Baghdad girl weeps
after her home is destroyed.
From Bob Herbert in the New York Times
The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can’t think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can’t put a positive spin on dead children.
More…
There’s been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It’s an ugly subject, and the idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don’t want the public to be too upset by it.
The Iraq body count:
Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq
Min = 21,218, Max = 24,082
Consider also those made homeless like the little girl above. She lives in the dangerous city of Baghdad and it is likely that she was kept inside her home for protection. Now that her home is destroyed where will she go for safety? There is almost no citizen of Iraq who has not been affected by the slaughter brought on by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Will we seek out the truth of what is going on in that beleagured country or will we be seduced by the smoke screen that most of the North American media is putting up to blind us from that truth?
Bob Herbert wonders
As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media’s manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha, Jacko, et al.
from al Jazeera
Baghdad is the worst city
in the world in which to live.
Oh god. That little girl… I want to do anything possible to make her world alright again.
btw, I just heard on CNN that 14 Iraqis were just killed in a second suicide bombing / very devastating
Sybil, you have such a big heart.* And you express yourself so well in these diaries. Thank you for touching all our hearts everyday.
___
*Canadians like you are leap years ahead of us in terms of your humanity.
This just arrived in my mailbox from Tom Engelhardt
Iraq “Uptick,” Superpower Downtick?
He gives the official versions of the situation in Iraq with links to news of the chaos and horror going on in Iraq.
This comment is faster to put up than an update, I gotto go…
.
“I was really changed by my experiences in Afghanistan. It is a luxury for people to say war is bad when they are in San Francisco. You need to make friends with people in the U.S. government in order to get a change in policy. You can’t say something is bad unless you come in with ways to fix it.”
-Marla Ruzicka
Memorial services at St. Mary’s in Lakeport and Washington DC.
International collection of friends remember humanitarian, who died in Iraq.
In an e-mail message to a friend, Marla Ruzicka described the girl sitting on her lap in a Baghdad photo: "This is Harah, she was 3 mts old when her mom threw her out of the window of the car and all her family members died when a US rocket hit the car - now she is big and healthy -we help her- thought you would like to see the photos."Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
And keeping us all sheltered from the atrocities of this criminal war is what helped Bush to keep his vice grip on our country. May he rot and burn in hell.
Sybil..is there anything we can do to support these children?
Iraqi people in need for thirty years was kidnapped and killed November 2004. Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi, born in Ireland, worked for Care International in Iraq. She was held hostage for a month then killed. This is said to have been a turning point for the violence in Iraq. After her death, (she was the first aid worker to be murdered) the violence became more random and vicious. I think Care International is still operating in Iraq. Check them out to see how much of their money goes to admin and how much goes to victims. There’s a rating system online.
Escalating violence is going to isolate the civilians in Iraq. It is becoming increasingly dangerous for anyone but the military to go there.
You are so kind to think of helping out.
I will go google Care International now. I will let you know if I come up with any ideas. The obscenity is sometimes more than I can bare.
This whole sanitizing of the war in Iraq(and Afghanistan) is really incredibly disgusting. Do most americans think this is some kind of video game that has no consequences in terms of damage to real live breathing, laughing, loving people who are just like us? Who cry and worry about their children and want whats best for them…and it ain’t no war-torn country making for a generation of shell shocked children who will no doubt end up with post traumatic stress just like many of our troops will.
My opinion has always been that if people are gung ho for war then it should almost be a law that the daily carnage inflicted on our troops and carnage inflicted by our troops must be shown every single night on the news.
I sound like a broken record but my disgust for the media not doing their jobs on this is overwhelming. As long as the general public remains sheltered from what is happening there will be no outrage, no resolution, no end, no protests in the streets-ala Vietnam, nothing.
This war will go on it’s merry way just like Vietnam until after another 4 or 5 years the public just might wake up to fact that this was one big scam and maybe get off their asses and want to put a stop to this atrocity.
I’m trying to avoid even commenting on picture of the little girl cause it’s too sickening for me to think about what is happening to all the children there and here affected by this war.
What I find amazing is that war can even be sanitized. The murder of civilians is a crime against humanity – so by its very definition war is too. As kids we always thought – wouldn’t it be great if the leaders could go slug it out and leave the others at peace – of course that would create a number of problems as well, but children don’t think like that.
People who are gung ho for war lack those things that make us civilized, unfortunately it reflects all of us. This war, however is a war of looting, and until we’re done I don’t see us leaving. Public opinion may eventually sway those who will be in power, but they must also take into consideration the wreckage of a country (and possibly a region) that, among others, we are dependent on for oil.
This was an invasion of a small relatively defenseless country in order to unseat a tin pot dictator. Whenever I posted anything like the above on Usenet I was challenged by claims like “You love Saddam.” In order to prove I did not favor his dictatorship I was further challenged to provide an alternative to Iraq ‘regime change.’ I believe that US supported clandestine operations could have cracked Saddam’s security. With all the talent in the US, I cannot believe that there was no other way to get rid of Saddam for his human rights abuses. But then is regime change what Bush/Cheney really wanted, or did they want 14 military bases and control of Iraq’s oil?
Now we know Iraq was never a threat to the US or the world and we witness an extravagantly high price that the people of Iraq pay each day for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Anyone see any viable way out of this quagmire?
The US has a long history of clandestine operations to overthrow people we don’t like. Some don’t work, but others turn into disasters in the long run, (for example with Mosaddeq). Now I will maintain that it wasn’t any of our business – we are supposed to be a democracy, not a democracy spreading Empire. There are too many horrible things happening on the home front for us to point fingers elsewhere.
On the flip side we supported Hussein and we will continue to support a whole host of unsavory dictators until the public takes notice and puts an end to it.
Repatriate all gunmen, torturers, sexual predators, contractors, consultants, support personnel, operatives, operators, specialists, take every bomb and napalm canister and gun and mine and tank of poison gas, leave anything useful.
I believe the best method for this would be C-130s. They have a large capacity, and the US has many of them. Also aircraft carriers. Leave the aircraft, load them up with gunmen, torturers, etc, start engines, and go.
About Saddam. I watched too many “Mission Impossible” episodes in my youthful naive days. Later, I realized that what the whole program was based on illegal interference of US operatives in sovereign countries.
No disrespect, because I agree with your comment, but I have to say it…
we knew all along that Iraq was never a threat to the US or the world because the UN weapons inspectors told us so. They repeatedly followed up US allegations, tip-offs etc and found no evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We knew at the time that these people were not fools and were not being fooled.
It’s not that we’ve discovered after the event that the invasion was a mistake. It was based on a lie from the beginning.
Will we seek out the truth…
War is the act of killing more of the enemy’s people than they kill of yours. Kill it, burn it, blow it up. And the result is the same as we’ve seen all too often, in this as in all wars, the innocent get caught in the crossfire.
We already know the truth of what is going on in that country.
There will be no “answers”, no single place to put your rage, no amount of tears will salve your pain, and no matter how hard you try to suppress them, you will remember the images you see for the rest of your life.
It is a bloody military occupation of a devastated and divided country. Iraq is not even a nation.
Many people do not know the truth.
If you read Tom Englehart’s article he gives the news stories that most people are reading about Iraq countered by the lesser known true reports.
Your last paragraph is very true, poetic almost. Thank you.
The last paragraph comes from that blackened place in the center of my being that I’ve tried to deal with for forty years. Nine of us hung together in 1966, 7 went in, 6 went to Vietnam. In my dad’s eighty years on this planet he only asked for a favor once, when he asked me not to join the Marines (like he did in WWII). I joined the AF in June ’66.
It has taken every bit of those 40 years to get the guys to talk about what the f*ck happened to them. This: One of them got civil affairs duty after 9 months in-country (combat). He was working with a local headman to help them rebuild their village, and in the course of that work they became friends. He helped the man’s daughter get docs together, and she was accepted into an American university stateside. He went to the village to give her a ride to the airport on the morning she was to leave, and found her and her father murdered, and the village razed. A message from the VC.
That’s the truth I live with, carried inside the memories of people I love who “survived” that war. 99.9% of the time they just go to work like the rest of the world. Maybe it’s a picture in a newspaper, or an image on television, or seeing someone in camo walking down the street. The triggers are everywhere. Then comes the memory, and the unremitting pain and rage.
Those incidents are happening every day in Iraq. Remember that the people involved may not be old enough to buy a beer. Imagine how you would feel if the kid you gave gum to yesterday was a bloody pile on the sidewalk today. The family you tried to help was slaughtered in their home because you tried to thelp.
The millions of veterans of all our “wars” do know the truth. But like their brothers-in-arms, the only thing they care about is keeping our people alive, and bringing them home.
We are destroying another generation of our own people; we are creating enemies for life among the Iraqi people. We are the enemy. We are the people living in a democracy who had the choice to kill the beast. It is unconscionable that we still send our young to face their young and in the process destroy both. While the politicians that send them into harm’s way wax eloquent in the expansive halls of Congress, bending over forward for the King.
As long as I breathe air I will never forgive them. Nor will I forgive an American public too slothful, too ignorant, and too self-absorbed to demand answers before sending our kids to die.
Your post makes me weep. I wish it could be broadcast from the hilltops.
Thank you and I seriously hope you do write more both for people to know the truth and for some personal solace over the suffering your memories bring you.
Peace.
If you will permit me to have a little rant of my own, the body count is not the couple of tens of thousands directly killed in military operations. An estimated 100,000 have died as a result of the conditions resulting from the damage to the infrastructure in Iraq.
We have the mealy mouthed right-wing who continually claim that the Iraqis are better off because Saddam is not killing them. Yet the rate at which they are dying is five times that under Saddam. He is estimated to have killed around 300,000 (discounting those killed in the fighting of the Iran/Iraq war)in the 30 years he had in power. In 2 years we have killed a third of that number.
And if when they challenge you and ask you if you would prefer that Saddam was still in power, give the answer that the LibDems have in the UK (and it is one that I have used for some time). Saddam’s power was based on fear and in large part it was based on the supposition that he had used and therefore was willing to use gas weapons against revolts. If the Inspectors had been able to do their job and show he had none, that would have removed and important plank in his base. He had no airforce to speak of and there were constant patrols to stop any movement.
The other was precisely what is now being used by the right against the UN. The abuses of the oil for food program were well known yet none of the protagonists of the war made any attempt to ammend the scheme. That was despite protests, in which I played a very small part, that the abuses should stop. This made vast sums available to Saddam from the kick-backs on the oil contracts which he used to build palaces and buy the support of his clan.
If we had both stopped the money flow and exposed his vulnerability. It is very likely that a combined Shia and Kurdish revolt would have toppled him if he had not been killed in a palace coup. There would very likely have been immediate overtures to the west to help rebuild the country’s defences against what is going to be a huge threat, a powerful Iran which still retains its armed forces and, indeed, quite a few of Iraq’s warplanes flown there to avoid being destroyed in GW I.
do not agree with the 100,000 figure from Lancet, the British medial journal. I believe a whole generation has been destroyed. Most of the middle class has fled the country. Children are under nourished and sickened by poor water.
If we had both stopped the money flow and exposed his vulnerability. It is very likely that a combined Shia and Kurdish revolt would have toppled him if he had not been killed in a palace coup.
Your hypothesis does make a lot of sense. I’m no foreign policy expert but I know there must have been another way to topple Saddam Hussein. As if liberating the Iraqi people was the reason for the invasion.
Invasion of Iran in June is the word. I sure hope not.