The Death of Baghdad
By Larry Johnson on June 17, 2006 at 10:53 PM in Current Affairs
by
Larry C Johnson
Civil society depends ultimately on the ability of the government to protect the safety and security of its people. If someone commits murder, we look to the government officials to find the culprit, arrest and try the suspect, and punish the guilty. When people lose confidence in the government’s ability or willingness to protect them, they have little alternative but to turn to self-defense and neighborhood militias.
Today’s story in the Guardian chronicles the horror and savagery that pass for society in Iraq.
For Iraqis who suffer the loss of a family member, a dreaded ritual
ensues. Everyone knows there is no point in reporting a missing person
to the police — no action will be taken. The first stop is always the
morgue. The lucky ones find a body straight away. For others, the
morning walk past the coffins has to be repeated. Their search can last
for days.As a former trauma specialist in a hospital casualty
department, Dr Baker Siddique, 29, thought he was inured to scenes of
carnage. But nothing he had witnessed prepared him for a visit to a
pathologist friend working at the mortuary.“I saw a street packed with people and coffins standing up
vertically,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room to lie them
horizontally.”
His voice faltered and his eyes filled with tears as he
recounted the agony of a woman in black who discovered the bodies of
her four sons that day.“I have never heard screams of pain like that,” he said. The
woman collapsed on the floor, throwing dirt over her head — a gesture
of grief and helplessness that has become tragically commonplace in
Iraq.As the doctor talked to his friend, a police pickup truck
pulled up with a dozen or more bodies piled in the back. “I could not
believe that the dead were brought in such a way,” Siddique said. “They
were one on top of the other like animal carcasses.”When the police found that no porters were available to help,
they threw the bodies off the truck. It was then that Siddique noticed
the corpses of two boys aged about 12 lying in the pile on the ground.“Each had a piece of knotted green cloth tied around his neck
and I could see they’d been strangled,” the doctor said. He also
noticed round holes that were slightly inflamed in several parts of
their body, a sign that they had been tortured with electric drills
before being killed. “Even their eyes had been drilled and only hollow
sockets remained,” he said.
America, under the leadership of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, have
helped create this nightmare. Our failure to create a safe, secure
society is producing a bloodbath. Imagine that armed men come into
your home tomorrow on Father’s Day. They grab your father and your
brother. They disappear for two days until you discover their savaged
bodies with their eyes gouged out at the local morgue. You cannot file
a police report because you do not trust them (they are staffed with
your religious enemies). No autopsy will be performed and no one will
ever be arrested. And George Bush touts this as a society worth living
in. I encourage George and Laura and their daughters to move there
immediately. If things are so peachy guys, lead by example.
The Clueless Decider continues to insist we have turned a corner in Iraq. But instead of a broad boulevard we are facing a deadend. We are in the alley of death and the only way out is to turn and walk away.
by Ronald Scott
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