The Path to and Through Iraq

Eliot Weinberger has an article titled What I Heard about Iraq in the 2/03/05 London Review of Books (thanks to Emily at Strangechord for forwarding the link). This is one of the most complete collections of the quotes of key players regarding official position on Iraq. It is a difficult read, but Weinberger has done an excellent job.

Recently there was a disagreement on this site about the number of civilian deaths in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to Iraq Body Count the maximum number of civilians killed by the US military in Iraq is 17,842. That seems like an impossibly low number when you take into account the sheer amount of munitions dropped on Iraq.

In Weinberger's article he writes:

I heard the Pentagon spokesman call the military plan 'A-Day', or 'Shock and Awe'. Three or four hundred cruise missiles launched every day, until 'there will not be a safe place in Baghdad,' until 'you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes.' I heard the spokesman say: 'You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.' I heard him say: 'The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never contemplated.'

...

I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: 'On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried nearby by volunteers. That is what there will be for their relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse.'

...

I heard the Red Cross say that casualties in Baghdad were so high that the hospitals had stopped counting.

...

I heard that air force regulations require that any airstrike likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians be personally approved by the secretary of defense, and I heard that Donald Rumsfeld approved every proposal.

I heard the marine colonel say: 'We napalmed those bridges. Unfortunately, there were people there. It's no great way to die.' I heard the Pentagon deny they were using napalm, saying their incendiary bombs were made of something called Mark 77, and I heard the experts say that Mark 77 was another name for napalm.

...

I heard that, in the last year alone, the US had fired 127 tons of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the radioactive equivalent of approximately ten thousand Nagasaki bombs.

Add to this the destruction of Fallujah, the daily deaths at checkpoints, and the bombing of wedding parties (after all terrorists get married too).

The toll of war is awful to read, it is worse to live.

Included in Weinberger's article is the deaths and casualties of US forces. The attacks every day, the deaths as they have mounted from the beginning. From a few to 140 to 500 to 1000 to 1400, and the casualties eight times that number. Weinberger states:

I heard that 7 per cent of all American military deaths in Iraq were suicides, that 10 per cent of the soldiers evacuated to the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany had been sent for "psychiatric or behavioural health issues', and that 20 per cent of the military was expected to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

An awful toll, and one we have not heard the end of.

Regardless of how one feels about the justifiability or validity of this war, the costs are there. They will be felt and they must be acknowledged. Eliot Weinberger shares with us difficult truth-telling. I encourage you to read his work and share it with others.