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 A baby who died in the Diwanyah hospital in Iraq for want of an oxygen mask |
We owe it to Iraq to send medical supplies
Peace campaigner Nicholas Wood on how the war in Iraq can threaten your sanity
BRITAIN is party to allowing innocent babies to die for want of an oxygen mask costing 95p while our Defence Secretary Des Browne is busy selling Storm Shadow missiles for £560,000 each, on the grounds of their “success “in Iraq.
All opponents of the Prime Minister are routinely labelled mad by his coterie of unscrupulous PR assistants and a compliant Attorney General. Among those so labelled are former minister Clare Short, who said the first reaction of No 10 is to lie, gentle Dr Kelly, who killed himself, former BBC director general Greg Dyke, ex-BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who told the truth, anti-Iraq war protester Brian Haw and MP George Galloway.
But what other option is there to going mad when we are faced with the stream of drivel from Kafka’s castle? It tells us we are supporting the Red Cross/Red Crescent, that the deaths of children in Iraq are all down to Saddam Hussein and that we are helping the government of Iraq to contain subsequent violence. It tells us that our contribution to the $120 million Iraq World Bank Trust Funds exonerates us (even though that’s not even enough to build a single PFI hospital).
I know I am mad when I go to bed thinking of Scarlett Johansson in the nude, but wake up at four thinking of Cherie Blair like some figure out of Macbeth preening her glossy red lips and saying of her family when the Hutton report came out “the children slept better in their beds”, when 3,000 miles away children are going to Shakespeare’s “long good night”.
Then I leap out of bed, waking my wife, to compose some letter in an attempt to deprive the Blairs of their Connaught Square home through the International Criminal Court and to compensate the head of the Hamoudi family. Mr Hamoudi is an Iraqi surgeon who had worked in Britain for 30 years and retired to Basra, only to have his house demolished and 17 of his family wiped out.
At 8am I phone my surgeon friend, David Halpin, who I first met in that fairy palace of gilded vanities, the House of Commons. He had said: “I spent my life as a trauma surgeon trying to repair the smashed faces of children and here they are smashing them by remote control.”
It was then we realised Blair modelled himself on Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, the consummate actor who betrayed his best friend, the Jewish opera diva, to the Gestapo to advance his career.
War, he thinks, gives a licence to kill. Blair laughs that he is “no socialist”, though leader of a socialist party, and claps Asbos on everybody so that our dungeons are bursting. His son, who spewed in the gutter, is let off and given a nice flat to live in, while young blacks are deprived of their youth clubs.
More madness: I have been working with Euan Donaldson on films to support Tony Benn’s petition to the UN and the Attorney General. Frames are constantly forming in my head.
These are the dreadful scenes. The Al Qa’im ambulance driver’s widow and her black-shrouded mother wailing and waving their outstretched hands in the desert like an etching from Goya’s Disasters of War.
The beautiful girl of eight, last year taken by the Americans without any information given to her family for three months. She had seen her father beaten and punched in the eye. She was repeatedly asked to identify Iraqi corpses in our name. She bravely refused.
No, it’s true. I have gone mad. I and 98 doctors and several professors of international law are intending to turn the players’ play in Hamlet into reality. In the interim we want a flight of medical supplies to be dropped into the courtyard of Diwanyah Maternity Hospital so that at least some fathers do not have to put their babies into cardboard boxes.
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