XPost: uk.politics.misc, alt.politics.british, alt.conspiracy.princess-diana   
   XPost: alt.conspiracy, alt.conspiracy.new-world-order, alt.america   
   XPost: us.politics   
   From: oO@oO.com   
      
   Published on Saturday, June 3, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer   
   The Way Americans Like Their War   
   by Robert Fisk   
      
   Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?   
      
   The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the   
   dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of the   
   United States' army of the slums go further?   
      
   I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be   
   taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting   
   corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend,   
   told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the   
   Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are   
   we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had   
   already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a   
   body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the   
   hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."   
      
   What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the   
   mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha,   
   we are going to reshape our suspicions.   
      
   It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are corrupted.   
   But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the   
   mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know   
   of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya.   
      
   We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their   
   proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700   
   Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the   
   Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this   
   is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in   
   Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.   
      
   I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis,   
   which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the   
   army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became   
   Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in   
   Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we   
   will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet.   
      
   Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little   
   Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from   
   all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but   
   which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in   
   Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to   
   hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."   
      
   In a way, we reporters are also to blame. Unable to venture outside   
   Baghdad -- or around Baghdad itself -- Iraq's vastness has fallen under a   
   thick, all-consuming shadow. We might occasionally notice sparks in the   
   night -- a Haditha or two in the desert -- but we remain meekly cataloguing   
   the numbers of "terrorists" supposedly scored in remote corners of   
   Mesopotamia. For fear of the insurgent's knife, we can no longer   
   investigate. And the Americans like it that way.   
      
   I think it becomes a habit, this sort of thing. Already the horrors of Abu   
   Ghraib are shrugged away. It was abuse, not torture. And then up pops a   
   junior officer in the United States charged for killing an Iraqi army   
   general by stuffing him upside down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his   
   chest. And again, it gets few headlines. Who cares if another Iraqi bites   
   the dust? Aren't they trying to kill our boys who are out there fighting   
   terror.   
      
   For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest,   
   the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of   
   Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not   
   other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as   
   Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to   
   bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents   
   slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi   
   elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.   
      
   Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, published in Great Britain.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)