DUCK POND

NOW IT IS MOSUL November 17, 2004

Margaret Hassan appears to be have been beheaded. There have been, it is reported, 35 other incidents. It seems unlikely that her murderers will not be brought to account.

A United Nations official, Louise Arbour, has called for an investigation of bleaches of internationl law, both by the invaders and the insurgents, during the devastation of Falluja. Nothing will happen, except for one incident which was captured on video tape.

The number of non-combatants in Falluja is unknown, and may never be known. Crimes may have been committed which will never be brought to account. According to a spokeswomen for the ICRC, in a city of 300,000, there remain 150 families.

And now the centre of interest has shifted to Mosul.The same methods will be used, creating devastation, destroying lives and livlihoods, in the name of the war against terror, and to minimize American military casualties.

The truth cannot be told, or will not be told, so crimes must be committed over again.

UPDATE: 17/11/2004

The Guardian provides a situation report to the effect that Falluja is still not totally subdued, and situation in Mosul is reported under control. There is little reporting of the non-combatant population, a great success for the American propaganda machine.

Somewhere, I cannot remember where, American soldiers were described as sociopaths or psychopaths. On reflection, they are exactly the sought sort of people to participate in this form of conflict – on both sides. If true, this represents evidence of the application of a sound human resources policy. Will the well of psychos ever run dry? The non-sociopathic population will find this form of warfare extraordinarily distressing – just one of the hidden costs, not yet apparent, along with the toll of the dead.

As I recall, John Dunne observed: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls”. We do not live in world of cholera-drenched London, but in an interactive and interdependent global society, where the time between cause and effect, action and reaction,can be as long as it ever was, or short as it is now possible to be.

Yes, the sad murder of Margaret Hassan, and the other 35 hostages, comes under this category as well. The leading Islamic bodies need to be getting their message into the media, in Europe, America and Australia, that this behavior is completely unacceptable to their religion. If they are not, and I do not see the evidence where they are, I believe they are losing out in the propaganda/communication war.

But does it matter? In the longer term, prehaps a year or two years, the outcome in Iraq will not be determined by murder and military conflict, but by world public opinion. (Or, at least, I suspect, it might be.)

INTELLECTUALS ARE ALWAYS WRONG? November 17, 2004

Sometimes, reading away, a sentence appears to leap out from the screen. You probably have to be a French President to be discussing intellectuals at all. I am, for example, not expecting to see any similar comment any time soon from the American President. About to visit London on the occasion of the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, and for the Anglo-French summit, President Chirac was reported by The Independent to be in “an upbeat, even ebullient mood.” Here are the words that leapt out from their immediate context:

It was wrong, he said, to suggest Britain and France had diverging, or even hostile, points of view on the future of the European Union. “I have been in politics a long time, probably before any of you were born,” he said. “I have known the European Union a long time. From the beginning, people have said, first the French and Germans, then the British and French, have incompatible views of what Europe should be. It will not work.”



“This is what the intellectuals say and you should always listen to intellectuals because they are very interesting people. But they are always wrong.”



The European Union would solve its problems and move forward, hopefully with “yes” votes in the referendums in Britain and France, M. Chirac said.

“Why? Because Europe is inevitable. We are heading, inevitably, I have said it before, for a multi-polar world, in which there will be an American pole, a Chinese pole, a South American pole, an African I hope, and a European pole.”

In this multi-polar world (a Chiraquian concept detested in the US), the President said that two things were vital. First, the United Nations should be reformed and revitalised to prevent the “appalling prospect” of a war between continental blocs. Second, that Europe should be united and strong enough to join with the US – not to fight the US – in imposing a democratic and open view of human relations.

Then again, there might just have been a few times, when those who knew what they were talking about, having spent their lives studying the subject, and related subjects, were right. Still there is something to be said for scepticism. (Oops soon after that word was mentioned, my philosophical education lapsed>)

Where does Australia fit into M. Chiracs multi-polar world? I hope for an African renaissance in the 21st Century.

BACK IN ATLANTIS November 16, 2004

Atlantis Under the Mediterranean

Sometimes man’s inhumanity to man just gets too much. Let us review, as the warning sirens of global warming are sounding, a story of nature’s inhumanity to man. According to this article published in the SMH, an American researcher claims to have found the lost city of Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus. It is a nice picture anyway – with a quiet surrealist touch.

WHERE TO FROM HERE? November 15, 2004

The ABC reports that,”US forces also launched sporadic mortar rounds against targets overnight.” According to the same report, they have refused emergency medical and other supplies into Falluja. This would appear to indicate a more casual regard for the lives and welfare of Iraqi civilians than for their own soldiers.

Surprise, there are further reports of an outbreak of fighting in Baguba. The logic of American position, short of abject surrender and retreat, similar to the approach of the Romans,might be to systematically lay waste to all the cities of Iraq.

Short of the final solution,they are caught in an interesting conundrum of their own making. If they leave Falluja, it will become apparent almost immediately that they have achieved very little positive gain. If they stay they will suffer increasing casualties – and it would appear they would be prepared for greater non-combatant casualties.

I suppose they know what they are doing, but I doubt it. I seem to remember Senator Kerry saying that he had a plan, Now that would be a good idea.

Postscript:

Fatique can be given as one factor, but I had placed this as a comment on John Quiggin’s Monday Messageboard. I am genuinely curious. In the whole course of the Iraq adventure, the stated objectives have never been the real objectives, and the stated objectives have seemed always to change with the moment. One question the Americans need never ask is: “Why do the Iraqis hate us?”, or more particularly, “Why do the Fallujans hate us?”.

UPDATE: 16/11/2004

This Reuters report provides evidence that the US Military is providing civilian aid, but on their terms. Ayad Allawi is reported as believing that there have been no civilian deaths. But we are also told that dogs and cats in the streets of Falluja have taken to eating human bodies.

While, truth may have become one of the casualties, it still matters.

“And these claims have been impossible to verify independently”.

These reports here and here in the NYT are celebratory about the success of US troops, uncritical of the methods employed, and uncurious about the plight of the population caught up in the fighting. The major objectives achieved, although acknowledging a major rebuilding program is now necessary. They suggest the major objectives achieved: as destroying the insurgents sanctuary and providing the opportunity to enroll the population to vote.

FURTHER UPDATE: 16/11/2004

Juan Cole has posted his thoughts on the Falluja campaign, and David Tiley has done a great job of threading this narrative with pictures.

Since visits to this blog are rear it was worthwhile to comment on Monday Message Board, and receive criticism.

FALLUJA IN OUR IMAGINATION November 14, 2004

There are those who would justify the death, disease and squalor caused to the people of Falluja by future happy outcomes such as democracy, peace and stability, which seem unlikely to effected anytime soon. One of those, perhaps not surprisingly is the “Iraqi Foreign Minister”, Hoshyar Zebari, who makes the case that no government could allow people who undertake hotage seizures and beheadings to control the third city of Iraq.

The timing and the agenda is not run by the Iraqi but by their American overlords. Heedless, murder in Fulluja had to await the US presidential election, and when it does occur it has be minimized, and still as I hear reports that “insurgents are running”, food and medicine wi being denied the people of Falluja.

There are at least three questions, to which there is no reliable information.

Is there a humanitarian crisis within the city?

Many reports are suggesting this is the case. Here is a report from The Observer:

Their story is the hardest to tell: that of the Iraqi civilians who have remained in the besieged city of Falluja. They have no embedded Western journalists to speak for them, only a few Iraqi correspondents. They cannot leave their homes because of the risk of constant sniper fire. They have no water to drink, no electricity. If they are injured, they have nowhere to go.

Suddenly, the bitter urban war that many feared would greet the advancing coalition troops during their invasion in March last year, has become a reality in Falluja and is threatening elsewhere.

With it has come the awful realities for civilians. ‘Anyone who gets injured is likely to die, because there’s no medicine and they can’t get to doctors,’ said Abdul-Hameed Salim, a volunteer with the Iraqi Red Crescent. ‘There are snipers everywhere. Go outside and you’re going to get shot.’

Rasoul Ibrahim, who fled Falluja on foot with his wife and three children on Thursday morning, said families left in the city were in desperate need. Doctors at Falluja’s hospital said there had been an increase in typhoid cases. ‘There’s no water. People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying,’ Ibrahim told aid workers in Habbaniya, a makeshift refugee camp 12 miles to the west of Falluja where about 2,000 families are sheltering. ‘People are eating flour because there’s no proper food.’

What is the nature of the insurgency?

The Observer also reports:

Already the fighting in the city, and the preparation for the battle, has overturned hard-held assumptions about the nature of the insurgents. For months, in briefings in Baghdad and elsewhere, the picture of the insurgency was of a chaotic and largely criminal affair, bolstered by ex-Baathists and foreign terrorists from the Zarqawi network.

In recent months, however, intelligence officials in Washington and the UK have drawn up a picture that is infinitely more troubling for the interim government and its sponsors in the west. From an estimate that the fighters number hundreds, latest figures put the numbers of insurgents at up to 20,000 fighters and allies. Even that appears to be a guess. What is also clear is that, far from being loosely organised groups, the insurgency is well funded and led by up to 20 former regime members, including cousins of Saddam, and Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, a former aide to Saddam and regional Baath party leader.

On the ground, too, the US military appears to have underestimated the sophistication and determination of the insurgents, particularly in Falluja. As the battle has unfolded, US troops have been surprised by the ingenuity of the fighters who, aware that their communications can be listened to by the American soldiers, have used flags to concentrate their attacks.

The insurgents also appear to have fine-tuned their tactics against US helicopters, bringing down four by ground fire from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms in a few days.

In what appears to have been a major tactical error, it now appears that perhaps the majority of insurgents in Falluja, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose alleged presence there was the pretext for the assault, may have been able to slip away to regroup elsewhere.

Will the Falluja assault be a turning point?

From the same article we are informed that:

Such has been the violence in response to the assault on Falluja that politicians and officials are already changing their briefing lines on what the battle for Falluja was supposed to achieve. Six weeks ago officials on both sides of the Atlantic were talking about how they hoped that giving the fighters in the city ‘a big slap’ would be definitive in ending the insurgency and quickly pave the way for elections in January.

It is a promise that has been made before. The establishment of an Iraqi governing council was supposed to do the same, as was the capture of Saddam and the handover of sovereignty. Yet all have seen the violence get worse.

Now senior military officers in Britain and the US have begun to express private doubts over whether the battle for Falluja will make things better in the long run, or much worse. By yesterday even George Bush was rowing back on expectations that there would be any improvement in Iraq’s security situation, instead warning that it could worsen in the run-up to the planned elections in January.

Those who staid in Falluja were thought to have a death wish, but:

There is another view – that those who chose to stay and die did so as an overtly political act of immolation. Because they see their deaths in Falluja not as a last stand, but as the beginning of a wider insurrection.

There is a question as to how the people are faring who remained behind in Falluja, there is the plight of the people who fled the city, presumably living in makeshift accommodation, in conditions perilous to their health, and with limited sources of water and food.

Those who have committed these crimes, are one and the same as those invaded Iraq. They could not tell the truth then, and they cannot tell it now.

WAGING WAR AMONG A CIVILIAN POPULATION November 13, 2004

From the tenets of Christian theology, the invasion of Iraq was an unjust war. Furthermore, it was based on lies and misinformation.

Now it has sunk into the pit of criminality, and there is not mechanisms to bring those blood on their hands before proper tribunals. The leading figure in the play is all probability too stupid to be fully accountable, which makes those around him without that fig leaf of an excuse more culpable.

There is talk elsewhere of “meat grinders” and “car bombs”, both in their own way horrific ways of murdering people.

Reporting of this war has been wholly given to propaganda. Journalists are not able to report from both sides. The reports we get are from the so-called “embedded journalist” whose reports are subject to military censorship.

The US military has taken care to bomb hospitals and capture them, thus denying the limited medical assistance to the cities population.

The saddest reflection on the state of the world, and in particular of our country, is that these criminals will not be brought to account.

UPDATE: 14/11/2004

This report in the NYT celebrates American military technoloyg, without mentioning civilian casualties. When the NYT behaves in this way, it has simply become a propaganda organ of the state. The mutalation of children is however mentioned in this report:

Hospitals in Baghdad began receiving civilian casualties from the fighting in Falluja. In Numaan General Hospital, a taxi driver, Farhan Khalaf, 45, stared at two bedridden sons who had been wounded by shrapnel. Alaa, 11, was hit in the chest, and Nafe, 7, lost one of his legs.

“Everything was so quiet,” Mr. Khalaf said. “Offices and shops were open, police were in the city. I didn’t see anyone carrying guns. Now the Americans are shooting randomly at anything that moves.”

“Our houses are completely deserted now,” he said. “Look at that child. Does that child look like Zarqawi?”

Supposedly, the invasion of Iraq was integral to the “war on terrorism”. In esssence, the opposition to terrorrism is repugnance against the careless murder of civilians. We will have to live with out moral standards.

THE POIGNANCY OF DEATH IN WAR November 11, 2004

David Tiliey reminds me at Barista, it is far too late, that today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and I had forgotten about the eleventh hour. How easy is it to forget what for past generations could not, and must not be forgotten? I looked here for my maternal Australian forbears, knowing that they would be listed, but not knowing their first names, and having no indication of their state of origin, which for me was Western Australia, I could not find them in this list. Similarly, with scanty information, or no information, looking through the 89 Westbrooks, I have no idea about any relationship, however remote.

Meanwhile, best can be told from the embedded front line journalist and American military sources, and the remote and limited sources for Al Jezeera, the invasion of Falluja is going swimmingly, albeit somewhat confused. War has become a computer game. The impersonality of death is made complete, by means of the asymmetical opposite, the use by the methods of suicide and murder against soft targets. Indiscriminate killing of innocent people seems to be the order of the day. The end justifies the means. But hardly a word for the suffering of the Iraqis at this dawn of a brave new world that will somehow justify needless death and suffering.

Meantime, in his opinion page comment in the New York Times,“Groundhog Day in Iraq” ,Thomas Friedman, suggest that there six questions to be answered before claims are made for either defeat or victory.

UPDATE: 12/11/2004

John Quiggin describes the First World War as “The Greatest of Crimes”:

November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions.

None of these things were previously known to me, identifying whole areas of weakness in my education, both formal and informal. I was also interested to note in the reference, The Heritage of the Great War, discovered by Davil Tiley Winstron Churchill (scroll down the sidebar until:”Why America Should Have Stayed Out”) suggested that had the Americans stayed out the war may have ended sooner.

FALLUJA FALLS November 10, 2004

It seems that the Americans have captured the centre of Falluja and 70% of the city. The Independent report that the resistance has melted away and is now attacking targets elsewhere in Iraq.

The Guardian runs a opinion by Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi and political refugee from Saddam Hussein. He is taking a strong anti-Bush and anti-Blair view. Including proposing that:

The US generals will no doubt deliver Falluja to Bush and Blair after bombarding its neighbourhoods with artillery and rockets. But they are doomed to deliver neither the Fallujans nor the people of Iraq. Perhaps they are unaware that Fallujans defied Saddam’s rule during his last years in power. Falluja – known as the city of a thousand mosques – attracted Saddam’s wrath in 1998 when its imams refused to hail the tyrant in their Friday sermons. Many were imprisoned, and the city punished as a result.

But the generals certainly do know how resistance began in Falluja. On April 28 2003 US soldiers opened fire on parents and children demonstrating against the continued military occupation of their primary school – killing 18 of them in cold blood and injuring about 60 others. Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Falluja or any of the cities north of Baghdad. But, remorselessly, little-known Falluja became a world-renowned centre of defiance, where a poor and poorly armed people has courageously faced the military wing of the new empire.

The way Falluja’s 300,000 people reacted to the April 28 massacre has made them a prime target for savage bombardment and conquest. Najaf was bombed into a ceasefire in August. Samarra was conquered in September. Sadr City in Baghdad was bombarded and negotiated into temporary silence in October. Now they want to crush the symbol of Falluja, to teach the rest of Iraq a bloody lesson. Another pyrrhic victory is likely to be added to an already long list.

He then goes on to discuss the numbers of Iraqis killed after the occupation:

More than 100,000 Iraqis are estimated to have been been killed since the US-led invasion; the country’s infrastructure has all but been destroyed; people are exposed to the danger of US and British depleted-uranium shells; hospitals have been reduced to impotence in the face of mounting injuries and disease; the centre of Najaf and entire neighbourhoods of several cities have been razed. How much more should the Iraqi people be subjected to for Bush and Blair to have their “democratically” chosen puppets installed in Baghdad?

These are war crimes of Saddamist proportions, and there is evidently more to come. Bush’s latest pronouncements and Blair’s declaration of a “second war” have made clear that the occupation governments are ready to kill (as “collateral damage”, no doubt) even more Iraqis to enforce a pro-US order. Without a shred of evidence, Bush, Blair and Ayad Allawi’s quisling regime shamelessly declare that they are only pursuing the Jordanian kidnapper Zarqawi and other “foreign terrorists”. The people of Falluja, their leaders, negotiators and resistance fighters have always denounced Zarqawi and argued that such gangs have been encouraged to undermine the resistance.

Reading that thousands of people have been killed, and making no distinction between people on this level, is always mind numbing. Sometimes we get a brief report of particular person with some tragic detail. Al Jazeera has a fuller report of the plight of the citizens of Falluja, often confined to their houses, the lack of medical care and supplies,not to mention declining food supplies and power shortages. It is also reported that about half the mosques in the city have been destroyed.

DEFINING A TERRORIST STATE November 9, 2004

The lack of protest against the American assualt on the civilian population of Falluja is a a cause of considerable surprise to me. The American government seems to have lost sight of the fact that they should be engaged in a moral campaign against terrorism, and however imperfectly they should be promoting the cause of justice and reconciliation.

And yet the Americans understand these principles very well indeed. According to this report in The Independent, Syria was declared to be a terrorist state on the basis of a similar armed aerial and ground assault launched by that country against the city of Hamas. Another extended quote from The Independent follows:

Muslim fundamentalist insurgents seeking to topple the government are holed up in a conservative city with little sympathy for secularism or pluralism. They raise the banner of Islam, and they call on the rest of the country to rise up and expel the oppressors. The government reacts by massing forces around the city. It demanded that the militants surrender or the city give them up. If not, the city would be destroyed. Fallujah this week? Yes, but it was also the Syrian city of Hama in the spring of 1982.

The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood seized Hama as the first step towards its goal of a national uprising against the secular Baathist regime. The Syrian President demanded their surrender. His army shelled the city, and special forces went in to kill or capture the militants. The Syrians employed the same strategy that the US is using now. Its tanks and artillery waited outside the city; they fired on militants and civilians alike. Its elite units, like the American Marines surrounding Falljuah today, braced themselves for a bloody battle.

The US condemned Syria for the assault that is believed to have cost 10,000 civilian lives. The Syrian army destroyed the historic centre of Hama, and it rounded up Muslim rebels for imprisonment or execution. Syria’s actions against Hama came to form part of the American case that Syria was a terrorist state. Partly because of Hama, Syria is on a list of countries in the Middle East whose regimes the US wants to change.

POSTSCRIPT: 10/11/2004

I thought about it, and went back to check and I surely did confuse Hamas and Hama. The central issue of the justifiable use of force has bedevilled the Iraqi invasion. It is not something to which I have any claim to expertise. Interesting to reflect that the early Christians were pacifists, and so in that limited sense I am adopting a fundamentalist approach. I hear reports that most of the armed groups have left the city, leaving those people concerned to protect their property against looting to take the brunt of the asymetrical American firepower that might be directed at them, in a highly precise way of course, when their houses are appropriated by the resistance.

How legitimate and accountable is the interim Iraqi Government? Elections organized and held sooner, at least to establish local governments may have averted some bloodshed and provided a basis for legal action and greater negotiation. There needs to be a date set for the end of the occupation, which must be established by the Security Council.

THE BATTLE OF FALLUJA HAS BEGUN November 9, 2004

The successful capture of the major hospital for Falluja on the western side of the city must surely go down as one of the eminent success of American arms. Of course, capture is to be preferred to obliteration by aerial bombs as happened yesterday. The ABC reported in part that:

Earlier pool reports said US and Iraqi special forces had taken over the hospital on Fallujah’s western edge in the early hours of today without firing a shot.

And why is the hospital such a strategic target? The Guardian report has an answer:

During the siege of Falluja last April, the hospital was a main source of reports about civilian casualties that US officials insisted were overblown. Those reports generated strong public outrage in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, prompting the Bush administration to call off the offensive.

While “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind” counts for very little, or perhaps so it seems, this account would suggest (I suspect) one of those violations of the norms of decency, if not the Geneva Conventions, that we have come to expect. To quote the same Guardian article:

Iraqi doctors said 10 people were killed and 11 others injured during overnight clashes. Two US marines were killed in the assault.

Dr Salih al-Issawi, the head of the hospital, said he had asked US officers to allow doctors and ambulances go inside the main part of the city to help the wounded but they refused. There was no confirmation from the US military.

Madeline Bunting has a trenchant opinion piece published in The Guardian:

There’s a repulsive asymmetry of war here: not the much remarked upon asymmetry of the few thousand insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly outnumbered by the US, but the asymmetry of information. In an age of instant communication, we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of what happens inside Falluja in the next few days. The media representation of this war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be left to our imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud walls; the agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts to save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on the reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.

The silence from Falluja marks a new and agonising departure in the shape of 21st-century war. The horrifying shift in the last century was how, increasingly, war was waged against civilians: their proportion of the death toll rose from 50% to 90%. It prompted the development of a form of war-reporting, exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the technology and hardware, but about human suffering, and which fuelled public outrage. No longer. The reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military machismo of an earlier age. This war against the defenceless will go unreported.

The reality is that a city can never be adequately described as a “militants’ stronghold”. It’s a label designed to stiffen the heart of a soldier, but it is blinding us, the democracies that have inflicted this war, to the consequences of our actions. Falluja is still home to thousands of civilians. The numbers who have fled the prospective assault vary, but there could be 100,000 or more still in their homes. Typically, as in any war, those who don’t get out of the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable – the elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it too late to get away; and the insanely brave, such as medical staff.