The New Nation - Internet Edition

Bouthaina Shaaban

YET another conference on the Iraq mess was convened in Stockholm last week while President Bush was speaking to the Air Military Academic cadets in Colorado. In both events, President Bush and Secretary Rice were speaking about an Iraq that exists only in the minds of the speakers, and is so far removed from reality that millions of Iraqi widows, orphaned children and the physically maimed in addition to a million Iraqis who lost their lives and five millions displaced.

Bush speaks about fighting enemies and adversaries anywhere in the world. But who is the enemy and the adversary? "When rulers know we can strike their regime while sparing their populations, they realise they cannot hide behind the innocent, and that means they are less likely to start conflicts in the first place".

If we were to apply this statement to Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, can President Bush say that he has hit the regimes and spared the people? What is he talking about when we recall what has happened to the Iraqi people of death and destruction?

Perhaps what the members of American administration say about Iraq should be read in the light of what is taking place in Iraq, and in the light of what few Americans, who were liberated of the administration pressures, say about Iraq such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter and the latest is Scott McClellan, who was the White House spokesperson from 2003-2006 and whose book, What Happened: Inside The Bush White House and Washington Culture of Deception, in which he explains how Bush misled the US and the world about the war on Iraq: "The decision to invade Iraq", he says, "was a serious strategic blunder". Richard Clark, the previous head of countering terrorism in the White House, said that leaving the American forces in Iraq is helpful to Al Qaeda.

Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander of the American forces in Iraq, also wrote a book, Wiser in Battle: a Soldier's story, in which he exposed the lies of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to justify the war on Iraq.

McClellan emphasises that both Bush and his advisers confused propaganda with news. He also accuses two previous senior advisors of Bush, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, of deceiving him in order to lie about their role in leaking the name of the CIA agent Valerie Plame in vengeance of her husband Joseph Wilson, who unravelled the deliberate lies of the Bush administration about Iraq buying uranium from Niger for military purposes which turned out to be a lie as well.

McClellan says they "both encouraged me to repeat the lie time and again," claiming that he did not discover that it was a lie until journalists started digging for the truth after two years.

The machine of the supposedly "free Press" is being used in order to market fabricated lies for pre-designed purposes which bring death and destruction to millions of innocent people. In such a climate, truth becomes an orphan searching for an exit in an ocean of lies and waves of propaganda campaigns.

The New York Times of May 28 said, "Carter is right to say the unsayable' and the unsayable is the truth of Israeli possession of 150 nuclear heads directed against the people of tens of Arab capitals". Carter has said the unsayable before, though, when he published his book in 2006 under the title: "Palestine, Peace and Apartheid", which caused him a storm of false accusations and irresponsible responses from groups who support occupation, settlement and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the indigenous people of Palestine. Carter's visit to the region and his meeting with Hamas has also earned him the anger of pressure groups who only pressure against Arabs and for the sake of Israel no matter how horrid the Israeli measures against the Palestinians and Arabs are.

But the unsayable truth is also being said today by Desmond Tutu, who is the head of the investigation committee formed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the massacre perpetrated in Beit Hanoun by the Israeli occupying forces in 2006 whose result was the killing of an entire family of Al Athamna. The victims included five women and eight children who were killed in their homes by Israeli shelling.

Tutu said: "What is happening in Gaza is unacceptable and is disgraceful to the entire humanity."

This also falls within the unsayable because no one is expected to highlight the horrors of what Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians because these horrors are not consistent with the image of a democratic state as it is portrayed by the Western media.

Propaganda campaigns also target British academicians who are trying to boycott Israeli universities because of the role they are playing in supporting the policies of Israel in killing and destroying the Palestinians.

We have to remember that Britain took a leading role in highlighting the crimes of the South African Apartheid regime in the seventies and eighties of the last century, and today British academicians are the pioneers of pointing out the only way to uncover the real face of Israel's racist and settlement policies and their disastrous consequences on the indigenous people of Palestine.

The only reasonable conclusion is that, Iraq and the Middle East, both look bright and prosperous from Stockholm to those who travel in their luxurious private jets from their air-conditioned and comfortable offices to 7-star hotels and who have the ability to speak about humanity and peace in a way that makes them look human to the audiences of satellite TVs. But far away from them are the people of Palestine and Iraq who can only smell death and blood and who cannot even find a piece of white cloth to wrap their dead children.

Between those making speeches in Stockholm and the hell called Iraq, there is a huge gap filled by millions of displaced people, by a way of life that is totally destroyed and by the fear that this is not the end of the story.

(Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is Syria's Minister of Expatriates. A professor of English literature, she taught at Damascus University and abroad for several years, until 2002.)