literarydiscussions.myfreeforum.org

Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Thu May 1, 2003 7:29 am
Subject: Who Cast the First Stone?

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=57554

Sitaram writes:

One of my most respected Internet acquaintances (but someone who
holds views very different from my views on certain issues) has just
written me the following (together with several lengthy, interesting
news articles). In my post, I will call my acquaintance "Ramasita",
in order to maintain anonymity.

Their words (below) are in response to my post entitled "Acronym Hall
of Fame."

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...eeHouse&cid=330307&show=0

=============================

Dear Sitaram:

For the sake of a balanced perspective, please read the attached post
through to the very end.

The first piece is on the war, and the second about the looting of
antiquities from Iraq's museums.

Saddam Hussein's depravities are too obvious, open, and well
documented for me to add anything.

But this recent war, and the attitudes of this administration, their
inability to stomach any criticism, and the media -abetted gloating
over inflicting a calamity on a whole nation as a necessary byproduct
of simply eliminating one man....is a horror. Because to call another
side murderous or evil requires one to be on higher moral ground than
those whom you condemn.

Best Regards,

Ramasita (not this person's actual name)

=================

Sitaram replies:

Dear Ramasita:

Naturally, because of our Internet correspondence over the past
several years, I am well aware of your differing viewpoints, and I
greatly respect you and your views, as well as your inalienable right
to be different and express those views. I always try to remind
myself and also admit publicly that I may possibly be quite mistaken
or misguided in some of my beliefs, since I do not have a corner or
monopoly on truth or wisdom.

Ramasita, you wrote: "Because to call another side murderous or evil
requires one to be ON HIGHER MORAL GROUND than those whom you
condemn."

Excellent phrase! Bravo! I like this choice of words, truly! I am
reminded of Jesus and the Parable of the woman accused of adultery.
Jesus said to the crowd, "Let whoever is without sin cast the first
stone." Having uttered that one simple statement, Jesus began to
write some words in the sand at his feet. We are never told WHAT
Jesus was writing, but simply that he wrote something in the sand.
As Jesus continued his writing, one by one, the accusers left, until
finally there was only Jesus and the accused woman remaining. Some
theologians from antiquity speculated that Jesus was writing cryptic
hints in the sand which had meaning only to the onlookers in the
crowd of accusers (perhaps dates and names and places of their own
adulterous affairs, or possibly hints of other serious sins having
nothing to do with adultery).

We all realize that no one is without sin or fault. Christians
perceive Jesus as "the only sinless one", so in that crowd of
accusers, Jesus, (Theanthropos or "God-man") was the only one without
sin who could have claimed the right to cast the first stone.

This parable of Jesus presumes that the crowd is enlightened enough
to recognized and admit to themselves that they too are sinners. Yet
in reality, with the nature of crowds that I know, many would
should "Yo! Right on. I AM without sin" and they would begin to hurl
stones like fury at the adulteress. We call that crowd "the moral
majority". Such moral majorities exist both in Protestant America
as well as in the Islamic Arab nations. A humorist once commented
that "the moral majority" is NEITHER "moral" nor a "majority".

Now, whereas in the IDEAL crowds which typically populate parables,
all hang down there heads and, one by one, walk away, in REAL crowds,
there is always one to cast the first stone (after which many more
stones follow until the job is done).

Nowadays, the term for "casting the first stone" is PREEMPTIVE
STRIKE. It is also called "being proactive".

First, I must ask, WHO is it, exactly, in this current world
situation, who has "cast the first stone?" MY OWN personal answer
to that question is the Prophet Muhammad himself, in 7th century
Mecca and Medina. In fact, it is ironic that in the Hadith, there
are accounts of Muhammad during the heat of battle coming out from
the safety of his tent (which was at a considerable safe distance)
and hurling some pebbles at the enemy, to invoke the wrath and
vengeance of his Allah.

http://www.hraic.org/the_life_of_muhammad.html

The two armies met at Hunayn. At first the battle did not favor the
Muslims but the Prophet prayed to Allah and threw some pebbles in the
direction of the enemy just as he had done at Badr. Allah revealed
later that he had sent down, unseen, angels to punish the
disbelievers. (9:25-7)

http://quickstart.clari.net/qs_se/webnews/wed/cg/Asaudi-
hajj.R8dz_DFA.html

In my opinion, the ripples from those stones which Prophet Muhammad
cast led to the Crusades of the Middle ages as well as to our current
world crisis.

Who is our REAL enemy? I do not think our real enemy is Saddam
Hussein or Osama bin Laden. I once saw our real enemy on a news
clip from a television interview. The interview was with a young,
veiled, Muslim woman with beautiful eyes. In an animated and
agitated fashion, she praised Osama bin Laden and every injury and
attack and terrorist act of destruction against the evil and satanic
West, which she clearly perceived as the enemy of Islam. She
exclaimed that if she could not herself personally inflict such
injury, then she would do THE NEXT BEST thing by giving birth to
several children and raising them up to be the Osama bin Ladins of
the next generation. YES, that young woman and her unborn children
are the real enemy of democracy, freedom of speech, and inalienable
human rights.

We may kill all the Saddams and bin Ladens that we please, and fight
many surgically precise wars of liberation to liberate Muslims from
the oppressive tyrants which they habitually, voluntarily place over
themselves, and we may continue in this fashion for the next hundred
years, but we will never strike a blow at our REAL enemy, since we
are softhearted and feel sorry for the real enemy. We do not throw
missiles at the real enemy, but rather food and medicine. We "bomb"
our real enemies with food and medicine and compassion.

Our real enemy is an ideological meme which has spread like a cancer
for many centuries now, and women are children are the nurturing
matrix in which it grows. This cancer feeds upon the ideas in the
Qu'ran and Hadith.

So, what do we do with such an enemy? What are our choices? We can
use the weapon of reeducation and try to transform such a society
into a benign secular democracy of tolerance and free speech.

"Nuking" Islam with Education - Page 379

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page379.htm

Yet we see that in Iraq already people are clamoring for the
institution of a strict Islamic Theocracy form of government. The
strict laws in Islam against theft do not seem to discourage a Muslim
peope from looting. Nor does the Islamic prohibition against alcohol
seem to discourage Muslims from hoarding vast quantities of whiskey
and scotch (as Saddam's palaces reveal).

In America, there never seems to be any shortage of assassins to
shoot people like John F. Kennedy. One wonders why, if Saddam and
his family were so outrageous, there was no one to take the
initiative to assassinate them. Even a saintly figure like Dietrich
Bonhoefer recognized how monstrous Hitler was and took steps to
assassinate Hitler. But no, deep down, the Iraqi people ADMIRE a
personality like Saddam. Just as, deep down, Islamic peoples ADMIRE a
monstrous personality like Prophet Muhammad.

When a dog has rabies and runs around the village, foaming at the
mouth, attacking everything in its way, we do not send it to the
veteranarian for medical treatment, we shoot it. We shoot it because
there IS no cure for the advanced stages of rabies.

Certainly, a modern American nuclear submarine is a weapon of mass
destruction, I have read that the destructive power of ONLY ONE such
submarine is greater than the combined destructive power of all of
World War Two (both sides)! Please tell me, why does anyone invent
and build such a weapon of mass destruction if they consider such a
level of killing and annihilation to be ethnocide and a horror which
outweighs any strategic advantage or threat of defeat? I say that,
no, on the contrary, systematic annihilation of entire cities or
nations IS considered a necessary evil in certain tactical situations.

I wrote about such strategy in the following URL:

Morality vis a vis Military Strategic Objectives - Page 375

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page375.htm

War is never moral; it is at best unavoidable and expedient.

When a nation, or an alliance of nations, perceives some threat to
their sovereignty, and when strategic targets or measures have been
defined, whether it is of the scale of surgically precise missile
strikes at bases or plants, in which a few dozen lives are lost, or
whether it is of the scale of the landing at Normandy in which
thousands of lives are lost, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in which millions of lives are lost, the fact remains that there is a
price to be paid in terms of human life, both for the enemy and for
the invading forces, and the magnitude of loss is defined and deemed
reasonable and necessary. That price is in terms of human lives lost,
on both sides. Casualty and death is an unavoidable aspect of
military actions. Whether only one life is lost, or ten lives or one
thousand lives, or a million lives, is not an issue. We tend to think
nothing of the news report of ten fatalities. We are alarmed by one
thousand fatalities. Should the fatalities reach one million we are
revolted by what we perceive as a morally reprehensible destruction
of human life. Yet the simple fact remains that any human life is of
inestimable value, and taking one life is no more or less disturbing
than the sacrifice of 100,000 lives or even a million lives, provided
the strategic goal justifies the magnitude of the loss. It is NOT the
number of lives lost, but the justification of such losses from a
strategic point of view. If the loss of human life amounts to an
entire city, or even an entire nation, we categorize the event as a
genocide or ethnocide or holocaust. But, from a strategic military
perspective, the value of the objective is weighed against the loss
of life, and hopefully, strategists are motivated to take no more
lives than might be considered necessary and justified to achieve a
victory. Military and strategic victory will never be equivalent to a
MORAL victory. War and killing is never moral. And there is no war
without the taking of human lives.

In retrospect, with historical hindsight, we can say that IT WAS NOT
necessary to destroy the entire German or Japanese people in order to
put an end to Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. We can see that
the German and Japanese people of today are not the same kind
of "ideological" threat as they were in the 1930's. Times change,
people change, nations change. Even the peoples of the former Soviet
Union are not quite the same as they were in the 1950's. Chinese
ideology poses a threat today, but I dare say one does not yet think
of the annihilation of China as a solution to ensure world peace and
democracy.

Where am I heading with this train of thought? I am simply posing a
theoretical situation in which one part of the world perceived
an "ideological" threat of such magnitude, that the wide-scale
annihilation of an entire nation might be proposed as the only
certain method to ensure a victory and peace. Current weapons of mass
destruction are too damaging to the environment to be deployed on
such a large scale as to achieve the annihilation of an entire nation
in an efficient and timely fashion, and yet leave the land habitable
and the natural resources useable. But, let us imagine, for the sake
of argument, that clean, environmentally safe weapons of mass
destruction were developed. And let us FURTHER imagine that an
alliance of nations perceived an ideological threat of SUCH MAGNITUDE
that a simple military defeat and occupation would NOT ensure world
peace. In such a hypothetical situation, IT IS CONCEIVABLE that a
strategic decision might be made to destroy the population of an
entire country, and that the importance of the military strategic
objective would outweigh the price in human life in the minds of
those making the decision in favor of such a pre-emptive strike. No
matter how heinous such a military action might appear to us, in
terms of loss of human life, it is NOT MORE immoral simply because
millions of lives are envolved, rather than only thousands or
hundreds of lives, since the taking of even one human life
unnecessarily is in some sense no less worse than taking a thousand
lives or a million lives. Strategists weigh the strategic importance
of the victory against the price in casuality and mortality which
must be paid.

It IS NOT inconceivable that one day an ideological threat of
sufficient magnitude might develop which would make the deployment of
such weapons of mass destruction seem a reasonable, or perhaps even
unavoidable, solution.

==================

The news articles which Ramasita sent to Sitaram:

(Sitaram comments: Obviously, these news articles are effective IF
and only if one feels sorry for the suffering of women and children
and elderly. Do YOU imagine that suicide bombers and terrors feel
sorry for women and children and innocent bystanders? Do YOU
honestly imagine that the Prophet Muhammad felt sorry for the women
and children that he slaughtered? For that matter, do you see the
terrorist violence ending ANY TIME in the next hundred years, simply
as the result of one of these month long surgically precise wars of
liberation, or with the capture of any one figure such as Saddam or
bin Laden? Personally, I do not see terrorism coming to an end
anytime in the next hundred years. Personally, I see the ultimate
defeat of the non-Islamic world, and the triumph of Islam, precisely
because the non-Islamic world is too compassionate and not
sufficiently ruthless. I sincerely hope I am wrong. I hope I am
mistaken. I hope that good will triumph over evil and that the
peoples of the world will unite as one in peace and tolerance. But
right now, I do not see that happening any time in the next century.)

News Articles:

The evil, the grotesque and U.S. official lies MARC W. HEROLD

When U.S. `precision' bombing really is not so.

"So far, the liberators have succeeded only in freeing the souls of
the Iraqis from their bodies." George Monbiot, April 1, 2003.1

"We had a great day. We killed a lot of people. We dropped a few
civilians, but what do you do? I'm sorry... but the chick was in the
way." U.S. Marine Sgt. Eric Schrumpf on March 29.2

THE U.S.-U.K. bombing of Iraq has caused widespread carnage that
utterly discredits any notion of careful targeting and `precision'
strikes. As of March 28, U.S. bombs and missiles had killed about 450
Iraqi civilians, injuring at least 1,000. Well over 800 Iraqi
civilians died under U.S. projectiles since the start of the war,
that is, more than 50 per day. In the week since March 28,
U.S. "precision" projectiles have hit a vegetable market, countless
homes, markets, a hospital, a trade fair, telephone exchanges, a bus,
farms, a grain silo, a street outside an emptying mosque, the lawn of
a women's university and so on. CHERYL DIAZ MEYER/THE DALLAS MORNING
NEWS/REUTERS

By April 1, 700 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired and 8,000
bombs had been dropped [by 12 p.m. on March 29, the respective
figures were 675 and 6,000; by 12 a.m. on March 27, and it was 600
and 4,300].3

U.S. commanders and pilots said they were taking great pains to limit
casualties in their efforts to overthrow President Saddam Hussein. At
the receiving end, Iraqi officials said over 50 civilians were
pulverised by a blast at a busy marketplace in northwestern Baghdad
on March 28.

Wherein lies the truth? Rageh Omaar of the BBC in Baghdad provides
the answer:

"The people of this poor district on the outskirts of Baghdad have
already made up their minds. Hundreds of them have come back to the
scene of the tragedy today [March 29] to try to make sense of their
plight. They say it was an American cruise missile that caused all
this damage."4

Photos too provide an answer - the Reuters photographers Akram Saleh
and Faleh Kheiber have done spectacular work. Many photos from
various sources are collected in the "Shock and Awe" photo gallery.5
France's Le Monde headlined an article on April 2 - "More and More
Iraqi Civilian Victims."6

The market district of al-Shu'la [Al Sholeh] is populated by poor
Shiites, precisely those whom Washington seeks to `liberate'. Reports
indicate 55 to 62 innocent civilians were incinerated and another 50
injured.7 The dead were quickly buried. The Iraq Peace Team (IPT)
reported:

"The largest carnage of Iraqi civilians yet since the beginning of
U.S. bombings occurred on March 28 at about 6 p.m. when a bomb fell
on a heavily crowded open air market in the predominantly Shiite
district of Al Sholeh in north Baghdad, a very poor neighbourhood. An
IPT member visited the Al Naser Market the following day, observed
the bomb site, and talked with neighbours and witnesses. The main hit
was on an asphalted lane between a row of metal booths and a row of
tents. The crater in the asphalt appeared to be about 1 metre deep
and about 3 metres in diameter."8

Ikhlas Faiq, 25, who was treated later at the al-Noor hospital,
recalls:

Ali Mustafa, 5, at the Qaddamiyyah Hospital, in the wing for victims
of cluster bombs, on April 19. Ali was out playing with his siblings
in their garden on April 11 when they found a cluster bomb and it
exploded. "I lost my mind," said his mother, Muna Hassan (left), when
she found all her children covered in blood. Ali suffers from
shrapnel wounds all over his body and may lose his eyesight.

"When the rocket came, the whole area became dark. For a few minutes
I couldn't see a thing. When I opened my eyes, I saw bodies and parts
of bodies everywhere I looked."9

By late evening, 52 corpses passed through the al-Noor hospital. Even
the battle-hardened doctors at Noor said this U.S. attack marked a
fresh descent into horror:

"There were limbs torn off, and burns, multiple shrapnel injuries,
head and chest injuries... [doctor Tarif Jamil said] I saw about six
children - all dead - and at least three women."10
On the night of March 28, Navy commander Penfield was `apparently
still buzzing', saying "I can't sleep yet."

Buzzing and exhilarated.

In the cloudless, star-lit night of Baghdad, the wailing of women
emanating from a poor house was a beacon of grief. Inside, a dozen
Iraqi women clad in full-length, black cloaks sat huddled on the
floor, bobbing back and forth and sending piercing, high-pitched
screams into the night of Baghdad. They mourned the three boys - aged
12, 18 and 12 - of the al-Hamdami family.11
Exhilaration and soul-wrenching grief co-existed as the day of March
28 faded away.

"It was all nice and calm in the city..."

Earlier on March 28, two other U.S. "guided" projectiles landed in
the Al-Mansour neighbourhood of Baghdad, killing eight persons and
injuring 33. Jo Wilding provided a first-hand account of what he saw
on March 29:12

* A U.S. missile hit the middle of Palestine Street just outside the
Omar Al Farouk mosque at about 4-15 p.m., just as people were leaving
after prayers. Umar, a student at Rafidain College, fell. He had
fragments of shrapnel about 3 cm-long removed from his liver and
abdomen. Another U.S. missile hit three minutes later. Akael Zuhair
was standing in front of his house opposite the mosque. He received
`liberating' shrapnel wounds to his left shoulder, left chest, right
forearm and possibly a piece is lodged in his brain. No one could
guess what the intended U.S. target was.

Jo Wilding notes:

"Something is wrong. There are too many civilian casualties, too far
from military targets, for all of these to be mistakes. Either they
are hitting civilians on purpose, to whip up fear in the hope of
spurring rebellion, or their weapons are not as precise as they say,
in which case they are not suitable for use in an urban environment.
There's no justification for using any weapons here, but if you
cannot hit a military target without causing civilian casualties, you
don't have the right to attack it."

On March 29, U.S. pilots targeted Baghdad's local telephone system,
destroying telephone exchanges like the Mimoun International
Communications centre.13 A target of military significance?

An Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist visited the farming
community of Al-Janabiin [Janabiyah] on the southeastern edge of
Baghdad. A night-time U.S. raid had destroyed three homes, killed 20
civilians [11 children, seven women and two men]. 14

A report, titled "Kids Became `Human Torches'", describes the scene
at Janabiyah, where U.S. `precision' weapons hit:15

"Bloodied school books and children's shoes lie amidst animal
carcasses on the road leading to the Ismail'a farm in this village...
the main building of this hamlet, accessible via a checkpoint manned
by militiamen, has been levelled, the second burned out and the third
partially destroyed. A neighbour told an AFP journalist that two
missiles fired by coalition [sic!] warplanes on Saturday night caught
five sleeping families on the farm. The raid left 20 people dead...
littered amongst the rubble spread over the grass were carcasses of
four cows, their eye, nose and mouth cavities blackened by swarms of
flies. Two dogs, sheep and chickens lay motionless nearby. `Five
children were turned into human torches in this house because of the
gas cylinders inside,' one of the survivors said, wondering how God
spared him while four other family members were wounded. `Their
bodies protected me because I was in a corner.'"

What might General Vincent Brooks have to say about how his precision
missiles transformed five children into human torches?

Another six civilians were killed and six homes destroyed inside
Baghdad in the al-Amin neighbourhood in east Baghdad.16 The Al-
Salehia Telecommunications Centre of Baghdad was completely levelled
by U.S. strikes on March 30. The magnitude of the destruction and the
obviously injured persons were captured in a published photograph:

That same day, U.S. bombs fell into the industrial neighbourhood of
al-Zafaraiya in southern Baghdad, killing another six civilians.

At 11 a.m. on March 31, a U.S. bomb struck the dirt-poor Shiite
Muslim neighbourhood of Rahmaniya in Baghdad.17

A pre-dawn U.S. strike targeted the Iraqi Information Ministry,
setting off fires in an adjacent shopping mall named after Saddam
Hussein's birthday.18 Abu Dhabi television showed live footage of the
raging fire, which it said was in the Ministry's press centre. A
Tomahawk missile had hit the Ministry building early in the morning
on March 29, gutting one floor and destroying many satellite dishes
on the roof. But, it had also demolished neighbouring dwellings. Next
door to the levelled telephone office in Baghdad's A'azamiah
district, hit early in the morning on March 30, Adel Hussein al-
Abdali, 70, told a crowd of journalists escorted to the site next to
the Ministry:

"That Bush is a despicable coward. But we will be victorious with the
help of God."

U.S. bombing also hit a cooking gas cylinder-filling factory in the
southern city of Qurnah on the morning of March 29. The factory was
located in a residential area of Qurnah, situated at the confluence
of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

On March 31, U.S. Marines in a Bradley fighting vehicle machine-
gunned to death, 11 civilians at a U.S. Army check point on Route 9
near Najaf. The Iraqi family of 17 had left their village, packed
into a 1974 Land Rover, wearing their best clothes "to look American"
for the trip through the American lines. At least seven women and
children died in the assault on a vehicle filled with civilians -
Bakhat Hassan, 35, said from his hospital bed that he lost 11 members
of his family [two daughters aged 2 and 5, a son aged 3, his parents,
two older brothers and their wives, and two nieces aged 12 and 15].19
His wife, Lamea, 36, who is nine months pregnant, said she saw her
three children die:

"I saw the heads of my two girls come off... my girls, I watched
their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead." 20

"I watched their heads come off their bodies."

The captain in charge at the checkpoint blamed his own troops for
ignoring orders to fire a warning shot.

Kim Sengupta of The Independent visited Manaria, a dusty farming
village in Mohammedia district, about 50 km south of Baghdad. 21 She
was 13 years old. She died before they got there. A U.S. missile fell
on the dusty ground outside Samar Hussein's home on March 29 morning,
leaving a small crater, pockmarks of shrapnel damage scattered across
the walls of her house and the family's battered Toyota Cressida.
Samar's mother, Hamida, 40, had just told Samar not to go outside.
Wiping her eyes with her black chador, Hamida recounted:
"She just fell. I could see blood coming from her stomach. She was
gasping, and as I ran to her she was crying, `Mama, Mama'... It was
so terrible... There were others also hurt, and everyone was crying
and screaming. We had to wait for a car because ours was so badly
damaged. But I knew my Samar would not last until we got to the
hospital. And that is what happened... she died in my arms..."

Hamida's voice faded away.

U.S. projectiles hit a cluster of villages - Manaria, Zambrania and
Talkana - surrounded by fields. They buried 22 people and now care
for another 53.

"The dead from [both] villages are buried in desolate rows of graves,
at the Haj Khudair cemetery, a garden of sand and mud. The newest
grave, a mound of gray earth, is that of Samar Hussein. In the rows
behind her are the rest of the dead brought in during the last
fortnight, matching many of the names in the hospital's casualty
list. Daoud, the cemetery's caretaker, was re-arranging some palm
fronds covering the graves. `There have been more people buried here
in the last two weeks than in the last two years. I knew some of
them. They were killed by the Americans and the British. They all had
simple ceremonies, because none of these people are rich...'"

On April 1, another 66 to 81 Iraqi civilians were killed by American
bombs and missiles. The following day, another 40 to 44 civilians
were killed and over 200 injured. On April 3, air strikes in Baghdad
killed 27 civilians and wounded 193 others.22 As the battle for
Baghdad loomed, the rate of civilian casualties rose - with 100 to
125 being killed just in the first two days of April.

U.S.-British cluster bomb assaults upon villages [for example,
Mazarek] around the city of al-Hillah in Babylon around lunchtime on
March 31, killing another 48 to 60 civilians and wounding 300
others.23 Dozens of homes were destroyed in the U.S. bombing that
also killed donkeys and chickens. Khalid Hallil, 21, in the Babylon
General Hospital with a left thigh torn from knee to crotch from
shrapnel, was inside his house three miles from the centre of town.
His father Hamid explains:

"Metal just came from everywhere. Believe me, there were no soldiers
in the area. Only civilians. There was no reason for attacking us in
our homes. Tell your countrymen what is happening here. Let them see
with their eyes instead of listening to Tony Blair's lying words.
Look, this is reality - not the make-believe world of Bush and
Blair."24

Hamida Abed lost 15 members of her family when U.S. cluster bombs
landed on her home. Reuters and Associated Press representatives were
permitted by Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into Hillah. The
pictures showed babies cut in half and children with amputation
wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs.25
A 21-minute videotape was made, but was deemed too terrible to be
show in public.

A bus was hit by tank fire near the city of al-Hillah in Babylon on
April 3. Basem Hoki, a 38-year-old former construction worker, took a
fateful bus ride south from Hillah on March 27. At Hillah hospital
with a left arm now ending in a bloody stump, Hoki was one of only
five survivors among the 35 in the bus. The Hillah hospital surgeon,
Dr. Dhiya Sultani, said: "Many of the people on the bus were
decapitated."26

Nader, 5, and his mother had escaped the U.S. onslaught upon al-
Hillah, which killed dozens of civilians. The next day, Nader went
out to play. He stepped upon one of America's liberating cluster
bomblets. He was lucky, experiencing `only' damage to his right
eye.27

A U.S. Apache helicopter fired a rocket late March 31 at the pickup
truck of the al-Khafaji family in the area of Haidariya near al-
Hillah, 80 km south of Baghdad. The family was fleeing the fighting
in Nasiriyah. The father, the sole survivor, Razek al-Kazeem, lost 15
members of his family - his wife, six children, his father and
mother, his three brothers and their wives.28
Robert Fisk reported on his visit to a `ladies education agricultural
college' on the outskirts of Baghdad on April 1.29 A 20-foot crater
from a U.S. projectile had disturbed the college lawn. Internal doors
were torn from their hinges, desks overturned, beds thrown across
rooms, but no one was hurt. Fisk found four black and white cows
tethered in the grass, perhaps 10 meters from the crater. The
Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg reported on March 31: "A poor baklava
seller, pitied by the entire neighbourhood, lost his wife, mother,
sister, nephew, and two sons to American bombs."30 She goes on to
describe the day's happenings:

"... Tragedy struck in Sueb [a suburb 35 km from the centre of
Baghdad] when U.S. missiles killed six members of the family of the
lowly baklava seller, Ali Abdul Rasul, and five others living in the
same road. Twelve houses were destroyed in the blast, hastily built
one-storey structures crumbled into the earth. `The people living in
the area are the very poorest people. It really is so cruel that we
are being hit,' said Taliya Al Mohammed, whose house, down the road
from Mr. Rasul's, was strewn with shattered glass."

The close proximity of the houses in Sueb magnifies the impact of
America's "liberating bombs".
On the morning of April 2, the Basra Sheraton was hit by four heavy
artillery shells. The hotel's only guests were the al-Jazeera
journalists.31 At 9:30 a.m., U.S. aircraft fired projectiles into a
complex of buildings in Baghdad's al-Mansour district, housing the
International Trade Fair.32 The Trade Fair was built in 1954 as a
symbol of Iraq's new nationhood and it once housed 1,000 companies
from 60 nations.33 But, the force of the explosions incinerated
nearby cars, killed three to 10 civilians and wounded 25, and
severely damaged a Red Crescent maternity hospital on the other side
of the street. The hospital was renowned for providing a reliable
service for those who could not afford the high fees of private
clinics. The hospital's facade was destroyed as was its drug store. A
ceiling in the waiting room had collapsed. A doctor said a total of
ten patients and staff were injured at the hospital.34 The U.S.
missiles obliterated wings of Baghdad's trade fair building that lay
next to a government security office that was missed in the morning
bombings! A foreign correspondent said five burned-out and twisted
cars halted in the middle of the road with their drivers burned to
death inside. A Greek doctor who had just sat down at 9-45 a.m. on
April 2 to talk with doctors at the Red Crescent hospital, was shaken
by four U.S. bombs striking across the street, Dr. Dimitrius Mognie
said:

"We all fell to the floor, and the glass windows shattered all over
us."35

Two women in the room were hurt. Dr. Mognie commented upon how
Baghdad hospitals were running out of supplies. Critical surgeries
were being carried out with only very light anaesthetics. Antibiotics
and tetanus vaccines were running out.

On April 3, yet another `smart' bomb struck a vegetable market at
Nahrawan on the southeastern edge of Baghdad, killing eight civilians
and injuring five.36 Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-
Sahhaf reported the same day that 27 civilians had been killed and
193 wounded in the U.S.-U.K. bombing of Baghdad on April 3.37

On the morning of April 4, the Khalaf family was getting up after a
night of heavy bombardment.

A correspondent of Britain's Mirror recounted:

"And I shall try to write what he and his family said in exactly the
order they said it. I shall try because I hope it will better convey
the bewilderment and horror that broke on one Iraqi household
yesterday... Both sisters [Nadia and Alia]... were still in their
nightclothes, dressing gowns loose around them. They said they had
risen late because of all the shelling overnight. Like everyone else,
they were talking about the electricity being cut off on Thursday
night. Nadia was joking about going for a shower. Alia told her she'd
probably be away for three hours... just waiting for some water. They
were laughing. `I didn't hear any sound,' Alia says, `Suddenly a
shell or bomb or something came through the room. I fell to the
floor. My mouth was full of dust. I was swallowing dust. Then I
looked at her.'

"The missile, something big and unexploded, had come through her
chest and her heart. She was covered in blood, unconscious. I ran
down to the street, Daddy and Mummy behind me, screaming for an
ambulance. There wasn't any. A neighbour said he would drive us here
to the hospital.

"`We all knew it was too late. But we hoped, we hoped.'

"Her father Najem Khalaf stood beside her corpse... `A shell came
down into the room as she was standing by the dressing-table,' Najem
says. `My daughter had just completed her Ph.D in Psychology and was
waiting for her first job. She was born in 1970. She was 33. She was
very clever. Everyone said I have a fabulous daughter. She spent all
her time studying. Her head buried in books. She didn't have a care
about going out enjoying herself. My other daughter is the same. She
has a Master's degree in English and teaches at the University. Me?
I'm just a lorry driver. A simple man.'" He holds out his dead
daughter's identity card for us to see. His fingers are covered in
her blood... "38

His fingers are covered in her blood.

A litany of lies has spewed forth from the U.S. and U.K. officialdom,
whose intent appears to be to capture the headlines regardless of the
substance said.39

The thinking is that the general public remembers mostly `headlines',
therefore priority must be to monopolise the headlines with claims
[which later get retracted, but at no political cost].
The biggest official U.S. lie remains the constantly repeated claim -
one endlessly intoned by the solemn U.S. corporate media choir with
solos sung by `defence intellectuals' - that unprecedented precision
bombing is taking place in Iraq, bombing which largely spares
civilians.
The mainstream corporate media have, alas, once again blindly
accepted Pentagon claims of `precise' and `surgical' bombing. After
the first night of U.S. attacks, NBC's Pentagon correspondent Jim
Miklaszewski pontificated: "Every weapon is precision guided - deadly
accuracy designed to kill only the targets, not innocent
civilians."40 The initial spin about `deadly accuracy' would later
give away to simply ignoring compelling evidence [from Britain] that
the U.S. had bombed and killed many civilians, for example, parroting
the Pentagon claim of having no knowledge of the deadly attack on the
al-Shu'la market.41 When U.S. Marines machine-gun Iraqi civilians at
a checkpoint outside Najaf, most of the mainstream U.S. media prefer
the Pentagon's sanitised version.42

In point of fact, U.S. bombing during Iraq War II has to-date been
over three times as deadly to civilians as that of Iraq War I
notwithstanding the dramatic use of so-called precision weapons.

Egypt's leading newspaper, Al-Ahram, said in an editorial on April 2
that the `clean war' had become the dirtiest of wars, the bloodiest
and the most destructive. Smart weapons have become deliberately
stupid, blindly killing people in markets and popular
neighbourhoods.43 Even the Red Cross said its doctors who visited
southern Iraq saw "incredible" levels of civilian casualties.44 A Red
Cross spokesperson in Baghdad mentioned a truckload of dismembered
women and children in al-Hillah. And as American tanks blasted their
way into the western suburbs of Baghdad on April 5, they pulverised
more homes and a truck driver witnessed children `flying in the
air'.45

American tanks firing... and on the receiving end, Iraqi children
flying in the air.
"It was all nice and calm in the city... [but] once those bombs hit
all hell broke loose."

Marc W. Herold is a Professor at the Departments of Economics and
Women's Studies, University of New Hampshire, Durham, United States.

A U.S. tank outside the Iraqi National Museum. The American forces
arrived there long after the looters had left.

IN what is perhaps one of the most tragic civilisational losses of
our times, the priceless collection of the Baghdad National Museum of
Antiquities, which constitutes an irreplaceable part of the record of
human history itself, was ransacked and much of it looted in the
aftermath of the war. The looting and arson that followed the
American occupation of Baghdad destroyed the collection in the
National Museum, the seventh largest in the world and the repository
of some of the earliest artefacts known to humankind.

The Baghdad National Library and Archives, a treasure house of the
historical records of the Ottoman Empire, and the Library of the
Korans in the Ministry of Religious Endowment have also been
subjected to similar treatment. The two libraries were doused with
petrol and set alight by mobs.

Crack troops and tanks of the United States occupation forces, which
were within blocks of the museum, did nothing as mobs ransacked the
buildings, broke display glasses, smashed historical antiquities and
looted or destroyed over 170,000 items of historical value. If the
Americans had posted one tank and two soldiers on guard, the museum
could have been saved, Nabhal Amin, the Museum's Deputy Director,
pointed out. Indeed, the official U.S. response to this catastrophe
has been typically insensitive and stupid. "Stuff happens" was how
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the violence when
asked for his comments. He even justified it by saying: "It's untidy.
And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and
commit crimes."

The occupation forces were well aware that the threat to Iraq's
cultural and historical remains came from possible direct missile
hits on historical and archaeological sites and from looting in the
immediate aftermath of war. Iraq suffered considerable losses on both
accounts after the 1991 war and the bombings in 1998. Iraqi
archaeologists, historians and curators played a heroic role in those
years in defending the antiquities from destruction by moving them to
safer places and ensuring their safekeeping. The 12 years of stiff
sanctions imposed on Iraq put even more pressure on the programme for
the preservation and restoration of historical sites and museums.
Looted antiquities appeared in the art markets of the Western world,
while in Iraq the government imposed death penalty for exporting
antiquities.

The Baghdad Museum of Antiquities, which suffered much damage in the
1998 bombings, was opened for public viewing only six months ago.

When it became clear that the U.S. and the U.K. would attack Iraq
this year, there were widespread fears that war this time around
presented a far greater threat to heritage sites in the `cradle of
civilisation'. Coalition forces were, after all, threatening to
unleash unparalleled destruction. Antiquities experts, archaeological
associations, and even the United Nations Economic, Social and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) today say they had provided the
Pentagon with information on Iraq's cultural sites well before the
war. Western media reports quote University of Chicago Professor
McGuire Gibson, who said that he and a group of antiquities experts
had met Pentagon officials several times with lists of historical
sites to be protected, the Baghdad National Museum being among the
most valuable of them. He claims that they had been assured that
these would be secured.

The U.S. and the U.K. are two countries which refused to sign the
Hague Convention of 1954, which prohibits the targeting of cultural
and religious sites during war. The U.S. and the U.K. blocked an
Iraqi appeal in the United Nations Security Council for a UNESCO
commission to conduct a survey of the damage to historical and
cultural sites during the 1991 war. The results of such a survey
would almost certainly have put much of the blame for the damage to
these sites on those countries. In the early days of the current
invasion, a direct missile hit from an American bomber destroyed the
elegant building of the Mustansiriyah School, a reputed 13th century
university built during the reign of the 37th Abbasid Caliph,
Mustansir Billah.
The occupation forces must surely bear the responsibility for the
damage to the Baghdad museum and its splendid collection. It is a
loss that has been valued at several billion dollars, but unlike
other losses it is irreplaceable. The museum houses exhibits,
artefacts and memorabilia that go back 5,000 years to the dawn of
civilisation in Mesopotamia, and spans the period of the Assyrians,
Babylonians, Sumerians, Medes, Greeks and Persians. There are
artefacts from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, and gold and silver items
from the cemetery at Ur. Carvings on marble, cuneiform writing on
stone and clay, ancient pottery and some of the earliest known
samples of writing were destroyed.

One of the museum's most fascinating exhibits was an ancient pebble
with 12 deep scratches on its surface, thought to be one of the first
calenders. A Sumerian seal dating from around 5,000 years ago shows
the first pictorial representation of two people shaking hands. Three
of its priceless antiquities, which it is now believed were "stolen
to order", are a 5,000-year-old vase, an Akkadian (Babylonian-
Assyrian) statue base from 2000 B.C. and an Assyrian stone statue
from about 800 B.C. Several stolen items have already shown up for
sale in Paris.

IN a poignant piece on the destruction of the cultural heritage and
identity of Iraq, the veteran West Asia correspondent, Robert Fisk of
The Independent, wrote of how, when he caught sight of the flames
coming out of the Koranic library, he raced to the office of the U.S.
Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau in Baghdad. He gave them the map
location, and the name of the library in Arabic and English. It was a
five-minute drive to the burning library, but half an hour later
there was no sight of the Americans. The documents and records of the
Baghdad National Archives and Library, an epoch of history from the
Ottoman period to the present, were burnt to ashes.
Eyewitness accounts of the looting from Baghdad do not endorse the
view promoted from Washington that the populace of Baghdad
perpetrated this crime in a senseless celebration of `freedom'.
Khaled Bayomi, a West Asia expert teaching at the University of Lund,
was in Baghdad as a human shield. In an interview on April 11 to the
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, he described how U.S. troops in
tanks watched the plunder, including the ransacking of the
museum. "There were two crowds, one that plundered, and one which
watched with disgust," he said.

The UNESCO is to send a team to Baghdad to assess the damage. An
anonymous private benefactor in the U.K. has provided the money for a
team of conservators and curators to begin work on what was stolen
and what remains of the collection. But the damage in this case is
irreversible. The Iraqis have been left to grapple with the human
consequences of war with nothing, not even the remains of their proud
past.

SFG75 · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:07 am Post subject:

Let me start off first of all by stating that the war in Iraq is an egregious
mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's
government had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, and Iraq's military services
in no way provided training for Al-Qaeda terrorists. The "ties" that the
president likes to cite with such vigor was a low-level sit down meeting
where a marriage of sorts was proposed by Osama Bin-Laden. Saddam
refused and feared that dictatorships like his would be undermined by
religious Liliputins such as Osama. It also must be pointed out that both
men loathe each other. Saddam is a secular pan-Arabist, a philosophy
that emerged in the 1960s that featured strong dictatorships, a strong
military, as well as an economy run by the state. To Osama, Saddam is a
"socialist infidel" as socialism/communism are repugnant to him and his
fellowers. The war in Iraq should not have been undertaken and the fact
that it was, just goes to show that war crimes do not have to be war
crimes, if you are the one with the most weapons.

With all that being said, I'm rather curious as to why Ramisita(sp?) is so
careful to document the damage every stray American bomb does, while
completely overlooking the followers of radical Muslim Imams who blow
themselves up in crowded civilian streets, who are responsible for the
disappearance of about a hundred Shi'ite men, not to mention the roving
death squads tide to the Shi'ite government who hunt for Sunnis. Without
911, you don't have American intervention in the middle east. Before
that, you have the U.S. coming to the aid of Kuwait and even saving Saudi
Arabia and Mecca from the "socialist infidel." I would think that would
garner the U.S. some credit, but in the eyes of Osama and others, using
religious themes and eternal stories of persecution are a quick way to
power.

_________________
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