War Post

Maybe you’ve noticed there isn’t much new content here. For all future writing about and from the Middle East, please check out HIDDEN CITIES at hiddencities.wordpress.com.

BIDEN: Based on what you’ve said, there’s really no hope — we really should get the hell out of there right now. I mean, there’s nothing to do. Nothing.

ROSEN: As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power. And I don’t think that we’re there for the interest of the Iraqi people. I don’t think that’s ever been a motivation. […]

BIDEN: [If we withdraw], the good news is we wouldn’t be imperialists in Iraq, from your perspective.

ROSEN: Only elsewhere in the region. (laughter). … There’s no positive scenario in Iraq these days. Not every situation has a solution.

What a refreshing sight… speaking truth in front of Congress and cutting through the political fray on both sides to reveal the hollowness of any so-called exit strategy. Watch Nir Rosen here.

What would you say to people who describe 9/11, its precursors and the years since as part of an inherent clash of civilizations?

Well, for one thing it’s not inherent. Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it. Also, I think it’s wrong to think of it as a clash between civilizations, because Islam is not really a civilization but a religion that exists in civilizations all over the world. That is a mischaracterization. I think that, for the most part, the clashes come from a clash of identity within civilizations that feel threatened.

In Belgium, for example, the number one name for a child born today is Mohammed, which isn’t that surprising because Mohammed is the most popular name in the whole world right now. But if you were someone of Flemish ancestry, you must be saying to yourself, where is this going? What is happening to my country’s history and language, our precious place in the world? And if you’re Mohammed you’re probably thinking, they speak for someone else; I’m not one of them.

And it’s very likely that Mohammed has never been to Morocco, or may not even speak Arabic. But he’s really lost. It’s not surprising that he goes off to this mosque and associates with other angry and alienated young men and that Islam becomes more than a religion; it becomes a complete identity. That is why I call it a clash of identity within civilizations. It’s different wherever you go. It’s different in Europe than in the Middle East. It’s different in Indonesia. There are many different expressions of these feelings of alienation, rather than this clash of civilizations.

Lawrence Wright, in an interview I did for the Daily Star Egypt last summer, offering a new explanation — not Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations," nor Edward Said’s "Clash of Ignorance." A compelling and unique response.

Read the rest of the interview here and another piece I did after talking with Lawrence Wright on the Huffington Post.

Bab Zuweila, Cairo, Feb. 2007. My other blog and photo page.

"115 bridges were bombed. What did that have to do with Kuwait?"

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon talked to Charlie Rose on the five year anniversary of the Iraq war and immediately turned the conversation back to Kuwait, sanctions and the 1990s. He pierced through the current rhetorical stasis of Sunni-Shi’a, of benchmarks, and of blaming Iraqis to the "material reality" of America’s first destruction of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade of sanctions that killed maybe a million, kept the country’s infrastructure ruined, expanded the Iraqi diaspora and plainly convinced Iraqis that the Americans were not interested in liberation when they invaded in 2003.

He was searing in his criticisms, as he attacked "amnesia" in this country about the American-made devastation of Iraq before it was invaded. He explained to Rose that the myriad Iraqi uprisings which followed Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and which were not supported by the United States were mixed and wide-ranging. They did not fit into exclusive frames broken down into religious groups — the favorite sought-after media explanation for any violence in Iraq and the Middle East today. After all, as he explained, there was an uprising in 16 of the 18 provinces of Iraq, from the Shia holy cities to "mixed" Baghdad and even Saddam’s home province of Tikrit.

The seemingly ignored recent history of America’s complicity in destroying Iraq before the jingoes launched shock-and-awe is vital to any view of Iraq in 2008 and, while the point should seem obvious, it seems to escape most coverage on this anniversary. The mainstream focus is instead on a "what-if" timeline that looks at the mistakes of the past five years outside of the context of the 1990s, which indirectly serves to support the rationale of going to war in the first place.

A rough transcription of one of the interview’s best moments:

Antoon: The problem we have also in the discourse is all this talk about mistakes and what-not. The premise of the entire war is not questioned. Even if no mistakes were ever done, citizens need to understand that human beings by and large do not like to be occupied by foreigners, no matter what. And that was the case, so even if no mistakes would have been done, people would have said in a very short period of time, thank you, bye bye.

Rose: Okay, then that raises the question of whether you could have done it in a way that you did not create the idea of occupation. You created the idea of liberation, not occupation. Unless you say that’s not possible at all?

Antoon: It would have been impossible because the practices of the United States army and Pentagon reflect also a certain ideology and a way of looking at the Middle East and a way of looking at the past and its history. So, we don’t have time to go through all of that, but these mistakes are made. They are not side mistakes. They reflect the structure and the approach to the Middle East and to Iraq and to its history and this amnesia that I’m talking about.

Two of Antoon’s remarks have stuck with me all day. The first is his citing of a US general in 1991, that "we bombed them back to the pre-industrial age." It immediately brings to mind Arundhati Roy and her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," which the New York Times refused to publish after 9/11.

"In America there has been rough talk of ‘bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age,'’" Roy wrote then. "Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way."

Iraq was half-way there after eight years of war with Iran — supported by the US — and farther down the road after Operation Desert Storm. The United States made sure it never recovered with sanctions through the 1990s, only to bomb the devastation all over again beginning in 2003, our five year anniversary. And Americans still wonder why there are insurgents.

The second quote from Antoon was in response to Rose asking what sort of conditions were needed for reconciliation: water, sanitation, the basic amenities of modern, unoccupied life. Antoon nodded but shot back: "It’s a crime after five years that electricity is not back to pre-war levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days."

"So why is the United States not achieving that in five years? It’s not just miscalculation. That was never the priority."

"The Israeli foray left many Palestinian civilians dead."

The telling and reprehensible shape of understatement. Say perhaps that rockets fired by militants from Gaza had killed five or ten Israelis in the past week. Would the New York Times have reduced that to a "Palestinian foray that left a few Israelis dead." Of course they wouldn’t — there would be obituaries within news articles on the Israeli dead, and longer reports on the anxieties of 100,000 living in Ashkelon. But 120 dead Palestinian — reportedly a third of them children, uninvolved save for the fact that they were born in the prison of Gaza under occupation, blockade and air strikes — are not eulogized, are reduced in the euphemism of "many Palestinian civilians dead," consistently in the context of Israeli air strikes aimed at curbing terrorist rocket fire — a "foray" into a strip of land populated by a million and half desperate and starved people.

Palestinian rockets are never framed as retaliation for an on-going blockade, or as violent resistance to a 40 year occupation. Israeli bombs however are tactical strikes with regrettable consequences, whether in Gaza or Lebanon.

None of this is new, whether the bias of different deaths accounting for different journalistic language or the outrage at such moral deficiencies in the New York Times and wider American press not to count Muslim or Arab lives as equal lives. It only echoes what Judith Butler wrote in 2002, that "a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation."

The New York Times is barely concerned with reporting on experiences of Palestinians that do not include celebrating rocketry or fitting into an unexplainable "cycle of violence" — or, if you like, "The Chronic Crisis of Gaza: Air Strikes and Rocket Attacks." There are in fact discernible political and historical factors that have created this current crisis in Gaza — who funded Hamas during the first Intifada? Who stoked the recent civil war in Gaza? — but it’s easier, and beneficial to the twisted mathematics of one dead Israeli justifying 30 dead Palestinian kids, to skirt those in favor of the rhetoric of cycles, something chronic and unexplainable.

Last week Isabel Kershner in the Times called Katyusha rocket attacks on Israel "unprecedented" and advanced the view that they were "an escalation of the conflict." What did it call the mounting Israeli air strikes and new round of dozes of dead Palestinians, specifically 54 last Saturday? "Israel Takes the Gaza Fight to Next Level."

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the so-called peace conference in November. But the Times continues to propel a view that only Israeli victims can escalate the conflict and that the Palestinian dead and injured should be the second or third detail in news stories. The peace process is doomed by homemade rocket fire on fields and scattered apartments, not by bodies pulled from buildings flattened by smart bombs. Palestinians dying that way ought to be normalized in how we view this "cycle of violence," as the Times covers it. Heed the Israeli army spokesman quoted last week: after all, Hamas fighters firing rockets at Israeli civilians are war crimes.

Last week’s Israeli air strikes on 10 year-old boys playing soccer were acts of state security. And please, if you can, forget about them quickly.

 

This small video blog operation equips Iraqis with cameras and other gear to go out and get the kinds of stories that foreign journalists can’t. An example of new media on a shoestring, as well as a better window into what, say, the Shatt al-Arab looks like on any given patrol day, or how crowded Basra’s streets were during last year’s Ramadan. One of their Iraqi videographers, 22 year-old Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, was killed this past December, underlining the ongoing risks for all reporters in Iraq as the five year anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom approaches.

"Soldiers’ videos and photos show how obscene games and simulated violent acts became part of everyday life and led to a culture of abuse in Iraq’s detention facilities."

From The American Prospect.

…the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority argues that he "was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny," including the Baath Party and the Iraqi army. He complains about "critics who’ve never spent time in Iraq" and "don’t understand its complexities." But Bremer himself never understood Iraq, knew no Arabic, had no experience in the Middle East and made no effort to educate himself — as his statements clearly show.

 Nir Rosen on Paul Bremer in the Washington Post.

Time and again, he refers to "the formerly ruling Sunnis," "rank-and-file Sunnis," "the old Sunni regime," "responsible Sunnis." This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves — at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of "Sunni Iraqis" or "Shiite Iraqis" before the war, just like there was no "Sunni Triangle" or "Shiite South" until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq’s regions.

Despite Bremer’s assertions, Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a Sunni regime; it was a dictatorship with many complex alliances in Iraqi society, including some with Shiites. If anything, the old tyranny was a Tikriti regime, led by relatives and clansmen from Hussein’s hometown. Hussein punished Sunnis who became too prominent and suppressed Sunni Arab officers from Mosul and Baghdad in favor of more pliable officers from rural and tribal backgrounds. Local Sunni movements that were not pro-Hussein were repressed just as harshly as the Shiites.

Bremer was not alone in his blindness here. Just two weeks ago, I interviewed John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, about the crisis of Iraqi refugees, who now number more than 2 million. He displayed the same dismal approach to Iraq as Bremer. Bolton claimed that most of the refugees were Sunnis, fleeing because "they fear that Shiites are going to exact retribution for four or five decades of Baath rule."

More.

I talked to Nir Rosen briefly for a newspaper story in January about the launch of IraqSlogger, focusing on the site’s Iraqi-based reporting.

“There’s a dearth of good information about Iraq given the security situation,” Rosen told The Daily Star Egypt.

A founding member of Praedict and IraqSlogger and regular contributor to the website, Rosen added, “What we really need are Iraqis to tell their own stories of survival,” admitting that “at this point there’s really no choice, because Western journalists can’t get around at all.”

“As Iraq becomes more and more difficult to work in, and more and more important in the region, that information vacuum becomes larger.”

More.

 
Warner Plans to Investigate Pentagon’s Ban on YouTube, MySpace, Others

Reacting to the ban, soldiers said the real reason for the curbs were their negative comments about the war, including scepticism about George Bush’s claims about progress. Soldiers in the field and former soldiers, in blogs posted on sites such as Black Five, an unofficial site run by former paratrooper Matthew Burden, said the regulations would be inoperable with most troops obeying the rules but dissidents finding ways round the ban.

Mr Burden, editor of The Blog of War, a book pulling together accounts from the field, also criticised the decision: "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has - its most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced."

More.  

 

A wife whose husband and two sons are fighting the Americans delivers messages and sometimes weapons to the highly organized resistance in her neighborhood. A father of three identified as “the Teacher” preaches Jihad and criticizes Baath party members for not defending their country as so many other Iraqis are.

A pensive man, he explains the Al Adhamiya resistance as a group that “formed spontaneously under the banner of Islam,” but then says, “before these events, I didn’t pray. I didn’t even know my way to the mosque.”

Read the rest of a recent review I did of ‘Meeting Resistance,’a new documentary on the insurgency from Al Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad, in the Daily Star Egypt. The film won the Golden Award at the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival in Doha, Qatar last week.

"22898 Ptv. B. Hobson
London, March 12/17

Dear Cousin Norman,
    I hardly know how to write to you yet I suppose I must come to the point and although it seems terribly hard tell you the worst and that is of your Dear brother’s death in action on the night of the 19th."

This is the beginning of a letter of a British private from the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force writing home to England in 1917. Private Benny Hobson was not with his cousin when he died, "not far away but from information gathered from the comrades of his platoon it seems he was at this time on sentry and met his death at the hands of a sniper who got him in the head." At the time the MEP ‘Force D’ was moving up the Tigris toward Baghdad, three years into their campaign to take Ottoman ‘Iraq.’

"His end Dear cousin I believe was quite short and painless as he fell to the ground without murmuring. I did not hear of this till the day following and and then my coy. or what remained of it, where our orders to get back across the river. Now I will give you an idea of what we had to face and the glorious deeds which some day sooner or later will come to light."

Private Benny Hobson describes an Ottoman ambush at a canal 12 miles south of Baghdad after his division "had been on the heels of the retreating Turks since of the fall of Kut" — the major British surrender the previous year. Hobson’s division is about to cross in a pontoon boat before "Johnnie’s artillary fire soon put an end to this idea."

The British are outnumbered by the advancing Ottoman ranks. "God only knows we held on like grim death every hour brought depletion in our ranks," Hobson writes to his cousin, "men fell wounded and killed, our rifles blazed and became too hot to handle and ammunition began to run out." For Hobson "it was Hell. "

"Some day Dear Cousin if God spares me I will tell you it all. I do not know how I escaped Death as pals around me fell and I had my helmet knocked off by a piece of Turkish shell. Help came just as day broke on the 10th and under the devastating fire of our own artillary the Turks began to retire, many coming in to our lines and giving themselves up."

Help did not come for the other cousin, fighting along the Tigris, and Hobson survived the two-night battle only to "mourn the loss of one who could not have been more to me if he had been my brother."

The British adventure to create Iraq claimed some 90,000 soldiers, many of them Indian, and over 20,000 were lost in the 1915-16 siege of Kut alone. British soldiers filled the officer ranks as the regular infantry was dominated by Indians enlisted under the Raj.

Read the rest of the letter here, which is from the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents (04/19/1, Doc. 456).

"Last fall the British medical journal "Lancet" published a study done by researchers from Johns Hopkins University estimating that the midrange number of Iraqis dead "as a consequence of the war" was about 2.5 percent of that country’s population, or roughly 655,000 people. Over 90% of those died from violence. Comparable casualty rates in our country would mean that every person in Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and Philadelphia would be dead. Every. Single. Person."

Again, via the Angry Arab.

 

Looking for the price of black market goods in Baghdad or a Slate-style daily round-up of Iraq’s newspapers? IraqSlogger has that and more, from a "Kirkuk Police Blotter" to categories about insurgents and journalists that are more substantitive than anything in the newspapers quoted on Slate. For example:

The Sunni fundamentalist website Islam Memo reports that joint U.S.-Iraqi forces are raiding civilian residences in Fallujah and breaking up TV sets of families who are caught watching the banned Zawraa TV satellite channel. At least one resident, Kamel Ahmed Hamadi, of Nazzal district in Fallujah, was detained. One person reportedly asked the raiding force in English about freedom of the press and as a result got a slap in the face by an American soldier, Nazzal district residents said.

"Safavids are Forbidden to Enter" was scrawled under a sign that reads "Welcome to Baghdad" at the Mahmudiya intersection, south of Baghdad, according to an Islam Memo correspondent. Safavid is a reference to the Persian Safavid Empire that invaded Iraq during the 16th and 17th centuries and massacred thousands of Sunnis. It is a derogatory term used by Sunni insurgents and fundamentalists to describe the Shia, their militias, and even Iraqi security forces. Two IEDs that were placed under the sign exploded when a police commando force attempted to wipe out the graffiti, killing and wounding several policemen.

The site went up recently and splits much of its content as "StateSde" anad "IraqiSide." Most of all, the latter includes an "Iraqi Diary;" the most recent post is from a woman in Baghdad writing about her 22 year-old cousin, a Sunni, who was killed because his fiance was Shia. To the question of why it also includes a "humor" link, the editors say they based the decision "in part because Iraqis and U.S. troops have a wickedly morbid sense of humor."

Graphic via Iraq Slogger.

November 6, 2003 

 

There’s been a recent surge in attention the blog is getting and I feel a little overwhelmed. I’m one month into an eighteen month deployment. We haven’t even done anything yet. Soldiering is boring work with scarce and brief moments of intensity. I’m in for the long haul. There isn’t going to be a tidy coda after two hours of Josh Hartnett mugging for the camera. Credits won’t ever roll and house lights don’t go up for a long long time. On top of it, I’m in the National Guard. The guard isn’t cool, it’s a place for unrepentant masochists with a lot of karma to work off. We’re gluttons for punishment that jones for a monthly grunt fix. If I were cool, I’d join the friggin’ Ranger Battallion and start talking shit about how I’m gonna try out for Delta or SEAL team six. In real life I’m a geek. I’ve never read Black Hawk Down. I miss the city and I just want to get back and finish school. This “war on terror” crap has totally ruined my semester. Okay, at least this time I have an enemy. Now who was it again? I did a month guarding the West 4th station from 8pm - 1am (terrorist hours?) which was cool for about two days. Anways, I love everyone for all the wonderful things they’ve shared with me, but we haven’t even started to roll yet. Oh yeah, my company motto it “Let’s Roll.” Todd Beamer’s last words are now ubiquitous and tiresome. I’m certain he cringes everytime he hears it.

The NYT Book Review asked a few writers for war books "they find particularly illuminating." Here’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and author of “A New World Order,” on Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

"With intensity so strong I can almost smell and feel the jungles of Vietnam, Herr chronicles the brutality and boredom of war without intermediation, redeeming glory, medals or even a belief in a cause."

Maybe it’s a bit of wishful thinking, but the omission of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and, most recently, Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad dims the list. That, and no mention of The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

A good idea for the Book Review, but one that seems too much like the editor at the last minute, flipping through the Times’ Rolodex for a feature.

Why The Quiet American? Here:

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I hate war.’ There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

Hans Haacke, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W. 21 St. Nov. 5-Dec. 23, 2005.

Photos confirm US raid child deaths

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.