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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Americans Are Commiting War Crimes in Iraq
(Robert Fisk, The New Nation, Feb 22, 2004)
"The men we are being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them--and rightly so. . . . Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe--indeed have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld--that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the equation), are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war on terror". Special forces soldiers are now being told by their officers that the "war on terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket--unless they can be described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or "deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer. . . . Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth. Ordinary Iraqis--many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein--are attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. And Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles and--no doubt--fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect, are indeed themselves the "terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops--his first line of defence--would be very angry indeed. . . . No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their own government. US troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth their President or Secretary of Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who have about the same status in the eyes of the occupation authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US military police near Abu Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at the next election, they fell about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should never have been sent here," one of them told me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can tell me: why were we sent here?" . . . Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and--eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds of Iraqis--stealing money from houses they are raiding? No, this is not Vietnam--where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in a month--nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists--not to mention Iraqis themselves--are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American military occupiers. . . . Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack--or who merely pass the scene of an American raid--are being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement"--rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public. . . . I first came across this absence of remorse--or rather absence of responsibility--in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run a new American checkpoint--a roll of barbed wire tossed across a road before dawn one morning in July--and US troops had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men were burned inside, the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured vehicles and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out the identities of the men they killed--an obvious step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"--and inform their relatives. Scenes like this are being repeated across Iraq daily. . . . Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own role in killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths." . . . But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians--even when the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. . . . Suicides among US troops in Iraq have risen in recent months--up to three times the usual rate among American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are believed to have taken their lives since the Anglo-American invasion and others have been wounded in attempting suicide. . . . is it any surprise that American troops in Iraq understand neither their war nor the people whose country they are occupying? Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the difference?

posted by LoZo 5:25 PM