned strikes on power lines affecting a large hospital in Belgrade. But the group [of US-UK political leaders] brought him around”. (Priest, ‘Bombing by Committee: France Balked at NATO Targets,’ Washington Post, September 20, 1999)
Cook said of the assault on Serbia:
“I think its [NATO’s] credibility would have been undermined if we had failed to act in this case.” (Quoted, Mark Curtis, Web Of Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p.141)
This sounds reasonable enough, until we consider the meaning of ‘credibility’ in this context. The partially declassified 1995 study of the US Strategic Command, STRATCOM, called “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence” stressed the need for credibility:
“It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed…”. It was important for potential enemies to understand “That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked” and so this “should be a part of the national persona we project.” It is “beneficial” for our strategic posture if “some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control’”. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism, Pluto Press, 1999, p.145)
The consequences are indisputable and horrific, as John Pilger observed:
“Thousands of men, women and children, including those Kosovars NATO was claiming to ‘save’, would now be alive were it not for the post-cold-war machinations of American power, egged on by Blair, [defence minister] Robertson and Cook with their few ageing Harrier aircraft and squadrons of propagandists.” (Pilger, ‘Nothing in my 30 years of reporting wars compares with the present propaganda dressed as journalism,’ New Statesman, July 12, 1999)
On January 28, 2000 Cook commented on the ferocious Russian oppression of the Chechen people in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs:
“Russian conduct in Chechnya is unacceptable and has produced grave humanitarian suffering. Nor, without a political settlement, will it produce their own stated objective of defeating the terrorists.” (Quoted, Curtis, op. cit, p.163)
This rehearsed the standard official definition of “terrorists”: namely, anyone opposing the interests of the West and its allies (recall that, out of office, Cook had deemed the struggles in East Timor and West Papua “secessionist movements“). Channel 4 reported on February 23, 2000, that Cook, in talks with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov, had said he “understood” Russia’s problems in Chechnya. Cook delivered Britain’s “frank concerns” over the conflict, but said it was “equally important that we retain a relationship with Russia that enables us to work together constructively”. (Ibid, p.164)
On the same day, the Guardian covered a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report noting that at least 62 people had been killed earlier that month when 100 Russian soldiers had systematically robbed and shot civilians on the southern outskirts of the Chechen capital, Grozny, in a two-day rampage. “This is the single worst massacre of civilians that we have documented so far,” HRW commented.
‘Ethical’ blather aside, Chechnya was “quite simply, off the radar screen”, at a Foreign Office focused on promoting “British interests in and relations with Russia”, historian Mark Curtis observed. (Ibid, p.163)
Of the US-UK sanctions that claimed one million Iraqi lives, Cook said in 2000:
“We must nail the absurd claim that sanctions are responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people.” (Ibid, p.164)
The claim was anything but absurd. In February 2001, Cook justified the intensified bombing of Iraq that month:
“Saddam alone is to blame for his people’s suffering. It is a myth that UN policy prevents the delivery of food and medicines. To export most goods to Iraq – including food, medicines, agricultural and educational equipment, and water and sanitation goods – it is simply necessary to notify the UN.” (Cook, ‘Why it is in the interest of the Iraqi people to bomb Saddam,’ Daily Telegraph, February 20, 2001)
This was mendacious propaganda of the very worst kind (see our interview with former UN assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday: http://www.Media Lens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm). Politicians like Cook played a vital role in persuading the media to turn a blind eye to mass death, so keeping the awful truth from the British people at immeasurable cost to the Iraqi people.
In December 1998, Cook propagandised shamelessly on behalf of Clinton and Blair’s Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq. Cook declared in the Observer:
“I want to spell out to the people of Britain why our forces are bravely risking their lives destroying Saddam’s threat to humanity. Our objective is to achieve by military action the disarmament Saddam will not allow the UN inspectors to carry out on the ground.” (Cook, ‘Saddam under fire: “Saddam represents an extraordinary evil of terror”,’ The Observer, December 20, 1998)
This was one of the key deceptions that allowed Bush and Blair to wage war in 2003. In reality, the Desert Fox attacks were the US-UK reward for Iraq cooperating in the destruction of 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction between 1991-98, including 100% of its nuclear capability. By the time bombing began, Iraq had been “fundamentally disarmed”, according to then chief UN (Unscom) weapons inspector Scott Ritter. (Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, War On Iraq, Profile Books, 2002, p.23)
Using intelligence gained through CIA infiltration of Unscom, Desert Fox personally targeted Saddam Hussein, thus instantly destroying the inspections process. Ritter, noted that just prior to the strikes, Unscom was sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that “had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing”. (Quoted, New York Post, December 17, 1998)
Indeed the timing could not have been more personally fortuitous for Bill Clinton – the air strikes began the day before his impeachment referendum on the Monica Lewinsky affair was scheduled, and were called off two hours after the vote. US government sources had told Ritter three weeks earlier that “the two considerations on the horizon [are] Ramadan and impeachment”. (Ibid)
Hugo Young wrote in the Guardian of persuasive indications “that these really were, as most Arabs claimed, Monica’s Missiles”. (Hugo Young, ‘Britain should not act as a puppet of the US over Iraq. France doesn’t,’ The Guardian, January 28, 1999)
Young added:
“Blair and Robertson, with the old leftist Robin Cook alongside, almost embarrassed their European counterparts by the openness with which they played the role of spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon.” (Ibid)
Part 2 Will Follow
