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Today's
Stories
April 15, 2005
Michael
Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes Reporting
in the Toronto Globe and Mail
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion Story: We Rule; You
Die
April
13, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Ill, Old and Young of Fallujah Ask:
"Do We Look Like Fighters?"
Stan
Goff
The Bridge: a Rant
Dave
Lindorff
The Real Lessons of Vietnam
April 10
/ 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age
Patrick
Cockburn
Ambush, Kidnap, Murder: Another Day in "Post War" Iraq
Ellen Cantarow
Health Under Siege on the West Bank
Tariq Ali
Iraqi
Resistance: a New Phase
Werther
Pseudoconservatism Revisited: When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Robert
Fisk
Bush's War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Gary Leupp
Indian Wars, Vietnam and Orientalist Fantasy
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Cont.
Jorge Mariscal
Perils of the Bootstrap
Phil Gasper
Defying Stereotypes About Death Row
Dave Zirin
Bringing the Black Freedom Struggle Into Sports: an Interview with Lee
Evans
Brandy
Baker
The Revolution is Playing at a Theater Near You
Mickey Z.
Underground Music is Free Media: an Interview with Twiin
Ali Tonak
Get Ready for the Million Worker March
Harry Browne
Asking the Wrong Question About Richard Clarke & 9/11
Gideon
Samet
The Sharonizing of America
Conn Hallinan
Remote Control Warriors
Website
of the Weekend
Taboo
Tunes
April 9,
2004
Robert
Fisk
This
War's Simple Truth: Iraqis Do Not Want Us
John L.
Hess
The
Non--Confessions of a Warrior Princess: Condi on the Stand
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Condoleezza's Condescensions
Christopher Brauchli
Holes in the Sky: Bush's Crazed Missile Defense Plan
Don Santina
Forget the Alamo!: Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
William S. Lind
The 4G Warfare Seminar, Cont.
Bill Christison
9/11
Commission is Bush's New Lapdog
Website of the Day
What We've Done to Fallujah
April 8, 2004
Wayne Madsen
Rice
(and the Record) Proves It: Bush Knew, But Failed to Act
Kurt Nimmo
Will
Bush Flatten Fallajuh?
Patrick
Cockburn
Guided
Missile; Misguided War
Laura Flanders
Steamed
Rice
Larry Everest
What Condi Rice is Hiding
Adam Federman
Sacred Capitalism Hits Russia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Iraqi Intifada Begins
Norman Solomon
The Quest for a Monopoly on Violence
Douglas
Valentine
Echoes
of Vietnam: Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq
Website of the Day
Xispas: Chicano Art, Culture and Politics
April 7,
2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Those
Pulitzers!
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Deeper
into the Mouth of Hell: We Must Find the Exit from Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Tet
in Iraq: Closer to the Cosmic Disaster?
Patrick
Cockburn
Battles
Across Iraq: US Death Toll Mounts
Kathy Kelly
Pacification: Worth the Price?
Sonali
Kolhatkar
What Are You Doing About Afghanistan?
Rahul Mahajan
Report from Baghdad: Opening the Gates of Hell
Robert
Fisk
US Airlifts Saddam to Qatar
Mike Whitney
America Out of Iraq, Now!
Sam Hamod
Bush, Pandora's Box and the Tiger
April 6, 2004
C.G. Estabrook
Mercenaries
and Occupiers
William
Blum
The
Anti--Empire Report: the Israel Lobby
Col. Dan
Smith
The
Language of Disbelief: 1.3 Billion Still Live in War Zones
Dr. Bulent Gokay
The Coming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Lynn Landes
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote; Machines Do
Sheila Samples
What Would Royko Write?
Jason Leopold
Condi's Blind Spot: Rice Never Mentioned al--Qaeda
Mickey Z.
A Reality Show with No End in Sight
Robert
Fisk
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
|
April
14, 2004
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt
Just
Change the Channel
By VIRGINIA
TILLEY
If
any shred of moral authority remained to the US occupation of Iraq,
it finally evaporated in a single historical phrase, at a press conference
in Baghdad this Easter morning. For those who missed it, an Arab journalist
had asked commanding Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt what people should
understand about the US occupation from the images they were seeing
of women and children killed in Fallujah, where over four hundred civilians
have been killed and thousands wounded so far in the US attack to repress--who
exactly? But the tall general had his answer. Nailing the journalist
with flashing eye, he pronounced the measured solution to this moral
dilemma: "Change...the...channel! Change...the...channel!"
It
is, apparently, just the baseless propaganda of Arab media like al-Jazeera
which has hallucinated, for a gullible public, hundreds of Iraqi civilian
dead under the US attack. Switch to some "honest" coverage
and we will get the "true" story--apparently, of US soldiers
fighting the good fight and not killing the women and children whose
bodies are being carted out of Fallujah in convoys. As Iraqi doctors
in Fallujah scream frantic pleas for a US ceasefire into CNN ABC, CBS,
NBC, and MSNBC camera lenses, it is not clear precisely what "changing
the channel" is supposed to gain us. But, the General stressed,
the US troops didnâ't kill those innocents on purpose and, if
we get the right commentary, we might rightly grasp that point and be
relieved.
Instead
of sober humility regarding a ferocious policy gone foul, Kimmitt radiated
indignation as he laid out the grossly unfair situation in which his
forces struggle. Militants take cover in a mosque, you see. Then they
fire on US troops from that mosque. When the US forces blow up the mosqueâ's
wall to get at the militants, they use the mosqueâ's loudspeaker
to denounce the US occupation for brutality and human rights violations.
How can anyone be so blind as to blame US soldiers for doing what they
have to do, facing such nefarious treatment? The Generalâ's own
logics, of course, preclude his mental backtracking to consider that
the US should not be confronting militants in a mosque in the first
place. That, if US forces find themselves in such a dilemma, it is because
they have screwed it all up.
The
similarity to the moral rot of Vietnam is so glaring that it hardly
needs mention ("we had to destroy the village in order to save
it," "children will kill you just as quick as an adult,"
etc.). But another ghostly image floated behind the fine general as
he made this amazing pronouncement, one picked up by the film Gandhi
because it was, indeed, a turning point for British colonial rule in
India. In 1919, one General Dyer had brought his troops to repress a
demonstration against British rule in a walled garden square in Amritsar.
Ten-thousand Indians--unarmed women, children, men and activists--had
crowded into the space to listen to speeches and chant slogans for independence.
The fine British general ordered them to disperse; when they hesitated,
he drew up his troops; when they milled in confusion, he ordered his
troops to open fire with machine guns. Some four hundred people died,
most of bullets, others crushed beneath dozens who jumped into the central
well trying to escape. Another 1200 wounded lay bleeding helplessly
as Dyer pulled his troops out and left them there. On a symbolic level,
British rule wrote its epitaph that day.
Yet
the ultimate demise of British authority was capped later: in the elevated
chin, steely gaze, and unassailable moral certainty of the British general
(war criminal) as he explained his actions to a investigating tribunal
as just action against a dangerous unruly mob. His fatuous image formed
the ghostly backdrop behind the aquiline profile of General Kimmitt,
as with equally steely moral certitude, he blamed stubborn and irrational
Iraqi militants for failing to grasp the moral lesson of his guns: if
they would simply and unilaterally stop fighting, his troops would stop
bombarding those women and children and all would be well.
Political
suicide indeed reeked from the press conference as Kimmitt and his civilian
counterpart explained the iron-fist policy which has flabbergasted the
international community for its short-sighted and self-destructive stupidity.
For these architects of occupation, the horrible dismemberment of four
US mercenaries in Fallujah did not call for what might seem obvious:
urgent enlistment of local Iraqi authorities in Fallujah, who were equally
appalled by the event, to help identify and isolate (politically and
socially) the few dozen people who had been involved. Rather, it called
for surrounding the entire city and ultimately attacking the entire
populace, to crush and flush out the evil-doers--a strategy that scandalized
the entire country and lost the peace even while it flailed about in
the battle. For things were already pretty bad. As Patrick Graham wrote
recently in the Guardian Observer, "In the areas outside Falluja,
the American army controls only what it can shoot."
Similarly,
the hard-line resistance of Muqtada al-Sadr has not manifested to the
US military as it has manifested to the rest of the world: as a difficult
but subtle political matter calling for careful coordination with alternative
Shiâ'a figures--other Shiâ'a clerics, sympathetic Shiâ'a
business networks, Sunni clerical intermediaries--to cultivate factional
rapprochement, foster public debate and steer political direction within
the Shiâ'a community toward defusing and minimizing al-Sadrâ's
appeal. Such methods were simply not in the worldview of a US military
authority which understands all serious Iraqi protest as an extension
of war. Rather, al-Sadrâ's appeal was granted vastly more moral
authority by clumsy US closure of his dinky newspaper, arrest of his
lieutenant and now his own arrest warrant. Al-Sadr might even be thanking
the US forces for transforming him from a fringe voice to a charismatic
anti-occupation icon. The US approach is all the more bizarre for its
ludicrous premise: that it can arrest al-Sadr without an all-out assault
on the holy city of Najaf, which is impossible without losing all of
southern Iraq to a general uprising. Having established such terms for
itself, the US occupation is doomed in its failure or in its success.
It has already lost the peace.
The
whole fiasco signals one other factor, one which stood invisibly behind
the US generals throughout the Fallujah attack but is not a ghost: the
Israelis. Few people familiar with the regionâ's history watched
Fallujah without thinking of Jenin. One could almost hear the Israeli
voices around the paper-strewn tables of US command centers: "O
US brethren, at last you have fully grasped the dangers of Arab terror,
and at last you will listen to us. We have long experience and great
expertise in military occupation. We know how to be tough with the Arabs.
Here is what you must do." And so the US military has picked up
Sharonâ's big stick, and US citizens are all staring at the oncoming
consequences: we are preparing to live like Israelis. But, hey, all
we really need to do is change the channel.
Virginia
Tilley is Associate Professor of Political Science at ... She
can be reached at: TILLEY@hws.edu
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