[Black humor dept: Here’s my question of the day: Where does the military find the people who make up the names for their campaigns? The Tacoma College of Advertology or Dr. Freud’s Institute of the Semiconscious in Washington DC? Now we have Operation Desert Scorpion, touted in the media as a “carrot-and-stick” operation. But do you want to get your carrots from a scorpion? Perhaps the military brains behind the name meant to indicate that the Baathists were scorpions to be stamped out, but I think not. (After all, in Operation Desert Storm, we were the storm, not the ones stormed.) If this is your basic hearts-and-minds campaign (a term I heard used twice on the TV news last night), then we’re not off to a promising start. Such names and such fantasies about delivering life and death, promise and doom, in the same operations and from the barrel of a gun were disasters in Vietnam
By the way, I’m not alone in having Vietnam leap to mind again these days. An editorial in the British Guardian yesterday (Iraq’s lethal peace, It could yet change American minds), well worth reading in full, included these two telling paragraphs:
“The US commanders themselves acknowledge that their occupation has met growing resistance and that they are engaged in what Gen McKiernan calls “a cycle of action, reaction and counter-action.” Significantly, this realisation is reaching deep into the US heartland. Newspapers from Cleveland, Tallahassee, Charlotte and Salt Lake City carried headlines this weekend such as “Losing the peace”, “Iraq war still hot, commanders say”, “Civilian deaths intensify anti-US ire” and “The war is over, but US soldiers keep dying”.
“The latest military offensives, with their ambiguous body counts and dodgy “terrorist” identifications, began to recall the US “search and destroy” operations in Vietnam over 30 years ago. So does the talk of a “counter-insurgency” campaign though as yet on a smaller scale. One crucial difference is that US public opinion has continued to support the president. Yet the longer that US troops remain at war – whatever it is called – in Iraq, the more that public support will be tested.”
By the way, is anybody in the American press taking the “heartland” news pulse this way? I think not. The latest polling figures from Zogby indicate that the president’s positives have dipped a tad and his negatives have risen by the same tad, while Kerry and Dean are neck-and-neck in New Hampshire. Call me a cock-eyed optimist but I see the tiniest rays of possibility here (though I have to admit I’m squinting).
Oh, and another item in the laugh-so-I-won’t cry category is the Jessica Lynch made-for-TV story, still officially set for a Fall airing on NBC. According to the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Tim Goodman (NBC tries to save ‘Lynch’),
“NBC issued a weak statement Monday saying it was staying the course on its original story despite the whiff of the fish now surrounding Lynch’s ordeal. But indications are there’s confusion at NBC over which way to proceed. There isn’t even a script yet
“The latest military offensives, with their ambiguous body counts and dodgy “terrorist” identifications, began to recall the US “search and destroy” operations in Vietnam over 30 years ago. So does the talk of a “counter-insurgency” campaign though as yet on a smaller scale. One crucial difference is that US public opinion has continued to support the president. Yet the longer that US troops remain at war – whatever it is called – in Iraq, the more that public support will be tested.”
By the way, is anybody in the American press taking the “heartland” news pulse this way? I think not. The latest polling figures from Zogby indicate that the president’s positives have dipped a tad and his negatives have risen by the same tad, while Kerry and Dean are neck-and-neck in New Hampshire. Call me a cock-eyed optimist but I see the tiniest rays of possibility here (though I have to admit I’m squinting).
Oh, and another item in the laugh-so-I-won’t cry category is the Jessica Lynch made-for-TV story, still officially set for a Fall airing on NBC. According to the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Tim Goodman (NBC tries to save ‘Lynch’),
“NBC issued a weak statement Monday saying it was staying the course on its original story despite the whiff of the fish now surrounding Lynch’s ordeal. But indications are there’s confusion at NBC over which way to proceed. There isn’t even a script yet
“How NBC hopes to pass a “fact-based” movie through its own fact checkers in the legal and standards departments when no one — not even Lynch herself — seems to know what happened is beyond comprehension. After much scrambling for direction that apparently wasn’t there less than a week ago, NBC sent out this statement: “We’re in the early stages of script development on this project and are proceeding with the story that we always wanted to tell — the rescue of Jessica Lynch.If there are new developments that impact the original story, we will take them under consideration.”
As Jim Ruttenberg of the New York Times reports today (To Interview Former P.O.W., CBS Dangles Stardom), no “whiff of the fish” is going to stand in the way of CBS, which is giving news “synergy” a new name when it comes to the captured and freed private, who (as a doctor friend commented to me the other day, and I’ve seen nothing whatsoever written on this) seems to have one of the more improbable cases of “amnesia” going. I can hardly wait for the interview with the young woman who, it is claimed, remembers more or less nothing of her experience. The leaked CBS “proposal” for a “news” extravaganza included:
“‘ideas from CBS News, CBS Entertainment, MTV networks and Simon & Schuster publishers,’ Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president, wrote to Private Lynch’s military representatives. ‘From the distinguished reporting of CBS News to the youthful reach of MTV, we believe this is a unique combination of projects that will do justice to Jessica’s inspiring story.’
“CBS Entertainment executives, the proposal said, ‘tell us this would be the highest priority for the CBS movie division, which specializes in inspirational stories of courage.’ Simon & Schuster, it said, ‘is extremely interested in discussing the possibilities for a book based on Jessica’s journey from Palestine, West Virginia, to deep inside Iraq.’
“MTV Networks, the letter went on, was offering a news special, a chance for Private Lynch and her friends to be the co-hosts of an hourlong music video program on MTV2”
Ruttenberg himself never indicates that Lynch’s story might in any way be questionable and evidently CBS could care less.]
Now, let me turn to the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Amid the present horrors — the suicide bombings and the assassinations-by-missile — and the airy discussions of road maps and future peace, little attention has been paid to the most prominent, the most massive, you might say, of the changing facts on the ground likely to determine the nature of any future settlement. The “seam line project” is a vast wall, fence, divider that Ariel Sharon’s government is building to separate Palestinian and Israeli areas and that is redefining those areas — disastrously for the Palestinians — in the process. Soon, to the settlements in the occupied territories will be added another vast project difficult to dismantle. A former student of mine, Robin Shulman, toured the areas where the “wall” was being built for PBS’s Frontline some months back, exploring “the shifting frontiers of a country without established borders.” It’s a vivid piece which I recommend to you, but with its many illustrations, maps, and parts too complicated to include here. (To read it go to Tracing Borders)
Below I include two strong pieces on the facts on the ground in Israel and the occupied territories, the first by Edward Sheehan from the New York Review of Books; the second by Geraldine Bedell in the Guardian. To these I add a piece by the eloquent Ha’aretz correspondent Gideon Levy on what Ariel Sharon — and in this he is representative of many Israelis — refuses to know of the facts on the ground. (“Sharon knows only maps.”) Tom
The Map and the Fence
By Edward R. F. Sheehan
The New York Review of Books
July 3, 2003As the Iraqi war has wound down, the United States has been promoting a “road map” intended to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Together with the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia, the US defines the road map’s destination as “a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel–Palestinian conflict by 2005.” The “settlement, negotiated between the parties, will,” they hope, “result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.”
Phase I of the map requires the Palestinians “to undertake an unconditional cessation of violence,” while “Israel freezes all settlement activity” and “immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001.” In Phase II, if the mutual security and many other measures of Phase I have been fulfilled, “an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders” will be created by December 2003….
To read more Sheehan click here
Set in stone
Geraldine Bedell
The Observer
June 15, 2003Butterflies drift over the tall flowering grasses beside paths that crisscross an ancient rocky hillside. Your feet crush thyme and lemon balm as you walk through orchards of mango, pomegranates, figs, walnuts, peaches, oranges, lemons and the little apricot-coloured fruits the Palestinians call askadinya, which translates as ‘the sweetest life’.
And then breaking in on the birdsong comes the drone of bulldozers. Climbing towards the poor but picturesque hilltop village of Jayyous, it is possible to see this machinery at work, carving a motorway-sized scar through the orchards, leaving behind a bald patch up to 100m wide as far as the eye can see. The diggers have uprooted orange plantations, overturned greenhouses and pushed aside 500-year-old olive trees to create the foundations of a great wall that the Israeli government intends to build all down the side of the West Bank, where it abuts Israel.
To read more Bedell click here
Clueless about the occupation
By Gideon Levy
Ha’aretzAt long last, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
started to talk about the occupation, but doesn’t
have a clue about the subject. Nor do many in his
close circle – cabinet ministers, advisers, army
generals, politicians – have any idea what the
occupation is all about.When the prime minister’s
confidants boast about the
wealth of experience the
veteran statesman has
accumulated – “He has already
seen it all,” they say – they
need to be reminded that there
is one thing, at least, that
Sharon has never seen: He has
never seen the Israeli
occupation, certainly not the occupation as it
has evolved in the past few years, with all its
ugliness and cruelty.What does Sharon know about life under curfew, in
communities that have been under siege for years?