Jaidness

heard the vice president say: ‘By any standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton’s romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties.’

I heard Colonel David Hackworth say: ‘Hey diddle diddle, it’s straight up the middle!’

I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95 per cent of the Iraqi casualties were ‘military-age males’.

I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: ‘On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried nearby by volunteers. That is what there will be for their relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse.’

I heard the director of a hospital in Baghdad say: ‘The whole hospital is an emergency room. The nature of the injuries is so severe – one body without a head, someone else with their abdomen ripped open.’

I heard an American soldier say: ‘There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think: “They hit us at home and now it’s our turn.”’

I heard about Hashim, a fat, ‘painfully shy’ 15-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the boy’s death, the division commander said: ‘That person was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

I heard an American soldier say: ‘We get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna turn around and shoot one of the little XXXXXXX, but you know you can’t do that.’

I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that the US did not count civilian casualties: ‘Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy’s capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths.’ I heard him say that, in any event, it would be impossible, because the Iraqi paramilitaries were fighting in civilian clothes, the military was using civilian human shields, and many of the civilian deaths were the result of Iraqi ‘unaimed anti-aircraft fire falling back to earth’.

I heard an American soldier say: ‘The worst thing is to shoot one of them, then go help him,’ as regulations require. ‘****, I didn’t help any of them. I wouldn’t help the ****ers. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped. Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn’t want any prisoners of war.’

I heard Anmar Uday, the doctor who had cared for Private Jessica Lynch, say: ‘We heard the helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military. There were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. They cried “Go, go, go,” with guns and flares and the sound of explosions. They made a show: an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors. All the time with cameras rolling.’

I heard Private Jessica Lynch say: ‘They used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about.’ Of the stories that she had bravely fought off her captors, and suffered bullet and stab wounds, I heard her say: ‘I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do.’ Of her dramatic ‘rescue’, I heard her say: ‘I don’t think it happened quite like that.’

I heard the Red Cross say that casualties in Baghdad were so high that the hospitals had stopped counting.

I heard an old man say, after 11 members of his family – children and grandchildren – were killed when a tank blew up their minivan: ‘Our home is an empty place. We who are left are like wild animals. All we can do is cry out.’

As the riots and looting broke out, I heard a man in the Baghdad market say: ‘Saddam Hussein’s greatest crime is that he brought the American army to Iraq.’

As the riots and looting broke out, I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy.’

And when the National Museum was emptied and the National Library burned down, I heard him say: ‘The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times, and you think: “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”’

I heard that 10,000 Iraqi civilians were dead.

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Crazy,but thats how it goes Millions of people,living as foes,maybe,it's not too late,to learn how to love and forget how to hate.~Ozzy~Crazy Train
In your house,I long to be,Room by room,patiently,I'll wait for you there,Like a stone,I'll wait for you there Alone~ LIke A Stone ~Audioslave(for my hubby)