It is time to speak the unspeakable. But we should get something
straight right from the start. To us, there is image more searing,
heart-rending an image than that of women and children who have
become, in the antiseptic phraseology of war, collateral damage.
But equally so, in the awful arithmetic of war, it doesn’t make
sense, if a trade-off there must be, to equate the lives of people
close to you with the lives of those who are not. It would be
patent hypocrisy for a man to say that he equates the death of his
mother with the death of the fellow who drives the bus that takes
him to work every day. Similarly, we cannot easily abide equating
the death of a young American in the Armed Forces with the death,
cruel though it may be, of an Iraqi civilian. It is true any death
is a tragedy. In 1624, John Donne wrote:
“… any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to
know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”
But better than tolling for thee is if the bell tolls for
somebody else.
As it is now, we have drawn an exquisite line in Baghdad: the
military, we believe, on one side; allegedly innocent civilians on
the other. With precision we bomb only the side of the line behind
which we believe stands the military. We bomb in this manner in an
effort to protect the Iraqi civilians and hopefully only injure
those Iraqis involved in the war effort, assuming, in the process,
that all the Iraqis on other side of the line are good Iraqis, and
no member of the military would be dishonest enough to avoid bombs
by crossing the line. In so doing, we are certainly putting
American young men and women, and the pilots who perform this
surgical bombing, at risk. The bad Iraqis who take advantage of our
policy to live to fight another day are an on-going threat to our
troops. Our troops are accompanied by lawyers whose duty it is to
make sure none of our targets violate the Geneva Convention. There
are already 10,000 Iraqi targets that have been declared
off-limits. While we create the conscience-saving device of a line
of demarcation separating the combatants from the civilians, our
enemies do not. Sometimes the enemy hides behind civilian skirts
until our guard is down, and then strikes. Sometimes the civilians
are utilized against their will but less often, we suspect, than we
would like to admit.
There is another point that fits into the category of the
unspeakable. People end up with governments they desire or, at
least, allow to happen. There never was a dictatorship in the
history of the world that sprang up by spontaneous generation like
Minerva arising full blown out of the sea. Certainly, if it ever
did happen, it could not sustain itself without the support of the
people. From Castro to Hitler, dictators have been put in power by
the people of their country. One can remember Castro’s triumphant
entrance into Havana to the adulation of tens of thousands of
Cubans. Similarly, some might find it convenient to forget the fact
that in July 1932 and March 1933 Hitler was elected in free
elections by the German people. Saddam Hussein and his thugs could
not have been in power but for the will of the Iraqi people.
There are reports of unexpected stiffening of resistance by
Iraqi soldiers, not just the elite guard units or the civilian
clothed Iraqi SS troops. These thousands of ordinary foot soldiers
could not have all supped at Saddam Hussein’s table, nor only
performed their duties because revolvers were put to their
heads.
Recent television images have depicted the American troops
dispensing foods to crowds of Iraqis. At the same time there were
interviews from rabid Iraqis who refused to take food from the
Americans, preferring dead Americans to live ones, even live ones
who were offering them food. Further, there are numerous stories of
thousands of Iraqis who have previously fled the country now paying
their own way to return to Iraqi.
Every limitation and control we place on the U.S. military has
been done for humanitarian reasons, and every precision bombing
that is attempted to protect the Iraqi civilians is truly
translatable into added deaths of American soldiers.
What should happen in Iraq is simple and swift. Leaflets should
be distributed to Iraqi civilians informing them that they have 48
hours to evacuate Baghdad. They should be informed that the
coalition forces are prepared to open a safe corridor for their
egress from the city. Then it becomes Saddam Hussein’s problem. He
will be dealing with a Hobson’s choice: if he does not let the
civilians leave the city there will be massive unrest and perhaps
even forceful activities by the population directed to undermine or
overthrow his regime. If citizens are allowed to leave the city
because of the safe corridor, Saddam would be left in town with,
basically, his own thugs. After that, the city should be leveled by
the MOAB’s (Mother of All Bombs) massively destructive non-nuclear
bombs that America now possesses. Perhaps this is not a perfect
solution. By doing this there will weigh on America’s collective
conscience perhaps dead Iraqi civilians who for one reason or
another did not take advantage of our offer of safe passage. But by
pursuing the present policies there will certainly be more dead
Americans.
Our present war policies of humanitarian precision bombings
might allow the bleeding hearts among us to go to bed with clearer
consciences or feel justified in their demonstrations, but the
young Americans would still be dead.
