Compliments of Shobak

This is an information age, but it will be months before we learn the truth
about the assault on Falluja

Madeleine Bunting
Monday November 8, 2004
The Guardian

With fitting irony, one of the camps used by the US marines waiting for the
assault on Falluja was formerly a Ba'ath party retreat occasionally used by
Saddam Hussein's sons. Dreamland, as it was known, has an island in the
middle of an artificial lake fringed by palms.
Now the camp's dream-like unreality is distorting every news report filed on
the preparations for the onslaught on Falluja. We don't know, and won't
know, anything about what happens in the next few days except for what the
US military authorities choose to let us know. It's long since been too
dangerous for journalists to move around unless they are embedded with the
US forces. There is almost no contact left with civilians still in Falluja,
the only information is from those who have left.

This is how the fantasy runs: a city the size of Brighton is now only ever
referred to as a "militants' stronghold" or "insurgents' redoubt". The city
is being "softened up" with precision attacks from the air. Pacifying
Falluja has become the key to stabilising the country ahead of the January
elections. The "final assault" is imminent, in which the foreigners who have
infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will
be "cleared", "rooted out" or "crushed". Or, as one marine put it: "We will
win the hearts and minds of Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents. We're
doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."

These are the questionable assumptions and make-believe which are now all
that the embedded journalists with the US forces know to report. Every
night, the tone gets a little more breathless and excited as the propaganda
operation to gear the troops up for battle coopts the reporters into its
collective psychology.

There's a repulsive asymmetry of war here: not the much remarked upon
asymmetry of the few thousand insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly
outnumbered by the US, but the asymmetry of information. In an age of
instant communication, we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of
what happens inside Falluja in the next few days. The media representation
of this war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated
by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be
left to our imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud
walls; the agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts
to save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few
supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on the
reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.

The silence from Falluja marks a new and agonising departure in the shape of
21st-century war. The horrifying shift in the last century was how,
increasingly, war was waged against civilians: their proportion of the death
toll rose from 50% to 90%. It prompted the development of a form of
war-reporting, exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the technology and
hardware, but about human suffering, and which fuelled public outrage. No
longer. The reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military machismo
of an earlier age. This war against the defenceless will go unreported.

The reality is that a city can never be adequately described as a
"militants' stronghold". It's a label designed to stiffen the heart of a
soldier, but it is blinding us, the democracies that have inflicted this
war, to the consequences of our actions. Falluja is still home to thousands
of civilians. The numbers who have fled the prospective assault vary, but
there could be 100,000 or more still in their homes. Typically, as in any
war, those who don't get out of the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable
- the elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it too late to get
away; and the insanely brave, such as medical staff.

Nor does it seem possible that reporters still use the terms "softening up"
or "precision" bombing. They achieve neither softening nor precision, as
Falluja well knew long before George W Bush arrived in the White House. In
the first Gulf war, an RAF laser-guided bomb intended for the city's bridge
went astray and landed in a crowded market, killing up to 150. Last year,
the killing of 15 civilians shortly after the US arrived in the city ensured
that Falluja became a case study in how to win a war but lose the
occupation. A catalogue of catastrophic blunders has transformed a
relatively calm city with a strongly pro-US mayor into a battleground.

One last piece of fantasy is that there is unlikely to be anything "final"
about this assault. Already military analysts acknowledge that a US victory
in Falluja could have little effect on the spreading incidence of violence
across Iraq. What the insurgents have already shown is that they are highly
decentralised, and yet the quick copying of terrorist techniques indicates
some degree of cooperation. Hopes of a peace seem remote; the future looks
set for a chronic, intermittent civil war. By the time the bulldozers have
ploughed their way through the centre of Falluja, attention could have
shifted to another "final assault" on another "militant stronghold", as
another city of homes, shops and children's playgrounds morphs into a
battleground.

The recent comment of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: "Why,"
she asked wearily, "don't they go and fight in a desert away from houses and
people?" Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable
historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to retreat
to in a time of war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian
wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city into a
target, a place of terror.

What is so disturbing is that much of the violence meted out to cities in
the past 60-odd years has rarely had a strategic purpose - for example, the
infamous bombing of Dresden. Nor is it effective in undermining morale or
motivation; while the violence destroys physical and economic capital, it
usually generates social capital - for example, the Blitz spirit or the
solidarity of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 - and in Chechnya served only
to establish a precarious peace in a destroyed Grozny and fuel a desperate,
violent resistance.

Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to
demonstrate resolve and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of
casualties are required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim.
That was the thinking behind 9/11, and Falluja risks becoming a horrible
mirror-image of that atrocity. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in
Dreamland would it be possible to believe that the ruination of this city
will do anything to enhance the legitimacy of the US occupation and of the
Iraqi government it appointed.