Apocalypse now

On the last issue I reflected on how the Americans had gone about their war with a singular lack of appreciation of history or the diverse and furious forces loose in the Middle East. I underestimated them.

They appear to have adopted the (still unsuccessful) Israeli tactic of trying to do away with opponents. How else to explain their pursuit of the Muslim cleric Al-Sadr? They also launched attacks on suspected guerrilla targets. Sadly, as often as not, they hit non-combatants.
The cauldron was the city of Fallujah in the old Saddamite heartland of Sunni Iraq. You’ll remember the terrible scenes from there of mob mayhem as March turned to April. At least four western civilians were murdered. Charred bodies were tied to cars and dragged through the streets. They were kicked, battered and dismembered.
One witness saw two men dragged from their car pleading for their lives – they were doused in petrol and set alight. Their corpses were hanged upside down on a bridge – one headless. A hand and a leg were strung from an electrical pole. Chanting crowds were shown celebrating on the Arab station Al-Jazeera.
No sane or civilised person could fail to be horrified. Some said it was a defining moment for Americans in the war in Iraq. The White House called the killers thugs and terrorists and vowed to stay in Iraq till victory is achieved.
Well, the attacks and the viciousness and hatred belied the upbeat assessments circulated by the Bush administration about the war and laid to rest the notion that the Americans and British would be welcomed by crowds strewing flowers in their paths.
But, even as they made Americans question the validity of the war, the horrors of Fallujah handed the moral high ground to the Coalition. Nobody respects a mob, and the callousness and savagery shocked even those who vehemently opposed the Coalition’s adventuring.
That time of grace ended with the publication of photographic evidence of the brutal treatment and degradation of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by American troops with which we are all now familiar.
The central character is Lynndie England, the thumbs up, cigarette smoking pixie soldier who poses smiling, smirking and joking at the plight of the hapless prisoners. Described by some as a ‘trailer trash army reservist’, along with her colleagues she actually has the look of a convenient scapegoat.
Yes, what they did was appalling. But the fish swims in the sea. They got their signals from higher up.
Donald Rumsfeld was rebuked by George Bush, but neither disowned nor fired. The cause of freedom is in good hands, said Bush who, while he said the abuses sickened him to his stomach, didn’t apologise for them.
By last week the pendulum had swung again and the Americans were back in the shit.
The actions shown were in breach of the Geneva Convention. That’s bad enough, but of greater significance to the present war is the fact that the Geneva Convention is intended to provide double protection for both sides. So, warned Maureen Cavanaugh of Amnesty International, captive Americans and British are unlikely to get better treatment than they themselves dished out.
And so, terribly and appallingly, it proved, with the gruesome butchering of the hapless American engineer Nick Berg whose beheading by a member of an Al-Qaeda group was shown on the internet.
He wasn’t the first captive to be so horribly killed. It happened in Afghanistan and also in Iraq. But in the context of the delicate balance of global opinion, it showed a level of brutishness, inhumanity and unconcern that left most of us aghast.
This wasn’t the crazed action of a mob. It wasn’t the dispassionate jobsworthiness of a pilot shedding his bombs from afar. It was cold. It was intended to be horrifying. It takes a particular kind of monster to kill someone like that. One’s immediate reaction is that, whatever else happens, the lead perpetrator should be hunted down and killed.
But even to say that reduces one to his level. It means the bastard has won. And it also takes no account of the similar callousness of the person who orders a gunship to pump a rocket into an apartment building to kill an opponent or unleashes firestorms on non-combatant civilians.
Nearer home, we can find examples of equally terrible deeds, like the murder of the British soldier Robert Nairac by the IRA, his tortured and mutilated body reputedly disposed of in a border county meat factory, never to be found…
The history of our times is replete with horrors, from Rwanda to Srebrenica. Go back far enough and nowhere is immune.
Somewhere in all this we have to start getting back to our shared humanity. Insofar as we have anything that makes us worth preserving, that’s it. Take that away and the apocalypse can’t come quick enough. It isn’t enough to despise the masters of war (of both sides). We have to find ways of defeating them, and on our terms, not theirs.
It is time to start reading Ghandi again.
THE HOG