Do you think you would get any accurate information at all on the suffering of Iraqi civilians from an American source? We don't even get to see the bodies of dead children on tv during this war. The news coverage during Vietnam was fairly unrestricted. American no longer has a free press. It has a propaganda machine. The U.S. refuses even to attempt to count the Iraqi civilians who have died. Thank goodness international organizations are trying to!
Nor would you get accurate information from American soldiers. They are pumped up to kill, often to blaring Christian rock music. They are the victims of brain washing. They would be the very least reliable source (although I am sure once they are back home, some of them will come out and tell of the atrocities they committed or saw others commit). You have what I would call a very naive way of looking at the world, where the U.S. is perfect and always right, and all the other countries are just our enemies or leftists. The world is a very big place, and does not revolve completely around the blessed country America. And America is not always right. America pursues its security interests, period. At the level of national government, particularly under Republican administrations but not solely, the U.S. has been guilty of incredible evil on many occasions.
Did you even read what I sent you in the first post on this subject. There were many civilian deaths in Fallujah, a city full of people just trying to live their everyday lives. People just as nice and intelligent and interesting and worthy of life as the people in your family and your town:
While the American media talks of the great restraint and "pinpoint precision" of the American attack, over 700 people, at least half of them civilians, have been killed in Fallujah. And, according to the Ministry of Health, in the last two weeks, at least 290 were killed in other cities, over 30 of them children. Many of those who died because of the hospital closures will never be added in to the final tally of the "liberation."
By any reasonable standard, these hospital closings (and, of course, the shooting at ambulances) are war crimes. However afraid the Plus Ultra garrison may have been of attack from the rooftops, they didn't have to close the hospital; they could simply have screened entrants. In the case of Fallujah, it's clear that one of the reasons the mujahideen were willing to talk about ceasefire was to get the hospital open again; in effect, the United States was holding civilians (indirectly) hostage for military ends. |
