Irish Voice-Tears of a Soldier

[summer]

Here's a Irishman's voice on the war in Iraq..


By Cormac MacConnell

I HAVE been reading the letters in the Irish Voice over the last month or two. I have been reading them wryly and a little sadly too.

All the pens which attacked me so strongly at the start of the year now ending for saying that a war against international terrorism could not be won in the way President Bush is pursuing it are now as silent as the Iraqi guerilla guns and bombs are loud and louder. And ever more lethal.

It pains me to be so accurate on this score and, God help us all, it will pain me more before it is over.

I am not, as ye well know, a columnist who likes to walk the harsher and more serious road. I normally leave that well-traveled route to others.

But I have to return to this subject one last time because of contact I had over the weekend with an old British hack with whom I covered the Northern Troubles at the beginning of that bleeding. He is an old globetrotting hack who has seen more wars by now than most generals, and has the savvy and scars to prove it. I respect his judgement and his folklore on subjects such as this.

Having flown back to Italy with the plane load of bodies of Italian soldiers and policemen, and written that story, and having worked in Baghdad for the past three months, he was taking some R&R in Ireland, and that is how we came to spend last Saturday evening together. It was interesting. It was frightening too.

He told me, for example, that the U.S. networks, working under instructions from Above, were told to cut back very tightly on coverage of casualties. He told me that there was little or no take-up by them of the extremely emotional coverage of the Italian disaster such as we have seen in Europe.

We have seen footage, for example, of a Blackhawk chopper actually being blasted out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. He thought (rightly or wrongly) that this was not transmitted over America.

He told me, as a man who has saved his life a hundred times by acutely reading faces, that he has never before seen such implacable hatred and force, too, as he is now seeing in the young dark eyes of the men of Iraq.

And he told me, in his view, that so much of what is happening now could have been diluted if a simple few steps had been taken by the Allied forces immediately after they flowed effortlessly over Iraq and pulled down the statue of Saddam.

What they should have done then, he said, was to ensure that the utilities were restored at once. That there was water and light and policing. Then there would have been all the semblances of normality, of freedom from tyranny, of better times ahead.

Instead the utilities are still erratic, all these months later, the policing is either not there or too heavy-handed, and, in plain man’s language, the last state of the people is worse even than it was under Saddam. That is what the man told me, and there you have a fertile breeding ground indeed for hate.

And do ye know what else he told me? He told me that he knows, in a general geographic way, where Saddam now is! He says the Iraqi dogs in the street know the general location too. And he says that Saddam is still in Iraq and very definitely in charge of the increasingly more effective guerilla campaign against the Allied forces.

He said more than that. He said that Saddam, cruel and even evil tyrant that he was, is now more deadly than ever.

Why and how? I asked the obvious question.

He said that before he was a dictator in a marble palace Saddam had been a natural born cruel desert fighter. And it was because he was so good at that that he became a dictator with 10 palaces and a country by the throat. And now that is what he is at again.

My friend talked to a colleague who had even better Arab sources than him. His friend was filing a story, fed by these sources, to the effect that Saddam, far from being a fugitive abroad, is now on active service against what his people see as the enemy.

The bloated Generalissimo of the grotesque palaces is now back in a burnous, hardened and even more ruthless way because of the deaths of his sons, the leader of the savage shadows that are killing young Americans every day. It could be argued, said my friend, that Saddam is having the time of his life!

And do you know what else he told me? He told me that he has seen more soldier’s tears in the last few months in Iraq than he ever saw before. He finds that very telling indeed.

African soldiers don’t cry at all, he says, even when their brothers are killed. Soldier’s tears are unknown in the Orient, and he has seen warfare there. The Indians and the Pakistanis, when they kill each other on their border, they don’t cry.

In Iraq he is seeing soldier’s tears. Even ruling out the Latin outpouring of the Italians, following their disaster, the death of each young American soldier, he says, is causing great and morale-sapping grief to their colleagues. They know they might be the next one.

So, he argues, on the one side, on their home ground, you have fanatics and zealots, battle hardened by their local conflicts, queuing up to be the next suicide bombers.

On the other side you have the young men and women of the greatest economy in the world, most of whom have never known any real hardship or deprivation in their entire lives. They may be infinitely better equipped and trained and supported, but they come from a mindset where life is precious.

How can they understand the primal hatreds which fuel the suicide bombers who threaten them, my friend asked. And so, on a battlefield where you cannot tell friend from enemy, and where the casualties mount daily, he has been seeing, uniquely, chillingly, floods of soldiers’ tears.

After he left me I heard the first reports of the suicide bombing of the synagogues in Istanbul on the late night radio. From Iraq there was the report of another two American casualties from a roadside bombing.

On the TV screens there were the pictures of London being turned inside out by security checks in advance of the state visit of President Bush.

In the desert, somewhere, unscathed, deadly, ruthless, evil Saddam.

In another desert, somewhere, equally unscathed after it all, equally evil, far more lethal bin Laden.

There was another way to defeat such evil men, as I said long ago, a way which would have been clinically precise and would not have been entangled in economic considerations and strategies and which would have been within the compass of a powerful nation like America.

Instead we now have soldiers’ tears.

And where is the shock and awe?