Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
It has finally happened. Chemical weapons in the hands of a religious fundamentalist are being used in Iraq. Unfortunately, he's one of ours.
Providing a fuller, more revealing quote from Lt. Col. Brandl, the Sunday Times of London included a lead-in sentence: "The Marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan... In other words, Satan started this conflict. And we -- the anti-Satan forces -- fully intend to finish it by destroying him."
[...]
During a real holy war, of course, the fire and brimstone is not just figurative. Dominating the top half of the New York Times front page on Nov. 10 was a full-color picture with stunning hues and brilliant composition, over this caption: "Marines tried to take cover after a phosphorous round, set off to help provide cover for tanks, rained down on the unit. No one was seriously hurt." An article inside mentioned that the phosphorous broke "into a hundred flaming pieces ... burning backpacks and gear but seriously hurting no one." Reassuring.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post article provided more graphic -- though sketchy -- information about phosphorous. "Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water," the Post explained more than 20 paragraphs into the story. "Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns." The Post quoted hospital physician Kamal Hadeethi: "The corpses of the mujaheddin which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
But such melting of human flesh is an abstraction in U.S. media, as it is apt to be for holy warriors. On NBC’s "Today" show Nov. 9, a network correspondent in Baghdad mentioned phosphorous shells just long enough to say that they are "meant to burn through metal bunkers." Presumably a description of effects on human beings would not have gone well with viewers breakfasts.
A live report from a CNN correspondent in Fallujah, on Nov. 8, was similarly circumspect: "Tanks have been blasting away inside the city, and shells filled with phosphorous -- shells to hide the movement of the Marines inside the city -- have been exploding overhead."
Via Lenin's Tomb, who notes that the use of white phosphorus "violates the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, for those who think it matters." I await the principled denunciations from the hawks who endlessly flogged the fifteen-year-old chemical attacks on Halabja.
TrackBack"Willy Pete," another name for white phosphorus, is nasty, nasty stuff. I've seen a scar from a piece of it; it was used in US grenades. Picture a Brown Recluse spider bite. Dousing it with water is ineffective; the only way to stop it from burning through your body is to smother it with mud or something until one can DIG IT OUT WITH A KNIFE. Yeah, I suppose forceps would be better, but good luck finding a medic when one of those WP devices goes off- medics are suddenly very popular.
Posted by: by at at November 14, 2004 10:26 AMWhile I agree that WP is a nasty round, its principal use in a place like Fallujah would be as part of a smoke mission - as mentioned in the article, WP burns with a thick white smoke that is often used to obscure either a target or an area between the bad guys and U.S. troops. Given that there are probably few indicendiary targets in the city, it sounds from the story that a smoke mission was fired short onto our guys.
WP has been used by arty and mortars on every side, in every conflict from Anzio to Afghanistan. My unit has fired it. As far as I know, it is legal to use WP in combat. It may be one of those things that is "technically" illegal, like using a .50 cal MG on individuals (the 50-cal machinegun is supposed to be an "anti-vehicle" not an "antipersonnel" weapon), but happens all the time when you have people fighting.
Let's make sure we don't get sucked down into arguments over whose atrocities are worse than whose. The point here is - does the wholesale immolation of an entire city make the possibility of a better, more peaceable, less horrific future for both Iraq and America more, or less likely? The argument might be made that such terrible acts in places like Stalingrad and Berlin made the world today a better place. Similar acts in Brazzaville, Jenin and Grozny did not. I suspect that Fallujah is more likely to fall in with the latter than the former.
J. Lawes
Posted by: FDChief at November 14, 2004 03:22 PM