<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META content="MSHTML 5.00.2314.1000" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Verdana size=2>
<DIV><FONT face=Verdana size=2>Hello, all. This message is about the assault on
Fallujah and what we can <BR>expect, and our responsibility to oppose it. For
more information, please <BR>visit my blog Empire Notes at <A
href="http://www.empirenotes.org">http://www.empirenotes.org</A>.<BR><BR>To
unsubscribe, send a message (from the subscribed address) to <BR><A
href="mailto:empirenotes-unsubscribe@npogroups.org">empirenotes-unsubscribe@npogroups.org</A>.<BR><BR>Best
regards,<BR><BR>Rahul Mahajan<BR><BR>Fallujah and the Reality of War<BR>by Rahul
Mahajan, Empire Notes<BR><BR>The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being
sold as liberation of the <BR>people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a
necessary step to implementing <BR>"democracy" in Iraq. These are lies.<BR><BR>I
was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a
<BR>word picture of what such an assault means.<BR><BR>Fallujah is dry and hot;
like Southern California, it has been made an <BR>agricultural area only by
virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known <BR>for years as a
particularly devout city; people call it the City of a <BR>Thousand Mosques. In
the mid-90's, when Saddam wanted his name to be added <BR>to the call to prayer,
the imams of Fallujah refused.<BR><BR>U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the
beginning of the assault; for the <BR>next several weeks, Fallujah was a
blacked-out town, with light provided by <BR>generators only in critical places
like mosques and clinics. The town was <BR>placed under siege; the ban on
bringing in food, medicine, and other basic <BR>items was broken only when
Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The <BR>atmosphere was one of
pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more <BR>bombing. Noncombatants
and families with sick people, the elderly, and <BR>children were leaving in
droves. After initial instances in which people <BR>were prevented from leaving,
U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave - <BR>except for what they called
"military age males," men usually between 15 <BR>and 60. Keeping noncombatants
from leaving a place under bombardment is a <BR>violation of the laws of war. Of
course, if you assume that every military <BR>age male is an enemy, there can be
no better sign that you are in the wrong <BR>country, and that, in fact, your
war is on the people, not on their <BR>oppressors,, not a war of
liberation.<BR><BR>The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from
the bulk of the <BR>town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the
main bridge, <BR>cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to
treat <BR>patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could
<BR>carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed
<BR>at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no
<BR>operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending
<BR>machine. Another clinic, I'm told, had been an auto repair shop. This
<BR>hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also
<BR>violates the Geneva Convention.<BR><BR>In Fallujah, you were rarely free of
the sound of artillery booming in the <BR>background, punctuated by the smaller,
higher-pitched note of the <BR>mujaheddin's hand-held mortars. After even a few
minutes of it, you have to <BR>stop paying attention to it - and yet, of course,
you never quite stop. <BR>Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I'm often
transported <BR>instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of
Fallujah.<BR><BR>In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500,
1000, and <BR>2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that
can <BR>demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had
snipers <BR>criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of
<BR>sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man's-lands of
<BR>sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever
<BR>moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours,
<BR>only five were "military-age males." I saw old women, old men, a child of
<BR>10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in
<BR>Baghdad they might have been able to save him.<BR><BR>One thing that snipers
were very discriminating about - every single <BR>ambulance I saw had bullet
holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence <BR>of specific, deliberate
sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in <BR>wounded people were shot
at. When we first reported this fact, we came in <BR>for near-universal
execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked <BR>me how I knew that
it wasn't the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, <BR>say, Brownsville,
Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded <BR>(which, of course, Mr.
Bush courageously protected us from during the <BR>Vietnam war era) and
Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of <BR>whether the residents
were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow <BR>guess, would not have come
up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the <BR>Iraqi Ministry of Health and
even by the U.S. military.<BR><BR>The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000
people were killed directly, <BR>blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess,
based on news reports and <BR>personal observation, is that 2/3 to ¾ were
noncombatants.<BR><BR>But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever
you like about <BR>the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential
areas in <BR>Fallujah, but the reports don't tell you what that means. You read
about <BR>precision strikes, and it's true that America's GPS-guided bombs are
very <BR>accurate - when they're not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time
that <BR>they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within
10 <BR>meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound
<BR>bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the whole
<BR>neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under
<BR>bombardment is a town in constant fear.<BR><BR>You read the reports about X
killed and Y wounded. And you should remember <BR>those numbers; those numbers
are important. But equally important is to <BR>remember that those numbers lie -
in a war zone, everyone is wounded.<BR><BR>The first assault on Fallujah was a
military failure. This time, the <BR>resistance is stronger, better-armed, and
better-organized; to "win," the <BR>U.S. military will have to pull out all the
stops. Even within horror and <BR>terror, there are degrees, and we - and the
people of Fallujah - ain't seen <BR>nothin' yet. George W. Bush has just claimed
a new mandate - the world has <BR>been delivered into his hands.<BR><BR>There
will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but <BR>our
government won't listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the <BR>people of
Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror <BR>will be us,
the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn't <BR>meet in April
and we didn't meet in August when Najaf was similarly <BR>attacked; will we meet
it this time?<BR><BR>Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes
<BR>(<A href="http://www.empirenotes.org">http://www.empirenotes.org</A>), with
regularly updated commentary on U.S. <BR>foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq,
and the state of the American <BR>Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice,
and was in Fallujah during the <BR>siege in April. His most recent book is Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power <BR>in Iraq and Beyond <BR>(<<A
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20</A>><A
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20</A>).
<BR>He can be reached at <A
href="mailto:rahul@empirenotes.org">rahul@empirenotes.org</A><BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>