The world is watching

Lee Kyong-hee in the Korea Herald, Seoul

Last Saturday afternoon, the host of a popular radio news show in Seoul pleaded with Korean parents to keep their children from television. It was hours after a thousand Tomahawks had pounded Baghdad. Watching the city reduced to smoldering rubble and its skies ablaze with soaring columns of dark smoke, the world was terrified with a sense of helplessness. . . .

A war broadcast in real time by the press “embedded” with the allied forces is certainly a novel experience with conspicuous benefits. But it has high risks of injustice as well. It is doomed to project a one-eyed view of the conflict. . . . The risks grow even more dangerous in wars like the one that was started by President George W. Bush and his hawkish commanders in the face of popular objection around the world, not to mention the absence of endorsement from the United Nations. The media can be exploited to make up for the invasion’s widely disputed moral and legal justification. . . .

For all the outspoken suspicions about Bush’s genuine motivation for his misadventure, there may be no reason yet to doubt his avowed goal. Nonetheless, the painful question at the moment is how much sacrifice the war will incur on innocent people before his commendable dream comes true.

James Meek in The Guardian, London

Hopes of a joyful liberation of a grateful Iraq by U.S. and British armies are evaporating fast in the Euphrates valley as a sense of bitterness, germinated from blood spilled and humiliations endured, begins to grow in the hearts of invaded and invader alike. . . .

Out in the plain west of the city, marines shepherding a gigantic series of convoys north towards Baghdad have reacted to ragged sniping with an aggressive series of house searches and arrests.

A surgical assistant at the Saddam hospital in Nassiriya, interviewed at a marine check point outside the city, said that on Sunday, half an hour after two dead marines were brought into the hospital, U.S. aircraft dropped what he described as three or four cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing 10 and wounding 200.

Mustafa Mohammed Ali said he understood U.S. forces going straight to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but was outraged that they had attacked his city and killed civilians. “I don’t want forces to come into the city. They have an objective, they go straight to the target,” he said. “There’s no room in the Saddam hospital because of the wounded. It’s the only hospital in town. When I saw the dead Americans I cheered in my heart.” . . .

Asked about the much-vaunted fedayeen militia, reported by some sources to be leading the battle, Mr. Ali said: “They are children.” Other travellers from Nassiriya said they were press-ganged youths who went into battle dressed in black with black scarves wound around their faces and who fight for fear of the execution committees waiting to shoot them if they try to run.

Watching from behind a barbed wire barrier as hundreds of the marines’ ammunition trucks, armoured amphibious vehicles, tankers, tanks and trucks lumbered past through clouds of dust as fine as talcum powder, Mr. Ali asked why such a huge army was needed just to catch a single man. “We don’t want Saddam, but we don’t want [the Americans] to stay afterwards,” he said. “Like they entered into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar and didn’t leave, they will do here. They are fighting Islam. They’re entering under the pretext of targeting Ba’ath, but they won’t leave.”

Another Iraqi squatting next to him leaned over, pointed to the convoys and said: “This is better than Saddam’s government.”

Pratap Chatterjee in the Pakistan Daily Times, Lahore

As the first bombs rain down on Baghdad, thousands of employees of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, are working alongside U.S. troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars. According to U.S. Army sources, they are building tent cities and providing logistical support for the war in Iraq in addition to other hot spots in the “war on terrorism.” . . .

In December 2001, Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, secured a 10-year deal known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) from the Pentagon. The contract is a “cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite delivery/indefinite-quantity service” which basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send Brown and Root anywhere in the world to run military operations for a profit.

Linda Theis, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, confirmed that Brown and Root is also supporting operations in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Georgia, Jordan and Uzbekistan. “Specific locations along with military units, number of personnel assigned, and dates of duration are considered classified,” she said. “The overall anticipated cost of task orders awarded since contract award in December 2001 is approximately $830 million.” . . .

During the past few weeks, [approximately 1,800] Brown and Root employees have helped transform Kuwait into an armed camp, to support some 80,000 foreign troops, roughly the equivalent of 10 percent of Kuwait’s native-born population. . . . Some of the encampments are named after the states associated with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001–Camp New York, Camp Virginia and Camp Pennsylvania. The headquarters for this effort is Camp Arifjan, where civilian and military employees have built a gravel terrace with plastic picnic tables and chairs, surrounded by a gymnasium in a tent, a PX and newly arrived fast food outlets such as Burger King, Subway and Baskin-Robbins, set up in trailers or shipping containers. Basketball hoops and volleyball nets are set up outside the mess hall.

Raju Rajagopal in The Times of India, Mumbai (Bombay)

How can [the U.S.] suddenly claim that it truly cares for the welfare of Iraqis, after having presided over 12 years of crippling sanctions, which [have] killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children? The so-called “embedded” journalists travelling with the U.S. army have become a huge embarrassment to the profession, as they ingratiate themselves to their commanders, and appear to have become an extension of the Pentagon propaganda machinery. . . . It has become hard to distinguish between TV anchors and a coterie of retired generals, who seem to have taken over the airwaves with mutual back-patting for the difficult job being done by the journalists and our troops. Cooed one anchor, “The reason the U.S. is going out of its way not to destroy the civilian infrastructure is that we are soon going to own it anyway.” Apologised another anchor to Gen. Wesley Clark, “too bad we didn’t have such a close relationship with the Pentagon during the Vietnam War.”

The gathering strength of the anti-war movement across the globe seems to have caught the administration by surprise. An alarmed White House now seems to be egging on the small pro-war movement to take to the streets. One is beginning to hear all the familiar jingoistic slogans against peace demonstrators: unpatriotic, un-American, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, prolonging the war, putting our troops in harms way, etc.–the sort of accusations that those working for secularism, peace, and harmony in India are painfully familiar with. . . .

At the risk of sounding cynical, it seems to me that the lower the cost of this war in American lives, the more the chances of [America gaining] a feeling of invincibility. That would be a sure formula for America’s continuing misadventures towards total dominance of the world’s resources, as enunciated in the “shock and awe” doctrine. If this is indeed the course that Mr. Bush is embarked upon, we had all better brace ourselves for a long period of world-wide acts of terrorism, which this war was intended to end.

Donald Rothwell in the Sydney Morning Herald

Early last year the U.S. was embroiled in a controversy over the application of the Geneva Convention to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured during the Afghanistan conflict. The U.S. has consistently argued against applying the convention to Afghan POWs, insisting that the fighters were “battlefield detainees” with no rights under international law other than respect for very basic principles of humanity. . .

While there can be little doubt that the Geneva Convention clearly applies in Iraq, the U.S. ambivalence over the captured prisoners from Afghanistan now held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have rebounded upon it in this instance.

What is important for all parties to this war to remember is that if they expect their troops to be treated consistently with international law then this is a reciprocal obligation. The recent actions of the U.S. in Afghanistan and now in Iraq to unilaterally interpret international law, including the U.N. Charter, unfortunately undermine respect for international law. u

This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 2, 2003.