[Mb-civic] Falluja: The 21st Century Guernica

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Where’s Picasso?
Falluja: The 21st Century Guernica

http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Landau&otherweek
=1101448800

By Saul Landau

On November 12, as U.S. jets bombed Falluja for the ninth straight day, a 
Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his 
wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and 
dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes. 

Indeed, Peterson “news” all but drowned out the U.S. military’s claim that 
successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300,000 residents had struck 
only sites where “insurgents” had holed up. On November 15, the BBC 
embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial 
death toll estimate had risen to well over 2,000, many of them civilians. 

As Iraqi eyewitnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting 
residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes 
about Peterson. One photographer captured a Falluja man holding his 
dead son, one of two kids he lost to U.S. bombers. He could not get 
medical help to stop the bleeding. 

A November 14 Reuters reporter wrote that residents told him that “U.S. 
bombardments hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors, 
nurses and patients.” The U.S. military denied the reports. Such stories 
did not make headlines. Civilian casualties in aggressive U.S. wars don’t 
sell media space. 

But editors love shots of anguished GI Joes. The November 12 Los 
Angeles Times ran a front page shot of a soldier with mud smeared face 
and cigarette dangling from his lips. This image captured the “suffering” of 
Falluja. The GI complained he was out of “smokes.”

The young man doing his “duty to free Falluja,” stands in stark contrast to 
the nightmare of Falluja. “Smoke is everywhere,” an Iraqi told the BBC 
(Nov 11). “The house some doors from mine was hit during the 
bombardment on Wednesday night. A 13-year-old boy was killed. His 
name was Ghazi. A row of palm trees used to run along the street outside 
my house – now only the trunks are left
 There are more and more dead 
bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable.”

Another eyewitness told Reuters (November 12) that “a 9-year-old boy 
was hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. His parents said they 
couldn't get him to hospital because of the fighting, so they wrapped 
sheets around his stomach to try to stem the bleeding. He died hours later 
of blood loss and was buried in the garden.”

U.S. media’s embedded reporters – presstitutes? – accepted uncritically 
the Pentagon’s spin that many thousands of Iraqi “insurgents,” including 
the demonized outsiders led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had joined 
the anti-U.S. jihad, had dug in to defend their vital base. After the armored 
and air assault began and the ground troops advanced, reports filtered out 
that the marines and the new Iraqi army that trailed behind them had 
faced only light resistance. Uprisings broke out in Mosul and other cities. 
For the combatants, however, Falluja was Hell. 

Hell for what? Retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor declared 
that: militarily “Falluja is not going to be much of a plus at all.” He admitted 
that “we've knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we 
really got were the nut-cases and zealots, the smart ones left behind­ the 
guys who really want to die for Allah.” While Pentagon spin doctors 
boasted of a U.S. “victory, Trainor pointed out that the “terrorists remain at 
large.” 

The media accepts axiomatically that U.S. troops wear the “white hats” in 
this conflict. They do not address the obvious: Washington illegally 
invaded and occupied Iraq and “re-conquered” Falluja – for no serious 
military purpose. Logically, the media should call Iraqi “militants” patriots 
who resisted illegal occupation.

Instead, the press implied that the “insurgents” even fought dirty, using 
improvised explosive devices and booby traps to kill our innocent soldiers, 
who use clean weapons like F16s, helicopter gun ships, tanks and 
artillery.

Why, Washington even promised to rebuild the city that its military just 
destroyed. Bush committed the taxpayers to debts worth hundreds of 
millions of dollars, which Bechtel, Halliburton and the other corporate 
beneficiaries of war will use for “rebuilding.”

Banality and corruption arise from the epic evil of this war, one that has 
involved massive civilian death and the destruction of ancient cities. 

In 1935, Nazi General Erich Luderndorff argued in his “The Total War" 
that modern war encompasses all of society; thus, the military should 
spare no one. The Fascist Italian General Giulio Douhet echoed this 
theme. By targeting civilians, he said, an army could advance more 
rapidly. “Air-delivered terror” effectively removes civilian obstacles.

That doctrine became practice in late April 1937. Nazi pilots dropped their 
deadly bombs on Guernica, the ancient Basque capital – like what U.S. 
pilots recently did to Falluja. A year earlier, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War 
erupted. General Francisco Franco, supported by fascist governments in 
Italy and Germany, led an armed uprising against the Republic. The 
residents of Guernica resisted. Franco asked his Nazi partners to punish 
these stubborn people who had withstood his army’s assault.

The people of Guernica had no anti-aircraft guns, much less fighter 
planes to defend their city. The Nazi pilots knew that at 4:30 in the 
afternoon of market day, the city’s center would be jammed with shoppers 
from all around the areas. 

Before flying on their “heroic mission,” the German pilots had drunk a 
toast with their Spanish counterparts in a language that both could 
understand: “Viva la muerte,” they shouted as their raised their copas de 
vino. The bombing of Guernica introduced a concept in which the military 
would make no distinction between civilians and combatants. Death to all!

Almost 1,700 people died that day and some 900 lay wounded. Franco 
denied that the raid ever took place and blamed the destruction of 
Guernica on those who defended it, much as the U.S. military intimates 
that the “insurgents” forced the savage attack by daring to defend their 
city and then hide inside their mosques. Did the public in 1937 face the 
equivalent of the Peterson case that commanded their attention? 

Where is the new Picasso who will offer a dramatic painting to help the 
21st Century public understand that what the U.S. Air Force just did to the 
people of Falluja resembles what the Nazis did to Guernica?

In Germany and Italy in 1937, the media focused on the vicissitudes 
suffered by those pilots who were sacrificing for the ideals of their country 
by combating a “threat.” The U.S. media prattles about the difficulties 
encountered by the marines. It never calls them bullies who occupy 
another people’s country, subduing patriots with superior technology to kill 
civilians and destroy their homes and mosques.

On November 15, an embedded NBC cameraman filmed a U.S. soldier 
murdering a wounded Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. As CNN showed the 
tape, its reporter offered “extenuating circumstances” for the 
assassination we had witnessed. The wounded man might have booby-
trapped himself as other “insurgents” had done. After all, these marines 
had gone through hell in the last week.

The reporting smacks of older imperial wars, Andrew Greely reminded us 
in the November 12, Chicago Sun Times. “The United States has fought 
unjust wars before – Mexican American, the Indian Wars, Spanish 
American, the Filipino Insurrection, Vietnam. Our hands are not clean. 
They are covered with blood, and there'll be more blood this time.”

Falluja should serve as the symbol of this war of atrocity against the Iraqi 
people, our Guernica. But, as comedian Chris Rock insightfully points out, 
George W. Bush has distracted us. That’s why he killed Laci Peterson, 
why he snuck that young boy into Michael Jackson’s bedroom and the 
young woman into Kobe Bryant’s hotel room. He wants us not to think of 
the war in Iraq. We need a new Picasso mural, “Falluja,” to help citizens 
focus on the themes of our time, not the travails of the Peterson case.

The Bush Administration sensed the danger of such a painting. Shortly 
before Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, UN Security Council fraudulent, 
power point presentation, where he made the case for invading Iraq, UN 
officials, at U.S. request, placed a curtain over a tapestry of Picasso’s 
Guernica, located at the entrance to the Security Council chambers. As a 
TV backdrop, the anti-war mural would contradict the Secretary of State’s 
case for war in Iraq. Did the dead painter somehow know that his mural 
would foreshadow another Guernica, called Falluja?

Landau directs digital media at Cal Poly Pomona University’s College of 
Letters, Arts and Social Sciences. He is also a fellow of the Institute for 
Policy Studies. His latest book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW 
CONSUMERS HAVE RPELACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN 
REVERSE THE TREND.

 

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