“Is there nothing you will not lie about? Do you have no shame?”
With these moving words passionately spoken, the US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power rounded on her Russian counterpart at the Security Council this week. Her outrage was genuine and compelling. Her words were flashed across the western world.
As I watched Samantha Power, the Irish-born ex-Mount Anville pupil who emigrated to America as a child, the thought occurred to me to wonder where she will be in a few weeks’ time when the new Trump administration takes office. Doubtless she is making arrangements to pursue her impressive politico-academic career in one or more new roles. She could try drama if all else fails.
That she is genuine there can be no doubt. But being genuine and being straight-forward are sometimes different things. She seemed to be suffering from astonishing memory loss.
The time has come to speak a little “Truth to Power” – to Samantha Power.
Has America itself no shame?
Having destroyed Iraq on the pretext of finding non-existent WMDs, you might think that the US, which teamed up with Blair to lie convincingly to the gullible world (myself included) about those WMDs, might just admit to a little guilt or shame in relation to the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives, their kin, their homes and their futures since that escapade.
You might think that the State Department in which she serves might voice a little shame in respect of the utterly catastrophic regional consequences of the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. Even if Obama opposed that monstrous act of deceitful, reckless folly, the US has never yet admitted its responsibility for that disgraceful abuse of power and statecraft.
Has America no shame in relation to the current air-war being conducted in Yemen by the Saudis using US and UK armaments against helpless civilians? Has America no shame in relation to the thousands killed in Gaza? Ms Power has carefully avoided admitting American complicity and responsibility in any of these matters.
Let there be no doubt about it – the US, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar decided to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus in a very real, if unspoken, unholy alliance. It suited their several strategic interests to do so.
And so, Damascus suddenly ceased being a place to which the CIA routinely airlifted detainees for “interrogation” by the Syrian intelligence services and became the enemy. Not a word from Ms Power about that shameful chapter. Not a word.
What article in the UN’s constitution allows the members of that unholy alliance to initiate and wage a proxy war in Syria?
Has Saudi Arabia or Qatar a right under the UN charter or international law to promote a Sunni uprising in Syria while Saudi Arabia sends in its tanks to put down the uprising of the Shia majority in “democratic” Bahrain? Did Ms Power’s State Department suggest sending arms and advisors to help the oppressed Shias of Bahrain?
But if regime-change in Damascus became a matter of strategic interest for the members of that unholy alliance, it did not suit the strategic interests of Shia Iran, Shia-led post-invasion Iraq, and Russia – not to mention the Alawite, Christian, Druze, moderate Sunni and secular Syrians who have everything – literally everything – to fear from a Salafist insurgency in Syria.
And so we have to face the question. Do the West’s strategic interests and those of their client despots in the Gulf outweigh the strategic interests of Iran, Iraq, Russia, and the Syrian regime and the Syrian minorities? And why?
Imagine, as John Lennon might have put it, if the US had not invaded Iraq. Imagine too if the US, Britain and France had told the Saudis and the Qataris not to pour billions into the Islamist uprising in Syria. Who takes responsibility for those gross US failures? On whom lies the shame?
Can the present US administration wash its hands of the Iraq invasion because it happened before 2008? It certainly can’t was its hands of encouraging the Saudis and Qataris efforts to start the civil war in Syria. That happened on Obama’s watch.
What is the cost of these US failures? Millions have paid -and are paying – the price?
And if Trump now cosies up to Putin on Syria, who will bear responsibility for the last five years? What will it all have been about?
Bob Fisk’s journalism has been brave and truthful. He has no illusions about Putin, Assad, the Shia militias and the Iranians. Nor has he illusions about the US and its “unholy allies”.
He truthfully tells how civilians have been held hostage and used as shields by the Syrian rebels – just as Isis uses them as shields in Mosul. They are shot if they try to flee the besieged enclaves– shot by the rebels. Ms Power overlooks that. So do most media.
Fisk reminds us of the rebels’ mass-slaughters, mass-graves, beheadings, suicide bombs, shelling of civilians, use of schools and medical facilities as cover for military purposes, and their terrorising of captive civilian populations. Ms Power averts her gaze.
The US deluded itself and quite a large portion of the western media into believing that there was a viable, moderate rebel faction which could be armed by the Americans and relied on to do the Americans’ bidding in the matter of human rights. That was the State Department’s forlorn self-deception.
Very few Arabs anywhere have any time for the Americans deep down. Most Arabs think of waterboarding, the West Bank, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo when they see the stars and stripes, alas. They may ally with the US – but not out of friendship or shared values.
In the end, the US poured arms, money, training and advice into a ghost army of moderate rebels which faded like the morning mist – giving all their weapons to the extremists. Another shameful miscalculation by the State Department.
So as her administration moves out of office and is replaced by something even more frightening, it cannot shed its responsibility like a cloak of office. True, Obama finally learned to avoid using military power to further America’s interests in the Middle East. But Power’s State Department fought him tooth and nail to unleash force in Syria.
This week, we were treated to asinine Tories bemoaning their failure to bomb into the dust Assad and all those who depend on him for their survival when they had the chance. If there is one crowd who have no right – in morality or in international law – to use force in Syria it is the English. And after them the French.
Ask yourself these questions: “Who is more to blame for the fact that Boko Haram sent two eight year old girls as human bombs into a Nigerian market this week? Who is more to blame for the bombing of the Coptic cathedral in Cairo this week? Is it Assad? Or is it the Saudis and their Salafism-for-export brand of Islamism? And why, then, do the Americans consider the Saudi despots as allies”
Doubtless Samantha Power has clever answers. But they escape me.
