A painful decision,” say the supporters of an invasion. But it is not they who will feel the pain: it will be the Iraqi infants writhing in the dust when the cluster bombs fall.
In “Dulce et decorum est”, his classic poem from the First World War, Wilfred Owen described young soldiers, doomed to die, “like old beggars under sacks”, and a man’s “hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
What has changed since Owen wrote those words, not long before his own death in the trenches? In the Gulf war in 1991, the slaughter of Iraqi conscripts was conducted in a similar industrial way. Three brigades of the United States 1st Mechanised Infantry Division used snow ploughs mounted on tanks and combat earth movers, mostly at night, to bury terrified Iraqi teenagers, many of them still alive, including the wounded, in more than 70 miles of trenches. A brigade commander, Colonel Anthony Moreno, said: “For all I know, we could have killed thousands.”
The policy of General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American field commander, was that the Iraqi dead were not to be counted. “This is the first war in modern times,”
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 17 Feb 2003