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This is the Reality
of War: We Bomb. They Suffer
Veteran
war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital to see the wounded after a
devastating night of air strikes
by
Robert Fisk in Baghdad
Dissident Voice
March 23, 2003
Donald
Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is "as targeted an air
campaign as has ever existed" but he should not try telling that to
five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed
attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to
move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her
home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs
they were bound up with gauze and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now
she has lost all movement in her left leg.
Her
mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg which the little girl
thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her
child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from
her paralysis. She was the first of 101 patients brought to the Al-Mustansaniya
College Hospital after America's blitz on the city began on Friday night. Seven
other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise missile bombardment;
the youngest, a one-year-old baby, was being breastfed by her mother at the
time.
There
is something sick, obscene about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer.
Then we turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister
of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to
emphasise the "bestial" nature of the American attack. The Americans
say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and
the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move
her left leg and feel no more pain.
So
let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally
cheap moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the
Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not
about military victory and defeat, or the lies about "coalition
forces" which our "embedded" journalists are now peddling about
an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians.
War, even when it has international legitimacy which this war does not is
primarily about suffering.
Take
50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs but
who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders
they are now twice their original size who was on her way to visit her
daughter when the first American missile struck Baghdad. "I was just
getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and
found my blood everywhere," she told me. "It was on my arms, my legs,
my chest." Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest.
Her
five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She
had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when
the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood has
clotted around her toes and is staunched by the bandages on her ankles and
lower legs. Two little boys are in the next room. Sade Selim is 11; his brother
Omar is 14. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.
Isra
Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel
wounds to the legs as she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the
blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and
lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black
scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel
wounds. After a while, "multiple shrapnel wounds" sounds like a
natural disease which, I suppose among a people who have suffered more than
20 years of war it is.
And
all this, I asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001? All
this was to "strike back" at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil,
Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing absolutely nothing to do with those
crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam? Who decided, I
wonder, that these children, these young women, should suffer for 11 September?
Wars
repeat themselves. Always, when "we" come to visit those we have
bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, I remember how American
reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been
hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991,
"we" asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And yesterday, a
doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter yes, you've guessed it
"Do you think, doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by
Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?"
Should
we laugh or cry at this? Should we always blame "them" for their own
wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they
did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk.
Isra
Riad came from Sayadiyeh where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas's
home is in Risalleh where there are villas belonging to Saddam's family. The
two small Selim brothers live in Shirta Khamse where there is a store house for
military vehicles. But that's the whole problem. Targets are scattered across
the city. The poor and all the wounded I saw yesterday were poor live in
cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage.
It
is the same old story. If we make war however much we blather on about our
care for civilians we are going to kill and maim the innocent.
Dr
Habib Al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101
patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom
85 were civilians 20 of them women and six of them children and 16
soldiers. A young man and a child of 12 had died under surgery. No one will say
how many soldiers were killed during the actual attack.
Driving
across Baghdad yesterday was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed
carefully selected even though their destruction inevitably struck the
innocent. There was one presidential palace I saw with 40ft high statues of the
Arab warrior Salaheddin in each corner the face of each was, of course, that
of Saddam and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the faηade
of the building. The ministry of air weapons production was pulverised, a
massive heap of pre-stressed concrete and rubble.
But
outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed
Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, still ready to defend their ministry
from the enemy which had already destroyed it.
The
morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too
hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river nor the
smouldering ministry of armaments procurement. They burned for 12 hours after
the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries
and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then
again, no one under the present regime would want to spend too long looking at
such things, would they?
And
Iraqis have noticed what all this means. In 1991, the Americans struck the
refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But
yesterday, Baghdad could still function. The landline telephones worked; the
internet operated; the electrical power was at full capacity; the bridges over
the Tigris remained unbombed. Because, of course, when "if" is
still a sensitive phrase these days the Americans get here, they will need a
working communications system, electricity, transport. What has been spared is
not a gift to the Iraqi people: it is for the benefit of Iraq's supposed new
masters.
The
Iraq daily newspaper emerged yesterday with an edition of just four pages, a
clutch of articles on the "steadfastness" of the nation
steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name as the missile that Iraq
partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to
war and a headline which read "President: Victory will come [sic] in
Iraqi hands".
Again,
there has been no attempt by the US to destroy the television facilities
because they presumably want to use them on arrival. During the bombing on
Friday night, an Iraqi general appeared live on television to reassure the
nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions
blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.
So
where does all this lead us? In the early hours of yesterday morning, I looked
across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the
colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and
the sky was lowering with smoke, the buttressed, rampart-like palace sheets
of flame soaring from its walls looked like a medieval castle ablaze;
Tsesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction as it has
been seen for many times over so many thousands of years.
Xenophon
struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The
caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now
come the Americans. It's not about legitimacy. It's about something much more
seductive, something Saddam himself understands all too well, a special kind of
power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he
smashed his way into the land of this ancient civilisation.
Yesterday
afternoon the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around the city of Baghdad in the
hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against
computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 3.20pm London
time, followed by the utterly predictable sound of explosions.
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign
correspondent for The Independent
(UK), where this article first appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy
Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition). Posted
with authors permission.