Category: War

UPDATE to a story I posted April 4:
The American software engineer arrested in mid-March, and being held without any charges, remains in federal prison in Oregon.
But, in spite of moans from the softy liberals, it’s really ok to round up citizens and hold them in secret detention as witnesses without any of the evidence needed to charge or prosecute them, according to the “Department of Justice.”

Legal analysts at the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties group, said they feared that the government was using the material witness statute as a form of preventive detention to buy time while officials searched for evidence, a practice that is illegal in the United States. The material witness statute is normally used to detain witnesses deemed to be flight risks.
“Jailing people who are simply under investigation is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime,” said Kate Martin, who runs the center in Washington.
Justice Department officials say their detention of material witnesses has been lawful, and critical to the battle against terrorism. “It is difficult for a person in jail or under detention to murder innocent people or to aid or abet in terrorism,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said.

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of captivity.

We’ve thrown Baghdad back at least 100 years.
We can’t even find the government which we claimed was the objective for the death and destruction we have visited upon Iraq, and I won’t mention our failure to track down the weapons of mass destruction we claimed were the major immediate threat to U.S. security, but we have been remarkably successful in destroying the entire infrastructure of the capital city of five million people.
Baghdad’s public facilities once were of first world standard. Today the city has no electicity, no water, no sewage or trash collection, no police, no telephones. Thirty-five of the city’s thirty-eight hospitals are closed because of looting or arson.

Eleven days after US forces occupied the city and four days after their engineers were supposed to have begun working around the clock at the power plants, the lack of amenities is fueling the anti-American feeling in the streets. “They did the destroying, why can’t they repair them?” is the most common question.

Why? Our guys have been too busy securing the oil production facilities which are going to pay the big U.S. corporations to whom the White House is awarding lucrative post-war construction contracts.
The country is well rid of a dictator, but it was done in a way and at a cost whose legitimacy and worth is arguable at best. But for Iraquis, more important going forward is the identity of the forces which authored the change and the fact of their continued presence as occupiers. We have robbed Iraqis of their pride and they may not forgive us.
For more on the pulse of Iraq, see another commentary in today’s Independent, “A DANGEROUS GROUNDSWELL OF RESENTMENT IS BUILDING UP ON THE STREETS OF BAGHDAD.”

Then came one of those moments that you live through with every nerve of your body vibrating. I saw young men breaking away from the main crowd and running toward a street corner. There was some shouting. Then I spotted American helmets bobbing above the crowd. “Look, buddy, I’ve got the gun – now back off,” a voice shouted. An Iraqi man was confronting an American soldier. “Go ahead and shoot me. Go ahead,” the man said. A woman shouted into my face: “It’s about our pride. Its just about our pride.”

We came as conquerors, and the conquered know it. Now they are asking questions, tomorrow they may want to do more.
Robert Fisk has been in Iraq, in Baghdad itself, since well before the war began, and what he sees is not the success being reported by the American media. He asks the righteous new overlords in Mesopotamia, if America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, and if America insisted that the guilty, the war criminals, would be brought to trial, where are those rights being defended, and why haven’t we apprehended the felons?

17 April 2003
It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of “liberation” has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of “liberation”.
At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted.
“Fuck you!”

The people of Baghdad have been ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn.

Lockdown. It’s a form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command of the 1st US Marine Division, it’s a curfew in all but name.
If I was an Iraqi and I read that,” an Arab woman shouted at me, “I would become a suicide bomber.” And all across Baghdad you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon – very soon – a guerrilla resistance must start. No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are “remnants” of Saddam’s regime or “criminal elements”. But that will not be the case.

But the main thrust of Fisk’s argument is the observation that the coalition has done virtually nothing to apprehend the leaders of Sadaam Hussein’s regime, or its agents of terror, and very little to protect the country’s infrastrucure at any level, with the single, all-too-telling exception of the oil sector.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to escape? And they’re right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s personal adviser, Dr A K Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information . . . .
. . . .
So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage: the looting of the archaeological treasures from the national museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives; the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim we are going to create for them.
Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew by their so-called liberators?

The answer isn’t in the text of his essay. Instead, Fisk ends with a warning which has other thoughtful authors these days.

So I’ll make an awful prediction. That America’s war of “liberation” is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.

Tim Robbins’ credentials as a baseball fan are impeccable, but it appears that at least part of the baseball establishment is no fan of Tim Robbins.
Ok, most of us know the facts already, but now we’ve “Nuke” Laloosh‘s own account. He didn’t just speak softly and he wasn’t carrying a big bat, but Robbins got his own bully pulpit a couple of days ago when he delivered a fiery speech before the National Press Club in Washington.

For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children’s terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
And then came the speech: You are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any suspicious behavior.
In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided, and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

And this was just his warm-up.

Leave it to the British to make us laugh about the war. If we’re all real good, maybe we’ll even wind up seeing this delicious lampoon, inspired by our real life little kingy and the fictional Stanley Kubrick movie, “Dr. Strangelove.”

“[The Madness of George] Dubya” — part vaudeville, part farce, part cabaret — has become the newest emblem of the frustration and ambivalence felt by some Britons at being drawn into a war as the principal allies of an American administration that provokes incredulity and resentment rather than loyalty among many of them.
“It’s undoubtedly anti-Bush,” Mr. Butcher said, “but to understand it as an anti-American diatribe is to miss the point.” To describe it as topical might be an understatement, too. From its conception to its first production took less than three weeks, he said.
The United States, Mr. Butcher said, justified a war on Iraq by “a series of palpable hoaxes” that left him “increasingly flabbergasted by the shameless, manipulative cynicism of the whole approach.” He was so incensed that starting late in December he resolved to cast, write and stage his revue, which opened just over two weeks later, on Jan. 14, in the Theatro Technis fringe theater in north London. It opened in the West End last Monday.
. . . .
Some characters seem to be caricatures of American politicians whose own words have already made them seem like caricatures to some of their critics. “All you have to do is transcribe their utterances, and it needs very little embellishment,” Mr. Butcher said. “You couldn’t invent it.”
The British characters, by contrast, are more or less bumblers dragged along in the powerful American wake. Prime Minister Tony Blear is preoccupied by a real estate deal — a real-life scandal that swirled around Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, last year. Group Captain Windbreak is the very model of British deference as he seeks to dissuade General Kipper from ordering a nuclear strike. “Quite so,” he murmurs, as the American officer demurs. “See your point.”

The NYTimes account concludes with the revelation that the very fresh review necessarily incorporates an element of news, because of the speed of events in Iraq. Each day’s performance is updated with new jokes.

A quote, à propos the events of the past week in Iraq, from the Polish Holocaust survivor and satirist Stanislaw Lec, supplied by David Remnick in his “The Talk of the Town” notes this week in The New Yorker:

“When smashing monuments, save the pedestals — they always come in handy.”

The bodies aren’t warm yet in Iraq, and in fact many on both sides don’t even know yet that they are about to be dead, yet White House political necessity is about to create another war, the Bush regime arguing now that it’s absolutely sure that this time it is Syria which is the real threat to the security of the United States.
No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, but our boys in Washington say that those notorious Iraqi WMDs have been spirited away to Damascas.

Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harbored, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a “grave and gathering” threat: precisely zero.
. . . .
The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbors– and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.
Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.
But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock’s films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.
If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

We are going to be paying for our stupidity for generations.

[The Americans] pulled up in a tank and are Westerners, the same people who promised all last century that the Arab world would be able to throw off the yoke of colonialism yet never let them.
Proof? Look at Israel, they say here, a Western colonial outpost planted on Arab soil in 1948. The United States has for decades been promising the Palestinians a state with freedom and self-determination. What have they delivered? Nothing.
There, in that sense of historical impotence and betrayal, is the root of the frustration, sadness and rage that shot through the Arab world on Wednesday when an American armored vehicle toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of Baghdad.
“Saddam Hussein fomented a miracle: he took history backwards many generations,” Talal Salman, the publisher of the respected Al-Safir newspaper in Beirut, wrote in a bitter front page editorial, grieving the loss of the richest Arab civilization to what he described as a colonial power.
“What a tragedy again plaguing the great people of Iraq,” he wrote. “They have to chose between the night of tyranny and the night of humiliation stemming from foreign occupation.”
Toward the end, even when they knew the game was lost, many Arabs were rooting for the idea that even Iraqis who despised Mr. Hussein would take up arms along side his troops. A little more of him seemed preferable to a lot of Americans.
“They know that the Saddam Hussein regime will eventually end one day, he will die,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor of social sciences at the Lebanese American University. “With America you have a whole system, an entirely different system. The threat from America is far greater than the threat from a government that will disappear one day.”
There is a small constituency of writers, editors and intellectuals that believes the United States will in fact create a better Iraq, a civil society run by Iraqis. They argue that the rapid collapse of Mr. Hussein’s government should serve as a slap in the face, a warning that Arabs need to jettison their dictators and their socialist police states and learn to compete in the modern world.
But many, perhaps most, suspect the war is just to grab oil and to castrate the one country that remained a potential threat to Israel. Democracy delivered at gunpoint appears a dubious proposition.

See Bloggy today for a sense of what is really happening in Baghdad, Washington and New York.
Sample, straight from the Department of Defense itself:

Rumsfeld: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases?” (Laughter.) “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”

Those who are now making the effort to look outside the country for news are having an experience similar to that which was common in occupied Europe when a shortwave radio in the attic was the only source of real information – and hope. And yet for today’s true patriot there seems to be little cause for hope (no sign of a liberating army, as in the 40’s), and our current effective media blackout may be even more demoralizing than that of sixty years ago. The Bush regime hasn’t even had to physically take over the dissemination of news or ban the radios. Americans have simply decided neither to report nor seek the truth.

The Israeli government has killed another young International, as he tried to shield children from a tank-mounted machine gun in Gaza.
About a dozen members of the peace movement had been trying to set up a protest tent on a road in an attempt to block Israeli army incursions into a Gaza refugee camp.

Along the way, the protesters were joined by several children, the witnesses said. When the group was about 200 yards away from three tanks, soldiers opened fire from a tank-mounted machine gun, the witnesses said.
Hurndall and another foreign activist tried to get two children out of the line of fire, [the witnesses] said. “Thomas (Hurndall) grabbed one of their hands and as soon as he did that a tank fired at him, hitting him in the head,” [AP photographer] Hamra said.
The photographer said the children were not throwing rocks at the troops and that he saw nothing that would have provoked the troops.

The incident occurred yesterday, friday. Today the beautiful 21-year-old Manchester, England, photographer has been declared brain dead. As I am writing this, there is a report that he has been removed from life support. On the scale of decades of Israeli and American crimes in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, this news would be unlikely to shock a world inured to news about the mad policies which have already removed so many others from our support for their very lives.