Screams Will
Not Be Heard
By Madeleine
Bunting
08 November 8
The
Guardian
With
fitting irony, one of the camps used by the US marines waiting for the
assault on Falluja was formerly a Ba'ath party retreat occasionally
used by Saddam Hussein's sons. Dreamland, as it was known, has an island
in the middle of an artificial lake fringed by palms.
Now the camp's dream-like
unreality is distorting every news report filed on the preparations
for the onslaught on Falluja. We don't know, and won't know, anything
about what happens in the next few days except for what the US military
authorities choose to let us know. It's long since been too dangerous
for journalists to move around unless they are embedded with the US
forces. There is almost no contact left with civilians still in Falluja,
the only information is from those who have left.
This is how the
fantasy runs: a city the size of Brighton is now only ever referred
to as a "militants' stronghold" or "insurgents' redoubt".
The city is being "softened up" with precision attacks from
the air. Pacifying Falluja has become the key to stabilising the country
ahead of the January elections. The "final assault" is imminent,
in which the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi
city with their extremist Islam will be "cleared", "rooted
out" or "crushed". Or, as one marine put it: "We
will win the hearts and minds of Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents.
We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."
These are the questionable
assumptions and make-believe which are now all that the embedded journalists
with the US forces know to report. Every night, the tone gets a little
more breathless and excited as the propaganda operation to gear the
troops up for battle coopts the reporters into its collective psychology.
There's a repulsive
asymmetry of war here: not the much remarked upon asymmetry of the few
thousand insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly outnumbered by the US,
but the asymmetry of information. In an age of instant communication,
we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of what happens inside
Falluja in the next few days. The media representation of this war will
be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated by the flashes
of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be left to our
imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud walls; the
agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts to
save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few
supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on
the reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and
Grozny.
The silence from
Falluja marks a new and agonising departure in the shape of 21st-century
war. The horrifying shift in the last century was how, increasingly,
war was waged against civilians: their proportion of the death toll
rose from 50% to 90%. It prompted the development of a form of war-reporting,
exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the technology and hardware,
but about human suffering, and which fuelled public outrage. No longer.
The reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military machismo
of an earlier age. This war against the defenceless will go unreported.
The reality is that
a city can never be adequately described as a "militants' stronghold".
It's a label designed to stiffen the heart of a soldier, but it is blinding
us, the democracies that have inflicted this war, to the consequences
of our actions. Falluja is still home to thousands of civilians. The
numbers who have fled the prospective assault vary, but there could
be 100,000 or more still in their homes. Typically, as in any war, those
who don't get out of the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable -
the elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it too late to
get away; and the insanely brave, such as medical staff.
Nor does it seem
possible that reporters still use the terms "softening up"
or "precision" bombing. They achieve neither softening nor
precision, as Falluja well knew long before George W Bush arrived in
the White House. In the first Gulf war, an RAF laser-guided bomb intended
for the city's bridge went astray and landed in a crowded market, killing
up to 150. Last year, the killing of 15 civilians shortly after the
US arrived in the city ensured that Falluja became a case study in how
to win a war but lose the occupation. A catalogue of catastrophic blunders
has transformed a relatively calm city with a strongly pro-US mayor
into a battleground.
One last piece of
fantasy is that there is unlikely to be anything "final" about
this assault. Already military analysts acknowledge that a US victory
in Falluja could have little effect on the spreading incidence of violence
across Iraq. What the insurgents have already shown is that they are
highly decentralised, and yet the quick copying of terrorist techniques
indicates some degree of cooperation. Hopes of a peace seem remote;
the future looks set for a chronic, intermittent civil war. By the time
the bulldozers have ploughed their way through the centre of Falluja,
attention could have shifted to another "final assault" on
another "militant stronghold", as another city of homes, shops
and children's playgrounds morphs into a battleground.
The recent comment
of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: "Why," she
asked wearily, "don't they go and fight in a desert away from houses
and people?" Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable
historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to
retreat to in a time of war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian
wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city
into a target, a place of terror.
What is so disturbing
is that much of the violence meted out to cities in the past 60-odd
years has rarely had a strategic purpose - for example, the infamous
bombing of Dresden. Nor is it effective in undermining morale or motivation;
while the violence destroys physical and economic capital, it usually
generates social capital - for example, the Blitz spirit or the solidarity
of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 - and in Chechnya served only to
establish a precarious peace in a destroyed Grozny and fuel a desperate,
violent resistance.
Assaults on cities
serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to demonstrate resolve
and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are required:
they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim. That was the thinking
behind 9/11, and Falluja risks becoming a horrible mirror-image of that
atrocity. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in Dreamland would it
be possible to believe that the ruination of this city will do anything
to enhance the legitimacy of the US occupation and of the Iraqi government
it appointed.