War Crimes

The people at Ground Zero

S U.S.-LED FORCES seized control of Baghdad, American media showed us images of "jubilant" Iraqis celebrating their liberation from the cruel tyranny of Saddam Hussein. And indeed there may have been some genuine jubilation: After all, Saddam Hussein, the Wicked Warlock of the Mideast, was dead or at least gone.

There were, however, other images American media did not show us: images of the people at Ground Zero, the victims of this supposed war of liberation ... or was it a war against terrorism? ... or a war against weapons of mass destruction? But to the people at Ground Zero, the reason does not matter, for they are equally dead for whatever purported cause. And each of them was a human being, as real and significant as you or I, and each left loved ones to mourn.

Imagine for a moment, if you can, that you are the father portrayed here. How do you think you might feel, as you take your dead and broken little girl in your arms, about the country that did this?

This ruined travesty was once a lovely young woman — someone's daughter, perhaps someone else's sister, maybe also another person's mother. Now she is a shattered shell, an image that will invade the nightmares of millions as it has invaded mine.

When our troops marched into Baghdad, we were told that we should be proud.

And why?

We were told, by our government and our media, that our doughty troops had just saved the people of Iraq from tyranny and the world from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. We are a great nation, we were told, and took great pains to make a better world. Perhaps there'd had to be a few civilian casualties, but our humanitarian forces, there because they truly cared about the people of Iraq — unlike those ingrates who unaccountably opposed the war — had done everything in their not inconsiderable power to make them as few and as mild as possible.

"The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy. 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."

— Corporal Ryan Dupre
on the scene of numerous civilian casualties
inflicted by his unit near Nasiriyah

That, however, is strangely not the impression gained of our invasion by the people of Iraq or indeed those of most of the world. Then again, the rest of the world doesn't see wars through the distorting lens of media bias and outright propaganda. And perhaps the rest of the world can see the bigotry and dehumanizing malevolence that are used to motivate our troops, and wonders just how humanitarian they really were and are.

This is a question that will assume new meaning for all of us, though, as the troops begin to filter home. America has a bad habit of sending uneducated, skill-less soldiers, primed with fury, to kill its actual or perceived enemies in battle, and then forgetting them when the battle ends. And so we find them today, those veterans of killing fields in distant lands, often still uneducated, unskilled, unemployed — and still filled with fury.

Does the name Timothy McVeigh ring any bells?

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