Fallujah and the Reality of War
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
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Too bad our mainstream us news media refuses to give reports like this
one. The American newsmedia billionaire owners are making huge profits
from bush and his filthy invasion/occupation, so they
greedily/cooperate. They've all got the blood of over 100,000 innocent
Iraqi women and children on their hands, plus more than a thousand
American boys. Guess they just can't get enough!
4 pretty good sources for news:
http://www.DemocracyNow.org
http://truthout.org/
http://www.alternet.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/
Post by know buddeeIf we plan to return Iraq to the Iraqis, why is the pentagon building
fourteen PERMANENT military bases there? Those who have been paying
attention know that the US appointed Iraqi Prime Minster Allawi is a
US puppet - and is not respected by the Iraqi people. Bush doesn't
belong in the white house, he belongs in prison
along with his bosses: Cheney & Rumsfeld.
I do not trust those who have recently murdered 100,000 innocent women
and children. Child molesters and wife beaters are less twisted than
they are.
====================================
Report: 100,000 innocent Iraqis killed since Bush's invasion
The Times of London reported that the survey attributes most of
the extra deaths, many of whom were women and children, to "airstrikes
by coalition forces." ....
http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2004/1029/dailyUpdate.html