Haditha, Ishaqi: so what else is new?
Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian yesterday: “Haditha: so what else is new?” echoed many people's view that the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by US troops at Haditha was most likely not an isolated incident but the tip of a very large iceberg.
Two years ago, a "senior Army officer" told The Telegraph that "My view and the view of the British chain of command [my emphasis] is that the Americans' ….. don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful".
Given the potency of the word “untermenschen” (the use of which wasn’t isolated), and the source of these comments, this should have set several alarm bells ringing. In fact the story of widespread, substantive allegations of US brutality is there for anyone who wants to report it. The most obvious person to start with is Dahr Jamail, a freelance American journalist who co-wrote this Guardian piece on Falluja with Jonathan Steele last year. Jamail’s compiled a wealth of eyewitness accounts of atrocities like Haditha. To anyone familiar with his work these stories in Time and now from the BBC are tragic, but old news.
Though Jamail is probably the best, he is by no means the only source of information on possible widespread atrocities. Take this account of US attacks on hospitals and health centres in US magazine The Nation, for example. As I say, the story's there for anyone who wants to report it. Last year I wrote this article showing how allegations of atrocities and other war crimes are consistently ignored by the mainstream media. I doubt that it would have been so easy for supporters of the war to poor scorn on the Lancet report into Iraqi deaths in the conflict - which gave a figure of 100,000 as of October 2004 - if the realities of coalition conduct had been open to proper scrutiny in public debate.
Given the fact that Britain helped start this war, we share responsibility for whatever happens in the course of it. We should therefore at the very least be aware of the serious question of whether atrocities committed by our side in the conflict are not isolated, but widespread. The media could make a belated start by giving Dahr Jamail the prime time tv news interview that his brave work surely deserves.
Two years ago, a "senior Army officer" told The Telegraph that "My view and the view of the British chain of command [my emphasis] is that the Americans' ….. don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful".
Given the potency of the word “untermenschen” (the use of which wasn’t isolated), and the source of these comments, this should have set several alarm bells ringing. In fact the story of widespread, substantive allegations of US brutality is there for anyone who wants to report it. The most obvious person to start with is Dahr Jamail, a freelance American journalist who co-wrote this Guardian piece on Falluja with Jonathan Steele last year. Jamail’s compiled a wealth of eyewitness accounts of atrocities like Haditha. To anyone familiar with his work these stories in Time and now from the BBC are tragic, but old news.
Though Jamail is probably the best, he is by no means the only source of information on possible widespread atrocities. Take this account of US attacks on hospitals and health centres in US magazine The Nation, for example. As I say, the story's there for anyone who wants to report it. Last year I wrote this article showing how allegations of atrocities and other war crimes are consistently ignored by the mainstream media. I doubt that it would have been so easy for supporters of the war to poor scorn on the Lancet report into Iraqi deaths in the conflict - which gave a figure of 100,000 as of October 2004 - if the realities of coalition conduct had been open to proper scrutiny in public debate.
Given the fact that Britain helped start this war, we share responsibility for whatever happens in the course of it. We should therefore at the very least be aware of the serious question of whether atrocities committed by our side in the conflict are not isolated, but widespread. The media could make a belated start by giving Dahr Jamail the prime time tv news interview that his brave work surely deserves.
posted by David Wearing at 9:18 AM
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