Tomgram

Baghdad’s new blogger

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Today’s front page of the New York Times — my starting point for dispatches this week — features Senator Kent Conrad of North Carolina, ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, responding to the $3.9 billion per month price tag put on the military part of the occupation of Iraq by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld yesterday. (David Firestone and Thom Shanker, War’s Cost Brings Democratic Anger). His comment:
“It’s a bit more than I expected. Obviously the Iraqi occupation is bogging down, and the cost is substantially higher than we were earlier advised. So the problems are mounting, and I got a real earful from parents of soldiers when I got home about the lack of a plan for the postwar.” Note that “earful” and also that “bogging down” — another of those Vietnam quagmire phrases (back in the days when we were worried about “bogging down” in a land war in Asia) that are spiraling ever closer to the White House.

In the meantime, General Tommy Franks insisted again that we would need 150,000 troops in Iraq for that “foreseeable future” and — from another Times piece on the foreseeable future — “At the same time, the Army has hired Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary to feed and house up to 100,000 troops in Iraq. The contractor could erect large tents, but an Army spokesman said today that the $200 million project [probably not even part of that $3.9 billion per month price tag] ordered last month could also include semi-permanent wooden buildings similar to what American troops in Kosovo use.” (Eric Schmitt, Franks Sees Decision Soon on Rotation System for G.I.’s)

Believe me, if we’re talking about Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, then “semi-permanent” is hardly the word for what’s being planned. In other words, as I’ve been saying for months, we planned to stay. It just seems our leaders didn’t know Iraq was a quicksand land, the “quagmire” being geologic shorthand for resistance, which for the last century or more has been the most prominent — and strangely enough always unexpected — feature of every imperial experience abroad.

By the way, has anyone noticed — or is it just my imagination — but haven’t all those perfervid neocon comparisons that turned us proudly into the new Roman Empire of the space and email age somehow died away? To pick up a phrase from Michael Ignatieff’s shameful prewar cover piece in the New York Times Magazine, “The American Empire: the Burden,” how did the “burden” turn so quickly into the bog of empire? (Hmmm, there’s a future scholarly study for you.) In the meantime, the legionnaires of our new military are sweating out the dreams of our leaders as they turn into yesterday’s nightmares (another sure-to-return Vietnam metaphor, “the nightmare” from which you can’t awake). The only “burden” I noted in the paper this morning was this, from a comment by Senator Robert Byrd who managed to give another of his remarkable speeches and pressed Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld hard in the Senate hearings:

“At a time when the United States is running record-breaking deficits of $400 billion each year, the Administration has not even included these $58 billion in occupation costs in its budget. In sharp contrast to the 1991 Persian Gulf war, where our allies contributed $54 billion of the $61 billion cost of that war, the American taxpayer is virtually alone in bearing the burden for the staggering cost of this most recent war with Iraq

“Iraq is fast becoming an urban guerilla shooting gallery with U.S. troops as the targets. It is time to go to the United Nations and work to deploy a trained multinational peacekeeping force to cope with the perils of the occupation of Iraq. Before there is a disaster to cope with. Before there is a major loss of life. Before there is a crisis, we must read the tea leaves.

“This White House cannot further presume on the patience of the public. The American people must be given an exit strategy for our troops. We must ask the International Community for help in Iraq.”

“Iraq is fast becoming an urban guerilla shooting gallery with U.S. troops as the targets. It is time to go to the United Nations and work to deploy a trained multinational peacekeeping force to cope with the perils of the occupation of Iraq. Before there is a disaster to cope with. Before there is a major loss of life. Before there is a crisis, we must read the tea leaves.

“This White House cannot further presume on the patience of the public. The American people must be given an exit strategy for our troops. We must ask the International Community for help in Iraq.”

The burden our empire-builders will indeed bear sooner or later is the burden of dead Americans sent to enforce their dreams on a foundation of sand. It couldn’t be sadder. What they are already building — an analogy nobody has yet thought to make — is a 21st century Vietnam (Iraq) Wall, body by body, and this should be stopped. And, of course, let’s not forget that there is no Vietnam Wall for Vietnamese, which, if built for their casualties on the same scale as our Wall, would, in essence have been unbuildable. Estimates of Iraqi wartime civilian casualties continue to rise as do postwar casualties of every sort. :

Certainly, we get a small sense of what a soldier’s life in Iraq is like in the press, but little straight from the soldier’s mouth. Fortunately, Paul Woodward, who has a fine eye for a sharp piece and runs a weblog, www.warincontext.org, that’s a daily stopping spot of mine, has been in touch with one of the first military bloggers from Baghdad. There was a famous Iraqi blogger in that city during the war, who now has an intermittent column in the British Guardian, but Sean, whom you’ll meet briefly below in Woodward’s piece, also up at his website, is an early gutsy voice rising from within our own military, offering us a version of “the facts on the ground.” Read Woodward’s piece, then visit Sean’s blog for yourself. It gives an every day sense of life in American-occupied Baghdad. Tom

Baghdad’s New Blogger
By Paul Woodward

Salam Pax is still the best known Baghdad blogger, but another picture of life in the city newly emerges, this time from a blogger who arrived there just a few weeks ago. The weblog is Turningtables, its author is a U.S. Army sergeant camped outside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

Soldiers on active duty are often reluctant to say how they feel, but at a time when U.S. casualties are mounting, the justification for the war is open to question, and “pockets of resistance” are beginning to look more like guerilla warfare, Turningtables unmasks the fears that usually lie hidden behind a soldier’s expressionless face.

it’s a sad state that originates when the death of soldiers becomes common everyday news…and it stops being surprising…and shocking…and horrible…when it takes a really gruesome story to remind you that you are in the middle of this shit…and you can’t go home…YOU CAN’T GO HOME…you want to curl up and quit…

Sergeant Sean has been keeping his journal since early June and the life he describes will ring true for many a soldier:

we volunteered for this…we sit here because we raised our hand…and sold our souls…most would think that we knew exactly what we were getting into…they would be wrong…we were naive…we were homeless…we were living with our mothers…this is just a job for 75% of us

Circumstances may have set this soldier on a course he hadn’t foreseen, but nevertheless, his appreciation for military life shines through:

if there is a person who wanders aimlessly through life I would recommend the service to them…and I would even allow my children to join…I would only hope that they remain objective through out…that they keep a sense of reality and stay aware

the military in itself is altruistic…communism…but how else could it possibly operate…selfless service…the good of the whole over the good of the one…the pay…the living conditions…think about it…soldiers are not free to make their own decisions…if they were how could anything difficult be completed…how could a platoon take a machine gun nest…or a war be won…

His unit wants to be seen as the toughest support unit in the Army, but he knows that neither inside nor outside the military does any glamour attach to the role of support. Movies don’t get made about these troops even though they form the backbone of every army.

With six years of service under his belt, previously based in Bosnia and later Afghanistan, Sgt. Sean is a regular soldier doing his job but the story he tells gently mocks the icons of warfare that are Hollywood’s bread and butter. Arnold Schwarzenegger can rally the troops in Baghdad and promote his new movie by calling the GI’s the “true terminators,” but military life — as described by a man actually living it — is a way of making a living, a stepping stone to college, a structure for an unstructured life.

I once read that some people come off as courageous because they are so afraid of being thought a coward…I’m glad that as of yet I haven’t had to prove my courage…that would mean somebody was trying to kill me…and right now…I’m content with people shooting off nasty emails instead of bullets…

Military service carries the honor of defending ones nation even for those who never fire a shot, but all the while the hopes and dreams of each soldier must lie in wait, far from the battlefield, locked away in a life postponed.

there are so many difficulties that come with a deployment to the Middle East…a major portion of your life is put on hold for 6 to 9 months and all the areas that could not possibly pause for your war are forced on to the phone lines…

Sgt. Sean, like thousands of other American service men and women, now finds himself at the sharp end of a political experiment whose design was always unclear and whose conclusion becomes ever more elusive. The president insists that America will stay the course in Iraq, but a mission with no deadline is a plan that dare not risk being called a failure.

The White House and the rest of Washington continue to juggle with competing demands from ill-defined strategic goals, bungled foreign relations, a neglected economy and a presidential campaign that makes every other need subservient to that of electoral victory. Meanwhile, thousands of soldiers must sweat it out in Iraq not knowing whether they will be there for months or years or, worst of all, whether they might end up the next victim of a rocket-propelled grenade attack or a drive-by shooting.

Turningtables, Sgt. Sean’s weblog, is located at turningtables.blogspot.com/

All quotations (appearing in italics) are from Turningtables and used with the author’s permission.

Paul Woodward is the editor of The War in Context( warincontext.org).

© 2003 Paul Woodward