Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
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Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
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Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Weekend Edition
January 29 / 30, 2005
Smart Bombs; Wrong House
Iraq's
Civilian Dead
By
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
The bomb was delivered by a USAF F-16.
(Don't you warm to that word, 'delivered' - it's so wonderfully
innocuous : "I delivered some flowers"; "You
delivered a baby" ; "They delivered a 500 pound
GBU-30 bomb that obliterated a house and blew its occupants to
bits".) It was guided to its target by a precision system
that depends on amazingly sophisticated devices. It can't miss.
And on January 8 it didn't miss. It smashed into the house
it was programmed to destroy.
But it was the wrong house.
***
In all the reports of attacks
on US forces and general mayhem in Iraq in early January there
was one news item that verged on the banal. It was certainly
treated by US mainstream media as if it were completely unimportant,
and in the eyes of the US military it was a mere blip, a trivial
incident in their records of explosions and deaths, with an average
of 75 attacks taking place day in, day out (very few of which
we hear anything about). It was about the wrongly-directed precision-guided
US bomb that killed Iraqi civilians - only a dozen or so - in
the town of Aitha.
The bomb itself was not to
blame for being misdirected. It could hardly be at fault because
it performed the manifest duty for which it was constructed at
a handsome profit for McDonnell Douglas. (It's nice to know that
some people are doing so well out of this war.) It zoomed down
as intended and exploded with devastating force. It was a good
and obedient bomb that did what it was told to do. And it killed
an Iraqi family in the course of "a cordon and search operation
to capture an anti-Iraqi force cell leader", according
to a US military statement. So let's examine this official
pronouncement.
We'll leave the "anti-Iraqi"
reference for the moment, because this is crude propaganda aimed
at influencing an audience that doesn't exist beyond the revolving-eyeball
supporters of the Bush war on Iraq. But if we consider the
tactical and reporting aspects, the part concerned with professional
military application, it tells us a great deal about how the
US Command in Iraq is performing its duties.
If a military operation is
intended to capture someone it is obvious that soldiers have
been ordered to take him alive. A cordon and search operation
is an effective method of doing this, although it is professionally
demanding. What usually happens (or should happen) is that in
dead of night a unit of troops (their number dependant on the
size of the area to be cordoned) silently surrounds the village
or urban locality to be searched. The operation has to be rehearsed
beforehand, and every single soldier must know exactly where
to go, which is basic routine for a well-trained army.
Given good troops, clear orders, and, especially, capable junior
leaders (corporals to lieutenants), the area can be sealed off
effectively. Once that is done, the sub-units tasked to capture
the designated person move into their sectors through the cordon,
before dawn. Their intelligence about the location of the
wanted person is precise (it must be, otherwise there would be
no point in the operation), so they are able to grab him quickly.
If the target and his supporters fire on those who wish to take
him, then the most effective means of dealing with such a hardly
unexpected situation is to fight through in classic infantry
style. If it is necessary in that process to kill the people
who opened fire on the searchers, then so be it.
This particular operation was
obviously a botched job and was no more a professional cordon
and search than it was a moon-shot (like the Tora Bora operation
in Afghanistan, when bin Laden escaped). Part of the shambles
was misdirection of an F-16 pilot.
Pilots of F-16s don't capture
suspects. Pilots - who are people, too : it's not "an
F-16" that kills, as if it were some sort of out-of-earth
robot, beyond human control - use precision-guided bombs to
destroy buildings. And in this so-called cordon and search operation
a pilot was ordered to send a 500 pound bomb thundering explosively
into the wrong building. The person whom it was intended to
capture was not there. If he had been there, he would have
been blown to bits, not captured. But other people were blown
to bits. Just an Iraqi family, of course. Who cares?
The military can keep the public
confused almost indefinitely concerning the effects of their
weapons. Depleted uranium? Nah - fuggedahboudid ; no problems
: we absolutely deny there are residual radiation effects lasting
for generations ; trust us. And cluster bombs that scatter
bomblets looking like soft drink cans that kill kids over decades?
- 'We don't use them except in carefully-controlled circumstances';
trust us. And so on.
500 pounds doesn't sound an
enormous weight, and not many of us understand what a GBU-30
bomb can do. Generally speaking the only layfolk who know this
sort of thing are seriously disturbed war-geeks who get a panting
thrill from watching videos of death and destruction. The propagandists
are happy to keep it that way, with most people imagining that
a 500 pound bomb is just a dinky itsy-bitsy little popping thing
that won't hurt anyone except the bad folks. But think back
to the bombings on the island of Bali, Indonesia, in 2002.
The most devastating was a car bomb at the Sari night club.
The Australian Federal Police estimated that the explosive weighed
at most 350 pounds. And that bomb killed 202 people.
And we are expected to believe
that a 500 pound bomb thundering down from an F-16 can destroy
a single house, precisely ('surgically' used to be the OK word,
but it fell out of favor), and not affect any other houses around
it. You can imagine it : "Excuse me?" "Yes."
"Is this number 22?" "Yes." - Kabooom.
And the houses and people on either side of number 22, and
those opposite and behind number 22 are miraculously spared devastation.
I believe in the Tooth Fairy, too.
In this case the US military
admitted that the house flattened to rubble on January 8 by a
500 pound bomb in the town of Aitha, 30 miles south of Mosul,
"was not the intended target for the airstrike. The intended
target was another location nearby".
But in the house that was
"not the intended target" were people who had nothing
to do with the Iraqis' guerrilla war against US occupation forces.
The owner stated that the bomb killed 14 people. An Associated
Press photographer confirmed that four women, three men, and
seven children were killed. Naturally, the US military said
different. They said five people had been killed. Whom do you
believe?
Unfortunately, these days,
there is little room for choice because the military in Iraq
and Afghanistan have told so many lies to the world concerning
their activities. The more high-profile instances were the Keystone
Cops farce of the Jessica Lynch 'rescue' in Iraq, and the wicked
lies that US Army generals told about the death in Afghanistan
of Pat Tillman. We were told in great detail how he died leading
a charge against the enemy, but in fact he was killed by his
own side, by gross incompetence. It is difficult to imagine
how the generals thought that they could get away with such blatant
mendacity, but they charged ahead and lied their boots off just
the same. And of course they did get away with it, because
none of them has been disciplined for their dishonorable conduct
(and I shall never forgive these disgusting people for causing
Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, so much distress and pain). There
are many other less well-known examples of official lying, but
these two alone are enough to make it clear that truth is not
the military's priority. (As I write, news came in about a
US helicopter crash in western Iraq that killed all 31 on board.
The official story is that it went down because of a sandstorm.
Such is the reputation of the US military that responsible media
outlets immediately consulted Accuweather and other met sources
to find out if the military were lying. You have to work hard
to engender that sort of distrust.)
Just as important as telling
the truth are acceptance of reality and admission of wrongdoing.
It seems that some present-day US military representatives
are incapable of either, in which inability, alas, they ape
and echo the entire Bush administration. The wording of the
official statement following the bomb that killed Iraqi civilians
on January 8 could have come straight from the Bush White House
and does much to explain why it is regarded with contempt by
the so much of the world. The phrase "The multinational
force in Iraq deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives"
should be on page one of the "How Not To Do And Say Things
In Iraq" manual.
First, "the multinational
force" - which is a joke concept, anyway - had nothing to
do with the affair. It was a bomb from a United States Air Force
F-16 in support of a United States Army operation that killed
the Iraqi kids. There wasn't any other nation involved.
Second, and crucial in the
context of the US Mission in Iraq, is the ludicrous phrase "possibly
innocent lives". Does nobody in the US Command realize
how crassly insulting is their use of the word "possibly"?
Is it beyond their comprehension that this throwaway line would
cause even more resentment among a population that already detests
the crash-and-bash-them occupation force? The children of the
Iraqi family killed by that wrongly-directed precision-guided
bomb were not 'possibly' innocent. THEY WERE INNOCENT.
Forget the amateur psyops nonsense
about "anti-Iraqi forces". As observed by the newspaper
Al-Arab al-Alamiyah on January 24, "Washington . . . is
losing its credibility day by day and the resistance is gaining
national legitimacy", and it is obvious that most Iraqis
in the occupied areas (excluding semi-autonomous Kurdistan) are
pro-Iraq and very much anti-US, courtesy of the brutal and aggressive
behavior of American troops. The Army and Marines have savagely
humiliated countless thousands of innocent Iraqis, and phrases
like "possibly innocent lives" are starkly offensive
to the millions of ordinary people whose only wish is to live
in peace. They did not, after all, ask anyone to invade their
country and turn it into bloody chaos.
A simple and effective message
of apology would have been : "The United States Military
Command in Iraq greatly regrets the deaths of civilians in Aitha
that were caused by misdirection of a US Air Force bomb. The
town elders have been asked to give advice on how best we can
make amends for the results of this deplorable failure in our
system. We offer our sincere apologies to the relatives of those
who died."
Would Bush say anything like
this?
Of course not.
So his military won't, either.
- Smart bombs ; what about the people?
Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs.
He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com
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