AMMAN, JORDAN: MARCH 1991

     It was there, in that room on the outskirts of Amman, that we first heard about the Rodney King incident, where several Los Angeles cops had been videotaped beating King past the point of submission, just a day or two before. We had not been watching CNN, but the rest of the world had, including these angry Arab men.    

   

     It seemed to me that the men in business suits had been quietly deferring to the man in the brown Arab robe and white kafiyeh. He was fully as fluent in English as the others. Now, as he spoke, he first expressed amazement that we hadn’t heard of Rodney King. Then his voice rose to a shout and his finger pointed angrily across the room at me. I assumed that because I was a journalist and perhaps also because I was clearly the oldest male in our group, that somehow made me even more personally culpable for crimes against his people than the younger members of our group.

     He gave vent to his rage: “You! You have no respect for human beings other than yourselves… you don’t even respect your own! Your police beat this black man as if he were an animal… you fight a war against Arabs without even coming out on the field like men(26), you sit in an air-conditioned bubble and push buttons and kill Iraqis from a distance without even knowing who they are... but the whole world knows who YOU are, except you! You do not know who you are! You have no idea of the consequences of what you do in the world! What do we have to do to get your attention - blow up buildings in New York?”

(26)As he spoke, I remembered a brief flurry of news stories about a tidy method the U.S. had developed for overwhelming Iraqi soldiers sheltered against the Allied ground attack in trenches along the Saudi/Iraqi border.

     A helicopter gunship and a bulldozer worked together: the gunship pinned the Iraqi infantry down in the trench as the bulldozer came along and buried them, alive and dead. One U.S. official, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the helicopter’s gun camera tape, denied the request, saying “If that got out we’d never fight another war.” He seemed to think that was a bad idea.