[Additions to yesterday’s dispatch: A reader with a knowledge of nuclear matters had the following comments on the looting of the Iraqis al-Tuwaitha nuclear site and a comment in a Glasgow Sunday Herald piece about the destructiveness of a dirty bomb: “The Glasgow Herald quotes someone who is exaggerating when he says uranium oxide in a dirty bomb would kill countless people. According to scientists I’ve queried that can’t happen. It’s not sufficiently radioactive. But it would certainly cause mass panic.
“As you probably know, the US did not permit the IAEA to secure Tuwaitha before the war or to track down anything from Tuwaitha, after the Marines opened it up, except uranium and its compounds. The agency somehow got around that and found that 400 sources of other types were missing after the US military had come and gone. Appalling. Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137 seem to have disappeared. They are strong gamma emitters and can be tracked from the air if moved around unshielded. Presumably whoever stole them knew how to do it properly. Those isotopes could make nasty dirty bombs.”
For those of you whose interest was piqued by yesterday’s piece on the 1964 “Nth country experiment” in designing an atomic bomb from public sources of information, check out No Experience Necessary, a long piece by Dan Stober in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. l]
Wrong movie, wrong war:
An eagle-eyed reader spotted an op-ed in the Oregonian by an Army private now in Iraq who sports the splendidly oxymoronic name, Isaac Kindblade (We don’t feel like heroes anymore) From Cornelius, Oregon, he volunteered for the Army at age 17 before graduating from high school. He had the urge — and a courageous one it was — to tell the folks back home what Iraq’s really like for an American soldier. He writes in part:
“When the war had just ended, we were the liberators, and all the people loved us. Convoys were like one long parade. Somewhere down the line, we became an occupation force in their eyes. We don’t feel like heroes anymore.
“A lot is made of our military’s might. Our Abrams tanks, our Apache helicopters, computers, satellites, this and that. All that stuff is great, but it’s essentially useless in peacekeeping ops. It is up to the soldiers on the ground armed with M-16s and a precious few words of Arabic. The task is daunting, and the conditions are frightening. We can’t help but think of “Black Hawk Down” when we’re in Baghdad surrounded by swarms of people. Soldiers are being attacked, injured and killed every day. The rules of engagement are crippling. We are outnumbered. We are exhausted. We are in over our heads.”
“As you probably know, the US did not permit the IAEA to secure Tuwaitha before the war or to track down anything from Tuwaitha, after the Marines opened it up, except uranium and its compounds. The agency somehow got around that and found that 400 sources of other types were missing after the US military had come and gone. Appalling. Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137 seem to have disappeared. They are strong gamma emitters and can be tracked from the air if moved around unshielded. Presumably whoever stole them knew how to do it properly. Those isotopes could make nasty dirty bombs.”
For those of you whose interest was piqued by yesterday’s piece on the 1964 “Nth country experiment” in designing an atomic bomb from public sources of information, check out No Experience Necessary, a long piece by Dan Stober in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. l]
Wrong movie, wrong war:
An eagle-eyed reader spotted an op-ed in the Oregonian by an Army private now in Iraq who sports the splendidly oxymoronic name, Isaac Kindblade (We don’t feel like heroes anymore) From Cornelius, Oregon, he volunteered for the Army at age 17 before graduating from high school. He had the urge — and a courageous one it was — to tell the folks back home what Iraq’s really like for an American soldier. He writes in part:
“When the war had just ended, we were the liberators, and all the people loved us. Convoys were like one long parade. Somewhere down the line, we became an occupation force in their eyes. We don’t feel like heroes anymore.
“A lot is made of our military’s might. Our Abrams tanks, our Apache helicopters, computers, satellites, this and that. All that stuff is great, but it’s essentially useless in peacekeeping ops. It is up to the soldiers on the ground armed with M-16s and a precious few words of Arabic. The task is daunting, and the conditions are frightening. We can’t help but think of “Black Hawk Down” when we’re in Baghdad surrounded by swarms of people. Soldiers are being attacked, injured and killed every day. The rules of engagement are crippling. We are outnumbered. We are exhausted. We are in over our heads.”
He’s caught something here. The men who run the Pentagon have fetishized high-tech war (all those “computers and satellites”) but, not surprisingly I suppose, they managed to ignore the merely human — what had to happen once the high-tech part was over. In his latest column, David Ignatius of the Washington Post — not exactly an oppositional figure — writes about this in very much the way Pvt. Kindblade did (Standoffish soldiering):
“America remains too much of a standoff power in the new Iraq. The U.S. military lacks the language skills, the cultural familiarity, the network of political connections to make the necessary, intimate connection with that country. It needs to ‘stand in’ now, but it doesn’t have the tools to do so securely. Hunkered down against a small but pesky Iraqi resistance, it looks like an occupying army more than a transforming (or ‘liberating’) one.
“The world’s only superpower is contemplating new technologies that could come out of the latest ‘Terminator’ movie. On this future battlefield, ‘super-empowered’ U.S. war-fighters will have body-machine interfaces that will make them all but invulnerable.
“These are astonishing military capabilities. But I worry that they will distance the United States all the more from the countries and cultures it seeks to influence. As we’re seeing in Iraq, political transformation requires intimate contact between real human beings This is not a standoff project.”
I quote this in part because mainstream figures in the media are already slowly beginning to think about and write about our occupation of Iraq as a failure. It’s increasingly an implicit, if not explicit, assumption in both articles and opinion pieces — and not just from the usual suspects either (see below).
Casualties:
I notice now that on days when American soldiers don’t die, the news from Iraq tends to fade, even though attacks continue and the numbers of wounded grow. Iraqi civilians, of course, continue to be killed in ongoing American operations, something that is usually noted, if at all, only in passing, though Vivienne Walt recently had a piece in the Boston Globe about the way civilian casualties were angering ever larger numbers of Iraqis. She writes (Bitterness Grows in Iraq over Deaths of Civilians):
“In numerous interviews, Iraqis said that more than factors like unemployment, fuel shortages, or electricity blackouts, civilian casualties since the war’s end have raised the level of bitterness against US soldiers and could prolong or widen armed resistance.
‘
”’It has increased our hate against Americans,” said Ali Hatem, 23, a computer science student at the University of Baghdad. ”It also increases the violence against them. In Iraq, we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want revenge.”’
Today, Ann Scott Tyson of the Christian Science Monitor offers a moving portrait of a single American death, that of Spc. Brett Christian, in an ambush in Mosul ( Portrait of a US combat casualty):
“Wastewater ran in gutters through the narrow streets, and children emerged from dim alleys to throw rocks at the soldiers. A standard mission. A sudden blast. A soldier lost – and no enemy in sight. This is the kind of faceless battle that tens of thousands of US troops are bracing for in Iraq each day. For infantrymen like Lieutenant Wood who fought their way to Baghdad to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, today’s terrorist-style ambushes are in some ways worse than major combat, when the enemy was more visible and predictable.”
Julian Borger of the Guardian reports that “US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media.” He adds that another largely unreported figure is the number of wounded. The official figure for wounded, he tells us, stands at 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, but he adds — and he’s quite a sober and reliable reporter — that “unofficial figures are in the thousands Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown back to the US at a relentless rate, in twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force base near Washington.”
And, of course, given the ambushes of the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours, this official figure is already out of date. (The headline of Jon Ward’s piece in the Washington Times says it all: War casualties overflow Walter Reed Hospital.)
Yesterday, an employee of KBR (Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton) was the second American “civilian” to die in an ambush, this time when a bomb exploded under his car somewhere north of Tikrit. The man — his name has not been released yet — will not count among the war dead, but I put that “civilian” in quotes because now that the Pentagon is involved in the wholesale privatizing of its own operations, the distinction between military and civilian has grown far foggier.
We’re potentially talking about the Enronization of the military here (not to speak of the Enronization of Iraq, given the drive to privatize that country as well and dump it into some of the same Halliburtonesque hands already “supporting” our military). David Wood in a recent Newhouse News Service piece, also brought to my attention by a reader, offers some idea of what this means in practice in Iraq (Some of Army’s Civilian Contractors Are No-Shows in Iraq):
“U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up, Army officers said Logistics support for troops in Iraq is handled by dozens of companies, each hired by different commands and military agencies with little apparent coordination or oversightThanks to overlapping contracts and multiple contracting offices, nobody in the Pentagon seems to know precisely how many contractors are responsible for which jobs — or how much it all costs.
“That’s one reason the Bush administration can only estimate that it is spending about $4 billion a month on troops in Iraq. White House Budget Director Joshua Bolten said this week he could not even estimate the cost of keeping troops in Iraq in fiscal 2004, which begins Oct. 1.”
I believe it’s beginning to sink in that, no matter how you look at it, this is a situation which is not about to go away or prove particularly amenable to imperial solutions.
Withdrawal rears its head:
Remember the antiwar movement? Well, in the piece quoted above Borger points out that “according to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans still think Iraq was worth going to war over, but a quarter want the troops out now, and another third want a withdrawal if the casualty figures continue to mount.” That quarter, I believe, is essentially the prewar antiwar movement, which was always a large, but distinctly minority, movement in our country (even if a majority in the rest of the world). And it’s still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. Add that other third to it and, though I was never much of a math whiz, I think you’re already talking about well over 50% of Americans. And just three months after war’s end, withdrawal (“bring our troops home”) is, I suspect, about to become a subject of discussion here.
As Paul Loeb suggested in a recent dispatch at this site, so Stephen Zunes now suggests at the Foreign Policy in Focus website — he argues that a renewed antiwar movement should call for the turning of the occupation of Iraq over to the UN, a strategy that could bring widespread support among Americans (as casualties mount) and that might actually succeed in helping devastated Iraq as well. (Why We Should Transfer the Administration of Iraq to the United Nations: Four Theses).
You can look rightwards as well and find the same subject rising. I include below a piece by Edward Luttwak, provocatively headlined “The time has come for us to get out of Iraq” that appeared in the British Telegraph. Luttwak is distinctly to the right (and many of you won’t agree with much of what he writes), but he’s very smart and a figure to be reckoned with. It’s no small matter that he’s calling for withdrawal in rapid time.
(By the way, a version of the same piece appeared today on this side of the Atlantic in the LA Times, but under quite a different title, one that tells a tale about differing atmospheres in the U.S. and England at a moment when Tony Blair, according to the latest polls, is far less trusted by the British public than the BBC. Luttwak’s piece in the LA Times is headlined, “Democracy in Iraq? It’s a Fairy Tale” and though that catches a major aspect of the piece, a couple of potentially incendiary lines are also missing like: “But the immediate problem is that even that perilously accelerated time-table is much too slow for many Iraqis – and for the US Army, which is heading for a veritable collapse in re-enlistments among the troops serving in Iraq.” To check out the Times version, click here.)
I’ve also included below a piece by Jonathan Steele from Baghdad in today’s Guardian on the need to withdraw from Iraq. He suggests that, if the US does suddenly decide to withdraw in any sort of disorder, the final legacy we might bequeath Iraq, ironically enough, might not be the return to rule by a Saddam-like figure or civil war between Kurds, Sunnis and Shia, but the fragmentation of the country into regional power-centers, into warlordism “linked to, or tolerant of, mafia and other crime.” In short, the Afghan solution.
Finally, James Carroll has written another of his remarkable Boston Globe columns pointing out that the most essential if least discussed motive for the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945 was vengeance (as I said yesterday in my dispatch, vengeance being the only thing nuclear weapons could possibly be used for). While it focuses on Hiroshima — August 6 being Hiroshima Day — its analysis of the present moment in America takes my breath away. Tom
America’s habit of revenge
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe
August 5, 2003”Although the war did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions.” These words were spoken by Thomas Mann in his Nobel laureate speech in 1929, a reflection of the broad psychological rupture inflicted on the European mind by World War I. But just as war can lead to the ”reappraisal of fundamental assumptions,” it can do the opposite, reinforcing assumptions to the point of shutting down debate. That seems a more American story.
Tomorrow marks the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the questions of whether Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb was justified; whether the Japanese would have surrendered without it; whether the bomb, therefore, was truly an alternative to a bloody invasion
To read more Carroll click here
Only the UN can give Iraq security and sovereignty
A clear timetable for US withdrawal is now essential
By Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
The Guardian
August 5, 2003One out of every four Americans wants US forces to withdraw from Iraq now, according to a Gallup poll. Some worry over the mounting rate of casualties. Others sense they were duped over the need for war. Some are traditional isolationists who want no American part in foreign affairs. Others oppose the Bush administration’s new imperialism with its doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes and its contempt for other nations’ opinions – the two vices which led to the attack on Iraq.
Whatever their motives, American calls for “US troops out” raise the same questions that rack the minds of Iraqis as they enter the fourth month of the occupation. What would happen if the Americans indeed pulled out abruptly? Would there be a security “vacuum” and who would fill it?
To read more Steele click here
The time has come for us to get out of Iraq
By Edward Luttwak
The Telegraph
August 4, 2003It is now three months since Bush declared that the war in Iraq was over. The occupation is costing almost $4 billion a week and lives continue to be lost to Iraqi attacks as troops seek to provide some security and stability. It was agreed that the US and Britain could not simply leave Iraq in chaos after destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime, but the standard remedy – a rebuilt Iraqi military government was not even considered. Instead the allies defied almost all expert opinion in pursuing the highly ambitious goal of endowing Iraq with an elected democratic government. By now, however, it should be obvious that no significant population group in Iraq wants the democracy that the Bush administration is striving so hard to establish.
Edward Luttwak is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.