Step on a crack

Updated The more time goes on, the more information comes out, the more it becomes clear that it was not the insurgents who had their back broken in Fallujah, it was the city itself. From Tuesday's Guardian (UK):

Fresh evidence has emerged of the extent of destruction and appalling conditions in Falluja, still deserted two months after a major US offensive against the insurgent stronghold.

Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist working with the Guardian's film unit and one of the few reporters to travel independently to Falluja, describes ... a "city of ghosts" where dogs feed on uncollected corpses. ...

"It is completely devastated," Fadhil writes in the Guardian today. "Falluja used to be a modern city; now there is nothing. We spend that first day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I don't see a single building that is functioning."

Most of Falluja's 300,000 residents fled before the assault and now some have begun to return to find their homes destroyed, the water and electricity still cut and untreated sewage flowing openly.

Meanwhile, the supposedly "broken" resistance has spread to other areas, some previously mostly free of bloodshed. One fighter told Fadhil

his men left 10 days into the battle: "We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move."

Interesting to note that they use the same kind of euphemisms for retreat and defeat in a battle - "tactical regrouping," indeed - that we do. Be that as it may, Fallujah should remind us what war really is. It's not controlled, it's not "tactical fire" against "selected targets," it's wholesale destruction that leaves the civilians on whose behalf it's supposedly waged sitting dazedly on the rubble of what used to be their homes or by the graves of what used to be their family. In all our talk about "bringing democracy" vs. "resisting occupation" or "self-defense" vs. "imperialist exploitation," that image should remain firmly fixed in our minds - because it is the one true constant of war.

As I was writing that, I recalled something else, a passage from the July, 1992 issue of the print version of Lotus. It seems to fit, so here it is:

A story on the front page of the July 14 Boston "Globe" moved me as few have of late. It described the work of ambulance drivers in Sarajevo who speed through sniper fire to take the sick and wounded to hospitals. Their Volkswagen is bullet-battered, its rear window has been shot out, the drivers themselves are sometimes wounded, and they express thanks that the tires haven't yet been hit: "For then you may be immobilized. And then, of course, you are dead."

I flashed on reading about photographer Don McCullin recalling an incident in Beirut. He, too, was at a hospital. Some of the walls were missing, and on higher floors some patients had to be chained to their beds so they wouldn't, in their confusion, wander off the edge and fall to their deaths. Walking down a corridor, he heard what sounded like crying from behind a door.

He opened it to discover a group of children crammed into a closet. It was small, windowless, and stuffy - the temperature must've been, he said, over 100 degrees.

He asked some of the staff about it and they told him that they simply didn't have the means to watch out for the children, who were so profoundly retarded that they couldn't be trusted to keep away from flying glass from mortar fire. The closet, in short, was the safest place for them the hospital could offer.

That is the day-to-day reality of war. Not carefully-edited "combat videos," not swelling music behind soaring, sun-glinted jets, but hungry people wondering if the water from a broken pipe is safe to drink, bloodied babies wailing amid piles of rubble, snipers shooting at ambulances, retarded children put in airless closets as acts of kindness.

The eternal face of war.

Footnote: For the sake of accuracy and completeness, it should to be noted that not all returning residents blamed the US for the devastation in Fallujah; some blamed the insurgents and clerics who had turned the city into a mini-theocracy for bringing the assault down on them.

Updated to include the passage from Lotus.