The Longest Drive-By Shooting In History
It’s like Cops, but with heavy artillery!
I note the footage of the US armour column rampaging along the motorway shooting everything within range seems to have been a Fox “News” exclusive. Some genius at the TV station that created the endlessly re-enacted racist theatre of Cops obviously had the bright idea of packaging gruesome urban warfare for prime-time viewing. I foresee a new, long-running Troops show with (preferably) dark-skinned towelheads constantly being fired on by massive armoured columns of US troops.
The television film, possibly shot from the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle of one of the operation’s commanders, was dramatic, compelling and just a little frightening. It showed a small column of Abrams tanks and Bradleys driving along an urban motorway, firing on positions on both sides of the road. Any civilian vehicles which approached the column at speed were also fired on.
In one sequence, an olive-coloured lorry driving near the column was fired on by an American soldier manning a heavy machine-gun mounted on his armoured vehicle. Bullet holes appeared in the lorry’s windscreen and it rapidly lost speed before stopping. Another piece of footage showed a white car apparently carrying a gun-toting man coming under heavy fire. And another showed what appeared to be an Iraqi vehicle exploding behind roadside trees in a massive orange fireball and a mushroom cloud of black, oily smoke. The footage is a graphic illustration of the massive gulf between American and Iraqi firepower.
The truth about casualties
Even if civilian casualties in Iraq are light, expect a great deal
of attention to the subject in the days ahead. In a number-obsessed
society, focusing relentlessly on the deaths of innocents–and
inflating the numbers, if necessary–is a conventional way of
undermining support for war.
A similar numbers game developed after the Gulf War–large estimates
scaled down by calmer analysis. The radical group Greenpeace claimed
as many as 15,000 Iraqi civilians died, Saddam Hussein’s government
said 20,000 to 50,000, and the American Friends Service Committee/Red
Crescent went way overboard and claimed 300,000 civilians died.
Accepted estimates are far lower. Human Rights Watch estimated 2,500
to 3,000. A long analysis in Foreign Policy magazine put the number
of Iraqi civilian dead at 1,000.