Marilyn Young, historian and friend, pointed out to me the other day that an AP piece had, for the first time, used the ominous, Vietnam-era phrase, “seek and destroy” in describing the Marines’ mission. While today’s New York Times had this telling quote in a front-page piece, “Rumsfeld’s Design for War Criticized on the Battlefield”:
“Here today [V Corps Headquarters near the Kuwait-Iraq border], raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam.”
Could there be a worse curse? Thirty years later, Vietnam is still on the American brain. It’s the war we couldn’t outrun or confront, rewrite or erase in all these postwar years. Now, it’s the filter through which we can’t help but interpret already broken dreams — and not just us. In England, which is ahead of us in assessing broken dreams, (as befits the junior partner in what CNN still proudly and incessantly calls “the coalition”) the cabinet has evidently received a gloomy assessment of the battlefield situation and the polls which rose modestly post-the launching of the war, have just taken their first modest drop from the high 50s down to 52% war support. The Bush administration, still insistently in la-la land, as befits April Fool’s Day, will, along with the American public, have to play catch-up sooner or later. But in the case of the administration sooner may already be too late.
On the theme of a fast-forward war, the levels of destruction and the disillusioned style of see-all, kill-all that came to be practiced in Vietnam only after years of disastrous effort, appears to be gaining traction in Iraq in little over a week. It’s hard to tell this from most American press accounts, but in England and assumedly everywhere else on earth reports on how increasingly desperate, frustrated (and possibly hungry) American GIs, expecting a “cakewalk” and made doubly jumpy by the first suicide bombing of the war (by an Iraqi shia no less), are already acting in ways that ensure any future victory will taste like ashes. The Guardian already has a chilling summary of such behavior, Steven Morris’s US Troops accused of excessive force.
But the most devastating account I’ve seen is Mark Francetti’s account of fighting around Nasiriya, US Marines Turn Fire on Civilians at the Bridge of Death, in the British Times. Here’s a typical passage:
“A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made the fatal mistake of driving through US lines. The order was given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it with a barrage of machinegun fire, riddling the windscreen with at least 20 holes. The driver was killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road and into a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver had been armed and had fired at the marines. I walked up to the lorry, but could find no trace of a weapon. This was the start of day that claimed many civilian casualties.”
And here’s a Marine, quoted by Francetti, whose comments, while colorfully geared to the moment, would have been hardly less recognizable in 1900 in Philippines, in Korea in the early 1950s, or in Vietnam in the late 1960s. “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,” said Corporal Ryan Dupre. “I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.”
Could there be a worse curse? Thirty years later, Vietnam is still on the American brain. It’s the war we couldn’t outrun or confront, rewrite or erase in all these postwar years. Now, it’s the filter through which we can’t help but interpret already broken dreams — and not just us. In England, which is ahead of us in assessing broken dreams, (as befits the junior partner in what CNN still proudly and incessantly calls “the coalition”) the cabinet has evidently received a gloomy assessment of the battlefield situation and the polls which rose modestly post-the launching of the war, have just taken their first modest drop from the high 50s down to 52% war support. The Bush administration, still insistently in la-la land, as befits April Fool’s Day, will, along with the American public, have to play catch-up sooner or later. But in the case of the administration sooner may already be too late.
On the theme of a fast-forward war, the levels of destruction and the disillusioned style of see-all, kill-all that came to be practiced in Vietnam only after years of disastrous effort, appears to be gaining traction in Iraq in little over a week. It’s hard to tell this from most American press accounts, but in England and assumedly everywhere else on earth reports on how increasingly desperate, frustrated (and possibly hungry) American GIs, expecting a “cakewalk” and made doubly jumpy by the first suicide bombing of the war (by an Iraqi shia no less), are already acting in ways that ensure any future victory will taste like ashes. The Guardian already has a chilling summary of such behavior, Steven Morris’s US Troops accused of excessive force.
But the most devastating account I’ve seen is Mark Francetti’s account of fighting around Nasiriya, US Marines Turn Fire on Civilians at the Bridge of Death, in the British Times. Here’s a typical passage:
“A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made the fatal mistake of driving through US lines. The order was given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it with a barrage of machinegun fire, riddling the windscreen with at least 20 holes. The driver was killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road and into a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver had been armed and had fired at the marines. I walked up to the lorry, but could find no trace of a weapon. This was the start of day that claimed many civilian casualties.”
And here’s a Marine, quoted by Francetti, whose comments, while colorfully geared to the moment, would have been hardly less recognizable in 1900 in Philippines, in Korea in the early 1950s, or in Vietnam in the late 1960s. “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,” said Corporal Ryan Dupre. “I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.”
As a friend Nick Turse, who pointed me to this piece, writes, “And talk about a fast-forward war – these grunts seem to have gone through their metamorphoses from bright-eyed boys next door to battle-hardened killers in a week” We’re already hitting the we-had-to-destroy-it-in-order -to-save-it note and there’s so much still to happen.
Reporter William Branigin, who questions the military’s version of the most recent highway catastrophe on today’s Washington Post front page, A Gruesome Scene on Highway 9, 10 Dead After Vehicle Shelled at Checkpoint, describes the help the Americans finally offered the living and dead women and children: “Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, the 3rd Battalion commander, gave permission for three of the survivors to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones. Medics gave the group 10 body bags. U.S. officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.”
The dean of the University of California’s journalism school, Orville Schell, who cut his journalistic teeth on the Vietnam War, suggests in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed From Sands to Quagmire that not to have planned for Saddam’s guerrilla tactics was the height of folly, but also of self-absorption. He returns to some classic texts — that of the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Zi (“The worst policy is to besiege cities”) and then those of guerrilla expert Mao Tse-tung to consider the threat that America’s warmakers in endless years of planning seem to have ignored. As he makes clear, what the Iraqis planned wasn’t exactly a closely held secret:
“‘People say to me, “You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps,” Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is quoted as telling a University of Warwick researcher six months ago. ‘I reply, “Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles”‚”
“Did Bush strategists view Aziz as such a propagandist that his words should be utterly discounted? It is difficult to believe, especially since short of instant occupation or abject surrender – options that few thought the Iraqi government would accept — Saddam Hussein had no other realistic options other than to borrow a leaf from Chairman Mao and engage in urban guerrilla warfare.”
If the American military was occupied elsewhere, it turns out Saddam was listening, or rather watching. If a recent report from the British Telegraph is to be believed, the golem of Baghdad was evidently consulting far more relevant texts than Chairman Mao or musty histories of the Vietnam War. As Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts obviously took in their fair share of catastrophe films, so, it seems, Saddam was watching the relevant “texts” from the most relevant place of all, Hollywood. And he knew that Saving Private Ryan wasn’t the way to go. Toby Harnden reports in the British Telegraph, “Saddam Hussein is said to have told his troops to use the film Black Hawk Down, the true story of how US soldiers were drawn into a bloody urban battle in Somalia, as a lesson for the Iraq war.”
Below Dilip Hiro in the Guardian and Pepe Escobar in Asia Times explain the particularly hell we’re approaching as American troops move ever closer to Baghdad.
Imagine then towns in rubble, Baghdad — and not just as now the symbols of Saddam’s rule — a ruin, the countryside littered with the shells of burnt out busses, tanks, cars, and taxis. Imagine a sullen population in a California-sized Middle Eastern version of Chechnya. Then try to imagine the mad idea of an American occupation, even with several hundred thousand troops to patrol the land. The question isn’t whether it will be the occupation of Japan redux, but whether it can be anything at all. Already the Guardian tells us US draws up secret plan to impose regime on Iraq,
“A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.
“. Decisions on the government’s composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government has had to accept a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.”
If there’s a single staggering difference between Vietnam and Iraq (and there are many), it’s the fact that we have entered the country with, as far as I can tell, not an Iraqi fighting on our side. Where are all those exiles who were supposedly being trained in Hungary? In Vietnam, at least, there was Ngo Dinh Diem; there were Catholics in arms; there was a South Vietnamese army; there were bureaucrats. Here, there are a few advisers to 23 ministries headed by Americans.
This might seem madness, but then, just when you think you’ve reached the bottom levels of this two-bit hell, there’s more — and, to ask the obvious question, how come it’s never reported first in the American press? It turns out, the Guardian tells us in an aptly headlined exclusive, US arms trader to run Iraq, Ex-general who will lead reconstruction heads firm behind Patriot missiles, that retired General Garner is “president of an arms company that provides crucial technical support to missile systems vital to the US invasion of the country. .. Garner is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq.”
He hasn’t yet even surrendered his position. “Arms Trader Who Profited from Iraqi War Reconstructs Nation,” there’s an appetizing headline for you, another gem from ten years of American planning.
It seems appropriate on this April Fool’s Day to end with two apt jokes, both from Jay Leno:
“In a speech earlier today President Bush said if Iraq gets rid of Saddam Hussein, he will help the Iraqi people with food, medicine, supplies, housing, education – anything that’s needed. Isn’t that amazing? He finally comes up with a domestic agenda – and it’s for Iraq. Maybe we could bring that here if it works out.”
“CNN said that after the war, there is a plan to divide Iraq into three parts … regular, premium and unleaded.”
Tom
Why 2003 is not 1991
By Dilip Hiro
April 1, 2003
The GuardianWhen Ali Hammadi al-Namani killed himself and four American soldiers in
a suicide attack near Najaf on Saturday, he put the final nail in the
coffin of the “liberation” scenario of the Washington-London alliance.
The invading Anglo-American forces will now have to keep all Iraqi
civilians at bay, treating everyone as a potential suicide bomber – just
the way Israel’s occupation army treats Palestinians.Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi’ite city
of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani
issued a fatwa, calling on “Muslims all over the world” to help Iraqis
in “a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our
homeland”. Sistani is based in Najaf, the third holiest place of Shi’ite
Muslims, and it is likely that Nomani, a Shi’ite, was following his
fatwa. As the only grand ayatollah of Iraq, Sistani is the most senior
cleric for Iraqi Shi’ites, who form 70% of ethnic Arabs in Iraq.Dilip Hiro is the author of Iraq: A report from the inside.
The Gaza or Grozny choice
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
March 30, 2003AMMAN – There are two options for Washington to win this war: the Gaza option or the Grozny option.
The suicide bombing near Najaf is proof that the “Palestinization” of Iraq is in full swing. The repeated calls for jihad from Islamic scholars in al-Azhar in Cairo, the Grand Mufti of Syria and a powerful imam in Najaf show that the jihad in Mesopotamia is also in full swing. In mass protests from Rabat in Morocco to Peshawar in Pakistan, from Kolkata in India to Jakarta in Indonesia, the Arab – and Muslim – street continues to demonstrate its opposition to the events unfolding in Iraq.
And certainly the majority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims – and seemingly most Iraqis themselves – don’t believe that the coalition has marched on Iraq to liberate its people. The message of the “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle – “When we leave, the oil will be left behind to the people of Iraq” – rings hollow in many a Middle Eastern ear.