Crimson and Clover
04-02-2003, 04:15 PM
APRIL 12:
The World Stands Together Against War
In the face of Iraqi resistance to the invasion, the U.S.
military strategy has abruptly shifted in the last few
days. Instead of posing as liberators, the U.S. high
command has called for open warfare against the Iraqi
civilian population. In the last 48 hours, hundreds of
civilians have been shot down on the roadways, in their
homes, on their farms. The aerial bombings are becoming
more indiscriminate as missiles land in markets and
residential neighborhoods.
The Iraq war has suddenly taken on the worst features of
the U.S. war in Vietnam. Facing a defiant and resisting
population, U.S. troops, under the direction of their
officers, treat all members of the population as suspect
and decide to shoot first and ask questions later. The
U.S. soldiers have been lied to about their mission. They
have been sent to kill and be killed in a war for empire
and conquest, not liberation. U.S. casualties are mounting
in this war that need not have happened.
On March 31, there was a massacre of civilians, mainly
women and their children, whose crime was that they were
driving on a roadway in their own country. As their van
approached a checkpoint, U.S. soldiers destroyed their
vehicle with a barrage of 25mm cannon fire from one or
more of their M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The Washington
Post quoted Capt. Ronny Johnson of the Army's 3rd Infantry
Division in his series of orders to the troops present:
- "Fire a warning shot"
- "Stop [messing] around!"
- "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
- "Cease fire!"
- "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't
fire a warning shot soon enough!"
The "shoot first ÈÎ ask questions later" strategy is not
the result of spontaneous actions by scared and edgy
troops. These are orders given the troops from the
Pentagon high command.
"Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven
otherwise," a Pentagon official is quoted in the
Washington Post of April 1, 2003. The Pentagon recognizes
that the shift in tactics will be understood as a brutal
escalation of force against the civilian population and
that their earlier posture as "liberators" will be
exposed. "You'll see acts of kindness, medical care and
the like, but the large scale aid effort will have to
wait," a Pentagon official told the Washington Post. In
fact the new U.S. strategy now is deliberately preventing
Iraqi civilians in Nassiriya and other towns from
receiving food and water unless they cooperate with the
occupation forces.
U.S. Marine Operations Commander Lt. Colonel Paul Roche
told reporters on March 31 that the U.S. strategy towards
the people of the city of Nassiriya included the use of
food and water as a weapon to terrorize and break the will
of the civilian population.
In the April 1 front page of the Washington Post, the
Pentagon's new strategy is euphemistically referred to in
the headline "U.S. troops instructed to use tougher
tactics."
The assault against civilians is being reported in greater
detail and honesty by the world media outside the United
States. This change in U.S. tactics is, as the following
report shows, encouraging the most racist and homicidal
tendencies among U.S. soldiers at the front.
It is important to read the following passage from the UK
Times of Sunday, March 30. It reports of a gruesome scene
outside of Nassiriya. Some fifteen vehicles, including a
minivan and a couple of trucks, were found destroyed and
riddled with bullets by the Times UK reporter Mark
Franchetti:
"Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in
the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to
leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of
being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.
"Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is
crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a
group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders
to shoot anything that moved.
"One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing
sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of
banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.
"Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and
dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a
ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her
father. Half his head was missing.
"Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition
holes, an Iraqi woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was
dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed
Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.
"This was not the only family who had taken what they
thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl
and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a
dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey."
The UK Times article also documents that in Iraq, just as
in Vietnam, the U.S. soldiers are being trained to wage
war against a civilian population by dehumanizing those
whom they are killing.
"I'll Just Kill Him"
"As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third
child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en
route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.
" 'Did you see all that?' he asked, his eyes filled with
tears. 'Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her
body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It
really gets to me to see children being killed like this,
but we had no choice.'
"Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter
satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they
surveyed the scene. 'The Iraqis are sick people and we are
the chemotherapy,' said Corporal Ryan Dupre. 'I am
starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a
friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just
kill him.' "
Crimes Against Humanity
George Bush and the high command are guilty of crimes
against humanity and war crimes. What we are witnessing is
a full-scale massacre carried out from the land, the air
and the sea assault. The U.S. media presents the war as
carefully packaged propaganda and trivializes the actual
human costs of the war by turning it into something of a
spectator sport. But the Iraqi people cannot escape this
war and they cannot turn off their television to make it
go away.
Again, it is the non-U.S. press that reveals the extent of
the criminality of the war.
A March 29 Reuters article entitled "Iraqis Delirious with
Grief After Missile Attack" described the Friday night
attack by U.S. bombs in a poor section of Baghdad. Arouba
Khodeir, 39, while "wailing hysterically and hitting
herself in the face and chest, as women around her were
trying to calm her down," spoke of her 11-year-old son
Karar who died outside the house with his friends: " 'My
son had his head blown off,' screamed Khodeir. 'Why are
they hitting the people? Why are they killing the
children? Why are they doing this to us? Why are they
attacking civilians? Didn't Bush say on TV that he won't
attack civilians. But these people who died are all
civilians? Is this a target?' she wailed, pointing at the
dried blood of her son still splashed on the walls."
"The Whole World is Watching Us Die"
The report also described the killing of Shaza Shallum,
20, who was "holding her baby and walking with two
relatives when the explosion sent a shard of shrapnel
through her neck. Six-month-old Fatma was found alive in
her dead mother's arms and brought by neighbors to her
grandmother. The wails of the mourners drowned the cries
of the hungry infant."
One of the people living in this neighborhood told
Reuters: "We are helpless people. It is all out of our
hands. Why cannot the world find a solution? The whole
world is watching us die and is doing nothing to help us."
The full article can be found at
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AIXRWPJ3C5TXOCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=2471290
The World Stands Together Against War
In the face of Iraqi resistance to the invasion, the U.S.
military strategy has abruptly shifted in the last few
days. Instead of posing as liberators, the U.S. high
command has called for open warfare against the Iraqi
civilian population. In the last 48 hours, hundreds of
civilians have been shot down on the roadways, in their
homes, on their farms. The aerial bombings are becoming
more indiscriminate as missiles land in markets and
residential neighborhoods.
The Iraq war has suddenly taken on the worst features of
the U.S. war in Vietnam. Facing a defiant and resisting
population, U.S. troops, under the direction of their
officers, treat all members of the population as suspect
and decide to shoot first and ask questions later. The
U.S. soldiers have been lied to about their mission. They
have been sent to kill and be killed in a war for empire
and conquest, not liberation. U.S. casualties are mounting
in this war that need not have happened.
On March 31, there was a massacre of civilians, mainly
women and their children, whose crime was that they were
driving on a roadway in their own country. As their van
approached a checkpoint, U.S. soldiers destroyed their
vehicle with a barrage of 25mm cannon fire from one or
more of their M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The Washington
Post quoted Capt. Ronny Johnson of the Army's 3rd Infantry
Division in his series of orders to the troops present:
- "Fire a warning shot"
- "Stop [messing] around!"
- "Stop him, Red 1, stop him!"
- "Cease fire!"
- "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't
fire a warning shot soon enough!"
The "shoot first ÈÎ ask questions later" strategy is not
the result of spontaneous actions by scared and edgy
troops. These are orders given the troops from the
Pentagon high command.
"Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven
otherwise," a Pentagon official is quoted in the
Washington Post of April 1, 2003. The Pentagon recognizes
that the shift in tactics will be understood as a brutal
escalation of force against the civilian population and
that their earlier posture as "liberators" will be
exposed. "You'll see acts of kindness, medical care and
the like, but the large scale aid effort will have to
wait," a Pentagon official told the Washington Post. In
fact the new U.S. strategy now is deliberately preventing
Iraqi civilians in Nassiriya and other towns from
receiving food and water unless they cooperate with the
occupation forces.
U.S. Marine Operations Commander Lt. Colonel Paul Roche
told reporters on March 31 that the U.S. strategy towards
the people of the city of Nassiriya included the use of
food and water as a weapon to terrorize and break the will
of the civilian population.
In the April 1 front page of the Washington Post, the
Pentagon's new strategy is euphemistically referred to in
the headline "U.S. troops instructed to use tougher
tactics."
The assault against civilians is being reported in greater
detail and honesty by the world media outside the United
States. This change in U.S. tactics is, as the following
report shows, encouraging the most racist and homicidal
tendencies among U.S. soldiers at the front.
It is important to read the following passage from the UK
Times of Sunday, March 30. It reports of a gruesome scene
outside of Nassiriya. Some fifteen vehicles, including a
minivan and a couple of trucks, were found destroyed and
riddled with bullets by the Times UK reporter Mark
Franchetti:
"Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in
the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to
leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of
being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.
"Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is
crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a
group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders
to shoot anything that moved.
"One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing
sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of
banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.
"Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and
dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a
ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her
father. Half his head was missing.
"Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition
holes, an Iraqi woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was
dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed
Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.
"This was not the only family who had taken what they
thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl
and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a
dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey."
The UK Times article also documents that in Iraq, just as
in Vietnam, the U.S. soldiers are being trained to wage
war against a civilian population by dehumanizing those
whom they are killing.
"I'll Just Kill Him"
"As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third
child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en
route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.
" 'Did you see all that?' he asked, his eyes filled with
tears. 'Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her
body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It
really gets to me to see children being killed like this,
but we had no choice.'
"Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter
satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they
surveyed the scene. 'The Iraqis are sick people and we are
the chemotherapy,' said Corporal Ryan Dupre. 'I am
starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a
friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just
kill him.' "
Crimes Against Humanity
George Bush and the high command are guilty of crimes
against humanity and war crimes. What we are witnessing is
a full-scale massacre carried out from the land, the air
and the sea assault. The U.S. media presents the war as
carefully packaged propaganda and trivializes the actual
human costs of the war by turning it into something of a
spectator sport. But the Iraqi people cannot escape this
war and they cannot turn off their television to make it
go away.
Again, it is the non-U.S. press that reveals the extent of
the criminality of the war.
A March 29 Reuters article entitled "Iraqis Delirious with
Grief After Missile Attack" described the Friday night
attack by U.S. bombs in a poor section of Baghdad. Arouba
Khodeir, 39, while "wailing hysterically and hitting
herself in the face and chest, as women around her were
trying to calm her down," spoke of her 11-year-old son
Karar who died outside the house with his friends: " 'My
son had his head blown off,' screamed Khodeir. 'Why are
they hitting the people? Why are they killing the
children? Why are they doing this to us? Why are they
attacking civilians? Didn't Bush say on TV that he won't
attack civilians. But these people who died are all
civilians? Is this a target?' she wailed, pointing at the
dried blood of her son still splashed on the walls."
"The Whole World is Watching Us Die"
The report also described the killing of Shaza Shallum,
20, who was "holding her baby and walking with two
relatives when the explosion sent a shard of shrapnel
through her neck. Six-month-old Fatma was found alive in
her dead mother's arms and brought by neighbors to her
grandmother. The wails of the mourners drowned the cries
of the hungry infant."
One of the people living in this neighborhood told
Reuters: "We are helpless people. It is all out of our
hands. Why cannot the world find a solution? The whole
world is watching us die and is doing nothing to help us."
The full article can be found at
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AIXRWPJ3C5TXOCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=2471290