let me say something loud and clear. an american life is not worth more than any other life.
a bomb dropped on any other city is no less harmful than a bomb dropped on new york.
am amputee american iraq veteran is no less crippled than the iraqi child victim.
a bereaved iraqi mother is no more consolable than the bereaved american mother of a deceased soldier.
bombs are real. they kill and maim.
The people in Falloojeh have been trying to get the women and children out of the town for the last 48 hours but all the roads out of the city are closed by the Americans and refugees are being shot at and bombed on a regular basis… we’re watching the television and crying. The hospital is overflowing with victims… those who have lost arms and legs… those who have lost loved ones. There isn’t enough medicine or bandages… what are the Americans doing?! This is collective punishment … is this the solution to the chaos we’re living in? Is this the ‘hearts and minds’ part of the campaign?
The American and European news stations don’t show the dying Iraqis… they don’t show the women and children bandaged and bleeding- the mother looking for some sign of her son in the middle of a puddle of blood and dismembered arms and legs… they don’t show you the hospitals overflowing with the dead and dying because they don’t want to hurt American feelings… but people *should* see it. You should see the price of your war and occupation- it’s unfair that the Americans are fighting a war thousands of kilometers from home. They get their dead in neat, tidy caskets draped with a flag and we have to gather and scrape our dead off of the floors and hope the American shrapnel and bullets left enough to make a definite identification….
and no way to earn either hearts or respect
Al-Jazeera had their reporter literally embedded in the middle of the chaos- and I don’t mean the lame embedded western journalists type of thing they had going at the beginning of the war (you know- embedded in the Green Zone and embedded in Kuwait, etc.). Ahmed Mansur, I believe his name was, was actually standing there, in the middle of the bombing, shouting to be heard over the F-16s and helicopters blasting away at houses and buildings. It brought back the days of ‘shock and awe’…
I know it bothers the CPA terribly to have the corpses of dead Iraqis shown on television. …To lessen the feelings of anti-Americanism, might I make a few suggestions? Stop the collective punishment. When Mark Kimmett stutters through a press conference babbling about “precision weapons” and “military targets” in Falloojeh, who is he kidding? Falloojeh is a small city made up of low, simple houses, little shops and mosques. Is he implying that the 600 civilians who died during the bombing and the thousands injured and maimed were all “insurgents”? Are houses, shops and mosques now military targets?
are you proud of yourselves yet, LGFers and other assorted armchair quarterbacks?