Connect: 'It was really distressing picking up dead bodies, especially children, from destroyed homes. It's the most depressing situation I've ever been in," a doctor told the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on January 4th. Of 700 bodies recovered by the team he leads, the doctor added that more than 550 were of women and children. The few men found were mostly elderly.
The emergency team recovered the bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood. Other doctors at the severely damaged hospital said that many of the bodies were found in a mutilated condition, some without arms or legs. All around was destruction, rancid with the stench of rotting flesh. The recovered bodies were from only a fraction of the ravaged area.
So extreme was the demolition, it would take years to rebuild the razed zone and convince people to return. Overwhelming force had caused this degree of ruination and the military says it has hundreds of bodies frozen in a potato crisp factory five kilometres south of the devastation. Without sanitation, there's now the risk of disease spreading from this epicentre of carnage.
Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, who spoke to the UN, was not referring to the Asian tsunami that washed away 150,000 lives, devastated coastal and island communities and has left millions homeless and vulnerable to disease. He was talking about Fallujah, where he is director of the city's main hospital. He added that those figures were from only nine of Fallujah's 27 districts.
The other 18 had not yet been reached because he and his team were waiting for help from the Iraqi Red Crescent to make it easier to enter Fallujah. The killer wave has rightly dominated news headlines since it struck on St Stephen's Day. But it has swamped concern for Iraq too, where the unfinished death toll has already reached about two-thirds that of the tsunami.
"The devastation in the region defies comprehension and our flags will fly at half-staff. We mourn especially the tens of thousands of children who are lost. We hold in our prayers all the people whose fate is still unknown," US president George Bush appropriately said of the tsunami.
There were not "tens of thousands of children" lost in Fallujah. But getting accurate information on the death toll in what used to be a city of almost 300,000 people appears impossible. We know that on November 9th last about 12,000 US and Iraqi troops attacked the place. Beyond that, estimates range from Dr Al-Iyssaue's account to Net blogger Mike Whitney's "more than 6,000" dead.
The attack on Fallujah was code-named Operation Phantom Fury. "There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed, certainly not by US forces," American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Reuters on November 9th. That "large numbers" is relative, isn't it? Dr Al-Iyssaue's figures suggest about 2,000 - mostly women and children - dead. Whitney's figure is treble that.
Even veering towards the lower figure, the number killed in Fallujah parallels the number killed in New York on September 11th, 2001. Not "large numbers of civilians", eh, Donald? While the Fallujah figure is minuscule beside that of the tsunami, Iraq's is not and there's no end in sight. Indeed so thorough has censorship been that "Phantom Fury" seems accurate for the entire disgusting escapade.
Bush has called the tsunami an "epic disaster". That is true, but what term does he use for the devastation of Iraq? "Epic liberation" perhaps? Certainly, in terms of liberating people from life to death, the Iraq misadventure has been truly epic.
In fact, it has been thoroughly Biblical, with repeated and misplaced political invocations to the Christian God to bless its prosecution and outcome.
"Moral values", you see! Bush, after all, was allegedly re-elected to defend such values.
Anyway, the tsunami has generated massive public donations amid unseemly accusations of "stingy" government contributions. That may well be unfair but some perspective is produced by noting the government contributions of the two most prominent invaders of Iraq: the US and Britain.
In Iraq, the US has already spent €112 billion in prosecuting the "war" and Britain has spent almost €9 billion. These same governments have respectively pledged €264 million and €72 million to help relieve suffering in countries devastated by the tsunami. As a proportion of the amount spent on invading and maintaining troops in Iraq, the US's financial contribution to tsunami relief is less than a quarter of 1 per cent. Britain's has been about four-fifths of 1 per cent.
Such proportions indicate priorities. In fairness to both governments, especially that of the US, they have also put some of their military hardware - ships, planes and helicopters - to a decent purpose. Yet put another way, the US government's financial contribution is less than what it spends every two days in Iraq; Britain's equals about five days of its expenditure in Iraq.
It's right to lament the innocents washed away by the tsunami. But it's right too to lament the innocents of Iraq and Fallujah, butchered by a man-made tsunami of lies, arrogance, greed, ignorance, hypocrisy and all those other "moral values".