Firsthand Account of Fallujah
From The Nation comes this fascinating story by Dahr Jamail, describing a trip that he made to Fallujah over the weekend with a group delivering medical supplies: Sarajevo on the Euphrates.
Righties will dismiss it as propaganda. I’m not so sure.
April 14th, 2004 at 7:43 am
Take a look at this web log
http://www.empirenotes.org/index.html
especially entry from April 13, 10:50 am EST.
April 16th, 2004 at 9:17 am
Gotta love the way the story implies how this collection of combatants are actually defending life, liberty and freedom from the great oppressors by referring to them as “resistance fighters”, thus conjuring up images of the brave French Resistance against the Nazis.
I think everyone gets by now that this whole Fallujah battle has been ugly. But then, so is war itself. No one walks away with clean hands. Civilians are dead. US soldiers are dead. Militants are dead.
But while eagerly posting the latest US atrocity, in which an entire population (seemingly) of helpless swarms of screaming women, children and elderly are running in panicked fear from the drooling, reptilian, US cyborgs laughing maniacally as they stomp down the streets like mini-Godzillas, indiscriminatly mowing down innocents like grass in a field, I wish people would at least try to self-check themselves and look at this in a semi-balanced way!!
Let’s think also about who the bulk of these militants are that have brought this battle upon them. Let’s consider what their motives are and to what extent they actually care for the welfare and future quality of life for those civilians whose city, families, and worldly possessions are being put at risk. Let’s consider combatants who will take innocent foreign civilians and blindfold and torture them, then hold a knife to their throats as the people scream for mercy and shout “God is great” for the cameras!!
I need to stop now, because I’m losing my own sense of reasoned thinking when it comes to these “souless, immoral US military stormtrooper” stories.
April 16th, 2004 at 10:03 am
Well, right. The person who wrote that account _does_ sympathize with the Iraqi position, and views the US invasion as an illegal and immoral action. That’s why he was in Iraq, and in Fallujah, in the first place. So it’s not particularly surprising that he’d describe what he saw in those terms.
I think it’s noteworthy that you feel compelled to exaggerate the one-sidedness of his account in crafting your response, though. It’s as if you are emotionally unwilling to honestly address the fact that US Marines really are shooting and bombing people who turn out to be innocent, so you have to take his (actually fairly dispassionate, if you ask me, considering) account of that happening and turn it into that stuff about cyborgs and Godzillas. I don’t think that really helps. It shows, as you obviously recognize, given your conclusion, that you’re not being rational.
I realize that in both the exaggeration and in your conclusion, you’re taking refuge in a sense of irony. But I think you can do better than that. You’re letting your moral sense off too easy when you get into sarcastic, Dennis-Miller-esque ranting. These are serious issues, and you’re a serious person. You should be willing to talk about them honestly.
“Let’s think also about who the bulk of these militants are that have brought this battle upon them.” Exactly. Let’s think about that. But let’s also think about the process whereby we grant ourselves the moral leeway to lump an entire city’s population in with a small number of actual perpetrators of the incident we’re responding to.
April 16th, 2004 at 12:42 pm
I exaggerate not because of this one “true account” but after reading numerous such one-sided by people who often, upon closer inspection have a particular ax to grind against US interests and perceived imperialism. One such example is from someone sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, who have earlier been exposed for their collusion with Saddam’s regime in pre-war times.
US military personnel are not saints in the war. Certainly, some poor snap judgements have been made, especially by some edgy 20-year olds, and innocents have died, tragically. How long do we have to verbally flog such people before we can be satisfied that we have convinced others and ourselves in some self-congratulatory notion that “yes, I’m also an American, but I’m not like them”? (at least that is the impression I get)
These soldiers are being held to the highest judgement of moral standards while their combatants are held to nothing but “doing what they have to”. If US soldiers were accused of kidnapping innocents for leverage and joyously threatening and killing them for TV cameras, the outrage would justifiably be ear-piercing. But yet, the moral indignation seems to only be reserved for US alleged actions.
I think that is a lot of what bothers me about these types of postings and discussions. I do obviously take the ugliness of war seriously. I wish others would take it equally seriously by denouncing and documenting perceived acts of immoral actions by either side of the conflict
April 16th, 2004 at 1:32 pm
Again, you seem to me to be going out of your way to skew the discussion into terrain where you can be comfortable in your “rightness”. Which, granted, is something everybody does, myself included.
The fact that one of the people describing Fallujah was affiliated with Voices in the Wilderness means what, exactly? That you think his account was fabricated? I can certainly understand your questioning some of his value judgements and assumptions. But on things like his reporting the statements of the people he came into contact with, and his statements of what he personally saw and heard, you have to either say he’s lying, or accept that the things he describes actually did occur. Now, it’s certainly possible that what he is describing is outright fiction. The people whose stories he’s passing on may have been lying to him. But in that case, you have the independent stories being reported by others who made similar trips, and the stories being relayed from Fallujah refugees via the mainstream press, to account for. Are they all part of some vast conspiracy to discredit the truthful statements of US military authorities?
Obviously, the truth lies in the middle somewhere.
I’m not verbally flogging 20-year-old Marines forced to make snap judgements with life-and-death consequences in a chaotic and stressful environment. I’m not blaming them. I’m blaming the people who, far from the stresses of the battlefield, made the decision to put them there with the specific set of orders they received.
On the question of equal-opportunity complaining about violence committed by Iraqi insurgents, the situations aren’t equal. I’m not responsible for the Iraqi insurgents. I didn’t pay for their training, equipment, and transportation. I didn’t elect the politicians who direct their actions. They did not invade my country and overthrow my government under a series of pretexts that have turned out to be false.
In the case of the Marines, however, I am responsible. I _did_ pay for their training, equipment, and transportation. I did, and do, elect the politicians who direct their actions. My government did invade the country where the fighting is taking place, justifying the invasion with a series of lies that have been exposed as such. So I think, as a practical and a moral matter, I am justified in focusing more of my attention on the evil being carried out by US forces than on the evil being carried out by the other side.
April 16th, 2004 at 3:31 pm
Calling out man’s inhumanity to man (even within the ironic context of “rules” of war) doesn’t require proof of citizenship. That is a cop-out.
April 16th, 2004 at 3:49 pm
Huh? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.