(The last of)

At my disk

Some of the editorials from Wilson's Almanac AAA
(from January 1, 2003, At My Disk appeared only in AAA)

Blogging changed the Net. I stopped putting editorials in the ezine altogether when I started the Blogmanac in May, 2003

« At My Disk Index

Sad/happy days

Thank you to the many readers who have stayed with my ezine
a year since I announced my opposition to the invasion of Iraq,
particularly my friends in the USA who must believe me that
my opposition is not to the people of the USA themselves.

My pro-peace stance has decimated the Almanac's subscription base,
and thus my income, but I don't resile from one word written,
and I am certainly hoping to keep the Almanac going despite all.
Now as the smoke clears from Baghdad, I have a few words to say.

Bright blessings,
Pip

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Cringemaking: It has been very moving to see the delight in the faces of people in Baghdad as they celebrate the end of the brutal regime of that unlamented monster, Saddam Hussein, and the brutal bombing of their city. Now begins the difficult task of winning the peace.

If anyone was ever in doubt as to the purposes behind the coalition's invasion of Iraq, those doubts must have been dispelled as we cringed when the occupying military force placed an American flag atop that primary symbol of old Iraq, the statue of Hussein in Baghdad's central plaza.

From my years as a PR dude, writing literally thousands of media releases and managing all kinds of situations and events (including a visit by the mother of George W Bush, Barbara Bush, when she was the USA First Lady,– yes, at your almanackist's invitation (cringe) – when I dealt daily with White House PR suits and Secret Service spooks), and from my years on the editor's side of the desk receiving a plethora of PR releases, I know at least one thing: PR guys are not always smart. This photo-op (photo opportunity) would have enraged the world a whole lot less if they had simply got a few local boys instead of American soldiers and tanks to pull down the Stalinesque Ozymandias. What could they have been thinking? One would have thought the Bush administration would do its utmost to dispel the current world antipathy to its global expansionism.

Corporal Edward Chin, who placed the flag there, admitted having second thoughts about committing such an act, but what choices does a kid soldier have when he's ordered to do anything at all? “At the moment," Chin said, "I was just doing what I was told to do by my commanding officer.”

The symbolic statement of the flag on the statue was almost certainly no accident. The neo-colonialist cabal in Washington has had Iraq-invasion plans on the drawing board for years, and somewhere at Operations HQ, no doubt, is a document filed as

 'Statue, Hussein, for the Desecration Of, One". 

We can only stand awe-struck at the chutzpah of these men, their born-to-rule mentality, and their joy as the new empire spreads. We wonder at their deadly attack on Baghdad's Hotel Palestine, the well-known residence of many Western journalists. Similarly, the offices of the news channel Al-Jazeera were attacked and a young journalist killed, even months after that office had, for safety's sake and trusting the invaders, provided the coalition forces with their co-ordinates. (Those who insist that Al-Jazeera was a propaganda tool for Iraq should note that Iraq called it a propaganda tool for America.) We recall that the Pentagon threatened to the BBC that it would kill independent reporters in Iraq, and they have been true to their word.

One also wonders which White House genius made the decision to tolerate and even encourage widespread looting in Iraqi cities. Even the hawkish Sydney Morning Herald (April 10) reports that not only are the occupying forces allowing the pillage, coalition soldiers are actually receiving some of the looted goods; indeed, they have not tried to hide it from reporters as occupying soldiers are wont to do. They are no doubt comfortable with their 'embedded' buddies.

Pressure must now be brought to bear on the US administration to remind it of its obligation under its nemesis, the Geneva Convention, to maintain order in occupied territories. Let us hope and pray – no, let us insist – that the non-oil yielding regions of Iraq are not left to the wolves in the manner of the Afghanistan debacle, in which a no-authority president was installed as a lame-duck Mayor of Kabul, surrounded by warlords and their awesome forces bearing mind-shredding weapons of mass destruction sold to them by Western firms under the auspices of Western governments. Let us not forget the thousands of innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well, nor their suffering families.

Over the past 21 days we watched with horror as Iraq sustained hit after hit of the best of the Western arsenal, wondering at which stage Hussein would unleash the much-vaunted 'weapons of mass destruction'. Remember those? The architects of this war are hoping we do not. The WMDs have been shunted to the back pages of the newspapers, and it's hoped we will forget the casus belli, the alleged excuse for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Strange, is it not, that even when Baghdad was under siege and things were getting desperate, the alleged WMDs did not leave their bunkers? Of course, those who have been following the Machiavellian process of this appalling chain of events are not surprised at all, and, if anything, have only been surprised that the Ba'ath dictator's defence forces withstood the barrage for three horrific weeks, having destroyed most of their big weapons in front of the eyes of UNMOVIC, which consistently reported that Hussein's regime was being reasonably compliant with UN requirements.

We will probably, of course, soon be presented with 'evidence' of the WMDs (why aren't coalition missiles, cluster bombs and daisy-cutters called WMDs anyway?). The media will be complicit in this charade, just as they were a few days ago with the so called 'torture charnel house' uncovered by British forces in Iraq. Front pages of newspapers showed large colour photographs under big banner headlines about this horror – screaming, outraged about  "480 bodies of Saddam's torture victims".

Of course, this turned out to be a regular morgue containing the bodies of Iranian soldiers killed years ago in the Iran-Iraq war. They were being held for an agreed body-exchange program with the Iranian Government. Naturally, this news filled about three column centimetres, nowhere near Page One. The wonder is not that governments and media lied to us once again; the wonder is that they allowed the correction. The PR suits certainly wouldn't have fed the correction to the media while the war was on, but now Iraq's oilfields have been more or less secured, their employers, Bush, Exxon and the rest, really don't care who says what any more. They've got the sand under which "their" petroleum flows, and the rest of us can go to hell in a handbasket.

The Marines, SAS, and other frontline troops formed the thin end of the wedge in this week's foray into Baghdad, and they will soon be followed by the next wave of other troops and administrators, civil servants, public relations consultants and business advance parties. Thinking back to my PR days, I can more or less picture how things will go down. Further cringemaking phony images from Iraq, further fabricated stories, more lies. Unfortunately, some – perhaps many – will believe them, as some people haven't put a sledgehammer to their TVs yet. 

Attractive young men and women (preferably gals, and the sexier the better) will be seconded for photo-ops. Something like this happened last week in the case of the young American female soldier whose 'daring capture' had the embedded PR guys at the Pentagon and in Kuwait and Iraq burning the air with their laptops. What was a pretty 19-year-old girl doing there anyway, if not for PR? Would you trust a government that sends a pretty young girl into the forefront of the hottest battle in the Middle East? The poor thing was whisked away for briefing faster than you can say Burson-Marsteller, before independent journalists or even her own parents could speak to her.

One also recalls the sweet young lady presented to US Congress just before the 1991 Gulf War, the girl whose heart-wrenching tales of Iraqi soldiers plucking Kuwaiti babies from incubators in a Kuwait City hospital, had grown Congressmen in tears and helped Bush Sr expropriate the will and the funds to go to war.

We all know now that the girl was no nurse at all, but the daughter of Kuwait's Ambassador to Washington. She had been engaged specifically to present her false tale, by the Washington office of one of the world's largest – and most deplorable – PR firms, Hill and Knowlton. It's the PR company whose building housed the offices not only of Bush Sr's good friend, H&K's Washington boss, Craig Fuller, but also those of the Congressmen who presented the Ambassador's daughter to the deceived people of America, and the world.

Probably slick players like Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, John Howard and Colin Powell, not to mention George Bush Jr, will present on national TV some smoking gun or other from Iraq. They won't even make a big effort to find something convincing. Why should they? As discussed previously in this almanac, the corporate ties between the major media conglomerates and armaments manufacturers are clear and strong, although not publicly well known. Why, NBC is fully owned by General Electric! As a consequence, the compliant megamedia will mostly continue to serve the interests of their huge advertising accounts. Those minimedia not already bought and owned by big moguls like Australia's Rupert Murdoch will reprint and broadcast whichever newsfeeds and columns come down the wires from the gigantic transnational syndicates and agencies, as these days it's far, far more cost effective than hiring journalists and sub-editors.

As George Santayana wrote, "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it". Let us never, ever forget that Colin Powell presented to Congress and the people of the world an audio tape that he bluntly pretended showed that (the now-sidelined) Osama bin Laden was connected to Saddam Hussein. All the while Powell was crossing his fingers and toes and hoping like hell that struggling, independent institutions like Yellow Times, and the Wilson's Almanac Scriptorium would not reveal that the transcript of the tape from the Arabic actually showed unequivocally that bin Laden was on that very tape calling for the 'infidel' Hussein's assassination.

At around the same time, Tony Blair with his PR suits presented their 'smoking gun' which turned out to be plagiarised lines from a student's old academic paper. Then there was the 'smoking gun' about an Iraq-Niger arms deal, which of course was a complete forgery. Let us never forget the 12,000-page weapons report presented by Iraq to UNMOVIC as demanded by the UN, but heisted by the US government and released with fully 9,000 pages cut by Rumsfeld's razor gang because it showed which Western companies had supplied Iraq with chemicals and weapons in disgraceful deals ... deals set up by Rummy himself.

Let us never forget that Afghanistan's Taliban dictators offered to turn over bin Laden to the International Criminal Court (the court that the Bush cabal is trying to topple, just like the Kyoto Protocols, the UN War Crimes Commission, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the United Nations itself) if evidence could be shown of the al Qaeda leader's involvement in 9-11 – evidence we still await with considerable interest. Let us not forget who gave Hussein and bin Laden their power. There are many things it behoves us not to forget, although the hypnosis of PR will affect us.

The hot part of the war is over and now the terrorism and vastly more destabilised Middle East begin. Tellingly, Iran now appears to have left its unmistakable warning odor on a tree via the assassination of Iraqi Imama Abdul Majid al-Khoei, to tell Bush that if Irani oilwells are next on his war-room table, they won't take it lying down.

We watch these events goggle eyed, scarcely believing that such barbarity, bumbling and deception could emanate from the highest office of the great United States of America. Those of us who are old enough to remember 'the good old days', long for the times when rich, crooked politicians at least had the decency to try to cover their tracks and erase the tape. Hey, where's Tricky Dicky when you need him? At least there are millions of Americans who walked for peace, and the Impeach Bush campaign is growing stronger by the day.

We shall observe the coming events with interest as they unfold, do our best to analyse their causes and implications, and present opinion in Wilson's Almanac – but mostly we'll just bring you many good reasons and many good ways to celebrate each day. Carpe diem!

Your generous support of this independent medium is humbly requested at http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/subs.html. Thank you, and I'll see you tomorrow with your regular almanac.

Abundance and gratitude,

Pip

More news on our arms trade
An estimated 3.5 million people have died as a result of armed conflict in eastern Congo since civil war broke out there in August 1998, according to a report released last year by the International Rescue Committee