Mother Jones Daily: War Watch
March 31, 2003
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| | War Is Hell As the western media begins reporting accounts of civilian casualties, this 'transformative war' begins to look like every other conflict. | | | |
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| |  Casualty Watch After Firefight, a Busload of Corpses and Questions (Reuters); 'Every Day Gets Worse and Worse' (Los Angeles Times)
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Media Watch 
Weapons Watch 
Baghdad Looms For all its immobility, the Iraqi capital is the onrushing train of US commanders' nightmares.
The Vulnerability of Power
How quickly the vulnerabilities of American power have been laid bare in Iraq. 
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| "The only effect (the bombing) has on the Iraqis is that it pisses them off, and they can't wait for the U.S. soldiers to arrive." -- Peace Activits Doug Johnson, in an email from Baghdad | ||||
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In the Gulf War, most Arab countries were solidly behind the US, even joining its coalition. This time around, the Arab Street is seething with anger. 
Arabs, Pro-US in 1990, Seethe Today (St Petersburg Times) In Shiite Slums, Survival, Not Revolt (The Washington Post) Anti-Saddam Iraqi: "I'll Shoot Yanks" (The Sunday Mirror) Turks Stone US Military Convoy (Reuters) In the Chaos of Friendly Fire (The Independent) Three UK Soldiers Sent Home for Dissenting (The Guardian) 
The grief grows in Baghdad, and so does the anti-US rhetoric, while aid shipments remain gridlocked by the war. In Baghdad, Family Tragedies (The Observer) Bombing Victims Fuel Fury Against US (The Age) Growing Resentment at "Liberators" in Basra (The Independent) War Blocks Main Aid Push (Reuters) It's like you're in a packed car -- or let's say, under the circumstances, an armored Humvee -- and you're heading for the train tracks and the locomotive, that big, black, ugly thing is bearing down on you. All you have to do to see it is look out the front windshield. And here's what you're discussing: the bleak scenery, the gas station you left miles back, the gas gauge at quarter-empty, the lack of a good meal, the insufficiency of your brakes. And here's the weird thing, as in any nightmare, you know what's about to happen and you can't turn back. You can only hope you'll wake up.
Baghdad, immobile as it is, has always been that speeding train. I think the US military high command has known it from second one. It's been chasing them out of their sleep for endless months. It's the logical endpoint of "regime change" in Iraq. During the day, of course, you can always look the other way -- you imagine friendly uprisings, or coup d'etats, or missile-assassins "decapitating" your enemy, or the tyrant fleeing into exile or shot by one of his generals, or something called "shock and awe" that will bring Baghdad to its psychological knees in a military nanosecond. But every time you go to sleep, there it is again, and in the meantime, you can't take the far smaller city of Basra or even places that are little more than isolated towns along your route.
I mean the truth is, this would be a pretty damn good war, all in all, if you didn't have to take that city. If they'd just come out and be slaughtered, or go away, or something. It goes without saying that you've got a high-tech plan with all sorts of "flexibility," many modalities, for taking the City. You're not going to be like the Germans in Stalingrad or the Israelis in Beirut. You're going to grab it in a series of heli-hopping attacks on strong points or whatever. It's brilliantly conceived, sure to succeed, a kind of ground "shock and awe" from which the enemy regime will crumble and the people will greet you with, well, maybe not flowers anymore but...
So, your planes begin to bomb more desperately and indiscriminately, and you have a few more cups of coffee from that thermos and maybe a little speed because you're in that Humvee and you're getting closer to where you knew you probably were going all along, and you just don't want to go to sleep tonight because you already know that, even if your plan works, this was where you never wanted to be.
Of course, the neocons, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the crew avoided this problem. Evidently, they just didn't sleep for a decade -- and then there was one man who evidently never even heard of the problem, or any other predictable problem of this war, who never had his sleep disturbed. That man, according to a piece in The Charlotte Observer, "Bush reportedly shielded from dire forecast" (found on the invaluable and recently expanded www.antiwar.com site), was the President and as everybody claims, he sleeps soundly indeed. That piece begins:
- "President Bush's aides did not forcefully present him with dissenting views from CIA and State and Defense Department officials who warned that U.S.-led forces could face stiff resistance in Iraq, according to three senior administration officials.
Instead, Bush embraced predictions of top administration hawks, beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney, who predicted Iraqis would joyously greet coalition troops as liberators and that the entire conflict might be over in a matter of weeks, the officials said.
Dissenting views 'were not fully or energetically communicated to the president,' said one top official, who, like the others, requested anonymity. 'As a result, almost every assumption the plan's based on looks to be wrong.'"
Three recent pieces, one more chilling than the next, give us a sense of what the taking of Baghdad might actually involve. Eric Margolis, the conservative columnist for the Toronto Sun offers a blistering review of the war so far and what's to come. (It's worth remembering that a significant group of conservatives, who have been willing to stare out that front windshield, think the neocons who have Washington by the throat are madmen.) Then Simon Jenkins of the London Times considers the history of urban warfare. Finally, Patrick Graham of the British Observer offers an unforgettable description of the state of the city and its environs -- "War," he writes, "suits Baghdad." -- that the Americans will very soon head for. (The Los Angeles Times also had a reasonably vivid piece on the subject of urban warfare today - Wars Take Some Nasty Turns on City Streets)
Today, in addition to a suicide bombing in Iraq that killed four American soldiers, an ambush in Afghanistan (remember the war in Afghanistan?) killed two more. You don't need to be a seer to see such things coming. No one can conquer this world and the foolishness of trying in the name of anything is almost unbearable to watch, and undoubtedly far more unbearable to take part in.
At the end of the first full week plus of war in Iraq, the surprising thing is how quickly the many sides of American imperial vulnerability are being exposed. As a start, the developing war has clarified one matter: the Bush administration only listened to those Iraqis, in exile, whose dreams fit with its own global fantasies. Here's part of a remarkable, almost touching passage from al-Mutamar, the paper of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group. Paul Woodward, editor of www.warincontext.org, googled it up and posted it at his site. In it, Kan'an Mikiya, author of The Republic of Fear, and two other exiles have a conversation with President Bush:
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 Thursday, March 27 Wednesday, March 26 Tuesday, March 25 Monday, March 24 Friday, March 21 | |||||
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- "...the president began to ask us about the Iraqis and Iraq. The first question was: 'What reaction do you expect from the Iraqis to the entry of US forces into their cities?'" Mr Makiya explained that 'each of us agreed that all Iraqis of all sects would welcome these forces from the very first moment. I added: 'The Iraqis will welcome the US forces with flowers and sweets when they come in.'
President Bush then moved on to his second question: 'If the initial bombardment of Iraq is severe, will the reaction be the same? I mean, will they still welcome the US army?' ...'I stressed to President Bush my personal opinion that 'the regime will be destroyed with the first blow'... Prof Makiya said he expected 'no real fighting right from the start of the war...'"
You might want then to take a look at quite a different sort of document from the group that runs the iraqwar.ru website. It's evidently some sort of Russian intelligence group that has begun issuing reports, translated into English, on the military aspects of the Iraq war. It was recommended to me by someone knowledgeable, but I have no way of assessing the accuracy of its information -- or the extent of its mis- or disinformation. However, what you get from it is a sense of how this war, in the eyes of many in the world, is already achieving results quite different from those the Bush administration hoped for. War in Iraq was clearly meant to be a lesson for the world - and so it may be, just possibly in unintended ways. The administration wanted to demonstrate American military invulnerability, the extent of American power. What they have demonstrated instead is American vulnerability. You can sense that in the provisional end-of-the-first-week conclusions of the Russian "journalists and military experts" - undoubtedly encouraged by what they see -- based on what they claim to be "Russian military intelligence reports." Here's an excerpt (the English is imperfect but quite understandable):
- "The first myth is about the precision-guided weapons as the determining factor in modern warfare, weapons that allow to achieve strategic superiority without direct contact with the enemy. On the one hand we have the fact that during the past 13 years the wars were won by the United States with minimum losses and, in essence, primarily through the use of aviation. At the same time, however, the US military command was stubborn in ignoring that the decisive factor in all these wars was not the military defeat of the resisting armies but political isolation coupled with strong diplomatic pressure on the enemy's political leadership. It was the creation of international coalitions against Iraq in 1991, against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Afghanistan in 2001 that ensured the military success.
The American command preferred not to notice the obvious military failures during expeditions to Grenada, Libya and Somalia, discounting them as "local operations" not deserving much attention.
Today we can see that in itself massed use of strategic and tactical precision-guided weapons did not provide the US with a strategic advantage [though, they later comment, they give the U.S. military a very distinct battlefield advantage]. Despite the mass use of the most sophisticated weapons the Americans have so far failed to disrupt Iraqi command and control infrastructure, communication networks, top Iraqi military and political leadership, Iraqi air defenses. At the same time the US precision-guided weapons arsenal has been reduced by about 25%."
Also of interest is the latest analysis from Paul Rogers of the openDemocracy website. He offers five outcomes for the war, two of which already seem inconceivable - and, though other scenarios are possible, he's a distinctly sane fellow with a fine track record for thoughtfulness and accuracy. Nonetheless, my own guess is that, had he written this the day before the war began the final, unlikely alternative, "defeat" wouldn't even have made it on board.
In addition, I include a powerful piece from this week's Nation magazine -- Jonathan Schell's "The Other Superpower." After all, it's with the earth's assorted peoples above all that this administration has not just shown American vulnerability but, you might say, created it. If you want to see an example of what's happening globally, just look at a piece on Spain -- 'Aznar faces 91% opposition to war' -- in today's Guardian. ("The Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, the third man on the international stage beside George Bush and Tony Blair in the run-up to war, was staring at political disaster yesterday as anti-war demonstrations spread and opinion polls revealed 91% of Spaniards against the war.") The headline says it all.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute.
