Fwd: Cheering crowd in perspective

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Forwarded from STOP NATO:

[The image of maybe 200 people (max) cheering was a disgusting piece of PR
that will no doubt fill the pro-war fanatics with a glowing burst of pride.
Already the BBC is putting up user comments such as "How stupid must the
anti-war lot feel now?!?"

I remember pictures of a man in Afghanistan being shaved on camera after
Kabul was taken, and even though the man had tears in his eyes (probably
from fear) as the Northern Alliance soldier was shaving him, most people in
the west likely thought "what a great moment in the guy's life - a taste of
freedom!".]



Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion
By James Conachy
10 April 2003
www.wsws.org

After three weeks of death and destruction, the US media on Wednesday
finally captured on film the scene it had been waiting for: the city of
Baghdad falling to American tanks and troops.

Some Iraqis in this traumatized city stood by and cheered. The American and
British media, in their stupid, cynical and inhumane manner, chose to
portray this spectacle of humiliation and demoralization as genuine
exhilaration and joy.

What the media has chosen not to focus its lenses on are those, the vast
majority, who are not cheering or applauding?the countless thousands who
cannot cheer because they are either gravely wounded or dead, and the tens
of thousands who have lost loved ones and are benumbed with grief.

There is no official estimate of how many Iraqi soldiers were killed or
wounded by the cluster bombs, rockets and bullets unleashed on the troops
defending the southern approaches of the capital. The American military has
not counted. As the US prepared to attack Baghdad proper, Pentagon
spokesmen simply reported that the six divisions of the 80,000-strong Iraqi
Republican Guard outside the city had been ?degraded? or rendered
?ineffective? by aerial and ground bombardment.

Dan Goure, an analyst for the Lexington Institute, told the Associated
Press on April 8: ?It may never be known how many Iraqis were killed.... It
would have to be over 10,000 uniformed Iraqis and more if you include
irregulars.? Dana Dillion, a military analyst for the Heritage Foundation,
commented: ?It?s difficult to verify, especially when you?re dropping bombs
on people and you don?t go and count the bodies.?

Ted Koppel of ABC TV?s Nightline program, who has spent the war embedded
with the US Third Infantry Division, told the New York Times: ?This war is
fought in many respects at arm?s length. The damage is done, people are
killed, but without the people who do the killing seeing very much of the
consequences until hours or days later, when they advance.? By then, the
Iraqis have taken many of the bodies away for burial.

After slaughtering the defenders outside the city, American forces entered
Baghdad on the evening of April 3. From April 5 to April 8, columns of
American tanks and other armored vehicles rampaged down the city?s highways
and through its suburbs seeking to kill the disorganized and hopelessly
outgunned Iraqi defenders, or force them into the open for annihilation by
American aircraft stalking the skies above.

At least 2,000 Iraqis were killed in clashes from April 3 to April 4 at the
approaches to and within Baghdad?s international airport. The American
military claims as many as 3,000 Iraqis were killed on April 5 during a
three-hour assault through southwestern Baghdad by tanks from the Third
Infantry Division. At least 1,000 Iraqis are believed to have been killed
on April 7 during the US tank assault on the Republican presidential palace
on the banks of the Tigris. Hundreds more are estimated to have been killed
during the eight hours of fighting on April 8 in both the south and east of
Baghdad, as US forces pushed into the center of the city to attack the main
headquarters of Iraq?s government and military.

The casualties among Iraqi civilians have been horrific. Journalists for
Arab television networks and newspapers, the British Guardian and
Independent and the Washington Post have all testified that large numbers
of civilians were killed and wounded by the US and British forces as they
crush resistance in Baghdad, Basra and other Iraqi cities and towns. The US
military, in particular, has indiscriminately bombed civilian areas and
targeted civilian vehicles.

A Washington Post article on April 8 headlined ?At Intersection, Army?s
Mission Turns to Chaos? detailed some of the carnage inflicted by US forces
during their forays into Iraq?s capital: ?The Bravo company convoy drove
past dozens of burned-out vehicles and charred bodies on the way to
downtown Baghdad.... Civilian passenger cars and trucks were also among the
blasted vehicles, some with corpses inside. Whether they were fighters
heading south to engage the Americans or luckless civilians trying to
escape the city remained unknown.?

The article described what transpired after the convoy came under fire:
?Any vehicle that approached from the north was considered fair game.
Several civilian vehicles were blasted with 25mm high-explosive rounds and
machine gun fire, their passengers assumed to be hostile.?

A dispatch filed April 8 for the Washington Post by correspondent Anthony
Shadid cited a wounded man at Baghdad?s Kindi hospital, who said, ?I?m a
civilian. My car was attacked. They attacked my car.? Another man wounded
by shrapnel in an artillery barrage during the April 5 attack on southern
Baghdad stated: ?We didn?t do anything to them. I was 100 percent sure they
would not shoot at a civilian. Now I?m 100 percent sure they will.? A man
from the southern suburb of Yamama accused US forces of ?firing at any car,
any person.? The hospital was reportedly stacking bodies on top of one
another in its morgue.

Robert Fisk of the British Independent wrote on April 8 about the civilian
casualties he had seen in Kindi hospital?a two-and-a-half-year-old boy
dying, a man who saw a family blown to pieces in front of him by a US bomb,
an 11-year-old girl with her stomach torn open by shrapnel.

Britain?s Daily Mirror on April 8 published a report under the headline
?Boy Bomb Victim Struggles Against Despair,? which read, in part: ?Ali
Ismaeel Abbas, 12, was fast asleep when war shattered his life. A missile
obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly
burned?and blowing off both his arms.

?With tears running down his face he asked: ?Can you help me get my arms
back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands? If I don?t
get a pair of hands I will commit suicide. I wanted to be an army officer
when I grow up but not any more. Now I want to be a doctor?but how can I? I
don?t have hands.??

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 100 civilian casualties
per hour were being brought into Baghdad hospitals following the April 5 US
armored assault. Morphine and other medicines were running out, staff were
exhausted and operating facilities were stretched to the limit. The WHO
reported amputations being performed without adequate anesthesia.

Outside Baghdad, similar reports of carnage have been filed. A
correspondent for the Saudi Arabian-based Arab News interviewed a wounded
resident of the small town of Sanawa on April 8: ?One Iraqi soldier will
enter a neighborhood and fire a few shots at a fighter plane, and they [the
US aircraft] will respond with a barrage of shots killing as many as 50
civilians in the effort to get him.? A local resident, Sami Osama, was
allegedly shot dead when he did not stop on a verbal command?given in
English?by US troops.

Arab News reported April 9 from a residential neighborhood of Najaf that
had been devastated by US aircraft attempting to destroy a column of Iraqi
military trucks: ?Many Iraqi military vehicles were abandoned, burned out
after being targeted by US planes. A resident of the street, who said his
uncle and sister were killed in the bombings, told Arab News: ?I think the
Americans wanted to destroy these military trucks, but in order to do that
they had to destroy our neighborhood three streets deep.? Just yards from
these trucks lay the rubble of what once were civilian homes, completely
destroyed?houses, shelters and cars.?

Unexploded cluster bombs are strewn throughout the area. The city?s
hospital reported to Arab News it had processed 287 civilian corpses and
treated 920 wounded.

On top of the loss of life inflicted on the Iraqi people, many of their
cities and towns have been devastated. The power generation and
communication infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. Water and
drainage mains have been ruptured, cutting off water supplies and flooding
suburbs with raw sewage. Bridges, highways and hundreds of government and
civilian buildings have been reduced to rubble, along with hundreds of
houses and office buildings.

There is little doubt that large sections of Iraqi society will emerge from
the invasion deeply traumatized. The country has been subjected to US
aggression for over 12 years. The bombing during the first Gulf war wrought
immense destruction and claimed thousands of lives. Economic sanctions and
continuous US bombing throughout the 1990s claimed the lives of tens of
thousands more and prevented any meaningful reconstruction. Weak and
helpless, Iraq has now been subjected to the final humiliation?the entry of
foreign troops into its capital for the first time since 1941.

The war against Iraq is an atrocity. The Iraqis did not welcome the
American and British troops as liberators, but rather fought them for what
they were?invaders seeking to impose colonial rule on the country. The
response of the Bush administration and the Pentagon, with the support of
the British and Australian governments, which sent troops to participate,
was to order a bloodbath.

The world has witnessed the US utilizing its overwhelming military
superiority to massacre Iraqi soldiers and civilians, lay waste to the
country?s cities, and kill international journalists attempting to document
its crimes. The scene of jubilant American troops in Baghdad, hoisting the
stars and stripes over statues and buildings, is both ugly and tragic.

Drunk on its victory and deluded by its false sense of invincibility, the
Bush administration is proceeding with the installation of a puppet
government. Protected by a garrison of US troops, it will provide a fig
leaf of legality to the transfer of the country?s oil wealth to American
corporations?realizing the most immediate war aim of US imperialism. The
claim that anything progressive will come of this for the Iraqi people is
an affront to the moral conscience and intelligence of humanity.