12 Apr 2003 @ 13:23, by Sandi Hunter
3 articles for you to conemplate. All are important! I also suggest you visit this web site, [link]
I am not saying the Iraqi Regime was good and I am not defending it, but ALL the truth, not just what is convenient and fits into any agenda...
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The stage-managed events in Baghdad’s Firdos Square: image-making, lies and the "liberation" of Iraq
By Patrick Martin
12 April 2003
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Several photographs publicized by an antiwar web site shed light on the way the American media is manipulating images of the war in Iraq to give the false impression that the vast majority of the Iraqi people are joyfully welcoming the invasion and occupation of their country by US and British troops.
These photographs, available on the web site of Information Clearing House show that the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, given massive publicity in the US and international media April 9-10, was a stage-managed affair.
As transmitted to the world by US television and newspaper reports, the pictures from Firdos Square purported to show a mass of enthusiastic Iraqis hailing the US military and trampling on a gargantuan bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Hours of television time and pages of newspaper coverage were devoted to these pictures, with accompanying commentary comparing the scene to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the liberation of Paris in 1944.
The first photograph on the Information Clearing House site is a wide-angle shot encompassing the entire expanse of Firdos Square, rather than the narrowly focused, closely cropped framing used in the mass media. It shows that the “crowd” surrounding the statue of Saddam Hussein is anything but massive, and that the square itself has been surrounded by US Abrams tanks, cutting it off from the rest of the city.
The caption supplied by the site notes that Firdos Square is across the street from the Palestine Hotel, where most international journalists based in Baghdad are located, a fact that even the Washington Post’s TV critic noted was “either splendid luck or brilliant planning on the part of the military.” Of the 200 or so assembled, the majority were journalists and American soldiers. The BBC reported that only “dozens” of Iraqis were involved.
Who those dozens were is suggested by two additional photographs published below the wide-angle photo. They show the arrival from exile of the Pentagon’s handpicked Iraqi “leader,” Ahmed Chalabi, in Nasiriya on April 6, accompanied by several aides, and a close-up of one of the participants in the April 9 statue demolition scene in Baghdad. It is clear from the two pictures that the man celebrating “liberation” in Baghdad was one of those accompanying Chalabi into Nasiriya three days earlier.
The significance of this should be clear: those who “spontaneously” gathered in Firdos Square included Iraqi political agents of the American military, dispatched from Nasiriya to Baghdad to serve as an appropriate backdrop for the visuals desired by Bush administration spin doctors. If not “Wag the Dog,” it is at least a case of “rent a crowd.” Or, as Robert Fisk of the British newspaper the Independent described it, “the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.”
To a critical observer, the live coverage from Firdos Square had already suggested that there was less than met the eye to the scenes of universal rejoicing. Even this small and controlled crowd fell silent and muttered its disapproval when a US Marine initially draped the statue’s head with an American flag. An Iraqi onlooker supplied one of his own country’s flags, and there were cheers when this replaced the Stars and Stripes.
The Los Angeles Times quoted one Iraqi bystander who said that while some Iraqis in the square were praising Bush in English to the American media, others were denouncing the US president in Arabic. “Today I saw some people breaking this monument,” he told the Times, “but there were people—men and women—who stood there and said in Arabic: ‘Screw America, screw Bush.’ So all this is not a simple situation.”
The cynical staging of “news” and manipulation of visual images in the service of gargantuan lies is typical of both the Bush administration and the US media. It is the technique of Madison Avenue applied to the justification of a program of aggression and military conquest. In their Orwellian presentation, conquest is “liberation,” bombing is “humanitarian aid,” and seizure of the world’s second largest oil reserves is “rebuilding Iraq.”
To expose Firdos Square as outright fakery is not to say that every account of Iraqis welcoming the arrival of US or British troops is equally phony. There is no doubt that millions of Iraqis hated and feared the regime of Saddam Hussein and welcomed its end, whatever their feelings about the new regime of violence that is replacing the Ba’athist dictatorship.
But the reality is more complicated than the simplistic and cynical propaganda of the Bush administration and its media accomplices. First of all, the vast majority of Iraqis have not taken to the streets to hail the conquering armies of the US and Britain.
Indeed, as even some American media outlets have reported, since the Firdos Square episode of April 9, whatever euphoria might have existed in Baghdad has largely turned to fear and anger directed against the American occupiers. ABC News on Friday evening showed outraged citizens of Baghdad denouncing the US for unleashing chaos and a wave of killings and looting. Some were filmed shouting that the hellish conditions in the city proved that the US had come not to liberate the country, but rather to steal its oil wealth.
The first days of the invasion evoked fierce resistance from Iraqi soldiers and civilians alike, and far from precipitating a wave of emigration out of the country, the onset of the war witnessed thousands of Iraqi exiles returning from Jordan, Syria and elsewhere to stand and fight against the aggressors from the West.
American and British soldiers were not pelted with flowers, but faced heroic and death-defying armed resistance. It was only after Bush and Blair changed tactics, resorting to unrestrained bombing of civilian neighborhoods and the wholesale incineration of Iraqi troops, that this resistance was largely overcome.
By Pentagon figures, more Iraqis were killed in Baghdad on Saturday, April 5—the day of the Third Armored Division’s drive-by killing rampage through the city—than died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The total number of Iraqis killed in three weeks of war likely exceeds the 50,000 Americans killed over a 12-year period in Vietnam. This death toll is in a country whose population is less than one tenth that of the United States.
Added to this must be the long-term impact of Hussein’s repressive regime (supported by the United States government until 1990), the Iran-Iraq War, the shattering defeat in the first Persian Gulf War, and the effects of 12 years of US-imposed economic sanctions, which starved Iraqi society, causing a death toll estimated by UN aid workers at between 1 million and 1.5 million, with children accounting for over half of the victims.
The result is a society that has been physically, emotionally and morally traumatized—as demonstrated by the widespread looting, not only of targets associated with the regime, such as the homes of the Ba’athist elite, but of hospitals, educational institutions, the UNICEF feeding program, and other vital elements of Iraq’s social infrastructure.
If sections of the Iraqi people are now prepared to welcome the invading forces—and just how large remains to be determined—their motivation must be understood as a complex mixture of hatred of Hussein (not only for his repression and corruption, but for his failure to defend the country against invasion), relief at the end of bombing, hope for restoration of essential services, and, for some, the desire to curry favor with the new masters.
Far more Iraqis have lost a loved one to American bombs, missiles, tanks and guns, or to the US-led economic blockade, than have embraced American soldiers or shouted praise for George W. Bush. As the essential American purpose in Iraq becomes more evident—control of Iraq’s oil reserves and domination, in partnership with Israel, of the Middle East—there is no doubt that popular opposition to the US occupation will intensify.
The liars and image-makers in Washington and the media understand little of the historical process and its deep impact on popular consciousness. What they cannot comprehend is the deep-seated legacy of decades of struggle against colonialism and foreign domination. Whatever the broad layers of Iraqi society may think of Saddam Hussein, they retain an abiding hatred of imperialism and a determination to resist a return to colonial domination in a new form and under new, American masters.
See Also:
The battlefield deaths of American journalists Michael Kelly and David Bloom: some hard truths
[12 April 2003]
Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion
[10 April 2003]
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Political lessons of the war in Iraq
Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board
11 April 2003
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The following is the English translation of a statement of the WSWS Editorial Board that is being distributed at antiwar demonstrations throughout Europe called for this weekend. It is posted on the WSWS in both English, German and French as a PDF file.
Three weeks after the first bombs fell on Baghdad there can be no longer any doubt that the war waged against Iraq is a criminal enterprise of historic dimensions.
Rarely has a war been fought on the basis of such huge differences in weaponry and fire-power. On the one side US and British troops armed with the latest high-tech weaponry are able to rely on undisputed dominance of the air; on the other side are primitively equipped Iraqi soldiers using tanks dating back to the 1960s. No one has as of yet provided reliable figures of Iraqi civilian and military victims of the invasion, but there can be no doubt they are in the tens of thousands. What is taking place in Iraq has more in common with a massacre than a war.
The reasons given for beginning the war have proved to be completely without substance. There is not the slightest trace of the “weapons of mass destruction” with which, it was alleged, Iraq threatened its neighbours and the US. The Iraqi government, which had everything to lose in the war, would have likely resorted to such weapons if it had possessed them in the first place.
The claim that the war is being fought to bring “democracy and freedom” to the Iraqi people has also been shattered by daily pictures of bodies blown apart by allied bombing raids, the deliberate targeting of independent media sources such as the offices of Al-Jazeera, and, above all, the plans made public by the White House for a military occupation of the country after the war.
The “Iraqi Interim Administration” is waiting on call in luxury villas in Kuwait. It consists almost exclusively of high-ranking American officials and military personnel with close connections to US big business and those neo-conservative circles around the Pentagon which for years have demanded a war against Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle enjoy close relations with the right-wing Likud government in Israel and are hated throughout the Arab world.
Ex-general Jay Garner, who heads the Interim Administration and is directly subordinate to US Supreme Commander Tommy Franks, is a self-confessed neo-conservative who has criticised the Israeli army in the occupied territories for being too restrained in its treatment of Palestinians. If Garner regards Israeli military policy in occupied Palestine as overly restrained, one can only imagine what he has in store for the people of an occupied Iraq.
The most important task for the Interim Administration is the awarding of lucrative contracts, financed by the proceeds from Iraqi oil, for the rebuilding of the devastated country and the privatisation of its oil industry. The man to be made responsible for Iraqi oil production is former Shell manager Philip Carroll. His appointment itself makes a mockery of the claim that the Iraqi people are to benefit from the country’s oil wealth.
Such developments underscore the fact that the aggression against Iraq is nothing less than a classic colonial war, aimed at the plundering and subjugation of a poor country and, in the longer term, the entire region. It was launched although there was no indication of any potential threat from the side of Iraq itself. The war was then justified with falsified evidence and deceitful pretexts. It is an act of aggression that violates all international law.
European governments share responsibility for the war
European governments—in particular, the French and German—share responsibility for this monstrous crime. Although in the United Nations they both rejected the war, they have in practice given direct or indirect support to the US-British war effort.
The German government has refused to bar US and British war planes from using German airspace and has allowed the use of Allied bases on German soil for the prosecution of the war. They have made such allowances even though they expressly contravene the German constitution, which regards as a criminal offence subject to prosecution any support for the preparation and carrying out of a war of aggression. In the terms laid down by the constitution, it is illegal to permit German territory to be used for the prosecution of an aggressive war. In 1973, for example, the government of Willy Brandt based itself on the constitution when it blocked the use of German facilities during the Yom Kippur war between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Three Israeli freighters that sought to load American war material in the port of Bremerhaven were ordered to leave German territorial waters.
The present government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has not dared to even contemplate a similar action, although there can be no doubt that refusal of German airspace and the use of bases on German soil would have created considerable difficulties for the US war machine—and given a powerful boost to the antiwar movement within America itself.
Since the start of the war, Paris and Berlin have dropped their verbal objections and sanctioned the aims of the war as articulated by the Bush administration, supporting “regime change” in Baghdad—this despite their previous denunciation of the war as a violation of the charter of the United Nations.
In Berlin, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer assured his British counterpart, Jack Straw, as follows: “We hope the regime will collapse as soon as possible.” In an official government statement the following day, Chancellor Schröder expressed his desire that “with the overcoming of the dictatorship, the Iraqi people will be able to realise as quickly as possible their hopes for a life of peace, freedom and self determination”—a statement calculated to win the approval of every figure in the American government.
For his part, the French head of state expressed his solidarity with allied fighting troops in a letter to the British Queen. In the letter, President Jacques Chirac apologised for damage to British war graves located in France. “Let me tell you that at this time when your soldiers are engaged in battle,” he wrote, “the thoughts of the French people are naturally with them.”
For Berlin and Paris, their military alliance with the US in NATO, their joint economic relations—in short, their own foreign policy interests—are far more important than such issues as international law and the fate of the Iraqi people. As Schröder declared in his government statement: “We should not forget that the states which are now waging war against Iraq are alliance partners and friendly nations.”
The stance taken by Schröder and Chirac in response to the aggressive course of the US government calls to mind the appeasement policy of the British government in the 1930s towards the expansionist ambitions of Adolf Hitler. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, thought that a combination of concessions and conciliation regarding German occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, and then annexation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, would be sufficient to contain the German dictator. In fact, such concessions only served to encourage Hitler’s delusions of world power and conquest.
The right-wing clique dominating the White House have reacted in similar fashion to the conciliatory stance of leading European governments. Already new threats have been made against Syria, Iran and North Korea, and the list of enemies, the White House has made clear, can be extended when necessary—including even Europe itself.
In a barely concealed threat, President Bush declared at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair last Tuesday: “Evidently, there’s some scepticism here in Europe about whether or not I mean what I say. Saddam Hussein clearly knows I mean what I say.”
The ease with which the White House has been able to ignore international rules and United Nations decisions, the arrogance with which it has set out to determine the fate of Iraq and divide up the country’s resources among its closest business allies has only served to encourage the regime in its aspirations towards world dominance.
While European governments may hope for some sort of return to normality after the war is over, quite the opposite will take place. The war against Iraq has only served to whet the appetite of American imperialism.
What is to be done?
If there is one lesson to be drawn from the course of the war, it is the utter inability of existing institutions—governments as well as political parties—to provide any alternative. To the extent that parties and governments draw any conclusions from the unilateral actions of the US, it is the need to speed up their own program of militarization and escalate their pursuit of Great Power politics.
Chancellor Schröder, for example, concluded his government statement on the Iraq war with the remark: “We have to seriously reconsider our own military capacities.” Three weeks previously, Foreign Minister Fischer declared: “We have to strengthen our military power so that we are taken seriously in this sphere.”
Within the spectrum of German parties, it is above all the Greens, the former party of pacifism, that has become the most persistent protagonist of European rearmament. According to its new policy, the much discussed plan for European cooperation in military questions has to be turned into a reality, and the decision of 1999 to establish a 60,000-strong European intervention force realised as quickly as possible.
The proposal has been met with complete support in Paris and signs of agreement in London. Tony Blair, who has tied his own political future to support for the US president and the Iraq war, is looking for an opportunity to loosen the embrace of his transatlantic big brother.
Such a course of militarization can only end in disaster. It sets into motion a race to rearm that will be financed at the expense of working people and the socially disadvantaged. The logic of such a policy inevitably leads to intensified military conflicts and a possible Third World War.
The only way to counter these dangers is through the construction of a new political movement entirely independent of the existing parties and political institutions.
The mass international antiwar demonstrations of February 15 and 16—including powerful protests inside the US itself—showed that the basis for such a new political movement exists. The demonstrations were the biggest ever in history and the expression of a broad popular movement against war. Millions took part.
Nevertheless, protest by itself is not enough. The movement requires a political orientation and perspective. It has to draw the lessons from the failure of the old political organisations.
In the final analysis, the current war is the product of irresolvable contradictions at the heart of the world capitalist system. The global character of modern production is no longer compatible with the capitalist system of competing nation states and private ownership of the means of production.
In 1914 and again in 1939 Germany, as the strongest European economic power, sought to resolve these contradictions by reorganising Europe under its own domination. It failed. Today, the United States, as the most powerful economy, is undertaking the same task—only on a world scale. The military subjugation of Iraq is the first step toward the reorganisation of the world in the interests of American big business. This attempt is also doomed to failure.
Whoever balks at drawing a parallel between America today and Germany in 1939 should not forget that Germany followed broadly the same aims in the Second World War as it did in the First. There were significant differences between the monarchist regime of Wilhelm II and Germany under the Nazis, but they both represented the interests of the same reactionary circles—finance capital, the big industrial concerns and extreme right-wing forces in the state and military.
The current American government also bases itself on the most reactionary layers of American society—criminal elements who gained enormous wealth and influence during the stock market boom of the last 20 years, together with neo-conservative and Christian fundamentalist layers. The Bush clique came to power on the basis of a stolen election and tramples on basic democratic rights in America itself.
As was the case with Hitler in 1939, Bush in 2003 is using war as a means of diverting attention from the enormous contradictions within American society and seeking to project the mounting social tensions at home into militarism abroad. Social polarisation in America has taken staggering forms, with a thin layer of the super-rich confronting the broad masses, for whom life is becoming more and more precarious.
The old reformist organisations have no answer to these developments. They themselves have close links to business interests and defend the national state and the profit system. The rise to prominence of the clique surrounding Bush demonstrates, in particular, the bankruptcy of the American Democratic Party. But in Europe, social democratic and former Communist parties have also shown they have nothing to offer in dealing with pressing social and political problems. For the past 20 years they have been moving unswervingly to the right.
The movement against imperialist war must develop as an international, independent and socialist movement, basing itself on the broad masses of working people. It must unite the issue of war with burning social questions.
The World Socialist Web Site has set itself the task of constructing such a movement, and providing the necessary political orientation. Produced by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality parties, it provides daily analyses of world developments and fights for the development of an international socialist perspective and program. We call upon all those participating in the antiwar rallies to read the WSWS, establish contact with the Editorial Board, distribute its articles and statements, and submit their own articles and commentaries. We further call on all those committed to the struggle for social equality, democratic rights, peace and a better world to join the Socialist Equality Party and help build a new mass socialist movement of the international working class.
See Also:
Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion
[10 April 2003]
Into the maelstrom: the crisis of American imperialism and the war against Iraq
[1 April 2003]
The crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq
[21 March 2003]
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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq
On the "Battle for Baghdad"
By Serge Lefort
12 April 2003
The following article was submitted April 9 by a reader in Paris.
American propaganda, obligingly relayed by the media, had announced that the taking of Baghdad would be no cakewalk for the British and American troops. After having foisted on us the myth of the “fourth most powerful army in the world,” the spin doctors pushed the myth of a Republican Guard armed to the teeth, ready to use chemical weapons to defend the regime. Well, Baghdad fell today without any resistance from the Iraqi army or the Republican Guards. Where then are the tens of thousands of soldiers and fighters? It is likely that many died in the bombing, which has been pounding the capital for 21 days, and that survivors have melted into the population like the regime’s officials.
Journalists are having a field day describing “scenes of jubilation” and “rejoicing crowds.” The pictures, designed to show the “liberation” of Baghdad, are, however, less convincing than is being claimed by the commentators bent on making history alongside the victors. France 2 TV, for example, shows an Iraqi bashing a poster of Saddam Hussein with a rock. He is joined by another, who disappears and then is chased by two individuals. The camera very briefly follows this scene, but then focuses again on the man, who poses for the journalists. The purpose is to “manufacture the news which people want to hear” (Rupert Murdoch’s editorial policy, Le Monde, 5 April 2003)
Pictures of an Iraqi populace greeting the British and American troops as liberators in massive numbers are noticeably absent. The television channels broadcast a few insignificant shots over and over. Mainly we are shown scenes of looting. Fleeting images give a glimpse of several people throwing stones at a lorry loaded with stolen goods. Is it really any wonder? The images, created by obedient journalists, have been celebrating American soldiers kicking open the doors of public buildings. The hint is given. It was a call to loot.
To impose colonisation and a docile government on the country, the Bush administration’s strategists need chaos to set in. But that is a dangerous game, as it could also create the conditions for a civil war which the victors would have difficulty controlling. The British and American troops still fear the population, part of which is armed. They are letting the looting take place so as to provide a pretext, in a few days time, for a tough intervention to restore order. In the end, the American administration wants to subject the Iraqi population by obliging it to beg for food and water.
The French commentators are imploring the US to find evidence of “weapons of mass destruction”. It is on this condition that Jacques Chirac is prepared to rally to the British and American coalition. You can be sure they will find something for French diplomacy to feed on so that it can shamefully slip back into the victors’ camp and gather the crumbs from the festive table. A shed has already been found containing chemical substances and another with brand-new coffins with corpses from 1985 in them! It was too good to be true. The truth-twisting experts will likely find images, less spectacular, but capable of influencing public opinion.
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