Mahajan: Falluja and the Reality of War | ZINN: The Optimism of Uncertainty

Fallujah and the Reality of War

By Rahul Mahajan



The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of

the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to

implementing "democracy" in Iraq. These are lies.



I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you

a word picture of what such an assault means.



Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an

agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been

known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City

of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90's, when Saddam wanted his name to

be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.



U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for

the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light

provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.

The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine,

and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged

the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing

and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick

people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial

instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began

allowing everyone to leave - except for what they called "military age

males," men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from

leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of

course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there

can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in

fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors, not a war of

liberation.



The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of

the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main

bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to

treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they

could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one

I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four

beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a

soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I'm told, had been an auto

repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented

in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.



In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in

the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the

mujaheddin's hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have

to stop paying attention to it - and yet, of course, you never quite

stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I'm often transported

instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.



In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and

2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can

demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had

snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series

of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the

no-man's-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately,

usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I

observed in a few hours, only five were "military-age males." I saw old

women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the

doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save

him.



One thing that snipers were very discriminating about - every single

ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two that I inspected bore clear

evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out

to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this

fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to

believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn't the mujaheddin.

Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by

the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously

protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances

been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at

their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later,

our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by

the U.S. military.



The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed

directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news

reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.



But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like

about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas

in Fallujah, but the reports don't tell you what that means. You read

about precision strikes, and it's true that America's GPS-guided bombs

are very accurate - when they're not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of

the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they

hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however,

the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb

shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A

town under bombardment is a town in constant fear.



You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should

remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally

important is to remember that those numbers lie - in a war zone,

everyone is wounded.



The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the

resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to "win,"

the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within

horror and terror, there are degrees, and we - and the people of

Fallujah - ain't seen nothin' yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new

mandate - the world has been delivered into his hands.



There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time;

but our government won't listen to it; aside from the resistance, all

the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the

horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that

we didn't meet in April and we didn't meet in August when Najaf was

similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?



Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes

(http://www.empirenotes.org), with regularly updated commentary on U.S.

foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the American

Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah during

the siege in April. His most recent book is

Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond

He can be reached at rahul@empirenotes.org



----



The Optimism of Uncertainty     



by Howard Zinn 

November 06, 2004  



In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in

comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to

stay involved and seemingly happy?



I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we

should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The

metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose

any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a

possibility of changing the world.



There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will

continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden

crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's

thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the

quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.



What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter

unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that

most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most

advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him

rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre

shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos

of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army

rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal

casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western

edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of

the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to

die?



And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in

advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent

Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China

renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making

overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing

everyone.



No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening

so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be

created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village

socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent

Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham

Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism

being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone,

a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists,

Communists, anarchists, everyone.



The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective

spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political

power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of

the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The

failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision

to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most

striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does

not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States

has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina,

conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world

history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we

see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the

presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of

workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight

destructive corporate power.



Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the

struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent

overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem

invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power

has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less

measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity,

organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by

blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua

and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the

Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need

deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.



I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world

(is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite

of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me

hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go,

I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be

hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they

tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist,

they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing

that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not

alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a

national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a

movement.



Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of

such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag

toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic

actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when

multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we

don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been

involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.



An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the

dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly

romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not

only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our

lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do

something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so

many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy

to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a

world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a

way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is

an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human

beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself

a marvelous victory.





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