The coalition is now hellbent on victory at any cost, but it is not a price worth paying
Mary Riddell Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer
The dictionary of war has been translated in a week. Apocalypse then was a firestorm over Baghdad. Now it's the porridge of marshland skirting the Euphrates, a doomscape that struck a marooned correspondent as 'apocalyptically bleak'. The mood in Downing Street can hardly be more cheerful.
Victory is not going to be won by a pincer action of hi-tech Armageddon and Twix bars. The Iraqi people have not enjoyed being bombed, shot at and invaded half as much as they were supposed to. The war may still be over quickly, but it seems unlikely.
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Here, instead of sanitised technology, is a people's war, with the mud and blood and weariness of conflict down the ages.How much of it arewe permitted to see and how much can we bear? Are the images of an Iraqi boy with half his head shot away and the twisted bodies of civilian victims suitable for public viewing? Of course. Politicians dissemble and ignorance soothes. The dead and maimed of this conflict, and every other, sometimes offer a more honest testimony than the unharmed.
Children still sell the image of Kim Phuc outside the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. Old hatreds are eroded, as they should be, and memories blunted. They have replica GI dogtags at the official gift shop now. But the picture of a nine-year-old girl, naked, ablaze with napalm and fleeing down the Trang Bang road, still freezes history. The agony in one child's eyes tells of all that happened in Vietnam and why it must never be repeated.
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Saddam, meanwhile, is lionised, both by those citizens who hate the invaders more than they hate him and by others enraged by pictures of wounded and dead civilians. The child with the shattered skull is becoming the Kim Phuc of the Arab world. In theory, the Iraqi regime could fall at any moment, but for now it looks more solid than ever.
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The coalition has unearthed rumours but no chemical weapons. The third-string rationale, a moral crusade to free the desperate, has been exposed as deluded fantasy. In these admittedly early days, the only tangible results of this people's war lie in morgues and hospital beds. Mourn first the Iraqi children, innocents who deserve none of this. Consider Iraqi soldiers, or 'fanatics' as our politer newspapers call those whose crime is to defend their land. A headline reading '175 Iraqis dead' is longhand for 'Gotcha'.
Pity those parents who weep on Mother's Day for children whose coffins are already arriving home. Images of death are harrowing, but so are the portraits of those dispatched to die; carefree boys with pints of beer at their elbows, or solemn in uniform. The youngest Briton to be killed was just 19.
Every conflict produces its anthem for doomed youth, but this is an elective crusade, fought not in extremis but because of political desires. They call it a humanitarian war. There is no such thing. Death is equally brutal, whether it is delivered by a resident dictator or a US missile, and politicians, however moral, are rarely as merciful as they pretend.
The coalition is in a bind. If it pursues its stated mission of caring for civilians, it will win less quickly. If it acts more brutally, it will spark ahatred that will imperil any peace. Already, some newspapers counsel a tougher approach. If the ungrateful citizens of Iraq don't want liberation, they can have attrition instead. Others, insidiously, argue that more killing now will spare lives in the long run.
The official line remains that Iraqis will get our message of a better tomorrow. But how can they? Even we barely know what it is. When the plan is for an American military protectorate followed by an unspecified leader, possibly ex-Baathist, it is unsurprising that Baghdad's citizens are not strewing the streets with rose petals.
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There is rioting in Kashmir. North Korea has raised its military spending again. Russia has put off ratifying its arms treaty. The road map for Palestine sounds like another dead end. What is this war for?It is for winning. Bush will not countenance defeat, for if he loses, he will have visited upon his country a devastation of which al-Qaeda could only dream. The bottom line is victory at any price.
But the dead children, the mangled and burned civilians, are inadvertent conscripts to another battle. There remains the hope that the weakmay, in the end, still vanquish the strong. The hawks of Washington, who have so misread Iraq, may never dare pursue their threat to crush more regimes on unmandated whims. And British politicians may ponder, in whatever uneasy peace exists, the distinction between liberation and a bloodbath.
