Karen,
I like reading Robert Fisk and do often (though the English paper that
prints him now demands a subscription fee - so I haven't read much of him
lately. He does have a web site though.
I cannot recall an item in all his columns that I've read that
shows Americans in a favorable light. Maybe there is nothing favorable about us
that can be written about. If there were, I'm sure you wouldn't find it in a
Fisk column.
Which is all right, for he writes to his constituency, among whom is our
good friend Keith.
So, that's my background to the present column.
Perhaps everything he said is true about the 130,000 or so American
soldiers in Iraq. Perhaps there are a score of good things happening for every
bad thing recounted by Fisk.
But, as we've said, a story about children going to school or adults
going to the races don't sell newspapers to anti-Americans. So, you are unlikely
to get them from a Fisk column.
I fear that anti-Bush political types (I except you) see in the present
attacks, not a danger to US soldiers, but a good way to beat him in 2004.
It would be good for Americans if the attacks can be stopped -
or at least squelched. Perhaps the best thing about them is they will light a
fire under the bureaucrats charged with recruiting Iraqis to fight the
Saddamites and the foreign intruders.
Harry
-------------------------------------
From: Karen Watters Cole [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 7:41 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: RE Harrell; Harry Pollard; E Weick Subject: RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the President's votes) One of the
unfortunate similarities, perhaps, between Vietnam and the current conditions in
Iraq is that troop morale and incidences of increasing hostile acts are leading
to atrocities. For all concerned,
let us hope this does not continue.
Even if just half of these stories trickling out are true, it is very
sobering and sad to see any reports of this
already. Yes, there are
good stories also emerging, of school boards and courts operating, of poor
families with less than they had before who no longer fear the secret
police. But that does not excuse
the deteriorating situation or incidences of unnecessary violence. Don’t tell me to “never mind, it
happens.” Now I know
Harry and maybe others will object to Robert Fisk, the Brit journalist and the
more ‘argumenative’ style of Brit journalism, so they say, but read this and
pause to think about all the men and women – and children - who are victims
here, civilians, combatants and soldiers.
This did not
have to be. -
KWC One,
Two, Three, What Are They Fighting For? Robert
Fisk | 10.27.2003, Tikkun
@ http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/193.html I was in the
police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the
schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to
explain to me the nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against
American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a
former presidential rest home down the road—"Dreamland", the Americans call
it—but this was not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are
being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom
fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called
them—and rightly so. Here's the
reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe—indeed have to believe,
along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld—that Osama
bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's borders from Syria,
Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait
and Turkey are always left out of the equation), are assaulting United States
forces as part of the "war on terror". Special forces soldiers are now being
told by their officers that the "war on terror" has been transferred from
America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq
2003. Note too how the Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability
bracket—unless they can be described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or
"deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer. Captain Cirino's
problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. Ordinary Iraqis—many of
them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein—are attacking the American occupation
army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. And Captain Cirino works in
Fallujah's local police station, where America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are
the brothers and uncles and—no doubt—fathers of some of those now waging
guerrilla war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect,
are indeed themselves the "terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys
"terrorists", the local cops—his first line of defence—would be very angry
indeed. No wonder morale
is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the streets of Baghdad and
other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their own government. US troops
have been given orders not to bad-mouth their President or Secretary of Defence
in front of Iraqis or reporters (who have about the same status in the eyes of
the occupation authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US military
police near Abu Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at the next election,
they fell about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should never have been
sent here," one of them told me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can
tell me: why were we sent here?" Little wonder,
then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own newspaper, reported
this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq suffered from low morale. And
is it any wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq are shooting down
the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and—eyewitness
testimony is coming from hundreds of Iraqis—stealing money from houses they are
raiding? No, this is not Vietnam—where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in
a month—nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not yet. And they
remain light years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights
monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists—not to mention Iraqis
themselves—are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American military
occupiers. Iraqis who fail
to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack—or who merely
pass the scene of an American raid—are being gunned down with abandon. US
official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in either silence or
claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement"—rules that the
Americans will not disclose to the public. The rot comes
from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces
declined to take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We do not do
body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there was no apology for the 16
civilians killed at Mansur when the "Allies"—note how we Brits get caught up in
this misleading title—bombed a residential suburb in the vain hope of killing
Saddam. When US special forces raided a house in the very same area four months
later—hunting for the very same Iraqi leader—they killed six civilians,
including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and only announced, four
days later, that they would hold an "inquiry". Not an investigation, you
understand, nothing that would suggest there was anything wrong in gunning down
six Iraqi civilians; and in due course the "inquiry" was forgotten—as it was no
doubt meant to be—and nothing has been heard of it
again. Again, during
the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on villages
outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of chopped-up
corpses. Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even transmitted by
the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there were "no indications"
cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah—even though Sky TV found some
unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad. I first came
across this absence of remorse—or rather absence of responsibility—in a slum
suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run a new American
checkpoint—a roll of barbed wire tossed across a road before dawn one morning in
July—and US troops had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many
bullets that the vehicle burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men were
burned inside, the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded their
armoured vehicles and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit the
hospital mortuary to find out the identities of the men they killed—an obvious
step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"—and inform their relatives.
Scenes like this are being repeated across Iraq
daily. Which is why
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian organisations are
protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US army even to count
the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own role in killing
civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in
Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really incredible that
the US military does not even count these deaths." Human Rights Watch has
counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the capital. The organisation
also criticised American forces for humiliating prisoners, not least by their
habit of placing their feet on the heads of prisoners. Some American soldiers
are now being trained in Jordan—by Jordanians—in the "respect" that should be
accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the culture of Islam. About
time. But on the
ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been
disciplined for shooting civilians—even when the fatality involves an Iraqi
working for the occupation authorities. No action has been taken, for instance,
over the soldier who fired a single shot through the window of an Italian
diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the
soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in
Fallujah in April. (Captain Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops who
shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of low morale
mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for example, the "Coalition
Provisional Authority"—which is what the occupation authorities call
themselves—have instructed local money changers not to give dollars for Iraqi
dinars to occupation soldiers: too many Iraqi dinars had been stolen by troops
during house raids. Repeatedly, in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah
Iraqis have told me that they were robbed by American troops during raids and at
checkpoints. Unless there is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide scale by
Iraqis, some of these reports must bear the stamp of
truth. Then there was
the case of the Bengal tiger. A group of US troops entered the Baghdad zoo one
evening for a party of sandwiches and beer. During the party, one of the
soldiers decided to pet the tiger who—being a Bengal tiger—sank his teeth into
the soldier. The Americans then shot the tiger dead. The Americans promised an
"inquiry"—of which nothing has been heard since. Ironically, the one incident
where US forces faced disciplinary action followed an incident in which a US
helicopter crew took a black religious flag from a communications tower in Sadr
City in Baghdad. The violence that followed cost the life of an Iraqi
civilian. Suicides among
US troops in Iraq have risen in recent months—up to three times the usual rate
among American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are believed to have taken their
lives since the Anglo-American invasion and others have been wounded in
attempting suicide. As usual, the US army only revealed this statistic following
constant questioning. The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad—up to 50 in
a night—go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling back from
Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer
fire around 13 American bases—not a word of which was later revealed by the
occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell
near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding passengers for Amman. I saw
this attack with my own eyes. That same afternoon, General Ricardo Sanchez, the
senior US officer in Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack,
which—unless his junior officers are slovenly—he must have been well aware
of. But can we
expect anything else of an army that can wilfully mislead soldiers into writing
"letters" to their home town papers in the US about improvements in Iraqi daily
life. "The quality of
life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large
part of why it has happened," Sergeant Christopher Shelton of the 503rd Airborne
Infantry Regiment bragged in a letter from Kirkuk to the Snohomish County
Tribune. "The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms."
Only it hasn't. And Sergeant Shelton didn't write the letter. Nor did Sergeant
Shawn Grueser of West Virginia. Nor did Private Nick Deaconson. Nor eight other
soldiers who supposedly wrote identical letters to their local papers. The
"letters" were distributed among soldiers, who were asked to sign if they agreed
with its contents. But is this,
perhaps, not part of the fantasy world inspired by the right-wing ideologues in
Washington who sought this war—even though most of them have never served their
country in uniform. They dreamed up the "weapons of mass destruction" and the
adulation of American troops who would "liberate" the Iraqi people. Unable to
provide fact to fiction, they now merely acknowledge that the soldiers they have
sent into the biggest rat's nest in the Middle East have "a lot of work to do",
that they are—this was not revealed before or during the invasion—"fighting the
front line in the war on terror". What influence,
one might ask, have the Christian fundamentalists had on the American army in
Iraq? For even if we ignore the Rev Franklin Graham, who has described Islam as
"a very evil and wicked religion" before he went to lecture Pentagon
officials—what is one to make of the officer responsible for tracking down Osama
bin Laden, Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, who told an audience in
Oregon that Islamists hate the US "because we're a Christian nation, because our
foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian and the enemy is a guy called
Satan". Recently promoted to deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence,
Boykin went on to say of the war against Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia—in
which he participated—that "I knew my God was bigger than his—I knew that my God
was a real God and his was an idol". Secretary of
Defence Donald Rumsfeld said of these extraordinary remarks that "it doesn't
look like any rules were broken". We are now told that an "inquiry" into
Boykin's comments is underway—an "inquiry" about as thorough, no doubt, as those
held into the killing of civilians in Baghdad. Weaned on this
kind of nonsense, however, is it any surprise that American troops in Iraq
understand neither their war nor the people whose country they are occupying?
Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the
difference? (c) 2003 Independent Digital Ltd.
|
- RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pres... Karen Watters Cole
- Robert Fisk (was : Re: [Futurework] No similaritie... Keith Hudson
- RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the... Harry Pollard
- RE: Re: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the... Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pre... Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the... Harry Pollard
- RE: [Futurework] No similarities? (was All the Pre... Cordell . Arthur