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Not in My America Gets It

(Iraq Page)

Not in My America Gets It-1

October 10, 2003

Sunday a US Army UH-47 Chinook was lost in Iraq. About fifteen US soldiers were killed, and BBC reports that Iraqi witnesses say it was struck by surface-to-air missiles. (Here is an AP Newswire about the personnel; here, one about the attack). Here is a detailed analysis of the recent role played by helicopters, especially the CH-47 and its variants, in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was a bit startled to learn how important this workhorse continues to be for the US Army.¹

This is by Steve at Not in My America, and I think it cuts to the heart of the matter by deconstructing the President's speeches:

Terrorism is a tactic. Terror is an abstract noun, not a physical entity. It cannot be fought. It can only be suffered. And we in the west suffered a mighty blow on September 11, 2001. We then reacted, not by pursuing the criminal organization which sponsored the terrorists, but by bombing the bejeesus out of Afghanistan, ostensibly to persuade the Afghans to turn over the leaders of the organization. However, in the process, we terrorized, and indeed killed, a helluva lot of people who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
The president is flagrantly abusing the definitions of the words above, in a propagandistic attempt to rally Us to attack Them. By invading Iraq, he has created a larger number of people who wish to harm us. To terrorize us, if you will.

There's a lot more and Steve's writing style is eminently readable. He points out the abuse of metaphors, the misleading reifications, and the outright mendacity of the President in his heavily-coached public appearances. The site is actually crammed with good stuff and I strongly recommend reading it. Just stumbled over it myself.

Also, for additional reading by those interested in a post-mortem, David Rieff writes in the NY Times a detailed account of how the Rumsfeld-Perle-Wolfowitz Axis at the Pentagon managed to quell more seasoned, realistic planners at the Dep't of State. The report by Rieff contains few surprises for those who had resisted the effects of the administration's Kool-Aid, but this episode (page 9) is rather illustrative of the sort of decisionmaking that led us to this state of affairs:

Bremer's first major act was not auspicious. Garner had resisted the kind of complete de-Baathification of Iraqi society that Ahmad Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had resisted calls to completely disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only to fire Baathists and senior military officers against whom real charges of complicity in the regime's crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects.
Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and the lustration of 50,000 members of the Baath Party. As one U.S. official remarked to me privately, ''That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.''
The decision — which many sources say was made not by Bremer but in the White House — was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where the average family size is 6, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving 2,700,000 people without incomes; in other words, more than 10 percent of Iraq's 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers.

This sort of error is striking in view of the popularity of WW2 analogies amongst hawks. The Western Allies were particularly keen to denazify former Axis states, but soon gave up when it was found the administrative costs were unsustainable.

(Permalink | Iraq Links)

NOTES: 1 The Army's CH-47 fleet was grounded in April 1999 in the wake of powertrain problems. Later the fleet was revived. Unlike the more maneuverable UH-60 "Blackhawk," the CH-47 operates far better at high altitudes.

The Resistance

October 15, 2003

Steve is not a Kucinich-style pacificist:

To date, I have supported keeping the troops in Iraq and also support the $87 billion requested by the president—$67 billion for the troops, and $20 billion for the reconstruction.

More in sorrow than in anger, however, he goes on to observe:

However, I see no sign of the president changing the mission into a serious move to rebuild or to turn over the nation to the Iraqis. Instead, I see him and the rest of the administration going around the country trying to sell us on yet another lie—that things are "better that you probably think". I have given up on the administration dealing seriously with the UN either. As much as I hate to think of us abandoning Iraq, I hate even more the idea of American soldiers having to defend themselves against the groups Mr. Chehab interviewed, and being expected to police Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle.

He is quite anguished about the prospect of abandoning Iraq to a fate of protracted civil war and eventual de facto Iranian occupation, but the alternative seems to be the unchecked zeal of the Bush Administration to carry out every jot and tittle of its bizarre fantasy.

Meanwhile, he also observes an article on the Resistance to Coaltion Occupation:

Zaki Chehab of the Arabic TV station al-Hayat-LBC had an opportunity to interview several groups of Iraqi resistance fighters. His article for the Guardian describes not a unified assemblage of "terrorists" as the president persists in calling them, but groups with differing motivations and differing goals:
Iraq is a country which has faced more than 20 years of war, and more than a decade of sanctions. The motivations of each strand of Iraqi resistance vary: the loyalists [Saddamists] are driven by the loss of power; the nationalists by the desire to establish independence and security; the Islamists by their dream of returning political Islam to the Iraqi nation. These aspirations may be incompatible, but the focus of each group now is to fight together against the common enemy of Iraq—the occupying forces.
This is what our troops are facing now. Here we are, six months into an occupation directed by an administration which promised a liberation. If it had been a liberation, the second and third groups mentioned would not be interested in fighting our troops, and would not be looking at the first as colleagues. Even our commanders are clueless boneheads, and seem determined to make things worse:
The resolve and ferocity of the Iraqi resistance has been amplified by the blunders of the American soldiers in Iraq. Coalition commanders have dealt ineptly with ground operations, and neither the British nor the Americans have come up with a clear road map for the political reconstruction of Iraq that would enable Iraqis to rule themselves.

Random road checks and house-to-house searches, often based on inaccurate information, make a bad situation worse. Culturally inappropriate behaviour—male soldiers body-searching women, for example—and collective punishments have further alienated the population and helped entrench popular support for resistance.
Not to mention the habit of cuffing residents, laying them out on the ground and holding their heads down with boots—not just morally wrong, but culturally an insult.

There's no question the Occupation's lack of professionalism or regard for the political dimensions of war have led to its total isolation within Iraq.

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Counterinsurgency 101

January 13, 2004

This is my favorite of Steve's many excellent postings on the Iraq Occupation:

Here's a fine example of the arrogance which we have to lose if we are going to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis (from Peter Maass' NYT magazine piece which I am still reading):
The classroom was situated in a concrete airplane hangar in which Iraqi and American flags hung from the ceiling. The recruits, wearing red baseball caps with ''I.C.D.C.'' [Iraq Civil Defense Corps] printed in English and Arabic, ranged in age from their late teens to their mid-40's. Because the American trainers were having a hard time recalling the recruits' Arabic names, the Iraqis were given English nicknames. (One of the recruits, a pudgy Iraqi in his 20's, was called Flounder, after the character in the movie "Animal House.") When I visited, they were being trained to say, in English, "Raise your hands!" and "Drop your weapon!"—a strange choice in a country where few people speak English.
Don't forget to teach them, "Lie the fuck down!" No wonder they're having trouble with the ICDC:
Each course takes two weeks, the first week in the classroom and the second week in the field. The battalion had already trained three classes, but not without hitches. The first commander and deputy commander of the I.C.D.C. in the area were fired after it emerged that they were extorting kickbacks from the recruits. One recruit was found to be trying to organize other recruits into an anti-American cell that would use its training to mount attacks against the occupation force; he was thrown into prison. ''In every class there are people we're concerned about,'' an American officer told me. ''There are people in the I.C.D.C. now who we're concerned about.''
Yeah, well, you call me Flounder and witlessly teach me English phrases, instead of asking me what the corresponding Arabic phrases are, and I'll turn on your ass, too. And lose the American flag in the classroom—if we have no territorial aspirations, the Iraqi flag should fly alone. It's their country, for crying out loud.

I would absolutely love to learn that Coalition forces are overwhelmingly unlike this, and this is an urban legend such as one is constantly stumbling across on the internet. Unfortunately, the testimony of Iraqi nationals is not encouraging.

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Iraqi Constitution

Sept 30, 2005

Steve posts about the Iraqi Constitution (or what he refers to as "The Document eformerly known as the Iraqi Constitution," or TDFKATIC).

28 August '05: 28th Amendment

30 August '05: Further comments on TDFKATIC

13 September '05: How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?

23 September '05: The new, new draft

I looked around for other posts on the Constitution, but I guess this'll do.

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