A curious war with no dead

Tom Pearson

There is something curious about the war in Iraq — it's a 
conflict with no dead. There are burning vehicles; soldiers on 
patrol; GI snipers plying their bloody trade; buildings, city 
blocks, whole towns and villages, blown to pieces by American 
shellfire; protesting Iraqis; arrested Iraqis; homeless Iraqis; 
some wounded. But search the newspapers, scrutinise the 
television news, and there's not a body in sight.

This is perhaps the most censored war in history. There are 
reports. In Falluga, 700 reported dead last month, half of them 
women and children. Families, trapped by the fighting in their 
homes, bury their dead in their gardens. Refugees are quoted 
describing "streets littered with bodies".

Right from the beginning, the invaders took their "embedded" 
journalists with them. Then kept them and their cameras away from 
the carnage. Many journalists have been killed — by who? The 
occupying forces who are suppressing information on atrocities, 
torture, racism, rape, mass killings?

Of course, those running the war have learnt some lessons from 
past adventures, in particular Vietnam. It is even forbidden by 
the Bush Government to publish photos of the coffins of US 
personnel, let alone Marines dead in the streets.

Sources independent of the occupiers have come in for brutal 
attention. One of the early targets of US forces in Baghdad was 
Al-Jazeera, the Arab-language television station, which 
was bombed, resulting in the deaths of a number of the station's 
staff.

At the other extreme, there is no detailed coverage of the daily 
lives of the Iraqi people. On the state of their schools, health 
services, water, sanitation, heating, where they get food, etc — 
nothing.

As Robert Fisk, of The Independent newspaper, puts it, 
"Just shut up" is now the foreign policy line of the Bush 
administration. People who raise criticisms of the manipulations 
and machinations of Bush and his cronies are told to pull their 
heads in.

Fisk notes that the occupation's US administrator, Paul Bremer, 
closed cleric Muqtada Sadr's little weekly paper — a closure 
that in part sparked a bloody uprising — because it condemned 
Bremer for taking Iraq down "Saddam's path".

Here in Australia "Just shut up" is also the favoured approach of 
the Howard Government, which, like its US and British 
counterparts, keeps announcing that their whole and sole purpose 
in Iraq is to bring democracy to the Iraqi people.

Curious also, then, that at the same time they have put in place 
draconian anti-democratic laws designed to silence all opposition 
to their policies and actions.

But if the images that would speak a thousand words — of the 
dead, the dying and the maimed — are being buried by the 
occupiers and their masters, the power of words has not been 
quelled.

Here is Felicity Arbuthnot in the British socialist weekly, 
Morning Star, on the ruthlessness of the occupiers: 
"Winning `hearts and minds', `freedom, democracy', common 
civility and decency have no place, just arbitrary slaughter on 
suspicion, random bombings, the demolition of homes of 
`suspects', and the rounding up of families, women and children, 
in night raids.

"Collective punishment is the order of the day, and night."