16 posts tagged “iraq”

Some days I wish I didn't follow current events.  I wish I didn't read the news or listen to the radio.  Today is one of those days.

Seymore Hersh reports that the US is currently preparing for military action in Iran.  According to Hersh, the build-up of troops and equipment is taking place in Afghanistan.  US officials counter by denying that they're launching any attacks from Iraq.  Iran, meanwhile, offers that they're already digging graves to properly bury the bodies of invading troops. 

It's like both sides have hired Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Misinformation.  On the one hand, he regrets to inform us that we are "too far from reality."  On the other hand, "There are no American infidels in Tehran. Never!"

Could we possibly bump the presidential election up to August?

One quote from Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf cannot be denied, but then even a stopped clock is right twice a day: "I speak better English than this villain Bush."

Show us something that hurts.

Look, police in Tibet "pursuing" nuns.  To hit them with batons.

Or how about "unrest" in Gaza that ended with 22 people dead.
Over in Iraq, you've got casualties from a funeral turned suicide bombing.
Or an 8-year old Yemeni girl who was forced to get married.  She went to the court and filed for a divorce herself, but only after the marriage had been consummated.  She accused her husband of beating her.  (And don't forget the polygamists in Texas.)

I thought I'd feel better when people who supported the Iraq war began slowly to come to their senses and admit they'd been wrong.  I don't.  I don't feel even a little bit better, because when I read their excuses for why they were wrong it's just a litany of ignorance.  That's the excuse at heart--a failure to understand the implications of war, deep-seated cultural divides, all things that could have been fixed with a little research. 

So Andrew Sullivan can claim he committed "four cardinal sins," but he didn't.  He committed one: willful ignorance.  He believed what he wanted to believe, based on the data that he chose to consider.  In his little confession on Slate.com, he writes, "What I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster."  Come on, Andy!  What?  You haven't seen any of the hundreds of war films that have been made in the last 70 years?  You missed Full Metal Jacket?   Saving Private Ryan?  The news footage coming out of every war zone in the last twenty years?

General William Tecumseh Sherman spelled it out at his speech to the cadets of the Michigan Military Academy over a hundred years ago: Cadets of the graduating class--boys--I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.  Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!

It's no secret.  You don't have to go very far to find out how monstrous war is, but that didn't serve Andy's purpose.  Doing research might have made him wobbly in his early support of the war.  Knowledge might have undermined his faith in Bush's morality.  That's the other thing Sullivan writes in his admission of wrong-doing: that he made a "fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality.  I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable." 

No, asshole.  You made a fatal misjudgment of your own intelligence, because with access to all the information necessary to take up an anti-war position, you chose to place your faith in someone who had repeatedly shown a complete lack of real morality.  You got it wrong because you were willing to take form over content.  You were willing to believe someone who claimed he was a Christian with moral values, instead of looking to see what his actions proved.  And how could anyone not know how glib Bush was?  That's a man who mocked a fellow Christian on the eve of her execution.  Can you get more glib? 

So, officially, I'm no longer interested in hearing the confessions of guilt and complicity of those who wanted to invade Iraq.  They don't do anything for me, because they all come from the same place: an awkward, self-effacing moment that does no one any good.  Andy Sullivan may be struggling to forgive himself for following an amoral leader, but I doubt he's learned anything from the experience, because he hasn't figured out that willful ignorance was his real mistake. 

Full text of Sullivan's column: How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality

Last night, Hubzilla and I went to see No End in Sight.  It's the sort of movie that I wish I could recommend to you, but I don't know that I can.  If you aren't already horrified and depressed about the US occupation of Iraq, this movie will do you no good.  You aren't paying attention or you're watching FOX News.  You won't believe anything in this movie anyway.  If, like me, you're already horrified and depressed by the situation in Iraq, this won't do anything other than remind you of why. 

Rather than looking at the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a whole, the movie focuses specifically on the planning failures of the Bush Administration for a post-invasion Iraq.  It interviews several high-ranking people who were involved in the early days of the occupation, including Jay Garner, Richard Armitage, Barbara Bodine, and Paul Hughes.  In short, it's a convenient summation of what went wrong and why.  It's not news--it's the simple facts, readily available in the news during the early days of the invasion:

• The failure to stop the looting of Baghdad.
• The dissolution of the Iraqi Army and Police.
• The de-Ba'athification of government ministries and other public service posts.

A rational person can't look at that to-do list and think, "This is all going to turn out fine."  Chaos in the streets, with everything movable being stolen.  More than half a million armed, angry, and unemployed men milling around.  All the people who knew how to run the country essentially barred from carrying out the work they knew how to do.  The most compelling parts of the film are the interviews that reveal how hopeless the situation was from the beginning.  When the people who'd been assigned to begin reconstruction--Garner, Hughes, Bodine--arrived in Iraq they found that no plans had been made for them.  With the government buildings gutted by looters, there weren't even any offices for the arriving provisional authority.  No computers, no phones, no chairs, no desks.  Nothing.  It was a shambles from the word go.  Just as any rational person could have predicted.

Oh, there are things to shock you in the film, like the fact that only two months were spent planning for a post-invasion provisional authority vs. the two years we spent planning how to occupy Germany.  Or the fact that the original contingent of people who were supposed to somehow set up a provisional authority number just 167.  Among them only a dozen had any experience in the Middle East.  Five spoke Arabic.  Or the fact that support personnel were hired for three month contracts, thereby destroying any semblance of continuity.  Or the fact that recent college graduates whose parents were Bush donors were hired for important tasks for which they were not qualified.  In one astounding example, a young woman with a BA was given the task of improving traffic flow in Baghdad, a thing she had no education or experience in. 

The thing that stings most is watching the interspersed clips of Donald Rumsfeld glibly dismissing questions about problems in Iraq.  "Freedom is messy."  "Stuff happens."   I have to remind myself that when he speaks, he speaks for the whole smug, ignorant, arrogant raft of them--Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bremer, and Rumsfeld.  (For Colin Powell, I reserve a spot in a raft full of his compatriots--intelligent but cowardly toadies.)  I left the film deeply regretting that I don't believe in heaven or hell, karma or universal justice.  No death is too terrible for those people.  No fate too cruel. 

See the film if you can stomach it.

September 11 means something in Chile, too.  That's the date in 1973 that President Salvadore Allende was politically assassinated*, following America's three-year assault on his presidency. Allende was a leftist, a socialist even, and he was determined to diminish the gap between the wealthy and poor in Chile.  Not only were the rich Chileans unhappy with that, the Nixon administration was pretty displeased, too.  A lot of wealthy Americans had investments in Chile and were worried about their profits falling, and conservative factions in the US government were worried about Chile becoming a communist state.

Nixon was intent on destroying Allende's presidency, declaring, "Make the economy scream...to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him."  After failing to get Allende's opponent elected (too bad those were the days before Diebold, eh?), the CIA spent millions of dollars on covert operations to destabilize Allende's administration.

That's right, the US, that alleged bastion of democracy, targeted a democratically elected president, because we didn't agree with his ideology or his political platform.  So...democracy is only good if we like the candidate?  It is true that Allende received campaign money from the KGB, but then, the USSR never claimed to be hip-hip-hooray for promoting democracy abroad.  America has claimed that a lot, most recently when we "democratized" Iraq. *cough*

When it turned out that campaign contributions and parliamentary manipulation weren't enough, however, the US was willing to go to the next step: fomenting a military coup against a democratically elected president in another country.   The CIA waged a propaganda war, trying to build support for Allende's opponents and trying to undercut support for Allende.  Whether the CIA had any involvement in the final coup that overthrew Allende and ended in his death (an alleged suicide*), that information is still classified. 

In these times, where America has used the "War on Terror" as an excuse to run rough-shod over democratic principals and constitutional rights, the important thing to take away from all of this is the outcome of our involvement in Chile.  Some of us might learn something that could be useful in Iraq.  Most of us, probably not.

Of Allende's overthrow, Henry Kissinger remarked that America "didn't do it," but "we helped."  That's right: America helped to overthrow a democratically elected president.  By helping to destroy Allende's administration, America also  helped replace him with Augusto Pinochet, who is widely reviled as a brutal dictator, torturer, embezzler, and all-around asshole.  He is credited with "improving economic stability" in Chile--for rich people.  And that's all America wanted.  We were apparently perfectly happy with Pinochet's bloody reign, as we didn't make any attempt to overthrow him in his 26-year dictatorship.

*Based on witness accounts, it's likely that Allende did kill himself, as he was concerned that he would be captured and used as propaganda prior to an execution.  Considering the other things Pinochet did after the coup, I think Allende made the right choice.

Oh, right, they're fooling people who believe everything they see on FOX News.

Remember when John McCain visited Baghdad and was declaring that it was safe to walk around in the market, and all the various media outlets were showing footage of McCain walking around in the market?

It should not surprise anyone to learn that the market in question is nothing more than a facade, created by none other than General David Petraeus, who will likely soon declare that things are going great in Iraq (oh, and that your horse must lose.  Really, he looks pretty elven to me.)

The Washington Post suddenly decided to get all journalistic and really look into the the Dora market, where McCain went for a stroll in a flack jacket, surrounded by security.   Dora was once a very popular market in Baghdad, with 800+ shops.  Now, it has 300 shops, and the primary reason most of them exist is a "grant" program initiated by Petraeus, in which merchants who open a shop in Dora received $2,500.  And they can only get 300 merchants to open up?  What does that tell you?

The security of the market is produced in part by walling it off, prohibiting vehicle traffic, and doing body searches of everyone who enters the market.  Imagine going to your local mall and being patted down before you were allowed to enter.  Add to that the fact that American soldiers police the market, doing things like repairing broken shop windows, fixing doors and replacing locks.   For 300 shops, 50 soldiers patrol the area.  Again, imagine your local mall with 50 security guards armed with M-16's.  Is this an Iraqi marketplace or just a Disney PX?

Then consider this: most shop keepers are Sunnis, and when the Iraqi police showed up, almost all of the shopkeepers closed down early and left the market in fear.  Yet this is the showcase that is presented by administration lackeys as proof of the success in securing Baghdad.

So, whatever Petraeus has to say in his report, remember above all that he works for the Bush Administration.  He built this little pretend Iraqi market and uses it to demonstrate how safe Iraq is.  Whatever he says, keep in mind that the product he's selling is the continued US presence in Iraq.  If Bush didn't already know what Petraeus was going to say, he wouldn't let him open his mouth.

(Have you noticed, too, that his name sounds suspiciously like "betray us"?)

Yup, it's official.  The folks in charge of the US occupation in Iraq have started to suggest that maybe, just maybe, after all, we're not going to be able to bring democracy to Iraq.  Nice.  So, no weapons of mass destruction, no link to 9/11, and now we're not even going to democratize Iraq.  Exactly what are we doing over there?

It's what I've said all along.  Everyone was so eager to trash-talk Saddam Hussein, but nobody had any idea how hard his job was.  Sure, he killed people, but do you have a clue how hard it is to hold together an artificially created country where three different groups of people want to kill each other?  Do you?  Suddenly, we're looking around and thinking, "Dang, this is really hard." 

Right up until they dropped the trapdoor under him, I thought we'd keep Saddam in reserve, in case we needed to reinstall him as dictator in Iraq.  I thought that was an evil and stupid idea, but killing him was a mistake.  I mean, we've killed the one guy who knew how to run the country.  You don't have to like him, or name your kids after him, but just admit it: he was killing fewer people than we have been on an annual basis.  (Not that I think governments ought to be killing any of their people, but I'm always going to prefer fewer dead to more dead.  The numbers don't look good for the US occupation.)  Plus, under Saddam, Iraqis had schools, electricity, clean water.

Sounds like we've just imported democrazy to Iraq.

So, if Iraq isn't going to have a democracy, does that mean that the US just destroyed the country's entire infrastructure, invited terrorists in, killed an estimated 500,000 civilians, plus 3600 US soldiers, all to topple one evil dictator and replace him with another evil dictator?  (Trust me, my people, there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.)  All at a cost of one trill-i-on of dollars?

A bargain at twice the price.  If you've got stock in the oil industry or the military industrial complex.

While we're all huddled around this battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, let's talk about the thing its author feared most.  On more than a few occasions, Vonnegut talked about his fear that literature was irrelevant, or worse, futile.  He feared that all of his writing meant nothing, just marks on paper.  Quickly, quickly, we all want to blurt out, "No, no, it wasn't all in vain."  We want to mean it, too, but maybe it's that same urge that makes us lie to someone who's just received a truly terrible haircut.  Our first urge is comfort, not truth.

Now is also the time we get to trot out all of the quotes we loved of Vonnegut's, while death has made him fresh again.  The one that sprang to mind immediately on hearing Vonnegut's work blandly eulogized comes from Slaughterhouse-Five: There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.  No wonder he feared the futility of literature.  The thing he wanted to teach the world has only been learned by a few.  In fact, most Americans don't remember, or never learned that the firebombing of Dresden was our lesson.  America was the teacher and the students.  We used technology to kill people from a distance.  At some point we decided that was a good thing, a desirable thing. 

In early February 1945, Allied forces dropped nearly 4,000 tons of explosives on Dresden, and the resulting firestorm consumed so much oxygen that the fortunate among the estimated 150,000 actually suffocated before being burned.  The less fortunate were sucked up into the flames by the updraft between hot and cold air.  They burned alive.  Less than two weeks later, Allied forces began firebombing Tokyo, killing more people there than in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1969, Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five, and successfully picked the scab off the firebombing of Dresden, reducing all of its strategic lethality to the pain and horror of one man.  Did we learn?  Oh, indeed.  Our new strategic bombing technique involves cluster munitions instead of incendiary munitions.  That's the lesson our military industrial complex learned.  If we take a look at the enlistment numbers, it looks like some of our children have learned not to sign up for crusades.  (Of course, the military industrial complex knows how to solve that.  They solved it in 1969 even, when that earlier generation of children became wary of the crusades.)  No wonder the writing seemed futile to him sometimes.  You can write it, you can print it, and people will even read it, but you can't make them learn anything from it.

The other Vonnegut quote I keep thinking of came from a Playboy interview in the 1970's: Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again.

By primitive, I envision that Vonnegut meant when we can return to living simpler lives, demanding less of our resources.  When we can be satisfied with fewer things, won't we automatically be more satisfied?  How long will it take us to learn that greed and consumption don't make us happy?  The two lessons--greed and war--are now more clearly intertwined than they ever were before.  War has always been about money, but until recently the war-mongers have been a bit more slick about hiding the connection.  Or people have been more willing to ignore it.

I end with another quote, one that ties back to my post yesterday: And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." (From his essay "Knowing What's Nice.")

As well you know, none of this is permanent, so enjoy it while you can.  Pay attention and take notes.  There may be a test later.

We call it a "free press," but it's a joke.  It's a joke, because the government doesn't even have to silence reporters these days.  Their corporate bosses do that. 

Have you heard the one about how the US raided an Iranian liaison office in northern Kurdish-controlled Iraq and "arrested" five Iranian officials?  Of course you haven't.  You probably also haven't heard that this "arrest" and on-going detention of these Iranian officials were part of a US attempt to "arrest" Mohammed Jafari, deputy directory of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the intelligence chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And if you haven't heard that, then you haven't heard that Jafari and Frouzanda were in Iraq on an official trip, and had earlier met with Jalal Talabani, who in case you haven't heard is the president of Iraq.  So guests of the Iraqi president narrowly avoided being "arrested" by occupational forces who instead arrested some junior Iranian officials. 

Now, how can we act surprised that Iran was eager to "arrest" 15 British sailors and marines who drifted conveniently close to Iranian waters?  It's classic tit-for-tat, and for the US to pretend any level of indignation is disingenuous.  While America news outlets go on describing the British service members as hostages, they never mention the Iranians that we're holding, and if they did mention the Iranians, they certainly wouldn't call them hostages.  That word seems to be reserved for our people being held against their will by a foreign country.  When we hold other people against their will, we call them detainees or suspects or suspected operatives.  Take your pick.

Oh!  Hold the presses! CNN has decided to report on the "arrests."  Sometimes I almost feel hopeful.

Sorry, my people, but after a long weekend of adorable kitten posts, it's time to face the ugly again.  While I was playing with kittens, plenty of people marked yesterday as the 4-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.  The BBC marked it with a particularly disheartening interactive display of all the attacks in Baghdad since the invasion.  To get a real glimpse at how poorly things are going, just grab the scroller and move through the last four years of truck bombings and rocket attacks.  They go from scattered, then to intermittent, and by February 2007, they are a steady rash of red dots on a pastel map delineating the ethnic divides in Baghdad.

Bush doesn't even talk about victory anymore.  Is it that he knows it'll be over soon for him?  When we started out, he talked about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.  Then we were settling for bringing stability to the region.  Now, we're just trying to bring a little security to Baghdad.  How the dreams of the mighty have crumbled.  By the time he leaves office, we'll be down to trying to minimize casualties in one little corner of Baghdad.