Quote of the day: “Margaret Thatcher has savagely undermined Tony Blair’s case for war against Iraq. In her first reported comment on the conflict, the Tory leader who took Britain to victory in the 1982 Falkland Conflict, has told friends that the war against Iraq was a ‘mistake.’ Baroness Thatcher has warned that British troops could be tied up in a mission without end for years. ‘Britain should never have been involved and it will be very difficult to get our troops out in anything like the near future,’ she told Tory peers at a private meeting last week. She also believes a judicial inquiry should be set up into the Iraq conflict rather than the ‘tightly defined’ Hutton inquiry.” (The piece in full from the tabloid British Sunday Mirror, Chris McLaughlin, Maggie’s Mauling for Blair)
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounces the war in Iraq? Who am I, but this seems like a bit of “news” to me. It’s as if a not-yet-Alzheimer’s Ronald Reagan, her old buddy, had suddenly emerging to denounce the war. (Of course, she’s laying for Blair and the Labor Party, but still)
And here’s another quote of the day: “Local witnesses described a fierce battle, with helicopters, fighter jets and tanks attacking suspected guerrilla positions, according to The Associated Press. The witnesses’ account, though, said it had taken several hours for reinforcements to arrive, during which time the Iraqi attackers had run away.
“Military officials could provide no estimate of the size of the attacking force, nor any estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths. Reuters reported that local residents had said that at least five Iraqis had been wounded during the battle.” (Patrick Tyler, Ambushed in Two Towns, the New York Times)
Note that this Tyler piece from the inside pages of the New York Times represents another notch in the ratcheting up of the guerrilla war in Iraq. For the second time in a week, air power, with all its indiscriminant ability to destroy, was called in after an ambush — and this time not just helicopters but jets were brought to bear. You call in the jets and, because of the nature of the destruction that’s bound to follow in any settled area, you instantly create new enemies. In addition, American commanders have been repeatedly indicating that the 15 or more skirmishes, ambushes, incidents a day usually involve contacts of only a few minutes at most. Here the fighting seems to have gone on for many hours.
Finally, for anyone who ever read battle reports out of Vietnam, these two little paragraphs have an eerie resonance, right down to the disappearing enemy. And just a question — the fighting took place in the “Sunni triangle” (Tyler, at least, puts “so-called” before the name), just as much fighting in Vietnam took place in the “Iron triangle.” What I wonder is: Are there actually triangular formations in both countries or is this just a case of American brains with an urge to triangulate? (And if so, what does that say about where the Vietnam analogy actually resides?)
Tips of the Times (redux):
“Military officials could provide no estimate of the size of the attacking force, nor any estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths. Reuters reported that local residents had said that at least five Iraqis had been wounded during the battle.” (Patrick Tyler, Ambushed in Two Towns, the New York Times)
Note that this Tyler piece from the inside pages of the New York Times represents another notch in the ratcheting up of the guerrilla war in Iraq. For the second time in a week, air power, with all its indiscriminant ability to destroy, was called in after an ambush — and this time not just helicopters but jets were brought to bear. You call in the jets and, because of the nature of the destruction that’s bound to follow in any settled area, you instantly create new enemies. In addition, American commanders have been repeatedly indicating that the 15 or more skirmishes, ambushes, incidents a day usually involve contacts of only a few minutes at most. Here the fighting seems to have gone on for many hours.
Finally, for anyone who ever read battle reports out of Vietnam, these two little paragraphs have an eerie resonance, right down to the disappearing enemy. And just a question — the fighting took place in the “Sunni triangle” (Tyler, at least, puts “so-called” before the name), just as much fighting in Vietnam took place in the “Iron triangle.” What I wonder is: Are there actually triangular formations in both countries or is this just a case of American brains with an urge to triangulate? (And if so, what does that say about where the Vietnam analogy actually resides?)
Tips of the Times (redux):
I thought today I might hit the Tomdispatch mailbag and do a little follow-up on various dispatches and Tomgrams of the last weeks. So much interesting mail comes in, but I’ll just pick a few topics. Yesterday, I offered a tip or two on how to read the New York Times and someone I know who works in the media promptly wrote me this:
“I must say, you’ve hit the Times process on the head. With the (increasingly rare) exception of true scoops, the impact of Times front page stories can be measured in two ways.
1. The simple fact they’re on the front page of the Times. This might be the most important, simply because it is so influential in setting the news agenda for other papers. The Times front page lineup memo which goes out over the AP [Associated Press wire] each evening is probably read by more front page editors than any other feature.
2. The actual news which, as you noted, is often buried. The Times has, frustratingly, retreated from actually making news. It’s become a situation where the ‘news analysis’ slug is the best indication that you should read from the top straight through, because the best stuff will be at or near the top.”
This set me thinking about the Times and another matter I took up again yesterday — the Joseph Wilson affair. Wilson outed the White House, and the Vice-president in particular, on the Niger Uranium story — and he did so through an op-ed he wrote in the New York Times on July 6 (What I Didn’t Find in Africa). Almost three months ago, that is. Evidently in a quick act of retaliation Wilson’s wife was outed as a CIA agent. (A reader who wrote me the other day suggested the White House be renamed the Out House.) In any case, a mere eight days after Wilson’s op-ed, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote Mission to Niger which had this paragraph in it:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ‘I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me.”
So the knives were visibly out. Wilson was talking ever more loudly. The White House was identified. A CIA agent had been outed. Is there a journalist in the house? Let me just add that for anyone paying any attention, this hasn’t exactly been a secret since July. For most of the next two and a half months, while Wilson, an old line diplomat well thought of by the elder Bush among others before his retirement, grew increasingly angry and outspoken on programs like Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! (to which elite journalists evidently don’t bother to pay attention) and blogs like Josh Marshall’s Talkingpointsmemo.com followed the matter with care (as of course did British papers like the Independent), the mainstream media here largely acted as if there was no there there. It seemed of little interest that a retired and previously trusted American diplomat was talking about his desire to see Karl Rove in handcuffs frog-marched out of the White House.
This should, of course, have been the Times‘ story all the way. They had the original op-ed after all, but what little they wrote about the case broke no ground and was buried on the inside pages of the paper. You explain it. Now, the CIA comes along and asks for an investigation – that is a visible fight finally breaks out inside the bureaucracy – and the same story is front page news. Someday, someone will do a scholarly postmortem on all this — on, that is, how a story officially becomes a story in the paper of record. It will be fascinating, and make no difference whatsoever.
Today, Wilson finally hit the front page of the Times, but in a piece by Eric Lichtblau and Richard W. Stevenson that broke no new ground whatsoever. It did include an odd quote though from White House spokesman Scott McClellan: “There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the vice president’s office as well.” (Gee, I thought to myself, how did the VP’s office get into that quote? But the piece just runs on as if it hadn’t.)
In the meantime, now knowing for sure that the White House tried to take out their op-ed guy, here’s the Times lead editorial of the day began:
“White House officials have always leaked information to boost their own standing or damage rivals. Confidential and even classified information is by no means immune. Before the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was livid about leaks of military plans, saying more than once that leakers ‘ought to be in jail.’ But even by Washington standards, there is something particularly odious about an alleged White House leak seemingly designed to destroy the career of an undercover CIA officer married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The leak occurred in July but is just now becoming the subject of a Justice Department investigation.”
Whoops, sorry, that wasn’t the New York Times, that was the Los Angeles Times lead editorial (CIA Outing Snaps Back). The New York Times today had far better things to do in its lead editorial — like slapping Howard Dean’s wrist for “threatening to bolt from the regional trade bloc and even the W.T.O.”
In the meantime, Washington Post reporters, as on various other administration scandals for the last couple of months, are on this one like flies over the proverbial honey. Perhaps, talking about analogies in American brains, they can smell a mini-Watergate in the air and rush out in the morning muttering, “Woodward Bernstein”
They offered two pieces and a White House document on the Wilson affair for Tuesday breakfast. Howard Kurtz, in his Post media column, actually had some breaking news (One Heckuva Leak):
“Now it turns out that Time.com published the same leak around the same time as the Novak column, titled ‘A War on Wilson’:
“Some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband’s being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein’s government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build nuclear devices.”
This seems proof positive that Novak didn’t, as he now seems to be lamely claiming, simply stumble across the information while talking to senior administration officials in preparing a Wilson story. This looks more like, as reported in the Post over the weekend, media contact across the board. Of course, I have no idea who outed Plame, but rumors are evidently swirling that reporters who received calls are claiming privately that Karl Rove was involved. Who knows? Stay tuned, but I wouldn’t rush to the Times tomorrow to find out.
By the way, if you want to see how the right is handling this – who didn’t know that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA is the basic line – check out Clifford D. May’s Spy Games at the National Review website.
Parenthetically, Juan Cole (www.juancole.com)offers a fascinating explanation of the possible thinking behind this outing of Plame at his website: “Feminists will appreciate a possible subtext here, which is that if Valerie Plame got the CIA to send her husband on the Niger mission, then somehow that downgraded its seriousness–it originated with a woman and could be seen as nepotism. (We won’t bring up Lynn Cheney here).” Of course, Wilson is probably right that the most essential aspect of the outing was simply to threaten other whistleblowers or honest-talking insiders with unspecified damage, should they yak or leak.
Kurtz of the Post also quotes Slate’s Jack Shafer on what happened when the story finally left the confines of blog-world where folks like me dwell as if in some Tolkienish land:
“When Sunday’s Washington Post gave Page One, above-the-fold treatment to the Novak-Wilson-Plame triangle, it bestowed official Washington scandal status upon the story, sending the rest of the press corps to the blogosphere and Nexis to catch up with what had been a slow-moving story. Today, TV producers are frantically booking reporters who’ve covered the story to come on their shows and bring the hosts and viewers up to speed. . . . “
In a front-page Post piece, Dana Milbank and Mike Allen reported Tuesday (Justice Launches Investigation Into Leak):
“Another journalist yesterday confirmed receiving a call from an administration official providing the same information about Wilson’s wife before the Novak column appeared on July 14 in The Post and other newspapers.
“The journalist, who asked not to be identified because of possible legal ramifications, said that the information was provided as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, but that the CIA information was not treated as especially sensitive. ‘The official I spoke with thought this was a part of Wilson’s story that wasn’t known and cast doubt on his whole mission,” the person said, declining to identify the official he spoke with. “They thought Wilson was having a good ride and this was part of Wilson’s story.'”
That’s it to the moment, folks. Maybe my Times tip for the day is if you want your Washington scandal stories reasonably fresh, check out the Post.
By the bomb’s early light:
Perhaps a week ago I sent out a dispatch on bombing as an American way of war. If you missed it, check it out. It’s worth thinking about. It included an introduction of mine, the assessments of three historians on the nature of civilian casualties in the air war part of our three most recent Asian wars, and a piece by Mike Davis on a Mexican artist whose piece of conceptual art on American bombing ran into trouble in Reading, PA. No piece in the last month drove more email my way. I thought I might offer a sample here:
This from University of Massachusetts Press editor Paul M. Wright:
“Your latest Tomdispatch on aerial bombing prompts two observations:
1) I was one of those kids in the late 40s and all through the 50s who was seduced by sleek warplanes and used to hang around airports. The Spitfires and Mustangs from WW II and Sabers from Korea — even the superb Phantom of the Vietnam War — fired my imagination. Sex and power in one heady package. The nicknames alone carry it all. If I had better vision I’m sure I would have tried to become a fighter pilot.
2) The effectiveness of aerial bombing in the Gulf War is testified to graphically in Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead — a memoir of a Marine sniper. It is worth reading in any case — my Marine Corps veteran son who shared Swofford’s experiences says it is the genuine article regarding the war and the Corps — but the encounter with the charred remains of the ‘enemy’ is chilling testimony to the efficacy of air war. They went in expecting to fight in the usual small unit combat way and found a wasteland manufactured by aerial bombing with surrendering POWs streaming toward them.”
Nick Turse, American historian, who contributed to the Vietnam War section of the dispatch, sent a note adding:
“I really enjoyed Mike Davis’ article on Marcos Ramirez. I was also especially impressed by his mention of the U.S. Marine Corps’ bombings in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti during those ‘interventions.’ I rarely see historians pay much attention to them. One other thing he could have mentioned was the foreshadowing of the secret bombings of Cambodia during the Nicaraguan intervention when U.S. planes bombed suspected enemy positions in nearby, neutral Honduras.”
From Ariel Dorfman came an allied note:
“Just a comment, really a revelation that descended on me from on high one day when I was writing a book review for the LA Times on the wonderful memoir by Omar Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain…. I realized that 1928, the year when the US was bombing Sandino [in Nicaragua] from the air was coincidentally the year when Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was being published – and I went on to point out how air warfare allowed for ever greater distance between those who killed from afar and those who got killed (mostly in what would soon be called the Third World). And that’s one of the reasons why literature and art are so valuable – as the Mexican installation artist mentioned by Mike Davis proves – by going in the opposite direction, bringing us into intimate, searing contact with invisible others. The reason why I’m pointing this out is because the gurus of globalization keep telling us that the world is getting smaller, distances are being conquered (space is being abolished!), simultaneity is king, etc….. but at the same time there is a movement by the powerful to abolish the challenges of other and different human beings, the closeness which should be the real objective of creating the One Humanity that the Enlightenment first visualized as a real possibility. Technology not as our liberator but the instrument that secures our isolation, that cut us off from the rest of the suffering planet.
That’s perhaps why the shock of the Iraqi occupation has been so big. As soon as resistance began, the folks who were supposed to bring ‘democracy’ and ‘modernization’ to Iraq have retreated behind their barriers, far from their new ‘subjects.'”
From Sumi Adachi, a Japanese writer, who, I believe, lives in the U.S., came these comments:
“This dispatch has given me a chance to wonder what I thought about the guns and the bombs as a child during the Second World War. I also thought about why the word “civilian causalities” always sounded so alien to my Japanese ears in relation to the war.
There is an expression in Japanese — ‘he is like a bullet’ — that my mother used to describe my father whenever I asked her whether he would be joining us for dinner. In short, once he was gone in the evening, nobody knew where he could be found. While my great uncle, a lawyer in Kyoto with a great temper was described as ‘he is like a bomb.’ It meant that you never knew how and when he would explode, or who would be the causalities from his explosion including us, his small grandnephews and grandnieces. My sweet aunt’s policy was to keep us apart, just in case, when he came home early. As you can guess, the guns and the bombs were something nobody could control where they fell as far as I knew. They did not choose their victims. Sex, age, or status did not exist in front of them.
The hardest thing I had to swallow during the war was the realization that my parents could not help me however much they wanted to do so. I left my childhood with that realization.
The Hague Conventions and the International law were not taught at school, nor the mass murders of the Imperial Japanese Army in my days. Only recently, during the bombing of Kabul and Baghdad by the precision bombs, did I slowly begin to accept the reality and the meaning of civilian causalities. As a young man in Baghdad described his days during the war,”if you did not live near the Palace or the government buildings, you were safe. You would not be hit by the American bombs.”
A reader wrote me about Errol Morris’s upcoming documentary film Fog of War on Vietnam era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
“distilled from over 25 hours of interviews with him, far and away the most revelatory of which deal with his lieutenancy under Curtis LeMay as the number cruncher for the firebombing of Tokyo (had you known that?)
The material in Morris’s film on McNamara during World War II is completely mind-blowing, and not in some simple sensationalist McNamara as Monster way (or rather in a more complicated MacNamara as roiling, self-lacerating monster way, and a staggering contrast with, say, Rumsfeld, who would never be capable of such introspection, even if the introspection is itself laced with a certain degree of self-serving and self-forgiving bad faith). Be that as it may, the actual quote (re the firebombing of Tokyo and countless other cities, in which he participated as a close planning assistant to LeMay) goes as follows:
‘LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been tried as war criminals. And I think he is right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?'”
Battling in Algiers (on screen):
Back on September 6, I posted a Tomgram by Sheila Johnson on what to make of a Pentagon showing of the film The Battle of Algiers on September 6. Though it’s not from my mailbag, last week Adam Shatz, book review editor for the Nation offered the following in the magazine’s “In Fact” column under the title, “Lessons From Algiers.” It struck me as the perfect follow-up to Johnson’s piece (especially as it takes up the question of analogies which has absorbed me for the last year or more). The magazine has kindly let me reproduce it in full:
“Recently the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 The Battle of Algiers for a group of forty officers and civilian experts, on the theory that the film’s highly praised quasi-documentary realism would help them understand urban guerrilla warfare in Iraq. But a better analogy to the situation in today’s Iraq is Israel’s predicament in southern Lebanon in 1982. After winning the gratitude of much of the Shiite population for rooting out the PLO, Israel decided to effect ‘regime change,’ creating an army of collaborator-militias and carrying out sweeps. The result was the emergence of Hezbollah, a guerrilla organization that carried out a disciplined and highly effective struggle against the Israeli occupation, ultimately forcing Israel to withdraw. But even if The Battle of Algiers analogy isn’t perfect, it’s still worth contemplating. The French officer who leads the battle in Pontecorvo’s film is Colonel Mathieu, an urbane, charismatic veteran of the Resistance, loosely modeled on Jacques Massu, the commander of the French forces in Algiers. In his efforts to quell the insurgency, Mathieu introduces a reign of terror, killing, torturing and humiliating Algerians. Journalists raise objections at press conferences, but Mathieu puts them in their place, much as Donald Rumsfeld does today. Mathieu “wins,” but, as Pontecorvo reminds us, five years later Algeria achieves independence, thanks to the tenacity of the Algerian people but also to Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who, after years of insisting he would never “abandon” Algeria, finally decided that France had much more to lose by staying than by leaving. He had to summon enormous courage to do so, overcoming the objections of a furious settler lobby and the warnings of timid colleagues who told him, as neocons do today, that he mustn’t ‘cut and run.’ Rather than study the methods of Mathieu (whose contrite real-life model, Massu, repudiated torture before his death last year), the Pentagon would be better advised to study de Gaulle’s example and set a rapid timetable for withdrawal.”
The legions:
A Danish reader, who has written me a couple of times about his nation’s involvement in Iraq added the other day: “The Danish Iraq force has had its first few shooting incidents and its first casualty, and the Danish opposition is now putting pressure on our prime minister to admit that he led Denmark into backing a war based on misleading or even false pretexts.” Juan Cole reports the first Polish casualties and there has been at least one Albanian casualty. Under the circumstances this is unavoidable and bound to get worse. Though the administration has been much mocked by critics for its “coalition” claims, it has, in fact, managed to do something quite remarkable — recruit small numbers of soldiers from an unbelievable number of lands from El Salvador to Albania, Honduras to Mongolia. This seems to me, at the very least, to be reminiscent at a global level of the old Roman legions who swept endless, nameless subject peoples into the ranks of its imperial forces. But it’s worth remembering that in most of these countries, support for the war is exceedingly weak. As things get worse, we could see ever increasing pressure at home to withdraw various of these troops.
Finally, I include below two pieces which fit only tangentially with this dispatch — something I feel wonderfully free to do because the internet is still such an undefined beast and the blog — including this blog — still such an open form.
Paul Krugman, back from his book tour (I believe), takes up his New York Times column right where he left off, blasting Bush crony capitalism off the Iraqi map. Note, by the way, that the material I used yesterday on the company New Bridge Strategies made it onto the front page of the Times today in a pallid article about the looting of Iraq. But give credit where it’s due — only a day behind me and quoting the same passages. That’s reporting for you. After all, my intrepid band of journalists work day and night, it being the internet, while I’m sure the Times is just a day job. Nothing pallid about Krugman though. He makes it completely clear why the “reconstruction” of Iraq can only be a catastrophe (lucky then that the fellow running New Bridge Strategies is the former head of FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] and so professionally used to dealing with disasters.). He also makes it clear why much of the $87 billion dollars Congress is soon likely to pony over to the administration will go right down a rat hole — and not just the civilian part of it either.
To complete the picture, Jonathan Schell at Yale Global on-line explains why war is actually peace and vice versa, when it comes to a place like Iraq — and so why, no matter the crushing nature of our military “victory” in the three-week war, politics is — unfortunately for the Bush administration — in command. The piece is worth the price just for one of his newly minted phrases. He writes: “Regime change (a revolutionary policy) requires regime-creation – a requirement that our offshore Robespierres in Washington seemed until recently to have overlooked. Absent this, the choice will be the same as the one in Vietnam: indefinite occupation or withdrawal and defeat.” Our offshore Robespierres, don’t forget that one. Tom
Who’s Sordid Now?
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
September 30, 2003It’s official: the administration that once scorned nation-building now says that it’s engaged in a modern version of the Marshall Plan. But Iraq isn’t postwar Europe, and George W. Bush definitely isn’t Harry Truman. Indeed, while Truman led this country in what Churchill called the “most unsordid act in history,” the stories about Iraqi reconstruction keep getting more sordid. And the sordidness isn’t, as some would have you believe, a minor blemish on an otherwise noble enterprise.
Cronyism is an important factor in our Iraqi debacle. It’s not just that reconstruction is much more expensive than it should be. The really important thing is that cronyism is warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends, administration officials are delaying Iraq’s recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
To read more Krugman click here
Politics in Command
Without active political support for the US occupation of Iraq, mere military success won’t avoid defeat
By Jonathan Schell
YaleGlobal,
September 29, 2003American policy in Iraq is reaching a moment of crisis. American troops are stretched thin, and the US is considering calling up more reserves. The American team sent to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq reportedly have found none. The Bush administration’s request for $87 billion for the war has, according to polls, met with public rejection. Bush’s approval ratings have declined. But most important are events in Iraq itself. It’s commonplace to say that the United States, having won the war in Iraq, is now in danger of losing the peace. This view, however, is forgetful of the most famous saying of the theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz – that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Military victory, he is saying, is not sought for its own sake, but to achieve a political goal. If that goal is lost, the war is lost. In other words, to lose the peace is to lose the war.
Jonathan Schell is a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School. He is the author of “The Real War, and The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People”.