By Robert Fisk
Published on 26 January 2003
The Independent, UK
LONDON, 26 January 2003 - On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild
dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a
ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over
the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the
remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind.
"Just for the record," the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV
would never show such footage. The things we see - the filth and
obscenity of corpses - cannot be shown. First because it is not
"appropriate" to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second
because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again
agree to support a war.
That of course was in 1991. The "highway of death," they called it -
there was actually a parallel and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles
to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned
up to film it - and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the
photograph of the shrivelled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in his truck.
This was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent what
we had seen, when it was eventually published.
For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War -
there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the
offing - it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have
fallen romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like
those World War I paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had
to die benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor,
without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to
make it on to the morning news programs.
I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had
shelled Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106
civilians, more than half of them children, I came across a young woman
holding in her arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. "My father, my
father," she kept crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of
his legs was missing - the Israelis used proximity shells which cause
amputation wounds - but when that scene reached television screens in
Europe and America, the camera was close up on the girl and the dead
man's face. The amputations were not to be seen. The cause of death had
been erased in the interests of good taste. It was as if the old man had
died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his daughter's shoulder to
die in peace.
Today, when I listen to the threats of US President George W. Bush
against Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality.
Does George, who declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have any idea
what these corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest conception
of what the flies are like, the big bluebottles that feed on the dead,
and then come to settle on our faces and our notepads? Soldiers know. I
remember one British officer asking to use the BBC's satellite phone
just after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking to his
family in England and I watched him carefully. "I have seen some
terrible things," he said. And then he broke down, weeping and shaking
and holding the phone dangling in his hand over the transmission set.
Did his family have the slightest idea what he was talking about? They
would not have understood by watching television.
Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic population
- albeit only about 20 percent in support of this particular Iraqi folly
- has been protected from the realities of violent death. But I am much
struck by the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of World War
II, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an inalienable
memory of torn limbs and suffering.
I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead,
howling like an animal - which is, of course, what we all are - before
he died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me
when an Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly,
murderously, for throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg
sticking out of her stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem
after a Palestinian bomber had decided to execute the families inside;
and the heaps of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq
war; and the young man showing me the thick black trail of his
daughter's blood outside Algiers where armed men had cut her throat.
But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all
the other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have
to think of these vile images. For them it's about surgical strikes,
collateral damage and all the other examples of war's linguistic
mendacity. We are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the
people of Iraq - some of whom we will obviously kill - and we are going
to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes
trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we are going to watch
our defense "experts" on TV with their bloodless sandpits and their
awesome knowledge of weapons which rip off heads.
Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped
neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee
convoy in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit.
His head lay in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a
Tudor executioner. Months later, I learned his name and talked to the
girl who was hit by the severed head during the US air strike and who
laid the head reverently in the grass where I found it. NATO, of course,
did not apologize to the family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry
after war. No one acknowledges the truth of it. No one shows you what we
see. Which is how our leaders and our betters persuade us - still - to
go to war. (The Independent)