|
CounterPunch
January
27, 2003
The Human Cost
Does Tony Blair
Have Any Idea What the Flies Look Like That Feed Off the Dead?
by ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs
as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds
a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with
it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through
the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping
in the wind.
"Just for the record,'' the cameraman
said to me. Of course. Because ITV would never show such footage.
The things we see--the filth and obscenity of corpses--cannot
be shown. First because it is not "appropriate" to
depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if
what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again
agree to support a war.
That of course was in 1991. The "highway
of death", they called it--there was actually a parallel
and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles to the east,
courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up
to film it--and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was
the photograph of the shriveled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in
his truck. This was an iconic illustration of a kind because
it did represent what we had seen, when it was eventually published.
For Iraqi casualties to appear on television
during that Gulf War--there was another one between 1980 and
1988, and a third is in the offing--it was necessary for them
to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on their
backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those First World War
paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die
benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor,
without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they
wanted to make it on to the morning news programs.
I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in
1996, when the Israelis had shelled Lebanese refugees at the
UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106 civilians, more than
half of them children, I came across a young woman holding in
her arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. "My father, my
father," she kept crying, cradling his face. One of his
arms and one of his legs was missing--the Israelis used proximity
shells which cause amputation wounds--but when that scene reached
television screens in Europe and America, the camera was close
up on the girl and the dead man's face. The amputations were
not to be seen. The cause of death had been erased in the interests
of good taste. It was as if the old man had died of tiredness,
just turned his head upon his daughter's shoulder to die in peace.
Today, when I listen to the threats of
George Bush against Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of
Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality.
Does George, who declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have
any idea what these corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest
conception of what the flies are like, the big bluebottles that
feed on the dead of the Middle East, and then come to settle
on our faces and our notepads?
Soldiers know. I remember one British
officer asking to use the BBC's satellite phone just after the
liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking to his family in
England and I watched him carefully. "I have seen some terrible
things," he said. And then he broke down, weeping and shaking
and holding the phone dangling in his hand over the transmission
set. Did his family have the slightest idea what he was talking
about? They would not have understood by watching television.
Thus can we face the prospect of war.
Our glorious, patriotic population--albeit only about 20 per
cent in support of this particular Iraqi folly--has been protected
from the realities of violent death. But I am much struck by
the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of the Second
World War, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with
an inalienable memory of torn limbs and suffering.
I remember once a wounded man in Iran,
a piece of steel in his forehead, howling like an animal--which
is, of course, what we all are--before he died; and the Palestinian
boy who simply collapsed in front of me when an Israeli soldier
shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly, murderously, for throwing
a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg sticking out of her
stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after a Palestinian
bomber had decided to execute the families inside; and the heaps
of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war--the
stench of their bodies wafted through our helicopter until the
mullahs aboard were sickened; and the young man showing me the
thick black trail of his daughter's blood outside Algiers where
armed "Islamists" had cut her throat.
But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick
Cheney and Jack Straw and all the other little warriors who are
bamboozling us into war will not have to think of these vile
images. For them it's about surgical strikes, collateral damage
and all the other examples of war's linguistic mendacity. We
are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the people
of Iraq--some of whom we will obviously kill--and we are going
to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage
war crimes trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we
are going to watch our defense"experts" on TV with
their bloodless sandpits and their awesome knowledge of weapons
which rip off heads.
Come to think of it, I recall the head
of an Albanian refugee, chopped neatly off when the Americans,
ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee convoy in Kosovo in 1999
which they thought was a Serb military unit. His head lay in
the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a Tudor
executioner. Months later, I learned his name and talked to the
girl who was hit by the severed head during the US air strike
and who laid the head reverently in the grass where I found it.
Nato, of course, did not apologize to the family. Nor to the
girl. No one says sorry after war. No one acknowledges the truth
of it. No one shows you what we see. Which is how our leaders
and our betters persuade us--still--to go to war.
Yesterday's
Features
Anne Gwynne
Murder
in Zawatta
Thomas Mountain
The
War You Never Heard About: Holocaust of the Horn
Alwyn Moss
Military
Might Threatens the Planet: When Wisdom Lags Behind Technopower
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto
Alegre Diary I
Why Are We Here?
Jason Leopold
Bush
as a B-Grade Nixon
Selling a War No One Wants
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Will Attack Iraq:
Chemical Weapons or Not
William M. Evan
What
If Saddam Went Into Exile?
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Peace
as a Civil Right
David Vest
The Bush Balloon is Wheezing
What a World, What a World
Wayne Madsen
Rumsfeld's Dementia
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
January 25
/ 26, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
War as Football Game
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Too Many Smoking Guns: Israel, American Jews and the War on Iraq
Chris Clarke
Collateral Damage: Draft Resistance and the Peace Mvt.
Bruce Jackson
Killing an Oak Tree: a Gratuitous Death
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto Allegre Diary II: Building the Party, Lula Style
Forrest Hylton
Left Turns in South America
Edward Said
When Will Arabs Resist?
William A.
Cook
Israeli
Democracy: Fact or Fiction?
Anthony Gancarski
America Never Was America to Me
Subcomandante
Marcos
Zaps to Basques: Lighten Up!
Ellen Cantarow
Music Lives in Palestine
Marta Russell
Extinguishing Frida Kahlo
Adam Engel
Man in the Black Suit: a novelini
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|