Horror Show

I wonder of George Bush saw any of this during his latest photo op in Baghdad? In an article in The Sunday Times called Horror show reveals Iraq’s descent, A morgue’s grim scenes testify to a disintegrating nation we see what life (and death) is like in Iraq today:

The single-storey Al-Tub al-Adli morgue, whose nondescript appearance belies the horrors within, has become synonymous with the seemingly unstoppable violence that has turned Baghdad into the most frightening city on earth.

It is here that bodies from the nightly slaughter are dumped each morning. The stench of decaying flesh, mingled with disinfectant, hits you at the checkpoint 100 yards away.

Each corpse tells a different story about the terrors of Iraq. Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills. Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back, bear bullet wounds. Many are charred and dismembered.

So far this year, according to health ministry figures, the mortuary has processed the bodies of about 6,000 people, most of whom died violently. Some were killed in American military action but many more were the victims of the sectarian violence that US and Iraqi forces are struggling to contain.

For all the coalition’s recent successes in securing elections that brought a new government to power and in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the morgue remains a chilling reminder of the scale of the challenge ahead.

It receives 20 to 30 bodies on a quiet day. Last month it processed a record 1,384. Most autopsies have been cancelled; there are simply not enough doctors or officials to cope.

James Walcott directs us to "Stewart Nusbaumer at The American Conservative (July 3 issue). In "Unfinished Business" (not online as yet)" Nusbaumer reports:

"I've seen many wars--Vietnam, Beirut, El Salvador, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Norhter Ireland, Honduras, Peru, Philippines, Kosovo. In none of these did protesters scream to kill American civilians. In none of these wars did I avoid public taxis for fear of being kidnapped. In none did I carry a gun as a reporter. And never did the situation plunge from public optimism to military curfew in just one month...

"I came here to write that Afghanistan is not Iraq, that Afghanistan is looking promising, while Iraq is utterly hopeless. In one month, Afghanistan flipped from looking promising to starting to unravel. So I don't know what to write."

Oh, yes he does.

"I do know that in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush administration was clueless about the wars it faced, declaring victory before the real wars began. The neocons wrote a silly script that had Afghans and Iraqis pulverized by our hi-tech war machine and quickly capitulating, as if the Vietnam debacle never happened, as if the world's guerrilla fighters never learned how to stymie and slowly bleed the world's premier conventional military."

Congressman Murtha is just about the only public figure addressing the unfolding catastrophe with the moral, political, and emotional urgency that's cries out for action. As the bodies are propped upright in the Iraqi morgues and US jets ramp up their bombing runs in Afghanistan, this dispatch from Ted Rall in December of 2001 looks terribly prescient:

"'Next target: Saddam,' reads a handwritten sign on a derelict Soviet tank outside a 'secret' American base south of the Uzbek border. 'It would take billions of dollars to even begin rebuilding this country,' an American officer who refused to give his name noted while his driver worked on a flat tire. 'Billions of dollars and many, many years. We don't have that kind of attention span. Bombing Iraq will be a lot sexier than teaching Afghans how to read.'

"And so we've lost this war, not because they're good or we're not, but because of who we are. The American Empire can't spend the bodies or the time or the cash to fix this crazyass place, because in the final analysis, election-year W. was right—we're not nation builders. Guys who once called themselves Talibs switch to something called the Northern Alliance, and we call this a victory. We know it isn't so, but like Nixon's peace with honor, it'll have to do.

"Both the Russians and the English lost everything to Afghanistan, but it doesn't have to end that way for us. After all, the same thing happened to us in Vietnam, our first Afghanistan, but we survived it. True, our economy was never the same. Undeniably, it replaced an American Century with postmodern alienation and ironic detachment. But if those estimates are correct and this war is costing a mere billion bucks a month, we ought to tally our dead, write up our losses, and count ourselves lucky to still be called a superpower."

Five years later, our luck may have run out.