THE HIDDEN HOLOCAUST: OUR CIVILIZATIONAL CRISIS – PARTS 1 & 2
The Dissident Voice, CA
Nov 26 2007
Part 1: The Holocaust in History
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed / November 26th, 2007
1. "Hidden Holocaust"
As we are all aware, the term "Holocaust" is traditionally used to
refer to the "systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution
and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime",
during the Second World War. The word "Holocaust" is a Greek word,
which means "sacrifice by fire." It conveys an event, the scale and
horror of which, transformed the course of world history. Moreover,
it’s often seen as a crime against humanity that is unparalleled
and unique.
This, we cannot dispute. The Nazi Holocaust was, indeed, a uniquely
horrific genocide, whose enormity and systematic character is
barely imaginable, designed to exterminate wholly the Jewish people,
physically, socially, culturally, from the face of the Earth.
But what then, do we mean by a "hidden holocaust"? This term conveys
the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale
and enormity is such that one feels that the word "holocaust"
does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is "hidden", in the
sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the
world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially
unacknowledged.
This "hidden holocaust", is escalating, accelerating, intensifying;
according to all expert projections from the social and physical
sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species,
unless we take immediate drastic action, now.
2. "Civilizational Crisis"
We often hear the word "civilization". It’s often been used to
explain the dynamics of the "War on Terror", as a clash between two
civilizations, the advanced, developed and progressive civilization
of the West, and the backward, reactionary civilization of Islam.
As is well known, the man who first formulated this idea as an academic
theory of international relations was the Harvard professor and US
government adviser, Samuel Huntington.
In early 2007, then Prime Minister Tony Blair described the War on
Terror as "a clash not between civilizations", but rather "about
civilization." The War on Terror is, he proclaimed, a continuation of
"the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who
embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence." ["A
Battle for Global Values", Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007)]
But the "hidden holocaust" is not an aberration from our advanced
civilization that represents the peak of human development, requiring
only some reforms. Rather, the "hidden holocaust" is integral to the
very structure, values and activities of our civilization. It is part
and parcel of the "global values" of the international political and
economic order that underpins industrial civilization. And unless
we attempt to transform the nature of our civilization, we will all
perish in a holocaust of our own making.
3. The Genocidal Conception of Civilization
The hidden holocaust associated with our modern civilization, began
at the beginning of modern civilization itself.
The origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal
voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th
century to the 19th centuries. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch,
English and other explorers ventured out from their home countries in
search of new wealth and new land in all corners of the globe. They
went to the continents of America, Africa and Asia and set up colonies
and trading outposts.
Colonists and settlers had all sorts of intentions. Some of them had
capital, and were simply looking for new investment opportunities.
Others were trying to escape lives of hardship at home to make new
lives for themselves with a fresh start by settling in the colonies.
Others wanted to deliver the message of Christianity to native
populations. Almost all of them saw themselves as part of the
inevitable historical momentum of progress, bringing the fruits of
European civilization to backward peoples.
Whatever the intentions, European expansion involved massive,
systematic violence. Violence of all kinds. Wholesale massacres, forced
labour camps, disease, malnutrition due to the imposed conditions of
economic deprivation, mass suicides due to depression and cultural
alienation. As Irving Louis Horowitz argues, for example, "the conduct
of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide." [Genocide:
State Power and Mass Murder, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1976),
p. 19-20.] Below we review some salient examples.
4. American Holocaust
Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have
discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex
civilizations of native Americans, over the next few centuries,
were devastated. British historian Mark Cocker has reviewed reliable
estimates of the death toll:
"[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty
years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire
of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the
Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian
total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of
Mexico… Native Americans declined from an original population of
more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole
of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as
one hundred million." [Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold:
Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 1998),
p. 5]
Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of
European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of
death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors
in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive
colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders,
consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and
plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists,
religious and cultural dislocation, and so on.
As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide,
which he describes as an "American Holocaust", these factors
accelerated and intensified the mere impact of disease. He further
describes the colonists’ strategic thinking:
"At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and
priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either
give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing
allegiance ‘as vassals’ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown,
or suffer ‘all the mischief and damage’ that the European invaders
choose to inflict upon you." [David Stannard, American Holocaust: The
Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.
255]
This binary choice, put to the Native Americans five centuries ago,
bears an unnerving resemblance to the rhetoric underpinning the
"War on Terror" today, "you are either with us or against us."
5. African Holocaust
In Africa, the slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted
deaths of vast numbers of people. While slave structures had already
existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it
adopted in the course of European interventions. English, French,
Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by
raiding villages off the West African coast. The transatlantic slave
trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of "a series
of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan
Africa to final purchasers in the Americas." An observer at the time,
British journalist Edward Morel wrote: "For a hundred years slaves in
Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve
to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped
to death." [The Black Man’s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the
Fifteenth Century to World War I (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)]
>>From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among
African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high
as 2 million. Although the many millions who died "in capture and
in transit to the Orient or Middle East" is unknown, among the
slaves "kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died." Overall, in
five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 – and by some calculations
perhaps over 65,000,000 – Africans were killed in the transatlantic
slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1994)].
University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn has demonstrated
convincingly the centrality of capitalism to the growth of new world
slavery, arguing that the profits of slavery accumulated in the
"triangular trade" between Europe, Africa and America contributed
fundamentally to Britain’s industrialization. For instance, the profits
from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per
cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation. [Robin Blackburn, The
Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
(London: Verso), p. 572.] The question of capital formation, however,
is only part of the story. The trans-atlantic slave trade was an
indispensable motor in an emerging capitalist world system under the
mantle of the British empire. The mechanization of cotton textiles,
originally produced in American plantations manned by African slaves,
was overwhelmingly the driving force in British industrialization. [CK
Harley and NFR Crafts, "Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth",
Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (1994, no. 420)]
6. Indian Holocaust
In his landmark study, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and
the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), historian Mike
Davis shows how British imperial policy systematically converted
droughts in South Asia and South Africa into foreseeable but
preventable deadly famines.
In India, between 5.5 and 12 million people died in an
artificially-induced famine, although millions of tonnes of grains
were in commercial circulation. Rice and wheat production had been
above average for the previous three years, but most of the surplus
had been exported to England. "Londoners were in effect eating
India’s bread." Under "free market" rules, between 1877 and 1878,
grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat
to Europe while millions of Indian poor starved to death.
Crucially, Davis argues that these people died "not outside the modern
world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated
into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden
age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of
utilitarian free trade principles."
7. Division of the World
This violence was, therefore, not merely accidental to the European
imperial project. It was integral, systematic, as a solution to the
problem of native resistance.
Between about 1870 and 1914, European imperial policies received a
new lease of life, resulting in the intense scramble for control over
eastern Asian and African territories. Almost the entire world was
divided up under the formal or informal political rule of Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Japan.
Between themselves, in Africa for instance they acquired 30 new
colonies and 110 million subjects. African resistance was brutally
crushed. Consider, for example, the 1904 uprising of the Hereros,
a tribe in southwest Africa, against German occupation. The German
response was to drive all 24,000 of them into the desert to starve to
death; others who surrendered were worked to death in forced labour
camps. [Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest
of the Dark Continent, 1876-1912 (London: Random House, 1991).]
During this period, we can already see drastic inequalities in the
international system. By 1880, the per capita income in the developed
countries was approximately double that of the ‘Third World’. By 1913,
it was three times higher, and by 1950, five times higher.
Similarly, the per capita share of GNP in the industrialized countries
of the developed core was in 1830 already twice that of the Third
World, becoming seven times as high by 1913. [E. J. Hobsbawm, The
Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 15]
In summary, for five hundred years, hundreds of millions of indigenous
peoples were slaughtered, decimated, deported, enslaved, starved,
exterminated, impoverished, and forcibly assimilated into an emerging
world system dominated by Western Europe. This was how the global
values and politico-economic structures of our civilization came
into being. Globalization… the bloody legacy of a 500-year killing
machine.
07/11/the-hidden-holocaust-our-civilizational-cris is/
The Dissident Voice, CA Dec 10 2007
The Hidden Holocaust: Our Civilizational Crisis Part 2: Exporting
Democracy
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed / December 10th, 2007
1. The Real NWO
In part 1, we reviewed the emergence of the modern world system through
a process of systematic genocidal violence conducted across disparate
continents, killing in total thousands of millions of indigenous
peoples in Africa, Asia and America.
But this "hidden holocaust" didn’t end with the demise of colonization:
Because colonization never underwent a genuine demise.
Rather, it underwent a fundamental re-configuration, prompted by
rising demands for freedom and independence from around the world.
By 1945, the end of the Second World War, the contours of a new
international order were in place. According to US professors Lawrence
Shoup and William Minter its design was being prepared several years
earlier. It was known as the "Grand Area Strategy", drawn up by US
State Department policy-planners in liaison with experts from the
Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC.
If you want evidence for a plan for empire, you won’t get better than
this. The planners identified a minimum "world area" control over which
was deemed to be "essential for the security and economic prosperity
of the United States and the Western Hemisphere." This "world area"
included the entire Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire
and the Far East.
Grand Area Strategy saw that US policy was "to secure the limitation
of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that constitutes
a threat" to this world area. But this policy could only be
pursued on the basis of "an integrated policy to achieve military
and economic supremacy for the United States." So the concept of
"security interests" had to be extended beyond traditional notions
of territorial integrity to include domination of these regions
"strategically necessary for world control." Sounds strangely familiar
right? (Think "PNAC" or "Defense Planning Guidance")
In other words, national security, economic security and imperial
consolidation were interconnected components of Grand Area Strategy.
State Department planners had no illusions about what this meant.
Indeed, they candidly recognized that "the British Empire as it
existed in the past will never reappear", and that therefore "the
United States may have to take its place." Grand Area planning was
about fulfilling the "requirement[s] of the United States in a world
in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power."1
2. The Problem of "Freedom"
So what next? The contradiction between revamped American plans for
the extension of a new imperial order, and the struggle for national
independence breaking out across Africa and Asia, to be resolved.
American and British policy planners recognized the need to subvert
the process of decolonization, to sustain control. D. K. Fieldhouse,
Professor Emeritus in Imperial History at Oxford University, notes
that the economic dependence of the colonies was "the intended result
of decolonialism."2 Similarly, Robert Winks, Randolph W. Townsend
Professor of History and chair of the Department of History at Yale
University, explains that "the imperial nation controlled the process
[of decolonization] to the end."3
Part of the plan to obviate decolonization was implemented through
direct force. Since 1945, the United States, with routine support
from Britain, has conducted military interventions into more than 70
nations in the South. Many of these were conducted in the context
of the Cold War, supposedly to fight off the Soviet Union, which,
we were told, was intent on imminent invasion of Western Europe and
possibly even the American mainland.
But in truth, the vast majority of interventions conducted had
nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but were indeed fought to put
down nationalist independence movements across the Third World. The
paranoia and fear over the USSR allowed Western policymakers to label
anything that threatened Western domination as Communist. According
to former State Department official Richard J Barnet:
Even the word ‘communist’ has been applied so liberally and so loosely
to revolutionary or radical regimes that any government risks being
so characterised if it adopts one or more of the following policies
which the State Department finds distasteful: nationalization of
private industry, particularly foreign-owned corporations, radical land
reform, autarchic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet or Chinese aid,
insistence upon following an anti-American or non-aligned foreign
policy, among others.4
3. 1945-1990: Third World Holocaust?
The scale of the death toll from these interventions is staggering.
William Blum, another ex-State Department official, describes the
vast loss of life resulting from post-1945 military interventionism
in the Third World as a full-scale "American holocaust."5
How many innocent civilians died as a consequence of these military
interventions? A detailed break-down of figures can be found in
Unpeople, by the British historian Mark Curtis, a former research
fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Curtis’
conservative calculations confirm that Britain has been complicit
in the deaths of over 10 million "unpeople", expendable people from
far-off foreign lands whose lives are worthless compared to the
significance of a specific set of overriding strategic and economic
interests.
Here’s another overall estimate from the American development expert,
Dr J. W. Smith, director of the Institute for Economic Democracy
in Arizona:
No society will tolerate it if they knew that they… were responsible
for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing
the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were
destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to
care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this
has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record
of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990.6
Dr. Smith’s figures, it should be noted, point not only to a
core of up to 15 million deaths directly due to Western military
interventions, but a further unknown 100 million plus who died as
an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of
peripheral economies.
We do not recognize the post-war period as a "holocaust." But it was
only a few years after the appalling genocide against the Jews was
revealed to the world that the dictum "never again" was forgotten,
a pointless platitude by which to ignore the pleas of millions. The
reasons we do not recognize this period as a "holocaust" are several.
Firstly, our political culture does not really acknowledge the
scale of the interventions that our military intelligence services
conducted across the South. Secondly, consequently, such figures are
totally unheard of. Thirdly, our political culture is not equipped
to comprehend these 70 plus military interventions as manifestations
of a single expanding system. Rather, we are accustomed to thinking
about our history, about these events, about politics, in a fragmented
and disjointed manner. Yet it is precisely this political culture that
means that our history, perhaps even our historical complicity in this
"hidden holocaust", remains invisible to the majority of citizens.
4. Covering Iraq
The same political culture that mystifies and obscures the
systematization and globalization of genocidal violence in the
emergence, expansion and consolidation of the modern world system –
not only since 1492, but even continuing past 1945 until now – means
that even current events are difficult for us to truly assimilate
and understand. This is particularly true of our involvement in
Iraq. A fragmented and disjointed method of analysis ingrained in our
political culture, incapable of serious or sustained self-critique
and self-reflection, prevents us from envisioning the Iraq Holocaust
as it truly is.
For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the
beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. Western pundits,
politicians and political analysts routinely debate the emergence of
a new form of American empire after 9/11, particularly in relation
to Iraq. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new
phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the
2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it
is to be fully understood.
A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq
War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe
wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth
century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq
on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership
of the United States since 1991. With this in mind, we will begin
by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical
process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial
violence, which frequently included episodes that some scholars
consider to be genocidal. While not attempting to actually resolve
the questions here, if this argument is accurate in highlighting 1)
the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth
and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of
Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have
established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding
of contemporary international relations in the context of a renewed
exploration of the history and theory of imperialism and genocide.
5. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 1 – The "Arab Facade"
Shortly after the First World War, a number of European powers
including England turned their eyes toward the Middle East, with a
view to weaken the regional hegemony of Ottoman Turkey, the Muslim
caliphate for four centuries. The region encompassed by the Ottoman
caliphate included the areas of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan
and much of Saudi Arabia. Amidst a plethora of ethnic, linguistic,
cultural and even religious differences, Islam provided the basis of
political unity sustaining the caliphate.7 The Ottomans were hardly
saints, and had their own fair share of violence and repression. Among
other things, they were complicit in the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide.
Yet that doesn’t absolve the British for what they planned and did
in the Middle East, which has now amounted to the continuation of
relations of violence and even genocide. British officers in the Arab
Bureau in Cairo improvised plans to sponsor local uprisings.
According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, British
aims were explicitly to divide, and thus weaken, the Arabs, not
unify them. Despite public overtures of support for Arab unity
and independence, the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot
Agreement with France, which made official the task of controlling
Middle East oil by exploiting internal divisions. Under the Agreement,
Iraq was to be carved-up between France and Britain. Thus, Britain
invaded southern Iraq as soon as war with the Ottomans had been
declared, taking Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in November 1918.
Iraq was not the only innovation. British, French, American and
other European manoeuvres saw the creation of twelve new fictional
Middle East nation-states from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The
contents of the Sykes-Pikot agreement were revealed in 1921 when
the Bolsheviks retrieved a copy. Oil was, of course, a major factor
in its formulation, as was officially recognised in the 1920 San
Remo Treaty, and in the illegal 1928 Red Line Agreement, involving
the British and French sharing of the oil wealth of former Turkish
territories originally under Ottoman rule. Here, percentages of
future oil production were allocated to British, French and American
oil companies.8
Subsequently, emir Faysal I – who belonged to the Hashemite family
of Mecca – was appointed by the British High Commissioner as the
King of Iraq. Faysal immediately signed a treaty of alliance with
Britain that virtually re-instated the British mandate. To counter the
widespread nationalist protests to this continuation of colonial rule
by proxy, the British High Commissioner forcefully deported nationalist
leaders, while establishing an Iraqi constitution granting King Faysal
dictatorial powers over the Iraqi parliament.
Iraqi popular unrest, however, was intolerable enough to make this
state of affairs increasingly unsustainable, forcing Britain to
grant Iraq formal independence in 1932 as part of the process of
decolonisation. The gesture, however, was only token. Britain had
already signed a new treaty with Iraq establishing a "close alliance"
between the two countries and a "common defence position." With King
Faysal still in charge and British bases remaining in Basra and west
of the Euphrates, British rule was rehabilitated in an indirect form.
When elements of the Iraqi army and political parties toppled King
Faysal in 1941, Britain invaded and occupied Iraq again to re-install
him.
This policy in Iraq – which included both the colonial phase of direct
rule and the transition to effective indirect rule under decolonisation
– was candidly described by Lord George Curzon, then British Foreign
Secretary, who noted that what the UK and other Western powers desired
in the Middle East was an:
Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and
controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab
staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered
territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may
be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere
of influence, a buffer state and so on.9
Lord Curzon had defined in explicit terms the regional framework of
political order as a network of surrogate client-regimes. Hence, in
attempting to ensure that these client-regimes remain fundamentally
compliant with the overall parameters of "British guidance", regional
policy was designed to sustain their internal stability at all costs.
As the global hegemony of the British empire faded, virtually eclipsed
after the Second World War by the United States, the same policy
was pursued. As one US State Department official stated in 1958:
"Western efforts should be directed at… the gradual development
and modernisation of the Persian Gulf shaikhdoms without imperiling
internal stability or the fundamental authority of the ruling
groups." And similarly, the US National Security Council noted in
1958: "Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not
unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world
whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the
West and the status quo in their countries."10 Yet a further secret
British document from the same year concurs, detailing other relevant
strategic considerations:
The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are]
(a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to
oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued
availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues
of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism
in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of
Arab nationalism.11
6. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 2 – Our "Policeman"
The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures
from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq.
After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was
tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab
nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt.
[Roger Morris, ‘A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,’ New York Times, 14
March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again
by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled
Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate
historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait.7
He thus became "regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must
be removed." Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting
the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim’s administration,
with the CIA at the helm." In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad,
American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime," notes
the NY Times. "Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait,
intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The
United States armed Kurdish insurgents." Former Ba’athist leader Hani
Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein – then a 25-year-old who
had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 –
was colluding with the CIA at this time.7
Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing
that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated
once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in
the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors,
resulting in the decimation of much of the country’s educated class.
Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists
in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however,
was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None
were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and
elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam
himself "had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the
victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists
in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the
Muthaqafeen or educated classes."7
US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the
operation. According to the CIA’s royal collaborator: "Many meetings
were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence – the
most critical ones in Kuwait." Although Saddam’s Ba’ath party was
then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the
CIA due to the group’s close relations with the Iraqi army.
Aburish reports that the Ba’ath party leaders had agreed to "undertake
a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist
allies" in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba’ath party leader,
Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup
was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.7
In 1968, another coup granted Ba’athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman,
Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger
Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon
Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had
"often heard CIA officers – including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson
of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East
and Africa at the time – speak openly about their close relations
with the Iraqi Baathists." [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military
coups brought the genocidal Ba’ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein,
to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests.
Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University
working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put
together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of
the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the
direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and
occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of "excess
mortality" – "the difference between actual deaths in a country and
the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the
same demographics" – Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million
Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering
coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself
obtained power.12
Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued
through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds
and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only
three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with
Iran (1980-88) – killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his
internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89)
against the Kurds – killing 100,000 people including the gassing
of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate
passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities,
the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to
block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government
doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more
than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued
by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the
provision of funds and technology to Saddam’s regime, describing it
as the "West’s policeman in the region." The international community,
in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam’s acts
of genocide and ethnic cleansing.13
7. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 3 – "Paying the Price"
Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct
Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According
to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce
Department’s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to
the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians
were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including
due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq’s
infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign.14
1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United
Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to
prevent Saddam’s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which
tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving
the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to
2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data
confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom
were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that
the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime,
a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. "Iraqis will pay the price
while [Saddam] is in power", warned Robert Gates, then presidential
national security adviser and current Defense Secretary.15
Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide
are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly
involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday,
former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN
humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed
not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have
died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of
Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible
for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the
deaths of Iraqi civilians.16
8. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 4 – Exporting Democracy
Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War.
Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in
Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the
epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of
Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths
due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical
methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that
the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures,
which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s
figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser
described the survey’s methods as "close to best practice" and its
results "robust", advising ministers not to criticise the study
in public.17
Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists
visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local
reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was
subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business
Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005.
Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face
interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged
18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household
had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll
found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the
invasion.18 The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team,
whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australian
biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at
least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war.
These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the
total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American
invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to a
total of 3 million.
The "hidden holocaust in history" thus continues now. It erupts
directly from the unjust political and economic structure of the global
system, and intensifies against target populations in the process
of the system’s attempts to expand and consolidate its interests and
activities, to eliminate resistance to its rule.
Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation
that he "believed" what he did in Iraq was "right". No doubt, so did
Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.
We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial
power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the
worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed
that what they were doing was right. If we have any semblance of
humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile,
at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our
most urgent task must be to discover why our global system, as it has
expanded not only during the era of traditional modern "colonization"
but even moreso in the era of postmodern "globalization",
systematically generates genocidal violence against hundreds of
millions of people across the South; and systematically finds ways
to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for
us to live, breathe and prosper.
War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR). Cited in Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial
Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and US Foreign Policy
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). This edition is now out of
print but I believe it is available in print-on-demand format. #
D. K. Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945-80: Economic Decolonization and
Arrested Development, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 5. # Robin
W. Winks, ‘On Decolonization and Informal Empire’, American Historical
Review (Vol. 18, No. 3, June 1976), p. 540-42. # Intervention and
Revolution: The United States in the Third World (1968) # Killing Hope:
CIA and US Military Interventions Since World War II (Zed, 2003). #
J. W. Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st
Century (Arizona: Institute for Economic Democracy, 2003). # Aburish,
Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo,
London, 1998. # # # # # Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The
West and the Arab Elite
In the aftermath of the war, what remained of the Ottoman empire was
divided among the colonial powers in the mandate system established
under the League of Nations, by which formerly Ottoman territories
were to be governed by the European powers to guide them toward
self-government. Britain managed to obtain the mandate for Iraq, even
threatening war to keep the oil-rich Mosul province in the country.
The announcement of British mandate rule in Iraq in 1920 led to
widespread indigenous revolts, which were ruthlessly suppressed by
British forces. That year, then Secretary of State for War and Air,
Winston Churchill, proposed that Mesopotamia "could be cheaply policed
by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British
and 10,000 Indian troops." His proposal was formally adopted the
next year at the Cairo conference, and Iraqi villages were bombed
from the air.Edward Greer, ‘The Hidden History of the Iraq War,’
Monthly Review, May 1991. #
William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the
Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, 1982, p. 28, 34. # Curtis, Mark, The Great Deception, (London:
Pluto) p. 147, 127. # File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the
Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778. Cited in Nafeez Ahmed,
Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle
for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003). # Gideon Polya, "Iraq Death
Toll Amounts to a Holocaust", Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43);
Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne:
LaTrobe, 2007). # Anthony Burke, "Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering",
Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206;
Curtis, p. 129. # Beth Osborne Daponte, "A Case Study in Estimating
Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War"
Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993). # Nafeez Ahmed,
Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for
Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003). # George E. Bisharat, "Sanctions as
Genocide," Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11,
No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, "The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others",
Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July
2001). # Paul Reynolds, "Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates",
BBC News (20 October 2006); Owen Bennett-Jones, "Iraqi deaths survey
‘was robust’" BBC News (26 March 2007). # Tina Susman, "Poll: Civilian
Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million", Los Angeles Times (14 September
2007). # Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings:
An Independent Inquiry (Overlook, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11,
Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005), among
other books. He teaches international relations at the University of
Sussex, and directs the Institute for Policy Research & Development
in London. Read other articles by Nafeez, or visit Nafeez’s website.
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