The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake

Some other reasons the war on Iraq is a crime
Dealing with the details or the war on Iraq is the easy part. Last week, this column did just that. President Bush's government is trying its best to legitimise the war, but last week's arguments in this column dealt with the fact that there is no legitimacy for the war at all - and that all rationalisations for the assault are mere excuses. But, facts with footnotes hide a deeper, starker reality. No amount of citations, quotes and statistics against the legitimacy of this war, will compare with the dozens upon dozens of photographs that have been carried in the media of Iraqi children who have been wounded, burnt or otherwise hurt in the American assault.

They are now seen on an almost daily basis -- but who knows they might vanish soon from the media's radar, because George W. Bush might decide that too many pictures of wounded and dying children are not good for his “coalition of the willing.''
Sometimes little boys and girls are shown hooked to saline drips, their heads severely bandaged.

TIME magazine showed a photograph of a mother holding a dead child at a mosque in Western Baghdad. A boy treated for burns and wounds in Nasiriyah looks at the camera like a deer caught in the headlights. The word 'terror' is written all over the face of a small boy no more than seven years who is raising his hands above his head, as a US army third infantry soldier aims his automatic at him. The caption says it 'later turned out that this was just only a scared boy with two adult civilians.'
But images of injured boys are only 'collateral' to the media coverage. The media coverage concentrates mostly on the macho glamorous side of the war -- the screaming fighter jets, men in camouflage, night flares and automatic fire, all of which taken together is as exciting as a Dirty Harry movie.

As much as George. W. Bush is the cause of this suffering by civilians and innocent children, and as much as that it is very galling, it is also quite shocking to see the sanitized reaction to all the images of little children being hurt in this wholly unnecessary war.

It is bad enough that George W. Bush doesn't care. But it hurts that the world, by and large, doesn't care either. True, there have been marches in capitals all over the world against this war. But there has still been no sense of outrage in the media about the fact that so many innocents including so many children are being killed in this war - - despite the abundance of pictures of children in various stages of distress and agony due to injuries sustained in the fighting or what's called the 'crossfire'.

A group of lawyers in the United States wrote to President Bush that he can be tried for war crimes, for waging this unsanctioned war on the Iraqi regime. Last week's column dealt with the political intricacies of the illegitimacy of that decision. But the fact that so many innocents are in fact dying in this war - -and the fact that it is being widely documented -- in fact makes George W. Bush a prime candidate for prosecution for war crimes.

All this makes even more galling the fact that George Bush is supposed to wage this war in the name of righteousness. Last week somebody told me that after all, George W. Bush is said to be reading the Bible everyday and that therefore he must be convinced that this war is right and that it is the correct thing to do.
Well, there are Bible reading hypocrites in this world, and looking at all those children who are dying or are suffering in this unprovoked act of aggression by the United States, George W. Bush definitely falls into the category of a Bible reading hypocrite. Obviously he must be watching all these pictures of dying children and dying and injured civilians in this war, and these pictures must be pricking his conscience. These are of course the simple realities of this war -- some may call them simplistic.

But they matter more as to why this war should not be waged, than all of the political implications and legal arguments that were cited in last week's article.
This war is also an indication how indispensable and insignificant the lives of the 'rabble' in non Western countries is considered by the Americans. America raged thundered and wept copiously for the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks, but there are no tears or even so much as a blip in the American moral radar for all the children dying in Iraq, or for all the little boys and girls, suffering serious burn injuries who are hooked to saline drips in hospitals all over Iraq even as I write this.

So it is good that a good deal of pictures are coming out of Iraq which depict in real terms the civilian suffering that results from this war. For newscasters, and infotainment specialists, these pictures may all be a part of the montage of the glamorous serenading war report. ('Tralalalala this is the continuing CNN Coverage on the war on Iraq.') But good people somewhere, will be sensitized by these images. They will know that even though George W. Bush may read the Bible -- he is coming perilously close to being branded one of the worst war criminals of our times.

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