Cultural cleansing in Iraq — a publisher's review

CULTURAL Cleansing in Iraq is one of those books that make me proud to have published. Pluto sets out to provide radical explanations of the major events of our time. The invasion of Iraq was one of these events.

I cut my teeth as a young academic in studying the Colonial history of Eastern Africa. I would ask my students why Britain had invaded their country. I tried to ask them to look behind the popular myths, and profoundly explain why that invasion occurred. That was all in the 1970s. Later when I began publishing books it never occurred to me that the Great Powers of the day, the USA and its followers, Britain and now Nato, would move to colonise again.

Colonisation has always been a nasty, brutal business, and the 21st century version has proved that this aspect of Western 19th and early 20 century violence has not altered. Our newspapers and the Internet, mean that so much of the truly brutal behaviour is not hidden for too long. In the earlier version of colonisation, information took many months to get through. So the world has been told about the systematic torture of prisoners, and the millions of refugees, and we hear about the events as they unfold.

But how do we make sense of what has happened. Our masters in Washington or London don't want us to know their thinking. Iraq has been surrounded by honeyed words. Our leaders ought to be considered as war mongers and criminals, and many ordinary people consider them as such. But still we don't see the patterns, don't understand their thinking, we don't comprehend their goals and purposes.

Cultural Cleansing in Iraq succeeds in filling this gap as no other book I know about. What this book illustrates was the decision, somewhere in the interstices of the US Government, to destroy the old society completely. The purpose of the invaders wasn't just to remove Saddam Hussein; this was almost a sub plot. No, the purpose was to destroy the structure and the people, the intelligentsia, the middle classes. A mature urban society was in effect levelled to the ground. As in the long past when marauding invaders burnt cities, so modern invaders have undertaken the equivalent in Iraq.

Cultural Cleansing sets this out in its horrifying detail. And this is why I am pleased and proud that Pluto has been chosen by Raymond Baker and Tareq Ismael to be their publisher. And, of course we are all grateful for the vital work of the Russell Tribunal in publicising this horrific event of our time.

Dr Roger van Zwanenberg is the Chair & Commissioning Editor of Pluto Press in London. He contributed this article to The Brunei Times. Visit: www.plutobooks.com.