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A crying face of an Iraqi child was shown on TV, with eyes filled with fear of the war which is swallowing up lives of more and more people. This is a historical picture haunting the minds of the world people and will become a historical symbol of the Iraqi war, which former US president Jimmy Carter described as "an operation almost unprecedented in the history of civilized societies".
Facing the surging wave of worldwide protests against war and pressure from the international community, the US-British coalition forces have repeatedly claimed that it is necessary to distinguish soldiers from civilians and reduce civil casualties as much as possible through the use of high-precision, most sophisticated equipment.
However, from the heavy smoke floating over Baghdad, people can easily see that the bombs sent out from advanced US armaments still fall into civil zones without military targets, and the city's hospitals packed with injured civilians. Apparently, the profession that "a war which harms no innocent people" is nothing but an empty talk.
With the coalition forces closing in upon Baghdad, what they encounter is the increasingly stubborn resistance put up by the Iraqi troops. Once they fought their way into Baghdad, the US troops would have to engage in street fights with the Iraqi army in the city proper inhabited by 5 million people. By then, the allied forces would face severe tests, the advantage of hi-tech weapons of US troops would be greatly reduced in close quarter battles. For instance, the hi-tech device capable of judging whether there are people behind the wall, even if it is in the possession of US-British soldiers, cannot determine whether the said people are soldiers or civilians. To avoid casualties of their own personnel, the US-UK coalition forces can only use bombers to bombard military targets. If this method of fighting were adopted, the harm done would involve several civilians in order to eliminate one Iraqi soldier. And how many innocent people would be killed or wounded if the allied forces wanted to completely wipe out Iraqi crack forces numbering at least a hundred of thousands concentrated in Baghdad? In a word, the demand for reducing casualties of the allied forces and that for decreasing the deaths and injuries of Iraqi civilians will inevitably become an irreconcilable contradiction.
Some analysts said an important reason for the US army being bogged down in a quagmire of the Vietnam War, a war of US invasion of Vietnam, during the 60s-70s, is that it failed to differentiate soldiers from civilians, with the result that US troops unscrupulously adopted the cruel and indiscriminate homicidal tactic, and they thus encountered the "people's war" billows raging with great fury. Now if the US forces unscrupulously start indiscriminate killings in Iraq in order to win in their war against Iraq, then, they will inevitably whip up a wave of resistance put up by the Iraqi people.
The British and US leaders, in the face of possible falling in the mire of a protracted war, should think thrice and listen to many countries' demand for stopping the war. How much can the families of the hundreds of thousands of US-UK coalition forces endure the deaths and casualties of their dear ones? And how long can the world public opinion tolerate the humanitarian and ecological disasters caused by the war? If the United States and Britain arbitrarily continue the war regardless of the fact of the rapid surge in the casualties of civilians, then how the war starters would face the severe historical and moral questioning?
(People's Daily March 29, 2003)
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