March 2003

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The "Lull" in the War

Few story links here; sorry. Just a passing note on the stalled-out US invasion.

The old plan is gone, and the war is a waiting game now. The Bushies' shrill and discredited insistence that they are moving steadily ahead only illustrates the point. The administration now realizes that, owing to its haste in mounting a failed first invasion, it's got to fight a different war from the one it bargained on. This means a new plan, additional troops and additional supplies, and in the meantime more CNN footage of saturation bombing designed to "soften Iraqi resolve" and give the folks at home something to watch.

We're talking about days or weeks of stasis, in other words, unless one side or the other elects to do something daring. But even if the respective combat forces only sit glaring at each other for a while, it doesn't mean the war will be on hold; the tactical picture shifts and grows more risky every day.

Watch two things: Iraqi civilian casualties, and the involvement of forces from outside Iraq in the widening anti-US resistance movement. You can already see the civilian casualties mounting--all those pyrotechnic bombardments in Baghdad and other towns are hitting something, after all. And however masterfully the American media buries the particular details of the toll, civilian deaths are exploding, and becoming day by day a bigger story in the rest of the world. (Just go to the main Arabic Al-Jazeera page--unlike the English page, you can at least reach it--and look at the pictures posted each day.)

On the second count, of Arab volunteers flocking to Iraq from elsewhere around the region, some American observers would like to pretend that there is no great peril involved since these guerrillas/terrorists (take your pick; the distinction is mostly in the eye of the beholder) are either independent or affiliated with non-state groups. "Syrian elements" may attack us in Iraq or elsewhere, but not the Syrian government; hence the influx of non-Iraqi Arab volunteers pose no danger to the US's fragile rapport with "neutral" or pro-Western Arab governments. (The secretary general of the Arab League is plenty concerned about a spillover of the war.)

This is pure absurdity. Leaving aside what those elements might do to destabilize pro-US Arab regimes in their own backyards, there is another question: Have we forgotten all the Bush administration's talk about what it would do to states that "harbor terrorists"? Syria and Iran could well and justifiably consider themselves drawn into war by the actions of elements they don't control, and proceed accordingly. Or the US could choose to involve them on its own initiative.

In short, the coming days and weeks are anything but a lull in the war; they are a critical time for determining whether the US can ever pull back from this war in a manner that does not open up a dozen more Pandora's boxes.  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 6:17 PM

 

Syria and Iran Answer Powell

A statement on the Iraq war released by Syria today contains the clearest harbinger yet of conflict sooner rather than later:

"Syria [has chosen] to be with the international official and popular consensus that says: 'No to the aggression against Iraq; No to the bombing of cities and the killing of people'," a statement from the Syrian Foreign Ministry said.

"Syria also chose to side with the brotherly Iraqi people who are facing an illegitimate and unjustifiable invasion," the statement said.

And this item in India's The Hindu takes note of the aggressive US remarks on Iran and Syria and points to brewing US/Russia tensions as well (be sure to see the closing paragraphs).

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 4:51 PM

 

Why We Are in Vietnam

I must have posted a dozen links in the past few days to stories about the barrage of criticism levied against the Bush administration's war blueprint. What will history say when the smoke clears, if it does? At least two things, for a start: The invasion plan reflected a staggering blindness as to the not-so-unpredictable response of the Iraqi people--a blindness, that is, regarding how the US is now seen in the Arab world and elsewhere. That arrogant wishfulness was compounded by another, more desperate kind of wishfulness dictated by world opinion. The sheer outrage directed at the invasion before it started, abroad and at home, practically demanded a tidy and quick war. So the Rumsfeld claque cooked up a plan for executing one and made themselves believe the primitive and easily frightened Iraqis would not dare resist.

And that's how we got here. Isn't it? Your thoughts appreciated; the email link is at left.   

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 10:50 AM

 

Press Roundup 3/31

 

Afghanistan Flares

"Attacks against US troops in southern Afghanistan... have spiked in recent weeks," writes Gretchen Peters in the Christian Science Monitor, "culminating Saturday with the ambush of a US Special Forces unit in Helmand Province that left two US soldiers dead and a third injured. Meanwhile, fear of terrorist attacks was heightened in Pakistan, where officials announced fresh intelligence reports." [More]

The Iraq Invasion, Take 2

There's a good and mostly straightforward piece in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer setting forth the little we can surmise about where the war goes from here. It contains this ominous note:

The tactics used by the U.S. forces are likely to be tougher, both on the ground and in the air. With siege warfare looming at Najaf and other cities, the U.S. military may soon find itself seeking to use tactics that carry political risks for the administration.

"We're not going to catapult diseased cattle into the city or anything like that," one planner said. "But there's a question of what you can do and what you should do." [More]

Powell Talks Tough About Iran, Syria at AIPAC Gathering

The dispatch in Ha'aretz opens with an affirmation that many in Israel will not want to hear: Continually expanding Israeli settlements are "inconsistent with President Bush's two-state vision," Colin Powell told an assembly of 3,000 pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington.

But we already knew that. The real news here is buried deeper in the story, when Powell gets to Iran and Syria. As far as I know, these are his most bellicose public words yet on the subject:

"Tehran must stop pursuing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them," said Powell... "Iran must stop its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the ability to produce them."

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, Washington has charged that Syria has been shipping war materiel into Iraq to support Saddam Hussein.

Powell urged Syria on Sunday to abandon its support for "terrorist groups" and the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "Syria... now faces a critical choice," Powell said in a speech to a powerful U.S. Jewish lobby in Washington.

There are many who still persist in believing that Powell is somehow the good guy in Bush's war cabinet. Why? 

Anti-Israel Demos Escalate in Arab Nations

Angry and growing anti-Israel rallies are breaking out in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and now Europe, writes the Middle East Times.

Fact, Fiction, and War Reporters

Here's one I missed: a good primer on the pitfalls of writing--and reading--war reportage from Saturday's Guardian.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 10:28 AM

 

And Speaking of US Casualties

There's a new Time/CNN poll out today that buries the lead. Read past the innocuous headline ("Washington Too Optimistic Entering Iraq War"--you can't beat American pollsters for putting the best face on things) and you find some interesting numbers concerning the public's limited tolerance for loss of life:

While 59 percent of respondents say they would support a war in which 500 U.S. troops died, support falls to just 47 percent and opposition to the war rises to 41 percent if the U.S. death toll rises to 1,000.

Only 34 percent would support the war if as many as 5,000 Americans die, with 50 percent opposed if that happens. More than 50,000 American troops died in the Vietnam War.

Perhaps surprising to many abroad, a plurality of Americans would not support a war in which 5,000 Iraqi civilians were to die. In that event, opposition to the war rises to 47 percent, against 40 percent in support.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 10:14 AM

 

War Still Peachy, Says Perle

Like the knight guarding the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Richard Perle wants anybody who thinks this war is going badly to get back here and fight like a man! Perle, deposed last week from his official duties as a war planner, was among the most arrogant of Bush's people in asserting a fast Iraqi collapse prior to the invasion. Last July he pronounced thus: "Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder."  

Over the weekend the still-fearless Perle told the CBC that Gulf War II may be over more quickly than the first go-round. And the US casualties? They'll be nothing to speak of: "It's not going to be tens of thousands and I hope it's not even thousands. I hope it's not in the high hundreds but I don't know, nobody knows."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 9:57 AM

 

This War Was in the Cards All Along

More evidence in Sunday's Times of  a couple of unsavory facts now coming frequently to light: that the US has had its war plan for "spreading democracy" to Iraq and various other places well in hand since day one of the Bush administration, and that all pretenses to the contrary (the weapons of mass destruction scare, the liberation of Iraqis, even the globalized "war on terror" itself) are pure opportunism. This is German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, answering a Der Spiegel reporter who wants to know why the Europeans did not keep closer track of the Bushies after 9/11:

I did that. Ever since September 18th or 19th, 2001, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in Washington roughly outlined for me what he thought the answer to international terrorism had to be.... His view was that the US had to liberate a whole string of countries from their terrorist rulers, if necessary by force. Ultimately a new world order would come out of this... [More...]

Granted, this speaks to conversations between Fischer and Wolfowitz after September 11--one week after, to be exact, and one does not come up with a plan for "new world order" or a whole laundry list of countries targeted for regime change in a week's time. His view was that the US had to liberate a whole string of countries from their terrorist rulers... The word "terrorist" in that formulation is so patently a paste job; two weeks previously, Wolfowitz was no doubt still calling them "totalitarian."

Here, by the way, is an excerpt from a great piece about Wolfowitz's 1992 Defense Planning Guidance report, a document that has morphed a couple of times en route to becoming official US policy.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 8:07 AM

 

Rummy Held Hostage, Day 5

The Get-Rumsfeld drumbeat grows louder. The Bush crew is already taking heat from the Pentagon and in the polls, and Tony Blair is finding himself even worse off: Prominent MPs are telling him publicly to get out of Iraq.

The luckier Bush, surrounded at home by his own Elite Republican Guard, faces no such incivility from ostensible foes in his own government. One of the Democrats who did dare to say boo when the president launched his invasion, Tom Daschle, inexplicably chose this week to say he was sorry for the timing of his remarks. That's the kind of opposition party the people lust to see.     

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 8:06 AM

 

Syrians Arriving in Iraq, Many Civilians Killed in Basra

There's no accessing the new English-language Al-Jazeera site most of the time, but wire reports elsewhere indicate that A-J has two breaking stories of interest this afternoon: Syrian volunteers are now arriving in Mosul to fight for the Iraqis (the first concrete evidence for the Iraqi claim earlier today that 4,000 Arabs from outside Iraq have journeyed there to fight the US), and there may be heavy civilian casualties in the U.S.'s latest attacks on Basra.

And now: Islamic Jihad says it's sent forces, too.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 30, 2003 4:13 PM

 

War Raises Dean's Stock in Iowa

The NYT's Adam Nagourney writes:

[Howard] Dean, the former Vermont governor who spent the winter methodically positioning himself as the antiwar candidate for president, has emerged at the start of the Iraq conflict as one of the few Democratic contenders who can show up in this state, with its sizable contingent of antiwar Democrats, and have no fear of being shouted down. As other candidates steer clear of Iowa, at least in the first weeks of war, he is making the most of his moment alone on the stage. [Emphasis added.]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 30, 2003 10:53 AM

 

More on the Bushies' Big Picture

You may not know the name, but the International Herald-Tribune's William Pfaff is one columnist you should be reading regularly. Yesterday he published a dispatch on the Bush coterie's premature post-Iraq designs:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has already told visiting U.S. congressmen that Iran, Libya and Syria must be stripped of nuclear weapons, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton replied to him that it would be necessary to deal not only with Syria and Iran but also with North Korea. Israel's defense minister has already asked American friends of Israel to press for action against Iran.

An administration official was quoted Monday in a New York Times dispatch as saying, Iraq "is just the beginning. I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and North Korea as for Iraq." [More....]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 6:59 PM

 

NPR: As Bad as the Rest

Robert Jensen, the University of Texas academic and anti-war activist, utters some very useful heresies concerning his recent appearance on NPR:

"[W]hen I found out [Weekend Edition host Scott] Simon would be interviewing me, I had an idea of what to expect: the liberal defense of the American empire that one hears from people who have accepted the idea that we now intervene only for "humanitarian" or defensive reasons, and besides everything is different since 9/11. These people would never be so crude as to try to silence antiwar activists or question their patriotism; instead, they prefer to indulge our naiveté with that "someday you will understand" look....

"Since 9/11, I have been interviewed about antiwar politics hundreds of times on radio and television, including on a number of right-wing shows. I have been invited back on several of those conservative shows, where the hosts generally don't mind a guest who strongly disagrees.... But I don't expect ever to be invited back on a show hosted by Scott Simon. [More...]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 6:35 PM

 

Chomsky on Iraq

From the Al-Ahram Weekly package I mentioned earlier:

"Fear of the U.S. government is not based solely on this invasion, but on the background from which it arises: an openly-declared determination to rule the world by force, the one dimension in which US power is supreme, and to make sure that there will never be any challenge to that domination. Preventive wars are to be fought at will: Preventive, not Preemptive.... The openly-announced goal is to prevent any challenge to the "power, position, and prestige of the United States". Such challenge, now or in the future, and any sign that it may emerge, will be met without overwhelming force by the rulers of the country that now apparently outspends the rest of the world combined on means of violence...." [More...]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 6:02 PM

 

The Public Pulse: An Unscientific Survey

Just got this note from a pen pal:

"The older I get the harder it is for me to keep up supporting those that deserve it, not to mention find enough time to be disenchanted, chagrined, offended, nonplused and pissed off at all the things going on above, below, around, two streets over and three countries east of me. If it's not environmental worries, it's the threat of war. If it's not the war, it's fuel prices going up because of somebody's need to make a profit off the thought of war. If it's not somebody's need to make a profit off the thought of war, it's somebody else's eagerness to offer an old love letter from a soldier of the 101st Division on Ebay, 40 minutes before the next of kin are notified."

This is the sum of the law and the pollsters.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 5:42 PM

 

E-Bomb Update: Have They Used It or Not?

The Secret Weapon That May Have Barked in the Night

A few days back I posted an item about one of those here-today, gone-today stories that occasionally surface on the news wire in the Internet age. This one involved a report by CBSNews.com, posted briefly on Tuesday evening and then taken down, indicating that the U.S. had used a new and little-known generation of weaponry in its bombing of TV towers in Baghdad.

E-bombs (also known as "directed-energy weapons") are a new and long-rumored toy in the American arsenal. They use concentrated microwave bursts to fry the circuitry in any electronic gear located near the site of their detonation; military planners hope they will disable at a stroke much of an enemy's communication infrastructure. 

I watched American and European media reports for the rest of the week hoping to come across some clarification. Nothing. Then last night someone sent me a link to a wire story allegedly from the Agence France-Presse news service, in which Pentagon officials are at least put on the record refusing to comment about the e-bomb report. (Beware, though: the link is to a post at Rense.com, one of the most profligate and notorious conspiracist sites on the web.) 

Say, does anyone know what effect if any these intense microwave pulses have on the human beings in their path? Maybe it's one of those things we're in Iraq to find out. Second, why exactly did CBS and every other American news outlet (correct me if I'm wrong) abruptly put away the whole question? The likeliest and least flattering answer is also the most obvious one: because they were asked to.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 5:24 PM

 

The War So Far: Views From the Middle East

Wow: The latest English-language edition of Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly--you'll want to bookmark it if you haven't--features the best package of week one war stories I've seen in any single publication. A few highlights (these are the paper's own headline treatments):

Imploding strategy: A week into the war and it is the planners of the illegal invasion who are in shock, writes Hani Shukrallah.

Flicker in the fog: Galal Nassar reviews the military situation one week after the allied aggression against Iraq.

What went wrong?: US officials at the Pentagon are having a hard time explaining why the war against Iraq has not been a piece of cake so far, Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington.

Bracing for the worst: The Iraqi opposition in exile may have been manipulating the expectations of their US patrons, Iraqi analysts told Omayma Abdel-Latif.

Where it hurts: The war in Iraq is hitting Egypt right in the pocket. Al-Ahram Weekly surveys the fallout.

End of the Arab order?: Will the Arab region withstand the crises it is currently facing? Hassan Nafaa explores its past and current predicaments.

Resources of hope: The two major catastrophes currently facing the Arab world, the US-led war against Iraq and the Israeli war against the Palestinians, dominate political debate. At a roundtable organised by Al-Ahram Weekly this week, Edward Said and a number of political analysts debated the challenges the Arabs face today.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 4:46 PM

 

The Bush Doctrine Under Siege

Last night someone sent along a wire story from earlier this week that I'd missed, by Newhouse News's David Wood. A lot of people in high places are already stepping up their criticisms of Bush II's new world order, he writes:

-- U.S. troops may not be wholly welcomed as liberators when deployed to compel "regime change" and establish democracy.

-- Civilian casualties, coupled with the failure so far to seize weapons of mass destruction, are raising international condemnation of the war as unnecessary American bullying. This reaction does not help future U.S. efforts to fight terrorism or control the spread of weapons technology.

-- The fighting, particularly in rear areas "liberated" by American troops, has shaken the assertion that vastly superior U.S. military technology allows a modest-sized invasion force to scare off or quickly collapse the opposition -- in Iraq or anywhere else.
[More...]

The contradictions in the Bush gang's cheerfully facile plan for global gunslinging are becoming manifest, it's true, but hold the obituaries for now:

First, the Bush inner circle's plan for extending American empire was more than ten years in the dreaming (see my story in City Pages this week for more background) and will not be discarded in a couple of weeks' time.

Second, there is no assurance that American forces will be able to extricate themselves from further warring in Iraq. I'm talking not only about the civil skirmishes and the inevitable attacks on U.S. troops that will accompany the post-war occupation, but the ever-present possibility that other countries in the region will choose to enter or will get sucked into the present conflict. (Turkey has already made noises about sending troops over the border into northern Iraq, for one, and Syria professes to believe it's already targeted for future U.S. attack.)

Third there is the matter of North Korea, which may take advantage of U.S. entanglement in Iraq to kick-start its nuke program and dare the Bushies to do anything about it.

Rough seas or not, we are hardly near the end of the Bush Plan just yet.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 3:45 PM

 

A Soldier Reports From the Front

The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Sharon Schmickle includes this passage in her Saturday filing. The speaker is a Marine sergeant named Chris Merkle:

 "The Marines put their guard down and the Iraqi soldiers came out firing behind the kids," he said....

"Everybody got a false sense of security because of Desert Storm," he said....

"The American people assume we are this great super power and we would just roll in," he said. "But we are invading this country, and at least some of the people here don't want us...."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 2:46 PM

 

Iraq's War Plan, Disclosed at Last

This is from today's NYT dispatch on the suicide bombing attack against U.S. troops:

"Any method that stops or kills the enemy will be used," [Iraq's] vice president [Taha Yassin Ramadan] told a news conference. "What are they doing in our land? Let them pack and go."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 2:39 PM

 

Two Sites You Have to Know

If you already make a habit of reading around the many war-related blogs and news sites, then you certainly know about Cursor and Counterpunch, two of the truly indispensable stops on any daily graze. If you don't, bookmark them now. (Obligatory disclosure: I have written for both of them.)

Cursor is a Minneapolis-based media clearinghouse site that offers the best daily digest anywhere of news and comment links to the world English-language press. On top of that they offer an endlessly useful set of links to world press homepages, info/research resources, and creatively assembled archives, and they're still offering their real-time translator function for the main Arabic Al-Jazeera page. (The recently launched English-language Al-Jazeera page is a special edition that's updated less frequently--not to mention usually impossible to access.)

The Counterpunch site is a spinoff of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's subscriber-only politics newsletter by the same name. It's deservedly one of the fastest-growing politics sites on the web, and features a daily-changing menu of essays, news dispatches, and foreign press reprints. This weekend they're featuring a column by Cockburn that does a nice job of summing up the week in war.   

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 2:10 PM

 

Nova on Dirty Bombs

Earlier this week PBS re-aired its February Nova doc on dirty bombs--jerry-rigged conventional explosives laced with nuclear waste. As ever, the scariest part of the tale is the sheer volume of nuclear junk laying around out there, most auspiciously in the former Soviet Union but also here at home. The Nova report (there's no streaming video at the site I've linked--they mean to sell you that--but several interesting documents) likewise draws a boggling picture of the cleanup required if a dirty bomb is ever exploded in a major city.

One happy thought: Just imagine the contracts to be had by Friends of W then.   

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2003 1:04 PM

 

Poll of the Week

On Wednesday CNN/USA Today/Gallup released a new set of polling numbers with this priceless tagline: "War Makes Americans Confident, Sad."  Sure. Those emotions go hand in glove, don't they?

New numbers today from the Pew Research Center as well. Shockingly, Americans are already getting tired of watching war on TV.   

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 3:24 PM

 

Perle Goes; Big Deal

Gratifying as it may have been to see at least one member of the Bush cabal brought low, what exactly does Richard Perle's resigning the chair of the Defense Policy Board mean to the rest of us? Nothing. He will still be lurking around stage right, and more to the point the Trotskyite neo-con views that once made Perle seem so dangerous are now the lingua franca of the president's brain trust; there is no dastardly scheme he might have proposed that Cheney or Rummy or Wolfowitz won't think of, too. Present or absent, he is more or less fungible at this point.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 2:46 PM

 

A Tough Dove for Tough Times

Does General Wesley Clark want to be your next president?

Yesterday my colleague and confrere Brad Zellar confessed he's been hitting the CNN harder than usual lately. Did I have an opinion about their talking head in stripes, the former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark? Not really. He went on to tell me about Clark's appearance on NewsNight With Aaron Brown a couple of days ago. It seems Clark took pains to praise Michael Moore's speech at the Oscars and to proclaim himself a proud Democrat and a lover of the Middle East's people.

A campaign speech, obviously, though it isn't clear whether Clark wants to be the Big Kahuna or the next Dick Cheney. If he's got his eye on the prize he would probably do well to forgo a run at the big job--and the party establishment--and wait instead to be courted as the vice-presidential dream date: an anti-war Democrat with Pentagon credentials.

I don't know much about him at this point, but doves in hawks' clothing always deserve an extra measure of suspicion. I live in Minneapolis, where for years the local police chief, Tony Bouza, cut a figure not unlike Clark's. Wherever he went he drew high marks for his "progressive" "straight" talk. That is, he described the racism and brutality of police work with a disarming candor--and then he went out and cheerfully did his job, running a department that was known nationally for its abuses.

In any case, here are a couple [1] [2] of analysis pieces Clark has written about the war for the Times of London (mercifully brief registration required).     

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 10:30 AM

 

Press Roundup 3/28

Ha'aretz: The Israeli Right's Hold in Washington

Interesting piece by David Landau about an impending AIPAC lobbying blitz in Washington:

So sweeping is the success of the Israeli right and its allies among the Jews (and Christians) in the United States that an unchallenged political axiom has emerged, to the effect that if the president decides to push ahead with the road map [linking Iraq outcome to an Israeli/Palestinian settlement], he will generate hostility among millions of voters....

By the terms of the draft road map of December 20, 2002, Israel is also called upon to freeze the settlements, "including natural growth," and to agree this year to the establishment of a Palestinian state with provisional borders. That scenario is a nightmare for the Israeli right, and it is operating in Washington, by the accepted democratic means of lobbies and pressure groups, to effectively get the plan shelved. The right wing believes that this is a patriotic act par excellence. [More]

Last Exit, Baghdad

Is it going to be street-fighting, or a reenactment of the siege of Stalingrad? Michael R. Gordon weighs in for NYT. Meanwhile, U.S./Brit forces have decided post-Shock & Awe to take out the country's communications infrastructure after all.   

About That Northern Front

 Most American press accounts of the paratroopers dropped into northern Iraq this week speak vaguely of a "second front" to keep northern Iraqi forces from concentrating all their energy on the defense of Baghdad. But as Israel's Ha'aretz daily reports,  "An equally important goal was to send a broad hint to Turkey, lest it try to invade northern Iraq."

A Busy Week

Only nine days into the war, and already we have seen so much that seems familiar: the first guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops, the first fragging of American officers by their own personnel, the first reports that the people we came to "liberate" want us to get the hell out, and now, the first massive U.S. troop escalation. So far it's like Vietnam for people with hopelessly short attention spans.

 Rummy and the Blame Game

One of the more concise analyses of how the initial U.S. war plan came to ruin, from the Times of London. 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 9:01 AM

 

Polls and Polarization

The release accompanying the latest Pew Research Center poll numbers, from this past Tuesday (3/25), contains the following passage:

There also has been growing public antagonism toward anti-war voices. Fully 45% of respondents in recent days have said they have heard too much from those who oppose the war, an increase from 37% during the survey's first three days. Last month, only about a quarter of Americans (24%) said they were hearing too much from war opponents.

If you're counting, that makes 35 to 45 percent of the populace that opposes the war (discounting Bush's inevitable rally at the launch of the war) and another 45 percent that would like to tell them to shut the fuck up, or better yet make them shut up. That estimate feels about right, doesn't it?

And so does this one:

A Times/CBS News poll last week found evidence of divisions between Democrats and Republicans over the war. This latest poll found even sharper differences on the issue between two other groups: blacks and whites.... While 82 percent of whites said the United States should take military action to oust Mr. Hussein, just 44 percent of blacks said they supported that approach. In addition, 71 percent of whites said they were proud of what the United States was doing in Iraq, compared with 33 percent of blacks. [More...]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 7:27 AM

 

Bush 'Toons, Etc.

Most of these have been linked a thousand times, I know, and most of them hold up just fine.

First the classic, deservedly notorious, remix of Bush's State of the Union Address.

Second, the more recent clip of Bush and Blair declaiming their endless love.

Here's the Operation: Terrortubbies cartoon.

Ashcroft sings. Bush picks his nose. No joke.

Dancing Bush.

A Blair riff in the mode of Dancing Bush.

ModernTV.com has a great pastiche on war as TV sports.  

And finally, I stole this from cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (This Modern World) yesterday.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 28, 2003 7:26 AM

 

NYT on the Uglier and Uglier American

The Times takes the temperature of Olde Europe:

BERLIN, March 26 — The cover picture this week in Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, shows explosions in Baghdad under the caption: "Terror Bombing for Freedom." In the magazine Tip, a popular weekly guide to events in Berlin, the cover illustration shows President Bush in cowboy gear sitting on a saddle that, in turn, is strapped onto a missile heading for Baghdad. [More...]

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 9:01 PM

 

McGovern: "Plans Are in Place for the Next Invasions"

Just ran across this piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

"Even now, these wars are being planned by the current administration," [George] McGovern said. "I'm positive, based on conversations with people close to the White House, that plans are in place for the next invasions."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 6:23 PM

 

Despair's Two Lovely Daughters

A Cheney Girls Mystery

The chat lists have been aflutter in recent days with bizarre and seemingly apocryphal items about Mary and Elizabeth Cheney, daughters of Dick. A week or so ago, a Russian broadcast on Echo of Moscow Radio reported that bad-girl daughter Mary--a thirtysomething lesbian activist (she is Coors' gay and lesbian corporate relations manager)--was en route to the Middle East to volunteer her services as a human shield in Baghdad.

Then came a subsequent and equally dubious story (posted here the other day) claiming that good-girl daughter Elizabeth Cheney was part of a U.S. delegation that traveled secretly to Amman, Jordan, en route to secret U.S./Iraq ceasefire talks.

Now there is a new development to report. I will let Al Bawaba tell it:

The London based Arabic daily Al Quds Al Arabi reported on Tuesday, March 25 that the American vice president, Dick Cheney, would soon head to the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The newspaper claimed that the visit would be an attempt by Cheney to convince his daughter, who was in the Jordanian capital, to back down her decision to go to Baghdad within a group of volunteers who want to form human shields against the US led attacks on Iraq. [More...]

This makes a total of three reports, in a short time, from apparently disparate sources, alleging that a daughter of Dick Cheney's is in Jordan for some reason or other. Ridiculous as it sounds, one starts to wonder if there's a germ of truth in it somewhere.

No. It can't be. Can it?

  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 4:59 PM

 

Press Roundup 3/27

LA Times: "Every Day Gets Worse and Worse"

In the streets of Iraq many are embracing Saddam again, on the grounds that the enemy of their enemy is their friend:

"[P]eople had no doubt who caused the deaths: the United States, and specifically President Bush, considered here by most people interviewed (in the presence of government minders) to be the main author of the war, rather than their own President Saddam Hussein.

"Death to Bush! Revenge on Bush!" onlookers shouted at an American correspondent before breaking into chants of loyalty to Hussein.

Here's a good piece on the same subject from the Guardian (UK).

One CEO Who was Worth the Money

Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, was already raking in huge money from its contracts in Afghanistan, and now they've won the initial billion dollar contract for rebuilding Iraq. Here's a concise dispatch from Motley Fool.   

Come on, Give the Queen Some Sugar

Here's a note on the latest Bush/Blair summit, from Rupert Cornwell writing in the Independent:

"The situation on the ground was the main topic at the war-council summit between President George Bush and Tony Blair, which began at Camp David last night. The two leaders were due to discuss the vexed issue of United Nations involvement in the reconstruction of the country."

That's what they call burying the lead. As the only meaningful member of the Coalition of the Willing, Britain has taken a keen interest in the report (first publicly leaked by Neil King Jr. in the Wall Street Journal, 3/17) that America means to go it alone in rebuilding post-war Iraq and stocking its shadow government. So Tony Blair has been wanting to have this sitdown for a while now. The "vexed issue of United Nations involvement"? That's droll. There is one UN member in particular who had damned well better get a piece of the pie.

Or maybe not. This from the LA Times account of the Bush/Blair meeting:

"No doubt, the United nations has got to be closely involved in this process," Blair said, adding that the U.N. should endorse any postwar plan.

Signaling a difference on this issue, Blair said he and Bush agreed on "principles," but that there "are huge numbers of details to be discussed with our allies as to exactly how that is going to work."

You can't say Tony isn't trying. He used the occasion of the summit to affirm yet another principle that the rest of the world despises: U.S. military control of Iraq after the war.

A Bodybag Too Far

How many U.S. deaths can the Bush regime handle before it loses the public irretrievably? They're working on a perilously thin margin. The New York Times took up the subject today, noting that "In Gallup surveys taken this month, just 5 percent of respondents expected casualties of several thousand, while 4 in 10 expected fewer than 100 American casualties."

The Un-Embedded

A couple of nasty yarns about U.S. reporters in Iraq who did not choose to go the Pentagon's way, from Editor & Publisher and the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

Those Cunning and Inscrutable Iraqis

Have you noticed the language American reporters use to describe Iraqi forces since they started fighting back? It's purely incredulous. Sometimes, as in the banner story at the New York Times online right now ("Iraqi Resistance Badgers U.S. Forces"), the implication is that the enemy is being a really bad sport. Other times the Iraqi counteroffensive is one more sign of the essentially shifty character that must be rooted from the native breast so that democracy can grow there. 

It's amazing to watch withered old generals on the cable channels call the Iraqi reprisals "terrorism" when they know better, and firsthand. What is unfolding in Iraq is guerrilla war (or if you like, asymmetric fourth generation war) of a sort the U.S. knows well from Vietnam. Calling it terrorism is damage control for the most befuddled and intimidated of the folks at home--who, if they've managed to learn nothing else of much use from TV news in the past two years, certainly have learned that terrorists are bad.   

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 4:00 PM

 

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC

He won two Congressional Medals of Honor for taking Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914, and was for many years a faithful executor of our good neighbor policy in the southern colonies. In 1933 he wrote the following about his experience:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses....

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

For a longer piece of Butler's writing, check here.  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 2:04 PM

 

Rummy for Dummies

This was the plan:

"The whole world is watching us on this one and just waiting for us to do something heavyhanded. So we'll kill 'em with kindness instead. First we'll drop a lot of really big bombs and make sure the whole world's watching on TV. Message: Don't be next. This will scare the bejesus out of the Iraqis and they will probably just give up. If they don't, we'll drive tanks right through the middle of them and they'll scatter; we'll send in a modest ground force to catch the Iraqis when they swoon and faint. Worst case scenario: Baghdad takes a few days. But the north will be fine; the Kurds will love us, and Turkey will stay out. And the south--easy. Basra is Shiite, and they loathe Saddam more than they loathe us. No problems there.

"We'll wrap the thing up in a week or two at most, with fewer casualties than everyone expected. We'll seem heroic, sort of. Then we'll tap a well and invite all of our friends over."

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 1:51 PM

 

I'm Running Late Today

Normally the daily press roundup will be posted here by around 9 a.m. central time, but today it will be late afternoon. Meantime, have a look at the war package in this week's issue of City Pages.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 27, 2003 12:21 PM

 

Ceasefire Negotiations: Say What?

Chris Doss, editor of the online mag Russia Journal, just forwarded this note to a mail list I receive. It's taken from www.aljazeerah.info.

A US delegation arrived in Amman in its way to Baghdad for ceasefire negotiations

Abu Dhabi, Alittihad Daily, 3/26/2003 -- The UAE leading semi-official daily newspaper, Alittihad, reported today that a US government delegation has arrived in Amman, Jordan, yesterday in its way to Baghdad for negotiations with the Iraqi government about an immediate ceasefire.

A diplomatic source told Alittihad that the US government delegation included four leading members of Congress as well as Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the US Vice President Dick Cheney, representing the US Department of State, where she works as an Assistant to the Deputy of the Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs.

Doesn't sound very plausible, does it? Odds are that it's a counter-psy-ops move by the dastardly Iraqis.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 26, 2003 11:37 AM

 

Press Roundup 3/26

Rummy Gets Rocked

Donald Rumsfeld's grand design for the war is drawing fire from a number of retired U.S. military brass, as noted in today's LA Times, London's Telegraph,  and, well--pretty much everywhere else, too. Rumsfeld got a little hot under the collar at Tuesday's press briefing. Here's the transcript.

The Backbone of a Free Society is a Deeply Embedded Press

Over at the always useful Romenesko media blog, journalists and readers are dropping some e-bombs of their own on the men and women of the Pentagon's "embedded" press.

Eugene Linden writes, "As someone who began as an investigative journalist in Vietnam (I wrote the first major story on fragging), I'm by turns amazed, amused and horrified at the government's skill in manipulating the media in this war. The idea of 'embedding' journalists is brilliant from the Pentagon's point of view, and with few exceptions, the media have jumped into this leash like golden retrievers eager to be walked. For one thing, embedding keeps journalists where the military wants them - amid specific units where they can be spun and controlled. Better, from the military's point of view, is that in a benign version of the 'Stockholm Syndrome' journalists who bond with their military buddies are going to be far more likely to write jingoistic stories (that's certainly been the case so far), and far less likely to write anything critical of the men or the mission."

Iraqi Civilian Toll Edges Up

There's one odd thing about U.S. bombs and missiles: We have it on the unimpeachable word of Pentagon brass and embedded journalist alike that they can hit hummingbirds in the eye, but apparently that only goes for the city of Baghdad, since the missiles they use in greater Iraq have already rained down in Iran and Turkey and have taken out a Syrian bus as well. Now comes word that U.S. missiles hit a Baghdad market earlier today, killing over a dozen.

If you like to keep score as you watch, the researchers at the Iraq Body Count website are trying to keep a running log of Iraq's civilian casualties. They'll even give you a ticker for your own website. Or you can get a satellite dish and see every body on Al-Jazeera, along with the rest of the Arab world.

The End of Empire, part 57

One of the lead pieces in today's London Guardian is an analysis titled "Bush Fiddles With Economy While Baghdad Burns." In the words of author Mark Tran, "[D]oes the US colossus have feet of clay? It takes a brave soul to argue that America, the world's largest economy and by far its most potent military power, is about to go into decline, when it is widely perceived as a hyperpower. But Independent Strategy, a financial research company for institutional investors, has made the case in a paper that is making the rounds of big investment banks such as Goldman Sachs."

This won't do the markets a lot of good.

"I Quit"

The resignation letter submitted earlier this month by U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling has already made the rounds of internet mail lists; if you missed it, it's published in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 26, 2003 9:58 AM

 

The "E-Bomb": Ready for Prime Time?

For a brief while this evening, CBSNews.com was reporting that U.S. forces unveiled a new generation of weaponry in Iraq today when they used a so-called "directed energy" bomb against Iraqi TV facilities in Baghdad. Here is the lede from that disappeared dispatch:

(CBS) (NEW YORK) The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the "E-Bomb" in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports.

The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft.

Then a funny thing happened. The indefatigable Drudge barely had time to post his link ("U.S. Drops E-Bomb on Iraqi TV") before all reference to E-bombs vanished from the CBS story in question. None of the Big 3 cable news network sites have it either. Possibly this means that CBS had its story wrong; possibly it means that they did not. Generals and journalists alike have got to pull together in this thing, you know. 

We'll see what if anything the papers have to say tomorrow. Meantime, here are a few backgrounders on Our New Bomb. The first is an FAQ from the GlobalSecurity.org website; the other two (in the very best Crossfire tradition) are from the conservative Weekly Standard and City Pages' left-lib sister publication The Village Voice.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 25, 2003 10:34 PM

 

War and Vertigo

Okay, take a breath. Everyone I know who has been trying to follow the course of this war conscientiously is feeling a little dizzy by now, if only from trying to pick and choose amid all the disinformation. (Today, for example: Did the civilians in Basra rise up against Iraqi forces, as Western media reported, or against U.S. and British forces, as the Middle Eastern media suggested? We'll find out eventually, but for now: Don't know, can't know.)

At this juncture, any piece of writing that manages to survey the first week of war and produce a reasoned, coherent picture is a rarity. So by all means check out this essay by the fine New York magazine columnist Michael Wolff.  Nothing else I've read so far gets it right on so many important things, chief among them the polarization of opinion at home and the surreally Pentagon-friendly coverage in American media. 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 25, 2003 5:28 PM

 

Fisk: The Un-Embedded Journalist

The Independent's Robert Fisk--the English-speaking press's most controversial Middle East correspondent, and one of the best--spoke with a Democracy Now! panel about the war so far. He offers, among other things, the best account of covering a war from ground zero that I've seen in a long time. The experience Fisk describes is no doubt quite different from that of the "embedded" American journalists peering anxiously over their commanders/protectors' shoulders.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 25, 2003 4:55 PM

 

Shock & Awe: Shocking or Just Awful?

One of the more respected politics & commentary blogs around, The Daily Kos, has just posted an analysis of the shock and awe campaign purportedly written by "a fairly well known military officer and commentator who under the circumstances is going to have to remain unidentified.... This memo doesn't spill any secrets, but it is a thoughtful analysis based on Officer X's conversations with some of his colleagues--all of whom are harshly critical of the war plan and Rumsfeld's meddling with it." Take a look.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 25, 2003 2:27 PM

 

Press Roundup 3/25

 

Al-Jazeera for Anglos

The English-language version of the Al-Jazeera webpage (a special edition, not a real-time mirror of the main Arabic page) is up. Needless to say it's already running slow from high traffic. Meanwhile, the indispensable Cursor continues to offer its Al-Jazeera translation page.

The Iraqi Gambit

Thoughtful analysis of Saddam's military strategy in this morning's London Independent from Christopher Bellamy, a professor of "military science."

The U.S.'s High Risk Psy-War

One of the usual suspects--Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)--wrote a cautionary analysis of the whole "shock and awe" game in Sunday's London Telegraph.

Will Bushies Push Tactical Nukes?

For years certain Pentagon hardliners have pushed for the aggressive development and eventual use of low-yield nuclear weapons, the main ideas being to a) get over that silly "Hiroshima Syndrome" regarding nuclear weapons once and for all--these baby nukes are the mother of all bunker busters, that's all; and b) cow any prospective foe into capitulating without war. The U.S. interest in tactical nukes is revisited this week in one of the Middle East's better English-language publications, the Al-Ahram weekly from Cairo.

The Turkish Domino

Turkey has denied last weekend's reports that it was already sending troops to Northern Iraq to deal with the Kurds there, but they expressly reserve the right to do so. It would be a potential disaster for the U.S. war effort and the stability of the region; for that reason the EU is joining the Americans in trying to discourage them, as today's Independent reports. 

The GI Fragging Suspect

Today's LA Times (registration required) features a backgrounder on Asan Akbar, the 101st Airborne's alleged grenade-thrower.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 25, 2003 10:55 AM

 

My Old Blog is Here...

Check out the Archive of my old blog here.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 19, 2003 12:25 PM

 

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