[Mb-civic] The Agony of War

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0425-21.htm

Published on Monday, April 25, 2005 by the New York Times
The Agony of War
by Bob Herbert
 
"Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh 
and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good."— 
Simone Weil

"There's no doubt in my mind that the good Lord has his hands full 
right now." — The Rev. Ted Oswald at the funeral Mass for Marla 
Ruzicka

In a horrifying incident that occurred in the spring of 2003, an Iraqi 
woman threw two of her children, an infant and a toddler, out the 
window of a car that had been hit accidentally in an American rocket 
attack. The woman and the rest of her family perished in the black 
smoke and flames of the wreckage. The toddler, whose name was 
Zahraa, was severely burned. She died two weeks later.

The infant, named Harah, was not badly hurt. She was photographed 
recently on the lap of Marla Ruzicka, a young humanitarian-aid worker 
from California who was herself killed a little over a week ago in the 
flaming wreckage of a car that was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack 
in Baghdad.

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result 
of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully 
kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can't think of 
anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You 
can't put a positive spin on dead children.

As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of 
civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme 
from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the 
election of another, and the media's manic obsession with the comings 
and goings of Martha, Jacko, et al.

There's been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens 
of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It's an ugly subject, and the 
idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories 
or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage 
war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it.

So the public doesn't even hear about the American bombs that fall 
mistakenly on the homes of innocent civilians, wiping out entire 
families. We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery 
soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, 
women and children who were never a threat in the first place. We 
don't hear much about the many children who, for one reason or 
another, are shot, burned or blown to eternity by our forces in the 
name of peace and freedom.

Out of sight, out of mind.

This stunning lack of interest in the toll the war has taken on civilians is 
one of the reasons Ms. Ruzicka, who was just 28 when she died, felt 
compelled to try to personally document as much of the suffering as 
she could. At times she would go from door to door in the most 
dangerous areas, taking down information about civilians who had 
been killed or wounded. She believed fiercely that Americans needed 
to know about the terrible pain the war was inflicting, and that we had 
an obligation to do everything possible to mitigate it.

Her ultimate goal, which Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is pursuing, 
was to establish a U.S. government office, perhaps in the State 
Department, to document the civilian casualties of American military 
operations. That information would then be publicly reported. 
Compensation would be provided for victims and their families, and the 
data would be studied in an effort to minimize civilian casualties in 
future operations.

War is always about sorrow and the deepest suffering. Nitwits try to 
dress it up in the finery of half-baked rationalizations, but the reality is 
always wanton bloodshed, rotting flesh and the lifelong trauma of those 
who are physically or psychically maimed.

More than 600 people attended Ms. Ruzicka's funeral on Saturday in 
her hometown of Lakeport, Calif. Among them was Bobby Muller, 
chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. A former 
Marine lieutenant, he knows something about the agony of war. His 
spinal cord was severed when he was shot in the back in Vietnam.

He told the mourners: "Marla demonstrated that an individual can 
make a profound difference in this world. Her life was dedicated to 
innocent victims of conflict, exactly what she ended up being."

© 2005 NY Times Co.

###


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