A destroyed city with those inhabitants who have not fled trapped in the wreckage; a city with streets given over to gunmen who fire on US servicemen and helicopters; a city where disease and desperation grow with the heat of the sun and the decay of the dead. This is not a description of Iraq’s Fallujah last year, though it could very easily have been, but America’s New Orleans this week in the wake of the disastrous hurricane Katrina. It is a city under siege — and it is cracking in more ways than one. Maybe when the daunting task of rescuing the living and burying the dead is done, Americans will give some thought to those points where the enormity of destruction in Iraq touch the devastation that has been visited upon this famous American city.
As the looting and lawlessness in New Orleans has demonstrated, a disaster on this scale can bring out the very worst as well as the very best in people. No doubt some of the criminals ignored the mayoral order to evacuate the city precisely because they expected rich pickings in properties from which a million people had fled. There were many others among the 100,000 who stayed, who either lacked the means or the common sense to get out. Yet while these innocent victims struggle to survive the floods and ruin, a significant number of their fellow citizens, far from turning to help them, has instead helped themselves to whatever they can plunder from homes and shops.
At least one National Guardsman sent in to keep order has been shot and a rescue helicopter, probably suspected by the looters of spying on them has come under sustained fire. Yet though these depraved events have grabbed the headlines, it can be certain that there have been many more acts of bravery and selflessness, both by the official rescuers and by ordinary citizens helping out their fellow citizens.
The parallel between Fallujah and New Orleans can of course be taken too far but there is an important lesson here. As Americans recoil in horror at the extent of the tragedy that has befallen one of their cities as a result of a natural disaster, maybe they should reflect on the reaction of Iraqis to the man-made disaster of the Fallujah siege or the daily carnage of bombings and murders that has turned parts of Iraq into a bloody nightmare, a thousand times more awful than that which has hit New Orleans.
With the single home-grown exception of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, until 9/11, Americans were strangers to the horror of terrorism. They found it difficult to envisage the fear and tension elsewhere in the world where terrorists struck ferociously and often. That lack of empathy informed their furious overreaction and bad judgment when they themselves were targeted.
Now the people of America have the chance to learn what it feels like to have one of their own cities reduced to a helpless, lawless mess by a catastrophe. Maybe they will begin to understand the frustration and anger felt by decent Iraqis at the man-made destruction that Washington’s bungled thinking has brought down on their heads.
