Pacifistic Warfare
The war, as presented to us, was an array of spectacular fireworks. A flurry of bright lights following each other in graceful, arching parabolas stretching across the night sky. Thousands of miles away, viewing through the anaesthetising filter of television, it was easy to forget that the purpose of those pretty pyrotechnics was to destroy whatever they hit. It was easy to forget that each rocket brought with it the capacity to devastate families and communities. And so the arrival in Oxford of human rights observer Jo Wilding, who had recently arrived from Baghdad, served as an opportunity to gain a first hand report of someone's experiences in Iraq.
Jo Wilding spent six and a half weeks in Iraq, up until the beginning of April, when she was ejected by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. Wilding, like many others, found herself in the difficult position of being against the war, while simultaneously disgusted by Saddam. Yet she felt that the struggle to overthrow Saddam was one for the Iraqi people, and certainly not one for the United States, whose record in Iraq is morally deplorable. Wilding talks of a harebrained fantasy that she and a friend came up with, in the eventuality that Coalition forces entered Baghdad, "We were meant to be running around Baghdad pulling down posters of Baghdad and sabotaging U.S. tanks." As ludicrous as it sounds, the point is a serious one. She believes in the right for the Iraqi people to be free of oppression and tyranny, but also free from the heavy-handed intervention of a superpower with a recent history of belligerence and deceit in Iraq.
However, in an age of 'surgical warfare', so-called smart bombs and pinpoint accuracy, the argument that the Iraqi people would suffer greatly as a result of 'collateral damage' seems redundant. Not so after an evening with Jo Wilding.
Visiting site after site, Wilding and her colleagues claimed to find no systematic evidence of attempts to limit civilian casualties. One isolated farmhouse she visited had the top floor blown off by a rocket fired from a helicopter. She also relates a shocking story told to her by Belgian paramedics. All day ambulances came and went from a hospital in Baghdad- civilian casualties were streaming in. One ambulance came back riddled with bullet holes, and with several casualties. American troops had opened fire on it, worried about the possibility that it could be loaded with explosives.
One finds it difficult to be critical of American troops caught in such a position, but, at the very least, it makes a mockery of the notion of 'surgical precision'. "There seemed to be no safe place. People were hit doing the most casual things; walking outside of the mosque, standing in the street, eating, sleeping..." The evidence of Wilding, however anecdotal, is in a sense more revealing than mere statistics.
Regardless of whether you are pro-war or anti-war, atrocities were carried out in your name." Yet amidst the carnage Wilding found that people harboured no ill feelings towards the nations that brought this horror to their lives. One Iraqi she interviewed, Zuhair Khammas, had family members killed in a bombing attack. "We are thankful to all people in the world, especially in America and England, where over a million people marched".
The fears that many harbour for post-war Iraq- notably, the worry that the sectarianism of Iraqi society will prevent the establishment of a stable democracy- are not lost on Wilding, though she doesn't pretend to have any solutions.
"What a lot of people say is, 'Kurd, Sunni, Shia- it doesn't matter. We'll fight the Americans'". One of the most compelling arguments against war in Iraq was the possibility that it would breed an anti-American hatred that would be impossible to contain. The future is ominous if the evidence provided by Wilding is symptomatic of wider Iraqi opinion.
As well as the foreboding signs regarding Iraq's future, there are more optimistic indications of its capacity for regeneration and what can be made possible by going there with, "love in your heart and peace in your heart".
It is a flaw of the anti-war movement that the cruelty inflicted upon Iraq by Saddam is all too often swept under the carpet, as though the suffering of Iraqis doesn't count unless Britain or the U.S. is responsible. This is a flaw to which Jo Wilding also succumbs, as she harbours a belief that the Iraqis could have been supported to overcome Saddam themselves. The question she ignores is, how many people would be murdered, tortured and victimised in the meantime?
Yet the devastation that was perpetrated in our names to bring about the freedom of Iraq can not be forgotten, especially as the rationale of the war is shifted away from a pre-emptive strike against a country with weapons of mass destruction, to a humanitarian crusade against a ruthless dictator (albeit a ruthless dictator armed by Britain and America). As we watch pictures of Iraqis kiss the Stars and Stripes, and shake the hands of Coalition soldiers, we should not forget the price that we made them pay.
8th May 2003