guerrillaradio
1st October 2002, 18:54
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH:
Siege of Baghdad and the meaning of shame
By Adam Nicolson
(Filed: 01/10/2002)
The woman next to me on the pro-Palestine, anti-war march through London last Saturday held up a placard - red crayon, amateurish, not the sort of image that gets on the evening news - proclaiming "The Alliance for the Protection of the Iraqi Countryside". She laughed.
In front of us on the Embankment was a group of Palestinians, orchestrated by a man with a loudhailer. We were under the Hungerford railway bridge where the tracks emerge from Charing Cross, and their enraged chant, "Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad," echoed brutally from the girders.
"Fatman Sharon what do you say?" a man in dark glasses hooted. "How many kids did you eat today?" A reedy-voiced peacenik carrying a Stars and Stripes across which he had sewn, evening after evening, with loving delicacy, a large white swastika, was saying to the policemen as he walked past them: "Thanks, thank you, thank you for taking care of us, thank you, it's very kind of you."
The men in Day-Glo yellow made no visible or audible response. This huge muddled cavalcade - with its wit, innocence, anger, solidarity, deep eccentricities, a desire to do and say the right thing, to be polite - was a picture of England today, just as much as any tweeds, Huskies and Barbours were last week.
A great deal was made of the courtesy and gentleness of the Liberty and Livelihood marchers, but this demo, founded as it was on a burning sense of injustice, was its equal in courtesy. There were grounds for turbulence, God knows, but for all that, and for all the rage and hurt that was evident here, the mood on Saturday was civil, the anger that had brought people here restrained and disciplined.
Outside Downing Street, where I spent half an hour or so as the tide flowed past, each new group, unprompted by the one before, would begin a deep and heartfelt booing - not catcalling, not jokey, not taunting, but more like a growling of discontent and anger, immensely powerful, emerging from deep in the gut.
I don't think I have ever heard a crowd making such a controlled and threatening noise. It was the noise made by a dog in the moments before it bites. The policemen lined up in front of the Downing Street gates stood there with their arms crossed in front of their chests, gritted teeth, acutely uncomfortable, clearly threatened and disturbed.
And accompanying that noise, apart from the slightly facile, rhyming chants, borrowed from the Vietnam war, the only word that came to people's lips, repeatedly, was "Shame". "Shame. Shame. Tony Blair," they said over and over again. Nothing bloodthirsty, no talk here of dead babies, of killer presidents, but instead the one word that made an appeal to a moral sense, to an idea of moral community.
There were, it was said, some teenagers there with fake sticks of gelignite strapped to their chests, but the organisers had sent them to the back of the march. Adolescent extremism was not the message. Shame was the point and, more acutely than the acres of speculative newsprint, that repeated word articulated the doubts over any invasion of Iraq: is this something of which, like Suez, like Bloody Sunday, like Amritsar, this country will in future feel ashamed?
That is the necessary question. And it is worth thinking what that invasion might consist of. Nobody outside the Government knows. It may well not be settled in the Pentagon, or in the minds of Dick Cheney, America's Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.
But whatever the form the invasion takes, it seems likely that Saddam Hussein will retreat inside the huge human shield of Baghdad, a form of soft and receptive armour, five million people thick. News teams from around the world will be in there.
It is said that the Iraqi army will collapse in even fewer than the 100 hours it took to disintegrate last time. But that doesn't mean that Saddam will not have people around him who might want to fight to the last. If he does, the invasion force has the prospect of a battle for Baghdad. No commander in his right mind, I am told, would take his army into the streets of that city. The prospect of an Iraqi Grozny is as horrifying to the American generals as to anyone.
Nor will air power be usable. Saddam's forces will be in the schools with the children, the hospitals with the patients and the mosques with the devout. Every day, civilian Iraqi airliners flout the no-fly zones patrolled by allied air forces. They receive warnings from the AWACS planes that detect the contravention, but they announce themselves as civilian airliners and know that makes them safe. Instead, the American army - and those Iraqis who have risen in its support and been armed - will be forced to do what armies have always done to areas in which large numbers of people are concentrated: lay siege to Baghdad.
Electricity and water will be cut off. The people of Baghdad will begin to starve and die of thirst. Disease will become rampant. The old and the children will die first, and be filmed in their death throes. The population will attempt to escape.
Troops remaining loyal to Saddam (who will of course have stockpiled supplies, filled reservoirs, installed generators, replenished fuel bunkers) will prevent them, because they need the human shield to protect the regime against bombing, shooting those Iraqis trying to get out, like East German border guards in Berlin in the early 1960s. And CNN will still be there.
None of this may happen. Saddam may run away or kill himself. But what if he doesn't? That, in effect, was the question asked by the gaggle of English radicals outside Downing Street on Saturday. That is what "Shame" meant: has anyone properly weighed the risks of what might happen in an Iraq war against the risks of containment, deterrence, hard-headed diplomacy and alliance-building in the Middle East?
Has anyone really imagined whether this war has in it the seeds of something shameful?
Siege of Baghdad and the meaning of shame
By Adam Nicolson
(Filed: 01/10/2002)
The woman next to me on the pro-Palestine, anti-war march through London last Saturday held up a placard - red crayon, amateurish, not the sort of image that gets on the evening news - proclaiming "The Alliance for the Protection of the Iraqi Countryside". She laughed.
In front of us on the Embankment was a group of Palestinians, orchestrated by a man with a loudhailer. We were under the Hungerford railway bridge where the tracks emerge from Charing Cross, and their enraged chant, "Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad," echoed brutally from the girders.
"Fatman Sharon what do you say?" a man in dark glasses hooted. "How many kids did you eat today?" A reedy-voiced peacenik carrying a Stars and Stripes across which he had sewn, evening after evening, with loving delicacy, a large white swastika, was saying to the policemen as he walked past them: "Thanks, thank you, thank you for taking care of us, thank you, it's very kind of you."
The men in Day-Glo yellow made no visible or audible response. This huge muddled cavalcade - with its wit, innocence, anger, solidarity, deep eccentricities, a desire to do and say the right thing, to be polite - was a picture of England today, just as much as any tweeds, Huskies and Barbours were last week.
A great deal was made of the courtesy and gentleness of the Liberty and Livelihood marchers, but this demo, founded as it was on a burning sense of injustice, was its equal in courtesy. There were grounds for turbulence, God knows, but for all that, and for all the rage and hurt that was evident here, the mood on Saturday was civil, the anger that had brought people here restrained and disciplined.
Outside Downing Street, where I spent half an hour or so as the tide flowed past, each new group, unprompted by the one before, would begin a deep and heartfelt booing - not catcalling, not jokey, not taunting, but more like a growling of discontent and anger, immensely powerful, emerging from deep in the gut.
I don't think I have ever heard a crowd making such a controlled and threatening noise. It was the noise made by a dog in the moments before it bites. The policemen lined up in front of the Downing Street gates stood there with their arms crossed in front of their chests, gritted teeth, acutely uncomfortable, clearly threatened and disturbed.
And accompanying that noise, apart from the slightly facile, rhyming chants, borrowed from the Vietnam war, the only word that came to people's lips, repeatedly, was "Shame". "Shame. Shame. Tony Blair," they said over and over again. Nothing bloodthirsty, no talk here of dead babies, of killer presidents, but instead the one word that made an appeal to a moral sense, to an idea of moral community.
There were, it was said, some teenagers there with fake sticks of gelignite strapped to their chests, but the organisers had sent them to the back of the march. Adolescent extremism was not the message. Shame was the point and, more acutely than the acres of speculative newsprint, that repeated word articulated the doubts over any invasion of Iraq: is this something of which, like Suez, like Bloody Sunday, like Amritsar, this country will in future feel ashamed?
That is the necessary question. And it is worth thinking what that invasion might consist of. Nobody outside the Government knows. It may well not be settled in the Pentagon, or in the minds of Dick Cheney, America's Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.
But whatever the form the invasion takes, it seems likely that Saddam Hussein will retreat inside the huge human shield of Baghdad, a form of soft and receptive armour, five million people thick. News teams from around the world will be in there.
It is said that the Iraqi army will collapse in even fewer than the 100 hours it took to disintegrate last time. But that doesn't mean that Saddam will not have people around him who might want to fight to the last. If he does, the invasion force has the prospect of a battle for Baghdad. No commander in his right mind, I am told, would take his army into the streets of that city. The prospect of an Iraqi Grozny is as horrifying to the American generals as to anyone.
Nor will air power be usable. Saddam's forces will be in the schools with the children, the hospitals with the patients and the mosques with the devout. Every day, civilian Iraqi airliners flout the no-fly zones patrolled by allied air forces. They receive warnings from the AWACS planes that detect the contravention, but they announce themselves as civilian airliners and know that makes them safe. Instead, the American army - and those Iraqis who have risen in its support and been armed - will be forced to do what armies have always done to areas in which large numbers of people are concentrated: lay siege to Baghdad.
Electricity and water will be cut off. The people of Baghdad will begin to starve and die of thirst. Disease will become rampant. The old and the children will die first, and be filmed in their death throes. The population will attempt to escape.
Troops remaining loyal to Saddam (who will of course have stockpiled supplies, filled reservoirs, installed generators, replenished fuel bunkers) will prevent them, because they need the human shield to protect the regime against bombing, shooting those Iraqis trying to get out, like East German border guards in Berlin in the early 1960s. And CNN will still be there.
None of this may happen. Saddam may run away or kill himself. But what if he doesn't? That, in effect, was the question asked by the gaggle of English radicals outside Downing Street on Saturday. That is what "Shame" meant: has anyone properly weighed the risks of what might happen in an Iraq war against the risks of containment, deterrence, hard-headed diplomacy and alliance-building in the Middle East?
Has anyone really imagined whether this war has in it the seeds of something shameful?