Fallujah Guernica:
Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.al-Fahdily/Jamail/IPS
The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.
After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.
In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.
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What made it wrong, what makes it wrong forever isn't just the damage and the loss and the carnal degradation, the numbers of the dead and the deformed and the missing, it's where it goes from here as well, who it lifts and who it leaves behind, what it does to the human face.
The gamble and stake is on the outcome, Joshua tearing into Jericho because the Chosen People need that property, whether or not the Jericho natives have necessarily done anything morally wrong, just being there is morally wrong, in that context.
Fallujah is the great sin of Iraq, the place where it all got condensed and distilled into an obscenity that is beyond the ability of those who committed it to repair.
I really do believe George Bush and Lynndie England are a matched pair, a set of bookended tragic human figures. The catharsis of trying Bush for war crimes is important and therapeutic, but what really did this, what's doing it now, is as much spiritual as political, as much metaphysical as material. And in that light Bush is pathetic not demonic, a lost soul seduced and propped up by true evil and kept there intentionally, out in the light for all to see.
Bush has as much responsibility for Fallujah as Lynndie England had for those photographs from Abu Ghraib. Catharsis alone won't save us now.
