SDH War Journal 2003

by Shelton Hull

Notes on the War:

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap– about $95 billion for the next fiscal quarter, give or take the cost of bailing out the Federal Reserve. That’s a joke, gentle reader; don’t run down to your local bank and demand your life savings in cash forthwith, because if too many people follow you it could cause a crisis. Again, a joke. The War’s first 3,000 casualties were the good departed victims of 9/11; next came the mass media’s willingness to talk about the economy in any substantive form. America’s number-one priority in the first decade of this century could once have been the final cessation of this swirling vortex of inflationary debt that has amassed with little letdown since the end of World War II. . . . Instead, there is an enemy that needs killin’. Ari Fleischer can tell you everything about them, with style and creativity.

(A digression: Speaking of style and creativity, here, my nomination for official War anthem for the United States today is the acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War” sung by Sinead O’Connor on “Saturday Night Live.” The performance will always be remembered for her shredding the photo of Karol Woti(sp?), aka Pope John Paul II, which invoked the wrath of Frank Sinatra and a crowd at the Meadowlands that booed her off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert– right into the arms of Mr. Kris Kristofferson, who knows talent when he sees it. [Witness his duet with Kelley Deal on “Angel Flying Too Close to the Sea” on the Twisted Willie Nelson encomium.] The uproar was wildly overdone, as most non-Catholics would agree in 2003. It was the simplest and most respectfully accurate critique ever made in public about a Pope that needed a shock to his system, for the Church’s sake, but he didn’t get the point until it was too late to save his religion from extinction in the Western world.)

So far, the hardest part of writing about this War, now that it’s real and no longer theoretical, is making clean and structurally-precise paragraph breaks. Every sentence feels like it could go on forever, with endless ellipses and parentheses, colons and semicolons, etc. I do not envy the men and women who have bet their lives, careers and historical legacies on the outcome of this conflict and its offshoots; if describing it is so much trouble, imagine . . .

The official phase of “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” began March 19 with the words “Let’s Go,” about 90 minutes after the passage of a 48-hour deadline imposed by President Bush for Saddam Hussein and his sons, Udai and Qusay, to leave Iraq. Near dawn, their time (what little they have left), a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles was lobbed at several targets in the Baghdad area, apparently in response to credible intelligence hints that “senior leadership targets” were available for killing. Among the targets: a refueling station on the main road from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan and a bunker in the city said to contain the Iraqi dictator, whose image filled Iraqi TV shortly after, in defiance of the strike’s intent. Some Pentagon sources told CBS and the Drudge Report that Saddam may indeed be dead, and the televised statement may have been either Memorexed or the work of a body double. Hussein certainly looked like someone who’d had a couple dozen bombs dropped on his home early in the morning– I know how I look when someone mows their lawn next door while I’m trying to sleep, minus any physical discomfort. He has since shown up on TV twice more, looking progressively better. I don’t know if any of the Saddams I see on TV are the real, live one; all I know is that we shall now see this man in his most dangerous form; Baghdad will be his Waco, his Tora Bora.

The carnage got started quickly. The casual viewer was expecting a few days of intensive bombing followed by a ground offensive that had the potential to get bloody. However, even the possibility of heavy casualties was hyped as minor by the press going in. Although the military are professionals and can do their job with honor, the mood of the media had darkened considerably within five days, because of a series of vicious incidents that sucked all the humor out of our “embeds” and the desk-dolls at the home base.

Four foreign journalists were killed; several combat helicopters crashed (that damned sand!), each with a dozen or more of our boys aboard; and as some Iraqi troops began to surrender as the “shock and awe” sank in, others have jacked-up the level of brutality, claiming their first half-dozen or more POWs before we’d even gotten to Baghdad. Men and women of different races, some dead, others clearly victims of abuse. (It was disturbingly similar to a storyline from the last run of fresh “West Wing” episodes, which were stopped halfway through a promised run of eight as the cast’s real-life opposition to the war led to blowback.) And then it got really freakish: a US serviceman was caught rolling live grenades into the tents of his commanding officers. Thankfully, he was somewhat inept, but this was not expected. (He was a Black Muslim, allegedly, and so it’s left at that. The possibility of amphetamine psychosis has not been raised in public.)

Media is a parasitic art form: you build a story from the remains of things that have already happened, in hopes of mastering the process such that you can make reliable judgments about the future and “scoop” the competition. Or, that’s the theory, anyway. The reality, we now see, is that journalists have only so much stroke, which decreases as they make public mistakes and lose market share. One can only hope that War whips them back into shape.

It’s no secret that American mass media has been in a state of advanced flux since at least the 1980s, when the networks began scaling back their overseas bureaus. CBS, in particular, once had a very high standard of reporting, in terms of both style and substance; today’s networks have a fraction of the charisma and public esteem of their elders in the business. The last generation of pre-cable newspeople are on their way out, soon replaced with a generation whose minds have been almost literally “wired” from day one. Meanwhile, daily papers across the country began either merging or falling off, as the remaining papers experienced increased pressure to sell advertising, since it’s generally impossible to sustain the costs of mass production without advertising. The reputations of once-venerable “traditional” media institutions have suffered as a result, and rightly so.

The networks have flat-out sucked at covering politics since the Clinton era, from the dynamics of 1992 and the real issues raised by his candidacy to the ‘94 midterms to the real nature of his various scandals to his impeachment (which began with an item on the Drudge Report), with the 2000 elections as the pitiful denouement of the corporate media’s primacy in the information age. The world’s official line is that 9/11 caught everyone off-guard; we were all shocked and awed by the brazen brutality of that strike. I wanted to know why the architects for global jihad hadn’t been called out when it was declared in 1997. Until 2001, Osama bin Laden didn’t get a smidgen of the attention we all wasted on Fidel Castro or Robert Downey, Jr.

The invasion of Iraq had not been on four days before the mainstream media embarrassed itself in regard to our POWs from the Army’s 507th Maintenance Division. Footage of them (shot by unknown parties, presumably Iraq military) showed up on Al Jazeera TV; several had been killed, others clearly physically and emotionally traumatized. The footage was banned from American TV, by consent of the media, who kept it to still photos of the living troops. The Pentagon expressed deep discontent with Al Jazeera, and their press credentials at the New York Stock Exchange were pulled in an unrelated matter, on the same day we bombed the headquarters of Iraqi state TV. The impact of this move on the economy is speculative, but easily so: the Arabic world, which has lots of money invested in the NYSE, has no one on the floor that they can trust. This as the US economy is stagnant and Arabic banking cabals have flourished in the past year, a process exacerbated by the punishing of Al Jazeera for doing their job. If they’re going beyond their duty as journalists to help the enemy, that’s one thing. But mere reportage, however distasteful, should be encouraged to fill out the picture for non-combatants. Of course, the Iraqis did run CNN out of Baghdad first.

The casualty figures aren’t to be trusted, because they have so far increased at a steady clip since the beginning of ground fighting, as Marines and Army Infantry troops plow up from Kuwait through the southern “no-fly” zone, having been blocked from using the north (and thus splitting the Iraqi defenses on two fronts) by Turkey, who then proceeded to move into that area themselves, allegedly. This is a brazen act to restrain any overt acts of self-determination by the Iraqi Kurdish population and to establish control over one or more of the northern oil fields. The scams are starting, and Halliburton isn’t even there yet.

The Kurdish bloc is largely split between Iraq and Turkey, both of which have functioned as US client states and have killed tens of thousands of Kurds with US support, whose love for Turkey grew through the ’90s as did Reagan’s for Iraq. At least Saddam could be said to have performed an essential function: stopping the growth of Iran’s theocracy under the Ayatollah. Kurdish uprisings in Iraq after the Gulf War, encouraged by Bush “41,” were stomped silent by Saddam as our boys watched in horror. The Kurds are best known for being gassed at Halabja three years earlier, as part of the Anfal campaign led by “Chemical Ali,” who died under Allied bombs recently. Unless the Turkish swerve (if it was a swerve) infuriates Bush “43” enough that he throws his weight behind the cause of a democratic Kurdistan, I’d guess that the Kurds are now headed down the same dark road as the Palestinians.

Also dead, it seems, is eldest Hussein son Udai, who ran the state propaganda machine and who, according to Vanity Fair, may have been targeted for assassination a few years ago by his own younger brother Qusay, who runs the Elite Republican Guard, whose final battle approaches. Those who are not dead will be dead soon enough, probably.

March 26, 2003: Sand Trap?

The big news of the last two days has been a sandstorm sweeping through Iraq that has impaired some Coalition activity just as they got down to the heaviest action yet, in places like Al Nasiryah and Basra. “Across the sky, the black haze of burning oil trenches mixed with desert sand from a savage storm to wrap the city in an otherworldly glow,” wrote Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, which quoted a man named (ironically) Mohamed.

“The sandstorm contains sand all the way from Egypt and Libya and has reached velocities of 60 miles per hour,” said Lt. Col. Tom Frooninckx of the Operational Weather Squadron based at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. “This storm system is one of the largest and most severe, if not the largest I’ve ever seen in Iraq, and I’ve been tracking the weather there for 18 years,” he added.

The Russian role is filling out with the reports that GPS jamming equipment confiscated from Iraq troops bears the Bear’s imprimatur. Fox News reported that Mr. Bush put the question directly to Mr. Putin over the weekend, but who knows what those two crazy kids talk about off the record. And such a conversation would certainly be off the record.

Dr. Ronald J. Polland, the Assistant Director of the University of North Florida’s Office of Institutional Research, wrote in to Folio Weekly hoping to fill some gaps in the perceptions of its writers on the subject of War. “Critics of the war like to blame America for arming Saddam in the 1980s. The truth is that between 1973 and 1991, America only sold $5 billion in arms to Iraq as compared to $32 billion sold by Russia, $9 billion sold by France, $5.5 billion sold by China, $4.5 billion sold by Eastern Europe and $1 billion sold by Germany (Source: ACDA, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers).”

“U.S. embassies in Amman, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Caracas, Damascus, Kabul, Oslo, Pretoria, Nairobi, Riyadh, Almaty and Skopje were closed, state department officials said. In addition, the U.S. consulate in Johannesburg, South Africa was closed and the consulate in Durban was briefly evacuated after a bomb scare, the officials said. In Paris, the embassy remained open but the consular section was closed to all but emergency services for U.S. citizens, the officials said. Other U.S. posts reporting protests at their missions were Ankara, Bern, Budapest, The Hague, Kiev, Lisbon, Madrid, Malta, Moscow, Nicosia, Prague, Rome and Vienna. They added the closure list was partial and that other missions might be shut or closed to the public in the coming hours or days.”- Hector Carreon, www.aztlan.org, citing figures from Agence France-Presse in the first week of Operation “Iraqi Freedom.”

I knew the War had changed things when I couldn’t even inquire about a make-shift electric chair at night without being rudely dismissed with a wave of the owner’s hand. The thing sits on a Post street porch, and I’d made a mental note to ask if it was what I thought it was, should I ever get the chance to ask. I would never just walk onto the porch and knock; the thing sends clear “Keep Away!” vibes, and that why I wanted the thing. It was not of the quality one might expect of such a thing in a state like Florida, which is almost Texas-like in its affinity for fast and efficient execution. It was certainly several notches below the model owned and displayed by Bret “Hitman” Hart in the classic wrestling documentary “Walking With Shadows,” but still . . . a pseudo-Sparky would be a wonderful thing in this age of sleeper cells and crazy white people. I stood out in front of the house as the owner drove up with his sweetie, parked back behind the building and entered from the back, as is common in Riverside. He never acknowledged me, even as I loudly inquired about the price of his electric chair. Why? He couldn’t have possibly thought me a danger, not even at 10:30 pm with a lit cigarette dangling from my lips. No, not me. After all, who fucks with people who have electric chairs on their porches?

April 4, 2003

A report put out by independent “Arms Transfer Project,” based in Sweden, claims that the Soviet Union supplied 57% of the weaponry to Iraq in the period 1973-1991; the goods sold by the United States counts for 1% in their study. The great affection of America’s relationship with Russia has been tempered in recent months, at least in public, as the Iraq war became a reality.

The Iraqwar.ru website, allegedly organized by ex-Russian military people, claimed that, “[b]ased on the radio intercepts and internal information networks of the US field hospitals,” coalition casualties had numbered at least 122 as of March 31, as compared to the official total of 57, with 480 wounded and about 433 MIA. The discrepancy was explained through a quote from a field worker at a Kuwaiti medical facility (taped and smuggled out by the BBC): “We have standing orders to acknowledge only those fatalities that have been delivered to the hospital, identified and prepared to be sent back home. The identification process and the required standard embalming takes some time – occasionally up to several days. But only the command knows how many casualties we sustained today and you will learn about it in about three days…” Within three days the number of official KIA was 131.

The city of Baghdad has not yet fallen, as of this writing, though of course it will, perhaps at the end of some savage public violence that can be beamed across the world, inciting the usual range of emotions. But so far Baghdad hasn’t been penetrated by anyone other than US special ops, some floating Irgun and apparently more than a few Iranian troops dressed like Kuwaitis and Saudis. Iran has suddenly become a very big problem. After the Turkish invasion of Kurdish Iraq (which is now said to have not happened) and the discovery of Russian and Syrian complicity in the sale of weapons to Iraq, now there are rumors of Iran’s plan to “harass” US liberators along the way to seizing parts of the Shiite section of Iraq, which may also include parts of Baghdad. The Administration has not yet officially acknowledged that anyone outside the official coalition has military in Iraq–or in the US–and we may assume that to be correct. But the fact that reporters have actually solicited confirmation or denial of events that had generally been thought close to impossible isn’t promising, in the long-term.

April 16, 2003: Who’s Next? Syria, maybe.

No sooner than Baghdad had fallen and the War been declared a success did talk turn to our options in Syria. That’s to be expected, since it’s been well-known in many circles, up and down the ideological spectrum, that the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive war– or “preventive war,” as Chomsky calls it, noting that neither term quite gets at the exact nature of its intent– needs a means of independent access to each targeted country in advance of its invasion. That’s why, as Britain’s Blair was reported (by the BBC) to have told Aznar of Spain in March 2002 that “regime change” in Iraq could not happen until after the new government in Afghanistan was secure. This is a point worth remembering as the decade continues: these excursions are built upon each other.

What the US seems intent on doing, for whatever reasons, is exactly what constituted the old “domino theory” that led to Vietnam, insofar as we seek to impose our dominant ideology on other countries. They don’t have to be like us, but they must be friendly. They must be willing to sell their natural resources and offer their labor, if needed, and provide cover and logistical support for our dealings with other nations. There is a hierarchy, and it must be respected, or else it’s War. The faster a provisional Iraqi government can be set up, the faster Syria can be hit. A slow build to a July 4 bombing of Damascus isn’t inconceivable, and there could be action along the border immediately.

The above attribution to Blair was obtained from a confidential talk between he and Aznar by Russian intelligence, then passed along to Baghdad, where it was found in the ruins of the Iraqi intelligence agency. Also noted were periodic updates on Russian arms sales to Israel and other Arab states, as well as a vintage 1990 list of KGB assassins based in the United States. That’s weird, because I can only think of one person in America that Saddam would want to see dead: the same man who was slated to take an RPG in Kuwait in 1994, George HW Bush. Smoking gun? Russia’s ties to Syria are just as strong, but more overt, interestingly; we’ll see how the buildup to War in Syria affects already strained US-Russian relations.

This week’s Village Voice contains an article suggesting that Saddam Hussein may have been a CIA “asset” for up to 30 years prior to his invasion of Kuwait. Saddam was the leader of a group that tried and failed to assassinate former Iraqi president Kassim, a recalcitrant Nasserite, in 1961; Saddam was wounded and spent several years in exile before returning after Kassim was killed by related elements. The Voice article claims that it was the CIA who commissioned the hit(s). True? I don’t know. But American support for Saddam from that time on is well-documented.

The Odds of Conscription:

If I had to put money down, I’d bet that the draft is reinstated before 2006, unless unmanned-plane technology reaches the point that bombers and tactical fighters can be flown without risk. This raises the stakes for the current generation of young people, who could be forced to choose between open refusal and certain death in the deserts of Iran, Egypt, etc. A couple of these nations are nuclear, that we know of, and an arsenal of surplus American and Russian weapons. The Arab world could amass ten million or more guerrilla fighters if pressed at once to global jihad. We could match them, if necessary, and US strategic policy seems to presume that it may be. It may just be that there are a certain number of people out there who just have to be put down as quickly as possible, so they don’t join forces and pose the fabled “imminent” threat.