The Wedding Crashers

Tag : Bed Skirts

[ Note for TomDispatch readers: We live in a media world with a remarkably short memory, whichmeans that stories with a past go missing in action all the time.Witness the one that follows. To the extent my aging brain is able,TomDispatch tries to keep the past in mind and, when it comes tothe recent past, not to forget the remarkable record of the Bushadministration in its various wars. This Web site aims to rescue atleast a few of the missing stories of our age, before they slipthrough the cracks forever. The new book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age ofEmpire , is, I think, a striking record of this site's recovery effortsover the last years. I hope those of you who haven't yet gottenyourselves a copy will consider doing so. Think of it as a gestureof moral support for a site in the memory repo business. Tom ]
I t was a tribal affair. Against a picture-perfect sunset , before a beige-colored cross and an altar made of the very Texaslimestone that was also used to build her family's "ranch,"veil-less in an Oscar de la Renta gown, the 26-year-old bride saidher vows. More than 200 members of her extended family and friendswere on hand, as well as the 14 women in her " house party ," who were dressed "in seven different styles of knee-lengthdresses in seven different colors that match[ed] the palette of &wildflowers  blues, greens, lavenders, and pinky reds." Afterward,in a white tent set in a grove of trees and illuminated by stringsof lights, the father of the bride, George W. Bush, danced with hisdaughter to the strains of "You Are So Beautiful." The media waskept at arm's length and the vows were private, but undoubtedlythey included the phrase "till death do us part."
That was early May of this year. Less than two months later,halfway across the world, another tribal affair was underway. Theage of the bride involved is unknown to us, as is her name. Noreporters were clamoring to get to her section of the mountainousbackcountry of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We knowalmost nothing about her circumstances, except that she was on herway to a nearby village, evidently early in the morning, among aparty 70-90 strong, mostly women, "escorting the bride to meet hergroom as local tradition dictates."
It was then that the American plane (or planes) arrived, ensuringthat she would never say her vows. "They stopped in a narrowlocation for rest," said one witness about her house party , according to the BBC . "The plane came and bombed the area." The district governor, HajiAmishah Gul, told the British Times , "So far there are 27 people, including women and children, whohave been buried. Another 10 have been wounded. The attack happenedat 6:30 a.m. Just two of the dead are men, the rest are women andchildren. The bride is among the dead."
U.S. military spokespeople flatly denied the story. They claimedthat Taliban insurgents had been "clearly identified" among thegroup. "[T]his may just be normal, typical militant propaganda,"said 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry. Despite accounts of the wounded,including women and children, being brought to a local hospital,Capt. Christian Patterson, coalition media officer, insisted : "It was not a wedding party, there were no women or childrenpresent. We have no reports of civilian casualties." The members ofan Afghan inquiry, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, later found that, in all, 47 civilians had died, including 39 women andchildren, and nine others were wounded.
Here's another American take on what happened: "The U.S. military has denied allegations thatits forces & killed dozens of people celebrating a marriage. & 'Wetook hostile fire and we returned fire,' said Brigadier GeneralMark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations. & He said there wereno indications that the victims of the attack were part of awedding party."
Oh, my mistake. Kimmitt was denying that a different wedding partyhad been obliterated  in the Western Iraqi desert, near the Syrianborder, in May 2004. In that case, the wedding feast was long over.The celebrations had ended and the guests were evidently in bedwhen the U.S. jets arrived. More than 40 people died, includingchildren, women, musicians, and a well-known Iraqi wedding singerhired for the event. According to Rory McCarthy of the British Guardian , who interviewed some of the hospitalized survivors, 27 members of one extendedfamily died when the jets arrived.
In response to reports on that 2004 slaughter, Maj. Gen. JamesMattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, asked the followingquestion: "How many people go to the middle of the desert & to holda wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" And, in ane-mail responding to questions from a New York Times reporter, Gen. Kimmitt later offered what was, by U.S. military standards, little short of anadmission: "Could there have been a celebration of some type goingon? & Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations. Could this have been ameeting among the foreign fighters and smugglers? That is apossibility. Could it have involved entertainment? Sure. However, awedding party in a remote section of the desert along one of therat lines, held in the early morning hours, strains credulity."
The comments of Mattis and Kimmitt deserve, of course, to godirectly into the annals of American military quotes, right next tothat Vietnam-era classic: "It became necessary to destroy the townto save it."
But back to the subject of collateral ceremonial damage inAfghanistan. Consider this passage from a news report headlined, "No U.S. Apology Over WeddingBombing," in the Guardian :
"Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near DehRawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north ofKandahar, had been firing into the air  a Pashtun weddingtradition  when American planes struck. But a U.S. spokesmanclaimed yesterday that the shooting was 'not consistent' with awedding, saying that the planes had come under attack. 'Normallywhen you think of celebratory fire & it's random, it's sprayed,it's not directed at a specific target,' said Colonel Roger King atthe U.S. airbase at Bagram. 'In this instance, the people on boardthe aircraft felt that the weapons were tracking them and were[trying] to engage them.'"
That was indeed Afghanistan  not in July 2006, however, but fourJulys earlier, when at least 30 people in a wedding party werewiped out, most of them, again, reportedly women and children.Here's how Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan foreign minister at thetime, described that American air attack. It killed, he said, "awhole family of 25 people. No single person was left alive. This isthe extent of the damage."
Oh, and let's not forget the ur-incident in wedding partydestruction in Bush's wars. In late December 2001, a B-52 and twoB-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, essentially wiped outa village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike,took out Afghans digging in the rubble). At the time, it wasclaimed that Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders had been killed "in theirsleep." It was also claimed that surface-to-air missiles had beenfired at the American planes. A spokesman for the U.S. CentralCommand issued a congratulatory statement after the attack occurredwith this passage: "Follow-on reporting indicates that there was nocollateral damage."
Except, of course, as Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll, then in Afghanistan, put it , "bloodied children's shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, thescalp of a woman with braided gray hair, butter toffees in redwrappers, wedding decorations. The charred meat sticking to rubblein black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden's henchmen butsurvivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives andchildren, and wedding guests."
In fact, according to Time magazine's Tim McGirk, out of 112 Afghans in the wedding party, only twowomen survived. In this case, it seems that the Americans were feddisinformation by an Afghan official out to settle scores and actedon it.
That makes four wedding parties blown away by U.S. air power inIraq and Afghanistan since the end of 2001. And there was probablyat least one more. Back in May 2002 , it was claimed that U.S. helicopters wiped out a wedding party inthe eastern Afghan province of Khost, killing 10 and wounding manymore. An Agence France Presse report at the time concluded: "Awedding was in progress in the village when people fired into theair in traditional celebration and U.S. helicopters flying over thearea could have mistaken it for hostile fire. An aircraft laterbombed the area for several hours." On this event, however, thedocumentation is far poorer.
All these "incidents" have some obvious features in common: thealmost immediate claims by the U.S. military, for instance, thatthose who have been hit were adversaries, not wedding parties; theultimate dismissal of the killings as the usual "collateral damage"in wartime; and, above all, the striking fact that, for none ofthese slaughters of celebrating locals, did the U.S. ever offer agenuine apology.
The mainstream media tends to pick up such stories as he said/she said affairs. Of course, "she" never actually "says" anything, beingdead. But you get the idea. As with the most recent Afghanwedding-party slaughter, such pieces  generally wire servicestories  are to be found deep inside American newspapers whereonly the news jockeys are reading. In fact, your basic weddingparty wipeout report is almost certain to share at least some spacein the story with a mini-round-up of other kinds of recent deathand mayhem in the region in question. The language in which suchstories are written is generally humdrum and, in the military mode,death is sanitized (except in rare instances like Carroll's fine reports for the Guardian ).
We Americans have only had one experience of death delivered fromthe air since World War II  the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As noone is likely to forget, they shocked us to our core. And you knowhow those deaths were covered, right down to the special pagesfilled with bios of civilians who just happened to be in the wrongplace at the wrong time, and the repeated invocations of thebarbarism of al-Qaeda's killers (and barbarism it truly was).
These wedding parties, however, get no such treatment. Initially,they are automatically assumed to be malevolent  until the reportsbegin to filter in from the hospitals, the ruined villages, and thegraveyards, and, by then, it's usually too late for much pressattention. When that does happen, their deaths are chalked up to an" errant bomb ," or that celebratory gunfire, or no explanation is even offered.
Nothing barbaric lurks here, even though we can be sure that thesecivilians were hardly less surprised by the arrival of theattacking planes than were the victims of 9/11. For their deaths,no word portraits are ever painted. No one in our world thinks tomemorialize them, nor is there any cumulative record of theirdeaths. Whole extended families have been wiped out, while the deadand wounded run into the hundreds, and yet who remembers?
Here's the truth of it: In Bush's wars, the wedding singer dies,the bride does not get a chance to run away, and the event might berelabeled my big, fat, collateral damage wedding.
In the process, we have become a nation of wedding crashers, theuninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up theplace, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home. It's aremarkable record, really, and catches the nature of the Bush administration's air war not on, but of and for terror in a particularly raw way. And yet, in this country, whenthe latest wedding party went down, no reporter seems even to haverecalled our past history of wedding-party obliteration. So itgoes.
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt