Six Days in Fallujah if you missed the fun

Six Days in Fallujah if you missed the fun

Screenshot of Six Days in Fallujah first person shooter by AtomicAs virtual-gaming distributer Konami reconsiders its release of SIX DAYS IN FALLUJAH, gaming pundits ask “Is it too early to role-play the Second Battle of Fallujah?” To non-US-vets it’s known simply as “Fallujah,” as one would denote Lidice or Srebrenica, by name alone. I don’t know, when will it be appropriate to satiate the nostalgic veteran gamer’s appetite to reenact war crime?

The obvious sarcastic question would be to ponder if White Phosphorous is among the player’s arsenal. Likewise, in “free fire zones” where US rules of engagement permitted the shooting of anything that moved, do you accumulate points for killing the civilians or running them over with your tank?

It would be interesting to see how Atomic Games, neighbor of Blackwater, reenacts the raid on the Fallujah hospital, or the strafing of refuges trying to cross the river when US forces had blocked the infamous Blue Bridge. Are key episodes actionable, or do you sit by as the game cycles through the script, where women and very young children were let to pass to safety, but men and boys were forced to back to the city to be dispatched automatically as combatants.

Is there a game version of My Lai? Perhaps the entire manslaughter safari of the Tiger Force Unit in Vietnam. My guess is there would be plenty of takers. How about the Russian destruction of Chechnya, or the assault on the Warsaw Ghetto? Why not?

Until it becomes okay to blend hypothetical roleplay with real human tragedy, gamers will have to be satisfied with fictional scenarios like Grand Theft Auto and Chainsaw Massacre. I wonder if Amazon already has preorders for customers salivating at the first chance to replay the Manson LaBianca-Tate escapades, Ted Bundy’s cross-country trek, or if they’re jonesing over Iraq, the Haditha tea party and barbecue.

The 911 Reichtag Fire

In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

2001 brought the American People their 9-11, with similar doubt as to how it came to happen. Americans were also given their Dachau at Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp absent every American notion of civil right. Americans soon became responsible as well for waging a preemptive war on Iraq based on trumped up charges of WMDs, and American atrocities at Mazar-i-Sharif and Fallujah, which beg comparison to the Nazi taking of Czechoslovakia, and Nazi acts at Babi Yar and Lidice.

To compare American to Nazis may seem like a profound trivialization of the horror of the Holocaust. There is no evil greater than that which perpetrated the Holocaust. But the Final Solution didn’t start until 1940. The U.S. Neocons are comparatively early in their game.

History has now confirmed that it was the Nazis themselves who started the Reichstag fire. They set the fire at night, while no one was in the building. Not a single life was lost. Not very Nazi-like. Someday history will reveal the truth about who perpetrated the events of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center. Time will eventually have to overcome this administration’s persistent efforts to thwart investigation and accountability.

IF the Neocons in the U. S. administration, either by negligence or malice, did allow or facilitate or instigate or perpetrate this ugly tragedy, if they did this, what can they have yet in store for the American people?

(Reprinted ArmchairCommando.)

Vets Day part 2: the 3rd Armored Cav

Black gloved marchers
Before the Guernica that became Fallujah,
 
before our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah,

before there were civilians immolated in their beds by white phosphor in Fallujah,

before Napalm under the disguise of Mark-77 was used in Fallujah,

before our tanks were running over the injured Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah,

before our helicopters were killing every last family trying to wade across the Euphrates River to escape the blood bath that was Fallujah,

before we were turning back all able-bodied men from the age of 11 to 65 from the lines of refugees trying to leave Fallujah because we didn’t want insurgents to escape our pincer movement, forcing them back into the city to make a stand,

before we declared that anyone not evacuated from Fallujah would be treated as a combatant,

before we declared our determination to make an example of Fallujah.

2.
Before we tried to make an example of Fallujah the first time because the world saw what they did to the four contractor mercenaries,

but had to pull out because we hadn’t yet thought to cut off access to the hospitals from which were escaping horror stories of the atrocities we were committing against the civilians of Fallujah.

Before we had thought to ban Al-Jazeera from Iraq for reporting on Fallujah despite our restrictions,

before we killed the Al-Arabia reporter who dared to venture into Fallujah.

3.
Before the famous desecration of the bodies of the contractor-mercenaries by enraged Fallujah youth who’d often seen contractor-cowboys ride through their streets shooting indiscriminately out the window;

before our military tried to cordon off Fallujah with encampments.

4.
Before the killing of three unarmed Iraqi marchers, and the wounding of dozens more, who’d assembled to protest a massacre the day before, both times by nervous 82nd Airborne soldiers who thought they had been fired upon first.

3.
Before the massacre of schoolboys protesting the occupation of their school by American soldiers. The soldiers claimed to have been fired upon and yet the only bullet holes to be found after the killing of 17 unarmed Iraqi men and boys were from the American guns.

5.
Before that time Fallujah had not been occupied. Fallujah remained restful throughout America’s invasion of Iraq. It was not until the actions of the 82nd Airborne and the Marine Expeditionary Force that Fallujah erupted into a hotbed for the insurgency and, as a result of American anger, into American war crimes recalling Lidice and Guernica.

Throughout this period, and in between the disastrous actions by the 82nd and the Marines, Fallujah and the Anbar Provence were the responsibility of the 3rd Armored Cavalry of Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. To their credit, they were not party to the unfortunate American actions.

Fallujah had a precedence

The world has seen a Fallujah before. In Bosnia it was Srebrenica. There the town’s Muslem men and boys were herded into a soccer field and shot. Is this very different from what the Americans did?

The Americans ordered the evacuation of Fallujah, insisting that anyone who remained would be treated as an insurgent. To insure that resistance fighters did not escape with the refugees, the Americans forbid all men and boys of fighting age to leave the city.

In the Spanish Civil War it was called Guernica.

In the Second World War it was called Lidice. I found a poster made in 1942 to commemorate the eradication of the Czechoslovak town of Lidice. Notice any other similiarity?

Lidice poster