[Marxism] Remember Fallujah: demonising place, constructing atrocity

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

REMEMBER FALLUJAH:
DEMONIZING PLACE, CONSTRUCTING ATROCITY
(from Environment and Planning: Society & Space)

by Stephen Graham


GEOGRAPHER’S CONFERENCE ON URBAN WAR

In late 2001 I received an invitation from a geographer at Haifa 
University to attend an ‘urban’ conference. … although deeply 
ambivalent about attending an event in Israel, [we] decided to go, 
expecting that it would involve social scientific discussions about the 
changing intersections of urbanisation and political violence.

[T]he conference, we quickly realised, was one of an ongoing series 
where practitioners of state urban warfare exchanged practical tips on 
fighting wars and on counterinsurgency operations in cities. ….We were 
amazed to discover that US, Israeli, and British ‘experts’ in this 
emerging field of urban warfare were such close friends that they 
seemed to constitute a transnational social body, orchestrating the 
intense exchange of technology, experience, training, and experience 
between the three nations.We were nauseated at the bellicose 
technophiliac masculinities, where systematic repression and state 
killing were portrayed in glossy PowerPoint slides with a palpable 
sense of fascination, even excitement. Finally, the fact that the 
organisers of the event were geographers astonished us.

In the years since, that week has constantly haunted me. … I have since 
tried to help expose the dark, obscured terrains where states 
systematically practice, hone, and exchange their skills in city 
killing, and killing in cities. …
Fueled by a paranoid sense that global urbanisation is somehow working 
to undermine the technoscientific, disciplinary, and killing abilities 
of imperial nation-states, military urban specialists, such as those 
who attended the Haifa event, are helping to rethink radically how the 
United States, the other Western powers, and Israel wage war.

ISRAELI MODEL

The symptoms and results of such a transformation are now all too 
clear. … Sharon’s ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002 provided the 
template here. Two months after the Haifa conference, with US urban 
warfare specialists actually participating, the Israeli ‘Defense’ 
Force, using the techniques discussed in that event, demonstrated that 
they could violently repress the Intifadah by going into the hearts of 
densely packed Palestinian cities and refugee camps. With techniques 
blending real-time high-tech surveillance, total coverage by sniper 
fire, bulldozing, and blowing continuous new streets and walkways 
through the built fabric of cities, the Israelis laid the basis for a 
paradigm shift in military thinking that has since been closely studied 
as the model for the US invasions of Afghanistan and, particularly, of 
Iraq.

In Iraq it has been estimated, in a Lancet article, that at least 100 
000 people died prematurely in the US/UK invasion between March 2003 
and September 2004, mostly through the effects of aerial bombing, 
helicopter gunships, rockets, and the urban insurgency (Roberts et al, 
2004). More than 50% of the deaths recorded in this study were of women 
and children.

FALLUJAH: ATROCITY INVISIBLE

Tellingly, one Iraqi city was systematically excluded from this 
research because the death rates revealed by the adopted methodology 
were considered so high by the research team that they would 
unreasonably skew the overall national results, so radically increasing 
the above estimate still further. This is the city that, after Jenin in 
2002, has now come to symbolise the attempted killing of a city, or 
‘urbicide’, by the massive high-tech forces of imperial nation-states 
in our ‘colonial present’.

This city, of course, is Fallujah, a largely Sunni and densely 
populated city with a population of 300 000 people, situated 50 km to 
the west of Baghdad. The initial insurgency in the city was sparked by 
the killing there, in cold blood, of 18 civilians protesting about the 
US military’s initial occupation of their primary school on 28 April 
2003. As a result of this, the burgeoning resistance against US 
occupation in Fallujah emerged to symbolise the wider Iraqi insurgency 
on both sides. Fallujah was thus constructed as the symbolic centre of 
resistance against the installation of a US-friendly regime in Iraq. It 
was also repeatedly alleged, but totally unproven, that the city was 
the base for the key Islamist resistance leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
...
As Robin Cook, Blair’s ex-foreign secretary, commented, Paul Wolfowitz, 
in particular, was “furious [in spring 2004] when the outcry among both 
Sunnis and Shias obliged the Marine corps to abandon its siege”
___________________

For this thorough article on the background and destruction of 
Fallujah, go to
http://www.envplan.com/epd/epd_current.html
and choose the guest editorial for a pdf file.

from Brian Shannon
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