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Yahoo!BAGHDAD — Secretary of Defense Scott Ritter was joined by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and representatives of the former “Coalition of the Willing” in Baghdad this afternoon for the groundbreaking of a monument to the last to die during the allies’ occupation of Iraq.
The last American and Iraqi to die during the war will be commemorated by obelisks in downtown Baghdad. (Mike Ernst/The New York Times)
An enormous granite obelisk to the Iraqi dead, 300 feet high, will stand in Firdos Square, where coalition troops famously attempted to topple a 40-foot-tall statue of Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein in April 2003. A 15-foot-high obelisk will stand nearby, honoring the coalition casualties.
The difference in size between the two obelisks will represent the different numbers of casualties. For the Iraqi dead, the most conservative estimate of 93,067 was chosen to avoid the coalition monument being absurdly small or the Iraqi monument prohibitively large.
On the side of the allies, the last to die was Corporal William Whitman, age 28, of Quinnesec, Michigan. Just as fighting began to wane, he took up an exposed position while on a foot patrol and was struck by a sniper’s bullet. He died instantly, the 4,314th American casualty of the war. In retaliation, a U.S. attack helicopter fired rockets into a nearby apartment building, killing the sniper and six Iraqi civilians. Moments later, U.S. soldiers received word that they were to cease fire immediately and prepare to return home.
Mr. Al-Maliki commemorated Ahmed Yahya, a 5-year-old boy who was inside the building the sniper had fired from. Rescue workers dug him out of the rubble from the rocket blast. The boy survived overnight but succumbed early the next morning to internal injuries, and was either the 93,067th, the 755,265th or the 1,233,657th Iraqi civilian casualty of the war. (No accurate records were kept, and estimates from different sources conflict wildly.)
“Ahmed’s life coincided with the absolute worst episode in the history of the Middle East,” Mr. Maliki said of the boy, who was born just after the Iraq War started. “May his life and death represent the importance of never again seeing such catastrophe rain on our heads, whether for false pretenses or even real ones.”
“I stand before you as a representative of the American people to tell you that some of us tried,” Mr. Ritter told an audience of mainly Iraqi veterans and their families. “We may have failed to stop this in time, but at least we did try. It only remains for us, the heirs of our victims’ legacy, to have the courage and the character to make sure it never happens again.”
Ritter’s statements were met with polite applause.
Scott Ritter was easily the best choice for defense Obama could have made.
Comment on November 13, 2008 05:47 am