In Iraq, It Has Come To This. (Oh Dude!)

Iraq is burning. There are terrorists roaming the nation on the ground. And in the sky, there is “the other” terrorist.

On Tuesday [10/06/04] night, Channel 4 News showed a 30-second footage from an F-16 cockpit, flying over an urban location, in Iraq, last April. In brief, the pilot observes a crowd of people, asks CentCom for permission to “take them out”, and is given the go-ahead signal in an instant. 10 seconds later, the crowd is physically pulverized, as a massive dark cloud forms where it was. The pilot goes “oh, dude!”; the crowd was never assessed as a threat. In fact, it just wasn’t assessed, period. In my mind this raises a few questions.

First, rational minds will ask, might this have been a one-off incident? And perhaps, this is what the Bush administration would say, in a procedure similar to that of the Abu Graib abuses scandal. If this was yet another case of misbehavior, I think we may start to wonder whether misbehavior has not become the standard. However I doubt that this was merely a case of a pilot not abiding by the rules. The order to fire came from CentCom. That’s pretty high up the chain of command. At the same time, the request for this action came from the pilot; he believed this crowd was worthy of being targeted, regardless of whether it was a proven threat or not. So it is not a pilot misbehaving, or the “call center” officer not paying attention. It most clearly appears to be a system where the ‘commander’ and the ‘actor’ mutually and consciously contribute to a rather generous hand-out of precise missiles. In an urban setting.

Second, cynics apart, those who have seen this footage [and I urge you to do so] must feel something is amiss, when an American military unit kills with such indiscrimination, in a war with –not debatable but- debated and identified false motives. One must wonder, has it really come to this?

Third, and this is more of an aside, I can’t help but feel, for the first time, that something truly wrong has occurred, and some sort of action ought to be taken. Yet I’m not doing anything really. As human beings, I find it shocking –yet it is the case- that we can be so indifferent to something like this.

Finally, I’m quite young myself, but when I heard the pilot’s ecstatic explosion of awe, with his “oh dude!” remark, I allowed myself to wonder, with sincere shock, who are these children of America, who are sent to fight a war far far away from home? And as in any war, I ask, for what true purpose are these soldiers sent to murder, and die? Because now more than ever, as failure in Iraq is apparent, they and their families will ask this too. The statistics look really good for America. There are barely more than a 1000 US casualties. But how many have lost their souls –their spirit? And, globally, can we really say the good they’ve done still outweighs the wrong, or is it time to recognize that truly, more harm has been done, more hatred has been fuelled?

It’s quite ironic that the “shock” and “awe” that I talk of here do not match those the administration was hoping for.

see the source yourself at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1011.htm