US BOMBED FALLUJA HOSPITAL SO THAT WORLD WOULD NOT GET REPORTS OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

The New York Times article I cited earlier, G.I.'s Open Attack to Take Fallujah from Iraq Rebels, has been expanded in today's print edition and on the Web.

Here's the key excerpt:
It was the second time in six months that a battle had raged in Falluja. In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw.

American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.

"It's a center of propaganda," a senior American officer said Sunday.

This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons. The military hopes that if it can hold its own in that war, then the armed invasion - involving as many as 25,000 American and Iraqi troops, all told - will smash what has become the largest remaining insurgent stronghold in Iraq.

And with only three months to go until the country's first democratic elections, American and Iraqi officials are grasping for any tool at their command to bring the insurgency under control.

The hospital was one of the primary initial targets of the assault, occupied by U.S. soldiers, with patients and doctors initially handcuffed. Later, doctors were allowed to resume treating patients, but it's for damn sure that few if any of Fallujah's wounded will be brought there -- and, in fact, with both bridges seized, it will be nearly impossible (Fallujah General is across the Euphrates from most of the city), as it was during the last assault.

It was selected as a target because it was the source of "rumors" that were "unconfirmed" about civilian casualties -- i.e., doctors who treated the patients and communicated with other doctors treating patients compiled estimates and gave them to those few journalists who wanted to know.

The U.S. military, of course, which claims never to count civilian dead, and distances itself from the people of Fallujah with a wall of metal, gunfire, artillery fire, and heavy bombs, is in a much better position to estimate civilian dead than the doctors who treat them.

The military "intends to fight its own information war." Of course, information about the truth has been a "potent weapon" for those who oppose the invasion, because Iraqis, Arabs in general, some Western Europeans, and a handful of Americans have learned that truth and tried to act on it.

That must be changed. Since hospitals and information itself are the primary initial targets, the only conclusion can be that the United States wants to cover up in advance the atrocities it will commit, atrocities almost certainly on a greater scale than in the last assault.

When the United States bombed Serbian TV during the war on Yugoslavia, with the same rationale that it spread propaganda and was thus a military target, Amnesty International determined that the attack was a war crime. How much greater a war crime it is to occupy a hospital (oh, and just by the way, the U.S. military is launching attacks on the resistance from positions near the hospital, thus making it in effect a military target for the other side as well) because it is reporting on the victims of this brutal assault.

If you want a symbol of Bush's second term, at home and abroad, there is no more potent one than this action.

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November 8, 12:25 am. All bounds have just been passed. Read this Times article, G.I.'s Open Attack to Take Falluja From Iraq Rebels. Fallujah's hospital has just been taken by American soldiers. This is why:
It was the second time in six months that a battle had raged in Falluja. In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw.

American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.

"It's a center of propaganda," a senior American officer said Sunday
The hospital was shut down because doctors told people how many innocents were killed by the American assault, thus making it a military target. Any pretence of civilization is now gone.

Also, read this incredibly powerful post from Under the Same Sun.

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November 7, 10:15 pm. U.S. bombing of Fallujah has just demolished a newly-built, just-opened hospital, the Nazzal Emergency Hospital.

After waiting for "permission" from Ayad Allawi (i.e., after doing preliminary bombing to soften up their targets), apparently U.S. forces have begun ground movements leading to the final offensive.

Allawi declared martial law for 60 days, across the whole country except for the three northern Kurdish-run governorates, ostensibly to guarantee security before the elections, now scheduled for January 27. In truth, of course, security for the elections could have been imposed a week in advance. There are two reasons for this declaration of martial law.

First, and most important, the political climated created by the first assault on Fallujah, and by the defeat (withdrawal of U.S. forces without gaining their political objective) has meant that resistance forces can counterattack across much of the country while U.S. forces are concentrating on Fallujah. The imposition of martial law across everything but northern Iraq is, and will be necessary, in any such attack in the future.

Second, there is a call for Iraqis, especially in Baghdad, to engage in mass civil resistance to help stave off the assault on Fallujah. Under martial law conditions, this may become impossible.

My friend and colleague Dahr Jamail is, amazingly, back in Baghdad. He's very restricted in what he can do, but he has posted a dispatch from Baghdad, called Carnage and Martial Law. Please go read it. As I understand, Dahr has enough money to stay for about two-thirds as long as he wants to. If you can contribute to help him do this important work, please do. And let's hope he manages to keep himself alive. Unfortunately, as we know, many people in Fallujah will not.

P.S. When I read about the hospital, I was worried about Makki al-Nazzal, the man I spoke with extensively when I was in Fallujah in April. He lives in that area of the town. Fortunately, I found out from the Post that he was part of a delegation to Baghdad trying desperate negotiations to head off the assault.

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November 6, 1:15 pm. Another quick post before I run off to spend the whole day speaking. I've been speaking about the elections, about hope and despair, and about the need to start over ab initio (and, of course, how the colonial war in Iraq fits into that context). I'm going to try to get audio and maybe a transcript to put up.

But for now Iraq. A couple of great victories for Iraqi democracy recently.

First and foremost, the assault on Fallujah has begun. If you remember, we've seen weeks of escalation, with news articles every day about "Marines preparing for assault," "G.I.'s Itch to Prove Their Mettle in Falluja," and more. We also saw a pattern of strikes in residential neighborhoods on "Zarqawi safe houses."

Now, the true aerial assault has begun. All roads to Fallujah and Ramadi have been closed, with only "families" allowed to leave (i.e, "military-age males" can't leave by themselves). There is an escalating pattern of strikes on "suspected rebel targets." Dozens of houses and a medical warehouse have been destroyed.

All that is lacking is tightening the noose on the ground. The reporting is low-key, so that people don't notice the war on Fallujah has started until it's well along. But it has started.

In other news of the farcical progress toward "democracy" in Iraq, apparently, according to the Times, the Iraqi government has chosen to allow Iraqi expatriates to vote in the scheduled January elections.

This is done against the advice of the U.N., and is simply something that is virtually unheard of. Even in Afghanistan, expatriates were not allowed to vote. The difficulties with regard to vote fraud are even greater with expatriates, but most important they don't have to live in the country they are shaping with their votes. It's an indefensible move. With a generally estimated four million Iraqis living out of the country, it's also something that could easily sway the elections.

The Times paints it as something done at the behest of Sistani and the Shi'a parties, against the objections of the United States, because Iraqi expatriates are mostly Shi'a. This is, of course, in keeping with the trend of Americans explaining everything in Iraq as having to do with internal ethnic and sectarian differences, rather than having to do with opposition to foreign occupation.

In fact, the U.S. government has shown, the Allawi government has no independence of action. This was made crystal clear in October, when the United States nixed a plan to have Muslim peacekeeping troops sent in to help U.N. observers in setting up elections, even though the Allawi government was in favor of it (also read the original Newsday article here).

So, the unstated factor is clearly that Iraqi expatriates would be much more likely to ratify a U.S. choice for puppet figurehead than Iraqis living in Iraq would, so this new policy helps the United States in its quest to pretend that it has brought democracy to Iraq while fixing the results in advance. It's very hard to believe that the United States opposed this.

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November 5, 7:55 pm. Two quick responses to my recent writing on Fallujah that I'd like to share with you, one from a current military person and one apparently from an ex-military person:
how dare you call Americans ruthless................with the animals that occupy that city

...

However, having killed my own number of ragheads and my strong support of genocide of the Arab race and Muslim religion, stands. These are a people who have no business living. None of them. Women, children, old men and any other filthy ###### fucker. We should systematically eliminate them all.
No, I couldn't make these up. Yes, this is America.

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November 5, 7:25 pm. Unfortunately, I've had no time to post on the vast number of things that require posting. Now that it seems the assault on Fallujah has started, though, here's a piece about it:
Fallujah and the Reality of War

The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing “democracy” in Iraq. These are lies.

I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a word picture of what such an assault means.

Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90’s, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.

U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave – except for what they called “military age males,” men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors,, not a war of liberation.

The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.

In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have to stop paying attention to it – and yet, of course, you never quite stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often transported instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him.

One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.

The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to ¾ were noncombatants.

But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under bombardment is a town in constant fear.

You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally important is to remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone, everyone is wounded.

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate – the world has been delivered into his hands.

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?
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November 4, 4:30 am. I'm about to leave on a tour of Southern California, speaking today, tomorrow, and Saturday. The details of appearances are below:
November 4th, 8 pm, 33 ⅓ Books at 1200 North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, (213) 483-3500
November 5th, 7 pm, 2000+ Books at 309 Pine Avenue in Long Beach, (562) 435-1199
November 6th, 1-2 pm, First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego at 4190 Front Street, San Diego, (619) 298-9978
November 6th, 7 pm, Casa del Pueblo Cooperative at 1498 Sunset Blvd. #2 in Echo Park, (213) 481-1986 (with KPFK’s Sonali Kolhatkar)
If you know people in the area, please let them know.
November 4, 4:29 am. I'm still here. It's just that this result brings up so many thoughts that I need some time to process them. Very quick thoughts:

This is a huge defeat. Kerry's losing means nothing; Bush's winning means everything. Tariq Ali and others were right about that (to say that therefore the antiwar movement should mobilize for Kerry was a different statement and one that I still disagree with today). This is shattering. It will be interpreted, rightly, by the world and by many in this country as a ratification of Bush's imperialistic, dictatorial, dishonest, and unbelievably destructive policies.

Kerry's concession speech, in which he talked about "healing the wounds" and all of that garbage that losers, especially Democratic losers, always say, was a really stupid thing to do. If Bush "reaches across the aisle," it will be to strangle his opponents. Expect things to get a lot worse. I wrote a month and a half ago about Hindenburg not being exactly the greatest bulwark against Hitler, but electing Hitler? That's a little much to swallow.

All this talk about "did Bush get a mandate" is nonsense. Mandates are not given, they are taken. Bush has the power, therefore he gets to decide if he has a mandate.

This election unfortunately was not a referendum on the occupation or on the "war on terrorism." That would have required some significant, easily graspable divergence of views between the major candidates. The country is evenly split on the occupation of Iraq. This is not for moral reasons; the predominant sentiment against those who oppose the occupation is that "Iraq is not worth it." This makes a difference in terms of political opposition, rather than just opposition expressed in a poll. Still, the country is split.

This election was about the victory, not so much of imperial arrogance and neocolonialism or of crony-capitalist "free market" fundamentalism, but of stupidity. Tom Coburn was elected to the Senate in Oklahoma; while campaigning, at one point he said, "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

Jim Bunning was re-elected to the Senate in Kentucky. He is senile. He said his opponent looked like one of Saddam's sons, admitted he hadn't read a newspaper in six weeks, and reneged on a promise to debate his opponent in a public forum, instead teleconferencing in from remote location where he could read from a teleprompter.

Voters who said honesty was their key consideration for a candidate voted for Bush over Kerry 2 to 1.

The crucial margin in this election came because of gay marriage and the fact that banning it was on the ballot in at least 11 states. This enhanced turnout among conservative evangelicals who weren't all that motivated by Bush, who has not really moved their agenda.

When the United States has launched an imperial crusade that imperils the world and is likely to suffer a defeat as stunning as that in the Vietnam War, these people mobilized to vote because letting homosexuals marry each other "threatens" their marriage.

The victory of stupidity.

This is a time to wallow in the defeat. Let's not shrug it off too quickly. Let's acknowledge what it means in a world that is in the process of being torn apart by a new crusade. When we move on to try to find hope, let's start with a rational core, not one built out of wishful thinking, fantasies about how the world works, and self-congratulation.

I'm naturally perverse. In times of hope, I look for sources of despair; now, I'm looking for signs of hope. Will report when I find them.

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November 2, 1:50 pm. Apologies. When I posted my intro to Naomi Klein yesterday, I mixed things up and replaced the end of the introduction with duplicated text from higher up. So if you read it you missed the last four paragraphs. That's been fixed and you can read it here.

Today is Election Day. If you haven't voted yet, go vote. If you don't believe in voting, do it as an act of postmodern anarchist culture-jamming or as a sardonic comment on the mundane obsessions of the hoi-polloi. If you need to fool yourself into believing that voting is a revolutionary act in order to vote, watch Eminem's remarkable and disturbing video, then vote.

On the way home yesterday, I passed a homeless man earnestly telling passersby to be sure to vote. The other 1460 days of the quadrennium, I react with annoyance that people can still think that voting is the summum of political engagement; today, however, for an hour or two at any rate it's nice to feel that spirit of solidarity as voters, of agreement that we all share at least one basic obligation. It's a pale echo of the feeling of human solidarity one feels and I felt, for example, in the Seattle demonstrations, where we all had the same job to do and we instinctively looked out for each other; but for many people in this atomized society, it's as close as they get.

But while you're standing in line to vote, be thinking about what you do tomorrow, because that's more important.

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November 1, 6:11 am. On Sunday, I introduced Naomi Klein to an audience of about 500 in Austin. Because of the imminent danger of a major assault on Fallujah after the election (the U.S. hatchet man, Ayad Allawi, has just said that "the time is closing down" and "we are approaching the end"), I spoke about Fallujah and what I saw there during the assault and siege in April, before actually doing the introduction.

What I tried to do was paint a picture, not only of what U.S. forces did to the town in April, but of what it's like being in a war zone. I've posted my remarks here.

October 30, 12:25 pm. Because I'll be flying on Monday when I usually record my weekly radio commentary on Uprising Radio, I recorded this one in advance. It's called Bin Laden's Message to America.
October 27, 3:20 pm. Under the Same Sun has done some really stellar posts recently. I strongly urge readers to check it out. In particular, the recent post, Is Zarqawi Trying to Start a Civil War in Iraq, is a must-read.

Regular readers know that I have frequently written about Zarqawi's particular animus against the Shi'a and the dangers that it holds for Iraq, starting actually on February 10, when he came out with his first communique calling for a full-scale sectarian war, continuing through the Ashura bombings, the emergence into the spotlight of Tawhid wal Jihad, and most recently in Iraq, Algeria, and Civil War.

Under the Same Sun, however, has gone beyond the obvious attacks, like the assassination of Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim at the Imam Ali mosque last year or the Ashura bombings of Shi'a pilgrims, to look at the various attacks on Iraqi recruits, those applying to become police, etc., and is finding that, although often unreported, these attacks are also directed at Shi'a. So it is literally true that Zarqawi never attacks the occupying forces directly; it is simply a way to legitimize his real agenda with sections of the Iraqi resistance.

Anyway, go read it.

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October 27, 38 pm. I sometimes read the Weekly Standard, the leading "theoretical" journal of the neoconservatives, online (not as often as I should), but I just really looked at a hard copy of one a few days ago.

It was the October 18 issue. The cover story is When a Kiss is not just a Kiss: Reality TV Comes to the Arab World. The article itself is a typically snarky neocolonialist racist/culturally supremacist product of Weekly Standard-type writers, complete with laudatory references to Christopher Buckley's absurd new book, Florence of Arabia.

But what really stands out is the cover picture:


A bunch of Arabs, all of course dressed Bedouin-style, with hooked noses, distorted faces, and bizarrely uncomprehending expressions starting at a TV, with a child that has Down's Syndrome-type features waving a flag. And in case that's not enough for you to get the point, there is, of course, a camel in the picture as well.

All in all, a picture that could have come straight out of the pages of Der Stürmer. And this is supposed to be the intellectual journal of the right wing.

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October 25, 7:30 pm. For readers living in Texas, I will be speaking in Houston tomorrow on the 26th and in San Antonio on the 27th. Please let your friends and acquaintances know.

Details:

OCTOBER 26th, 80 pm: Houston Global Awareness, as part of Halliburton Awareness Month, presents author and activist Rahul Mahajan. Mahajan will be discussing his book, Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond, and the current situation in Iraq where he traveled to earlier this year.

WHERE: The Station. 1502 Alabama at LaBranch

www.houstonglobalawareness.org

OCTOBER 27th, 60-7:30 pm: University of the Incarnate Word, Peace Day Keynote, San Antonio.

WHERE: Marian Hall Ballroom

University of the Incarnate Word (map)

4301 Broadway

San Antonio, Texas 78209
Rahul Mahajan, author of many books and antiwar activist will discuss the occupation of Iraq and the prospects for an antiwar movement.
October 25, 11:50 am. Over the weekend, I was at the annual conference of the National Lawyer's Guild, in Birmingham, Alabama (the site chosen to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and to honor the civil rights movement).

It's the second one I've been to. Both times, I've been struck, as an outsider, by the members' fervent devotion to their purpose, which is being the legal arm of progressive movements in this country, and to their own organization and its history of important work. I always find it heartening.

I gave a talk on Iraq as a colonial war. I'll post a longer transcript up as soon as I can, but I used a shorter version as today's radio commentary for Uprising Radio.

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October 24, 1:53 pm. Interesting article in the Times today by Norimitsu Onishi, Dutch Soldiers Find Smiles Are a More Effective Protection:
In a neighborhood here without lights, its pockmarked dirt streets and open sewers faintly visible under the full moon, the Dutch soldiers began a foot patrol on a recent evening. After getting out of their soft-top vehicles, the soldiers entered a street, wearing no helmets and pointing their guns down, chatting with Iraqis clustered in front of their homes.

"Hello, Mister!" some boys cried out, and they followed the soldiers to the bend in the road. Driving through the town later, the Dutch called out "Salaam Aleikum" to pedestrians. Many Iraqis, adults and children, waved at them.

Part neighborhood police officers, part social workers, the soldiers managed to practice in Iraq what the Netherlands has come to call the Dutch approach to patrolling. Scarred by national shame over the Dutch peacekeepers who proved powerless to stop the Bosnian Serbs from rolling into the United Nations enclave of Srebrenica in 1995 and killing thousands of Muslims, the Dutch have nonetheless managed to keep a soft touch, honed in Afghanistan and now on display in this small town on the Euphrates.

Instead of armored vehicles, the Dutch drive vehicles that leave them exposed to the people around them. To encourage interaction with local residents, they go bare-headed and are forbidden to wear mirror sunglasses. Making soldiers accessible and vulnerable to their surroundings increases their security, they contend. Making them inaccessible decreases it.
When I was in Iraq in January, I spoke with a Hungarian journalist who had been there since May 2003. He told me that in Samawah the Dutch went around without guns. They learned the language, shopped in the local shops, were friendly to people, and walked around like ordinary people. At long last, the mainstream media has caught up with this story.

I had assumed that the no-guns policy was a casualty of April's events and indeed the article mentions that they carry guns now, although they keep them down, not constantly swiveling and pointing at people the way Americans do when on patrol.

The article suggests that it is unfair to compare the Dutch with the American methods:
Samawa, one of the quietest spots in Iraq outside the Kurdish north, is a world away from the lawlessness that has spread across Baghdad and other cities. What the Dutch face here cannot be compared with what American soldiers must deal with in the capital or in the Sunni triangle, where they are confronted daily with a deadly resistance.

Yet, perhaps unfairly, the Americans do get compared with the Dutch here, in a way that underscores how difficult it will be for Americans to win back some of the popular support they enjoyed after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
But there is an obvious chicken-and-egg problem here. When the Americans swept into Baghdad, very few parts of the city manifested any violence toward Americans. Shi'a areas like Sadr City and Shuala had many people who hoped that the Americans would be liberators and who were grateful for the removal of Saddam Hussein. There were no attacks on Americans coming from most sectors of the city; there's little reason to believe that this would have had to change had the Americans acted like the Dutch.

Even Sunni areas like Aadhamiyah that had regular, consistent attacks on Americans starting in the summer of 2003 (actually, this is almost the only area in Baghdad of which this was true) had large numbers of local authorities and notables who were very willing to work with the Americans and only got turned off after repeated indignities.

In Samawah, the biggest security problem is the occasional American trips across the city:
In Samawa, Chief Zayad and others here said, the American convoys represent the greatest affront to Iraqi dignity. The Dutch and Iraqis say the convoys indiscriminately hit private cars and pedestrians, treating Iraqis only as obstacles to be removed. A few weeks ago, one such convoy struck a car, killing two Iraqi passengers and injuring three, the Dutch said. The convoy never stopped.
The locals clearly note these things and have a very different attitude to the Dutch:
Karim Hleibit al-Zayad, the police chief here, made a clear distinction between the Dutch and Americans: "The Dutch have tried seriously to understand our traditions. We do not view them as an occupying force, but a friendly one. The Americans are an occupying force. I agree they helped us get rid of the past regime, but they should not take away our dignity."
According to the Dutch colonel, even in peaceful Samawah, dislike for the Americans is growing. His attempt at understanding the difference in attitudes:
"Of course, an American is a different type of human than a Dutchman," the colonel said. "We have our own culture. But I think the Americans could have a way of operating with more respect and more understanding toward the population."
A British officer in Basra in April expanded a bit on this:
They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.

The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
When the final histories of this war are written, look for the word "Untermenschen."

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October 23, 12:25 pm. If the beheading of 12 Nepalis who came to Iraq to work as cooks and cleaners back in the summer was the height of inhumanity that some terrorist groups loosely associated with the Iraqi resistance reached, then, in a different way, the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is another kind of height.

Although Irish in origin, she had lived in Iraq for 30 years, married an Iraqi, learned Arabic, and converted to Islam. To consider her a foreigner is to apply the standards of the Gulf despotisms that jihadis hate, where if your ancestors for generations back were not natives of the land then you are considered a foreigner.

Furthermore, of course, she spent much of those 30 years fighting to help the Iraqi people in any way she could, opposing the Gulf Wars and the sanctions.

Felicity Arbuthnot, one of the few journalists to cover Iraq extensively even in the mid-1990's , when nobody wanted to talk about the sanctions, has a personal note on Margaret Hassan that was published by BBC. In it, she says,
She never considered leaving - not during the eight year Iran-Iraq war, the 42 day carpet bombing of the 1991 Gulf war, the 13 years of the grinding deprivation of the United Nations embargo, numerous bombings by Britain and America during those years, or when last year's invasion became inevitable.

Instead, she fought for the people and country, of which she had become a part.

She went to the UN in New York in January 2003, briefing the Security Council and UN Agencies that the majority of Iraqis were staggering under the weight of the embargo and the collapse of the infrastructure, due to prohibition of imported parts.

She briefed the British Parliament: "The Iraqi people are already living through a terrible emergency - they do not have the resources to withstand an additional crisis brought about by military action."
She fought in particular, says Arbuthnot, for the "lost generation," Iraqi children and young people stunted and destroyed by the sanctions and, unlike so many others, understood that the war and occupation would mean a second lost generation.

Even those few souls intrepid enough to go to Iraq now can't dream of going to Fallujah. With signs pointing to a massive assault on Fallujah soon to come, there will be no one to document the atrocities in English; this cruel and inhumane policy of abductions and beheadings is harming the people of Iraq more than anyone else -- not that the groups doing it necessarily care about that.


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