thestar.co.za
When killing doesn't stop
October 28, 2003
By the Editor
Why should people want to kill other people? There are many answers. The Americans and their British coalition partners killed more than 12 000 Iraqis this year. The reason: so that Iraqis could enjoy a better life.
How it is possible to enjoy life when its very fabric has been destroyed, is not easy to understand.
But now the Iraqis have apparently decided they they too want to kill. Who are these Iraqis? Terrorists, of course. Certainly followers of Saddam Hussein. And even worse, probably followers of Osama bin Laden.
That may be true, but it is also possible that the people of Iraq are tired of living under occupation. In which case, there does not seem to be much point in holding onto the belief that the coalition forces are liberators.
After the bombing that happened in Baghdad on Sunday, Paul Bremer, the American chief administrator for Iraq, declared: "We're going to have good days and bad days." But if Sunday was a bad day, then yesterday was an absolute catastrophe.
Two facts can no longer be hidden.
Firstly, that the smile has been wiped off the face of that arch-proponent of the war on Iraq, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He was in the Baghdad hotel that was hit by a barrage of rockets on Sunday.
Secondly, an anonymous American official staying at the hotel lamented that attacks against it, the UN headquarters in Baghdad and the Turkish embassy had "helped undermine confidence in the US-led administration's ability to provide security and stability". Exactly!
It would appear that the Americans learnt very little from their "liberation" ventures in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Until they do, people like Wolfowitz - also George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld - will go on talking of the "reality of a new and free Iraq".
The problem is that they are not the people who die, they merely guarantee that others will pay with their lives. |
