Bombings unleash the politics of hypocrisy

Vincent Browne:

Three months ago, local doctors in Fallujah, Iraq, reported that more than 800 civilians had been killed in a concerted American and British military assault on the city.

That estimate is now thought to have been too high and the reported civilian death toll is put at something over 600.

Half of the dead are reported to have been children.

The major assault on the town took place before women and children were allowed to leave.

I refer to this, not to suggest that a crime against humanity provides any justification for the slaughter of more than 50 civilians in London last Thursday morning, nor to suggest that the Fallujah massacre was the motivation for the London attack. I don't believe it was.

Rather my point is that condemnations of the slaughter of innocent civilians should apply to the slaughter of all innocent civilians.

Tony Blair's condemnations of the London killings is a piece of awful hypocrisy, given his complicity in what happened in Fallujah.

But, of course, Blair's hypocrisy does not stop there.

He bears culpability for the deaths of thousands of people, including the killings of British and American soldiers in Iraq, because of his complicity in the unlawful invasion of that country on the basis of a deceit.

Blair and his ally George Bush have no credibility in condemning any killings. He and Bush invite ridicule in promising retribution for the London killings. Indeed, more than ridicule, they invite retribution on themselves.

As was the case during the Northern Troubles, comment that might be regarded as justifying atrocity is censored.

Anything other than outright, unqualified condemnation of particular atrocities is demanded, uncluttered by reference to other atrocities.

Breakers of this code are classified as sneaking regarders of terrorism, as well as facing the usual taunts of anti-Americanism.

In saying that I regard the London killings as crimes against humanity, unjustified by any cause, I feel that, to some degree, I am capitulating to this intellectual terrorism, even though that is my conviction.

That ‘ terrorism' word causes me difficulty. How is it terrorism to set off small bombs on a London underground train and not terrorism to drop massive bombs from aeroplanes over cities and towns? Are the people in the towns and cities being bombed any less terrorised than the passengers in the London trains? Is it morally OK to massacre civilians from the air and a crime against humanity to massacre civilians in far smaller numbers on the ground?

In the last week, the killing of well over 100 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been reported. Almost certainly, many more were killed. Since 1998, millions of people have died in that country because of war.

My point is not that the former colonial powers are to blame for those deaths (although there is some basis for attributing responsibility to them), nor that the Americans who supported a dictator there for decades were responsible (although that, too, was a contributory factor).

Nor am I saying that the United Nations or the western powers - or the west in general - is to blame for failing to intervene to resolve the conflict (although there are elements of truth to that as well).

My point is that the war in that country was made possible by massive shipments of arms into the region from Britain, the US and other countries - including Israel, some of the Balkan states, Ukraine and the Czech Republic.

Those shipments could have been prevented, had there been the will to do so. Were those who ordered or facilitated or permitted those shipments terrorists?

The panoply of world leaders on stage in Gleneagles over the last few days contained several mass murderers. For a start, of course, there was George Bush and Tony Blair. Also Vladimir Putin.

To be fair to Putin, he had a good point when he said last Thursday that the west clung to "double standards in the assessment of bloody crimes".

He was referring to the way Europe and the United States regard attacks by Chechens on civilian targets in Russia as part of a local separatist struggle, rather than terrorism.

But how can the butcher of Grozny complain about terrorism, the mass murderer of thousands in Chechnya complain about double standards?

It is also hard to take a French president complaining about terrorism.

France armed, supplied and then protected the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda before and during the genocide in 1994, and then intervened, saving the mass killers from retribution and justice!

And our own crowd - couldn't they just shut up?

What credibility does our government have in condemning terrorism when we facilitated - and continue to facilitate - the infliction of terror on the people of Iraq by allowing American warplanes to pit-stop at Shannon?

Is it impossible to be against all killings: against the London killings, the Fallujah killings, the other Iraqi killings, the African killings, the Afghan killings, the Chechnya killings, the Moscow killings, the Twin Towers killings, the Madrid killings?

Is it impossible to regard as crimes against humanity what the Germans did in World War II and in the Holocaust, what the Japanese did during that war in Asia, what the Americans did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the British did at Dresden, what Stalin did to the kulaks in Russia, what Mao did in China?

Is it possible to be against all terrorism and all mass murder and not be classified as a sneaking-regarder of terrorism and mass murder?

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