“My question was and remains,” Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said yesterday, “does the degree of threat stemming from the Iraqi dictator justify a war that will bring certain death to thousands of innocent men, women and children?”
The “shock-and-awe” strategy the Pentagon has threatened during the initial hours of the war on Iraq will rain down upon the country more than 3,000 satellite-guided bombs. It will be an assault of such awesome power that, in the words of an official who wisely withheld his name, “they are not going to know what hit them.”
These bombs, smart or otherwise, are headed for thousands of targets in Iraq, most of them in Baghdad. People close to these “command centers,” or employed there in any number of civilian and menial functions, will die. So, of course, will the soldiers stationed there.
If only a few of the smart bombs should prove to be dumber than expected — or, as is likely, the US actively targets water and power supplies, or sewage facilities — cholera and typhoid will spread like wildfire. Hospitals will be rendered useless in the face of such a catastrophe, if they too are not bombed to smithereens.
On June 10, 1991, US soldiers slaughtered as many as 100,000 Iraqi conscripts who, after an agreed cease-fire, were retreating en masse along the Basra highway. It was an attack of such barbarity that British pilots refused to continue flying missions; and even American commanders expressed reservations about the morality of the operation.
Few of those teenagers had been given any choice about whether to participate in the war.
The Iraqi front lines, where most of the killing will be done, will once again be manned by conscripts, while the Republican Guard, Saddam’s elite squadron, are going to be well back in the rear.
If there is an alternative for these conscripts, it is the same as for ordinary Iraqis: To run.
The United Nations has estimated that the war could result in as many as two million refugees, who will be placed indefinitely in desert camps in Syria and in Jordan, where Oxfam alone has set up facilities for 30,000 refugees. They have already started to arrive.
A humanitarian tragedy of immense proportions, then, is beginning to unfold. As we are shown endless pictures of ordnance and other paraphernalia of war from the invader’s point of view, of this or that military-looking structure precision-bombed off a video screen, the dead and the dying — and the displaced people who were lucky enough to escape the carnage — will not be much talked about.
Footage showing their plight will be at best unsuitably depressing, at worst deemed “offensive” for the viewers of the evening news. Once again, the media and the Pentagon will collude to sideline the millions whom the war will hit worst.
There can, therefore, be only one answer to Gerhard Schroeder’s question: The one he himself gave. Does the situation justify a humanitarian catastrophe of such proportions?
“My answer was, and remains, no.”
