Welcome to Kafka's world

June 22 2003

The claim that Iraq posed a clear and immediate threat was never 
proven. It is a claim that could not have been made seriously, 
except by a propagandist uttering the big lie, writes Ray Cassin.  

   The broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall 
   victim to a big lie than to a small one. - Adolf Hitler  

Remember all the propagandistic effort that was devoted, during the 
months before the invasion of Iraq, to comparing Hitler with Saddam 
Hussein?  

The aim was to make a further comparison. The equivalence of these 
two moral monsters, it was claimed by those calling for war, implied 
a further equivalence: those who opposed war, or at least wanted the 
UN, and not US strategic doctrine, to decide if and when war might be 
necessary, were effectively taking the same line as the appeasers of 
the 1930s. To delay in deposing the Iraqi dictator, it was argued, 
would be to allow another Hitler to threaten peace, in his region and 
the wider world.  

The argument was a sham, even in terms of what was known at the time. 
Saddam Hussein, like Hitler, was undoubtedly a sadistic tyrant. But, 
unlike Germany after 1933, Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was not a 
resurgent military power making territorial demands on its neighbours. 
It was a defeated, militarily weakened, impoverished and demoralised 
nation. What is more, it had been reduced to that state, and kept in 
that state, under the banner of the UN, an organisation that those 
throwing the "appeaser" tag around were comparing, bizarrely, with 
the impotent League of Nations.  

There was evidence, reported by the UN weapons inspection team 
headed by Hans Blix, that Iraq had persisted in trying to manufacture 
weapons of mass destruction: stocks of toxins and chemical agents it 
was known to have possessed have not been accounted for. But missing 
- and, because of their age, probably degraded - chemical and biological 
agents are not the same as weapons capable of being deployed at short 
notice. And the case for invasion was built on the claim that Iraq did 
have such weapons. Whatever evasions of its commitment to the UN to 
dispose of all weapons of mass destruction that the Baathist regime 
indulged in, the claim that Iraq posed a clear and immediate threat 
was never proven.  

It is a claim that could not have been made seriously, except by a 
propagandist uttering the big lie. Just how barefaced a lie it was 
is now becoming apparent.  

It is not only because, two months after the downfall of the regime, 
no weapons of mass destruction have been found. They may yet be found, 
although the US is under such pressure to find them that the world is 
entitled to be sceptical of any "discovery" that is not independently 
verified. UN weapons inspectors have never been needed in Iraq more 
than now, when the US will not let them in. But the elusive WMDs are 
not the deepest cause for disquiet.  

The US Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, has airily 
dismissed the clamour about the WMDs, telling the Bush Administration's 
favourite glossy magazine, Vanity Fair, that the weapons had only been 
emphasised in making the case for war for "bureaucratic" reasons . . . 
"it was one reason that everyone could agree on". Bureaucratic reasons 
for war? This is a big-lie mentality so brazen that it outs itself and 
asks what all the fuss is about.  

George Bush is hardly Hitler reborn; neither is Tony Blair and nor 
is John Howard. Fascism is not yet, as is sometimes hyperbolically 
asserted, poised to snuff out liberal democracy. That much is 
attested by the questions being asked about the WMDs Iraq was 
claimed to have, and by the inquiries that the US Congress and 
British and Australian parliaments have instituted into the 
intelligence assessments used in support of those claims. But 
it is not crazy hyperbole to say that we have entered a proto-fascist 
phase. How it develops will depend in part on whether we have the 
courage to hold governments to account for taking us to war by deception, 
or whether we prefer to obscure the big lie by comforting ourselves 
with the thought that at least there is now one less tyrant in the world.  

Since September 11, 2001, governments in some of the Anglophone 
democracies, especially the US and Australia, have sought to turn 
the fear generated by terrorism to their advantage. This has taken 
all sorts of forms, from kitschy awareness campaigns beseeching us 
to be alert but not alarmed to the direct assault on fundamental 
freedoms contained in legislation such as the USA Patriot Act and 
the Howard Government's ASIO bill.  

The latter is the greatest single curtailment of civil liberties 
in this country since Federation, and so successful has been the 
Government's manipulation of security fears that the Labor Party 
abandoned its opposition to the bill, allowing it to pass the Senate. 
It does not have the stomach for a double- dissolution election in 
which the Government would seek to portray it as soft on security. 
In consequence, ASIO will effectively be transformed from an intelligence 
service into a secret police force, able to request the detention and 
interrogation of people whom it believes may have information on 
terrorist activities, even though they are not suspects. The onus of 
proof will be reversed, so that those detained will have to prove that 
they do not have the information. It is Kafka's world.  

The inevitable consequence of acquiescing in the loss of liberty will be a 
militarisation of our politics, not because the military will no longer be 
subordinate to elected civilians but because political discourse will be 
defined by a sense of threat. If that happens, the big lies will just keep 
on coming.  

Ray Cassin is a staff writer

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Source: "The Age" - Melbourne
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/21/1056119519173.html

Cheers, Steve..

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