Shock and awe

First report from the Ottawa/Montreal contingent of the Iraq Peace Team (Mary Foster, Mick Panesar and Lisa Ndejuru)

"One has to dismantle the wall of disinformation put out by the US and the UK. ... I am appalled that Bush thinks that informed persons will accept what he says as evidence. ... There isn't one point in the state of theunion address that can't be refuted by fact." -- Hans von Sponeck(paraphrase), CESR press conference, Baghdad, 30 Jan 03.

Baghdad, 30 Jan 2003. The sound of a wedding intermingled with car horns and revving engines comes in with the fresh breeze of a Baghdad winter evening. Life in Baghdad continues its frenetic urban pace, somehow undefeated by over a decade of low intensity warfare and Bush's bullying threats in yesterday's state of the union address.

Yesterday morning we left Amman to start the 12-hour car ride to Baghdad. Hour after hour, oil tankers streamed towards us, bringing lifeblood to our economic system - and stealing it from many in the gulf region. The oil we saw on its way from Iraq is sold under the UN-managed "oil for food" programme. The inadequacy of this programme to meet the basic needs of the Iraqi people is more visible than ever, according to a report released by CESR in a press conference we attended in Baghdad this morning (www.cesr.org).

The oil for food programme was introduced in 1996 as the "international community's" answer to the devastating consequences of sanctions on Iraq. As we drove south to Baghdad, the contrast between Jordan - with its stark, empty landscape, Amman's relatively humble buildings, the tent settlements by the highways - and Iraq - with its excellent highways, modern cities, experimental architecture of Baghdad - spoke to the pre-war prosperity of the latter. A prosperity which has been stretched to the snapping point over the past decade: Iraq is a society whose interdependent vital systems -electric, water, health, food distribution - can bear no further pressure.The assault planned by the Pentagon will provide that extra pressure. According to the Pentagon – a good source of information on such issues – one of the first targets will be the electrical grid, which will debilitate the rest of the infrastructure. Water treatment facilities, for example, will cease to function, ensuring people have no access to drinkable water.

Quite simply, the invasion will kill many of the people we encounteredtoday: the children at the hospital we visited, the man who sold us falafel, the young boys in soldiers' uniforms trying to look like men, the two men laughing and singing in the back of the jeep we passed as we drove into Baghdad last night, the translator I exchanged a few words with at the press conference. Unlike Bush's allegations, innuendos and downright lies, this claim, with its implication of war crimes, is substantiated by hard facts (provided, among other places, in the CESR report).

It is hard, as a westerner, to look at people in the eyes here. I found myself unable to meet the gaze of two despairing looking women waiting with their children outside the hospital today. Traveling around Baghdad -refreshingly free of MacDonalds and other multinationals - it hurt to look at the many beautiful buildings and mosques of Baghdad knowing that if the Pentagon's plans of opening the attack with ‘shock and awe’ are implemented, these proud and splendid structures will soon be blackened rubble. ‘Shock and awe’ is pentagonspeak for a massive cruise missile blitz. It is made all the more difficult because of the friendliness of people we have met and the gratitude of Iraqis who know of our anti-war work.