Republican News · Thursday 27 March 2002

War and words

BY LAURA FRIEL

An acceptable role for the Iraqi people has already been mapped out by coalition politicians and the media. It involves silently enduring the hardship and humiliations of a war conducted in their name but not at their request

"The problem with these people is that you can't believe anything they say," said US Sergeant Michael Sprague, bemoaning the apparent duplicity of Iraqi civilians in Nassiriya, a city along the river Euphrates the occupation of which has been declared a US and British military objective.

Sergeant Sprague was commenting on the fact that a young Iraqi detained and then released by the US military was later discovered in possession of a Kalashnikov rifle and cash to the equivalent of £500 in his father's home. Nathen's father, Said Yahir, had remonstrated with his son's American captors. "This is your freedom?" the farmer had demanded before declaring, "This is my life savings."

The altercation had taken place in front of a British media team and eventually Said and his son were released to return home, together with their money. Sergeant Sprague was a member of an invading foreign army waging what many people believe to be an illegal war.

In the pursuit of war, the US military had raided a home, arrested a son and confiscated the family's wealth and possessions but somehow the US soldier still felt he had a right to feel aggrieved. "You canít trust anyone," another US soldier told the media. "They smile at your face and then shoot you in the back."

Back home in the USA, Sergeant Sprague's President and his coalition partner, Tony Blair, had promised cheering crowds of grateful Iraqi civilians and happy-to-surrender Iraqi soldiers greeting American and British soldiers as liberators.

The template had been drawn from Second World War images of Allied soldiers entering Nazi occupied territory but there was one fundamental flaw.

Iraq is a sovereign state, not an occupied territory. As a sovereign state, Iraq is protected by international law and the institutions of the international community had already refused to sanction military action. Sergeant Sprague, like thousands of other US and British troops, had been in Iraq less than a week and clearly he already felt he wasn't fighting the war his leaders had promised.

Sergeant Sprague was slowly realising that many people in Iraq didn't really want him there, that ordinary Iraqis like Said and Nathen Yahir might actually resent foreign military occupation. Worse still, some might even resist. As the US Army secured bridges in Nassiriya, a few shots had been fired. The marines responded with aggressive house raids and searches. Sporadic sniping continued.

Later, after bodies of two US marines had been brought to Nassiriya hospital, American aircraft dropped cluster bombs on a residential area, killing ten civilians and injuring over 200. But the military tactic of collective communal punishment was doing nothing for American/Iraqi relations.

Mustafa Mohammed Ali told the British media that he had understood US forces would go straight to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "I don't want forces to come into this city. They started bombing Nassiriya on Friday but they didnít bomb civilian areas until yesterday. There is no room in the hospital because of the wounded. We don't want Saddam but we don't want them," said Mohammed Ali.

The media had already reported military engagements with 'civilian-clothed' paramilitaries but were quick to point out that these could not be identified as civilians taking up arms in defence of their country or community. These were 'political fanatics' and 'irregulars' who support Saddam's regime, the media told us. The logic was simple.

America and Britain had already declared that the Iraqi people were not their enemy. It is, therefore, inconceivable that the people of Iraq might see America and Britain as anything other than their friends and benefactors. Only a 'fanatic' would identify military invasion accompanied by aerial bombardment as an act of hostility.

d anyway, an acceptable role for the Iraqi people has already been mapped out by coalition politicians and the media. It involves silently enduring the hardship and humiliations of a war conducted in their name but not at their request; passively accepting the destruction of their homes and business, schools and hospitals, water and electricity supplies in exchange for a promise of 'humanitarian aid'; welcoming the opportunity to surrender to the invading forces and meekly accepting capture and detention; and finally, forgiving the maiming and killing of their children, family, friends and neighbours as inevitable, regrettable and ultimately insignificant 'collateral damage'.

Of course, the people of Iraq might be 'humanely' bombed into freedom from Saddam Hussein's regime, but there's no hope of democracy.

The US has already made it clear that it intends to impose one of its generals to oversee the governing of post-war Iraq. Despite this, the message to the Iraqi people is clear. It is all for their own good and it will be worth it in the end.

But as the British Guardian reported, "hopes of a joyful liberation of a grateful people by US and British armies are evaporating fast". But all was apparently not lost. According to the Irish Times, "a lot" of Iraqi soldiers were "surrendering gleefully, happily".

Meanwhile, the media was focusing on US outrage at footage of captured and dead American soldiers by Iraqi television. Some of the footage was later broadcast on Al Jazeera, the Arabian satellite TV station in Qatar.

Footage of five captured US soldiers was denounced by Donald Rumsfeld as a breach of the Geneva Convention, which indeed it was, but even the British press couldn't quite ignore their coalition partner's blatant hypocrisy.

Photographs released by the US government of shackled and prostrate suspected Al Qaida and Taliban prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan appeared in the British media with the caption "look who's talking about international law and regulations". The same picture carried by the Mirror ran with the caption "what does the US expect when it treats POWs like this"?

The media pointed out that the decision to hold over 600 captives outside the US's domestic jurisdiction at a prison camp in Guantanamo Bay had been taken precisely to deny the prisoners legal protection.

"Earlier this month, when lawyers acting for 16 captives demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that because Guantanamo Bay is not sovereign US territory, the prisoners have no constitutional rights," reported the British Guardian.

The paper went on to point out that the US has also refused to recognise them as POWs and implement the Geneva Convention. The USA is currently in breach of 15 articles of the third convention that includes the right of POWs to be held without being subject to coercion to secure information.

"One rule for them," wrote anti-war campaigner George Monbiot. "Suddenly the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law.

"It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld immediately complained," said Monbiot.

Meanwhile, the people of Baghdad had taken to the streets to protest, not as anticipated against their oppressor, Saddam Hussein, but in anger at their liberatorsí who were bombing their homes.

Crowds of citizens gathered, some carrying the coffins of the latest victims of the war, not members of Saddam's notorious Republican Guard but ordinary Iraqi civilians killed during the coalition's aerial bombardment of a city that is home to over 5 million people over 40% of which are children.

"We are not being given the full truth," wrote Brian Reade in the British Mirror. "We see screaming babies in ramshackle hospitals stripped bare of supplies by a dozen years of medicine sanctions and we despair at the lie that this war is a humanitarian mission to help stricken people.

"It wasnít supposed to be like this. The propagandists at Allied Command gave unprecedented access to journalists and camera crews in the hope of showing how merciful their mission was. But the many sickening sights we have seen have only strengthened the belief held by the majority of the world, that this is a futile and immoral attack on people who currently threaten no outsiders."

Within a week of the invasion, Iraqi civilian casualties of the war have already reached many hundreds but some newspapers persisted in reporting only the deaths and capture of American and British troops. "Allies feel the pain," was the front-page banner headline of the Irish Independent.

"As the coalition forces faced unexpectedly fierce resistance from well armed Iraqi troops and the official death toll rose to at least 34, the mood in London and Washington became increasingly sombre," wrote Tim Reid and Roland Watson.

"The human cost of war overshadowed the limited advances made by coalition forces on what one American general described as the toughest day of resistance." But the human cost to the citizens of Basra had to wait until page 10. "77 civilians claimed dead," said the headline at the bottom of the page.

The newspaper reported a further 366 Basra civilians as injured during cluster bomb attacks but was preoccupied by the "droves of Iraqi soldiers" surrendering to the coalition forces.

The photograph accompanying the article showed a small child, severely injured and most probably dying, her right foot hanging as a lump of mangled flesh and her body ripped and bleeding with shrapnel wounds, but the story ignores the image and remains upbeat.

"In orderly queues they lined up submissively to collect humanitarian rations from the Royal Irish Regiment soldiers, before sitting cross-legged in silent rows to tuck into Laughing Cow cheese spread, Heinz tuna steak, chicken luncheon meat, milk biscuits and honey with water, orange juice or banana milk shake to drink," wrote Terri Judd.

From outside Basra the British and American media reported a long predicted 'uprising' against Saddam Hussein's regime. Al Jazeera journalists who were actually reporting from inside the city rubbished the claims. The streets of Basra were quiet, they said.

But the failure of the Iraqi people to provide the media with images of rebellion in support of the coalition's objective of regime change had been considered so significant a setback that both the British PM and US Defence Secretary had felt compelled to explain.

Neither mentioned the fact that during the last Gulf War, the then US President George Bush Senior had urged the Iraqi people to "take matters into their own hands". But when a popular rebellion seized control of 14 out of 18 provinces controlled by Saddam, the American administration had panicked.

Popular revolutions are an anathema to US interests of control and extraction. During the last war, the US and its allies had encouraged rebellion only to draw back support and allow Saddam to defeat the rebels.

The Iraqis hadn't rebelled because they have been repressed by Saddam Hussein's "vicious regime", Donald Rumsfeld told the media, but "at some point their fear of him will be much less than their fear of us". The coalition had promised 'liberation' but they were delivering repression. To quote Sergeant Sprague, "the problem with these people is you can't believe a word they say".