Tomgram

An eye for an eye: I-ran for I-raq

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Okay, so let’s start with the Jessica Lynch story. On May 15, John Kampfner reported in the British Guardian on a BBC investigation he had conducted of the Lynch story in which he had discovered that almost every element in the instant patriotic myth of her rescue was phony or highly exaggerated. As the subhead for the piece put it, ” Her Iraqi guards had long fled, she was being well cared for – and doctors had already tried to free her.” (John Kampfner, The truth about Jessica) And that was only half the sordid tale of instant Pentagon myth-making. She had received no gunshots or stabs wounds and her mistreatment at the hands of her captors hadn’t happened. But somehow this story — except on a couple of op-ed pages and evidently in the Chicago Tribune — seemed barely to dogpaddle across the Atlantic until today, two weeks later, when the Associated Press repeated the BBC’s investigation. They went to the hospital where she was rescued and again interviewed her “captors.” In a piece over-stuffed with Pentagon denials of various sorts (“Lynch’s Rescue Called Overkill”), reporter Scheherezade Faramarzi nonetheless found the story to be accurate. (The Brits were our allies, but you wouldn’t want to take their reporting, when at variance with our government’s myth-making, at face value) Faramarzi adds one delectable detail to this already tattering tale of heroism:

“The U.S. commandos refused a key and instead broke down doors and went in with guns drawn. They carried away the prisoner in the dead of night with helicopter and armored vehicle backup – even though there was no Iraqi military presence and the hospital staff didn’t resist. In the tale of Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s rescue, this is the Iraqi side.”

I believe this represents a new Pentagon policy in action: “Don’t knock, don’t tell.”

Robert Scheer, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has been writing about this story (which, given the attention the Lynch rescue got at the time, should have been instant headlines on newspages around the country) and he’s been roundly assaulted by the Pentagon for his effort. See his piece today: Pentagon Aims Guns at Lynch Report.

In fact, if you think about it, is there any American story from the prewar or war period that actually made it through the war intact? How wrong were our boys in the Bush administration anyway? Remember in those distant prewar days when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was roundly hooted out of town for claiming it might take “hundreds of thousands” of troops to police occupied Iraq? Rumsfeld and his cronies claimed only 100,000 to begin with and those numbers were sure to drop fast. (Army chief says 200,000 troops needed to keep the peace)

Well, lo and behold, the New York Times on its front page today reports, “the total number of allied forces [British and American] involved directly and indirectly in securing Iraq is 200,000 or more, American military officials estimate.” And troops expected to be sent home aren’t going. I assume that it’s just a matter of days until apologies go out to General Shinseki.

Let me then, offer a little rundown on tattered tales, Iraqi, Iranian and otherwise, adding in a bit of humor, partially because the horrors, the lies, and the absurdities are mixing in such quantities at the moment — and laughing, believe me, is a way of dealing.

I believe this represents a new Pentagon policy in action: “Don’t knock, don’t tell.”

Robert Scheer, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has been writing about this story (which, given the attention the Lynch rescue got at the time, should have been instant headlines on newspages around the country) and he’s been roundly assaulted by the Pentagon for his effort. See his piece today: Pentagon Aims Guns at Lynch Report.

In fact, if you think about it, is there any American story from the prewar or war period that actually made it through the war intact? How wrong were our boys in the Bush administration anyway? Remember in those distant prewar days when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was roundly hooted out of town for claiming it might take “hundreds of thousands” of troops to police occupied Iraq? Rumsfeld and his cronies claimed only 100,000 to begin with and those numbers were sure to drop fast. (Army chief says 200,000 troops needed to keep the peace)

Well, lo and behold, the New York Times on its front page today reports, “the total number of allied forces [British and American] involved directly and indirectly in securing Iraq is 200,000 or more, American military officials estimate.” And troops expected to be sent home aren’t going. I assume that it’s just a matter of days until apologies go out to General Shinseki.

Let me then, offer a little rundown on tattered tales, Iraqi, Iranian and otherwise, adding in a bit of humor, partially because the horrors, the lies, and the absurdities are mixing in such quantities at the moment — and laughing, believe me, is a way of dealing.

A little sidenote first: Unfortunately, I’m technically — or do I mean technologically? — incapable of putting up images at my site, but let me recommend that you take a small cyberspace visit to look at “Life During Wartime,” a project of cartoonist, illustrator, historian, and novelist Josh Brown. Every few days he puts up another image at his site; often they’re both fierce and funny. Captioned but not quite cartoons, they catch the absurdity of our moment, highlighting what we won’t look at here or in Iraq. Just click here and wander.

Weapons of Mass Destruction:

Flash! Weapons of Mass Destruction Found! Pentagon heaves giant sigh of relief, White House congratulates American inspectors, Tony Blair says, “I knew it all the time”

Ah, but I’m sure you suspected that there might be a catch Here’s part of Julian Borger’s report on the find from yesterday’s Guardian (US finds evidence of WMD at last — buried in a field near Maryland)

“The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.

“The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post. But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.

“Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick”

Perhaps a reconstituted antiwar movement should call in Hans Blix and his inspectors, locked out of Iraq and idling their time anyway. Only yesterday, Don Rumsfeld claimed for the first time of Saddam’s regime, “It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy [the weapons of mass destruction] prior to a conflict.”

Borger’s Guardian story naturally wasn’t big news here. We know our wmd isn’t a problem (now that nobody remembers the Anthrax killer[s] anyway), and Rumsfeld’s revelation has so far caused hardly a ripple unlike in England where it actually created a stir. (See Ben Russell and Andy McSmith, the Independent, The case for war is blown apart)

Oh yes, and then we got a tiny insight recently into how the wmd issue has been covered at one major paper, the New York Times. Howard Kurtz, media columnist for the Washington Post released some internal Times emails (Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons) that show the intrepid Judith Miller, crisscrossing Iraq with an American wmd search team and scattering front-page scare pieces as she goes, actually seems to have been a mouthpiece for the Pentagon’s favorite future ruler of Iraq:

“A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi
exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper’s coverage
of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam
Hussein.

“An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper’s top reporter on
bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has
been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top
Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a
drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?…

“She noted that the Army unit she was traveling with — Mobile Exploration Team Alpha — ‘is using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own WMD work. . . .'”

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, writing on behalf of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in the Birmingham News (U.N. needs inspectors to return to Iraq), while shredding administration arguments on wmd, comments:

“Intelligence analysts rarely confess to being perplexed. We confess. We are perplexed at the U.S. refusal to permit the return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq.

“Washington’s decision to bar the very people with the international mandate, the unique experience and the credibility to undertake a serious search for weapons of mass destruction defies logic. U.N. inspectors know Iraq, know the weaponry in question, know the Iraqi scientists/engineers who have been involved, know how the necessary materials are procured and processed.

“Unquestionably, their familiarity with the nuclear facilities would go a long way toward ending the looting and thefts there. Yet repeated U.N. offers to make inspectors available have been rebuffed. This only compounds Washington’s credibility problem.”

But why go on when someone else has summed it all up so much better. Test your skills and American myths against historian (and ZNET contributor) Stephen Shalom’s splendid post-war Iraq quiz, every answer fully sourced (but not outsourced).

Post-War Iraq Quiz
by Stephen R. Shalom

1. The Bush administration claimed that it waged war on Iraq because of its concern about terrorism. How else has the administration shown its concern about terrorism?

A. Though there are more than 100 chemical plants where a single terrorist attack could potentially expose more than a million people to toxic gas, there are no mandatory security regulations applying to chemical plants. Tough legislation in this regard was blocked by industry lobbying and lack of support from the Bush administration.

B. It was not until 18 months after 9/11 that the Nuclear Regulatory Agency revised its policy stating that nuclear power plants needed to be secure only from an attack by three or fewer individuals armed with no more than rifles; the revisions were worked out in closed-door meetings with the nuclear industry and excluded public interest organizations. The new policy is secret, but NRC officials are on record as saying it is not necessary to be able to protect against a 9/11-scale attack.

C. The Bush administration has ordered the elimination of 11% of airport baggage screener jobs.

D. All of the above.

2. Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer declared on April 10 “we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.” Which of the following has been a result of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

A. Before the war, the Bush administration warned that Iraq might have 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, and upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. So far, these estimates have fallen short by exactly 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents.

B. Despite the claim that the war was fought to prevent WMD getting into the hands of terrorists, U.S. officials allowed the looting of seven sites in Iraq where nuclear material was present.

C. U.S. troops found a “top secret” Iraqi intelligence memo at a secret police headquarters that described an offer by a “holy warrior” in Africa to sell uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq. Iraq rejected the offer, the memo states, because of the United Nations “sanctions situation.”

D. All of the above.

(In order not to miss testing your Iraq war know-how against the other eight questions and the match-this-absurd-quote-to-that-ridiculous-speaker box in the quiz just click here.)

Facing Iran:

Let me skip over a few other horrors and absurdities of the moment. Let’s not, for instance, tarry long on the problem of those hundreds prisoners at Guantanamo from some old American war or other who have fallen into an extralegal black hole. Reports from England and Australia reassure us that a new plan to tidy up this unfortunate situation is on the drawing boards: “The US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber. Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal” (U.S. Plans Death Camp)

Let’s turn instead to the future. Ours is, after all, an Old Testament administration and, now that they’re in Iraq, there’s the secondary issue of in honoring the region’s ancient customs. So they’re evidently the White House is getting ready to apply Hammurabai’s famed “an eye for an eye” injunction to foreign policy — I-ran for I-raq.

Neal Pollack, a blogger whose site I’ve just been introduced to by a trusted friend has written a hilarious — and, as a result, all-too-serious — riff on the Bush Administration new focus on Iran and Jim Lobe, at the Foreign Policy in Focus website, provides a thoroughly sober analysis of the long neocon lobbying effort to take that country out, filled with ludicrous neocon predictions that could easily pass for Pollack’s humor. (There are, for instance, those spontaneous Iranian uprisings that would go with an invasion, evidently a vision meant to replace that of the Iraqi’s who were to toss garlands at our invading troops.) Tom

Iran So Far Away
By Neal Pollack
May 27, 2003

At last, the Bush Administration has woken up to realize that the real threat to our national security isn’t Al-Queda, or Iraq, or Syria. Our true enemy, our natural rival for dominion over the Middle East, is Iran. In case you were too busy “enjoying” yourself this weekend, let me recap. The United States has cut all diplomatic ties with the Iranian government and is engaging in various subversive activities to attempt to destabilize the country. Our allies in this quest are a highly trustworthy group of gentlemen called The People’s Mujahedeen. Don’t be skeptical. In the past, when our country’s faced trouble, The People’s Mujahedeen have always come to our aid. Isn’t it about time we returned the favor?

The Saudi Arabia bombings a couple of weeks ago were horrible, the works of conscienceless killers. The only logical response to those attacks?

To read more Pollack click here

Is Tehran Back in the Crosshairs of the Neocon Crusade?
By Jim Lobe
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 28, 2003

Reports that top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush met Tuesday, May 27th to discuss U.S. policy toward Iran, including possible efforts to overthrow its government, mark a major advance in what has been an 18-month-old campaign by neoconservatives in and out of the administration. Overshadowed until last month by their much louder drum-beating for war against Iraq, the neocons’ efforts to now focus U.S. attention on “regime change” in Iran has become much more intense since early May and has already borne substantial fruit.

A high-level, albeit unofficial, dialogue between both countries over Iraq, Afghanistan, and other issues of mutual interest was abruptly broken off by Washington ten days ago amid charges by senior Pentagon officials that al Qaeda agents based in Iran had been involved in terrorist attacks against U.S. and foreign targets in Saudi Arabia May 12th. Teheran strongly denied the charge.

Jim Lobe <[email protected]> is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.

To read more Lobe click here