[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Mahajan / Fallujah and the Reality of War / Nov 07

[Morton K.Brussel]

FYI

> ZNet Commentary
> Fallujah and the Reality of War November 07, 2004
> By Rahul Mahajan
>
> The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of 
> the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to 
> implementing “democracy” in Iraq. These are lies.
>
> I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for 
> you a word picture of what such an assault means.
>
> Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an 
> agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been 
> known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City 
> of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90’s, when Saddam wanted his name to 
> be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.
>
> U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; 
> for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with 
> light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and 
> clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, 
> medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse 
> challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, 
> from bombing and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and 
> families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in 
> droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from 
> leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave – except for 
> what they called “military age males,” men usually between 15 and 60. 
> Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a 
> violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you assume that every 
> military age male is an enemy, there can be no better sign that you 
> are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the 
> people, not on their oppressors, not a war of liberation.
>
> The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of 
> the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main 
> bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to 
> treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they 
> could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the 
> one I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had 
> four beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a 
> soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto 
> repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I 
> documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.
>
> In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in 
> the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the 
> mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you 
> have to stop paying attention to it – and yet, of course, you never 
> quite stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often 
> transported instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.
>
> In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 
> 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can 
> demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had 
> snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a 
> series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the 
> no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, 
> usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I 
> observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw 
> old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the 
> doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save 
> him.
>
> One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single 
> ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two that I inspected bore 
> clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who 
> went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first 
> reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many 
> just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t 
> the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, 
> been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. 
> Bush courageously protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and 
> Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the 
> residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, 
> would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi 
> Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.
>
> The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed 
> directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news 
> reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were 
> noncombatants.
>
> But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like 
> about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential 
> areas in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You 
> read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided 
> bombs are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 
> 85% of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, 
> i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of 
> them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; 
> every single bomb shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and 
> smashing crockery. A town under bombardment is a town in constant 
> fear.
>
> You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should 
> remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally 
> important is to remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone, 
> everyone is wounded.
>
> The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the 
> resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” 
> the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within 
> horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of 
> Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a 
> new mandate – the world has been delivered into his hands.
>
> There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; 
> but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all 
> the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate 
> the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, 
> that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf 
> was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?
>
> Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes 
> (http://www.empirenotes.org), with regularly updated commentary on 
> U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the 
> American Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in 
> Fallujah during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full 
> Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond 
> (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20). He 
> can be reached at rahul at empirenotes.org
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