Fallujah Forgotten
I don't know if most people in the United States ever knew what
Fallujah meant. It's hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist
if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten a problem
that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.
"You're welcome for the service!"
Fallujah was the "city of mosques," made up of some 300,000 to
435,000 people. It had a tradition of resisting foreign including
British invasions. It suffered, as did all of Iraq, from the brutal
sanctions imposed by the United States in the years leading up to the
2003 attack. During that attack, Fallujah saw crowded markets bombed.
Upon the collapse of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, Fallujah
established its own government, avoiding the looting and chaos seen
elsewhere. In April, 2003, the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division moved into
Fallujah and met no resistance.
Immediately the occupation began to produce the sort of problems seen
by every occupation everywhere ever. People complained of Humvees
speeding on the streets, of being humiliated at checkpoints, of women
being treated inappropriately, of soldier urinating in the streets, and
of soldiers standing on rooftops with binoculars in violation of
residents' privacy. Within days, the people of Fallujah wanted to be
liberated from their "liberators." So, the people tried nonviolent
demonstrations. And the U.S. military fired on the protesters. But
eventually, the occupiers agreed to be stationed outside the city, limit
their patrols, and allow Fallujah a degree of self-governance beyond
what the rest of Iraq was permitted. The result was a success: Fallujah
was kept safer than the rest of Iraq by keeping the occupiers out of it.
That example, of course, needed to be crushed. The United States was
claiming a moral obligation to liberate the hell out of Iraq to
"maintain security" and "assist in transition to democracy." Viceroy
Paul Bremer decided to "clean out Fallujah." In came the "coalition"
troops, with their usual inability (mocked quite effectively in the
Netflix Brad Pitt movie War Machine) to distinguish the people
they were bestowing liberty and justice upon from the people they were
killing. U.S. officials described the people they wanted to kill as
"cancer," and went about killing them with raids and firefights that
killed a great many of the non-cancer people. How many people the United
States was actually giving cancer to was unknown at the time.
In March, 2004, four Blackwater mercenaries were killed in Fallujah,
their bodies burned and hung from a bridge. The U.S. media portrayed the
four men as innocent civilians who somehow happened to find themselves
in the middle of a war and the accidental targets of irrational,
unmotivated violence. The people of Fallujah were "thugs" and "savages"
and "barbarians." Because U.S. culture has never regretted Dresden or
Hiroshima, there were open cries for following those precedents in
Fallujah. A former advisor to Ronald Reagan, Jack Wheeler reached for an
ancient Roman model in demanding that Fallujah be completely reduced to
lifeless rubble: "Fallujah delenda est!"
The occupiers tried to impose a curfew and a ban on carrying weapons,
saying they needed such measures in order to distinguish the people to
kill from the people to give democracy to. But when people had to leave
their homes for food or medicine, they were gunned down. Families were
gunned down, one by one, as each person emerged to try to recover the
injured or lifeless body of a loved one. The "family game" it was
called. The only soccer stadium in town was turned into a massive
cemetery.
A seven-year-old boy named Sami saw his little sister shot. He
watched his father run out of the house to get her and be shot in turn.
He listened to his father scream in agony. Sami and the rest of his
family were afraid to go out. By morning both his sister and father were
dead. Sami's family listened to the shots and screams at the
surrounding houses, as the same story played out. Sami threw rocks at
dogs to try to keep them away from the bodies. Sami's older brothers
would not let his mother go out to close her dead husband's open eyes.
But eventually, Sami's two older brothers decided to rush outside for
the bodies, in hopes that one of them would survive it. One brother was
instantly shot in the head. The other managed to close his father's eyes
and to retrieve his sister's body but was shot in the ankle. Despite
the efforts of the whole family, that brother died a slow and horrible
death from the ankle wound, while dogs fought over the bodies of his
father and brother, and the stench from a neighborhood of dead bodies
took over.
Al Jazeera showed the world some of the horror of the First Siege of
Fallujah. And then other outlets showed the world the torture the U.S.
was engaging in at Abu Ghraib. Blaming the media, and resolving to
better market future genocidal acts, the Liberators withdrew from
Fallujah.
But Fallujah remained a designated target, one that would require
lies similar to those that had launched the whole war. Fallujah, the
U.S. public was now told, was an Al Qaeda hotbed controlled by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi a myth depicted as if real years later in the U.S. film American Sniper.
The Second Siege of Fallujah was an all-out assault on all human life
that included the bombing of homes, hospitals, and apparently any
target desired. A woman whose pregnant sister was killed by a bomb told a
reporter, "I cannot get the image out of my mind of her foetus being
blown out of her body." Instead of waiting for people to emerge from
houses, in the Second Siege, U.S. Marines fired into houses with tanks
and rocket-launchers, and finished the job with bulldozers, Israeli
style. They also used white phosphorus on people, which melted them.
They destroyed bridges, shops, mosques, schools, libraries, offices,
train stations, electricity stations, water treatment plants, and every
bit of the sanitation and communication systems. This was a sociocide.
The controlled and embedded corporate media excused all.
Within a year after the second siege, with the city transformed into a
sort-of open-air prison among the rubble, staff at Fallujah General
Hospital noticed that something was wrong. There was a dramatic worse
than Hiroshima increase in cancer, stillborn births, miscarriages, and
never-before-seen birth defects. A child was born with two heads,
another with a single eye in the center of his forehead, another with
extra limbs. What share of the blame for this, if any, goes to white
phosphorous, and what to depleted uranium, what to enriched uranium
weapons, what to open burn pits, and what to various other weapons,
there is little doubt that the U.S-led Humanitarian War is the cause.
Incubators had come full circle. From the lies about Iraqis removing
infants from incubators that (somehow) justified the first Gulf War,
through the lies about illegal weapons that (somehow) justified the
massive terrorism of Shock and Awe, we were now arrived at rooms full of
incubators holding deformed infants quickly dying from benevolent
liberation.
The U.S.-installed Iraqi government's Third Siege of Fallujah came in
2014-2016, with the new tale for Westerners involving ISIS control of
Fallujah. Again, civilians were slaughtered and what remained of the
city was destroyed. Fallujah delenda est indeed. That ISIS arose out of a
decade of U.S.-led brutality capped by an Iraqi government's genocidal
assault on Sunnis went unmentioned.
Through all of this, of course, the United States was leading the
world through the burning of the oil the wars were fought over, among
other practices in rendering not just Fallujah, but most of the Middle
East, too hot for humans to inhabit. Imagine the outrage when people
who support someone like Joe Biden who played a key role in destroying
Iraq (and who can't even seem to regret the death of his own son from
open burn pits, much less the death of Fallujah) discover that almost
nobody in the Middle East is grateful for the collapse of the climate
into an unlivable inferno. That's when the media will be sure to tell us
who the real victims are in this story.