HANGING SADDAM

So now it is being reported by Reuters, the AP and the London Times that Saddam will be hanged within 24 hours (which means he may already be dead since I'm writing in the States). This is madness; there is definitely a question of due process here (it takes YEARS to execute someone in the U.S.) and there is nothing like making something worse out of a bad man: a martyr. The U.S. has handed over custody of Saddam to the Iraqi government, and handed over any vestiges of sanity as well. In a time when it is imperative for Baghdad to be pacified by negotiations, by jobs for angry young men, by a strong and able government, hanging Saddam is a good idea? This action does nothing but illustrate how weak the government of Iraq actually is; rather than working on the real problems, it creates more for itself. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or for that matter the foot soldier on the ground, to realize that all hell is going to break loose--if not immediately, then it will be dished out in small, but deadly, doses--against Shiites, against the Iraqi government, and especially against American forces since they are perceived by many Iraqis as helping "rig" the trial.

I am no supporter of the man--he was a tyrant, he was a killer, and he involved his country in horrible wars--but his crimes never took the toll that the present war has. There was at least a society, and there was law and order. Now, Iraq is chaos, death and stripped of any civilizing force, basic services such as electricity and water, and its government (such painfully obvious irony!) is holed up in one of Saddam's old palaces, suffering none of the deprivations of the average person in Baghdad. "Democracy is messy" . . .indeed!

Surge

I can understand why military leaders might question the idea of a "surge" of troops into Baghdad (and by a "surge," we are talking about 40,000 more troops at the most--some of them newbies, and some returning for their second or even third tour-of-duty). As former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff member, Colin Powell, noted on CBS's Face The Nation, if there is no specific strategy in place, then throwing more troops at the problem of violence in Baghdad will be a collosal waste of lives and time (btw, he was misparaphrased by Reuters, who stated that he supported a "troop surge": I watched the program, and this definitely was not what he said). Unfortunately, by conservative estimates, it would take around 500,000 troops to "pacify" Baghdad and the surrounding small towns. Baghdad is a huge city, and if you employ only 40,000 troops added to the 50,000 that are in and around Baghdad, you are again in the position of possibly playing "whack a mole." Furthermore you are in danger of doing the following: 1) alienating Iraqis by increasing the "footprint" of American forces 2) using this "surge" as an excuse not to engage in meaningful negotiations with factions inside and outside of Iraq 3) putting more soliders', and civilians', lives at risk since as the "footprint" grows larger, so does the "target" for insurgents.

If you are going to put down internecine conflicts, which now involve different factions of Sadr's militias, the police, the Iraqi army, the various ministries' militias, Iraqi Sunni insurgents, both Islamists and secular, foreign fighters and criminal gangs, you are going to need more than 100,000 American soliders and a vague plan to impose the peace. You are going to need divine intervention.

I'm not clear that anyone in the administration knows exactly what they are up against. This reminds me so much of Northern Ireland and the insertion of the British Army, but about 100 times deadlier and with about 10 times more players.

Someone please, please wake-up and smell the cordite.

Euphemisms

What they say, and What they mean


"War on Terror"

"War" by its very definition is "terror." So it's "Terror on Terror." Or as General W.T. Sherman said, "War is Hell," so it's "Hell Terror on Terror." Or "We Really Have No clue Who the Hell We are Terror Fighting."



"Collateral Damage"

Damn, the 500 ton bombs are just a tad more devastating to the neighborhood than we thought. . .


"Democracy for the Middle East"

Geez, Tito is really looking good right now. . .



"The Best Secretary of Defense in American
History" (Dick Cheney on
Donald Rumsfeld).

We need an intervention. . .would someone
please contact A&E?

The war in Iraq was launched with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results. Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold

If they want a war, we are the sons of war. Iraqi insurgent's posting on a website

The Iraq Study Group, of course, released its report last week, and apparently it is going to be wholly disregarded by the administration. The group that met this week to "discuss the shift in strategy," was the same group that was the architect of the current benighted policy and strategy. This seems to me, to say the very least, problematic. The group consists of Rumsfeld (who is not quite done yet), Cheney and others, and has already shown itself resistant to advice and quite immutable in their understanding and implementation of "victory and democracy" for Iraq. We, as the Iraq Study, pointed out, are involved in an insurgent war, now a civil war, that is entirely of our own creating. As any military historian knows, there are two approaches to an insurgency: scorched earth, like the quote that inspired this blog's title--the Caledonian chieftan said of the Romans, "They make a desert and call it peace"; the other approach is diplomacy, with all interested parties involved. You don't pick and choose who you talk to: you talk to everybody--Shiite milita, Sunni insurgent, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, and the list goes on. I don't think the administration will choose either option. A scorched earth policy is morally and ethically untenable (not that this administration hasn't entertained that idea, but we don't have the troops, and no one who wants a political future will call for a draft), and like middle-school children, the adminstration is inclined to talk to those who agree with our policy (or at least are not vocally against it). As Jim Baker, and even the Machiavellian Henry Kissinger, noted, you "must talk to your enemies." I don't see this happening, and I see a very bleak future for Iraq if policy and strategy has not changed radically within 90 days. I am despairing at this point.

HISTORY REDUX

Some have asked me when my interest in the Middle East began. That's easy to answer. In 1978, I worked at a hotel in Dallas Texas with an Iranian student named Dareesh (he was attending UTA--University of Texas at Arlington). We became great friends. His father was quite wealthy and his family seemed to be apolitical. But then in the latter part of that year, his father was taken from his home by the Shah's secret police, jailed, and ultimately executed. Dareesh knew, when he found out that his father was dead, that he couldn't go back to Iran--at least not at the moment.

Dareesh was a secular man, but when the Iranian student movement agitated to bring back the Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in Paris, he was an adamant supporter. He told me, and I will never forget this, "We thought that America was our friend, but they brought this tyrant [the Shah] to power, and he killed my father, and he's killed thousands more." He then gave me a pamphlet about the Ayatollah, and told me not to show it to anybody else. He was worried about his mother and brothers in Tehran. I was a teenager at the time, and I didn't understand what this was all about (the Shah? Ayatollah?), but I saw Dareesh become angrier and angrier, and increasingly strident. Granted, I don't think he thought very much about the Shah, or at least he didn't talk about him, until his father was arrested and killed--but he was a teenager too, and more concerned with friends and his studies.

After the Shah sought exile in America, this nearly drove Dareesh mad. "How can America give amnesty to such a man?" he would repeatedly ask me. I, at the time, didn't even really understand what amnesty entailed, or even what it was. I would stand mute while Dareesh would unleash a torrent of anger, hurt and frustration. And then, the U.S. Embassy was taken over and the staff held hostage for over four hundred days. Dareesh, and other students, found the environment in the U.S. increasingly hostile (the Pakistani guys that worked in the kitchen of the hotel made T-shirts that read "I am NOT an Iranian," half as a joke, and half as an answer to the local rednecks who would occasionally throw a beer can from a speeding truck at them as they walked to school). Finally, Dareesh decided to go home. We had a going away party for him, and he seemed elated, so full of hope for Iran. I'm sure he didn't reckon on what would follow. We never heard from him again, and I often wonder if he fought in the Iraq-Iran war (when we were Saddam Hussein's friends), and if he lost his life in this brutal eight-year war.

So here we are in Iraq, our former ally when the Iranians were incoveniently militant. And I wonder whom or what will come to replace Hussein, our former man in Arabia? What form will this once oppressive, like Iran, but secular government take? What great beast, its hour come at last, is slouching toward Baghdad to be born?

Singing the End of The Semester Blues

This has been an interesting semester. The introduction of students to the world of Iraqi and American blogs was at times hard and at other times rewarding. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was, at many of my students' sheer ignorance of the war and what exactly it entails. It's not their fault; the war has been so media-managed by the Pentagon that one doesn't see the graphic images that I did as a child during the Vietnam war. I remember flag-draped coffins and soldiers who were near death carried into helicopters on stretchers. It was apparent that war was brutal and ugly. The sacrifice was obvious, even to a ten-year-old like myself. Presently, the Pentagon will not allow the media to film the caskets of the war dead being unloaded from the planes, and American, or any Western, correspondents can't leave the Green Zone, which, in itself, is the height of neocolonialsim madness and hubris.

I am half way through "Fiasco." At times, I have to put it down because I find myself getting so angry. If you planned to screw up a war so badly, I don't think you could. The CPA and the Pentagon should be held accountable for all the deaths of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians. They should be accountable for the Dantesque condition of Baghdad. They should be accountable for the millions of educated Iraqis who are fleeing because of the violence, and because the intelligentsia is always first on the firing line during wartime. And young Americans need to occasionally divert their attention from their iPods, their Playstation 3s, their "Grey's Anatomy" and watch the news. We, as civilians, aren't asked to sacrifice anything-- except our soldiers' lives: to not dignify them by being aware and holding our officials accountable is unforgivable. Not to speak of the Iraqis whose plights are spelled out in their blogs, in English, for Americans to read and digest.

Finally (I'll get off my soapbox here), I'm so glad to see (and very saddened in a way because this should have never happened) that Zappy of "Where Date Palms Grow" has left Baghdad. Every time he didn't post for a while, his readers held their collective breath. Read of his darkly funny escape from Iraq. He is linked to this blog.