July 14, 2007
Here's an update on the previous post. The NYT has now followed up on the killing of their reporter,
Khalid Hassan, in Baghdad. He was apparently gunned down by militiamen
after his car had been diverted into the backstreets by an American
roadblock. It was a two-stage hit; he was forced off the road by a
black Mercedes and shot, but survived. As he was calling his mother to
say that he was OK, a second car came along, carrying a gunman who shot
Hassan twice more and killed him.
The
impenetrable murk which covers the atrocities on all sides in Iraq will
almost certainly make it impossible to determine just who killed
Hassan, and why. As the NYT's John F. Burns reports:
The
murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families
never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni
insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while
pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr.
Hassan’s case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at
risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?
With
a police force that barely functions because of the bludgeoning it has
taken from Sunni insurgents — and that has spawned Shiite death squads
— families can rarely hope to see killers tracked down. Now, that may
be the fate of Mr. Hassan’s family, for whom he was the principal
breadwinner. After his parents separated during his teenage years, Mr.
Hassan supported his mother and four sisters, all under 18, by selling
cosmetics door to door and, for the last four years, using a polished
colloquial English learned through movies, for The New York Times.
Hassan's
neighborhood is riddled with the virulent sectarian strife that Bush's
rape of Iraq has unleashed -- and which the "surge" is ostensibly
designed to quell. But as we've often noted here, the United States --
and tag-along Britain -- have themselves been waging a relentless "dirty war" in the country since the first months after the invasion, arming some violent groups, infiltrating and steering others,
throwing in with murderers, torturers, thieves, extremists and
provocateurs, setting in motion a multitude of deep-delving plots whose
ultimate consequences are far beyond the control of their begetters.
Hassan's
family -- Palestinians who came to Iraq in 1948, fleeing Israel's
takeover there -- believe that Hassan was most likely killed by
operatives of the Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Motqada al-Sadr, who, as
we noted yesterday, has been one of the mainstays of the Bush-backed
Maliki goverment. If so, then Hassan was killed by the very forces that
Bush has empowered in the conquered land. Burns notes that Shiite
extremists have been entering Hassan's district in police uniforms,
then changing into mufti to carry out their killings. Thus they are
almost certainly Iraqi policemen who have been trained, armed and paid
by American forces.
Hassan's
death is just one more of the "excess deaths" caused by Bush's war. The
number of such deaths -- i.e., in excess of the ordinary death rate
under Saddam's regime -- was estimated at some 650,000 last year by The
Lancet, the authoritative medical journal whose findings on the death
count were upheld by Tony Blair's own experts (although
Blair himself mendaciously derided the figures, as did Bush). Follow-up
studies using the Lancet's rigorous methodology have advanced that
figure to almost a million by now
-- more than were killed in Rwanda. An equivalent death toll in the
United States would be roughly 12 million people -- twice the size of
the Holocaust.
We
know about Hassan's killing because he worked for a Western news
organization. But most of these "excess deaths" are just tiny droplets
in a vast and spreading swamp of blood. They fall without notice in the
wider world -- but their echoes will still be reverberating in the
lives of our children and grandchildren.
***
|
