by Kate Bradley
illustration by Nina Frenkel
Free Press contributors
One series of bombings began on January 16th, 1991, and continued unabated until February 19th. That bombing was celebrated and cheered by many, if not most, Americans. On April 19th, 1995, another bombing occurred. Most Americans reacted to that incident with unmitigated horror.The five weeks of daily bombings which comprised the Gulf War killed upwards of 100,000 people, including children. These air assaults destroyed schools, bridges, water treatment plants, roads, hospitals and hydroelectric plants. They shattered any sense of security for millions of civilians. The diseases and malnourishment which came in the aftermath were responsible for grief, illness, and death long after the skies became quiet.
We can use our own feelings of horror and sadness toward the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people including children, to understand the pain we inflicted on the Iraqi people.
Unfortunately it has never been suggested to us that we ought to feel empathy towards the Iraqi people. Timothy McVeigh, judged guilty of the Oklahoma City bombing, killed civilians in both the Gulf War and in Oklahoma City. 
The killing of civilians in the war was ordered, condoned, and euphemized by the US military commanders. When he killed under those orders, he was awarded a bronze star. When he later killed American civilians he was deemed a heinous criminal and was punished accordingly. Why the difference?
The Gulf War incident which involved McVeigh occurred on February 24-25, 1991. By that time, Allied, mostly American, planes had been dropping bombs on Iraq for five weeks. Iraqi soldiers who had been stationed in trenches along the Iraqi border had been cut off from supplies, and were shell-shocked, hungry, and dirty.
The Allied war strategy had been to carry out nighttime bombings of Iraq until any resistance would be minimal, and then to move forward with ground forces. In preparation for the ground war, the American troops of three brigades of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division, who were stationed in Saudi Arabia, used the weeks of aerial bombardment to practice a maneuver designed to take full advantage of the desert sand.
First they dug trenches like those of the Iraqis. Then Abrams tanks, equipped with enormous saw-toothed plows, drove along either side of the practice trenches. Flanking the plows, a Bradley armored vehicle on either side would direct heavy fields of fire into the trenches using 7.62mm machine guns and 25mm cannons. As they moved forward, the Iraqis would be simultaneously fired upon and buried.
When the ground war was initiated in late February the American troops moved forward in their armored vehicles to where the Iraqis were dug in. Some 2000 Iraqis were allowed to surrender; another 6000 or so were buried, their "arms and things sticking out of the sand," as an American soldier later described the scene (Newsday 9/12/91).
One of the commanders of a Bradley vehicle said later that the Iraqi troops had been poorly equipped and ill-trained. "They had civilian clothes on under their uniforms. Some still had their new weapons unused in plastic bags." These men had been taken off the streets by Saddam Hussein's regular forces and sent to the desert as cannon fodder. Despite the fact that they knew after the first day the men they faced did not pose any danger to them, the Americans carried out the same tactics on a second day, again shooting men and burying them alive in their trenches.
The New York Times (5/4/95) reported in passing that McVeigh was one of the gunners in a Bradley vehicle in the war. Like his fellow soldiers he was safe inside the best military equipment money can buy, a product of the best killing psychology the military could prepare, murdering other mothers' sons who didn't even know how to fire a gun. He was unfortunately well-prepared to commit the Oklahoma City bombing.
There may be much focus now on the development of McVeigh's pathology. From the propaganda he read he was susceptible to the idea that the American government was a monolithic body of jack-booted thugs conspiring to disarm and enslave the American people. Given such a view of reality, he could allow himself to kill. He could not see that individuals working inside the federal building were trying to help others, or that innocent children were learning to play.
What happened to us, as a nation, that allowed us to similarly dehumanize and murder hundreds of thousands of individuals no better or worse than we are?
We were blinded by fear created through propaganda. The propaganda for the Gulf War began with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, presented to Americans as a surprise blitzkrieg. However, even the British magazine The Economist
|
Timothy McVeigh was.. a product of the best killing psychology the military could prepare. |
We were told that Iraq would likely invade Saudi Arabia, site of the world's largest oil reserves, and this would threaten our lifestyle. Again, fear filled the land. In fact, the border dispute with Kuwait was long-standing and involved a shared oil field and access to the Persian Gulf for landlocked Iraq. Even if Hussein had intended to invade Saudi Arabia, this invasion could not have been carried out, because Iraq lacked the necessary military strength.
Exaggeration of Iraq's military might was constant. Iraq and Iran had fought a crippling war for eight years from 1980 to 1988. And in the end Iraq was defeated even though the arms embargo against Iran had forced the Iranian soldiers to fight without shoes and to get around the battlefields on mopeds. The babies allegedly torn from incubators by Iraqi invaders turned out to be a public relations fabrication. Timothy McVeigh later went through the same exaggeration of danger: he thought that military monsters who burned babies at Waco would lay America to waste.
The earth continues to turn. We continue to buy oil, our standard of living is high, and the Gulf War is registered as a victory which restored America's place as a world leader. But we forget and deny what our exercise of power has done to uncounted thousands of individuals. Timothy McVeigh will probably be executed, and we can imagine that we have thereby eliminated evil. The bones of little arms sticking up through the sand have long since been picked clean by vultures and the wind. What will be done to eliminate the evil which murdered all those men and buried them far from the comfort of their loved ones?
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.