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CounterPunch
April 1,
2003
The Graveyard
at Baghdad's North Gate
Iraq is Littered with Graves
of Britons
By ROBERT FISK
At dusk yesterday the ground around the Baghdad
North Gate War Cemetery shook with the vibration of the bombs.
The oil-grey sky was peppered with anti-aircraft fire.
And below the clouds of smoke and the
tiny star-like explosion of the shells, Sergeant Frederick William
Price of the Royal Garrison Artillery, Corporal A D Adsetts of
the York and Lancaster Regiment and Aircraftman First Class P
Magee of the Royal Air Force slept on. An eerie place to visit,
perhaps, as the first of the night raids closed in on the capital
of Iraq.
Not so. For the Iraqi Foreign Minister,
Naji Sabri, had spoken earlier of these graves and awoke the
ghosts of colonisers past. For No 1401979 Sergeant Price and
No 4736364 Corporal Adsetts and No 210493 Aircraftman Magee all
died in Britain's first colonial war in Iraq, in 1921.
And what was it that Mr Sabri, dressed
in his Baath Party uniform said? "British soldiers already
have their graveyards in Iraq, from the 1920s and from 1941 ...
"Now they will have other graveyards
where they will be joined by their friends, the Americans."
 It's true that British graves lie across Iraq.
Among the saddest is at Kut--bombed by the Americans and British
but not yet occupied--where the dead of the great and terrible
Ottoman siege of the First World War lie amid the swollen sewers
of that scruffy city. There are thousands more at North Gate
in Baghdad, on the old road to Mosul.
Private Nicholson of the York and Lancaster
Regiment was only 23 when he died on 12 August 1921, Private
Clark of the Royal Army Service Corps was 38 when he was killed
six days later.
This first guerrilla war against Iraqi
nationalism is now to be refought, according to the Iraqi Baath
Party.
"We shall turn our desert into a
big graveyard for the American and British soldiers," Mr
Sabri said.
"The American and British forces
who do not surrender will face nothing but death in the desert
or else they will have to flee back to their puppet regime of
Kuwait."
As the missiles criss-crossed Baghdad
yesterday--one swept over the Tigris at only 200 feet above the
ground to explode with a roar and a plume of grey smoke in a
presidential compound--the temperature of the language increased
proportionately.
The new colonisers, according to the
Foreign Minister, were using the old British "golden rule"
of "divide and conquer"--we shall forget for a moment
that "divide et impera" was originally a Roman rule--and
he promised they would never break the unity of the Iraqi people.
From the Information Minister, Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf, came claims that the modern-day British Army
had just destroyed a water purification plant in Basra, capable
of providing water for 1.3 million people, while the same army
was busy bringing into Iraq "mineral water from Britain".
A warehouse had been destroyed in the
city, he added, in which 75,000 tons of food supplies were stored.
There was no way of checking these statements.
Nor, of course, was there any way of confirming his other claims
for the past 36 hours: 13 American tanks, eight armoured personnel
carriers, six armoured vehicles, four Apache helicopters and
a number of pilotless reconnaissance drones destroyed.
It sounded as if Iraq believed it deserved
to have destroyed them, as an Egyptian commentator later explained
his exaggerations during the 1967 Middle East war. But with Iraqi
television showing real video of a burning American Abrams tank
and at least two APCs--and with the Anglo-American authorities
in Qatar suffering from their usual lockjaw--who can say for
sure what casualties either side is taking?
The Americans talk of hundreds of Iraqi
dead, the Iraqis claim 43 American and British dead.
How much of the rhetoric, anyway, would
be abandoned if there was a way out of this war? "Real diplomacy,"
Mr Sahaf said, "is to kill them [the Americans and British]
on the battlefield so that they feel that their dreams have been
foiled. We are not going to allow these dirty lackeys to remain
on the land of Iraq."
Lackeys? Didn't it used to be "lackeys
and running dogs" when the Soviet Union existed? Are we
really reverting to colonialism? Since the Americans have not
reneged on their pledge of occupation and military government,
it's hard to avoid the question. Nor is it difficult to imagine
what Aircraftman First Class Magee might think as his grave vibrates
to the explosion of bombs from the very same Royal Air Force
he long ago died for in Iraq.
Yesterday's
Features
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
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