Ruminatrix
...more recent posts
Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003
There is a tension in American policy between the urge to remake the world and the old instinct for quick forays followed by withdrawal and disengagement. The US has neither the means nor the appetite for sustained international involvement. Knowing this, US strategists should be working to strengthen the sorts of transnational restraints and institutions that will serve America best when it has to live once again in a world it cannot dominate.From Tony Judt's NYRB review of several recent books (Robert Kagan , Charles Kupchan, Fareed Zakaria) entitled America and the World. Picks apart Kagan's lazy "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" canard, among other points.
Day Six: Coalition forces halted south of Baghdad are bombarding the Republican Guard division dug in in front of them. Apache helicopters took a lot of ground fire when they were used yesterday and one was downed. Others have observed a dearth of reporting from the field since then and a sandstorm has severly limited US air activity in any case. Speculation continues as to how long the lull will last, but B-52s will surely be used in large numbers before any ground attack.
Unlike the desert of Kuwait and SW Iraq, the Mesopotamian plain (scroll down for map), between the Tigris and Euphrates, is muddy (spring flood season March-May) and riddled with canals and irrigation ditches. These limit maneuverability, especially for vehicles. Dams can be breached and fields flooded; and there's not much cover.
This is the place where irrigation was invented circa 3000BC. But water has been used as a weapon many times before: this partial chronology of water conflicts and warfare begins with Leonardo's drawings (still at the Met until the end of this week) for a Florentine plan in 1503 to reroute the Arno River for military purposes, thus sabotaging their Pisan rivals.
Lack of clean water is a problem in the south of Iraq. Water and electricity have been out in Basra and Umm Qasr since the 20th, and civilians are likely facing a public health crisis. All while fighting continues in Basra. So who will police and garrison rear areas: National Guard units? U.N. troops? Who will administer the de-Ba'athification of Iraqi civilians?
Attitude readjustments galore -- could this war go on for weeks or longer, after all? The Dow drops 300 points after an 800-point surge over the past week; the bluster that US forces will be at the walls of Baghad in two days is muted. Bypassed Iraqi troops put up "unexpectedly" fierce resistance in towns along the Euphrates. Saddam makes another radio address, if only to show that he's not incapacitated. In several towns gunmen, guerillas or irregulars -- whether fedayeen, or mere Ba'ath Party functionaries with nothing much to lose -- snipe from cover. Has the coalition enough troops to secure its supply lines? If not, there could be a problem when humanitarian aid convoys arrive in the Shatt-al-Arab. The US Navy stops more small boats southbound, finds bundles of mines aboard them. Aircraft crash or are hit by ground fire. Could the Russians be to blame?
Exaggerated claims by reporters as well as official spokespeople eventually engender a credibility gap. It's not a new problem -- some untruths or stretches, first deployed in the name of psychological warfare, get compounded by reporters' enthusiasm for scoops, then bump hard into the reality of events. Now the process is accelerated by the speed of 24/7 reporting. Moreover the "embedding" (thud!) of correspondents into military units has worsened this by tying the press yet closer to official sources.
On a historical note, check out this older piece on the Iran Iraq War of 1980-88. It's a salutary reminder of how patient and tough the Iraqis were, especially on the defensive. It also tells how a number of powers -- not just the US and UK, but the French and the Soviets too -- backed them with hardware, strategy and tactics.
And lest we forget the alleged casus belli this time around, observe that during that conflict -- comparable to the trench warfare of the Western Front in WWI -- it took the US and UK intil 1984, i.e. four years to impose export controls on chemicals they shipped to Iraq for use as poison gases on the battlefields less than fifty miles east of Basra. For the record they were:
Thiodiglycol: convertible into mustard gas simply by contact with hydrogen chloride.Will Army CWB search teams uncover long-lost drums of any of these, I wonder?
Chloroethanol: essential to one of the ways for making thiodiglycol (see above).
Phosphoryl chloride: Essential to tabun production. Can also be converted, with some difficulty, into methylphosphonyl dichloride (see below).
Dimethylamine: Like phosphoryl chloride (see above), essential to tabun production, but much easier to make.
Methylphosphonyl difluoride: Convertible into sarin-family nerve gases simply by contact with any of' many alcohols.
Methylphosphonyl dichloride: Convertible into sarin-family nerve gases by carefully controlled reaction with an alcohol and a fluoride such as potassium fluoride (see below).
Dimethyl methylphosphonate: One of many methylphosphonyl compounds from which methylphosphonyl dichloride (see above) can be made quite easily.
Potassium fluoride: One of many fluorine compounds that could be used in the production of sarin-family nerve gases. Insignificant in the absence of a supply of methylphosphonyl or ethylphosphonyl compounds.
Sunday, Mar 23, 2003
And then the reporting turned grim. Inevitably, some of the dead and missing haunt the media more than others. There's nothing like the conjunction of friendly fire deaths, a fratricidal "fragging" and above all the capture of American personnel to provide a salutary reminder of how messy and chaotic wars are, even ones as lopsided as this one.
I read that Mr Rumsfeld immediately claimed that Iraq was failing to respect the Geneva Conventions by allowing film of the captives to be shown on Al-Jazeera TV. The Conventions forbid the photographing of prisoners in ways that may be humiliating, or used for propaganda purposes.
I heartily concur -- all prisoners must be humanely treated. But I am nonplussed: Aren't international laws and conventions things that can be revoked or ignored when they are inconvenient? So who gets to decide who is a POW, who an "enemy combatant", and who a hostage? What authority will adjudicate when disagreements on status arise? What sanction may apply? Just asking. Do photographs from Guantanamo humiliate prisoners, perhaps? I don't know. Aren't photos of Iraqi prisoners in coalition custody currently being used as propaganda to persuade Iraqis to surrender...Oh, never mind. Even the President seems befuddled. Asked today what he would say to the family of an American taken prisoner, he keeps going back to the sacrifices of the dead. It's like he doesn't see the difference.
Reports still indicate continued firing in Basra, Umm Qasr and Nasariya (where the five GIs were taken prisoner and five others killed). Some of the Iraqi resistance in the south has been from plain-clothes fedayeen, under the nominal control of Uday Hussein. Expect more such attacks to occur even if regular Iraqi forces collapse. With "regime change" already foreordained and the entire Ba'ath party put on notice by the B-52 strikes of the past two days, members of its many paramilitary and secret police branches have little incentive to turn themselves in.
US forces are reported 100 miles south of Baghdad. In the North, where complex rivalries and hostilities among Kurds, Turkoman, Shia and Sunni underlie political and economic resentments, talks between Washington and Ankara are at a standstill. Maybe the status quo satisfies the administration -- for now.
It is heartening to learn that only 1,000 people are said to have shown up for a pro-war rally in Times Square (sponsored by the Christian Coalition et al), as opposed to the more than 100,000 who marched yesterday. (Saw "Shocking and Awful" "Freedom Fries While Baghdad Burns" posters and plenty more verbal and graphic creativity on display, but heard no singing.) Even if it is improbable that the war can be halted before the fall of Baghdad, pressure must be kept on this administration -- for the long haul. And that will require some new anthems.
Pop Culture Ironies: Our household always watches the Oscar broadcast and tonight will be no exception. The "red carpet" fashion show has been cancelled (No "And who are you wearing?" this year) but the show itself goes on. Whenever glitzy entertainment and its siblings -- fashion and advertising -- bump up against "special TV coverage" characterized by bloody violence, fascinating ironies and anxieties come to the surface: What is appropriate, what can be said and by whom? Can you accept an Academy Award and not say what's on your mind? Who decides if and when to pull the plug on the speaker? And what if some news event were to pre-empt the dream-machine as it spins its reveries of fame and fortune? ("We now interrupt this broadcast...."). Remember when that's all that little word pre-emption meant?
A memory: A few days after the Sept 11th attacks I went down to Wall Street to check with the office where I worked. On one of the side streets, just yards east of Broadway and two blocks from the smoldering WTC site, there was a large billboard advertising some brand of bourbon (Maker's Mark? I'm not sure.) Some copywriter's once-clever slogan read "A Hit, From Way Off Broadway." Photographers could fit it in the same frame as the silhouetted wreckage of the North Tower base, which looked like a smashed cheese-grater when the sunlight shone through. If someone did take such a picture, I never saw it published.
I passed by that billboard for several weeks, over and over. Its obscenity appalled and riveted me. Then one day someone came and applied paint. They blacked out the words but left the image of the bourbon bottle up there. You could still see faint traces of the slogan, but only if you knew what had been there. I still wonder who told them to do that and what they were thinking.
This war needs an anti-anthem, singable in many languages if possible. Songs help crowds feel their own power. Anybody know of a good anti-war song other than Give Peace A Chance? Yesterday's NYC march was very impressive, with a calm crowd and the police much less jittery than in February. However "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" is not much of a slogan to shout out.
On the third day of the hostile takeover, awoke to sound of Phillip Knightly (in a 2002 interview) on the radio. His The First Casualty is perhaps the best book on the history of war-reporting. Twitchy from shortage of sleep, I'll keep it brief.
In the south Nasariyah and its bridge over the Euphrates taken; Basra too or nearly so, but it's a major population center so it's probably been handled with care. Some airfields and other sites in the western desert seized. This is probably to prevent the launch of any missiles in the direction of Israel and is undoubtedly a good idea. Bombing of the Ansar enclave along the Iranian border on the grounds that they are terrorist allies of -- oh never mind. A suicide car bomb in Halabja is blamed on Ansar.
As for the overall picture: the focus is on Baghdad and what will happen when the US/UK (aka "coalition") forces arrive at its outskirts. Four other points:
A) It's clear that the intense overnight/morning bombing was focussed on massive property damage. The BBC feed (URL changes) this morning said "Iraqi health minister says three people killed in overnight raids on Baghdad" and 250 injured. Even if it is based on incomplete information, that number is remarkably low. We are witnessing a new kind of psychological warfare at its most intense, attempting "all your base" demoralization. Can we imagine one of our cities undergoing such an ordeal in the pursuit of a political goal? Officials in Damascus must be considering changing the name of their party -- just to on the safe side.
B) Various press reports (WPost was first?) indicate that there are ongoing e-mail discussions with senior Iraqi officers. Disinformation or not? I reckon they are probably accurate and that more non-Republican Guard units will likely surrender as the coalition forces move north. There's no doubt that Iraqi staff officers must wonder when it's time to cut your losses -- and timing is everything in such matters.
C) So what sort of post-war regime does the US have in mind in Baghdad? I've avoided televised briefings as much as possible but US Central Command this morning said there will be "representative self-government" after the distribution of humanitarian aid, and moreover that "Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people." Interesting line for General Franks to take. BTW he also used the word "shock" to describe the bombing of Baghhdad but didn't append "awe". Must be a reader.
D) Contradictory reports over the whether Turkish troops have entered Kurdish areas and if so, how many. Ankara says it just wants to secure the border and prevent an influx of refugees. Kurds suspect otherwise and this continuing and recurring disagreement between Washington and Ankara is described in the NYT as "frustrating" and "infuriating" by unidentified US officials. Remember when the Russians went into eastern Bosnia at the last minute?
Gotta go march -- the first Amendment could lapse if not frequently and vigorously exercized.You never know these days.
It is now the second full day of the War in Iraq. I had to turn off the radio to get things done -- and forget about watching TV with its endless crawls and repeated video snippets. But it keeps pulling me back. I don't know how agonist files recaps three times a day, filtering dozens of sources. Must be out of his mind.
To triangulate from reliable sources, the least fanciful reports suggest that Allied troops have a) encircled the Faw peninsula and taken the port of Um Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait and b) started to move up past to the west of Basra. There's been very little resistance so far. Rumors about what's happening in the north of Iraq are of the "Special Forces Seize Oilfields" variety and not very credible. So will the Turkish Army move into the Mosul area, as the Ankara Parliament authorized them to do yesterday? Are any reporters filing from Southern Turkey?
There are hints of how disorganized and confused Iraqi resistance has been so far. A BBC radio correspondent -- I didn't catch his name -- described seeing astonished civilians driving near Basra who didn't know the war had begun. The night-time images of burning government buildings in Baghdad show all the streetlights turned on, as if they hadn't had time even to organize a blackout.
As far as we know (?), loss of life has probably been low so far. The siege of Baghdad is likely to be a different matter, as civilians and army units (of both sides) will be right on top of one another. Throughout history, sieges of cities have always been much worse for non-combatants than fighting "in the field." The aerial bombardment of cities, pioneered in the Spanish Civil War, has only made it worse. So-called precision weapons don't work at all in rubble. Will we see a humanitarian crisis with thousands of homeless refugees and injured? What's the plan for preventing the sort of vigilante revenge-killing we saw at the fall of Ceaucescu in Roumania in 1989?
But the whole world is watching and it doesn't necessarily interpret what it sees the same way as we do. Even if Americans lose interest once victory is declared, that won't be the case elsewhere.
The first new weasel word of the war: "decapitation" for the killing of a head of state. It is a poor choice of word when you are trying to convince your adversary to surrender. Why not just call it assassination -- or tyrannicide, if you prefer? Oops, that would echo JW Booth at Ford's theater: Sic semper tyrannis. Never mind.
As this lopsided war begins -- though I don't recall there ever being a formal, legal declaration of war -- I agree that opposition to it has to continue. It's even more important given that the media and entertainment businesses -- newspapers and entertainers alike -- can't afford to alienate too many of their customers. They have strong financial disincentives to rocking the boat. The same goes for many public officials. But citizens with nothing to sell are free to express their political opinions and should do so with vigor. And dissent has to go beyond uncovering disinformation and obfuscation by official sources -- it means ensuring that some social good comes out of this conflict.
Iraq is a basket case and the war against this regime will be brief unless Allied forces stay on long-term as an army of occupation. The administration knows this: reportedly, American troops are being told not to fly any flags at all since this would be considered provocative in other countries.
The implications for anti-war advocates? My feeling is that if the US and UK governments describe this as a war of liberation, they should be beholden by their own citizens to act as though they mean it. I am sceptical that setting up democratic institutions in Iraq can trump economic self-interest, but without continuous public pressure both from here and overseas, it has no chance at all. Everything in this government's past conduct (and their predecessors') suggests they would prefer a cabal or an authoritarian regime in Baghdad.
And while "we" impose democracy, why stop at the borders of Iraq? -- let's have it all over the middle east, please.
Hmm...In retrospect, wasn't it a little peculiar that Bush's Monday-night 48 hour ultimatum speech only demanded the removal of Saddam and his two sons? I mean, wouldn't you have expected a few Special Republican Guard and mukhabarat heads, Tikriti cousins or other senior Ba'ath officials to be on Bush's list?
In the context of psychological warfare operations (aka disinformation) already in progress, it's impossible to tell which of the various defection and desertion rumors flying around may be true. But it's conceivable that resistance by many regular Iraqi Army forces will indeed be minimal. At the very least, some units will likely surrender wholesale sooner than expected. Could there even be a coup in the offing? Just asking... And by the way, what's the US plan for housing all those Iraqi POWs?
I'm not at all a fan of his but check out Thomas Friedman's historical analogy for what will likely start in the next day or so:
Some 35 years ago Israel won a war in Six Days. It saw its victory as self-legitimating. Its neighbors saw it otherwise, and Israel has been trapped in the Seventh Day ever since — never quite able to transform its dramatic victory into a peace that would make Israelis feel more secure.The prospects for a Middle-East Marshall Plan don't look good: handouts and "hands-ups" are sooo last century. Friedman trusts that this government places a high value on building democratic institutions in the region. On what evidence? As for "the wisdom of their predecessors", I haven't heard any in this administration's rhetoric.
More than 50 years ago America won a war against European fascism, which it followed up with a Marshall Plan and nation-building, both a handout and a hand up — in a way that made Americans welcome across the world. Today is a D-Day for our generation. May our leaders have the wisdom of their predecessors from the Greatest Generation.
But the warning about the outcome of the Six-Day War -- a case of a truly defensive pre-emptive war if ever there was -- should be a sober reminder to Washington of the futility of unilateralism over the long haul...