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When In Doubt, Wave The Flag And Wag The Tail |
Current rating: 8 |
by P.M. carpenter (via Rev Dave)
Email: DarkMatter (nospam) Hypocrisy.org (unverified!) |
01 Apr 2003
Modified: 01:02:48 AM |
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The logic of your average American war booster leaves a considerable something to be desired. As I was watching one of the seemingly White House-operated cable networks last week, a flag-waving California lass being interviewed said we should prosecute the war in Iraq to the fullest because "there are people over there with guns trying to kill us." She appeared genuinely insulted, puzzled and ticked off that more than a few Iraqis have chosen to defend their homeland.
One presumes that if Bush, Halliburton & Associates should opt for regime change in, say, China, there likely would be a lot of oppressed Chinese with guns trying to kill liberating American troops and our insulted West coast lass would be just as puzzled and ticked off. This tunnel-vision opinion of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is held by 50 to 70 percent of Americans today. Their analytical wherewithal is so stunningly skimpy as to make one rethink the possible benefits of private-school vouchers.
Perhaps if the bomb-boosters at CNN, MSNBC and -- it goes without saying -- Fox were to report rather than peddle this war "24/7," those percentages would be decisively lower. Yet, compared to the printed press -- which so few Americans bother to read these days -- these electronic harlots provide little analysis as to why so many Iraqis are disturbingly anti-"liberation," or why Iraqi-regime goons aren't playing cricket on the battlefield. Cable networks dwell instead on interviewing endless streams of retired American brass promoting the offensive and decrying the enemy’s tactics. The only true instructional outcome has been in discovering there are more out-to-pasture generals, admirals, colonels, little colonels and majors wanting to be interviewed on national television than there are lesbian transsexuals dialing Jerry Springer.
It is, of course, axiomatic that totalitarian regimes -- left or right, makes no difference -- are brutal, inhumane, hypocritical, violators of international law and unwilling to play by Hoyle. Nevertheless, no matter how axiomatic or obvious that may be, cable networks cannot get enough of fingering Saddam Hussein as somehow unique in these qualities. Ergo, Iraq deserves a "freedom operation" while the networks ignore -- much to the White House's delight -- America’s history of buddying up to Hussein and countless tyrannical others. The networks ignore as well -- even more to the White House's delight -- that humanitarianism initially was among the lessor of Bush's rambling justifications for war.
Nor do the cable networks remind their audience that it is the United States violating international law by invading a foreign nation without provocation or with a plausible, non-risible excuse of self-defense. Presently the U.S. is, quite literally, an international outlaw. Any network discussion or analysis of this historically profound and disastrous change in American foreign policy -- that is, the inevitable boomerang effect of preemptive assaults -- is mostly absent. In its place we are treated to another Hussein horror story, after which the audience unfurls yet another American flag in self-righteous indignation.
Nor do the networks emphasize the singular constant of war: that every combatant country, no matter what its form of government, will, in time, behave atrociously. This point could (should) have been driven home while rightfully deploring Iraq's Geneva Convention violation regarding photo-airings of American POWs. Case in point: American military coroners have concluded the deaths of 2 Afghani detainees resulted from "blunt force trauma" while in U.S. custody. They were ruled homicides. That's not the American way; it's merely war's way, and brutality knows no borders.
And then there's the mouth-foaming over Hussein's trashing of genteel war "rules." The swarthy bastard is burning oil fields; ordering sniper attacks; sanctioning offensive surrenders; and in general deploying unspeakable tactics in the course of usually polite carnage. With unintended comic effect, one Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakly let loose an officious dollop of disappointment that Hussein "is fighting an asymmetrical warfare" [sic]. And it just ain't right. The Mideast tyrant refuses to match us man for man, tank for tank and cruise missile for cruise missile as any sporting chap would. By playing unfairly he is most rudely giving the "coalition" fits. That's your typical, thoughtless dictator for you.
The fact that North Vietnam chewed up a superpower with similar guerrilla tactics eludes cable-network anchors, thereby postponing the audience's inevitable realization that once again we're in for a grueling, body-counting nightmare from which we cannot gracefully wake up.
Just as costly to America's welfare will be -- in all forms of media but especially on evening cable-network programs -- the Right's tired, 100-percent, right-or-wrong Americanism designed only to stifle dissent or any sign of independent thought. For every antiwar piece delivered on air or in print, hordes of dictatorial creatures from the Right's boobgeoisie will rant that the author or speaker is unspeakably antiAmerican, a Hussein-lover, a totalitarian rube, a commie apologist, or whatever utterly off-the-point accusation springs to mind.
It shouldn't be the case that dissenting voices must preface their remarks with love-of-one's-country declarations, any more than it's the case that pro-war automatons don't feel the need to. In a sane world, only pro-war voices should be required to defend their advocacy of bloodletting versus the more peaceful status quo. That is not a world in which we find ourselves, however, and that's a darn shame.
P.M. Carpenter is a writer and professional historian.
A Champaign resident who obtained a PhD from the U of I, Carpenter is also an artist, has taught himself Chinese, plays chess like a pro, and is a former jazz drummer.
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Case In Point: Ten Iraqis Killed At U.S. Checkpoint |
by William Branigin
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 1
01 Apr 2003
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NEAR KARBALA, March 31 - As an unidentified four-wheel drive vehicle came barreling toward an intersection held by troops of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, Capt. Ronny Johnson grew increasingly alarmed. From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons of M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.
"Fire a warning shot," he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. "Stop [messing] around!" Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.
"Cease fire!" Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!"
So it was that on a warm, hazy day in central Iraq, the fog of war descended on Bravo Company.
Fifteen Iraqi civilians were packed inside the Toyota, it turned out, along with as many of their possessions as the jammed vehicle could hold. Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under 5 years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.
"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sgt. Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, said later in an interview. He said one of the wounded women sat in the vehicle holding the mangled bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car," he said.
The tragedy cast a pall over the company as it sat in positions it occupied Sunday on this key stretch of Highway 9 at the intersection of a road leading to the town of Hilla, about 14 miles to the east, near the Euphrates River. The Toyota was coming from that direction when it was fired on.
Dealing with the gruesome scene was a new experience for many of the U.S. soldiers deployed here, and they debated how the tragedy could have been avoided. Several said they accepted the platoon leader's explanation to Johnson on the military radio that he had, in fact, fired two warning shots, but that the driver failed to stop. And everybody was edgy, they realized, since four U.S. soldiers were blown up by a suicide bomber Saturday at a checkpoint much like theirs, only 20 miles to the south.
On a day of sporadic fighting on the roads and in the farms and wooded areas around the intersection, the soldiers of Bravo Company had their own reasons to be edgy. The Bradley of the 3rd Battalion's operations officer, Maj. Roger Shuck, was fired on with a rocket-propelled grenade a couple of miles south of Karbala. No one in the vehicle was seriously injured, but Shuck had difficulty breathing afterward and had to be treated with oxygen, medics said.
That happened after a column of M1 Abrams tanks headed north to Karbala in the early afternoon and returned a couple of hours later. Throughout the day, Iraqis lobbed periodic mortar volleys at the U.S. troops, and Iraqi militiamen and soldiers tried to penetrate the U.S. lines. Later, U.S. multiple-launcher vehicles fired rockets to try to take out the mortar batteries as AH-64 Apache helicopters swooped low over the arid terrain in search of other enemy gun emplacements.
It was in the late afternoon, after this day defending their positions, that the men of Bravo Company saw the blue Toyota coming down the road and reacted. After the shooting, U.S. medics evacuated survivors to U.S. lines south of here. One woman escaped without a scratch. Another, who had superficial head wounds, was flown by helicopter to a U.S. field hospital when it was learned she was pregnant.
Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, the 3rd Battalion commander, gave permission for three of the survivors to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones. Medics gave the group 10 body bags. U.S. officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.
"They wanted to bury them before the dogs got to them," said Cpl. Brian Truenow, 28, of Townsend, Mass.
[The Pentagon issued a statement in Washington saying the vehicle was fired on after the driver ignored shouted orders and warning shots. The shooting, it said, is under investigation. According to the Pentagon account, the vehicle was a van carrying "13 women and children." Seven were killed, two were injured and four were unharmed, it said, without mentioning any men.]
To try to prevent a recurrence, Johnson ordered that signs be posted in Arabic to warn people to stop well short of the Bradleys guarding the eastern approach to the intersection. Before they could be erected, 10 people carrying white flags walked down the same road. They included seven children, an old man, a woman and a boy in his teens.
"Tell them to go away," Johnson ordered. But he reconsidered when told that the family claimed its house had been blown up and that they were trying to reach the home of relatives in a safer area.
"They look like they pose no threat at this time," one of the Bradley platoons radioed.
Johnson, a former Army Ranger who parachuted into Panama in 1989, fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and rose through the ranks, relented. He ordered his troops to tell the old man that the group could walk around the Bradleys.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
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