Celebrating A Massacre

Where is the young Chinese dissident who stood before the tanks in Beijing? If alive, he’s needed in Washington.

On June 8, tanks rumbled along Constitution Avenue to the Pentagon in a Desert Storm victory parade. Armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns, a fleet of Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, and one hundred warplanes flying low over the Capitol and White House were on hand to accompany ten thousand marching troops.

The hyperbolic extravaganza, reminiscent of the May Day parade on the Kremlin’s Red Square, lacked only aircraft carriers docking at the Potomac marina near the Pentagon.

If the Chinese student had shown up to face down the tanks, he would have risked who-knows-what from the frenzied war-celebrating mobs on the parade route. Celebrators were in no mood to cotton to those who the god-general Schwarzkopf called “prophets of doom, the naysayers, the protesters, and the flag-burners.”

This warlord’s rhetoric, cheered everywhere from a joint session of Congress to the mint-julep set at the Kentucky Derby, is a cloud covering that kept the parade from being seen for what is was: both a celebration of megadeath in Iraq, an impoverished Third World nation, and a display to the world that a soulless America continues to be lost in the delusional promise and premise that military solutions are rational solutions.

The nationally televised June 8 war party — for $8 million in public and private money — was billed by the orchestrating Desert Storm Homecoming Foundation as an unprecedented event that was “going to set history.” All that was historical about it were the extremes the nation’s leadership — political and military — went to in gulling itself and the paying public that this one-sided massacre was risky and successful.

Except for those who gave their lives, the fiercest battle in the Persian Gulf for most of the 541,000 U.S. troops was the fight against boredom, not the Iraqis. More than 639,000 bottles of suntan lotion, 775,000 condoms, 60 million pounds of mail, and millions of cookies and other yummies were shipped in. Actual ground combat — against poorly equipped, hungry, and eager-to-surrender Iraqis — lasted 100 hours. Fewer than 30 U.S. soldiers were killed in ground battle. The returning “warriors” deserve shrugs, not parades.

Instead of a celebration for Schwarzkopf and his army of the bored, a few questions ought to be asked: what social benefits have resulted from U.S. violence? Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship remain in place. Kuwait’s royals are more skilled in running kangaroo courts than in establishing democratic reforms. Middle East governments are rearming themselves for the next war, with sellers in the U.S., Soviet Union, and Western Europe — in a slack post-Cold War market — salivating to trade. The Middle East is as unstable as ever, more so if the burning oil wells are included. U.S. intervention in no way enhanced regional justice, the one essential for peace.

Another question for the parade-happy, especially officials who ordered the dropping of eighty-five thousand tons of bombs in a low-risk operation in which Iraqi planes stayed grounded, is whether they buy Gen. Colin Powell’s lie that this was a “clean win.”

The cleanliness was reported last month by a Harvard medical team that found “a public-health catastrophe” when it recently visited major cities in all parts of Iraq. By conservative projection, it estimated that at least 170,000 Iraqi children will die in the coming year from diseases caused by the delayed effects of the war. Throughout the country, the medical team found, “gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid are now epidemic.” The cause? “The destruction of electrical generating plants in the Gulf War and the consequent failure of water purification and sewage treatment systems.”

None of this was in the surgical-strike scenario laid out by George Bush when he announced the start of the air war on January 16: “We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential. Much of Saddam’s artillery and tanks will be destroyed.” On the merry way to doing that, U.S. bomber pilots destroyed or incapacitated eighteen of Iraq’s twenty electrical power plants. The link between that and children dying today was explained by the Harvard team: “Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, waterborne diseases flourish, and hospitals cannot cure treatable illnesses.”

In his speech to Congress, Sir Norman forgot to congratulate his troops for their brave deeds against the children of Iraq. It was an oversight, no doubt. Amends are in order. For future parades, let a float be rolled out, between tanks and Tomahawks, carrying the rubble of an Iraqi power plant, with the corpses of children around it. On the front, a sign: “America kicked butt.” Would the cheers still be deafening?

Our thanks to the Washington Post for permission to reprint this column by Colman McCarthy.

— Ed.