The US military began the week with vigorous denials of claims made by Italian TV that phosphorus shells had been used as weapons in the battle for Fallujah. They had only, announced the Pentagon, been used to illuminate the battlefield and create smoke. The week ended, however, with the admission this had been a lie. Proof positive that phosphorous shells had been fired at targets in the battle was found in a report on their effectiveness written by a serving officer and published in a US artillery journal.
It has been the same story with napalm, which the Americans denied using during the Iraq invasion. When confronted with reports from embedded journalists, quoting US officers, that napalm indeed had been used in a bombing raid on a Tigris bridge, the military denied it had actually been napalm. Napalm, said the spokesman, was petroleum-based. The cloud of fire caused in the Tigris raid had been caused by a kerosene-based weapon. Given these revelations, it is barely credible that Washington continues to protest that it is not using “chemical” weapons, as if phosphorous or napalm or , if they insist, kerosene were not chemicals but soft drinks. Yet it was the alleged existence of chemical as well as nuclear weapons that was the original excuse for the start of George W. Bush’s Iraq debacle. In the end, Saddam was found to have absolutely none. Unfortunately the United States has all too many.
More important, however, than what US troops are actually doing on the battlefield is what Washington is saying. The Bush White House went to war on a lie, is still fighting that war with lies and if it stays true to form will end its involvement on a lie. The final falsehood will perhaps be that Americans can hold their heads up high because their sons and daughters have fought and prevailed in a noble cause. They are marching proudly home from Iraq, leaving the country on the threshold of freedom and prosperity, with its destiny now entirely in its own hands.
It has happened before. After eight years of fighting, at one time involving half a million US troops, America pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. Saigon and the South Vietnamese government it had left behind, fell to North Vietnamese forces. America lost that war because it failed to win hearts and minds. This failure stemmed directly from appalling incidents like the My Lai massacre, coupled with the constant lies the world was told about why the US was fighting the war and how it was winning it.
Thirty years on and America seems to have learned nothing. They have brought to Iraq the same profound cultural ignorance, the same imperial arrogance and the same hopeless total reliance on main force. And all the time, they busily forfeit what little trust exists among Iraqis by piling one untruth upon another.
Iraq was invaded because of the WMD lie. US troops poured into Vietnam because of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked US destroyers. That was a lie too.
