Kitt
04-08-2003, 01:52 PM
--Robert Fisk
Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn't invaded – not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital – and that we're doing all this for them. Didn't Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defense Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren't we coming here to save them – let's not mention their oil – and isn't President Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity.
Then there was Safa Karim. She is 11 and she is dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and – somehow most terrible of all – a series of four dirty scarves that tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes on the bed, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative said she is too ill to understand her fate. "She has been given 10 bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up," he said.
The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. "What can we do?" they always say, but the man was silent. But I'm glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for 11 September, for George Bush's fantasies and Tony Blair's moral certainty and for Mr Wolfowitz's dreams of "liberation" and for the "democracy", which we are blasting our way through these people's lives to create?
--Excerpt from link below.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0408-01.htm
Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn't invaded – not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital – and that we're doing all this for them. Didn't Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defense Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren't we coming here to save them – let's not mention their oil – and isn't President Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity.
Then there was Safa Karim. She is 11 and she is dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and – somehow most terrible of all – a series of four dirty scarves that tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes on the bed, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative said she is too ill to understand her fate. "She has been given 10 bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up," he said.
The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. "What can we do?" they always say, but the man was silent. But I'm glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for 11 September, for George Bush's fantasies and Tony Blair's moral certainty and for Mr Wolfowitz's dreams of "liberation" and for the "democracy", which we are blasting our way through these people's lives to create?
--Excerpt from link below.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0408-01.htm