Why The Children
In Iraq Make
No Sound When They Fall
By Bernard Chazelle
17 February, 2005
Countercurrents.org
No
one said that dying had to be dull.
"Screaming with fear, paralyzed children
at a shelter for the physically disabled
and mentally ill in Galle, Sri Lanka, lay
helplessly in their beds as seawater
surged around them." The CNN report
read like the screenplay of a horror film.
A crippled girl grows up destitute in a
home for the deaf, the blind, the insane,
and, for good measure, the disabled
elderly (what more could a kid wish for?)
At the end of a short life spent
wondering why no one ever looked out
for her, the child reaches the final
punctuation mark of her blessed
existence and drowns glued to
a wheelchair.
Tragedy should not
be too clever. Mourning embraces the solemnity of death but recoils
at an overzealous script. When fate appears to cross the thin line between
cruelty and sadism, grief turns to anger. We expect the church organist
at the funeral mass to interrupt Bach in mid-measure, look up to the
sky, and shout "Come on!"
Voltaire had his
"come on" moment in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake,
suggesting that God's supreme goodness perhaps was not all it was cracked
up to be. Religious irreverence is not much in fashion these days. But
piety was not always so docile. History has been improbably kind to
all sorts of figures who've had cross words with the Almighty. Think
of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Jesus on the crossand that's only
for the J's. Once or twice, the dispute even got out of hand: Nietzsche
killed God; and Richard Rubenstein saw in Auschwitz confirmation of
his death. Admittedly, to reconcile the Holocaust with a just and omnipotent
god is an interesting variation on squaring the circleor, since
Miklós Laczkovich actually succeeded in doing just that [1],
let us say, merely a reminder that gods may die but theological debates
never do.
My own reaction
to the CNN report was not nearly as elevated. "Why would God behave
like Don Rumsfeld?" I wondered. As the crippled child writhed in
agony, I pictured God murmuring "Stuff happens."
Woe unto me. To
compare God to Rummy is worse than blasphemous: It's unfair. After all,
God did not cow the media into decorating our TV screens with the beatific
smiles of preening peacocks reassuring us that smart waves drowned the
terrorists, spared the innocent, amused the children, and provided much
needed water to drought-prone regions. God gets accused of many things,
including being dead, but lying is rarely one of them.
Mendacity, on the
other hand, is the reserve currency of this administration. Its marketing
hook: "You give us your votes; we give you our lies." From
the fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda axis to the rosy updates on the Switzerlandization
of Iraq, from the bogus tales of WMD to the assurance that democracy
is the future of the region (and always will be, would add the cynics),
the giving has been, shall we say, generous.
The taking has been
no less effusive. Although the hysterical rantings of prowar voices
rarely exceeded, in dignity, the yapping of a chihuahua attacking a
meatball, they met only the meekest resistance from an oleaginous mainstream
media. The war hawks found powerful enablers in The New York Times,
which was more than happy to echo the delusory yarn spun by the White
House and pimp for Judith Miller's Best Little Whorehouse in Babylon
(where bling bling spells WMD).
Pimping being the
fickle business that it is, it won't be long before the In-Bush-We-Trust
media gets in touch with its inner peacenik and points an accusing finger
at the posse of visionary mediocrities who gave us a nasty case of Iraq
syndrome. No doubt some of the neocons will balk at going to their graves
with the word "loser" carved on a brass coffin plate; so watch
for them to pull a McNamara on us and humbly beg for forgiveness. Being
good souls, ie, suckers for smarmy group hugs, naturally we'll oblige.
Were it so simple.
The abject surrender
of the media fed a slew of illusions to the public, none more craven
than the belief that he whom we kill must be killed. Yeah, yeah, we
occasionally obliterate the wrong house and incinerate its occupants,
but that's just "friendly fire." (A lovely phrase if there's
one: Let's hear the surgeon who amputates the wrong leg inform his patient
of his "friendly amputation.") Minus the friendliness, our
whiz-bang weapon wizardry never fails to separate the wheat from the
chaff, the nursing mother from the crazed beheader. So goes the creed,
anyway.
The Lancetthat
well-known freedom hating ragbegs to differ. It estimates that
our high-IQ, mensa-schmensa bombs have killed 100,000 civilians [2].
Iraq Body Count, which plays the lowballing game by shunning projections,
reports the deaths of 600 non-combatants during our latest goodwill
tour of Fallujah (by now primed to be renamed Grozny on the Euphrates)
[3].
And then there is the Iraqi girl, hands soaked in her dead father's
blood, whose little brother does not yet understand that his childhood
has just come to an end. Fearing for their lives, US soldiers killed
the parents in the front seat of the family car. Demons will likely
haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, bless their
souls, will sleep well tonight.
Wars never fail
to produce their share of pithy lines. Tommy Franks made sure this one
would be no exception. "We don't do body counts," crowed the
general, who really meant to say that he does not do "dark-skinned
body counts" (he counts the others just fine). Lucky for us that
he doesn't run a Swedish newspaper, or it would have splashed the headline:
"Tsunami kills 2,000 Swedesand a few locals." To be
fair, Franks remembered the last time he did body counts, Vietnam, and
how well that ended. But today's tactical thinking packs a wallop of
self-righteous denial. We don't tally the children we kill for the same
reason monsters don't buy mirrors: That's how they go through life thinking
they're angels.
We've snuffed out
innocent lives in numbers that insurgents and terrorists could only
dream of. But we avert our eyes. We bury our heads in the sand and turn
a blind eye to our moral cowardice, thus pulling off the amazing feat
of being ostriches and chickens all at once. We owe this marvel of ornithology
to the inexorable fragility of human illusions. To quote James Carroll,
"we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare
to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back." George Bush,
the philosopher, has updated Berkeley's riddle: Do Iraqi children scream
when the bombs fall if there is no one in the White House to hear them?
The celebrity of
the month, the tsunami victim, has hogged newspaper headlines nationwide
with stomach-churning photo spreads of wailing mothers and floating
cadavers. Like his unsung Iraqi brethren, the victim has reminded us
that calamity always strikes the poor, the sick, and the helpless first.
It's invariably those with the least to lose who lose the most. At the
great banquet of cataclysms, rich Westerners get served last. Bush would
have us believe that we've suffered so much from terrorism the world
owes us undying compassion. In truth, our induction into the Misery
Hall of Fame is still a long way off. With our sustained assistance,
however (coddling Saddam while he was gassing Iranians, slapping sanctions
that killed half a million children, and fighting two wars in twelve
years), Iraq made it on the first ballot. Who ever said that we didn't
have a big heart?
Not Condoleezza
Rice: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity
to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people,
and I think it has paid great dividends for us" [4]. And I just
can't wait for the next one, our top diplomat might as well have added.
While watching Colin
Powell, pocket calculator in hand, add up the geopolitical benefits
of our generosity and tell us how shocked, shocked he was by the tsunami's
devastation, I could almost hear the Beatitudes from The Gospel According
to Dubya: "Blessed are the children whom the sea swallows, for
they shall tug at our heartstrings. / Cursed are the children whom our
bombs blow up, for they shall roam the dark alleys of our indifference."
We've been Iraq's tsunami. But expect no charity drive, no minute of
silence, no flag at half-staff: nothing that would allow shame to rear
its ugly head.
With Bush's reelection,
America now has the president it deserves. And should you find that
Lady Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you won't
need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.
The liberation of
Iraq began with smart flying bombs crashing over Baghdad. We should
have known better. Liberations that start with a reenactment of 9/11
rarely end well.
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[1] Laczkovich,
M. Equidecomposability and discrepancy; a solution of Tarski's circle-squaring
problem, J. Reine Angew. Math. 404 (1990), 77-117.
[2] 100,000 Civilian
Deaths Estimated in Iraq, by Rob Stein, Washington Post, October 29,
2004. The Lancet's article: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion
of Iraq: cluster sample survey, by Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard
Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham, Volume 364, Issue 9448,
Page 1857, October 29, 2004.
[3] Iraq Body Count
Falluja Archive, www.iraqbodycount.org, 2004
[4] Dr. Rice's senate
confirmation hearing, Agence France Presse, Tuesday, January 18, 2005.