Falluja, the 21st Century Guernica. Where's Picasso?
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 25 November 2004
On November 12, as US jets bombed Falluja for the ninth straight day, a
Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his
wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and
dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes.
Indeed, Peterson "news" all but drowned out the US military's claim that
successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300 thousand residents had
struck only sites where "insurgents," had holed up. On November 15, the BBC
embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial death
toll estimate had risen to well over 2000, many of them civilians.
As Iraqi eye witnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting
residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes about
Peterson. One photographer captured a Falluja man holding his dead son, one
of two kids he lost to US bombers. He could not get medical help to stop the
bleeding.
A November 14 Reuters reporter wrote that residents told him that "US
bombardments hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors,
nurses and patients." The US military denied the reports. Such stories did
not make headlines. Civilian casualties in aggressive US wars don't sell
media space.
But editors love shots of anguished GI Joes. The November 12 Los Angeles
Times ran a front page shot of a soldier with mud smeared face and cigarette
dangling from his lips. This image captured the "suffering" of Falluja. The
GI complained he was out of "smokes."
The young man doing his "duty to free Falluja," stands in stark contrast to
the nightmare of Falluja. "Smoke is everywhere," an Iraqi told the BBC (Nov
11). "The house some doors from mine was hit during the bombardment on
Wednesday night. A 13-year-old boy was killed. His name was Ghazi. A row of
palm trees used to run along the street outside my house - now only the
trunks are left. There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the
stench is unbearable."
An eye witness told Reuters (November 12) that "a 9-year-old boy was hit in
the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. His parents said they couldn't get him
to hospital because of the fighting, so they wrapped sheets around his
stomach to try to stem the bleeding. He died hours later of blood loss and
was buried in the garden."
US media's embedded reporters - presstitutes?- accepted uncritically the
Pentagon's spin that many thousands of Iraqi "insurgents," including the
demonized outsiders led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had joined the anti-US
jihad, had dug in to defend their vital base. After the armored and air
assault began and the ground troops advanced, reports filtered out that the
marines and the new Iraqi army that trailed behind them had faced only light
resistance. Uprisings broke out in Mosul and other cities. For the
combatants, however, Falluja was Hell.
Hell for what? Retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor declared that:
militarily "Falluja is not going to be much of a plus at all." He admitted
that "we've knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we
really got were the nut-cases and zealots, the smart ones left behind- the
guys who really want to die for Allah." While Pentagon spin doctors boasted
of a US "victory, Trainor pointed out that the "terrorists remain at large."
The media accepts axiomatically that US troops wear the "white hats" in this
conflict. They do not address the obvious: Washington illegally invaded and
occupied Iraq and "re-conquered" Falluja - for no serious military purpose.
Logically, the media should call Iraqi "militants" patriots who resisted
illegal occupation.
Instead, the press implied that the "insurgents" even fought dirty, using
improvised explosive devices and booby traps to kill our innocent soldiers,
who use clean weapons like F16s, helicopter gun ships, tanks and artillery.
Why, Washington even promised to rebuild the city that its military just
destroyed. Bush committed the taxpayers to debts worth hundreds of millions
of dollars, which Bechtel, Halliburton and the other corporate beneficiaries
of war will use for "rebuilding."
Banality and corruption arise from the epic evil of this war, one that has
involved massive civilian death and the destruction of ancient cities.
In 1935, Nazi General Erich Luderndorff argued in his "The Total War" that
modern war encompasses all of society; thus, the military should spare no
one. The Fascist Italian General Giulio Douhet echoed this theme. By
targeting civilians, he said, an army could advance more rapidly.
"Air-delivered terror" effectively removes civilian obstacles.
That doctrine became practice in late April 1937. Nazi pilots dropped their
deadly bombs on Guernica, the ancient Basque capital - like what US pilots
recently did to Falluja. A year earlier, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War
erupted. General Francisco Franco, supported by fascist governments in Italy
and Germany, led an armed uprising against the Republic. The residents of
Guernica resisted. Franco asked his Nazi partners to punish these stubborn
people who had withstood his army's assault.
The people of Guernica had no anti-aircraft guns, much less fighter planes
to defend their city. The Nazi pilots knew that at 4:30 in the afternoon of
market day, the city's center would be jammed with shoppers from all around
the areas.
Before flying on their "heroic mission," the German pilots had drunk a toast
with their Spanish counterparts in a language that both could understand:
"Viva la muerte," they shouted as their raised their copas de vino. The
bombing of Guernica introduced a concept in which the military would make no
distinction between civilians and combatants. Death to all!
Almost 1700 people died that day and some 900 lay wounded. Franco denied
that the raid ever took place and blamed the destruction of Guernica on
those who defended it, much as the US military intimates that the
"insurgents' forced the savage attack by daring to defend their city and
then hide inside their mosques. Did the public in 1937 face the equivalent
of the Peterson case that commanded their attention?
Where is the new Picasso who will offer a dramatic painting to help the 21st
Century public understand that what the US Air Force just did to the people
of Falluja resembles what the Nazis did to Guernica?
In Germany and Italy in 1937, the media focused on the vicissitudes suffered
by those pilots who were sacrificing for the ideals of their country by
combating a "threat." The US media prattles about the difficulties
encountered by the US marines. It never calls them bullies who occupy
another people's country, subduing patriots with superior technology to kill
civilians and destroy their homes and mosques.
On November 15, an embedded NBC cameraman filmed a US soldier murdering a
wounded Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. As CNN showed the tape, its reporter
offered "extenuating circumstances" for the assassination we had witnessed.
The wounded man might have booby-trapped himself as other "insurgents" had
done. After all, these marines had gone through hell in the last week.
The reporting smacks of older imperial wars, Andrew Greely reminded us in
the November 12, Chicago Sun Times. "The United States has fought unjust
wars before - Mexican American, the Indian Wars, Spanish American, the
Filipino Insurrection, Vietnam. Our hands are not clean. They are covered
with blood, and there'll be more blood this time."
Falluja should serve as the symbol of this war of atrocity against the Iraqi
people, our Guernica. But, as comedian Chris Rock insightfully points out,
George W. Bush has distracted us. That's why he killed Laci Peterson, why he
snuck that young boy into Michael Jackson's bedroom and the young woman into
Kobe Bryant's hotel room. He wants us not to think of the war in Iraq. We
need a new Picasso mural, "Falluja," to help citizens focus on the themes of
our time, not the travails of the Peterson case.
The Bush Administration sensed the danger of such a painting. Shortly before
Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 UN Security Council fraudulent, power point
presentation, where he made the case for invading Iraq, UN officials, at US
request, placed a curtain over a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, located at
the entrance to the Security Council chambers. As a TV backdrop, the
anti-war mural would contradict the Secretary of State's case for war in
Iraq. Did the dead painter somehow know that his mural would foreshadow
another Guernica, called Falluja?
Copyright 2004 Progreso Weekly
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