War Post

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.

"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."

 

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny."

- Diane McHorter on Slate

Bush Blames Al Qaeda for Wave of Iraq Violence

Iran: US spies behind Iraq unrest

A video showing US soldiers in Iraq taunting thirsty children with a bottle of water has caused outrage. The footage shows a group of children desperately chasing a truck so they can get a drink. Today the US Department of Defense confirmed the video showed US soldiers and said the images were ‘unfortunate’. The faces of the two men in the vehicle are not revealed but they can be heard saying in American sounding accents: ‘You want some water? Keep running.’

- The London Metro, via here.

In the YouTube age, what will the new, grainy digital images of war do? If smart bomb hits and targeting runs have become sanitized footage for CNN, what about soldiers taunting thirsty Iraqi children, leaving them in the dust? Will we actually react?

Or will we become hollow to these images too?

“That kid’s running forever.”

I wrote both of these late last summer, as the Ford Scholar work was officially wrapping up. They kicked around for a few months, and  now I’m posting them here.

Read the Soldiers

Bomb Writing 

 

Max Rodenbeck asks "How Terrible Is It?" in the newest NY Review of Books, reviewing two recent National Security Strategies and three book: this one by Harvard prof. Louise Richardson, Winning the Un-War by Carlos Peña, and Overblown by John Mueller.

Five years after George Bush launched America on a global crusade to "rid the world of evil," it is safe to say that the tide has turned. No, America is not winning, although some argue that it might be politic, at this juncture, to declare victory.^[1] Nor is America necessarily losing, as others have asserted. What has happened instead is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

This is not surprising. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for Americans to notice.

Rodenbeck’s review is some of the best, most basic criticism of this long rhetorical war that I have read in a while. The hollow foreign policy views that the US government publishes in National Security Strategies are easy fodder for rational disagreement: that a nuclear  Iran would never actually strike the US "because it would risk annihilation in response," that "America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States;" and that "perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran’s oppressive and unpopular government." Or that Iraq and Afghanistan are "no more a ‘war on terror’ than were the American invasions of Grenada and Panama."

Rodenbeck summarizes many of the key points of Richardson’s terror scholarship. Here are two:

1. Terrorism is anything but new. Violence by nonstate actors against civilians to achieve political aims has been going on for a long, long time. The biblical Zealots known as the Sicarii used it against the Romans, as well as against fellow Jews, in the vain hope of provoking the Imperium to so extreme a response that they would foment a mass uprising. Following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, the German radical Karl Heinzen published a tract, simply titled Murder, which advocated selective homicide as a spark to general revolt. Various groups soon put such ideas into practice. The Clerkenwell bombing of 1867, carried out by the Fenians, an Irish nationalist group, prompted a surge of hysteria in London reminiscent of the response provoked by September 11.

So, in later decades, did the wave of anarchist terrorism that swept Europe and the United States. Revolutionaries assassinated seven heads of state between 1881 and 1914. Paris suffered bomb attacks no fewer than eleven times between 1892 and 1894. In the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, Menachem Begin’s Irgun organization slaughtered scores of Palestinian civilians and British soldiers. The Israeli leader went on to share a Nobel Peace Prize.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve. When Britain sent its army into Northern Ireland in 1969 in response to the Troubles, it took just two years for the majority of Catholics, who were at first relieved by their presence, to turn against them. The turnaround for the US in Iraq was far shorter. During the seven months between September 2003 and April 2004, as Charles Peña reminds us in Winning the Un-War, the proportion of Iraqis saying that attacks on foreign troops were somewhat or fully justified leapt from 8 percent to 61 percent. This was exactly the period when a sudden surge in attacks on US forces, following the initial post-invasion calm, prompted vigorous counterinsurgency measures. That is all the time it took, it seems, for Iraqis to decide they did not like being searched, beaten up, shot at, jailed, and humiliated by American troops, whatever the reasons given. Recent polls show some 61 percent of Iraqis still approve of attacking the Americans, and 78 percent believe the US presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing."

Willem Marx’s article about his summer as an intern for a US "media" company in Iraq appeared in Harper’s in September. I read it on the plane to Cairo. I shared his reasons, which were nearly confessions, for why he wanted to be a journalist.

"[John] Simpson recounts his many adventures as a BBC reporter: lying in a gutter at Tiananmen Square in 1989, his camera rolling as bullets zipped by; being arrested during the revolution in Romania; and broadcasting from Baghdad in 1991, with U.S. bombs exploding around him. Inspired, I began writing for my high school paper…"

The entirety of "Misinformation Intern" is now available online.

"It was easy to find Iraqi reporters who would write U.S. military‒friendly op-ed pieces for a little extra cash. But hiring those who would go to the dangerous Anbar province was altogether a different matter. The reporters, cameramen, and sound operators we spoke with all said the same thing: they would work in Ramadi and Fallujah as part of a Rapid Response Cell only if they were embedded with U.S. troops. But because the whole point was that they were to report news that at least appeared to be independent of the military, this was impossible. We even explored whether we could embed our reporters with Iraqi troops there. But this also proved to be untenable."

 

"Today, there are echoes of the Vietnam experience in the protracted Iraq war — including a growing protest movement in the military. Its trappings are starkly different this time. Rather than insubordination and violence, it has formed around a form-letter campaign, presumably conducted within the bounds of military regulations that restrict what soldiers are allowed to say. Last week, a group of current troops, with support from a handful of antiwar organizations, announced plans to petition Congress with a collection of "appeals for redress," which call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. They had 65 signatures from active-duty troops and reservists."

Via Salon. The photo is the Fort Dix stockade, site of a prisoner rebellion in June 1969, a year after prisoners took over the stockade at Fort Bragg for three days.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Sir Richard Dannatt said "we must quit Iraq soon." 

"We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear."

"The military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in. Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance."

"That is a fact. I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them."

In comments that set him at loggerheads with Mr Blair, Gen Dannatt warns that the good intentions of 2003 have long since evaporated - pitching British troops into a lethal battle that few at home can understand.

"I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning," he said.

"The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East."

"That was the hope, whether that was a sensible or naïve hope history will judge. I don’t think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition."

The Daily Mail writes that the General also "understands why Prince William and Prince Harry want to serve on the frontline but has not yet decided whether they will be allowed to fight in Afghanistan."

The death toll among Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion has now reached an estimated 655,000, a study in the Lancet medical journal reports today. The figure for the number of deaths attributable to the conflict - which amounts to around 2.5% of the population - is at odds with figures cited by the US and UK governments and will cause a storm, but the Lancet says the work, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication.

 

In the pressing search for Arabic speakers, the military has turned to Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States. Sergeant Murad is a rising star in this effort. He has recruited 10 men to the program in little more than a year, a record unrivaled in the Army National Guard.

Still, he is an unlikely foot soldier in the campaign. His own evolution — from a teenage immigrant who landed in North Dakota after the first gulf war to a spit-and-polish sergeant — has been marked with private suffering.

In boot camp, he was called a “raghead.” Comrades have questioned his patriotism. Last year a staff sergeant greeted him by calling out, “Here comes the Taliban!”

He remembers a day in 2002 when the comedian Drew Carey visited a base in Saudi Arabia where he was working. During a skit, Sergeant Murad recalled, Mr. Carey dropped to the ground to mimic the Muslim prayer. As the troops roared with laughter, Sergeant Murad walked out.

“I thought about my mom when she prays, how humble she is,” he said.

Yet, day after day, Sergeant Murad sets out to sell other immigrants on the life he has lived. He believes that Muslims need the military more than ever, he said: At a time when many feel alienated, it offers them a path to assimilation, a way to become undeniably American.