Neville Watson
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad
October 9, 2003

The cause was simple, the effect disastrous. An old man was pushed over and as a result about 25 people were killed. And it happens again and again.

I sat last night and listened to the story told by Karima who was there last Saturday when it happened. A large number of ex Iraqi soldiers gathered outside the army pay office. They had come to receive their allowance of $3 a week. They were lined up between the razor wire that has become so much a feature of life in Baghdad. Tanks and wire and machine gun carriers abound everywhere around here. Along the line walks an old man. The old are respected in Iraq and it is not unusual for them to be given preference in queues. It is a cultural aspect which as an old person I find quite appealing, and it is a cultural characteristic almost unknown in the US and Australia.
The old man is confronted by a US soldier. The soldier knocks the old man down; a young man in the line remonstrates with the soldier; there is a fight and the soldier is struck with a rock. An ex Iraqi soldier pulls a gun and fires at the US soldier who is unhurt thanks to his flack jacket. The US soldier gets back to his Jeep and opens fire with the machine gun. Within a few minutes dead and dying are everywhere - how many will never really be known because in instances like this one rarely hangs around to make a systematic body count. The witness to whom I was listening estimated 25 deaths but the number of deaths is not the point. The point is that people were killed because of a teenage soldier being unaware of the cultural aspects of the country of occupation. He was trained as a killer not as a sociologist.

Is the answer then to have UN trained Peacekeepers here instead of the soldiers? It isn’t quite as simple as that. The UN is identified with ten years of sanctions during which 500,000 Iraqi children died because of embargoes on infrastructure repairs to such things as water treatment plants. In those days you couldn’t even import a pencil because of the inherent danger of the lead contained therein.

There is also the complicating factor that Iraqis are not stupid. They are aware that the invasion of their country was not because of a concern for their welfare. They are aware of how the rationale of the invasion moved from anti terrorism to weapons of mass destruction to the blatant extension of empire.

The situation here is complicated. It is complicated by the fact that the US is trying to build on a lie. And that is a impossibility. It is a principle as old as the Roman Empire. “Nemo gratis mendax” - a rough translation of which is “We pay a price for our lies”

Who is to blame for those needless deaths a few days ago? Does it lie with the old man who tried to jump the queue, or does it lie with the young inexperienced US soldier? In my book neither. Jackson Browne’s “Lives in the Balance” points to where the blame must be sheeted home.

“There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can’t even say the names
I want to hear who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire.”