hope this is not seen as a advert, its the story of how he did it, as much as the CD


Published in The Big Issue, London
 http://www.gibbyzobel.com/exclusivoTBIiraq.html


In 1991, when George Bush declared that America was at war with Iraq, Grant Wakefield was a 25-year-old working as a care assistant in Brighton, England. "I watched TV along with everyone else, with no depth, no analysis, very apolitical. It was just, 'Oh, here's another war'," he says.


Years later a film-maker lent him a book, The Fire This Time by Ramsey Clark, former US attorney general, which ripped apart the prevailing propaganda. It would take over his life. Horrified at what he read, Wakefield spent £20,000 of his own money and more than two years creating a landmark CD. It is a chronicle of the history of Iraq, the Gulf War and the aftermath of sanctions via a plethora of audio samples taken from generals, politicians and the media, overlaid on to a specially-written soundscape created by techno artists like Orbital and the Aphex Twin.


You think you remember the war. But do you? Wakefield took no chances and recreated the living room TV experience. He obtained video tapes from an ex-patriot Iraqi human rights lawyer who had recorded every edition of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news every day. Wakefield rewatched the entire war - all 42 days of it - in a cold damp house in a little village in Wiltshire.


"I lost my mind twice. There was one piece of footage with heroic American music of soldiers against the setting sun. It was so horrifying. How it was presented was just disgusting. It was the most disturbing experience of my life."


An Iraqi civilian quoted on the CD says, "You people watched us. You people watched our country being demolished. You watched us in your living room through the gun-sight cameras." One early distressing example of this was when General Norman Schwartzkopf tells a room full of journalists: "I'm now going to show you the luckiest man alive." A video shows gun-camera footage of a car crossing a bridge just moments before a US guided missile destroys it.You hear newsmen collapse, roaring with laughter. It was, at the time, the only Iraqi human being to be shown by the Allies to the press.


Pulling together the most telling quotes, Wakefield began to stitch his narrative together. He scanned the government-sanctioned history of the Iraq war, The Gulf, by Lawrence Friedman and Efraim Karsh. He hired a professional congressional researcher. One quote, by disgraced US colonel Oliver North, cost him $600 to use.


Wakefield ran out of funds before the final mix and he launched an appeal. Former United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator, Denis Halliday, who resigned in 1998 over sanctions, sent a personal cheque for $5,000.


"Overwhelming, profoundly moving, intense, spellbinding, landmark, powerful, eye-opening, blood-boiling stuff," say the advance critics including authors Iain Banks, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. This is 77 minutes and 37 seconds of irrefutable evidence of the nature of US foreign policy in one monstrous case study. The litany of lies and deceit imprints itself on your brain: the scale of the attacks - the most intense bombing campaign in history. The scale of civilian deaths - 130,000 by the end of 1992.


The underlying reason for the war - oil - is extracted from breathtakingly frank military and political comments. In 1989, Iraq's greatest nutritional disorder was obesity. This was replaced by chronic malnourishment within a few years - by design, not natural disaster.


We hear that the bombing of the El Ameriyah air-raid shelter, which incinerated 1,200 civilians, was "a major PR problem. We stopped for a day and a half." Asked if the incident had any effect on the conduct of the war, Richard Haas, special assistant to the US president, replies, "At the risk of sounding heartless, no."


And then the sanctions-era clincher from the then US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright: "We have heard that half a million children have died and... and is the price worth it? I think it is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Now the threat of war against Iraq looms large again.


Wakefield's inspiration, the former US attorney general, Ramsey Clark, sums up the end of the last war at the final hearings of the Commission of Inquiry into US Conduct in the Gulf, New York, February 1992: "Let me tell you what happened briefly. There were 114,000 separate aerial sorties in 42 days - one every 30 seconds. Eighty-eight thousand tonnes of bombs were dropped. Only seven per cent were guided. Ninety-three per cent were free-falling bombs that hit where chance, necessity and no free will took them. There were 38 aircraft lost by the US in this slaughter. That number is less than accidental losses in war games where no live ammunition is even used. No enemy aircraft rose to meet them.


"When the ground war came... there was no ground war. Name one battle. It wasn't a battle, it was a slaughter. General Kelly said when the troops finally moved forward, that there were 'not many of them left alive to fight'. We killed at least 125,000 soldiers and, to date, 130,000 civilians. We killed as many as we dared."


Wakefield's own defining moment came during his only trip to Iraq in 1999. "I came back to the hotel and was sitting in the restaurant. I was close to tears and the waiter said: 'What would you like?' I said, 'I'd like to apologise for what our country has done.' And he said, 'It's not your fault.' Despite everything, and he probably had family who had been killed by the US and Britain, he could still make the distinction between me as a civilian and the government. We in Britain, we treat them all the same."


Grant Wakefield says that he is "just an ordinary guy who believes in fair play." But he has created something extraordinary.