[Media-watch] Max Hastings "Marine atrocities mock US cause"

[Sigi D]

Dear Media Watch friends
I picked up the Daily Mail 17 11 2004 in the tube -
came across an article by Max Hastings  - good read -
racism and American soldiers - connection to racism
and vietnam; didn't know Hastings was against the war,
too! 
I can't access the Daily Mail site, thus I send you
the same article which also appeared in the Pretoria
News on 18 11 2004
All the best
Sigi

http://www.pretorianews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2304017&fSectionId=670&fSetId=521
http://www.pretorianews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2304017&fSectionId=670&fSetId=521
Marines' atrocities mock US cause

By Max Hastings
This is a scene straight out of Platoon or Full Metal
Jacket. A soldier gazing down on a prostrate enemy
sees him move and shouts: "He's f***ing faking he's
dead." Another soldier fires a single contemptuous
shot into the wounded man's head, and says
laconically: "Well, he's dead now."

On Saturday in Fallujah, that shocking melodrama was
played out for real. US marines shot a wounded and
helpless Iraqi - in a mosque, of all places - while an
NBC television news camera recorded every detail. The
images have flashed across the world, into the homes
of thousands of millions of people, many of whom
already hate what America is doing in Iraq.

It is hard to overstate the damage this horror must
inflict upon the Coalition's cause.

Here are the crusaders for democracy, as George Bush
and Tony Blair portray themselves and their soldiers,
acting like animals. Even before this atrocity, the
world recoiled from the spectacle of Fallujah
shattered in the name of freedom.

In the days ahead, those seconds of tape depicting the
killing of the wounded man will be played again and
again. Their impact upon world opinion seems likely to
be as great as that of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
It will drown out any Muslim pity for murdered Care
director Margaret Hassan.

Two months ago in Basra, a British officer said to me:
"We were appalled by those pictures from Abu Ghraib.
They seemed to cut the legs off the whole moral basis
for our presence here." So they did. So, likewise,
does the film footage from Fallujah.

The US Army and Marine Corps are imbued with a
"warrior ethos", notably more violent than that of the
British Army. This causes them to obliterate with high
explosives targets which a British unit would prefer
to capture and search. 

Americans pursue a doctrine of firepower which causes
Nato allies to think them unfit for any role in which
"hearts and minds" must be won. The fact is that the
American way leaves few hearts and minds alive to
parley with. American soldiers possess a contempt for
people of alien races, which cost them defeat in
Vietnam and could well cost them failure in Iraq.

I remember what a shock it was, 30 years ago in
Indochina, to discover that when Americans spoke of
"gooks" or "dinks", they referred not to the enemy,
but to any Vietnamese.

In their eyes, these were not real people, human
beings with emotions or rights. They perceived
Vietnamese as mere flotsam on America's battlefield.

I made a film for BBC TV during which the cameraman
and I rode in Skyraider fighter cockpits for a
strafing mission. Even with media witnesses, the
pilots dropped their bombloads on civilian homes just
short of the Laos border.

"You see that group of hooches three clicks east of
the river?" the US Air Force controller demanded over
the radio. "Bomb on my smoke." So we devastated a
cluster of huts three kilometres east of the river,
and filmed the mission for posterity.

The Americans didn't care. What the hell? Those were
only "gooks" underneath.

Today likewise, many US soldiers perceive Iraqis with
the same indifference. American barbarities are driven
by a fundamental contempt for the people they are
supposed to be liberating. What is one "towel-head"
more or less, for Chrissakes?

It is true that what the American marine did in
Fallujah, killing a wounded prisoner, has happened a
million times in the history of warfare. The British
killed several hundred crippled Zulus after Rorke's
Drift in 1879. Kitchener left thousands of wounded
Dervishes to die on the battlefield of Omdurman almost
20 years later, as Winston Churchill reported grimly.

I have met plenty of British and American veterans of
both world wars who saw prisoners killed. Let's not
kid ourselves that any army in history has been immune
to brutality.

The public, however, never got to hear about the
uglinesses. For decades, Hollywood nurtured a
sanitised fantasy of battle. Screen soldiers who were
shot slumped bloodlessly to the ground. Only Nazis
shot prisoners or raped women.

All that ended in Vietnam. From the 1960s onwards, not
only was the savagery of war brought home to ordinary
people, but Hollywood abandoned for ever its
nappy-clean presentation of the battlefield.

What is true of Hollywood is also true of the news
media. War is now recorded more explicitly than ever
before in history. TV and newspapers tell the public
with brutal frankness what happens in places like
Fallujah.

Since the beginning of last year's Iraq War, thousands
of journalists and TV people have been "embedded" with
combat units. Some created extraordinary images of
life and death "at the sharp end".

In the immediate aftermath of the drive to Baghdad,
the military deemed "embedding" reporters and
cameramen in military units to have been a propaganda
success.

Today, all that is out of the window. The shots from
Fallujah captured by an NBC TV team "embedded" with
the 3rd Marines have struck a crippling blow at Iraq's
"liberators".

The propaganda battle is vital to any modern military
cause. Public perception is as important as victory,
and inseparable from it.

It is not enough for George Bush to declare from the
distant citadels of Washington that the Coalition's
forces are pursuing an honourable cause. On the
battlefield, they must also be seen to be fighting in
an honourable way.

Apologists may say that it is wrong to damn the whole
US army in Iraq because of the misdeeds of one marine
and some prison guards.

Unfortunately, however, there seems plenty of evidence
to suggest that their conduct was not untypical. And
even more unfortunately, their shameful deeds have
been captured on film.

Not only have they abused Iraqis, they have been shown
before the world to abuse Iraqis. The damning visual
evidence is there.

Iraq is not Vietnam, because the Americans are
unlikely to persevere for years. I have always
predicted that they will cut and run, and sometime
next year this seems likely to happen.

Yet whatever happens afterwards to the Iraqi people,
the way Bush has waged his war in Iraq has inflicted
lasting injury on the cause of democracy. Who can
again take seriously this President's claim to be
fighting for freedom and virtue, when metaphorically
he delivers such proclamations from the wreckage of
Fallujah? 

In the country which he has made the focus of his War
on Terror, the best guesstimate is that 100 000
innocent civilians have died. 

They have been dismembered and incinerated
overwhelmingly by American firepower, but no American
can be bothered to count them. They are only Iraqis.
They are not real people.

Some people say it is wrong to hate George Bush,
especially when he has just won a popular majority in
a presidential election. Yet who can be surprised that
so many decent people loathe him? 

Colin Powell, the only wise man in the Bush
Administration, quit in disgust on Monday. I would
suggest that what happened in Fallujah this weekend is
arguably more the handiwork of Bush, Rumsfeld and
Cheney than of the wretched marine who fired the shot.

They have created this shambles. They are the ones who
seem wholeheartedly to share the ethic of the American
officer in Vietnam, who infamously explained that "we
had to destroy the village in order to save it".

We must cling to a slim hope that Iraq can achieve
stability and freedom, because we shall all be losers
if the attempt fails. But only a fool in the White
House would suppose that he can win the War Against
Terror through so much blood recklessly shed, such
mountains of rubble so carelessly created.

Every frame of film of Saturday's murder in Fallujah
is worth another legion of recruits to al-Qaeda.

Nothing could justify the reported murder of Margaret
Hassan, but in the eyes of many Muslims, her life is a
mere payment on account for Fallujah.

Why shouldn't people hate George Bush? 
 Published on the web by Pretoria News on November 18,
2004. 
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© Pretoria News 2004. All rights reserved.  


		
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