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CounterPunch
February
12, 2003
What War Looks
Like
Time to Acknowledge the Truth
by MANO SINGHAM
As preparations for the invasion of Iraq continue,
the talk is all about morality, strategy, evidence, and costs.
We are told that we are going to have a just war, to liberate
the people of Iraq, to bring democracy and freedom to the repressed
people of that nation. We watch military 'experts' on TV share
their immense knowledge of weapons and warfare, and we marvel
at the advanced technology of the armed forces.
What is curiously absent from all the
discussion is any visceral sense of what the attack will be like
in real terms, from the point of view of the people who will
actually be there. Instead, the language is soothing, referring
to surgical strikes and collateral damage. Take for example,
this January 26th report (by Andrew
West of the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia):
"The US intends to shatter Iraq
"physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining
down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
The Pentagon battle plan aims not only
to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies
in the capital, Baghdad.
It is based on a strategy known as "Shock
and Awe", conceived at the National Defense University in
Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would
fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more
than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire
40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. "There will not be a safe
place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS
News after a briefing on the plan. "The sheer size of this
has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
"
Later reports suggest that the number
of missiles could be as much as 3,000. This is part of the attempt
to win support for the war by assuring us that that the war will
be 'quick' and 'surgical', with minimal American casualties.
Most of us are fortunate to have never lived in the midst of
a war or to have been at the receiving end of bombing attacks
so we have no real sense of what such an attack will actually
look like.
But let us reflect for a moment. Baghdad
is a densely populated city of four million people, more than
half of whom are children under the age of 14. What would such
an attack look like through their eyes? We can get some idea
because there are journalists who have witnessed similar events
and have shared their first-hand accounts.
John Pilger is an Australian war correspondent
who has witnessed violent battles from as far back as Vietnam.
Here is his description (in the British newspaper The
Daily Mirror on January 29th, 2003)of what he has seen and
what we can expect.
"Waves of B52 bombers will be used
in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million
people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once
watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from
B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives
that day in what was known as the "long box" pattern,
the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a "box"
was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box",
the street had been replaced by a crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo
and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the
intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back,
like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood,
while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had
been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing
from a shoulder."
This was too much for even such a hardened
reporter, because he adds: "I vomited."
Is this what we envision and condone
for the children of Baghdad because of operation "Shock
and Awe" or its variants currently being planned?
Or take the
account of British journalist Robert Fisk who reports for
the London newspaper The Independent. Fisk, who has also seen
the horror of war in many places, describes what he saw during
the first Gulf war in 1991.
"On the road to Basra, ITV was filming
wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every
few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and
make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers
trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military
sleeve flapping in the wind."
But we are not shown this, we are not
told this. Because if people saw for themselves the kinds of
things that reporters on the scene see (in Fisk's words "the
filth and obscenity of corpses") no one would ever again
agree to support a war unless a far, far higher humanitarian
standard was met than the vague justifications currently in circulation.
Despite all the antiseptic language about
surgical strikes and collateral damage, this is what war looks
like up close. This is what will be done in our names. However
quick the actual fighting might be, the ghastly effects of the
devastation will remain for at least a lifetime. I don't know
how to end this better than to quote Fisk again: "No one
says sorry after war. No one acknowledges the truth of it. No
one shows you what we see. Which is how our leaders and our betters
persuade us--still--to go to war."
Mano Singham
is a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland,
Ohio. Email: msingham@cwru.edu
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