Coastal Post Online
MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
(415)868-1600 -
(415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924
|
|
Fallujah: Orwell's 1984 Revisited
By Edward W. Miller
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneouslyÉThere was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.. You had to live, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard... every movement scrutinized."
From George Orwell's novel "1984"
US Marines in their recent "search and destroy" mission in Fallujah , an Iraqi city of over 333,000 inhabitants, from whence US missile and bombing attacks had already stampeded some 250,000 terrified citizens into the surrounding countryside, then added house-to house "fighting," kicking in doors, firing blindly into homes and courtyards, while calling in helicopter gunships, bombers with 500 lb bombs and Hellfire missiles from Predator Drones decimating the City's basic infrastructure along with thousands of its homes, and killing several thousand of its inhabitants, the majority non-combatants. Of the CIA-estimated 5,000 "insurgents believed hiding in the City, about 1,200 were killed and no more than 2,000 "suspected guerrillas" captured . After thus introducing Iraqis to "Western Democracy" the US commanding officer announced the City was mostly "secured."
The 20 Km highway from Baghdad to its International airport has now been closed because of bomb threats, so helicopters are now the mode of travel. Most cargo transport in Iraq is now by plane. In November alone 136 Americans were killed and the total "wounded in combat" in the Iraqi conflict, is now estimated at between 15,000 to 20,000.
Americans may recall it was "to liberate Fallujans from the grip of terrorists and pave the way for electoral free choice" that President George W. Bush had ordered the taking of the City.
However, the "chilling reality of what Fallujah has recently become has been aptly described by columnist Thomas Engelhardt and Professor Michael Schwartz ( www.antiwar.com Dec. 18th, 2004 ) who present a sorry picture:
First, the US military today is blocking every entrance to the City to reporters, NGO's , Red Cross and former residents. No cars will be allowed inside Fallujah and supposedly bus transportation will eventually be afforded residents who will be forced to park outside the City limits. All 250,000 residents are ordered to stay away from Fallujah until after December 24th, after which only heads of households may enter, a few at a time, to access the damage to their homes. Those eventually allowed to enter and leave via the five designated "checkpoints: will be "fingerprinted, photographed, iris-scanned and forced to carry both ID cards and external "name tags" "Only Fallujahns cleared by the US will be allowed those temporary reconstruction jobs. These jobs will be organized into work brigades under military command. As Major Piccoli, spokesman for the First Marine Expeditionary Force spelled it out: "Some may see this as a Big Brother watching over you, but in reality itsÉ a security measure to keep the insurgents from returning. (www.attimes.com) Michael Schwartz comments: "...the US military is going to have a great deal of difficulty controlling a large number of rebellious, and angry people inside the gates of America's new mini-police state." (www.attimes.com)
Meanwhile over in Sadr City, where a population of 2.5 million was invaded by US Marines, responding to militant insurgent attacks in April and again in August, the Marines were forced to retreat after losing a couple of dozen killed and many wounded while the insurgent militias lost hundreds. After failing to "secure the city"Éthe US force retreated to the outskirts and have now begun a tacit re-building program to "gain Iraqi trust".
Actually the major portion of Sadr City is still under the control of Moqtada Sadr, a strongly anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric, whose staff of clerics, on a daily basis, hand out small jobs to their starving people, paying some 3500 dinars/day ( $ 3.00 dollars US ) with which to buy heating kerosene (3500 dinares one day supply) or powered milk for kids ( at 5000 dinars/ can.)
The US "rebuilding program" in Sadr City is being run by Col. Lawrence Holmes of the 20th Engineering Battalion who is trying to rid the streets of massive piles of stinking garbage, clean up the sewage-contaminated water for only a few thousand of the 2.5 million and get their electricity back for at least a few hours/ day.
So far the US invasion of Iraq, instigated by the "Neocons", Israel's US agents, and based on both their misinformation and outright lies, has turned out to be an abject and costly failure. Since the victims of this violent attempt at colonialization are mostly Muslims, the number of angry young men and women of similar faith around the globe who may join Osama Ben Laden's jihad against US imperialism can be expected to increase, thus increasing the threat of "terrorism"
On another note, as the trial of captured Saddam Hussein approachs, London' and Washington campaigns of vilification against him increase. Britain's Tony Blair described Saddam's Bathist Party's "300,000 in mass graves" but after reports by two international forensic teams, Blair was forced to admit in Parliament that less than 5000 bodies had been located, and just this week, after the US temporary administrator of Iraq, Ex- CIA agent Allawi, had described to the media "some 500 bodies in a mass grave near Sulaimaniyah, " a city east of Baghdad, an official in the region admitted to the press only two bodies had actually been found. (http://msnbc.msn.com/ID/6711142/ ) Misinformation was also one of Big Brother's bag of tricks in Orwell's novel.