There could be no better exemplar of the mindset of the servants of capital than yesterday’s (3/6/06) editorial in the London Independent.

Titled ‘A protracted and messy conflict, with its myriad dark corners’, at first reading it would seem to be a condemnation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but a closer examination reveals anything but.

In fact, it is in its own devious way, a defence of the imperial mindset replete with all the by now, predictable rationales for a war ‘gone wrong’. A war conducted with the ‘best of intentions’ but badly planned and executed, though executions are what the occupiers do best as those of us who have been following the occupation since day one, are all too well aware of.

The second paragraph spells it out,

Their [the US and UK] high-flown [sic] ambition was to free the world of a military threat and at the same time to free 26 million people from repression.

So even before we get into the meat of the Independent’s editorial, the basic premise is of two governments operating from the best of intentions. What of the lies told us by our governments concerning the ‘military threat’? Gone, that’s what.

Instead, the Independent continues that,

… the rest of the liberation [sic] project has gone disastrously wrong … How wrong becomes shockingly clear with each passing day.

The Independent would have us believe that an illegal invasion, conducted in direct contravention of every international law passed since the end of WWI including the relevant UN Conventions, was in fact an act of ‘liberation’.

The problem for the ‘liberal’ media is simple; how to defend the indefensible without revealing the true intentions of Capital and giving the game away?

For the more crass defenders of imperialism, outright lies is the chosen route but for those who claim to be ‘educated’, ‘thinking’ and critical, a more subtle approach is needed, one that excuses the crimes of our leaders.

Thus the editorial continues

Both [the US and the UK] admitted that they had underestimated the likelihood and the strength of the insurgency.

So, at heart the ‘problem’ is those damn Iraqis who logically resist occupation with every means at their disposal.

Compounding the Independent’s own crimes of omission and duplicity of thinking, it continues

And they [the US and the UK] omitted to say that their underestimation of the insurgency was to a large extent of their own doing.

Why? Because, according to the Independent

For the best part of two years they refused to acknowledge that the attacks on foreign troops [note, not occupation armies] were anything more than isolated actions of terrorists and foreign fighters who had sneaked across unprotected borders.

Again, the Independent avoids all mention of the illegal nature of invasion, let alone the genocidal actions of the occupiers, instead the problem is one of eyesight, at worst a medical problem, a myopia of thinking whereby the occupiers refused to acknowledge that having your country invaded, occupied and systematically destroyed would lead inevitably to resistance.

The Independent would have us believe that rather than being a deliberate policy of US Capital, the problem (in a variation on the theme of misguidance) is because

Mr Bush and Mr Blair were aided in their self-delusion by their Iraqi place-men, who enjoyed the luxury of security inside the fortied “green zone” in Baghdad.

Whose self-delusion are we talking about here? That these ‘place-men’ were handpicked by Bush and Blair is of course not mentioned and indeed, as I have referred to before, there was never any intention of ‘nation-building’ nor in reality, of establishing democracy, even of the distorted Western kind.

Let one of the leading Bush think-tanks, the Heritage Institute spell it out for us. Independent, where are your researchers when you have need of them? But of course, you have no need of them, your mission is to delude your readers into thinking that our leaders are well-intentioned but at worst, misguided democrats.

To make it clear that a post-war U.S. military operation in Iraq is not a nation-building exercise, the Bush Administration should state that the U.S. military will be deployed to Iraq to secure the vital U.S. security interests for which the campaign is undertaken in the first place. Specifically, these war aims should be to:

Protect Iraq’s energy infrastructure against internal sabotage or foreign attack to return Iraq to global energy markets and ensure that U.S. and world energy markets have access to its resources. – In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building by Baker Spring and Jack Spencer. Backgrounder #1589, September 25, 2002 www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/bg1589.cfm%00

No beating around the Bush here, the Heritage Institute tells it like it is, which is as it should be, there is no need of delusion, self or otherwise, the Heritage Institute speaks to the nation’s powerful, not the Independent’s ‘constituency’ of ‘liberals’ and ‘do-gooers’. Note the date of this ‘backgrounder’, September 25, 2002, an infamous date in the annals of disinformation, the same time, almost to the day as Blair’s pack of lies issued in the so-called Dodgy Dossier.

What needs to be unpacked here is how the capitalist media can speak with such forked tongue, for clearly the two views of what the invasion of Iraq is all about are at such variance that it cannot be explained away by some lefty view versus the ‘responsible’ media as represented, we are led to believe, by the utterly misnamed Independent.

The reality is that the Heritage Institute is part of the strategic planning infrastructure of US capitalism and, as the saying goes, ‘Don’t try and bullshit a bullshitter’, reserve the lies for those who have to be fooled into thinking that our glorious leaders are nothing but purer than pure.

The dissembling by the Independent’s editor/s is nothing short of shameful and criminal in intent, for it seeks to justify the invasion in the name of all of us, by covering up the truth with a lot of guff about ‘mistakes’ and ‘misguided’ but ‘good intentions’.

The Independent has to be called to task as to how it justifies its view, along with the rest of the so-called independent media that the most horrible crime committed against humanity since the Nazis, can be papered over with so many fine-sounding words?

Were I more naïve, I would have to ask how the editor of the Independent sleeps at night knowing how his words contradict the reality but then these apologists for the empire are all of a kind, differing only in the fact that the Independent is one of chosen mouthpieces for Capital, doing its loyal bidding by maintaining the fiction that we are a civilised nation guided by civilised notions of justice.

Since 1990, the West has slaughtered at the very least 500,000 Iraqis, many of them under the age of 25, in a calculated act of aggression and destruction that by any measure you care to choose cannot be justified under any circumstances except by the fact that Iraqi lives are worth less than those of the West. Unfortunate maybe but justified by the Independent as no more than a ‘miscalculation’.

Indeed, the Independent’s editorial further seeks to justify its position by telling its unfortunate readers that

One of the saddest aspects of the Haditha affair [sic] has been the weariness with which the allegations have been greeted in Iraq.

The Independent diminishes the massacre of innocents by transforming it into an ‘affair’ and further compounds its crime of dissembling by asserting—without any kind of foundation—that the Iraqi people are simply weary of the mass murder of its people! This is some kind of sick joke on the people of Iraq for which the Independent has to answer for.

The editorial finishes on the final, sickening note

The politicians hoped for a short, clean war that would forge a new Iraqi state … It was all so easy to start, and so very hard to stop.

So war is clean according to the Independent! Are these sick fucks for real? Yes, when it's ‘only’ Arabs that are being exterminated, war is indeed clean. ‘Dirty’ death is reserved for white, ‘civilised’ people.

Should you choose to accept the mission, you can write the Independent at letters@independent.co.uk. Not surprisingly, the Editor’s email address is not available.

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