| Author | Message | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2003 5:11 am Post subject: Tony Blair...Any Idea What Flies are Like that Feed off Dead |
| http://www.independent.co.uk
Does Tony Blair have any idea what the flies are like that feed off the dead?
By Robert Fisk
LONDON, 26 January 2003 — On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind.
“Just for the record,” the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV would never show such footage. The things we see — the filth and obscenity of corpses — cannot be shown. First because it is not “appropriate” to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war.
That of course was in 1991. The “highway of death,” they called it — there was actually a parallel and much worse “highway of death” 10 miles to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up to film it — and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the photograph of the shriveled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in his truck. This was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent what we had seen, when it was eventually published.
For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War — there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing — it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those World War I paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on to the morning news programs.
I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had shelled Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106 civilians, more than half of them children, I came across a young woman holding in her arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. “My father, my father,” she kept crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of his legs was missing — the Israelis used proximity shells which cause amputation wounds — but when that scene reached television screens in Europe and America, the camera was close up on the girl and the dead man’s face. The amputations were not to be seen. The cause of death had been erased in the interests of good taste. It was as if the old man had died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his daughter’s shoulder to die in peace.
Today, when I listen to the threats of US President George W. Bush against Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality. Does George, who declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have any idea what these corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest conception of what the flies are like, the big bluebottles that feed on the dead, and then come to settle on our faces and our notepads? Soldiers know. I remember one British officer asking to use the BBC’s satellite phone just after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking to his family in England and I watched him carefully. “I have seen some terrible things,” he said. And then he broke down, weeping and shaking and holding the phone dangling in his hand over the transmission set. Did his family have the slightest idea what he was talking about? They would not have understood by watching television.
Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic population — albeit only about 20 percent in support of this particular Iraqi folly — has been protected from the realities of violent death. But I am much struck by the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of World War II, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an inalienable memory of torn limbs and suffering.
I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead, howling like an animal — which is, of course, what we all are — before he died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me when an Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly, murderously, for throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg sticking out of her stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after a Palestinian bomber had decided to execute the families inside; and the heaps of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war; and the young man showing me the thick black trail of his daughter’s blood outside Algiers where armed men had cut her throat.
But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all the other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have to think of these vile images. For them it’s about surgical strikes, collateral damage and all the other examples of war’s linguistic mendacity. We are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the people of Iraq — some of whom we will obviously kill — and we are going to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we are going to watch our defense “experts” on TV with their bloodless sandpits and their awesome knowledge of weapons which rip off heads.
Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee convoy in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit. His head lay in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a Tudor executioner. Months later, I learned his name and talked to the girl who was hit by the severed head during the US air strike and who laid the head reverently in the grass where I found it. NATO, of course, did not apologize to the family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry after war. No one acknowledges the truth of it. No one shows you what we see. Which is how our leaders and our betters persuade us — still — to go to war. (The Independent) | |  | | Guest-c651 | | | | Guest-c651 | | | | Guest-c651 | | | | Alpha | | | | Guest-98a3 | | Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2003 1:26 pm Post subject: U.S. Weighs Tactical Nuclear Strike on Iraq |
| U.S. Weighs Tactical Nuclear Strike on Iraq
For what one defense analyst says is a worst-case scenario, planners are studying the use of atomic bombs on deeply buried targets.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer
January 25 2003
WASHINGTON -- As the Pentagon continues a highly visible buildup of troops and weapons in the Persian Gulf, it is also quietly preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iraq, according to a report by a defense analyst.
Although they consider such a strike unlikely, military planners have been actively studying lists of potential targets and considering options, including the possible use of so-called bunker-buster nuclear weapons against deeply buried military targets, says analyst William M. Arkin, who writes a regular column on defense matters for The Times.
Military officials have been focusing their planning on the use of tactical nuclear arms in retaliation for a strike by the Iraqis with chemical or biological weapons, or to preempt one, Arkin says. His report, based on interviews and a review of official documents, appears in a column that will be published in The Times on Sunday.
Administration officials believe that in some circumstances, nuclear arms may offer the only way to destroy deeply buried targets that may contain unconventional weapons that could kill thousands.
Some officials have argued that the blast and radiation effects of such strikes would be limited.
But that is in dispute. Critics contend that a bunker-buster strike could involve a huge radiation release and dangerous blast damage. They also say that use of a nuclear weapon in such circumstances would encourage other nuclear-armed countries to consider using such weapons in more kinds of situations and would badly undermine the half-century effort to contain the spread of nuclear arms.
Although it may be highly unlikely that the Bush administration would authorize the use of such weapons in Iraq -- Arkin describes that as a worst-case scenario -- the mere disclosure of its planning contingencies could stiffen the opposition of France, Germany and Middle East nations to an invasion of Iraq.
"If the United States dropped a bomb on an Arab country, it might be a military success, but it would be a diplomatic, political and strategic disaster," said Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation studies at the Carnegie Endowment for Interna- tional Peace in Washington.
He said there is a danger of the misuse of a nuclear weapon in Iraq because of the chance that "somebody could be seduced into the mistaken idea that you could use a nuclear weapon with minimal collateral damage and political damage."
In the last year, Bush administration officials have repeatedly made clear that they want to be better prepared to consider the nuclear option against the threat of "weapons of mass destruction" in the hands of terrorists and rogue nations. The current planning, as reported by Arkin, offers a concrete example of their determination to follow through on this pledge.
Arkin also says that the Pentagon has changed the bureaucratic oversight of nuclear weapons so that they are no longer treated as a special category of arms but are grouped with conventional military options.
A White House spokesman declined to comment Friday on Arkin's report, except to say that "the United States reserves the right to defend itself and its allies by whatever means necessary."
Consideration of the nuclear option has defenders.
David J. Smith, an arms control negotiator in the first Bush administration, said presidents would consider using such a weapon only "in terribly ugly situations where there are no easy ways out. If there's a threat that could involve huge numbers of American lives, I as a citizen would want the president to consider that option."
Smith defended the current administration's more assertive public pronouncements on the subject, saying that weapons have a deterrent value only "if the other guy really believes you might use them."
Other administrations have warned that they might use nuclear weapons in circumstances short of an all-out atomic war.
In January 1991, before the Persian Gulf War, Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned Iraqi diplomat Tarik Aziz in a letter that the American people would "demand the strongest possible response" to a use of chemical or biological weapons. The Clinton administration made a similar warning to the Libyans regarding the threat from a chemical plant.
But officials of this administration have placed greater emphasis on such possibilities and have stated that preemptive strikes may sometimes be needed to safeguard Americans against adversaries who cannot be deterred, such as terrorists, or against dictators, such as Saddam Hussein.
Instead of making such a warning from time to time as threats arise, the Bush administration "has set it out as a general principle, and backed it up by explaining what has changed in the world," Smith said.
In a policy statement issued only last month, the White House said the United States "will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all of our options -- to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States."
One year ago, the administration completed a classified Nuclear Posture Review that said nuclear weapons should be considered against targets able to withstand conventional attack; in retaliation for an attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; or "in the event of surprising military developments." And it identified seven countries -- China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria -- as possible targets.
The same report called on the government to develop smaller nuclear weapons for possible use in some battlefield situations. Both the United States and Russia already have stockpiles of such tactical weapons, which are often small enough to be carried by one or two people yet can exceed the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.
The administration has since been pushing Congress to pay for a study of how to build a smaller, more effective version of a 6-year-old nuclear bunker-buster bomb called the B-61 Mod 11. Critics maintain that the administration's eagerness for this study shows officials' desire to move toward building new weapons and to end the decade-old voluntary freeze on nuclear testing.
The B-61 is considered ineffective because it can burrow only 20 feet before detonating. The increasingly sophisticated underground command posts and weapon storage facilities being built by some countries are far deeper than that. And the closer to the surface a nuclear device explodes, the greater the risk of the spread of radiation.
The reported yield of B-61 devices in U.S. inventory varies from less than 1 kiloton of TNT to more than 350. The Hiroshima bomb was 20 kilotons.
Discussion of new weapons has set off a heated argument among experts on the value and effects of smaller-yield nuclear weapons.
Some Pentagon officials contend that the nation could develop nuclear weapons that could burrow deep enough to destroy hardened targets. But some independent physicists have argued that such a device would barely penetrate the surface while blowing out huge amounts of radioactive dirt that would pollute the region around it with a deadly fallout.
Wade Boese of the Arms Control Assn. in Washington said there is no evidence that conventional arms wouldn't be just as effective in reaching deeply buried targets. | | | | Guest-400c | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
