Category: War

Alnajar’s father, Bassam, declares himnself “100 percent against the war,” but he says he told his son: “You must do the best you can. You are an American soldier.”

The story is familiar, almost trite. But the Alnajjar family lives with complicated layers of feelings because its members are Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians.
While a son, a Navy airman aboard the Abraham Lincoln, has just ended his duty in the Persian Gulf, the family feels keenly the horror suffered by Iraqi civilians. First it was images of civilian carnage via Al Jazeera television, which they receive on satellite, and lately it is scenes of looting and chaos.
“I’m really scared now, more than I was scared before,” Suad Abuhasna said yesterday. “God only knows what is going on with all these killings, the burning of the buildings.”
Yet she said she is proud that her son, Airman Bashar Alnajjar, 22, took part in the war. “He did his duty to help the people liberate themselves from the Iraqi regime,” Ms. Abuhasna said. “I’m very happy he’s not there anymore. But what about the people?” Asked whether the regime’s removal was worth the military effort, she said, “I’m not Iraqi.”
Her husband, Bassam Alnajjar, declares himself “100 percent against the war,” but says he supports in equal measure his son’s “fighting for democracy.”
“I have 250,000 sons and friends and brothers there,” he said of the American forces. “I have 26 million Iraqi brothers dying. I hate what’s going on.”

Today there’s another report from Robert Fisk describing the hell that we have made of a Baghdad hospital.

A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn’t have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl.
There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful, and it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards. Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and legs; naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching a non-existing savior to rescue him from his pain.
“No! No! No!” another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he was a child again and he cried: “Umma, Umma [Mummy, mummy]”.

Bloggy calls for “A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE PLEASE” as he shows three photographs which belie representations by the American media that “Baghdad” celebrated the fall of a statue of Hussein in Firdos Square yesterday.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
— Howard Zinn

It ain’t over yet, as this headline reminds us: Bush Pleased but W.House Says U.S. Still at War. “They” intend to keep us in a state of perpetual war, since it works so well for them, so order your t-shirts, including the stunning Zinn number, as well as lots of other counter-weaponry, from the good people at Donnelly/Colt.

We told ourselves and the world that we had to hurl death and destruction on a country the other side of the planet primarily because its alleged posession of weapons of mass destruction was an imminent threat to us. Where are those weapons?
I don’t know the answer, but, because of the enormous global stakes involved, it’s not an idle game if we choose to speculate, or read the speculations of others.

If and when any weapons of mass destruction are discovered, those who supported the war in Iraq can be expected to use the find to justify the U.S.-led intervention. But if such weapons are located based on solid U.S. intelligence information, it raises other questions. If the U.S. knew where such weapons were, why was the information not given to UN inspectors? If inspectors could have been used to find such weapons, why was war necessary?
If the discovery of weapons of mass destruction happens by chance, it will suggest that the inspectors might have been just as likely as the U.S. military to have found those weapons, given the time they requested to search. Moreover, unless the weapons found are of the most potent kind – VX nerve gas or weaponized anthrax – and in vast amounts, there will be many questions about why they posed the imminent threat alleged by the administration. So finding such weapons does not in itself mean that the U.S. action against Iraq was required or that war was the only way to uncover and eliminate those weapons.
Even worse for the U.S. case against Saddam, however, is that as each day passes, conspiracy theories grow that any chemical or biological weapons found might well be planted by U.S. forces. With anti-American sentiment and suspicion of U.S. information and motives growing, especially in the Middle East and Europe, the international public relations battle to convince other countries that any weapons found are of Saddam’s own making will be an uphill battle.

Paul Krugman observes that the war on Iraq is but a skirmish when compared to the Second World War.

Yet self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the president of undermining the war effort.
Last week John Kerry told an audience that “what we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.” Republicans immediately sought to portray this remark as little short of treason. “Senator Kerry crossed a grave line when he dared to suggest the replacement of America’s commander in chief at a time when America is at war,” declared Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Notice that Mr. Racicot wasn’t criticizing Mr. Kerry’s choice of words. Instead, he denounced Mr. Kerry because he “dared to suggest the replacement of America’s commander in chief” — knowing full well that Mr. Kerry was simply talking about the next election. Mr. Racicot, not Mr. Kerry, is the one who crossed a grave line; never in our nation’s history has it been considered unpatriotic to oppose an incumbent’s re-election.

For almost a year and a half I’ve written that I fear we may never have another presidential election, but Krugman, who has editorial responsibilities far more constraining than my own, doesn’t go quite that far in his NYTimes Op-Ed piece today.

Some timid souls will suggest that critics of the Bush administration hold off until the war is over. But that’s not the American tradition — and anyway, when will this war be over? Baghdad will fall, but during the occupation that follows American soldiers will still be in harm’s way. Also, a strong faction within the administration wants to go on to Syria, to Iran and beyond. And Al Qaeda is still out there.
For years to come, then, this country may be, in some sense, at war. And all that time, if Mr. Racicot and his party are allowed to set the ground rules, nobody will be allowed to criticize the president or call for his electoral defeat. You know what? If that happens, we will have lost the war, whatever happens on the battlefield.

In a visit to the city’s al-Kindi Hospital, Robert Fisk walks among the civilians of Baghdad, confronting what he calls the real, immoral face of war.

It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam Hussein’s golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Messrs Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory.
. . . .
It’s becoming harder to visit these places of pain, grief and anger. The International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday reported civilian victims of America’s three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals now by the hundred. Yesterday, the Kindi alone had taken 50 civilian wounded and three dead in the previous 24 hours. Most of the dead – the little boy’s family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbors of Safa Karim – were simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits.
. . . .
Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn’t invaded – not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital – and that we’re doing all this for them. Didn’t Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defense Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren’t we coming here to save them – let’s not mention their oil – and isn’t President Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity.

This is not going well. See Bloggy for a picture of what war fanaticism and paramilitary violence looks like – here at home. There are more images and news stories linked on his post.
Reuters‘ statement doesn’t inspire much confidence, should any of us want to believe that the police assault in Oakland will remain an exceptional occurrence.

The action is believed to be the first police use of anti-crowd munitions against U.S. demonstrators since President Bush launched an invasion aimed at toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Remember, this is not just overkill. It’s not just incompetence. This is being done deliberately, whether in Oakland, New York or any other town in America, to intimidate anyone who might even think of expressing an opinion other than that approved by superstate Oceana’s thought police.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Update: The San Francisco Bay area paper, The Mercury News, now has the story.

The demonstrations at the port were planned with the quiet support of the ILWU, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Many rank-and-file members of ILWU Local 10 oppose the war with Iraq, and the local has its own Anti-War Action Committee.
Police fired into the crowd after some protesters failed to clear the street in front of the terminals.
. . . .
“I was there from 5 a.m. on, and the only violence that I saw was from the police,” said Joel Tena, the constituent liason for Vice Mayor Nancy Nadel. “What happened today was very surprising. It seemed the police were operating under the assumption that they were not going to let any kind of protest happen.”

Yes, it looks like I’m only arguing from the particular to the general, and yes, it is has the elements of an argument from sentiment, but there is is, and it started with Reuters.

The United States says it is taking precautions to avoid civilian casualties, but Baghdad’s hospitals are packed to overflowing with wounded residents of the capital.
One of them is Ali Ismaeel Abbas, 12, who was fast asleep when a missile obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and missing both his arms.
“Can you help get my arms back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands?” Abbas asked. “If I don’t get a pair of hands I will commit suicide,” he said with tears spilling down his cheeks.

Yes, there is a picture of Ali Ismael.
Many thanks to daily Kos, and to warblogs:cc, where I first saw this item.

In spite of the more specific focus of its title, “The Press and the Myths of War,” this short essay by Chris Hedges in The Nation this week may be the best thing you’ll ever read on the larger subject of mankind’s horrible fetish of war.

. . . .
The narrative we are fed about war by the state, the entertainment industry and the press is a myth. And this myth is seductive. It empowers and ennobles us. It boosts rating and sells newspapers–William Randolph Hearst owed his fortune to it. It allows us to suspend individual conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause. And few of us are immune. Indeed, social critics who normally excoriate the established order, and who also long for acceptance and acclaim, are some of the most susceptible. It is what led a mind as great as Freud’s to back, at least at its inception, the folly of World War I. The contagion of war, of the siren call of the nation, is so strong that most cannot resist.
. . . .
War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw how war turns young people into intoxicated killers, how it gives soldiers a license to destroy not only things but other human beings, and if we saw the perverse thrill such destruction brings, we would be horrified and frightened. If we understood that combat is often a constant battle with a consuming fear we have perhaps never known, a battle that we often lose, we would find the abstract words of war–glory, honor and patriotism–not only hollow but obscene. If we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their lives, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war.
. . . .