ZGram - 9/14/2002 - "What War Looks Like"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

9/14/2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A little kitten, no more than 6 weeks old, crawled up our hill the 
other day, dragging a hind leg bitten to shreds by a pack of wild 
dogs that are menacing our neighborhood.  I have never been a 
particular animal lover, but the sight of that baby kitten, that 
shredded leg, now rotting, beset by flies, is not pleasant to watch. 
We will have to destroy the poor critter.

Now visualize a 6-week-old baby, crawling out a house that is 
shredded by bombs.  I saw such a baby once.  I described the 
experience in one of my novels - where one of my main characters, a 
14-year-old girl named Erika*, is trying to make it to school after 
an air raid on Berlin in April, 1945:

[START]

For weeks, there had not been a single normal day;  the bombings 
never stopped, the horror didn't end - yet still some street cars 
ran, sporadically.  That morning, she had missed two tests already; 
if she didn't make it to the finals, it might mean extra work - 
spending weekends helping register the refugees who kept on pouring 
in, a ghastly stream of human misery, flowing silently into the 
twisted girders, broken glass and ashen rubble of Berlin.

The measure of one's character, the teacher always said, was social 
usefulness, but even so, Erika felt queasy in her stomach, hoping for 
reprieve, for time to sit in silence, somewhere.  That was what 
counted - social usefulness.  The teacher always spoke these words 
with worship radiating from his face while standing on one leg, down 
on his luck.  Half of his body ended at the hip, and sometimes he 
would give himself a mocking smile and claim it was impossible for 
him to step on people's toes.  She hated it when he made jokes about 
his injury.   To have to leave a leg back at the Russian Front was 
serious.

As she stepped out into the street, she blinked and took quick stock, 
then breathed a sigh of relief:  it looked like an average raid.  No 
worse, in any case, than yesterday.  She drew in her breath and kept 
walking, occasionally coughing from her lungs the dust that still 
fell from the shuddering walls.  Today was standard fare.  Something 
lay curled about the gutter, face buried in the mud, palms up, still 
in its shrapnel-riddled overcoat.  A pretty blue.  Remarkably new. 
Thank heaven no one she knew.

There was another one.  A third.  She would not call them corpses; 
that would have made it gross.  She gave them sideways glances.  She 
kept on walking gingerly, as though across a balance beam.  The skies 
were clear again, the bombers gone;  a cat was catching flies;  the 
air smelled of April and Easter.

And then she spied the child.

On blistered knees, a small, half-charred infant was crawling slowly 
from the debris of a demolished house.  It seemed dazed, but made no 
sound, not a peep.  It struggled to free itself of the ashes.

She yelled at the top of her lungs.  She nearly broke a vessel.  The 
infant crawled toward her, in slack motion, and then it coiled up, in 
a small quivering heap, still stirring drowsily.

With flying fingers, she took off her sweater and made a small nest 
for its head, not knowing what else she could do, except to shoo the 
April flies - until, at last, a neighbor came running and scooped up 
the infant with low, compressed moans, making soft, sucking sounds in 
her throat.  At that, she took her sweater back, relieved, and 
started looking for the morning streetcar to take her to her class.

[END]

No, I was not in Berlin as a fourteen-year-old;  I was only eight 
years old when World War II came to an end, living as a refugee child 
about 40 km away in a small village that was overrun by a murderous, 
plundering, raping Red Army.  I know first-hand, however, how war 
translates to children.

With the above vignette in mind, read on:

[START]

What War Looks Like
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
9-13-2

In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and 
newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the 
troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is 
something missing.
 
The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and 
personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass 
destruction, arms inspections, alliances, oil, and "regime change."
 
What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of 
thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are 
not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just 
want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with 
"national security" but with personal security, with food and shelter 
and medical care and peace.
 
I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who will, with 
absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs, or be 
blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing 
sickness that could lead to their bringing deformed children into the 
world (as happened to families in Vietnam, Iraq, and also the United 
States).
 
True, there has been some discussion of American casualties resulting 
from a land invasion of Iraq. But, as always when the strategists 
discuss this, the question is not about the wounded and dead as human 
beings, but about what number of American casualties would result in 
public withdrawal of support for the war, and what effect this would 
have on the upcoming elections for Congress and the Presidency.
 
That was uppermost in the mind of Lyndon Johnson, as we have learned 
from the tapes of his White House conversations. He worried about 
Americans dying if he escalated the war in Vietnam, but what most 
concerned him was his political future. If we pull out of Vietnam, he 
told his friend Senator Richard Russell, "they'll impeach me, won't 
they?"
 
In any case, American soldiers killed in war are always a matter of 
statistics. Individual human beings are missing in the numbers. It is 
left to the poets and novelists to take us by the shoulders and shake 
us and ask us to look and listen. In World War I, ten million men 
died on the battlefield, but we needed John Dos Passos to confront us 
with what that meant: In his novel 1919, he writes of the death of 
John Doe: "In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of 
chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held 
all that was left of John Doe, the scraps of dried viscera and skin 
bundled in khaki."
 
Vietnam was a war that filled our heads with statistics, of which one 
stood out, embedded in the stark monument in Washington: 58,000 dead. 
But one would have to read the letters from soldiers just before they 
died to turn those statistics into human beings. And for all those 
not dead but mutilated in some way, the amputees and paraplegics, one 
would have to read Ron Kovic's account, in his memoir, "Born on the 
Fourth of July," of how his spine was shattered and his life 
transformed.
 
As for the dead among "the enemy"--that is, those young men, 
conscripted or cajoled or persuaded to pit their bodies against those 
of our young men--that has not been a concern of our political 
leaders, our generals, our newspapers and magazines, our television 
networks. To this day, most Americans have no idea, or only the 
vaguest, of how many Vietnamese--soldiers and civilians (actually, a 
million of each)--died under American bombs and shells.
 
And for those who know the figures, the men, women, children behind 
the statistics remained unknown until a picture appeared of a 
Vietnamese girl running down a road, her skin shredding from napalm, 
until Americans saw photos of women and children huddled in a trench 
as GIs poured automatic rifle fire into their bodies.
 
Ten years ago, in that first war against Iraq, our leaders were proud 
of the fact that there were only a few hundred American casualties 
(one wonders if the families of those soldiers would endorse the word 
"only"). When a reporter asked General Colin Powell if he knew how 
many Iraqis died in that war, he replied: "That is really not a 
matter I am terribly interested in." A high Pentagon official told 
The Boston Globe, "To tell you the truth, we're not really focusing 
on this question."
 
Americans knew that this nation's casualties were few in the Gulf 
War, and a combination of government control of the press and the 
media's meek acceptance of that control ensured that the American 
people would not be confronted, as they had been in Vietnam, with 
Iraqi dead and dying.
 
There were occasional glimpses of the horrors inflicted on the people 
of Iraq, flashes of truth in the newspapers that quickly disappeared. 
In mid-February 1991, U.S. planes dropped bombs on an air raid 
shelter in Baghdad at four in the morning, killing 400 to 500 
people--mostly women and children--who were huddled there to escape 
the incessant bombing. An Associated Press reporter, one of the few 
allowed to go to the site, said: "Most of the recovered bodies were 
charred and mutilated beyond recognition."
 
In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged in a 
ground assault on Iraqi positions in Kuwait. As in the air war, they 
encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the 
Iraqi army in full flight, U.S. planes kept strafing the retreating 
soldiers who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter 
called the scene "a blazing hell, a gruesome testament. To the east 
and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing." That 
grisly scene appeared for a moment in the press and then vanished in 
the exultation of a victorious war, in which politicians of both 
parties and the press joined. President Bush crowed: "The specter of 
Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian 
peninsula." The two major news magazines, Time and Newsweek, printed 
special editions hailing the victory. Each devoted about a hundred 
pages to the celebration, mentioning proudly the small number of 
American casualties. They said not a word about the tens of thousands 
of Iraqis--soldiers and civilians--themselves victims first of Saddam 
Hussein's tyranny, and then of George Bush's war.
 
There was no photograph of a single dead Iraqi child, no names of 
particular Iraqis, no images of suffering and grief to convey to the 
American people what our overwhelming military machine was doing to 
other human beings.
 
The bombing of Afghanistan has been treated as if human beings are of 
little consequence. It was been portrayed as a "war on terrorism," 
not a war on men, women, children. The few press reports of 
"accidents" were quickly followed with denials, excuses, 
justifications. There has been some bandying about of numbers of 
Afghan civilian deaths--but always numbers.
 
Only rarely has the human story, with names and images, come through 
as more than a flash of truth, as one day when I read of a ten-year 
old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the 
Pakistani border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of 
American bombs.
 
Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack 
on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note 
that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for 
war--else we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point 
out that the country that possesses by far the most "weapons of mass 
destruction" is our country, which has used them more often and with 
more deadly results than any nation on Earth. We can point to our 
national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful 
evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our 
government.
 
But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go 
beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John le Carre 
has one of his characters say: "I despise experts more than anyone on 
earth.")
 
Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment 
and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be 
known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war 
memorial?
 
For this we will need the help of people in the arts, those who 
through time--from Euripedes to Bob Dylan--have written and sung 
about specific, recognizable victims of war. In 1935, Jean Giraudoux, 
the French playwright, with the memory of the first World War still 
in his head, wrote "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place." Demokos, a 
Trojan soldier, asks the aged Hecuba to tell him "what war looks 
like." She responds: "Like the bottom of a baboon. When the baboon is 
up in a tree, with its hind end facing us, there is the face of war 
exactly: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig."
 
If enough Americans could see that, perhaps the war on Iraq would not 
take place.
 
http://www.progressive.org