While the Western media concentrated on the return of the tiny number of 'allied' POWs, the cameras were kept well away as the bulldozers dug the mass graves in the desert. They have decided that the public should not know. No one should film or photograph the horrific aftermath as the countless legions of corpses are shovelled into the sand. They have decreed there will be no record to compare with the photos of Auschwitz, or Dresden after allied bombing.
But in the end, after the parades and the other nauseous celebrations of 'victory", more and more peopic will begin to know. That a war crime, a crime against humanity, a crime to compare with Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been committed against the people of Iraq.
Saddam Hussein, for his own reasons, colluded for much of the war in keeping quiet about the number of civilian casualties. The sickening finale - the attack on a fleeing, defeated and defenceless army with B-52s, with cluster bombs, with fuel air bombs, with napalm - was only the endgame of a crescendo of slaughter vented on soldiers and civilians alike. How many Iraqis died in this war? A hundred thousand? A quarter of a million? No one can, or will, say.
In the first week of the war the pretence was kept up that precision bombing minimised civilian casualties. The 13 February massacre of hundreds of civilians in a Baghdad bomb shelter broke through the myth. But no one can disguise that the slaughter of the army retreating from Kuwait was a deliberate act of mass murder which served no military purpose.
Much of the slaughter was done with cluster bombs. These weapons showered plastic-covered ballbearing sized fragments into their victims. Plastic covered so that in the unlikely event of any of the victims making it to hospital, X-rays could not detect the fragments. Tens of thousands were murdered in this fashion in the 17-mile convoy caught by allied planes at the Mutlah gap.
When the ground war began, the US-led offensive ran into an army already retreating. In response to the Gorbachev peace initiative the Iraqis were already withdrawing from Kuwait. To "liberate' Kuwait the ground attack was unnecessary. But it was necessary to complete George Bush's final goal - to smash up the Iraqi army, to complete Iraq's humiliation, to give the dreadful warning to anyone who stands up to US power that they will be crushed. Probably fifty or sixty thousand died in this final criminal act.
Now George Bush proclaims that aggression has been defeated". He insists that those guilty of 'war crimes' must be held to account. A War Crimes Tribunal is indeed needed. One which will point the finger at those responsible for bombing a poor country into ruins and killing more than one per cent of its population - an extraordinary figure for any war. A War Crimes Tribunal is needed which will tell the truth about those countless young conscripts - students, farmers, workers whose bodies lie piled in the sands of the souther Tragi desert. George Bush and his allies will be the accused, not the accusers.