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Sunday, December 31st,, 2006
Volume 5, No. 22
(Editor's note: Defining patriotism as obedience to government—as an uncritical acceptance of any war the leaders of government decide must be fought—has been disastrous for the American people. Failure to distinguish between the country and the government has led so many young people, recruited into the military, to declare that they would be willing to die for their country. Would not those young people hesitate before enlisting if they considered that they were not risking their lives for their country, but for the government, and even for the owners of great wealth, the giant corporations connected to the government. As a patriot, contemplating the dead GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq, I could comfort myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: "They died for their country." But I would be lying to myself. Howard Zinn)
4 Articles
4. Cynthia McKinney's Full Remarks on Bush Impeachment Bill
1. DRAGON-SLAYERS (In Three Parts. This is Part 1)
BY
COREY ROBIN
Last year marked the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. From Slovenia to Waco, conferences, readings and exhibitions were convened in her honour. This month, Schocken Books is issuing a new collection of her writings, its fifth publication of her work in four years. Penguin has reissued On Revolution, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Between Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters.
Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The appearance of such a being, she thought, might move others to speak and act in new ways as well. There was always a certain pathos to this notion. Whatever its promise, birth is a fact of nature. And nature, Arendt insisted, is the sphere not of novelty or freedom but of repetition and routine.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary of Arendt’s birth should have devolved into a recitation of the familiar. Once a week, it seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and imperialism. Academic careers are built on interpretations of her work, and careerism, as Arendt noted in her book on Eichmann, is seldom conducive to thinking.
The lodestone of the Arendt industry is The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 and reissued by Schocken in 2004 with an introduction by Samantha Power. Divided into three parts – ‘Anti-Semitism’, ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Totalitarianism’ – the book was composed at two different times and evinces two conflicting impulses. Arendt wrote the first two sections in the early to mid-1940s, when Fascism was her fear and a federated, social democratic Europe her hope. She considered calling the book ‘Imperialism’ and the title of her intended conclusion, on the Nazi genocide, ‘Race-Imperialism.’
By the late 1940s, however, Arendt’s hope for postwar Europe had waned – it was a victim, as she had predicted in 1945, of the anti-Communist drive for collective security, which she compared to Metternich’s Holy Alliance – and the Soviet Union was her preoccupation. She wrote the last third of the book in 1948 and 1949, in the early years of the Cold War. Racism merged with Marxism, Auschwitz with the Gulag, and Fascism morphed into Communism.
This last section is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent.
Arendt saw totalitarianism as the product of mass society, which arose from the breakdown of classes and nation-states. Neither a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘well-being’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to subsume themselves in any organisation that would extinguish their ‘individual identity permanently’. With their insistence on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience, totalitarian movements filled this need: they fastened mass man with a ‘band of iron’, providing him and his fellows with a sense of structure and belonging.
Ideology and terror reinforced this grip. Racism and Marxism confined their adherents in a ‘straitjacket of logic’, lending the world a spurious consistency and relieving people of ‘the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think’. By reducing men and women to the barest animal life, terror ensured that no one would resist ideology’s law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology ‘may decide that those who today eliminate races’ – or classes – ‘are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed’, terror must ‘fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim’. The purpose of totalitarianism, in short, was not political: it did not fulfil the requirements of rule; it served no constituency or belief; it had no utility. Its sole function was to create a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home, even at the cost of their own lives.
Arendt’s account dissolves conflicts of power, interest and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis, allowing her readers to evade difficult questions of politics and economics. We need not probe the content of a particular ideology – what matters is not what it says but what it does – or the interests it serves (they do not exist). We can ignore the distribution of power: in mass society, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard statements of grievance: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we needn’t worry about moral responsibility: terror makes everyone – from Hitler to the Jews, Stalin to the kulaks – an automaton, incapable of judgment or being judged.
During the Cold War, Arendt’s text allowed intellectuals and officials to avoid any reckoning with the politics of Communism and its appeal. Today, it offers a similar detour. ‘If one could pierce the cloak of mystery that shrouds al-Qaida, Hamas or Islamic Jihad,’ Power writes in her introduction,
one might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with totalitarian movements: ‘supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; “idealism”, i.e. their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power’.
Power makes the occasional nod to American policies in the Middle East and to terrorism’s local causes, but she cannot resist the psychological thrust of Arendt’s analysis: ‘Arendt wrote of German and Soviet selfless devotion to the idealised collective, but what greater testament to such selflessness can there be than martyrdom of the kind that thousands of young Muslim men and women are queuing up to undertake today?’
Young-Bruehl also believes that the anti-political ‘elements of totalitarianism have continued to be with us’. Unlike Power, she finds these elements on both sides of the war on terror: in militant Islam and neo-conservatism; in 9/11 and Shock and Awe; in the ‘supranationalism’ of bin Laden and Bush; in the Republican and Islamist push to submit the private sphere to public scrutiny.
But as virtually every intelligence analysis has shown, Islamist radicals are driven by hostility to the state of Israel and repressive Arab regimes, US patronage of Israel and those regimes, and, in Europe, discrimination against Muslims and support for US policies in the Middle East. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently said that British suicide bombers ‘are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan’. The Islamists’ grievances are local and specific. They are not the flotsam and jetsam of mass society or a globalised world; they come from and return to mosques, schools, parties and close-knit neighbourhoods. Suicide bombing is primarily a response to foreign occupation, and terrorism is, as it always has been, the weapon of choice for people with little power or no mass base.
The Bush administration is committed to the interests of its main constituencies: corporations, evangelicals, the military and big oil. It has revived the most toxic elements of American nationalism – not supranationalism – and though neo-conservatives may savour war for its own sake, Bush has folded their ethos into the rhetoric of national security and human rights. His party’s intrusions into the family and sexuality don’t reflect a general desire to dissolve the public and the private – Republicans happily respect the freedoms of employers – but are rather an effort to shore up the power of husbands and fathers. Whatever one may think of these warring antagonists, it is difficult to see how their aims are anything but political, their weapons anything but strategic and rational.
By the Cold War’s end, Arendt’s account of totalitarianism had been so trashed by historians that Irving Howe was forced to defend her as essentially a writer of fiction, whose gifts for ‘metaphysical insight’ enabled her to see the truth that lay beneath or beyond the verifiable facts. ‘To grasp the inner meaning of totalitarianism,’ Howe wrote in 1991, ‘you must yield, yourself, a little imaginatively.’ That fiction is again in vogue, but where once it was passed back and forth between intellectuals and officials, today it appeals primarily to the belligerati, who ignore the more informed analyses of Manningham-Buller or the former CIA officer Robert Baer.
If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’
In the second section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that imperialism’s animating impulse is expansion for expansion’s sake. Against the claims of some Marxists, she insists that capitalism provides a model, not a motive, for the imperialist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the accumulation of capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Cromer looked at Egypt and saw India, Rhodes looked at South Africa and saw the world. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he said. So it is today: Afghanistan leads to Iraq leads to Iran leads to who knows where? ‘The famous domino-theory’, Arendt wrote, is ‘a new version of the old “Great Game”’. As Kipling said, the Great Game finishes only ‘when everyone is dead’.
Despite its claims during the Cold War, Arendt argued, the United States was never threatened by Communism. World War Two had made the US ‘the greatest world power and it was this world power, rather than national existence, that was challenged by the revolutionary power of Moscow-directed Communism.’ I wonder what Arendt would have said about Islamist terrorism, which poses even less of a threat to America’s survival.
She was also sceptical of imperial professions of benevolence, and during the Cold War mocked both superpowers’ ‘hollow assurances of good intentions’. And though she had much to say about the threat to human rights from an international system that prized sovereignty above all else (a point Power discusses at length), she had little patience for great powers insisting on limiting the sovereignty of weak states while refusing to accept any comparable limitation on their own (a point Power never mentions). Few developments bred more cynicism and contempt for human rights than this double standard.
More important, the language of moral responsibility and humanitarian concern in the 20th century reminded Arendt of the racism that was ‘the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics’ during the 19th. The British Empire achieved the most successful combination of racism and responsibility and thus served as an instructive example for the American. Arendt identified Burke, arguably Britain’s greatest critic of imperialism, as one of the empire’s subterranean inspirations.
Against the Jacobins, Burke insisted that there were no Rights of Man, only the rights of Englishmen. That union of inheritance and freedom, Arendt believed, turned Britain into a ‘kind of nobility among nations’ and was ‘the ideological basis from which English nationalism received its curious touch of race-feeling’.
In the 19th century, Burke’s successors turned his criticism of messianic liberalism into a charter for racist imperialism. With their notion of a ‘national mission’, which had ‘a peculiarly close affinity to race-thinking’, British imperialists sought to export the rights of Englishmen to the rest of the world. Imagining themselves as ‘dragon-slayers who went enthusiastically into far and curious lands to strange and naive peoples to slay the numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries’, colonial administrators and secret agents – the empire’s emblematic figures – took on ‘a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-man and no people for another people’: to protect those who are ‘hopelessly one’s inferiors’.
For a while, it seemed as if today’s rhetoricians of empire had dropped racism from the language of responsibility. But the quagmire in Iraq has reversed that. ‘Arab societies can’t support democracy as we know it,’ says Ralph Peters, a retired US army officer and prominent columnist. Rather than build a liberal society, the Iraqis ‘preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption’. According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, after the fall of Saddam the Iraqis succumbed to their native ‘demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise . . . even in the face of self-immolation’. Liberal hawks such as Leon Wieseltier believe much the same thing:
The security situation is at bottom the social-cultural situation. It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called ‘the foreigner’s gift’, belongs to the Iraqis. Gifts must not be only given, they must also be received . . . For three and a half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom? . . . After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.
2. "THREE REASONS TO IMPEACH"
A MESSAGE FROM RAMSEY CLARK
There are three reasons why it is imperative for the American people to demand that their elected representatives impeach President George W. Bush and the officials of his administration responsible for the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq now.
The first reason is that President Bush and his cabal have committed an impeachable offense, indeed, “the Supreme international crime,” the war of aggression, for which they must be held accountable.
The integrity of constitutional government and the rule of law in the United States require We, the People, to assert our power, to assure accountability.
If George Bush were the most popular and honorable public figure in the country and the war in Iraq had been the most successful war in history, both militarily and in achieving peace and justice, impeachment would still be required, because criminal conduct of such deadly magnitude cannot be justified by any ends, however good the intentions and beneficial the results
The fact that President Bush is extremely unpopular and led us into war dishonorably by repeated and shifting proven deceptions reveals how impotent the American people have permitted themselves to become.
The second reason that impeachment is essential is that President Bush is still in office. The war in Iraq still rages. The illegal occupation of Iraq by 140,000 U.S. troops and a few others, remains a major cause and contributor of violence. The Iraq Study Group has found, “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.”
But George Bush, despite his crimes, remains, as he insists, the “decider.” And he intends to compound his prior wrongful conduct. At the Pentagon, on December 13, 2006, Bush said “I’ve heard some ideas that would lead to defeat, and I reject those ideas, ideas such as leaving before the job is done... We’re not going to give up.” Speaking about the troops in Iraq he declared his “unshakable commitment” to his goals in Iraq. “We’re going to give you the tools necessary to succeed, and a strategy to help you succeed... At the appropriate time, I will stand up in front of the nation and say, 'Here’s where we’re headed.'"
On December 16, 2006, the New York Times reported administration plans to send 20,000 or more additional soldiers to Iraq, a major “surge” in troop strength. More U.S. troops will cause greater violence, resentment and resistance.
President Bush acts outside the law, unilaterally, in defiance of the will of the American people and the world. He seeks to further dominate and exploit the earth and its people, to enrich the rich with the oil and other resources of the planet, while further impoverishing the poor at home and abroad. He ignores the international laws for peace, for fundamental human rights, the environment, health, to feed the hungry. He trashes basic protections of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, authorizing secret arrests and detention, torture. At his direction, the U.S. invades individual privacy and restrains free speech. And now, after several years of outrage over torture and illegal detention focusing on Guantanamo, the press reports as Christmas nears, that the U.S. will take an even harsher stand against detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The crimes of the Bush Administration increase in reaction to intense criticism.
America is headed to even greater tragedy, more unbearable death and destruction, increased isolation of our country, more enemies, staggering costs and public debt, if the American people do not act now to remove President Bush and other officials responsible for these crimes.
Meanwhile, the Speaker elect of the new Congress to be in a major policy statement of plans for the “First Hundred Hours” of the Democratic Congress in which she will be backed by a majority of 33 votes from the November 2006 elections, which repudiated Bush’s war in Iraq, never mentioned Iraq! What can be hoped for from such leadership?
Our government behaves toward its President more like a Monarch than an elected leader in a free and democratic society. George III received less deference.
It is up to the People: You and Me. Impeachment, or two years of even greater criminal aggression against human rights and more violent occupation in Iraq with all it bodes for the future. And where and what else?
The third reason for impeachment now is the most important. The tragedy of America’s policies and crimes these past six years cannot be undone. These six years have been deadly enough. We can survive two more years of the misbegotten words and deeds of George W. Bush and his illusions of war and wealth. But our good people must recognize and reject the long term policies of militarism and exploitation of our government that have continued for generations now, and stop it.
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George Bush’s policies are basically the same as those of the dominant economic powers that have guided U.S. policy since at least World War II. George W. Bush, as an individual, may be more arrogant, lack caution, be less competent and more deceitful than his predecessors, but in the main all have pursued the same policies if with greater caution and more restraint.
We must impeach George Bush to inform future Presidents of the price they too will pay for provoking war: impeachment. Presidents to be will continue the same policies of militarism and exploitation and war that George W. Bush has celebrated so destructively, unless the American people say, "No More." We must promise future officials that they will be impeached, as required by the Constitution and the conscience of its people, if they violate their oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
We will place new ads in the New York Times and other newspapers in the coming weeks, and we will continue our mobilization efforts to get Congress to introduce articles of impeachment. We have been able to make great strides so far with the support of all those who believe in the impeachment movement. We need to raise $100,000 to place the new newspaper ads.
JOHN PILGER
William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms his "authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors have found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of "endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing democracy to the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.
YELLOW: Tony Blair and George Bush
"That was my favourite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained "sensitive information" which needed "a little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the "long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a "box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been replaced by a crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a kind of freaks' gallery.
SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange.
It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.
This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.
Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.
You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.
That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I travelled in Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.
More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British.
Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.
For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields.
It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south.
LAST November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence Minister Adam Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by British forces operating in Iraq.
His robotic reply was: "I am withholding details in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information."
Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days.
This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes."
What will his "Hiroshima effect" actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14?
The answer is to be found in a "confidential" UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates, which says that "as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries".
A Bush-Blair attack will destroy "a functioning primary health care system" and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is "likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions".
It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with Blair's lies that have turned most people in this country against them, including people who have not protested before.
Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to find a "smoking gun" for Iraq to be attacked.
Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no "wider war" against Iraq unless there was "absolute evidence" of Iraqi complicity in September 11. And there has been no evidence.
Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more than $5billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council.
He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament were "needed to enrich uranium". The International Atomic Energy Agency has denied this outright.
He has lied about an Iraqi "threat", which he discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous target of his "war on terror". Blair's "Iraq dossier" has been mocked by human rights groups.
However, what is wonderful is that across the world the sheer force of public opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming, John Howard in Australia.
So few people believe them and support them that The Guardian this week went in search of the few who do - "the hawks". The paper published a list of celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy at describing their contortion of intellect and morality. It is a small list.
IN CONTRAST the majority of people in the West, including the United States, are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers grow every day.
It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed the true authority of parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue and there have been too many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street.
If, as Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers are against an attack, let them speak up now.
Blair's figleaf of a "coalition" is very important to Bush and only the moral power of the British people can bring the troops home without them firing a shot.
The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an attack on Iraq. Washington will effectively take over the Middle East, ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.
The next American attack is likely to be Iran - the Israelis want this - and their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it may be China's turn.
"Endless war" is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding.
Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons "if necessary". On March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries "can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons".
Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is right here at home and you, the British people, can stop it.
On Saturday, February 15, a great demonstration against an attack on Iraq will be held in London.
Contact the Stop the War Coalition on 07951 235 915 and office@stopwar.org.uk
Mr. Speaker:
I come before this body today as a proud American and as a servant of the American people, sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Throughout my tenure, I've always tried to speak the truth. It's that commitment that brings me here today.
We have a President who has misgoverned and a Congress that has refused to hold him accountable. It is a grave situation and I believe the stakes for our country are high.
No American is above the law, and if we allow a President to violate, at the most basic and fundamental level, the trust of the people and then continue to govern, without a process for holding him accountable, what does that say about our commitment to the truth? To the Constitution? To our democracy?
The trust of the American people has been broken. And a process must be undertaken to repair this trust. This process must begin with honesty and accountability.
Leading up to our invasion of Iraq, the American people supported this Administration's actions because they believed in our President. They believed he was acting in good faith. They believed that American laws and American values would be respected. That in the weightiness of everything being considered, two values were rock solid: trust and truth.
From mushroom clouds to African yellow cake to aluminum tubes, the American people and this Congress were not presented the facts, but rather were presented a string of untruths, to justify the invasion of Iraq.
President Bush, along with Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Rice, portrayed to the Congress and to the American people that Iraq represented an imminent threat, culminating with President Bush's claim that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. Having used false fear to buy consent, the President then took our country to war.
This has grave consequences for the health of our democracy, for our standing with our allies, and most of all, for the lives of our men and women in the military and their families--who have been asked to make sacrifices--including the ultimate sacrifice--to keep us safe.
Just as we expect our leaders to be truthful, we expect them to abide by the law and respect our courts and judges. Here again, the President failed the American people.
When President Bush signed an executive order authorizing unlawful spying on American citizens, he circumvented the courts, the law, and he violated the separation of powers provided by the Constitution. Once the program was revealed, he then tried to hide the scope of his offense from the American people by making contradictory, untrue statements.
President George W. Bush has failed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; he has failed to ensure that senior members of his administration do the same; and he has betrayed the trust of the American people.
With a heavy heart and in the deepest spirit of patriotism, I exercise my duty and responsibility to speak truthfully about what is before us. To shy away from this responsibility would be easier. But I have not been one to travel the easy road. I believe in this country, and in the power of our democracy. I feel the steely conviction of one who will not let the country I love descend into shame; for the fabric of our democracy is at stake.
Some will call this a partisan vendetta, others will say this is an unimportant distraction to the plans of the incoming Congress. But this is not about political gamesmanship.
I am not willing to put any political party before my principles.
This, instead, is about beginning the long road back to regaining the high standards of truth and democracy upon which our great country was founded.
Mr. Speaker:
Under the standards set by the United States Constitution, President Bush, along with Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of State Rice, should be subject to the process of impeachment, and I have filed H. Res.1106 in the House of Representatives.
To my fellow Americans, as I leave this Congress, it is in your hands to hold your representatives accountable, and to show those with the courage to stand for what is right, that they do not stand alone.
Thank you.
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