The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

Robert Fisk – The Independent March 19, 2008

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

Explosions rock Baghdad 21 March, 2003.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through
the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

“They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – “Mission Accomplished” – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or
“terrorism” – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”.

Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”.

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,97 is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number
of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb
blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis who have died.

America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.

www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-the-only-lesson-we-ever-learn-is-that-we-never-learn-797816.html

That ‘Unique’ Jewish Morality

It is something I run into more and more, both on a personal and non-personal basis. The questions, the bewilderment, the confusion…people trying to fit two completely irreconcilable ideas together in such a way that it all conforms to the laws of reason. ‘How?’ I hear and read often…‘How is it that the Jews–who call themselves ‘a light among nations’ and who constantly lecture the rest of the non-Jewish world on issues such as genocide, holocaust and whatnot–are so willing to turn a callous eye towards the plight of others, and particularly when those ‘others’ happen to be Arabs, the only real ‘Semites’ in the world?’

Well, the answer is really quite simple actually. A picture speaks a thousand words, as they say, and the above picture explains in a microsecond why the Jews of the world are for the most part silent over the slaughter taking place against the Semitic peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Look at the eyes of the man, the deep blue eyes common to European (non-Semitic) Ashkenazi Jews. Consider the other features as well. We have seen his face a thousand times amongst his cousins in the media and whatnot. His name is Shanbo Heineman, a Jew from San Francisco.

Next, look at the wound on his forehead. It was caused by a ‘rubber coated’ bullet fired by one of his own cousins in the IDF operating under orders from headquarters.

By the way, do not let the ‘rubber bullet’ thing fool you. It means nothing. It is simply a plastic coating around a regular lead bullet traveling at 3,000 feet per second and with around 800 foot-pounds of energy PSI behind it. People die from them all the time and the stressing of the ‘rubber coating’ is just a slight-of-hand on Israel’s part in trying to pretty up what is her organically-brutal character. Playing with words and ideas is her specialty and always has been. The Irgun and Stern Gang going into villages and murdering hundreds of innocent civilians is ‘patriotic’ and ‘heroic’ and the Palestinians fighting to protect themselves from being slaughtered is ‘terrorism’.

Anyway, back to our Jewish friend here, Mr. Heineman. He was shot in the head because he dared to follow a higher power, meaning his God-given conscience by protesting the brutality inflicted by Israel against the Palestinians. For this he was rewarded with a bullet to the head. Despite the fact that he survived it, he will be plagued with pain and serious medical problems for the rest of his life. In short, he has been permanently maimed.

And in his eyes you can see the reason why Jews around the world are silent when it comes to what has been done to Israel’s victims in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. In his eyes you can see the fear, no, the TERROR, as well as the sense of betrayal he feels when he figured out in a millisecond that his own people were his own worst enemies, when he realized that they would kill him in a second as if he were nothing more than a cockroach for his willingness to listen to his human conscience instead of listening to his ‘Jewish’ one.

And where is that ‘unique Jewish morality’ speaking out against what was done to him? Where is the ADL and other Jewish watchdog groups? Isn’t his being shot an act of ‘anti-Semitism’? If it were anyone else and the attacker had been another Gentile, we certainly would hear about it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Heineman is a rarity. He is much like those scorpions that are identical to their cousins in every respect except that they carry no poison in their tails, or like the rare pit bull that doesn’t have the same violent tendencies well-known to be part of his breed. Mr. Heineman–like some of his forebearers 2,000 years ago–chose to break from the tribe and follow the path of peace, righteousness and compassion rather than the dictates of that ‘unique Jewish morality’ and in that moment he became a terrorist in the eyes of his rabbis, be they religious or political in nature.

And in one picture that speaks a thousand words, we can see the answers to all those burning questions concerning Jewish ‘suffering’ and ‘persecution’ that has taken place for thousands of years…We see the reason for the deafening silence on the part of those who call themselves the ‘light
among nations’ when it comes to the genocide of 2 million–count ‘em, 2,000,000 Iraqi civilians. Whether it is Jews protesting the slaughter of the Palestinians today or whether it was those who dared protest the slaughter of the ancient Canaanites thousands of years ago, the issue is the same–

‘You stick with the tribe, right or wrong, Jew-boy. You don’t ask questions, you follow orders. If your leaders tell you to go and murder a million people, than you DO IT Goddamnit or you will be crushed like a grasshopper.’

On a spring day 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth rode into Jerusalem in triumph and the Jews there welcomed Him as a king, shouting ‘Hosanna to God in the Highest…Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord’, laying down palm leaves in His path. The Jewish leadership saw this and were incensed, as Jesus’ teachings threatened to free the Jewish people from the grip of their leaders…

…A week later, the same people who welcomed Jesus as a king were calling for Barabbas–a convicted murderer–to be released and for Jesus–a peaceful, righteous man–to be crucified, shouting ‘Let his blood be upon us and upon our children!’ The change was affected by their leaders who went through the crowd, threatening them if they did not ‘go with the flow’.

Today we see the same thing, as Jews all over the world (with few exceptions) are found cheering for the genocide of the original Semitic peoples of the Holy Land, shouting ‘Let their blood be upon us and upon our children!’

Those who do not add their voices to the mad chorus of the mob are rewarded with bullets to their heads, as was the fine man in this picture Shanbo Heineman. He chose to be a human being instead of a Jew and for that he is regarded as a traitor worthy of death.

Ariel Sharon was right in that interview he gave with Amos Oz in 1982. Jewish morality is ‘unique’. It is very different from the moralities of other religions and cultures throughout history. Other religions and cultures recognize a higher power other than that of man, where the rules of right and wrong do not have an asterisk placed next to them noting an exception exists when it applies to certain people. Jewish morality on the other hand is more ‘flexible’ and allows its people to do certain things that other religions prohibit. It maintains a deceptive, silent, insidious, double-minded and contradictory aspect to its character where the golden rule is ‘whatever benefits the Jews is good’. It is the ultimate ‘end-justifies-the-means’ logic and the same reasoning Cain used in killing his brother Abel.

I never thought the day would come where I see eye-to-eye with mass murderer Ariel Sharon on anything, but surprisingly, after careful and honest consideration, I have to agree with him in that interview in 1982 where he said–

“We’ll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality and all the bullshit talk about a unique people and of being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance…’

…to which I must add a simple yet unequivocal ‘Amen…Let us hear no more of it’

© 2008 by Mark Glenn, Contributing editor, American Free Press Newspaper