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Recent Stories
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The
Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
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Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
25, 2003
We Bomb; They
Suffer
This is the
Reality of War
By ROBERT FISK
Donald
Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is "as targeted an
air campaign as has ever existed" but he should not try telling
that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning,
drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as
she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile
that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad
blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs -- they were bound up with gauze
-- and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement
in her left leg.
Her mother bends
over the bed and straightens her right leg which the little girl thrashes
around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her
child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover
from her paralysis. She was the first of 101 patients brought to the
Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital after America's blitz on the city began
on Friday night. Seven other members of her family were wounded in the
same cruise missile bombardment; the youngest, a one-year-old baby,
was being breastfed by her mother at the time.
There is something
sick, obscene about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then
we turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister
of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the
wards to emphasise the "bestial" nature of the American attack.
The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha
Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake
from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain.
So let's forget,
for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally cheap
moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya
College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military
victory and defeat, or the lies about "coalition forces" which
our "embedded" journalists are now peddling about an invasion
involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians.
War, even when it has international legitimacy -- which this war does
not -- is primarily about suffering.
Take 50-year-old
Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs but who
now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders
-- they are now twice their original size -- who was on her way to visit
her daughter when the first American missile struck Baghdad. "I
was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and
I fell down and found my blood everywhere," she told me. "It
was on my arms, my legs, my chest." Amel Hassan still has multiple
shrapnel wounds in her chest.
Her five-year-old
daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed
out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the
explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood
has clotted around her toes and is staunched by the bandages on her
ankles and lower legs. Two little boys are in the next room. Sade Selim
is 11; his brother Omar is 14. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs
and chest.
Isra Riad is in
the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel
wounds to the legs as she ran in terror from her house into her garden
as the blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds
in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover
her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to
her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, "multiple shrapnel
wounds" sounds like a natural disease which, I suppose -- among
a people who have suffered more than 20 years of war -- it is.
And all this, I
asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001? All this
was to "strike back" at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil,
Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to do
with those crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam?
Who decided, I wonder, that these children, these young women, should
suffer for 11 September?
Wars repeat themselves.
Always, when "we" come to visit those we have bombed, we have
the same question. In Libya in 1986, I remember how American reporters
would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit
by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, "we"
asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And yesterday, a doctor found
himself asked by a British radio reporter -- yes, you've guessed it
-- "Do you think, doctor, that some of these people could have
been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?"
Should we laugh
or cry at this? Should we always blame "them" for their own
wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where
they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk.
Isra Riad came from
Sayadiyeh where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas's home
is in Risalleh where there are villas belonging to Saddam's family.
The two small Selim brothers live in Shirta Khamse where there is a
store house for military vehicles. But that's the whole problem. Targets
are scattered across the city. The poor -- and all the wounded I saw
yesterday were poor -- live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse
under blast damage.
It is the same old
story. If we make war -- however much we blather on about our care for
civilians -- we are going to kill and maim the innocent.
Dr Habib Al-Hezai,
whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients
of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom
85 were civilians -- 20 of them women and six of them children -- and
16 soldiers. A young man and a child of 12 had died under surgery. No
one will say how many soldiers were killed during the actual attack.
Driving across Baghdad
yesterday was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully
selected even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent.
There was one presidential palace I saw with 40ft high statues of the
Arab warrior Salaheddin in each corner -- the face of each was, of course,
that of Saddam -- and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged
into the façade of the building. The ministry of air weapons
production was pulverised, a massive heap of pre-stressed concrete and
rubble.
But outside, at
the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi
soldiers, rifles over the parapet, still ready to defend their ministry
from the enemy which had already destroyed it.
The morning traffic
built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at
the Republican Palace on the other side of the river nor the smouldering
ministry of armaments procurement. They burned for 12 hours after the
first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries
and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life.
But then again, no one under the present regime would want to spend
too long looking at such things, would they?
And Iraqis have
noticed what all this means. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries,
the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But yesterday,
Baghdad could still function. The landline telephones worked; the internet
operated; the electrical power was at full capacity; the bridges over
the Tigris remained unbombed. Because, of course, when -- "if"
is still a sensitive phrase these daysthe Americans get here, they will
need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What has
been spared is not a gift to the Iraqi people: it is for the benefit
of Iraq's supposed new masters. The Iraq daily newspaper emerged yesterday
with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the "steadfastness"
of the nation -- steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name
as the missile that Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the
UN inspectors to leave by going to war -- and a headline which read
"President: Victory will come [sic] in Iraqi hands".
Again, there has
been no attempt by the US to destroy the television facilities because
they presumably want to use them on arrival. During the bombing on Friday
night, an Iraqi general appeared live on television to reassure the
nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile
explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television
camera.
So where does all
this lead us? In the early hours of yesterday morning, I looked across
the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded
ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the
sky was lowering with smoke, the buttressed, rampart-like palace --
sheets of flame soaring from its walls -- looked like a medieval castle
ablaze; Tsesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction
as it has been seen for many times over so many thousands of years.
Xenophon struck
south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The
caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed.
Now come the Americans. It's not about legitimacy. It's about something
much more seductive, something Saddam himself understands all too well,
a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq
wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way into the land of this ancient
civilisation.
Yesterday afternoon
the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around the city of Baghdad in the
hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke
against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after
3.20pm London time, followed by the utterly predictable sound of explosions.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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