The Highway of death in Iraq was a US military atrocity that massacred up to 25,000 Iraqis

[Squire]

A column of Iraqis retreating from Kuwait following a UN resolution to do so were trapped, boxed in and massacred by the US military using its air power. It is not known if any Iraqi survived the massacre.

Even if the column "included hostages as well as civilian refugees" everybody was indiscriminately firebombed and machine-gunned by US pilots who whooped with joy at the massacre. "Images from the scene, even those captured by the U.S. Air Force, tend to show primarily civilian vehicles."

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clarke called it an atrocity.

US pilots enjoyed massacring and firebombing people they trapped and boxed in.

Many US military personnel who viewed the devastating aftermath were disgusted by the US military.

"But the controversy over U.S. actions on the Highway of Death is even more complicated. Some argue that the convoy was retreating in accordance with a U.N. resolution, and that there was no justification for attacking it even if it contained a significant number of military vehicles. Others maintain that it included hostages as well as civilian refugees. Images from the scene, even those captured by the U.S. Air Force, tend to show primarily civilian vehicles."

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Multiple reporters embedded with Western forces expressed shock and revulsion when encountering the Highway of Death. In his 1998 book Hidden Agendas, BAFTA-winning filmmaker and journalist John Pilger collected some of those early reactions. He characterized it as a massacre:

... the White House justified the attack by referring to the dead as “torturers, looters and rapists.” However, it was obvious that the convoy included not only military lorries, but civilian vehicles: battered Toyota vans, Volkswagens, motorbikes. Their occupants were foreign workers who had been trapped in Kuwait: Palestinians, Bangladeshis, Sudanese, Egyptians and others.

In the British press, the Observer published a shocking photograph of a charred corpse still at the wheel of a truck. With the lips burned away, it appeared to be grinning. Most newspapers preferred a front-page photograph of a US Army medic attending a wounded Iraqi soldier. [...]

In a memorable report for BBC radio, Stephen Sackur who, like Jeremy Bowen, distinguished himself against the odds in the Gulf, described the carnage in such a way that he separated, for his listeners, ordinary Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. He converted the ducks, turkeys and fish to human beings. The incinerated figures, he said, were simply people trying to get home; he sounded angry.

Kate Adie was there for the BBC. Her television report showed corpses in the desert and consumer goods scattered among the blackened vehicles. If this was “loot”, it was pathetic: toys, dolls, hair-dryers. She referred to “the evidence of the horrible confusion”. She interviewed a US Marine Lieutenant, who appeared distressed. He said the convoy had had “no air cover, nothing”, and he added ambiguously, “It was not very professional at all.”

In 1992, Ramsey Clark, who served as attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson, had gone so far as to categorize the attack another way. It became the fulcrum of his arguments against the Gulf War in his book War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq. ...

 

[Sir Bobby]

You're right LTYC -
it my opinion it was a war crime.
The USA asked that Iraqi troops get out of Kuwait -
when they did that they were massacred.
Sure - some of them were thieves and rapists
as stated by Stormin Norman but that doesn't
mean he had a right to execute everyone.
The USA makes itself exempt from the Criminal Court in the Hague -
otherwise most of their Generals would be on trial
and so would just about every President - POTUS.

 

[HBS Guy]

They were still enemy combatants.

 

[HBS Guy]

See, THIS is the sort of topic the real PA discusses. The sewer can stick to baking fucking scones.

 

[Sir Bobby]

See, THIS is the sort of topic the real PA discusses.
The sewer can stick to baking fucking scones.

Why didn't you start an interesting topic like this there?
You were too busy whinging and whining.

 

[HBS Guy]

I did start a couple, took part in some others. But there is an urgent need for reform at the sewer. I made constructive suggestions, guess you and Petticoat were not up to implementing them. That is no reason to whine like a 3yo girl tho!

 

[johnsmith]

Why didn't you start an interesting topic like this there?

Because there is no point trying have any sort of interesting discussions whilst management sabotages everything. First you need a solid foundation, then you can worry about building the rest of the house.

 

[Sir Bobby]

I did start a couple, took part in some others. But there is an urgent need for reform at the sewer. I made constructive suggestions, guess you and Petticoat were not up to implementing them. That is no reason to whine like a 3yo girl tho!

99% of your posts were whinging and whining.

 

[HBS Guy]

Critiques that were sound and on the point. Ony idiots mistake critique for whinging and whining. Your whine on OzPol whas whinging and whining!

 

[SethBullock]

War isn’t pretty. It isn’t a humane endeavor.

The job of the military is to destroy the enemy, and that’s what they were doing. It is accepted that retreat is a strategic decision; it is not surrender, and a retreating enemy may be attacked. When President Bush understood what the situation was, he ordered the military to stop.

During that war, surrendering Iraqi troops were treated humanely.

There are reports indicating that the Iraqi death toll on “the highway of death” is way overblown. Some analysts think the Iraqi death toll may have been as low as 200-300 because the majority of the vehicles had been abandoned before they were hit.

God bless our troops.

 

[HBS Guy]

I would abandon my car/AFV/tank and hotfoot it away from the road.

W. Tecumseh Sherman said: SYou cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it;

Trying to wage a “soft war” will mean the war goes on for longer killing/maiming/maling homeless more people than if the war was fought all out.

 

[Jim Lahey]

99% of your posts were whinging and whining.

Fuck off poofter

 

[HBS Guy]

After his disgraceful whine in OzPol he has nothing to say about anyone.

 

[Squire]

They were still enemy combatants.

You evidently don't understand the word combatant. In fact, none of them fired a shot at the USA.

 

[SethBullock]

I would abandon my car/AFV/tank and hotfoot it away from the road.

W. Tecumseh Sherman said: SYou cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it;

Trying to wage a “soft war” will mean the war goes on for longer killing/maiming/maling homeless more people than if the war was fought all out.

Nothing I can think of better illustrates that point than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced Japan to surrender.

The death toll from those two bombs was in the neighborhood of 200,000, probably almost all civilians.

But most historians and military experts estimate that a conventional ground invasion of Japan would have cost the lives of untold millions of Japanese, Americans, and American allies, including Australians.

This calculation is logical and terrible at the same time, isn’t it? .... that incinerating a couple hundred thousand women, children, babies, old men and other non-combatants saved many times more lives than those it took.

 

[Squire]

Nothing I can think of better illustrates that point than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced Japan to surrender.

The death toll from those two bombs was in the neighborhood of 200,000, probably almost all civilians.

But most historians and military experts estimate that a conventional ground invasion of Japan would have cost the lives of untold millions of Japanese, Americans, and American allies, including Australians.

This calculation is logical and terrible at the same time, isn’t it? .... that incinerating a couple hundred thousand women, children, babies, old men and other non-combatants saved many times more lives than those it took.

That was just speculation by US military propagandists. The Japanese were amenable to surrender and they just wanted a variation to the conditions of surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped.