2008-02-13 | This night of the 13th/14th February marks one of infamy. The seventeenth anniversary of the bombing of the Ameriyah Shelter in Baghdad, by the United States, incinerating up to fifteen hundred souls, the majority children and women. The full number has never been established as the register was destroyed in the inferno. With the 1991 carpet bombing at its height, it is known the Shelter was especially full. With its normality of showers, washing machines, a large communal kitchen and generators to operate them – and electricity off all over Baghdad – women and children went there to prepare for the feast of Eid the following day. The night of the bombing was also the eve of Saint Valentine’s Day and that of the anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden.

Three days before the Shelter bombing, Dick Cheney, and General Colin Powell visited the Air base at Khamis Mushat, Saudia Arabia (slogan: “bombs are us” and “we live so others may die”). After a pep talk to troops, they both signed two thousand pound bombs: “To Saddam with fond regards”, wrote Cheney (“A General’s War”, General Bernard Traynor and Michael Gordon, Little Brown, p324.)

A frantic investigation confirmed that their bombs had not hit the Shelter – and also confirm, then as now, how expendable precious souls are, to those in high places.

Lest we forget earlier crimes of enormity in Iraq.