a war lasting months may after all have its merits

Source: We are the chemotherapy

Amid all the claims and counter-claims - about whether the war is going according to plan, whether it will take weeks, months or years, whether the Iraqis really want to be liberated - it is easy to forget the true horror of war. The first pictures of exploding bombs, the first reports of tank battles, the first sight of flag-draped coffins may shock and awe us, but we soon take them for granted. We learn to distrust reports about numbers killed and how they were killed, so numbed are we by propaganda on both sides. We see a missile fall on a market place, killing dozens, and we assess how it plays in PR terms. We argue about whether a US or an Iraqi missile was responsible, as though it would make any difference to the 62 dead people and their parents, spouses or children. We hear British and US spokesmen arguing that there would be hardly any deaths at all if only Saddam would play by the rules, as though we had all thought him a sort of Boy Scout figure who spent his weekends helping old ladies across busy roads. We complain that Iraqis carry out treacherous ambushes on our troops, as though it were our country, not theirs.

The reality is that war not only kills; it degrades. If you want to understand that, look up a report from the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah in the 30 March issue of the Sunday Times, a pro-war paper. Written by Mark Franchetti, "embedded" with US forces, it recounts an incident that occurred before the more widely publicised shooting of women and children at a checkpoint near Karbala, farther north. Mr Franchetti saw some 15 vehicles blocking a road. They were riddled with bullet holes; some were already burnt out, others still burning. "Amid the wreckage," wrote Mr Franchetti, "I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or nearby ditches." One man's body was still in flames, giving out a hissing sound. A girl, no older than five, lay dead in a ditch; the man beside her, probably her father, had lost half his head. A woman, probably her mother, lay dead in the back of an old Volga. These people had blundered on to a bridge crucial to US supply lines and met shell-shocked, trigger-happy marines.

Mr Franchetti quotes a lieutenant in tears, expressing deep distress at "that little baby girl". But another marine says: "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy . . . Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him." A few days earlier, writes Mr Franchetti, these had been "bright-eyed, small-town boys". They were expecting "a welcome, or at least a swift surrender". Instead, they found themselves lured into a battle that left at least 21 Americans dead. Mr Franchetti spares no details of that horror. He quotes one marine: "I don't even know how many friends I have lost. I don't care if they nuke that bloody city now. From one house they were waving, while shooting at us with AKs from the next."

The importance of this outstanding report - like that by the late Nicholas Tomalin for the same paper from Vietnam, "The general goes zapping Charlie Cong" - is that it gets us away from the bromides and excuses of politicians and official spokesmen. It shows us how the war is perceived on the ground, and how it affects minds and moral sensitivities. It shows that the expectation of easy victory was not a media invention; it was shared by the ordinary soldiers. But more important, look again at what the marine said: "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy." That expresses, in graphic terms, what the Bushes, Blairs, Rumsfelds and Straws have essentially been saying all along. If you do not feel comfortable with it, do not support this war.

Give us victory (but just not yet)

Should the anti-war movement stay silent? This paper(NS), like most that opposed the war, took the view that, once started, the best end was a quick and comprehensive US/British victory. That would minimise the violence to the Iraqi people and, even if the invaders could be persuaded to withdraw, it is unthinkable to leave those few Iraqis who have co-operated with them to Saddam's mercies.

To that position, it is now necessary to enter three reservations.

First, if the war becomes more difficult, the invaders will be tempted to prosecute it more ruthlessly, with less regard for civilian lives. Vigorous reminders that many think it an unnecessary war will help to restrain political and military leaders.

Second, the choice is not necessarily between total withdrawal and total victory, particularly if the latter entails razing Baghdad to the ground. A simple ceasefire - negotiated perhaps with a successor to Saddam, if the tyrant is indeed as dead as government sources keep trying to tell us he is - would leave British and US forces in firm control of southern Iraq. That is where Shias, the likely targets of Saddam's revenge, are concentrated - though those phantasmagoric weapons of mass destruction, still undiscovered, must now be presumed to lie in the Sunni-dominated north.

Third, as several NS contributors report, the White House hawks, militantly supportive of Israel's Likud government and fanatically convinced of America's mission to civilise the world, are increasingly in the ascendant. The talk of next invading Syria or Iran is roughly at the level that talk of invading Iraq was a year ago: we can't quite believe it's serious. This time we had better believe it and treat the Bush regime, as public opinion throughout Europe does, as a threat to world peace. A rapid triumph in Baghdad would give it confidence and momentum and allow it enough time to zap another country before next year's presidential elections. For that reason, a war lasting months may after all have its merits.


I agree, a war lasting months may after all have its merits. Sad enough innocent Iraqis will suffer even more.