The puppet regime's latest accusations are just a diversionary tactic

The Guardian
April 24, 2004
By George Galloway

As the occupation forces sink deeper into the Iraq imbroglio and the deadline for the bogus "transfer of sovereignty" on June 30 draws nearer, those responsible are lashing out in all directions.

Speaking on the BBC this week, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who has left Baghdad as the prime minister's special envoy, was dripping with patrician condescension. Asked about the wave of armed opposition, Greenstock sniffed that these were "foreign fighters" (as if he and his army were locals) and "Saddam remnants". He seemed oblivious to the fact that it was the long-repressed Shia who were pelting his army with stones and grenades throughout the southern sector. We shall leave, said Greenstock, "once they can look after themselves": a comment that could have come from any plenipotentiary of empire in history.

He has little reason to be complacent. The Sunni clerics acting as intermediaries between the US and the Iraqi resistance in Falluja have washed their hands of Paul Bremer. Days of negotiations went up in smoke last week as the marines resumed a massacre, already of My Lai dimensions in the Arab psyche. In Beirut last Friday, I stood outside three mosques - two Sunni, one Shia - where the only word discernible to me in the agitated sermons was Falluja.

General Kimmet, the US commander, has demanded the removal from Falluja of al-Jazeera - without whom we would have had no filmed evidence of this war crime. Together with the closure of Moqtada al-Sadr's newspaper, the Americans have served notice that, along with the denial of elections, the suppression of the media is the price of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Meanwhile, George Bush lays into the Spanish for electing a government that he doesn't like and carries out its pre-election promises.

And now the Iraqi National Congress (INC), whose fabrications helped stampede us into war, is back on the attack. Pushing at an open door, it "demanded" that the Republican Congress investigate "billions of dollars of corruption" in the UN-administered oil-for-food programme.

I was not the only one on their list: one of the Pope's secretaries, the former French interior minister Charles Pasqua (the country's most astringent mainstream critic of the US), a string of top UN officials, Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Vladimir Putin, Russia's Communist party and the ANC - a kind of "axis of evil" of opponents of sanctions and war - are all miraculously named in documents saved from the flames as swimming in oil at the expense of starving children.

Of course, it was this group that helped to reveal the suffering of Iraqi children when the INC and its patrons in London and Washington were denying the existence of the killing fields: Iraqi children died at the rate of one every six minutes for over a decade. The oil-for-food programme - conceded by the US and Britain under pressure in 1996 - provided just 30 cents a day per Iraqi. Those who bought and sold oil are easily traceable on the UN's database. No evidence has been provided that any of the claimed largesse reached any of those attacked. In my own case, I have never owned, bought or sold oil, or rights to oil. Nor has anyone on my behalf. But I have repeatedly been the target of false accusations and forged documents, as the Christian Science Monitor, among others, has had to concede, to its cost.

But the biggest "kickback" out of Iraq's oil sales did involve billions of dollars changing hands. Fully 30% of the total oil sales were handed to Kuwait - one of the richest countries in the world - and a parade of businessmen who claimed they had lost profits because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Now, in an echo of the Tikriti nepotism that characterised Saddam Hussein's rule, his nemesis Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted fraudster and the principal puppet in the US-appointed governing council, has chosen his nephew, a Yale-educated Wall Street corporate lawyer with no criminal law experience, to try the former regime prisoners.

No legal justice can come from rampant illegality. The governing council is not the government of Iraq - and neither is Bremer or his successor, John Negroponte, the former point man for the Nicaraguan Contras: those slayers of priests, nuns and literacy teachers in the Reagan era. They are all in Baghdad as a result of an illegal invasion and occupation.

And, of course, there will be no open trial. How could there be when Saddam would make every effort to put the west on trial, adducing its former alliance with him? If he is tried for Halabja, he will remind us that for months after the chemical attack on the Kurds, the US claimed it had been carried out by the Iranians; and that he received British ministers, and even weapons, long afterwards.

When I met Saddam for the second and final time six months before the war, I asked to see him privately after listening to an hour of denials that Iraq still possessed banned weapons. When the room cleared of all but him, me, Tariq Aziz and the then foreign minister Naji Sabri, I suggested he had not been honest. "Look," I said, "if Iraq is to avoid a devastating war, you have to let Hans Blix and his team return, co-operate and destroy all remaining weapons of mass destruction."

Looking me straight in the eye, he spoke quietly, translated by Aziz. "Mr George, the people of Iraq are greatly in your debt, we appreciate everything that you have done to try to help our people. Please believe me, I would not lie to you, we do not have any weapons of mass destruction".

My heart sank. How could that possibly be? Even I, the archest of sceptics when it came to western fables about Iraq, had fallen for the biggest hoax in modern history. For as it has turned out, the dictator was telling the truth and the self-appointed leaders of the free world were guilty of mendacity.

If there were a genuine accounting for the many crimes committed in Iraq, it would be a trial not seen since Nuremberg. It would involve those who sold Saddam the gas he used at Halabja; those who encouraged him to invade Iran when its revolution threatened to sweep away the corrupt kings and puppet presidents of Arabia propped up and profited from by the west; those, like Donald Rumsfeld, who twice visited Saddam during that war to help him target the terrible weapons the west had sold him; and those whose hands are covered with the blood of all those buried in the biggest of all the mass graves in Iraq - slaughtered by sanctions.

We who saw and cried out about this slaughter were traduced as fabricators; and later, when it could no longer be denied, as "mouthpieces", "apologists" or even "paid agents" of Saddam. Far from having to apologise for anything that I, and others, did to campaign against sanctions and war, I am proud of it; I only wish we had succeeded.

None of Chalabi minor's trials will make any difference to the uprising that has now spread throughout Iraq, except to make it more ferocious. By the time the former dictator dangles on the end of a rope, the foreign occupiers of Iraq will belassooed tighter than a Texas steer on its way to the slaughterhouse. And by then Iraq may well be on its way to being ruled by turbaned, bearded men whose inspiration is either Ayatollah Khomeini or even Osama bin Laden. A dubious cause for celebration on the White House lawn.

George Galloway's book I'm Not the Only One is published next week by Penguin. He is the Respect MP for Glasgow Kelvin, and is standing in London in the European elections in June

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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