John Whitehead's Commentary
On the Highway of Death
"Now thou art come unto a feast of death."
Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI 4.5.7
War is not about territories. War is not about oil. War is not even about winners and losers. In the end, all that can really be said is that war is about killing. It is about the taking of human life.
John Donne wrote that "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.... Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind..." If this is so, then we belong to a race of human beings that has been greatly diminished over time. In fact, one "atrocitologist" estimates that roughly 144 million people died in the 20th century due to acts of war, genocide and tyranny.
War is also about the loss of humanity--a loss that has become an inherent part of modern-day warfare. Modern technology totally dehumanizes warfare and, in the process, totally dehumanizes us as human beings. While it allows us to wage battles from afar and bring more American fighting men and women safely home, modern technological warfare also reduces the act of killing human beings to nothing more than targeting blips on a screen--a macabre video game with faceless victims and no danger of someone shooting back.
I was an infantry officer in the Army from 1969 to 1971. Men in my platoon who had served time in Vietnam told me many stories--but none more chilling than the one from two helicopter pilots. They told me how they would shoot the "friendlies" on their way back from reconnaissance missions just so they could empty their ammunition before returning to base. The "friendlies" were South Vietnamese women and children, helpless victims in a war they did not understand. But to the American pilots, they were simply dots on the ground.
This is what warfare does to so-called civilized people. Unfortunately, these "joy killings" are not isolated instances. Take, for instance, a U.S.-led attack that occurred twelve years ago during the Gulf War. This took place after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with U.N. resolutions.
On a 60-mile stretch of road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq, a convoy of more than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were fleeing. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. The American armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait City to Basra, sealing it off and then bombed the other end of the highway, sealing it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hill overlooking the area and then, both from the air and the land, massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on those trapped in the traffic jams, backed up as much as 20 miles. One U.S. pilot reportedly said, "It was like shooting fish in a barrel." That fateful stretch of road has since been dubbed the "Highway of Death."
In a report submitted to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, charges are made that those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the siege of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. The report claims that no attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians.
Pictures taken after the attack show charred and dismembered bodies. Some of these photographs can be viewed by clicking on the link for Peter Turnley's photo essay, "The Unseen Gulf War." Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, suggested the carnage could only have resulted from the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs--anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols.
The killing did not stop with the Gulf War. Following the tragedy of 9/11, the American government dispatched its arsenal of deadly weapons to Afghanistan to quash Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaida network--but to no avail. And once again, there were reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by American forces where entire villages were wiped out and women and children lay dead on the cold earth of Afghanistan.
We are once again preparing to wage a war that is questionable on many fronts. Despite the violence we unleashed 12 years ago during the Gulf War and the more than 100,000 Iraqis who died, despite the fact that we have been unable to unseat Saddam Hussein, despite the growing opposition to military action against the Iraqi people at this time, the American government seems determined to unleash its awesome war machine once again.
Although the possibility that we are seemingly headed for war again has caused grave concerns, there is a much bigger issue here. That is the fact that modern technological warfare is turning human beings into non-feeling killing machines. This should cause us to tremble. Moreover, it has to make us question, and wonder, how far we have traveled down the road to perdition. We have placed others on the highway of death. In the end, however, it is we who are traveling the highway of death. May God help us all.
WC: 890
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org .
Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI 4.5.7
War is not about territories. War is not about oil. War is not even about winners and losers. In the end, all that can really be said is that war is about killing. It is about the taking of human life.
John Donne wrote that "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.... Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind..." If this is so, then we belong to a race of human beings that has been greatly diminished over time. In fact, one "atrocitologist" estimates that roughly 144 million people died in the 20th century due to acts of war, genocide and tyranny.
War is also about the loss of humanity--a loss that has become an inherent part of modern-day warfare. Modern technology totally dehumanizes warfare and, in the process, totally dehumanizes us as human beings. While it allows us to wage battles from afar and bring more American fighting men and women safely home, modern technological warfare also reduces the act of killing human beings to nothing more than targeting blips on a screen--a macabre video game with faceless victims and no danger of someone shooting back.
I was an infantry officer in the Army from 1969 to 1971. Men in my platoon who had served time in Vietnam told me many stories--but none more chilling than the one from two helicopter pilots. They told me how they would shoot the "friendlies" on their way back from reconnaissance missions just so they could empty their ammunition before returning to base. The "friendlies" were South Vietnamese women and children, helpless victims in a war they did not understand. But to the American pilots, they were simply dots on the ground.
This is what warfare does to so-called civilized people. Unfortunately, these "joy killings" are not isolated instances. Take, for instance, a U.S.-led attack that occurred twelve years ago during the Gulf War. This took place after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with U.N. resolutions.
On a 60-mile stretch of road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq, a convoy of more than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were fleeing. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. The American armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait City to Basra, sealing it off and then bombed the other end of the highway, sealing it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hill overlooking the area and then, both from the air and the land, massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on those trapped in the traffic jams, backed up as much as 20 miles. One U.S. pilot reportedly said, "It was like shooting fish in a barrel." That fateful stretch of road has since been dubbed the "Highway of Death."
In a report submitted to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, charges are made that those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the siege of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. The report claims that no attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians.
Pictures taken after the attack show charred and dismembered bodies. Some of these photographs can be viewed by clicking on the link for Peter Turnley's photo essay, "The Unseen Gulf War." Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, suggested the carnage could only have resulted from the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs--anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols.
The killing did not stop with the Gulf War. Following the tragedy of 9/11, the American government dispatched its arsenal of deadly weapons to Afghanistan to quash Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaida network--but to no avail. And once again, there were reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by American forces where entire villages were wiped out and women and children lay dead on the cold earth of Afghanistan.
We are once again preparing to wage a war that is questionable on many fronts. Despite the violence we unleashed 12 years ago during the Gulf War and the more than 100,000 Iraqis who died, despite the fact that we have been unable to unseat Saddam Hussein, despite the growing opposition to military action against the Iraqi people at this time, the American government seems determined to unleash its awesome war machine once again.
Although the possibility that we are seemingly headed for war again has caused grave concerns, there is a much bigger issue here. That is the fact that modern technological warfare is turning human beings into non-feeling killing machines. This should cause us to tremble. Moreover, it has to make us question, and wonder, how far we have traveled down the road to perdition. We have placed others on the highway of death. In the end, however, it is we who are traveling the highway of death. May God help us all.
WC: 890
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org .
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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