The Baghdad slaughter revealed by WikiLeaks is not an aberration. It’s all in a day’s work for Uncle Sam’s boys! observes AIJAZ ZAKA SYED.
It’s the season of apologies all over again. It began with a confession from Golf superstar Tiger Woods for his fascinating encounters off the field. While most sporting icons are forgiven for their feet of clay and an occasional adventure or two, the black kid who broke the white man’s monopoly over the richest and most elitist sport was hauled over the coals for his sexcapades.
Then it was the turn of Pope Benedict XVI to apologise for the long years of clerical abuse of children.
Now some solitary voices in the US media are debating whether President Barack Obama should apologise for the spectacular massacre of 15 Iraqi civilians including two children and two Reuters employees by the US forces way back in 2007 when our good ol’ friend Bush had been in the White House. The horrific carnage, captured on tape in chilling detail and released last week by WikiLeaks.org, has shaken the US government and shocked the Americans and rest of the world. The 38-minute long video has been seen by tens of millions of people around the world in the space of the last few days.
The chilling footage showing America’s finest and bravest indiscriminately firing at a group of totally unarmed civilians once again underscores the utterly evil nature of this war and the mindless bestiality of modern warfare. The ‘action’ was captured by the highly sensitive camera fitted in the belly of the US army gunship. The video is accompanied by excited commentary of US soldiers on the apparently ludicrous scenes of human beings dying and dropping like flies on the ground.
“Light ‘em all up,” one soldier says.
“Ah, yeah, look at those dead b*****s.” “Nice!” is the pleasured response from the mission leader. After discovering there are two children among the victims, one thoughtful soldier adds: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into the battle.”
Watching it all on Youtube, I feel like throwing up. Is this what Bush had in mind when he promised “human freedom” to Iraqi people? Is this how you promote “democracy” in the Middle East? Sitting up there in the smug safety of an Apache gunship and all the deadly weapons and ammo at your disposal, it must all appear like a video game to the superhuman members of the mightiest army on the planet.
Like one of those loud, freakish games that my son endlessly plays on his Sony play station, firing at the faceless terrorists and bad guys. And when the game is over and he’s declared a ‘winner’, he reloads another game, ready for the action all over again!
But life is not a video game. They are real, flesh-and-blood people dying out there, people like you and me – people with families and kids and going about their everyday life like you and me.
Predictably, the US response to the attack video has been typical – total denial followed by brazen justifications.
While the ever pliant US media has as always rushed to defend the indefensible, the Republicans/neocons and even some liberals are attacking the Sweden-based WikiLeaks for its audacity to malign “our boys”.
The video is being trashed as yet another “conspiracy” to slander the Infallible US Troops. Outraged pundits on the ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News scream and froth: “Our guys are the good guys” and they act differently “99.99999999% of the time.”
Pentagon boss Robert Gates is out in battle mode, furiously defending the boys. An incredibly blasé defence secretary insists the US forces committed no crime and were operating in a “combat” and “split-second” situation!
Mr Gates takes my breath away. Excuse me, Mr Defence Secretary, but it doesn’t look like a ‘combat’ or ‘split-second’ situation to me. Just go over the video again and take a closer look.
It’s a heavily populated, working class Baghdad neighbourhood and the victims are not seen carrying any weapons. You can watch it for yourself on WikiLeaks.org or Youtube.com – people going about their day-to-day business, talking over the phone. And what was the fault of the journalists? They were there to do a story, feeling proud for landing a job with an international news agency like Reuters. Namir Noor-Eldeen, the photographer was only 22, and his driver Saeed Chmagh was 40. He left behind a widow and four children.
Gates claims the troops acted in a “split second situation” to defend themselves. But the WikiLeaks video tells a different story. The gunship not just hovered there in the sky for what seems like forever and fired on the crowd on the ground. They attacked and killed even those who came to carry the dead and rescue the wounded after the initial attack.
The Pentagon boss says the matter was “thoroughly investigated” and US soldiers were found to have observed the “rules of engagement!” What’s he talking about? Do we live on the same planet? And if you think this is an isolated incident or ‘aberration,’ as some in the US media are desperately trying to prove, you’d better think again.
What the Apache camera captured in Baghdad is not an aberration but routine practice. This is anything but unusual. This is what the soldiers do all the time. They are trained, taught and indoctrinated to act in this fashion. It is drilled into their minds ad nauseam that the Enemy is not human and it’s perfectly alright to kill them at will – wherever, whenever!
As Glenn Greenwald argues in a brutally honest piece this week, this massacre is not an exception. “It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache killings is that we KNOW about it and are seeing what happened on video.”
This is just one incident that WikiLeaks managed to bring to public attention. Who knows how many such massacres of innocent people are lying out there, waiting to be discovered?
From the shame of Abu Ghraib to the rape and killing of Abeer al-Janaby and her family and from the carnage of Haditha and Fallujah to the killing fields of Afghanistan and Pakistan, this is just usual, all in a day’s work for Uncle Sam’s boys. It’s not a rotten apple or two we are talking about!
Meanwhile I am still waiting for President Obama’s reaction to the WikiLeaks video. But we are not interested in his comments or an apology. I know Obama has gone to great lengths to clear the mess left behind by his predecessor. And I like to believe him when he talks of America seeking “a new way forward” with the Muslim world.
But we have had enough of this bridging-the-gulf business without any change on the ground. If Obama indeed means what he says – and I’d like to believe he does – he must deliver justice to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bring all those responsible for the killings like those revealed by WikiLeaks to justice. Mere words and promises won’t do.
[AIJAZ ZAKA SYED is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times. Write to him at aijaz@khaleejtimes.com]