Editor's Note: Heather Wokusch is a
freelance writer. She can be contacted via her Web site.
With the US poised to attack Iraq, it's helpful to
recall what pushed us over the brink last time . . . the invisible steps
and the unspoken consequences.
In the fall of 1990, when the US Congress was debating going to war, Amnesty International (AI) released
an explosive report detailing how Iraqi soldiers had taken Kuwaiti babies
out of incubators and left them to die on hospital floors. Many US
Senators later claimed it was the Amnesty "dead baby" report that finally
convinced them to use vicious force against the Iraqis.
Minor glitch. It was soon revealed that the Amnesty
report was a complete sham - Kuwaiti propaganda put together by the PR
firm Hill & Knowlton.
The Summer 2002 edition of Covert Action Quarterly
describes how political infighting at AI had pitted a board member (who
said the report was too "sloppy" and "inaccurate" to release) against a
high-level official at Amnesty
UK, now suspected of having been an undercover British intelligence
agent, who released the sham report anyway.
Regardless, the attack on Iraq had already begun
and television viewers worldwide were absorbing endless footage of
laser-guided bombs, pinpoint missiles and other" precision warfare" that
miraculously seemed to destroy machinery without harming civilians. Back
home, flag-waving hysteria followed Operation Desert Storm to its climax,
and returning conquerors, including then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Colin Powell, were feted as national heroes.
Minor glitch. A few months later it was revealed
that actually 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis, many of them unarmed civilians,
had died during the six-week attack, including tens of thousands mowed
down in aerial assaults as they were trying to flee along what became
nicknamed "The Highway of Death."
Equating civilians and combatants is integral to
"The Powell Doctrine" which recommends using overwhelming force on the
enemy, regardless of civilian casualties. In his autobiography,
Colin Powell discusses the Vietnam War and explains the benefits of
destroying the food and homes of villagers who might sympathize with the
Viet Cong: "We burned the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson
and Zippo lighters . . . Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?
Ho Chi Minh had said people were like the sea in which his guerillas swam.
We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In
the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shot your enemy
or starved him to death?"
Unmentioned is the moral implication of targeting
civilians, or why doing so would make them want to sympathize with the
US.
A few years later, Colin Powell was an
up-and-coming staff officer, assigned to the Americal headquarters at Chu
Lai, Vietnam. He was put in charge of handling a young soldier, Tom Glen,
who had written a letter accusing the Americal division of routine
brutality against Vietnamese civilians; the letter was detailed, its
allegations horrifying, and its contents echoed complaints received from
other soldiers. Rather than speaking to Glen about the letter, however,
Powell's response was to conduct a cursory investigation followed by a
report faulting Glen, and concluding, "In direct refutation of this
(Glen's) portrayal, is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers
and the Vietnamese people are excellent."
Minor glitch. Soon after, news surfaced about the
Americal division's criminal brutality at My Lai, in which 347 unarmed
civilians were massacred; Powell's memoirs fail to mention the Glen
incident.
Fast forward to April 2002, and having risen to Secretary of State, Colin
Powell reported to a US congressional panel about his visit to the Jenin
refugee camp, site of a recent Israeli attack. Powell testified, "I've
seen no evidence of mass graves . . . no evidence that would suggest a
massacre took place . . . Clearly people died in Jenin - people who were
terrorists died in Jenin - and in the prosecution of that battle innocent
lives may well have been lost." In the same vein, Amnesty International
issued a short release stating that while it appeared "serious breaches of
international human rights and humanitarian law were committed . . . only
an independent international commission of inquiry can establish the full
facts and the scale of these violations." For its part, the White House
also claimed more facts were needed, and then Bush called Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel
Sharon a "man
of peace."
So in essence, the whole Jenin attack would need to
be swept under the carpet because (since Israel had not allowed a UN
investigation and NGOs had come up with very little) there was not enough
solid information to support accusations.
Minor glitch. Unmentioned is the fact that the US
military, under the auspices of learning about urban warfare, had
accompanied the Israeli military on its attack on Jenin (Marine Corps Times,
5-3-2002). Or the fact that dozens of foreign journalists witnessed 30
Palestinian corpses being buried in a mass grave right near the hospital.
Or the fact that local hospital personnel describe seeing the Israeli
military loading other corpses "into a refrigerated semi-trailer, and
taking them out of Jenin" (which would answer the question posed in
Amnesty's release, "What was striking is what was absent. There were very
few bodies in the hospital. There were also none who were seriously
injured, only the 'walking wounded'. Thus we have to ask: where are the
bodies and where are the seriously injured?").
Moral of the story? Truth is often the first
casualty of war. Before we hang our hopes on heroes or unquestioningly
believe what we hear from even the most reliable sources, we need to dig
deeper to find the real story. Second, while the US was appropriate to be
outraged at the targeting of its civilians in the September 11 attacks, we
should extend that outrage to scenarios in which our government targets,
or is complicit in targeting, civilians
elsewhere.
clear.gif