An Indiscriminate And Reckless Attack: Curiously, the British Prime Minister, Teresa May, does not appear to regard the “indiscriminate and reckless” attacks made against “innocent civilians” living on the soil of other United Nations member-states as being worthy of the unequivocal condemnation contained in her statement to the House of Commons on 12 March 2018. Only when the alleged attacker is the Russian Federation does the UK start screaming blue, bloody murder.
“I AM STRONGLY in favour of using poisoned gas against
uncivilised tribes.” So said Great Britain’s Secretary of War, Winston
Churchill, in 1920 – and he was as good as his word. That same year, Aylmer Haldane,
the commander of British forces in Iraq bombarded the villages of rebellious
“uncivilised tribes” with gas-filled shells. The British estimated Arab
casualties at 8,450 killed and wounded. The action was deemed a resounding
success. The use of chemical weapons had engendered, in Churchill’s telling
phrase, “a lively terror”.
It still does.
Much of Southern Iraq remains contaminated with the residue
of the depleted uranium shells used by American armoured columns against the
Russian-made tanks of the Iraqi army in the Gulf War of 1991. During the first
and second battles for the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in 2004, the use of white
phosphorus explosives (first developed for anti-personnel purposes in World War
I) inflicted hideous burns on hundreds of the city’s inhabitants – civilian as
well as insurgent.
The United States and British-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,
undertaken in defiance of the United Nation’s Charter and without the
authorisation of the UN Security Council was, in the near-unanimous opinion of
jurists around the world, an egregious breach of international law.
To date, no nation state, or collection of nation states,
has imposed diplomatic or economic sanctions on the United States or the United
Kingdom. The individuals responsible for planning and executing the illegal
invasion of Iraq are free to travel and conduct business wherever they choose.
The suspected use of an illegal chemical weapon by the
Russian Federation has provoked near-universal condemnation. Rightly so,
because the deployment of a deadly nerve agent in the picturesque medieval city
of Salisbury was an extraordinarily reckless act. The sheer lethality of the
substance has inflicted critical injury not only upon the target of the
assassination attempt, the Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal, but also upon
his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, and the local police officer who rushed to
their aid. Anyone or anything coming into contact with the Skripals is now
being treated as a potential bio-hazard.
The British Prime Minister, Teresa May, has condemned the
attack in the most unequivocal fashion. In her 12 March statement to the House
of Commons, she unhesitatingly identified the Russian Federation as the source
of the nerve agent used in the Salisbury incident. Her concluding remarks made
the UK’s position very clear:
“Mr
Speaker, this attempted murder using a weapons-grade nerve agent in a British
town was not just a crime against the Skripals. It was an indiscriminate
and reckless act against the United Kingdom, putting the lives of innocent
civilians at risk. And we will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to
murder innocent civilians on our soil.”
Curiously,
Prime Minister May does not appear to regard the “indiscriminate and reckless”
attacks made against “innocent civilians” living on the soil of other United
Nations member-states as being worthy of an equally forthright parliamentary
statement.
Since 2001, armed Predator drones piloted by United States
armed forces personnel have patrolled the skies above Africa and the Middle
East. Their mission: to track the precise location of individuals and groups
whose very existence has been deemed inimical, by the CIA and other
intelligence gatherers, to the national security of the United States.
When the location of these “targets” had been pinpointed,
the US launched one, or both, of the Hellfire missiles carried under the
Predator’s wings. Sometimes these missiles achieved a “clean kill” –
“neutralising” only their targets. On other occasions, however, these US drone
strikes inflicted “collateral damage” – killing or maiming the “innocent
civilians” living inside the blast zone.
It is passing strange, is it not, that the global news media
has, to date, seen no need to whip itself into a lather of fury over the fate
of these casualties of
state-sponsored terrorism? Especially when the death-toll from this US policy,
which operates well outside of any reasonable reading of international law – or
justice – now numbers in the thousands.
Then again, we are only dealing here with members of those
“uncivilised tribes”: human-beings for whom the protection of the law was
deemed, as long ago as 1920, and by no lesser authority that Winston Churchill,
to be unwarranted.
When set against these current and historical facts, the propensity
of Vladimir Putin to engage in “indiscriminate and reckless” acts is suddenly
rendered grimly intelligible.
If the West’s use of poison gas, depleted uranium, white
phosphorus and Hellfire missiles elicits no outrage in the House of Commons; and
if the “international community” is not moved to impose diplomatic and/or
economic sanctions against those responsible; then perhaps the only reasonable
lesson to be drawn is that “international outrage” has now become just one more
“lively terror” to be unleashed upon the “uncivilised tribes” of Planet Earth.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 20 March 2018.
