Erika Ransom

MRR #235

10/5/2002

War is the smell of burning bodies at sunset.

There are two roads that lead from Kuwait to Iraq now called the Highways of Death. One travels by the coast, and the other traverses inland. Ghosts still scream here, trying to escape the endless bombs and the napalm fire that lit up the sky on the night of February 25, 1991.

On the inland road, the sand holds the last breaths and bone splinters of thousands of people all fleeing for their lives. Hundreds of the dead were Palestinian and Kuwaiti refugees, trying to escape the coming siege of Kuwait City. They didn’t know their lives would be cut down like weeds, in the openness of the desert. The offensive strategy was a simple, brutal, efficient, massacre. The US Air Force bombed the first and last cars in the long line of traffic headed north–trapping the entire convoy–then spent hours intensely bombing everything that moved. A US commander described the attack as a "turkey shoot." No distinction was made between buses carrying entire families, and tanks. Everything was blitzed.

You can almost feel the ground still shaking on the coastal road, as plane after plane unloaded its cluster bombs and incendiaries on a 60-mile-long-stretch of tanks, automobiles, armored cars, buses, trucks, and ambulances carrying tens of thousands of people, all retreating to Iraq as per the United Nations order. The use of force was so extreme that Joyce Chediac, who gave testimony to the International War Crimes Tribunal, stated, “Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield shattered, every tank burned, every truck riddled with shell fragments. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.” No survivors were found.

In the aftermath, the burned shells of about 2,000 vehicles stood stark and mangled on the highway. The Los Angeles Times reported, “All that was left was the scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun.” There is a famous photo of a dead Iraqi soldier sitting upright, arms grasping the dashboard, skin and hair gone, charred black by intense heat, white teeth showing where his lips used to be. The image is so horrifying, I cannot look at it for long. It makes me feel sick to even picture it in my head. The man’s exposed skull grimaces at me. His gaze is war, death, and hell on earth.

Several hours before the massacre began Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait, in accordance with UN Resolution 660. The troops on the highway were returning to Iraq, beaten. The Gulf War and “Operation Desert Storm” were over. Hussein had announced the retreat over public and international radio. However, in defiance of international law, Bush ordered US troops to continue the offensive against Iraq’s retreating ground forces. US pilots reported seeing white flags tied to the back of vehicles, as the “turkey shoot” continued. Presumably, racist capitalist Bush wanted to kill as many Arabs as he could, given the chance.

When asked about the total estimated 200,000 Iraqi military and civilians who died during the war, General Colin Powell replied, "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in." General Powell and President Bush Sr. also didn’t make a huge fuss about the hundreds of US soldiers who died during the Gulf War, or came back to their families with missing hands or feet, or sick from radiation poisoning from US uranium-tipped bombs, or suffering from the madness of war. Tens of thousands of US and allied soldiers have been diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome: a collection of life threatening medical conditions linked to the various preventive medicines given experimentally to GIs, toxic smoke from the burning oilfields of Iraq and Kuwait, and various hazardous chemicals released during the war. The suffering is magnified tenfold in Iraq, as birth defects and cancer rates have increased exponentially.

War is Profit.

For the politicos, for the CEOs, for the bankers, the pollsters, and the newsmaker pundits, war is a political game, a seduction for loyalty and votes, a way to manufacture profit and control valuable natural resources. The goal of the Gulf War wasn’t strategic military targets as we were led to believe on the news; the mission was to utterly destroy Iraq’s industrial base, economy, government, and world standing, in order to control the oil. And in so doing, support US arms manufacturers.

It’s the same today. Saddam is an excuse, and hardly a realistic threat to the world’s most powerful military. House Representative Delahunt (D-MA) sums it up, “[Saddam is] a foe whose capacity and inclination to threaten the United States remain a matter of conjecture.” It’s smoke and mirrors.

In fact, the US has been eyeing Iraq as a target for decades. During the Cold War, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Iraq was firmly in the Soviet camp. With Mother Russia at its side, we didn’t dare an Iraqi invasion. However, with Russia a shadow of her former self, Bush Sr. decided to fight for the “national security interests of the United States,” which includes controlling strategic natural resources around the world. Clinton bombed Iraq again in 1998 to distract the American public from Monica, and to once again terrorize the Iraqi population. Today, Bush Jr. is eager to bomb Iraq to encourage a failing, bloated economy crippled by corporate scandals. The former-cocaine-addict-President is also the son of Texas Oil, and likes his crude cheap.

Bombs fall.

For the common man and woman, war is, and has always been, death–the death of young army boys, many drafted against their will, and the many more women, children, men, elderly and others who cannot escape harm’s way. The battlefield is strewn with the corpses of “non-combatants” who are not interested in the latest poll or the price of oil.

A bomb dropped from 30,000 feet has no politics. It doesn’t vote or see what color your skin is. At that altitude, on a clear day, cars are the size of peas, and people, if seen at all, are moving specks of dirt.

During Desert Storm, the US bombed Iraq every day, for 42 days straight. Allied planes dropped an estimated 250,000 explosives. To try to get a handle on what kind of damage that carries, it’s almost seven times the firepower of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Nothing was deemed sacred. Hospitals, water sanitation facilities, schools, neighborhoods, electric generators and crops were hit just as hard as military bunkers and bases.

Blood flows. And the US is preparing to attack, again.

Propaganda Lies.

I remember Bush Sr.’s public relations campaign for Desert Storm. The motto was, “Support Our Troops.” I was in high school, wearing out my first RAMONES tape. At night I’d bike around my small town and tear down the plastic yellow ribbons tied to fucking everything. How sad that many people here in the US “supported” our troops to die, to come home mutilated, and to kill so mercilessly. Like all good propaganda, the message was simple, and repeated often. It tapped into people’s worst fears, that their sons and daughters, friends and lovers would die halfway across the world. Of course, supporting the war didn’t help keep anyone alive. Sad, ridiculous, incredulous sheep wearing yellow.

The propaganda line repeated endlessly today is, “Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Given the unmatched US arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, this charge is rich. One associated example–the US repeatedly utilized the terrifying Fuel Air Explosive bomb during Desert Storm. The FAE bomb contains an ethylene oxide fuel, a highly flammable chemical, which forms an aerosol cloud on impact. The cloud is then detonated; creating a powerful blast that destroys anything within an area of about 50,000 square feet. People were incinerated, blown to bits, or died from the shock blast or lack of air. The famous dead man sitting in his truck may have seen the effects of this type of weapon of mass destruction.

The horror stories and human rights violations are endless. Since Desert Storm, an estimated two million Iraqi citizens have died as a result of sanctions and the lasting effects of the war. If we don’t stop this newest threat of US military invasion (and the threats that will come after) more will die on all sides. I share the war stories of ’91 as a reminder that war is not politics. War is death.

End This.

Think for yourself. Blind support for war is murder, and suicide. The web is full of information. Thanks to http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm for several figures used in this article.

Interesting to note, the first thing I wrote for MRR was a “What’s the scoop?” in #180, May 1998. I asked punks at a SHOWCASE SHOWDOWN show in Fitchburg, “What do you think about the US getting ready to bomb Iraq?” The question is eerily here again. What do you think?

Comments are encouraged at ransom@plaguedomes.com. Back columns and further rants and raves can be found at www.theprofits.org.

In solidarity, peace and justice–Erika.