[Mb-civic] Fallujah

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are THREE pieces on Fallujah.  It is important to read and share them to 
counter the renewed warblitz of the corporate media (and NPR, actually).  If you 
don't have the time or patience to read them all, read at least the first one, or maybe 
the first two....


Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-11/07mahajan.cfm

===November 07, 2004 

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). 
He can be reached at rahul at empirenotes.org 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Michael Schwartz 
To: xxx 
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2004 9:02 AM
Subject: The attack on Falluja is already horrific


The battle of Falluja is starting.  I hope that the guerrillas decide to melt and 
come back to fight another day, as they did in Samarra, because all the signs 
are that the U.S. intends to annihilate the city on the least provocation.  And 
even though most people have left, there are still at least 50,000 people and 
all those buildings to destroy—and a multitude of lives along with them.  

A few things that are worth noting have already occurred.  Most sickening is 
the fact that the U.S. is trying to prevent the insurgents and civilian casualties 
from having any medical care.  In the past couple of days, they shelled a new 
medical facility (and then issued a tepid denial—that “no medical facility was 
targeted”), blocked access to the main hospital, and now have taken over 
that hospital.  This is designed to deny medical care to Iraqis wounded in the 
battle (U.S. troops have their own field hospitals), but also to deny doctors 
access to Iraqi casualties.   In the past (especially the first battle of Falluja) it 
has been the doctors who have documented and publicized the multitude of 
civilian casualties from American offensives.  This time, the U.S. is 
attempting to forestall such information by denying all medical care to those it 
wounds and kills. NY Times reporter Richard Oppel, in generous 
understatement, framed this aspect of the situation thusly: American 
officials
have made little secret of their irritation with what they contend are 
inflated civilian casualty figures that regularly flow from the hospital - 
propaganda, they believe, for the Falluja insurgents”

So we arrive at the ghoulish result that the Americans are preventing Iraqis 
from obtaining medical care because they feel the doctors have exaggerated 
civilian casualties.  We will see if they are successful in denying the Iraqis 
medical care, but even if they are frustrated, this has the eerie echo of 
Nazism.  
 
The mass media has once again fallen into “total support” mode, just as they 
did during the original invasion.  The usual “embedded” journalists write 
everything from the view of American soldiers (as the quote above from the 
NY Times demonstrates), recording nothing of the impact of the hi-
technology, highly destructive assault, and expressing not even a smidgen of 
critical analysis or skepticism about official America versions of events.  On 
CNN this morning, their military reporter actually said that the way guerrillas 
hide and run was “unfair, referring to them of course, as “the bad guys.”  In 
addition to the disingenuous comments quoted above about inflated civilian 
casualties as a reason for taking over a hospital, Times reporter Oppel 
described the assault on the hospital as straight news—as a typical action in 
time of war—and even described rousting patients out of beds and 
handcuffing them as normal activity. 
 
Finally, pay attention to the gratuitous brutality that will be a feature of this 
onslaught.  The U.S., desperate as usual, has got a lot riding on the conquest 
of Falluja—it is supposed to do far more than “secure” the town.  It must 
completely demoralize and intimidate the resistance, there and in other parts 
of the country.  Their strategy for accomplishing this is to annihilate everyone 
and everything that impedes their progress.  In this context, the denial of 
medical care is a symptom of the larger strategy, called “scorched earth” in 
other contexts, that tries to end an insurgency by wreaking so much havoc 
and destruction and death that it intimidates all current and future rebels from 
further resistance. 
 
MS
Dir., Undergraduate College of Global Studies
Professor of Sociology
University at Stony Brook
Stony Brook NY 11794
Cell Phone: 516 356-4078
 
***************

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-11/08herman.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
We Had To Destroy Fallujah in Order to Save It November 08, 2004
By Edward Herman 

""The similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq wars become more marked 
with each passing week.We are now told that the U.S. forces have 
surrounded Fallujah and are about to unleash a full-scale attack to recover it 
from the insurgents. They are already bombarding the town with howitzers 
and missiles, so we can be fairly certain that the town will be destroyed and 
that civilian casualties will be very heavy. Fallujah must be destroyed in order 
to save it from control by a resistance to the U.S.-invasion/occupation and 
U.S. control, as was the case with Ben Tre in Vietnam, about whose 
destruction the famous phrase "We had to destroy the town in order to save 
it" was coined by a U.S. officer implementing the destruction. Then as now 
the U.S. right to invade and destroy in order to shape the politics of a distant 
country was taken as a given by the media and ready-access intellectuals.

In both cases there was this ready willingness to use advanced weaponry on 
relatively defenseless peoples, with heavy civilian casualties entirely 
acceptable, and of course kept under the rug as much as possible, with 
media assistance. There were no body counts of civilians in Vietnam, and 
U.S. leaders like Colin Powell and General Tommy Franks have been explicit 
that such counts as regards Iraqi civilians are not an interesting subject and 
in fact "We don't do body counts" (Franks). In Vietnam, U.S. legal personnel 
even coined the phrase "the mere gook rule," to describe the attitude toward 
the locals we were allegedly saving. In Iraq the natives are referred to as 
hajis by the invaders, a term of derogation that is matched by actions in 
raiding homes, dealing with prisoners, and once again the lavish use of high 
tech weapons in civilian-heavy locales with heavy civilian costs (heavy 
bombs, cluster bombs, DU ammunition).

In both cases there was a large-scale abuse of prisoners and ugly prison 
conditions. In Vietnam, electronic methods of torture were widely used, partly 
by proxy troops advised by the United States and trained in these up-to-date 
methods, and prisoners were regularly killed after interrogation, sometimes 
by being dropped out of airplanes; and Vietnam was famous for its "tiger 
cages" that were the predecessors of the cages used at Guantanamo.

In both cases puppet governments were installed by the occupying power 
with leaders who would take orders and give the United States a free hand to 
bomb and kill. There were "elections" in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, held 
under comical conditions of non-freedom, in which a military junta that openly 
admitted it couldn't compete with the insurgents on a purely political basis, 
won handily. The U.S. media were greatly encouraged by these elections. 
Iraq is possibly going to have an election in January that will not be very free 
(see my "Cheney, the New York Times, and the Afghan, El Salvador, and 
Iraq Elections," forthcoming in the December issue of Z Magazine). But 
meanwhile its is nominally ruled by Ayad Allawi, openly selected by U.S. 
officials, but taken by the media (and Kofi Annan and the UN) as a genuine 
leader of Iraq. In the runup to "saving" Fallujah U.S. military officials say that 
they are awaiting a go-ahead from the head-of-sovereign-Iraq, Mr. Allawi, for 
permission! Like the United States needed a go-ahead from Generals Ky and 
Thieu to ravage their country with Agent Orange and napalm!

In both cases the UN did nothing to impede straightforward aggression in 
violation of the UN Charter, although there has been a slight regression in 
that now Kofi Annan and company have been manipulated into servicing U.S. 
aggression: first, letting the United States play with them in making Iraq's 
threat of weapons of mass destruction a very serious business, even if the 
United States had to walk over the UN in the end when the inspections 
seemed to be yielding inadequate justification for conquest. But second, after 
the invasion-occupation, the UN was induced to give the occupation its 
imprimatur, therefore accelerating the UN decline to irrelevance as a peace-
making body and making it an open tool of aggression and imperialism.

In both cases, the huge turmoil that resulted from the invasion-occupation 
was used by the aggressor to justify further intervention and killing-having 
produced a great deal of instability, and stoked a powerful resistance by its 
horrifying tactics, the party responsible for the instability claimed the need to 
stay on and kill on a larger scale in the interest of "stability." Of course, the 
only stability sought by the aggressor was one in which at least some of the 
attack objectives were achieved: hopefully transformation of the target into a 
client state (still a goal in Iraq); in Vietnam, a partial victory without control, 
but so devastating the country and killing so many of its most energetic and 
productive citizens that Vietnam was unable to project any threatening 
development model to compete with the U.S. clients that had actually profited 
from the Vietnam holocaust.

In both cases, when problems arose as pacification of the attacked country 
became more costly than anticipated, extrication was difficult. Losing in 
Vietnam to "Communists"-- and little "yellow dwarves" to boot (Lyndon 
Johnson)--or in Iraq to a rag-tag, diversified but increasingly mass-based set 
of insurgents who had not a single helicopter, was intolerable, and would 
have domestic political costs. Withdrawal is therefore delayed, for many 
years in the case of Vietnam. Americans don't lose well, and today the 
powerful rightwing would shriek at the abandonment of our noble, God-
ordered killing goals. In both cases, with the huge commitment to the 
aggression/occupation, there was the problem of the loss of credibility and 
the fear that the U.S. threat that keeps lesser breeds in line would seem less 
fearsome.

There was also the problem that an actual loss, or seeming loss, would make 
the home public less willing to support future aggressions.This problem has 
been solved in part by choosing only weak targets, by effective demonization 
of their leadership, and by conquering them and exiting quickly. The failure to 
achieve a quick accomplishment of the "mission" in Iraq has been painful for 
the Bush administration, but now that Bush has won his election, and with no 
moral values obstructing his willingness to kill (those influential to his 
constituency certainly do not include "Thou shalt not kill"), we may expect 
escalated violence, starting with Fallujah.

In each case, both Republicans and Democrats played an important role in 
mass killing: Eisenhower and Nixon, and Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam; 
Bush-1 with the 1990 Persian Gulf War, and his son carrying the White 
Man's Burden in 1993-1994; Clinton managing the "sanctions of mass 
destruction" that killed over a million Iraqi civilians, and with Blair, steadily 
and illegally bombing Iraq throughout his term of office; and John Kerry voting 
for the Bush-2 war, and promising to stay the course with more troops and a 
planned four-year presence.

In short, destroying towns, cities and countries to save them from falling out 
of the orbit of Godfather control is bipartisan and is built-in to the highly 
militarized imperial United States. This isn't going to change without a change 
in the U.S. political economy, now geared to domination, expansion, and war 
without end.

--


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