US airstrike, Fallujah, February 2006 (cc photo: James Gordon)
The Iraq War was back in the news again, with reports that Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces claimed control over the city of Fallujah. For many in the media, this was a time to recall a particularly important moment of the Iraq War. But their memory of Fallujah was extremely limited.
In the Washington Post (1/3/14), reporter Liz Sly explained that this was “one of the most crucial areas that US troops fought to pacify before withdrawing from Iraq two years ago.” She added:
Roughly a third of the 4,486 US troops killed in Iraq died in Anbar trying to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq, nearly 100 of them in the November 2004 battle for control of Fallujah, the site of America’s bloodiest confrontation since the Vietnam War.
Events Friday suggested the fight may have been in vain.
On NPR‘s All Things Considered (1/4/14), Arun Rath explained:
A little over nine years ago, American soldiers and Marines in Iraq endured the bloodiest combat since Vietnam to retake the city of Fallujah from Iraqi and foreign insurgents. It must be hard for the veterans of that battle to see the headlines today.
NBC‘s Richard Engel (Meet the Press, 1/4/14) told viewers that “the gains that were achieved by US troops in Iraq, very hard-fought gains, have now been wiped out or are being wiped out. US troops fought in Fallujah; they invaded Fallujah twice to drive out Al-Qaeda extremists.” That left host David Gregory to say, “Critics already questioning whether some of our battles there–and the loss of life on the US side–whether that was in vain.”
So it’s clear that an awareness of the suffering and sacrifices of US forces in Fallujah is very much at the front of the corporate media’s memory. But mostly–if not entirely–forgotten is what was done to the people who lived in Fallujah.
There were two major offensives in 2004–a siege in April and an intense US-led assault on the city in November. Prior to both, there was an incident in 2003 where US forces fired on protesters, killing over a dozen.
The residents of Fallujah suffered terribly throughout. The April siege reportedly killed hundreds of civilians; as FAIR noted in real time (Action Alert, 11/16/04), outlets like the New York Times sought to downplay the death toll. The intense US attacks in November included the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorous chemicals (FAIR Blog, 10/22/12). More than half of the homes in the city were reportedly destroyed; civilian deaths were at least 800, according to the Red Cross.
As Mike Marqusee wrote in the Guardian (11/10/05):
The assault was preceded by eight weeks of aerial bombardment. US troops cut off the city’s water, power and food supplies, condemned as a violation of the Geneva convention by a UN special rapporteur, who accused occupying forces of “using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population.” Two-thirds of the city’s 300,000 residents fled, many to squatters’ camps without basic facilities.
He added: “The collective punishment inflicted on Fallujah–with logistical and political support from Britain–was largely masked by the US and British media, which relied on reporters embedded with US troops.”
But more than a decade later, US media still see Fallujah primarily as a place where US forces suffered–and died–perhaps “in vain.” Then and now, the hundreds of Iraqis who died in Fallujah hardly register at all.
Searching the pages and pixels of the corpress for the truth of empire
Will always be a mission undertaken “in vain”.
Also, al Qaeda didn’t have any roots in Saddam’s Iraq until after the US overthrew Saddam. When Engel says that “US troops fought in Fallujah; they invaded Fallujah twice to drive out Al-Qaeda extremists,” either he was lying or he doesn’t know anything about the history of the US war on Iraq.
History is always written by the victors. Nothing to see here folks.
I suppose their was a point to the article. The only ones killed or injured was the enemy
Another thing that they all conveniently forgot about is the use of depleted uranium in Fallujah (and elsewhere) which has caused many cases of cancer,birth defects, and other maladies among the remaining population and will continue to do so for a long while. We must not talk about that either though. Only american deaths have any value to those corporate whores.
gosh reading these comments I can now see what a horrible invedaing empire building horror the Us is.Lets all have a party and celebrate those fun guys flowing back into this city that was the love capital of the world before we got there.Idiots…
Someone in the comments named James Gonzales says the U.S. lost closer to 20,000 troops in Iraq. If that is true it’s big news, Since the war was based on knowingly fabricated evidence of WMD in Iraq, and Bush/Cheney lies about a connection between 911 and Iraq, we know we cannot believe what the government says. So, FAIR…how many troops died in or because of Iraq? You are reporters. Tell us.
I wondred about the point made by poster Gonzales— about how exactly the dead are counted. I tried wandering around in google but I kept finding lots of Vietnam references. i decided to start there in Vietnam because it seemed that this nation lost that war but was there forever too.
I actually wanted to know if the military had changed much or does it normally operate as a kind of gamers in a fantasy land war realm. Yes, I was kind of cynical going into this.
I found horrible things about Mai Lai and how many soldiers came forward to try to get the attention in the chain of command , but they were often ignored. I read of soldiers speaking of killing civilians for no reason and rapes and body parts cut up and heads cut off and this was violence done by American soldiers. Many soldiers later spoke to Congress about the violence. too. The military did give some soldiers medals for truth telling, but also sometimes treated the truth tellers as horrible, unpatriotic people. It seemed that the military said the”right words” but ofteb continued the same actions.
Then I read an interesting speech by Mr. Kerry in 1971; a speech given to Congress:.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake? Wow…….that was 1971 and after he had seen a lot of violence. it was sad that in future time he wanted to go to war to “save ” people. I guess that poem is true: that “the old men send the young men to war”, .even if these same men had once been young soldiers against war.
This next quote, from that same 1971 speech, is a very hard one to read;
” We rationalize destroying villages in order to save them.” Wow….and an almost exact version of that comment was heard in its counterpoint in Syria.
i did try to find the exact numbers of dead US soldiets in Iraq, but so far I haven’t found how the injured, who later die, are counted. However, I suppose that a person could just count body bags in Iraq and then never wonder about those injured soldiers who die later. That does seem like what a military who wanted to always sound successful might do.
So–I am left with this thought: I have never been a soldier and i would not want to be one. I did read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and I am left with the same sad feeling that war is all useless. It’s like that scene in the book when 2 gentleman from a past life in a Victorian drawing room, are now in Africa and murder each other over……..a chicken.
No one wins, but civilians , families, credibility, trust, nations and environments will always lose……… in war, it seems there are no real winners after all. The numbers are just numbers, but the known and unknown dead are still real people
Thank you, Jim Divine. The fight is about the way the Shia have taken such bloody revenge against the Sunni. AQ didn’t exist in Iraq when the town was shelled and bombed early after the ’03 invasion. These reporters have made serious error by claiming to the contrary. There are about 2 Million Sunnis now in exile, about another 1/2 Million internally displaced. The US death squads focused on them exclusively, much to the dictator’s liking; he’s excluded Sunnis from any active fighting role in the Iraqi army.
The MSM make it seem like everything is AQ based, that there can’t be just a legitimate armed resistance against a US puppet. That bias extends to Afghanistan and Yemen, where the media pretend those we kill with drones are people capable of blowing up NYC skyscrapers when, in truth, they would be totally satisfied if we would just leave their country and let the natives solve their own problems. But with communism not handy to blame, the new word “terrorist” is a must for the MSM to control the discussion and narrative about what we’re doing in the many countries we bomb, arm, or strafe.
James had some pretty outlandish claims about the number of dead Americans and Iraqis.I checked into it.Talked to a girl I know who works in the Veteran hospitals,…..and a Us senator.Simply he is wrong.Stats like “died due to wounds suffered in combat”are kept track of.(Suicide is not).Even if he dies in the Us months later.The listed numbers are for all intensive purposes correct.The number ofIraqis????Very hard to quantify.More than believed,but far less than reported by many left wing out lets.But one is too many innocents