The War Within

APRIL 2003 - Welcome to the 21st century where black is no longer black. The ghostly eerie images like a telecast from another galaxy flicker on the TV screen. Sandwiched between the green images of the brave coalition troops as they manouver for strategic footholds in the battle to liberate the Iraqis or the Mars-like films of the incessant raids on Baghdad, I watch with the occasional detachment that satellite broadcast brings in its wake.

Again and again, orange flames light up the dark, ghostly city and against the ominous distant rumble of guns and explosions, clouds of deathly white float up swallowed by dark, angry black swirling masses that soon engulf the skies of Baghdad. You never see the B-52s, the Harriers, the Jaguars, the F-17s and F-18s or the A-10s. You only hear them screaming. The tracers from the Iraqi ack ack guns seem pitiful, so few that you can almost count them off as they labour across the skies. They make absolutely no difference to the relentless onslaught that rocks Iraq every night – and now, in a macabre twist, every day. None of us has seen a single Iraqi jet take to the skies, not a single artillery piece recoiling like an angry, hissing giant python. The dance of death plays on. Like a slow motion replay of a cricket shot, these images cannot, do not even begin to convey the reality of the horror, the terrifying sounds of death raining down on the wretched Iraqis. ‘Allah O Akbar, Allah O Akbar, Allah O Akbar’ shouts a middle aged man, face close to the cameras that beam him into millions of homes, a small cameo performance in this great spectacle that Bush and Blair have put together. The global message to us all is crystal clear. Don’t mess with Texas.

But we, thousands of miles away, watch from afar, alternating between frustration, anger and impotence. Unlike the Iraqis, we are armed with remote controls that in nanoseconds take us away from the barbarity that is the grotesque liberation of Iraq. We are now immune to the destruction of Baghdad, the name of a city that so many of us grew up with, as part of our fairy tale childhood adventures. From a flying carpet, we saw its gleaming turrets, wondrous domes, magnificent palaces, public gardens and handsome tree-lined avenues. Tonight, another variety of flying carpets roam at will over the city of dreams and childhood fantasies. From the spooky fields of Gloustershire, the eight engine weapons of mass destruction, rumble and roll along gilded runways, the massive engines building the thrust that will lift a cargo of munitions of death into the fair March skies of Britain and onwards to Iraq. How many bombs will the B-52 bombers, that look like angels of death with their sweeping, low slung wings and gray-black body colouring, drop on a city that has nothing to offer in defence?

What chance do the decrepit guns of Iraq have against the shockingly awesome technological might of the USA? The armaments of mass destruction that have been unveiled so far in Iraq would do far better in a museum of antiquities than guarding the bridges over the Tigris. The 4600-kilo bombs that were dropped into Baghdad are beyond comprehension. Someone tells me that they weigh two tons each. What does a two-ton bomb like? What happens when it falls? What happens if it falls near you? Does it mercifully liquefy you into oblivion? What if you aren’t so lucky? What if death doesn’t come in milliseconds? What does it feel like when hundreds of red hot and sizzling jagged steel knives enter your body at a hundred places? Is it bliss? Do you feel no pain before you die? The human body can endure the most punishing ordeal and survive and yet, it is as frail as the tender stalk of a flower making brave attempts to stand upright.

What has been unleashed on the Iraqis, children of a lesser God for certain, during the past three weeks, is a blot on the entire world and a matter of great shame for those of us who have become silent and safe observers of the systematic massacre of a nation that has had more than its share of misery under that brutal dictator. There have been great protests all over the world and they continue but that has neither stopped the Americans or the British to abandon their plans. The bloody liberation of Iraq, a travesty if ever there was one, has moved on, in the same relentless fashion that the war machinery has cut across the desert that is Iraq.

Day after day, as the tanks, armoured cars and trucks move across the bleached landscape towards the city of yesterday’s magical dreams and as the great media machinery follows it every single foot of the way, the emerging picture of Iraq is of a country where progress, as it is understood in the every day context, had long made a hasty exit. There are no spawning highways or verdant orchards, or rolling plains of rich, agricultural land, the harvests of plenty rising from the great lands or pictures of modern metropolis, industrial empires or anything remotely resembling progress. Instead, there are shantytowns, decrepit villages, mud hovels, unpaved streets, flowing gutters and scattered miserable groups of people, without food, water or indeed adequate shelter. The few miserable settlements are drowned in the sands that sweep all the time from every direction. Iraq lies under a perpetual blanket of dark gray mixed with sands whipped up in blinding storms and the angry black smoke that rises without break. The poor of Iraq are the lucky ones, the people that the brave forces of freedom, light and courage have come to liberate. But as we all know, the mighty have made grave miscalculations. In their arrogance and the blinding whiteness that comes with absolute power, they have failed to understand that although Saddam is a tyrant, he is an Iraqi tyrant. In his worst manifestation, he is still acceptable, far more than an army that seeks to kill them so that it can liberate them. An army that rains bombs on them and offers them a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits is not an army anyone can love. The coalition may play a football match in Basra and lose to the locals 9-3, but that hardly nets them the game of ‘winning hearts and minds’ – another sordid string of words that the west has gifted to us.

In another time, after another bloody surge of killing, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals, August 12, 1945 said:

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." But then, they weren’t thinking of George Bush Jr.

When the last liberator has gone home, the question that will forever remain with us is what will we tell our children and their children in the years to come?