The first internationally televised
war, brought to you courtesy the Pentagon. Like an over-the-top
Hollywood blockbuster, it
has a bit of everything. Breathless correspondents in flak jackets
'embedded' in various army units, spectacular pyrotechnics over the
Baghdad skyline,
impressive heavy armament on the move. What's been invisible so far from
the big picture is the actual people in whose name, and for whose freedom,
this war is being fought. People wounded and maimed by flying shrapnel,
people rendered homeless, people blown to bits, already weakened babies
paralysed and dying, mothers in search of missing children... On
Wednesday, newspapers and TV channels across the world reported the
devastation of a marketplace in Baghdad. But again missing from action
were the many people who must surely have perished in that assault. Among
the very few reports that have cared to touch on the human element of this
war, the most notable have been on-the-spot despatches from Robert Fisk,
whose vivid accounts of Iraqi casualties chronicle a tragedy so far untold.
As Fisk says, "The reality of war is
ultimately not about military victory and defeat... War, even when it has
international legitimacy — which this war does not — is primarily about
suffering." Fisk's
accounts are poignant: Five-year-old Doha Suheil left paralysed by an
exploding cruise missile; seven other members of her family injured,
including a one-year-old baby, hit while being breastfed by her mother;
50-year-old Amel
Hassan, grievously injured
by a missile strike; five-year-old Wahed mowed down in the same incident,
and so on. "After a while", says Fisk, "multiple shrapnel wounds sounds
like a natural disease which I suppose — among a people who have suffered
more than 20 years of war — it is." This is only a glimpse of the
suffering unleashed on the Iraqi people day four into Operation
Iraqi
Freedom. Since then the "shock and awe" tactics of the US gameplan have gained reckless
urgency, as is evident from the bombing of the Baghdad marketplace and residential
areas around it. For far too long, experts, including many in this
country, have treated war as stra-tegy. To be won at all costs. Not
surprisingly, analysis of war is also confined to the success and failure
of strategy. What better example of this than the by-now accepted
definition of human casualties as collateral damage?
