[R-G] Does Tony Blair have any idea what the flies are like that feed o...

[DavidMcR at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/26/03 1:11:17 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
vlerner at interpac.net writes:

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  http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=22242
 Does Tony Blair have any idea what the flies are like that feed off the
 dead?
 By Robert Fisk
 
 
 
 LONDON, 26 January 2003 — On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as
 they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous
 beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in
 front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the
 burned military sleeve flapping in the wind.
 
 “Just for the record,” the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV
 would never show such footage. The things we see — the filth and obscenity
 of corpses — cannot be shown. First because it is not “appropriate” to
 depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was
 shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war.
 
 That of course was in 1991. The “highway of death,” they called it — there
 was actually a parallel and much worse “highway of death” 10 miles to the
 east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up to film
 it — and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the photograph of
 the shriveled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in his truck. This was an iconic
 illustration of a kind because it did represent what we had seen, when it
 was eventually published.
 
 For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War — there
 was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing — it was
 necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on
 their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those World War I paintings
 of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die benignly and without
 obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without a trace of shit or
 mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on to the morning news
 programs.
 
 I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had shelled
 Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106 civilians,
 more than half of them children, I came across a young woman holding in her
 arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. “My father, my father,” she kept
 crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of his legs was missing —
 the Israelis used proximity shells which cause amputation wounds — but when
 that scene reached television screens in Europe and America, the camera was
 close up on the girl and the dead man’s face. The amputations were not to be
 seen. The cause of death had been erased in the interests of good taste. It
 was as if the old man had died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his
 daughter’s shoulder to die in peace.
 
 Today, when I listen to the threats of US President George W. Bush against
 Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of British Prime Minister Tony
 Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality. Does George, who
 declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have any idea what these corpses
 smell like? Does Tony have the slightest conception of what the flies are
 like, the big bluebottles that feed on the dead, and then come to settle on
 our faces and our notepads? Soldiers know. I remember one British officer
 asking to use the BBC’s satellite phone just after the liberation of Kuwait
 in 1991. He was talking to his family in England and I watched him
 carefully. “I have seen some terrible things,” he said. And then he broke
 down, weeping and shaking and holding the phone dangling in his hand over
 the transmission set. Did his family have the slightest idea what he was
 talking about? They would not have understood by watching television.
 
 Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic population —
 albeit only about 20 percent in support of this particular Iraqi folly — has
 been protected from the realities of violent death. But I am much struck by
 the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of World War II, men and
 women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an inalienable memory of torn
 limbs and suffering.
 
 I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead,
 howling like an animal — which is, of course, what we all are — before he
 died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me when an
 Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly, murderously, for
 throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg sticking out of her
 stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after a Palestinian bomber
 had decided to execute the families inside; and the heaps of Iraqi dead at
 the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war; and the young man showing me the
 thick black trail of his daughter’s blood outside Algiers where armed men
 had cut her throat.
 
 But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all the
 other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have to think
 of these vile images. For them it’s about surgical strikes, collateral
 damage and all the other examples of war’s linguistic mendacity. We are
 going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the people of Iraq — some
 of whom we will obviously kill — and we are going to give them democracy and
 protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes trials and we are going to be
 ever so moral, and we are going to watch our defense “experts” on TV with
 their bloodless sandpits and their awesome knowledge of weapons which rip
 off heads.
 
 Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped
 neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee convoy
 in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit. His head lay
 in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a Tudor executioner.
 Months later, I learned his name and talked to the girl who was hit by the
 severed head during the US air strike and who laid the head reverently in
 the grass where I found it. NATO, of course, did not apologize to the
 family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry after war. No one acknowledges
 the truth of it. No one shows you what we see. Which is how our leaders and
 our betters persuade us — still — to go to war. (The Independent)
 
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