The Pentagon's plan for the occupation of Iraq is imperial in both tone and substance. Acting as a Vengeful God
What we are seeing (or, in the US, not seeing) is less war than outright slaughter.
Embedded in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt
When it comes to the mainstream media, embedded journalism is hardly a new phenomenon.
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-- BBC correspondent John Simpson on Kurdish translator Kamran Abdul Razak, who was killed when a US fighter mistakenly bombed a Kurdish convoy.
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While antiwar activists in the US contemplate the movement's future, Irish peace protesters plan to let President Bush know exactly what they think of him.
Bush to Get an Earful From Irish Activists (Belfast Telegraph)
Where Next for the Antiwar Movement? (Common Dreams)
What Purpose Does Protest Serve Now? (San Diego Union-Tribune)
Online Antiwar Activism Gains Ground
in Japan (Japan Media Review)
Wolfowitz of Arabia
"Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any 'hostile acts' they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation. Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word - 'Good' - and went back to work."
That is from David Sanger's piece in today's New York Times, which also includes the following chilling quote from "a senior administration official who played a crucial role in putting the strategy together": "Iraq is not just about Iraq."...)
War, postwar, and future war all are merging in this moment as the Pentagon, which essentially has become the foreign policy arm of our new imperial government, attempts to push aside the State Department (and the CIA) to set up the unilateralist occupation of Japan... sorry, Germany... sorry, Iraq that the neocons have all been planning for and dreaming about for a decade. Jane Perlez of the Times tells us today that "the Americans are scouring the region for armor-plated vans" for the diplomats and retired generals of the "interim" occupation government to use once they are in Iraq (a defense against bouquets undoubtedly). They are also being "given lessons on what to do in Baghdad if they were taken hostage." The new occupation government, still the object of fierce bureaucratic warfare in Washington, is reportedly to be moved into Umm Qasr sometime this week, a town long declared "liberated" and under "coalition" control.
But in a piece in the British Independent, Patrick Nicholson, a Catholic relief worker, indicates that even in the Shia south, where anti-Saddam sentiment was sky high, the "real war" looks quite different from the one seen on American television:
"I have recently returned from Angola where I witnessed haunting scenes of poverty but I never expected to see the same levels of misery in Iraq, a country floating on oil. I visited Umm Qasr as part of a Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) emergency response team, and had been led to believe it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were being met. The town is not under control. It's like the Wild West, and even the most serious humanitarian concern, water, is not being adequately administered.
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There is a lot of anger toward Westerners in Umm Qasr, triggered by bitter disappointment at their 'liberation'. They feel they have been given false expectations and are scared by the breakdown in social order in the town. I saw no obvious Allied presence and the normal structures of schools, government and police has disappeared. But the people are hopeful for a future without Saddam Hussein. However bad the situation today, they told me, it was better than under Saddam's regime."
This is a small snapshot of the land now to be occupied. A more panoramic view, offered us by Warren Vieth of the Los Angeles Times, is hardly more reassuring when it comes to a nation in rubble with "a debt load bigger than that of Argentina, a cash flow crunch rivaling those of Third World countries, a mountain of unresolved compensation claims, a shaky currency, high unemployment, galloping inflation and a crumbling infrastructure expected to sustain more damage before the shooting stops.... Bathsheba Crocker, director of the Post-War Reconstruction Project... said Iraq's oil money is not the panacea many Bush officials seem to think it is."
Now, mainly with the help of the British press, let's consider the occupation to come ... to the extent that it's now imaginable. For all the wartime talk in the media and the administration about the "coalition of the willing," this will clearly be a unilateralist occupation of the most extreme sort, few Iraqis, less Brits (except for "a small contingent of British soldiers" Jane Perlez tells us, meant to provide the officials of the new government with in-country security), no Spaniards, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Italians, or Micronesians, nor, as far as I can tell, other representatives of the "coalition." And certainly not - Condi Rice made this more than clear yesterday - those weasels at the UN, which at best is expected to pony up some money and some humble humanitarian assistance. And, oh yes, I almost forgot this one entirely, no Arabs from the various "allied" governments in the Gulf region, and for the time being, few Iraqis, exile or otherwise. As presently imagined, it's the sort of occupation of hubris that quite naturally follows from the dreams of the men who run the Earth's hyperpower with their stated "foreign policy" of disarming the world by force and striking where they want at will.
The centrist economists and analysts quoted in Vieth's piece are calling for a new Marshall plan, but the man the British Observer tells us has already been dubbed "Wolfowitz of Arabia" is insisting to Congress that Iraqi oil revenues will cover most of the reconstruction costs (which they won't). Perhaps that's because a postwar occupation of the kind Wolfowitz and his boss Donald Rumsfeld envision seems to ensure that Iraq will never be "reconstructed." Certainly, the American people aren't about to pay for it, nor is this government about to make them. And by the time the administration accepts that this part of the "burden" of empire is really work only suited to "mad dogs and Englishmen," it may be far too late.
Already, according to The Observer, many humanitarian relief groups have refused to work under such an occupation. (Only the fundamentalist Christian relief organizations, already waiting in Kuwait, are eager to enter Iraq under the wing of the interim government, to spread the good word.) As for the occupation regime itself, as the British press has reported, it is to be run by Jay Garner, a retired general who is the president of a company involved in the making of the Patriot missile. The information ministry is, if the Pentagon has anything to say about it, to be run by former CIA director James Woolsey. What a relief, 50 years after the fall of Iran's Mossadegh, the CIA can finally be openly involved in setting up governments in the Middle East. Woolsey, of course, believes that we are already in World War IV, while the future "viceroy" of Baghdad, former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, is, according to The Observer, well known for her "fervent hostility to a politically organised Muslim world."
For more on Woolsey, check out David Corn's weblog on The Nation online, which lays out the former CIA chief's incestuous relationship with one faction of the Iraqi exile community. And Jim Lobe, in an upcoming Nation piece, offers the following advice:
"If you want to figure out whether the administration of President George W. Bush intends a crusade -- and a unilateral one, if necessary -- to ''remake the Middle East'' in the wake of Washington's presumed military victory in Iraq, watch what happens with R. James Woolsey... If he soon pops up in Baghdad, you can bet that the 'clash of civilisations' is imminent, if it hasn't begun already."
As the Observer piece concludes, "One senior former diplomat in Baghdad and elsewhere in the region told The Observer: 'There are no serious Arabists left in the government now; only those who have been telling the White House what it wants to hear. The dragons have taken over'."
All of these prospective occupation figures -- including Douglas Feith, the third man at the Pentagon and evidently the list-maker for the Pentagon's Iraq regime -- either sit on the Defense Policy Board (until recently led by Richard Perle) and/or are close to Wolfowitz and/or Rumsfeld. Though this 'interim' government will have to report to Gen. Tommy Franks (and so to Rumsfeld), what we are seeing here is not simply military rule of a conquered Iraq, but military-industrial rule, as Ed Vulliamy and Oliver Morgan indicate in another Observer piece.
Just my curiosity perhaps, but why do we have to go to the British press to get all the connections of the men and women who are in the running to run this occupation -- and the interests behind them? Compare the Observer piece, for instance, with the fuzzier piece in The Washington Post by Karen DeYoung and Dan Morgan, or the Perlez offering in The New York Times mentioned earlier. At least the Post gives us a sense of how secretive this process has been. General Garner has not even been made available to Congress for questioning.
Acting as a Vengeful God
"America is shouldering the burden of freeing Iraq - and killing its vermin."
"Col David Perkins of the US 3rd Infantry told Sky News more than 1,000 Iraqis had been killed in the raid into Baghdad. 'There was some very intense fighting, with just about every kind of weapons system you can imagine. Now we basically own the main road going into Baghdad, so we've cut Baghdad in half, so to speak. We've taken out his defences, all his prepared organic defences are destroyed, we have destroyed probably in excess of 1,000 dismounted infantry."
"Iraqis had tried to stop the U.S. advance by charging with dump trucks, pickup trucks and buses filled with Iraqi soldiers firing their weapons, according to reports from CNN's Rodgers. The Army called the soldier-filled vehicles 'suicide buses.' U.S. tanks easily destroyed the Iraqi vehicles, he said. At least one of the buses blew up as if it had explosives inside."
"...while we watched, amazed by the wonder of the sight, the whole face of the slope became black with swarming savages. Four miles from end to end, and as it seemed in five great divisions, the mighty army advanced swiftly... [British gunboats on the Nile begin to fire.] The range was short; the effect tremendous. The terrible machine, floating gracefully on the waters - beautiful white devil - wreathed itself in smoke. The river slopes of the Kerrerri Hills, crowded with the advancing thousands, sprang up into clouds of dust and splinters of rock.... [The British soldiers] fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or excitement, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful.... The tiny figures seen over the slide of the back-sight seemed a little larger, but also fewer at each successive volley. The rifles grew hot - so hot that they had to be changed for those of the reserve companies... Their empty cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed small but growing heaps beside each man. And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting dust - suffering, despairing, dying."
- From Winston Churchill, at the time an embedded war reporter, covering
the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan a little over a century ago.
When that dust cleared at Omdurman, 13,000 "valiant" Sudanese and forty-eight Englishmen were dead. We don't know exactly how many Iraqi troops - the "vermin" mentioned by the Post -- will be dead when the dust clears from Iraq, if it ever does, but we already know the story. It's hundreds of years old. History tells it to us in a boring litany. Omdurman took place in 1898. The European (and American) advantage in weaponry had already been growing for at least two hundred years. In all that time, the "valiant" enemy fell at a rate somewhere close to perhaps a hundred to one. (Beside such technological power went a sense of the inferiority of other, lesser peoples whose virulence made epithets like "vermin" commonplace in all these wars.) Only when war was brought into the heartland of Europe in World Wars I and II did these figures equalize in a series of intra-European carnages still largely beyond comprehension. To engage in battle against such odds, against such weapons - the gunboats and Maxim guns having morphed into Apache helicopters, B-2 Stealth bombers, JDAM bombs, cluster bombs, and the latest in Abrams tanks, you had to be "fanatic." Who else would advance down that slope at Omdurman or get into a garbage truck or a lightly armed pick-up truck at the former Saddam International airport and charge tanks? It's obviously a form of madness. A hundred years-plus after Omdurman, you might think the world had seen enough of this - and its results, which were, after all, a series of bloody, protracted rebellions, revolutions, and people's wars which finally, with similar lop-sided casualty figures and similar fanaticism freed what came to be known as the Third World of the empires that controlled it but consigned most of the resulting independent countries to immiseration.
There is now, as many know, a site for the counting of "collateral damage," of the civilian dead of the Iraqi war -- www.iraqbodycount.net. As Peter Rothberg describes it in his ever-useful Nation weblog, Act Now, the site, which "keeps a running tally of civilian deaths in the US war against Iraq is attracting a lot of traffic and attention, and, in the process, is emerging as an authoritative source of information beyond the spin of either the Bush Administration or Saddam Hussein's propaganda ministers."
"The Iraq Body Count site is attracting 100,000 visitors a day, many of them journalists, who are increasingly citing the site's reporting in their own accounts. The material is critical given that no government, NGO or other organization is currently chronicling this information. As US General Tommy Franks has said: 'We don't do body counts.' Launched this past January, IBC is run by 16 researchers, based in the United States and the United Kingdom, who closely analyze reports from a range of both corporate and independent media...If a death is cross-referenced in two different sources, independent of each other, they count it."
Of course, these figures are only for "civilians" killed, and they are both misleadingly precise sounding and far too low, because they are based only on doubly corroborated reports -- that is, only on deaths recorded by reporters who happened to be on the spot -- and don't include killed Iraqi fighters, whether fanatic or unwilling, irregular or regular, trying to charge or trying to flee.
If you are an American soldier fighting outside of Baghdad, this war may at any moment be a fierce and frightening event. You may die. You may be maimed. An Iraqi bullet or mortar or grenade, if it reaches you, may prove no less deadly than anything in the American arsenal. Nonetheless, looked at coldly and in the context of several hundred years of European and American-style warfare in the Third World, what we are seeing (or often not seeing, especially here in this country) is not really war, but wholesale slaughter.
This war has also proved, as such wars usually do, a useful way to test out most of the latest generations of American weaponry in action -- and this is no small matter to many of the men who planned the war and are planning for ones to come. For instance, although Richard Perle has recently been in the news for various ethical "lapses," a recent report from the Center for Public Integrity on the Defense Policy Board which he led found that "[o]f the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon, at least nine have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four members are registered lobbyists, one of whom represents two of the three largest defense contractors."
It's true that this war has had its surprises and, no matter what happens in the next few days, the war and its aftermath could have many more to come. Under the pressure of 24/7 media attention, the urge to guess, interpret, speculate, predict becomes overwhelming and just about everyone writing about this "war" has guessed wrong and predicted incorrectly, or too quickly, myself included. But what is happening in Iraq has been in a sense perfectly predictable and it is the kind of pre-emptive war the Bush administration is ready to take elsewhere, whether now or in a prospective second term. And here's the truth of it, war -- the immediate events -- never prove the end of the matter, as Paul Rogers indicates in his latest analysis, aptly entitled, "The Thirty Year War."
Among the predictable results of this war will be the establishment of permanent American bases in Iraq. Hans Greimel in an Associated Press article, is already speculating on whether the vast Baghdad airport complex might be the first of these.
"For the U.S.-led forces on Baghdad's doorstep, Saddam International Airport is potentially a massive military base for bringing in weapons and troops and channeling aid to the Iraqi people ... American strategists prize the airport's main runway because it is long enough at 13,000 feet to land the military's largest transport planes as well as civilian jumbo jets. It also has a second 8,000-foot runway, once used by Iraqi fighter jets, that could help speed the flying in of supplies. ...
At the Tallil Airfield farther south, a hastily erected sign at that base's entrance reads 'Bush International Airport' for President Bush."
I've been thinking recently about the nature of the American bombing campaign against Baghdad. For instance, just the other day American planes took out an Olympic stadium that evidently fell under the control of Uday, one of Saddam's wretched sons, and reportedly had a torture chamber in its basement. However, like all the other monumental Saddamist buildings in downtown Baghdad, it has undoubtedly been unpopulated since the first days of the war. Does it occur to no one that Iraqis might actually like to have an Olympic stadium in the postwar years? But who will ever rebuild it and with what? (On the problems of "reconstruction," far more to come in the weeks ahead.) There is, it seems to me, an element of pure vengeance to the repeated destruction of all "monuments" the Iraqi regime built to its own vain glory. It's as if we were indeed immersed in Biblical times in Biblical lands and our government had taken the Old Testament role of an angry, vengeful god for its own.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute.
Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
Seeing the Victims
In the overflowing wards of Iraq's hospitals, the horrible human cost of this war is undeniably clear. Where's Salam?
'Bloggers around the world worry about the fate of an Iraqi mystery man.
The Misinformers
Much of the intelligence the White House relied on to plan and justify this war was wildly optimistic or just plain wrong. Robert Dreyfuss says that's no surprise.
P L U S :
The Thirty-Year Itch
Seeing the Victims
For the past 19 days, media critics and watchdog groups have warned that the war being shown on American television screens was sanitized and one-sided. Broadcasts overseas, especially in the Arab world, showed frequent images of injured and dead Iraqi civilians. They showed footage of carnage in the streets, and of survivors overcome with grief. US networks, instead, interspersed feeds from 'embedded' reporters with strategy pointers from former military men and endless hot air from punditry shows.
Still, the horrible human cost of this war is becoming undeniably clear as print reporters (albeit, mostly non-US print reporters) break from the embedded herd to chronicle the suffering in Iraq's overwhelmed hospitals. The International Red Cross made the desperate nature of the crisis clear this weekend, warning the world that hospitals in Baghdad were in danger of running out of space and personnel to treat the thousands of patients arriving each day.
As Paul Peachey of The Independent reports, the Red Cross says the situation is "particularly worrying in the south of the city where smaller hospitals were unable to cope with an influx of injured people."
Red Cross spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, interviewed by Radio Netherlands, said more than half of the patients arriving at one hospital "needed serious multiple surgery for very bad wounds."
"This is the kind of case you have when there is military exchange at ground level. It's different from what we've had in the past two weeks where we just had people wounded, most of them hit by shrapnel during air raids. A ground offensive causes a different type of wounds. There are many military [personnel] amongst the wounded, of course."
But this is not a story that can be told from afar, through interviews with Red Cross workers. It is a story that must be told from the wards of the hospitals themselves, as John Daniszewski and Sergei Loiko of the Los Angeles Times do shatteringly.
"Dazed relatives, their clothing soaked in blood, watched helplessly as the nurses pushed their relatives up the ramp into the receiving ward. Then the gurneys would be returned to the parking lot, hosed down and readied for the next. In back, by the overflowing morgue, six bodies wrapped in black polyurethane corpse bags tied closed with white string lay unattended on the sand-and-oil covered pavement while flies flew around them. The bags were unmarked except for one with a driver's license stuck in the string with the man's name -- Hamash Hussein Mohammed. His black-and-white license photo showed a clean-cut mustachioed face of about 30.
'Yesterday was worse if you are talking about dead,' said Kabil Khazael Jamal, a nurse. 'We were stacking bodies in the refrigeration and it was hard to keep them in order.' By Monday, however, the cooling mechanism had broken down, he said, so they were removing the bodies as quickly as possible and giving them to the families for burial.'
'Speaking as an Arab and an Iraqi, this is a brutal war,' he said. 'Won't you plead with the presidents and the kings around the world to stop this?'"
In terms of capturing the heart-rending nature of this war, however, the most effective story published in a US publication to date may be Jon Lee Anderson's dispatch in The New Yorker. Anderson introduces us to overwhelmed doctors and nurses, to traumatized children and stoic, crippled adults. Unlike the great majority of his colleagues, Anderson actually guides us into the surreal and hellish world of suffering in which Iraqis are living.
"The fourteenth day of the war in Baghdad, April 2nd, was pretty and springlike. I went with several journalists on a bus tour to the town of Al Hillah, about sixty miles south of the city, near the ruins of ancient Babylon. We had heard reports that American and British troops had crossed the Euphrates River southeast of Karbala and were advancing in a thirty-mile-long armored column, but apart from knots of Iraqi soldiers and sandbagged bivouacs on the side of the road -- and occasional glimpses of camouflaged tanks and gun emplacements hidden in the sparse copses of eucalyptus trees -- there were no signs of war. We could see Saddam's great limestone palace overlooking Babylon, several miles away. Shops were open in Al Hillah and there were few soldiers on the streets. It resembled Baghdad two weeks earlier, before the bombing began. We were taken to a hospital where there were scores of wounded people. Patients and doctors told us that a village had been bombed two days earlier and that, in a separate incident, the passengers of a bus had been ripped apart in some kind of an explosion. A man who had lost a leg lay next to a man who had had an arm amputated. The man whose arm was gone was being looked after by his wife. Their tiny baby, perhaps a month old, lay on the bed next to its father, swaddled in a cloth with a ribbon around it. The baby was sleeping. Its mother pointed to bandages on its head and told me that it had been hit by shrapnel, too. The man with the missing leg complained, rather mildly, about the attack: 'If Americans want to come here as tourists, like they used to, we welcome them. But they shouldn't do this.' He dismissed inquiries about his missing limb with bravado. 'I am an Iraqi,' he said. 'We are used to such things.'"
Anderson has gone farther than his print colleagues, writing with a touch that is as personal as it is journalistic. Yet stories like his are beginning to intrude on the battle-by-battle reporting of the nation's mainstream papers. They may even, at some point, intrude on the breathless firefight-by-firefight reporting of the networks. Which will undoubtedly send the Bush administration's message-minders into a frenzy, Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle argues. While caring, in an abstract way, about Iraqi suffering under Saddam Hussein's brutal rule is fine as far as the White House is concerned, caring in a real sense about Iraqi suffering as a result of the US-led invasion just won't do, Morford asserts.
"Please believe it's not happening. Please ignore the actual data, the brutality, focus instead on the patriotism and the soothing sound of the war drum and the idea of liberation, as opposed to, you know, invasion. We don't want you to see. We don't want you to know. And we certainly don't want to make it easy for you to find out. The U.S. military doesn't even 'do' body counts. They actually said as much. Don't keep track of those dang dead civilians. We've got a repressed Islamic rubble-strewn nation to annihilate, they say, and a puppet government to forcibly install afterward and a whole hell of a lot of petrochemical companies lining up. We're a little busy."
Where Is Salam?
Amid all the suffering in Iraq, the fate of a single Iraqi has captivated 'bloggers around the world. Posting under the name Salam Pax, a mysterious Baghdad resident had been chronicling his life as a subject of Saddam's regime for more than six months. He wrote about small things -- the difficulty of finding food, long lines at the gas station -- and he wrote about living in a city under bombardment. In the months before the US-led invasion, Salam Pax also wrote, unflatteringly, about the Baghdad regime.
As Baghdad weathered bombing after bombing, the postings on Salam's site, Where Is Raed?, became less regular. The city's internet service was unstable, as was its phone system and power grid. Still, every time, after a day of silence, sometimes a few days, Salam would return. That's what many 'bloggers say they expected to happen after Where Is Raed went silent againt on March 24. But Salam has not returned, and some fellow 'bloggers are worried that he has become a victim -- either of the war, or of the Iraqi regime.
And, as Anya Kamenetz reports in The Village Voice, some worry about the timing. Salam was attracting more readers in the west, and more attention from western journalists. The day Where Is Raed? went silent, Kamenetz writes, was also the day that The New Yorker published a short piece about him, "offering many more details about the Baghdad Blogger than had previously seen print."
"Diane [another 'blogger living in New York] was the main interview source for the story, which focused on the friendship of two secret bloggers. The piece's author, Daniel Zalewski, a senior editor at the magazine, chose to include a full dossier of personal details about Salam's life and history, including the contents of an email Salam had sent Diane headed 'Things I Shouldn't Tell You.' This included facts about his family background, upbringing and education, social class, his job, his religious beliefs and his personal life -- which won't be repeated here. ...
Zalewski said all but one of the personal details he included about Salam came from the Iraqi's blog. 'Salam, in my view, wanted his story to be known,' Zalewski said. 'Despite his stated nervousness about being monitored by Iraqi authorities, and despite his awareness that thousands of people were reading his blog each day, he bravely continued to post candid political commentary and sharp, personal details about his life as an Iraqi citizen. He also left his full archive online -- all six months of it. That's why I felt comfortable including details from his Web site in my New Yorker piece.'
As soon as the article appeared on Monday, sources say, Diane called Zalewski with concerns that the piece gave too many identifying details. She was particularly worried about a description of Salam's appearance drawn from a photograph Salam sent to Diane. Zalewski notes that a similar description had appeared on Salam's blog, but says that out of respect for Diane's concerns he had the piece taken off The New Yorker's Web site that same day."
Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
'We're Not Leaving'
Forget Bush rhetoric about the UN's 'vital' role, the running of post-war Iraq will be an All-American show. The Puppet-in-Waiting
The Pentagon's doing all it can to give Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress cronies an edge. Killing the Messengers
A US tank fires on a Baghdad hotel known to house foreign journalists, killing two, and the Pentagon claims self-defense?
A Desperate Waiting Game
By Kael Alford
Baghdad is now a city under siege, where residents, officials, and journalists can do little but wait for the inevitable. |
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-- Army chaplain Josh Llano, whose 500-gallon baptism pool is the only source of clean bathing water at the Army's sprawling support camp near the Iraqi city of Najaf.
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'We're Not Leaving'
"Vital." That was the word both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair used on Tuesday to describe the role of the UN in postwar Iraq after a bilateral summit outside Belfast. The two uttered the term at least six times. But neither seemed interested in saying anything more, refusing to define exactly what the UN's role might be, despite repeated questions from reporters. As The Guardian reports, Bush would only say that the UN would have a role related to "food, medicine, aid, contributions" and "helping the interim government stand up until the real government shows up". In other words, a cheer-leading and fund-raising role, at best.
Blair, clearly desperate to use the summit to heal the massive transatlantic rift precipitated by the Iraq war, hastened to assert that the "important thing is to not get into some battle over a word here or there, but for the international community to come together ... rather than endless diplomatic wrangles." How successful was Blair? Just hours later, French President Jacques Chirac declared that rebuilding Iraq should be "a matter for the United Nations and for it alone."
Chirac asserted that "we are no longer in an era where one or two countries can control the fate of another country." But that is clearly what the Bush administration intends. And, with Washington's neoconservatives happily writing endless UN obituaries, Blair's multilateral message appears doomed from the start. Hugo White, director of the centrist Australian Strategic Policy Institute, argues that there are reasonable doubts about whether the UN really has the capacity to deal with such a massive undertaking. But White, writing in the Melbourne Age, says that isn't why Washington is so dead-set on running the show.
"America has big objectives in Iraq. It wants to turn Iraq into a major political and strategic asset for the US in the Middle East - a beacon of democracy, and a bulwark against Islamic extremism. To do that it has faced down the UN and taken major military and political risks in launching the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration is not going to risk throwing away its potential gains now, at the moment of victory, by handing the prize to the UN. Even the relatively dovish Colin Powell acknowledged this when he told Congress recently that America expected to retain a "significant dominating presence" in post-Saddam Iraq. He made clear he only wants the UN to be involved to legitimise what the Americans themselves want to do in Iraq's reconstruction.
To be blunt, the Bush Administration wants to manage the political reconstruction of Iraq in a way that ensures future Iraqi governments are sympathetic to US interests. No one can say the Bush Administration lacks chutzpah."
Slate's William Saletan does his best to see that chutzpah in a positive light. But Saletan admits that the position apparently being adopted by the White House ("First, we're going to get out of Iraq so that Iraqis can govern themselves. Second, we're going to stay in Iraq so that Iraqis can govern themselves.") is surreal at best. And he notes that Bush himself seems to be having trouble absorbing the paradox.
"'It's important for the Iraqi people to continue to hear this message,' said Bush. 'We will not stop until they are free. Saddam Hussein will be gone. ... We're not leaving. And not only that; they need to hear the message that we're not leaving after he's gone -- until they are ready to run their own government. I hear a lot of talk here about how we're going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it. From day one, we have said the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country.' If this position confuses you -- they can run the country, but we aren't leaving -- join the club. Bush, too, looks confused. He's a black-and-white guy. He likes to talk about good and evil, freedom and tyranny, principles and focus groups. When these things come together in the same person or idea, he gets flummoxed. In postwar Iraq, he's up against a paradox. Freedom requires us to get out. And yet, for a time, freedom requires us to stay."
The editors of the Riyadh-based Arab News accept that the chaos expected to follow war in Iraq may be reason for US troops to remain in the country, keeping the peace. But peace-keeping and nation-building are far different than occupation, they argue. The Arab world is already seething over the US-led war, the editors claim, and a lasting US occupation will only harden that anger.
"If it appears to Iraqis that they have exchanged dictatorship for occupation, no amount of prosperity will soften their bitterness and anger. On the wider Arab front, there will be similar anger. Nothing raises Arab hackles more furiously than occupation. It is the dirty word in the Arab political dictionary. Arabs have had to fight it for centuries. Occupation is what Israel is all about, which is why the average Arab on the street is so implacably opposed to anything to do with Israel. Arabs will not tolerate the return of occupation elsewhere. Washington must accept Iraqi faces in the running of the country very quickly or reap the dire consequences of Iraq and an Arab world united in joint, implacable hostility toward it."
Like so many others, the Arab News editors worry that Washington intends to establish a puppet state, superficially resembling western democracies but without true sovereignty or any of the freedoms which are a democracy's lifeblood. If so, it would not be the first time -- for the US or for Iraq. Mohammad Tarbush, writing in The International Herald Tribune, reminds us that the modern state of Iraq was the product of British occupation, an imposed solution to pacify Arab nationalists and guarantee British interests.
"The paper model of the new Iraqi state strongly resembled any Western democratic state of that time: It had a constitution, a cabinet, a Parliament, political parties, free elections and an impressive number of newspapers and periodicals. However, the model bore little resemblance to reality and little resemblance to a viable democratic state. Ma'ruf Rasafi, an Iraqi poet of that period, wrote about the incongruity: A flag, a constitution, and a national assembly - each one a distortion of the true meaning ... He who reads the constitution will learn that it is composed according to the mandate. He who looks at the flapping banner will find that it is billowing in the glory of aliens. He who sees our national assembly will know that it is constituted by and for any but the electors. He who enters the ministries will find that they are shackled with the chains of foreign advisers.
I wonder what kind of poetry the postwar Iraqi government and the ruins of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities will inspire."
Of course, somber verse will be the least of Washington's worries if its plans serve only to widen the divide between America and the Arab world. The latest tape-recorded missive attributed to Osama bin Laden clearly anticipates the collapse of the Baghdad regime -- a regime bin Laden long despised -- and the beginning of a long American occupation. In the tape, the speaker exhorts Muslims to rise up against "agents of America" in the Middle East, and calls for a campaign of suicide attacks against U.S.and British forces in Iraq.
"Do not be afraid of their tanks and armored personnel carriers. These are artificial things... If you started suicide attacks you will see the fear of Americans all over the world.'
The Puppet-in-Waiting
Those skeptically assuming that the Bush administration plans to create a puppet government in Baghdad were provided with a healthy dose of new ammunition last week, when it was revealed that Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress will be at the very core of the 'interim' Iraqi government the Pentagon will impose once the shooting stops (or, perhaps, simply subsides a bit). And the CIA only added to that skepticism, claiming in a leaked report that the INC has little popular support within Iraq, and declaring that Chalabi would not be an effective leader for the conquered country.
Given how little the Pentagon has been influenced by other recent CIA opinions, though, it seems unlikely that Chalabi is in any danger of losing his place. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's other civilian leaders are busily consolidating control over the mission to rebuild Iraq, and Chalabi has been the Pentagon's man since the day Rumsfeld arrived. Still, the INC's allies outside the Department of Defense are eagerly coming to Chalabi's defense, asserting that the CIA criticism is politically motivated.
"'The CIA has been bad mouthing Chalabi and the INC for years. What is surprising is that they are still devoting resources to their character assassination effort instead of other more obvious missions,' said Randy Scheunemann, a long time adviser to Chalabi and now President of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, a lobbying group formed last year to support ending Saddam Hussein's regime. ...
'I think that nobody has any idea who is popular on the ground inside Iraq,' said Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise Institute's Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies told UPI. 'People who say that they do, including agencies of the U.S. government, are saying so to further a political agenda.'"
But Scheunemann, Pletka and other neoconservative boosters of the INC are unlikely to dent the Langley hostility. As one unnamed former intelligence official told UPI, "they basically say that every time you mention Chalabi's name to an Iraqi, they want to puke." Puking aside, Sarah Rimensnyder, writing in Reason, asks the obvious question: never mind the CIA's concerns, with so many people already assuming Chalabi is nothing more than a US puppet, how could he possibly be an effective leader?
"Given his history with the White House, could he be perceived any other way? The public perception that America is installing a puppet is of more than passing interest when you're trying to hold up Iraq as a model of democracy. What better way to convince skeptical neighbors, prospective terrorists and just about anybody else that our attack on Iraq is just the latest advance of Western imperialism and oil greed? On the bright side, a post-war Iraq briefing scheduled for today was postponed, suggesting that the issue is still under hot debate among the administration, the CIA, and the State Department."
Or not. While officials in Washington may still be discussing the issue, the Pentagon isn't waiting. Even as American and British forces were engaged in fierce fighting from Basra to Baghdad, the US military deposited some 700 heavily-armed Iraqi exiles -- trained and equipped by the Pentagon -- in the 'liberated' city of Nassiriya in a clear bid to help the INC build some semblance of popular support before Washington declares victory. Middle East expert Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution told Reuters that the deployment was an unmistakable sign that Rumsfeld and other Pentagon neocons intend to back Chalabi to the hilt. "Those who support the neoconservative vision pushed by some people in the Pentagon now have the upper hand -- and the INC is part of that,' she says.
The editors of The Baltimore Sun pull no punches in attacking the maneuver. "If there were a worse way to take over a country it would be difficult to imagine," the paper asserts, questioning what the US, the Iraqi people, and even the INC can hope to gain as a result of the deployment.
"The ostensible idea behind the Free Iraqi Forces is that they will assist their American and British allies in dealing with the local population; they will be the good face of the occupation. Undoubtedly, most or nearly all of the 700 men who were airlifted into southern Iraq by the Pentagon are opponents of tyranny and dedicated to making theirs a better country. That's not the point. The point is that the Iraqi National Congress, which is distrusted by the State Department but lionized by the Pentagon, has a dubious claim on a leadership role, and that any group that tries to come to power under the wing of the U.S. military is going to have a pretty hard time of it establishing any legitimacy."
But the Free Iraqi Army isn't the only US-backed force operating in southern Iraq, it appears. The Financial Times reports that citizens of Najaf, seized by US troops last week, now find themselves under the control of a little-known Iraqi militia apparently supported by US special forces.
"The Iraqi Coalition of National Unity (ICNU), which appeared in the city last week riding on US special forces vehicles, has taken to looting and terrorising the people with impunity, according to most residents. 'They steal and steal' said Abu Zeinab, a man living near the Medresa al Tayif school. 'They threaten us, saying 'we are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us.''
Sa'ida al-Hamed, another resident, says she has witnessed looting by the ICNU and other armed gangs in the city, which lost its police force when the government fled last week. One man told a US army translator on Monday that he was taken out of his house and beaten by ICNU forces when he refused to give them his car. They took it anyway, he said.
If true, the testimony of residents in Hay al-Ansar reveals a darker side to US policy in Iraq. In their eagerness to hand local administration back to Iraqis, US forces are in danger of losing the peace as rapidly as they have won the war, by handing power back to tyrants."
Killing the Messengers
"We are at war. There is fighting going on in Baghdad. Our forces came under fire. They exercised their inherent right to self-defense."
That was the official Pentagon line -- as delivered by spokesperson Victoria Clarke -- after US forces killed three journalists in a pair of attacks in the Iraqi capital on Tuesday. But nobody's buying it.
First, a US fighter launched a missile at the downtown office of Al-Jazeera, killing correspondent Tareq Ayub. Then, just hours later, a US tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign reporters in Baghdad are based. Taras Protsyuk, a cameraman with Reuter, and Jose Couso, who worked for the Spanish network Telecinco, were both killed.
After the first attack, Al-Jazeera quickly accused the US of 'intentionally targeting' the network's office. After the second, journalists and journalism groups argued that the US seems to be aiming at reporters in general.
Military officials couldn't explain why the Al-Jazeera office had been bombed, but insisted that the attack on the Palestine Hotel was justified. "The tank was receiving fire from the hotel, RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and small-arms fire, and engaged with one tank round. The firing stopped,' declared General Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division.
But footage filmed by a camera team from France 3 television of the attack shows the tank targeting the hotel and waiting at least two minutes before firing. And it doesn't show any fire coming from the hotel, the Melbourne Age reports.
"Herve de Ploeg, the journalist and film editor who filmed the attack, said: 'I did not hear any shots in the direction of the tank, which was stationed at the west entrance of the Al-Jumhuriya (Republic) bridge, 600 metres north-west of the hotel.' ...
'It had been very quiet for a moment. There was no shooting at all. Then I saw the turret turning in our direction and the carriage lifting. It faced the target,' said De Ploeg. 'It was not a case of instinctive firing.'
Robert Menard, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Frontiers, declares that Pentagon officials must provide a reasonable explanation for why the tank fired on the hotel. Until then, he argues, the worst will be assumed.
"This evidence does not match the US version of an attack in self-defence and we can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists. US forces must prove that the incident was not a deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent journalists from continuing to report on what is happening in Baghdad."
Robert Fisk of The Independent argues that the facts speak for themselves. And in both cases, he asserts, "they make it look very like murder."
"The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves to be a straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division -- whose tanks were on the bridge -- announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased. The general's statement, however, was untrue. I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired -- and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank's armament is fired. And there were no snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there -- myself included -- have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault point.
This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted just over a month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium munitions -- the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War -- in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew was in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turns a meretricious statement into a libellous one."
Meanwhile, among Arab journalists, the attacks are being seen as proof of the Pentagon's intent to control the news being broadcast out of Iraq. Noting that the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul was bombed, too, Arab editors and columnists are suggesting that the targeting of journalists has become a part of the US war plan. "The US-led coalition forces are killing journalists in Iraq to suppress the truth about civilian massacres. This also reinforces the Arab view that America wants the world to hear only its own account of the war," one unidentified Arab journalist told Arab News. Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
The Right, Rampant
The war party is feeling vindicated and vindictive. But is it too early to celebrate and count coup? The Weapons Tease
A month ago, Washington was hectoring UN arms inspectors. Now, the Pentagon is telling the world to be patient.
Never Fear...
Cartoon by Mark Fiore
Worried about the challenge of rebuilding a war-scarred Iraq? Never fear... RummyCo is here! |
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| "With every day and every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of [the war] plan becomes more apparent."
-- Vice President Dick Cheney
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The brutality of war spares nobody as children become enemy targets.
Media Watch: 
Spin Watch: Pentagon Defends Special Forces Use of Civilian Clothes (Associated Press); Keeping Track of the Claims (The Guardian); America Doesn't Just Spin, It Sledgehammers (The Age)
Saddam Watch: British Intelligence: Saddam Still Alive (The Guardian); Iraqi Official: Saddam Left Baghdad Days Ago (Hindustan Times)
Casualty Watch: Desperation of a "Liberated" Village (The Mirror); A Picture of Killing (The Guardian)
Weapons Watch: 
Money Watch: