[First published in AM New York]
SURELY IT WAS ONE OF THE WORST public moments of private pain in the Iraq war. Tahseen Hassan (left), the husband of murdered aid worker Margaret Hassan, saying with quiet dignity to a TV camera: “Margaret lived with me in Iraq for 30 years. She dedicated her life to serving the Iraqi people. Please, now, please return her to rne.”
There’s an ugly term for an ugly notion – one designed by professionals to deny the reality of the ugliness. It’s “collateral“.
It of course means unintended damage that accompanies a military action, and the euphemism originated in Armed Forces textbooks, seeped into press briefings, and out into the media generally – so much so that it’s now lightly tossed around in Hollywood as a metaphorical label.
But it represents something very real and very simple. Non-combatants suffer, even though the mainstream American media have not greatly highlighted that fact about Iraq. Try asking anyone on a New York street today how many Iraqis (just civilians, not fighters of any kind) have been killed since the lraq invasion began 20 months ago.
How many would know that the answer is estimated, by the conservative methodology of lraqbodycount.org, to be between 14,500 and 16,500? (This database relies for its numbers on actual death reports from official sources, like hospital records, rather than on statistical projections from a sample, which was how the British medical publication The Lancet arrived at its controversial number of 100,000 deaths last month.)
Nationals of other countries, killed doing their non-military service in Iraq – aid workers like Margaret Hassan, that is – plus many nation-building contractors and the like, can now be counted (if not yet totally reliably) in the thousands. Only yesterday the United Nations held a memorial tribute in New York to the chief of its Iraq mission, the Brazilian Sergio de Mello – killed by a bomb along with more than 20 of his staff.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s media feeders complain – anonymously, of course – about Kofi Annan being too cautious over sending more U.N. workers back into Iraq. They spoon out quotes to the press like: “We’re beyond anger. We won re-election. Kofi’s term is up in ’06 and … he is thumbing his nose at us.”
Such bullying braggadocio is, of course, in keeping with the president’s own bellicose challenge, voiced for the cameras: “Bring it on …”
Reporters need to ask: “On to whom, exactly?”
The administration’s more “chicken hawk” members (a term defined to me the other day as people who avoided war service themselves but who dispiay an unseemly desire to make others experience war) are now being well-matched by their mass-media cheerleaders. Twenty year-old Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, a Marine from Kentucky, inadvertently found himself the poster boy for Bush-era machismo when he was immortalized last week, cigarette in mouth, with the New York Post‘s caption “Marlboro Men Kick Butt in Fallujah.” lt was an ideal combination for the Bushites — chicken-hawkism meets Big Lobbyists’ image-making.
And what, exactly, did kicking butt mean? Answer: 1,200 insurgents killed, plus 40 U.S. personnel and six Iraqi soldiers, according to the Pentagon. What the Pentagon didn’t announce – though the Red Cross and Crescent did – was that an estimated 800 civilians were killed.
The novelist E. L Doctorow has suggested that this Commander-in-Chief who sent his his forces into battle “does not know what death is,” unlike many of his predecessors – perhaps most especially Dwight D.Eisenhower.
We certainly can, as a powerful nation, “cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war“, but we should still not forget that more than just the enemy will get ravaged.
It’s a sickening irony that Margaret Hassan herself spoke with passion to the BBC back in early 2003, trying to dissuade the U.S. from its invasion. “War,” she said, “brings only hardship to the most vulnerable“.
