Shock and awe: the night Baghdad burned (Fisk extract)

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Exclusive extract from Robert Fisk's new book (short version)

In an exclusive extract from his powerful new book about the Middle East, Robert Fisk watches in the Iraqi capital as the US air offensive begins in March 2003

Published: 02 October 2005

<snip> Donald Rumsfeld was to assert that the American attack on Baghdad was " as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed". But he could not have told that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looks at me on the first morning of the war, drip-feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tries vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her legs ­ they were bound up with gauze ­ and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg, which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of the patients brought to the Mustansariya College Hospital after America's blitz on the city began.

There is something sick, obscene, about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we reporters turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi Minister of Health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the "bestial" nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain.

So let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the cocky moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip ­ this bright morning in March 2003 ­ around the Mustansariya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about "coalition forces" which our "embedded" journalists were already telling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy ­ which this war does not ­ is primarily about suffering and death.

Take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs, who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders ­ they are now twice their original size. She was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missiles struck Baghdad. "I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere," she told me. "It was on my arms, my legs, my chest." <snip>

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article316530.ece