Friday, March 04, 2005
Rome, March 4, 2005 14.03

A certain risk of understimating human life is implied while daily reading the news from a war zone.
Human brain it is in fact built to get used to information and lower the level of attention requested for a random purpose.
This mechanism is the reason why we are able to improve a certain ability, if properly trained, by simply repeating an exercise or a reading a page of a book twice.
I believe that our task as journalists is to keep in mind what is important in the reality and what is less remarkable.

Since the “Iraqi Freedom “ operation begun in March 2003, a total toll of 1,674 coalition soldiers lost their life.
1,502 were Americans, 86 Britons, 20 Italians, 17 Poles, 17 Ukrainians, 11 Spaniards 7 Bulgarians, three Slovaks, two Dutch, two Estonians, two Thai one Daneone Hungarian, one Kazakh, one Latvian, , one Salvadoran.

1st Lt. Michael R. Adams from Seattle, Washington was 24 years-old when he lost his life, killed “when the barrel of the .50 caliber weapon mounted on his tank struck him in Al-ASad, Iraq, on MArch 16, 2004," he served the USA in the A Troop, 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

Lt. Thomas Mullen Adams, 27, U.S. Navy exchange officer assigned to A Flight, 849 Squadron, British Royal Navy, came from La Mesa, California and was instead the victim of a collision between two Britsh helicopters over the Persian Gulf on March 22, 2003.

Spc. Jamaal R. Addison, 22, from Roswell, Georgia was part of the 507th Maintenance Company and died on March 23, 2003 in an ambush at Nasiriya.

The special report that CNN has online is worth to see. In this case nationality does not matter, it doesn’t count to be American or Spanish, a personal political attitude doesn’t make any difference.

What does count, in my opinion, is to look the in eyes of who gave his life to defend us.
These boys are fighting a war because they strongly believe in freedom.
They are getting payed too and a lot of them were south americans or foreigners in search for a Visa card.
Moreover, there is the perspective of a good career but I believe that this cannot be the only reason why a man decides to go facing his death daily.

I am tempted to say, that they knew what was going to happen to them but the truth it’s sadly different.
These guys were told that the war was going to be short and the resistance movement not so strong or well organized, because Iraqi people were finally free from a 26 year-long dictatorship and thankful to the Western civilization for that.
The reality told us another story.

The Baath party was not totally defeated and bringing down Saddam’s statue could have been very spectacular and sensational but not practically effective as it seemed.

In order to mantain such a totaliarian state for so long a deep and well organized grid of power was projected.
Saddam, along with his friend Alì Hassan al-Majid “Khemiawi” (Chemical Alì), did not esitated in using chemical weapons to pursuit his policy of “Arabization”.

The Iraqi “Diaspora” counts about five million of refugees that were trying to hide themselves as far as possible as they witnessed what nervine gas can do to a human body.

The war that Iraq started against Iran on September 17 1980, was also intended to esterminate the Kurds close to the borders, always persecuted because they were living in an oil-rich area.
This, along with the Shaat al-Arab issue, the recriminations of a larger space and the fact that Saddam believed that to be the right moment due to the confusion created by Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, was the reason why the Kurds had to join the Iranian army.

Saddam considered them to be the “fifth column” of the enemy and as soon as the war ended, he started the “Al-Anfar” (the prey) project which meant hunting these people in every possible way.
It was both a personal revenge and a “financial” move in favour of the Sunni part of the population.

In March 16 1988 an horrible massacre was perpetrated: more then 6,000 Kurds were bombed with nervine gas and the survivors razed by the bulldozers.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait during 1990 (August 8), conviced of a shadow-support he never had from the United States, a resolution of the United Nations (no.660) immediately asked the withdrawal of the Iraqi troops.

When the “Desert Storm” operation begun Hussein could not face the power of the Western coalition and left Kuwait with his troops on February 2, 1991, destroying about 700 hundred oil wells.

The coallition reached its goal, to defend one of the most important oil resource for the Western world. Saddam was left in his domain free to indiscriminately kill thousands of Shiist and Kurdish people.

He had 26 years to build his power in Iraq and the resistance our troops are facing now is a tough opposition of those who had precise advantages and rich incomes from Saddam’s political structure.
It’s a group of interest that will not easily give up its privileges and that’s clear.

We must all remember that our sons and daughters are dying in this country because WE made mistakes in the past, but they can hardly even understand the global political situation and most of them are not part of specialized corps, they might be very well equipped but they are not all professional soldiers.

Our soldiers are not replaceble, each one of them is a unique person in the first place and I belive that we already lost too many souls to get around nicely with our cars in our safe world.
At least try to look at them in the eyes for a second, they once were our sons.
Il Romanaccio at 2:02 PM