- In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians
and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the
troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something
missing.
-
- The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and
personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass destruction,
arms inspections, alliances, oil, and "regime change."
-
- What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will
do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings
who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just
want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with "national
security" but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical
care and peace.
-
- I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who
will, with absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs,
or be blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing
sickness that could lead to their bringing deformed children into the world
(as happened to families in Vietnam, Iraq, and also the United States).
-
- True, there has been some discussion of American casualties
resulting from a land invasion of Iraq. But, as always when the strategists
discuss this, the question is not about the wounded and dead as human beings,
but about what number of American casualties would result in public withdrawal
of support for the war, and what effect this would have on the upcoming
elections for Congress and the Presidency.
-
- That was uppermost in the mind of Lyndon Johnson, as
we have learned from the tapes of his White House conversations. He worried
about Americans dying if he escalated the war in Vietnam, but what most
concerned him was his political future. If we pull out of Vietnam, he told
his friend Senator Richard Russell, "they'll impeach me, won't they?"
-
- In any case, American soldiers killed in war are always
a matter of statistics. Individual human beings are missing in the numbers.
It is left to the poets and novelists to take us by the shoulders and shake
us and ask us to look and listen. In World War I, ten million men died
on the battlefield, but we needed John Dos Passos to confront us with what
that meant: In his novel 1919, he writes of the death of John Doe: "In
the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime
and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left
of John Doe, the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki."
-
- Vietnam was a war that filled our heads with statistics,
of which one stood out, embedded in the stark monument in Washington: 58,000
dead. But one would have to read the letters from soldiers just before
they died to turn those statistics into human beings. And for all those
not dead but mutilated in some way, the amputees and paraplegics, one would
have to read Ron Kovic's account, in his memoir, "Born on the Fourth
of July," of how his spine was shattered and his life transformed.
-
- As for the dead among "the enemy"--that is,
those young men, conscripted or cajoled or persuaded to pit their bodies
against those of our young men--that has not been a concern of our political
leaders, our generals, our newspapers and magazines, our television networks.
To this day, most Americans have no idea, or only the vaguest, of how many
Vietnamese--soldiers and civilians (actually, a million of each)--died
under American bombs and shells.
-
- And for those who know the figures, the men, women, children
behind the statistics remained unknown until a picture appeared of a Vietnamese
girl running down a road, her skin shredding from napalm, until Americans
saw photos of women and children huddled in a trench as GIs poured automatic
rifle fire into their bodies.
-
- Ten years ago, in that first war against Iraq, our leaders
were proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred American casualties
(one wonders if the families of those soldiers would endorse the word "only").
When a reporter asked General Colin Powell if he knew how many Iraqis died
in that war, he replied: "That is really not a matter I am terribly
interested in." A high Pentagon official told The Boston Globe, "To
tell you the truth, we're not really focusing on this question."
-
- Americans knew that this nation's casualties were few
in the Gulf War, and a combination of government control of the press and
the media's meek acceptance of that control ensured that the American people
would not be confronted, as they had been in Vietnam, with Iraqi dead and
dying.
-
- There were occasional glimpses of the horrors inflicted
on the people of Iraq, flashes of truth in the newspapers that quickly
disappeared. In mid-February 1991, U.S. planes dropped bombs on an air
raid shelter in Baghdad at four in the morning, killing 400 to 500 people--mostly
women and children--who were huddled there to escape the incessant bombing.
An Associated Press reporter, one of the few allowed to go to the site,
said: "Most of the recovered bodies were charred and mutilated beyond
recognition."
-
- In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged
in a ground assault on Iraqi positions in Kuwait. As in the air war, they
encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the Iraqi
army in full flight, U.S. planes kept strafing the retreating soldiers
who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter called the scene
"a blazing hell, a gruesome testament. To the east and west across
the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing." That grisly scene appeared
for a moment in the press and then vanished in the exultation of a victorious
war, in which politicians of both parties and the press joined. President
Bush crowed: "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the
desert sands of the Arabian peninsula." The two major news magazines,
Time and Newsweek, printed special editions hailing the victory. Each devoted
about a hundred pages to the celebration, mentioning proudly the small
number of American casualties. They said not a word about the tens of thousands
of Iraqis--soldiers and civilians--themselves victims first of Saddam Hussein's
tyranny, and then of George Bush's war.
-
- There was no photograph of a single dead Iraqi child,
no names of particular Iraqis, no images of suffering and grief to convey
to the American people what our overwhelming military machine was doing
to other human beings.
-
- The bombing of Afghanistan has been treated as if human
beings are of little consequence. It was been portrayed as a "war
on terrorism," not a war on men, women, children. The few press reports
of "accidents" were quickly followed with denials, excuses, justifications.
There has been some bandying about of numbers of Afghan civilian deaths--but
always numbers.
-
- Only rarely has the human story, with names and images,
come through as more than a flash of truth, as one day when I read of a
ten-year old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the Pakistani
border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of American bombs.
-
- Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note
that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law.
We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for
war--else we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out
that the country that possesses by far the most "weapons of mass destruction"
is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results
than any nation on Earth. We can point to our national history of expansion
and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at
the highest levels of our government.
-
- But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should
we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John
le Carre has one of his characters say: "I despise experts more than
anyone on earth.")
-
- Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk
for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will
not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war
memorial?
-
- For this we will need the help of people in the arts,
those who through time--from Euripedes to Bob Dylan--have written and sung
about specific, recognizable victims of war. In 1935, Jean Giraudoux, the
French playwright, with the memory of the first World War still in his
head, wrote "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place." Demokos, a
Trojan soldier, asks the aged Hecuba to tell him "what war looks like."
She responds: "Like the bottom of a baboon. When the baboon is up
in a tree, with its hind end facing us, there is the face of war exactly:
scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig."
-
- If enough Americans could see that, perhaps the war on
Iraq would not take place.
-
- http://www.progressive.org
|
