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The enemy within

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

May 1, 2004

Fallujah, Iraq - I finally got into Fallujah today. It's worth saying first what the story there is not. U.S. forces have not wantonly destroyed a living city as did the Serbs in Sarajevo (Bosnia in the '90s) or the Russians in Grozny (Chechnya since 1997). The scale of destruction in Fallujah is vastly less.

And when the U.S. authorities in Iraq realized that it would require a Grozny-style destruction of Fallujah to subdue it, they backed off and found an alternative path. They chose a prominent Fallujah military man -- a general under Saddam Hussein -- to try to restore calm there.

Another thing the U.S. siege of Fallujah is not: it is not the simple contest for morality that official U.S. rhetoric tends to portray. On April 1, after anti-U.S. guerrillas killed four American security guards and a Fallujah mob mutilated their bodies, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, described Fallujah as "a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism."

As seen today, Fallujah was instead a dramatic example of war and the human excesses it requires. Hundreds of people, very many of them civilians, are buried in a soccer field downtown, or in their front yards or under rubble of their homes. Of 13 people who died in the first week of the siege at the clinic of Dr. Talab Janabi, about half were automatically innocents (two babies, four elderly).

At least some of the people fighting U.S. troops in Fallujah were defending not barbarism, but their homes and families from what they saw as barbarism. The most consistent defenders of human dignity were likely the medical teams of the city's heroic hospital director, Dr. Rafa Chiad. When the Marines' front line cut off the city's access to its main hospital, Chiad crossed into the combat zone to set up makeshift clinics, and a surgery ward in mosques and offices around the city. Chiad criticized both the Marines and guerrillas for endangering civilians.

I met Chiad in a clamorous, crowded clinic office where a television was tuned to Al-Arabiya, one of the main Arabic-language satellite TV channels. Suddenly the room was struck silent. The TV had begun showing the now-infamous images of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison (just east of Fallujah). Chiad's doctors and volunteer medical workers -- survivors of a real battle for human dignity -- stared in shock at the pictures.

In the coming days, hopefully, we'll learn details about the soldiers of the 372nd MP Company and how these presumably ordinary folks from around Cumberland, Maryland slipped into the kind of barbarism that our government declares is the exclusive attribute of our opponents. And we'll learn more about how consistently we were on the side of human dignity in our siege of Fallujah.