Fallujah 2004 Documentary

In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.

"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."

The documentary, entitled Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

More than 25,000 U.S. troops were pulled in to surround Falluja on November 2004, 15,000 of them ready to storm the rebel citadel. Interestingly, as Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, was giving a pep talk to 2,500 troops lined up before going in for the kill, he compared the coming battle to the bloody U.S. assault on the Vietnamese city of Hue in March 1968, trying to take back the ancient Vietnamese capital from the Viet Cong (the Vietnamese Communists), who had seized it during the Têt offensive. “You're all in the process of making history,” Kent told them. “This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt … that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done – kick some butt.” He neglected to mention that although the U.S. managed to “take back” Hue, the Têt offensive was a turning point in Vietnam as it became evident even to sections of the American ruling class that they couldn’t win that dirty imperialist war.

The destruction of Falluja inevitably calls to mind the words attributed to a U.S. officer in Vietnam at the time of the Têt offensive: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” That certainly is the mentality of the U.S. military in Iraq today. In Vietnam, the United States killed upwards of 3 million Vietnamese during eight years of war. In the Korean War, the U.S. slaughtered more than 2 million Koreans. In World War II, the U.S. notoriously slaughtered more than 200,000 Japanese with the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This came after the deliberate firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, in which the U.S. murdered more than 100,000 people. Or the U.S./British firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945 (150,000 to 225,000 dead, almost all civilians and wounded soldiers), part of the Allied imperialists’ systematic campaign of terror bombing German cities in the latter part of World War II which killed an estimated 635,000 German civilians. (See “The Great Chemical Weapons Hoax” and “U.S./British Massacre at Dresden” in The Internationalist No. 16, May-June 2003.) Not to mention the countless bloody crimes in Latin America: Bay of Pigs invasion, Pinochet coup in Chile, contra terror war on Nicaragua, death squads in El Salvador, the invasion of Panama...etc.