In the Gulf war, every
last nail was accounted for, but the Iraqi dead went
untallied.
At last
their story is being told
By John Pilger
26th June, 2000
The great American reporter Seymour
Hersh is at war with the American military over his j'accuse in the
New Yorker that a much-lauded general, now a member of President
Clinton's cabinet, ordered his troops to fire on retreating Iraqis on
the eve of the Gulf war ceasefire in 1991. Barry McCaffrey, commander
of the 24th Infantry Division, has denied accusations such as the
machine-gunning of 350 disarmed Iraqi prisoners. "Why are we shooting
at these people when they are not shooting at us?" says one of his
men on a tape quoted by Hersh. "It's murder," says
another.
The allegations against McCaffrey
suggest he was a bad apple. In fact, the enduring open secret of the
Gulf war was that it was not a war at all, rather an epic act of
homicide. A great deal of propaganda has been devoted to covering up
this truth and promoting so-called smart weapons, as if war has
finally become a science. The bombing of the Al-Amiriya bunker in
Baghdad in February 1991, incinerating more than 300 people, mostly
women and children, was a case in point; it was blamed on Saddam
Hussein and said to be a "military facility".
Six months later, the unedited and
unseen CNN and World Television News (WTN) "feeds" of footage of the
bunker were obtained by the Columbia Journalism Review. "They showed
scenes of incredible carnage," wrote the reporter who viewed them.
"Rescue workers were collapsing in grief, vomiting from the stench,
dropping blackened corpses." Unknown to correspondents corralled in
Saudi Arabia, less than 7 per cent of the weapons used in the Gulf
war were "smart"; most were old-fashioned "dump" bombs. Seventy per
cent of the 88,500 tons dropped on Iraq and Kuwait - the equivalent
of more than seven Hiroshimas - fell in populated areas.
Paul Roberts, one of the few
journalists to escape the "pool" system, travelled with Bedouins. "I
experienced bombing in Cambodia, but it was nothing like that . . ."
he said. "There were three waves every night. After 20 minutes of
this carpet bombing there would be a silence and you would hear a
screaming of children and people. [The survivors] were
walking round like zombies." This was never published in the
mainstream media, nor was the overwhelming evidence that - as in
Vietnam, and last year in Serbia and Kosovo - civilians were not
mistakenly killed, but targeted.
As the ceasefire was being negotiated
with Iraq, columns of retreating Iraqis and foreign guest workers who
had been trapped in Kuwait were attacked by American carrier-based
aircraft. They used cluster bombs and napalm B, the type that sticks
to the skin while continuing to burn. Returning pilots bragged about
a "turkey shoot". Others likened it to "shooting fish in a barrel".
Among the fleeing military trucks were old Toyotas, Volkswagens,
motorbikes. Defenceless people were strafed as they ran for
cover.
Unknown to journalists in the pool
system, in the last two days before the ceasefire (when the McCaffrey
atrocities allegedly happened), American armoured bulldozers were
deployed, mostly at night, burying Iraqis alive in their trenches,
including the wounded. Six months later, New York Newsday disclosed
that three brigades of the 1st Mechanised Infantry Division, "used
snowplows mounted on tanks and combat earth movers to bury thousands
of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 70 miles of
trenches". A brigade commander, Colonel Anthony Moreno, said: "For
all I know, we could have killed thousands." The only images of this
shown on British television were used as a fleeting backdrop to the
reminiscences of correspondents on the BBC's arts programme The Late
Show.
The policy of the American
commander-in-chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was that the Iraqi
dead were not to be counted. One of his senior officers boasted:
"This is the first war in modern times where every screwdriver, every
nail, is accounted for." As for human beings, he added, "I don't
think anybody is going to be able to come up with an accurate count
for the Iraqi dead."
The deaths of nine British
servicemen, all of them killed by American "friendly fire",
preoccupied the British media. An editorial in the Independent
rejoiced in "miraculously light casualties". In the United States,
there was some attempt to root out the truth. However, this was
confined to very few newspapers, such as New York Newsday with its
outstanding reporter Knute Royce, and samizdat publications such as Z
magazine, which publishes Noam Chomsky.
Shortly before Christmas 1991, the
Medical Educational Trust in London published a comprehensive study
of casualties. Up to a quarter of a million men, women and children
were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack on
Iraq and its immediate aftermath. In evidence before the
Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the major
international relief agencies reported that 1.8 million people had
been made homeless, and Iraq's electricity, water, sewage,
communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure had
been "substantially destroyed", producing "conditions for famine and
epidemics".
Most of this was not reported, or it
was tucked away. In the most covered war in history, almost everybody
missed the story. It is hardly surprising that, in the nine years
since, the deaths of half a million children as a result of an
American and British-led economic embargo and the continuing bombing
of populated areas in Iraq are not news. "The thought that the state
is punishing so many innocent people," wrote Arthur Miller, "is
intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally
denied."
