2 August 2004Znet Tom Engelhardt
Here's the most basic news report from America's Iraq over the last half-year, a recent Associated Press piece in its entirety; three sentences, each a paragraph -- a kind of journalistic haiku from hell headlined, U.S. soldier killed in roadside bombing:
"A roadside bombing near the town of Samarra on Sunday killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two others, the military said.
"The attack, about 12:30 p.m., hit a passing patrol of 1st Infantry Division soldiers in Samarra, a hotbed of violence 60 miles northwest of Baghdad.
"As of Friday, July 30, 909U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq in March 2003, according to the Defense Department."
Fill in Baghdad or Ramadi or Falluja or Baquba or numerous other Iraqi cities and towns (without dropping that "hotbed of violence") and you've got a template for the post-war war as it's been fought for months. One rigged roadside bomb, one dead American and two wounded Americans -- which may mean a young woman without a limb, a young man without his sight... who knows? This has been the drip-drip-drip of Iraq for us. One death, now generally tucked away well off the front page, because when anything becomes the norm in our media world, it ceases to be the news. In the same way, constant kidnappings or regular beheadings, if endlessly repeated, will also migrate sooner or later into the deep interiors of our larger papers and drop off the half-hour that each night (minus ten minutes of medicine ads for the aging) passes on network TV for our planet's news.
Ken Dilanian of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who not so many months ago was writing of the media "underplaying the good things happening in Iraq," makes this point in a recantation piece ("As for the turnaround, I couldn't have been more wrong") whose headline tells all, The situation in Iraq right now is not as bad as the news media are portraying it to be. It's worse:
"A kind of violence fatigue has descended over news coverage of Iraq. Car bombings that would have made the front page a year ago get scant mention these days. Assassinations and kidnappings have become so common that they have lost their power to shock. More U.S. soldiers died in July (38) than in June (26), but that didn't make the nightly newscasts, either."
But that's unlikely to remain the case for long. We like to say that our imperial media is "global"; in Iraq the truth of that is increasingly apparent. Like the rest of us on the planet, the insurgents, Islamists, ex-Baathists and other Iraqi resistors, having been summoned into existence by the "neocon sofa samurai" of the Bush administration, as Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis called them Sunday (8/1/04), now find themselves caught in the sensationalist gears of our media. Even if the Iraqi rebellion didn't call for a constant raising of the stakes against the American occupiers and their Iraqi followers, the media process would. If you cease to raise the stakes, after all, it's those back pages for you.
I don't, by the way, have a typical story of an Iraqi casualty at hand, because the dead and wounded of Iraq tend not to get their own individual stories in our press. If enough of them die to create the sort of media-worthy story Dilanian writes about, then there's a headline like the one in the New York Times last Thursday that read, "70 Are Killed By Car Bomber In an Iraqi City." Cumulatively, under "we don't do body counts" -- a quote from former Centcom war commander and now memoirist General Tommy Franks -- the Iraq Body Count website has carefully toted up the corpses in news reports from Iraq. It offers a minimum figure of 11,336 Iraqi "civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq" and a maximum figure of 13,305. This not only doesn't include Iraqi military deaths, which certainly numbered in the thousands, but is a distinctly conservative estimate, relying as it does on what's reported in a world where so many deaths by definition go unreported and -- as Western journalists are increasingly limited to brief, dangerous forays outside of Baghdad or simply outside their hotels in Baghdad -- so much else goes unreported as well.
Just recently, according to al-Jazeera, a group of Iraqi "activists and academics," who carried out a "detailed survey" of Iraqi civilian casualties in the fall of 2003, coordinating, they claim, with hospitals and gravediggers, offered the staggering figure of 37,000 civilian deaths -- including 6,103 in bloody Baghdad and 861 in Kirkuk.
Eric Margolis, in his latest column in which he compares George Bush to George Armstrong Custer ("...an arrogant, opinionated, headstrong fool who spurned all warnings, boldly and resolutely leading his command to disaster on the Little Big Horn"), quotes a figure of 20,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. Eleven thousand, twenty thousand, thirty-seven thousand -- it's impossible to know. And that's without the military dead (who for some reason seem not to count). Let's say, for the sake of argument, 25,000 Iraqis have died in all. Compared to the 900-plus dead American soldiers (and a few dead American soldiers of fortune), these certainly might be typical figures from any colonial war of the 19th century when, by rule of thumb, perhaps one Westerner died for every 10-20 "natives." And since Iraq increasingly looks like our country's first full-scale attempted colonial grab since we emerged as the planet's superpower in 1945, it's perhaps not an inaccurate comparison to call to mind.
As part of the justification for this war, our President increasingly invoked Saddam's "killing fields" while other justifications fell away. In his January 2004 State of the Union address, for instance, in a passage now famous for the switch from citing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to its "WMD-related program activities," he said:
"Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq. Objections to war often come from principled motives. But let us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We're seeking all the facts. Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. Had we failed to act, Security Council resolutions on Iraq would have been revealed as empty threats, weakening the United Nations and encouraging defiance by dictators around the world. Iraq's torture chambers would still be filled with victims, terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq -- where hundreds of thousands of men and women and children vanished into the sands -- would still be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place."
We were, of course, implicated in many of those Saddamist "killing fields" -- and not just because we supported his regime, and so its murderous acts and aggressive war against Iran, in the 1980s. After all, the elder Bush, having called for a Shiite uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War, stepped back at the last moment and let the defeated dictator order his helicopters into the air and his forces into action to slaughter the rebellious Shiites, thus creating many of those killing fields, which were later to become part of his son's war propaganda.
Now the killing fields of Iraq are back, though in a different form, and Iraq is again a charnel house, though this time with an occupying army and -- as yet -- no dictator, without in fact a central principle of order of any sort. Safer? Here's the beginning of a description of America's safer Iraq, as redefined by the rebels, taken from a piece by Akeel Huseen and Nicolas Pelham of the British Financial Times (Rebels' writ runs large across the troublesome Sunni triangle, 7/30/04):
"In the capital of the largest province of Iraq's so-called 'Sunni triangle', rebels have taken to announcing their daily arrival by loud-speaker. 'Close your shops before 1400. We don't want to hit anyone. The fighting will begin after 1400. Stay safe,' trumpets the megaphone strung to a white Nissan pick-up that circulates around the main thoroughfare of Ramadi at 1 pm.
"By 13:45 the streets empty. The governorate buildings, the police station and shops close. The police and the Iraqi National Guard, who had patrolled the town, disappear from the streets... [The resistance] remain[s] until daybreak, when the local security forces arrive for their eight-hour shift and markets briefly spring to life."
In the Sunni triangle and some southern cities, the Iraqi police have either made a kind of minimalist peace with the rebels, are besieged, or are simply absent, and whole regions of Iraq are now killing fields of largely unreported chaos and violence, kidnappings and murders, armed politics and crime, as Robert Fisk of the British Independent tried to indicate in a recent piece based on an American military document (Unreported war: US document reveals scale of conflict):
"US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported. This account of the insurgency across Iraq over three days last week provides astonishing proof that Iraq under its new, American-appointed Prime Minister, has grown more dangerous and violent."
Just recently, for instance, armed men broke into the Ramadi home of the governor of AnbarProvince, kidnapped his three sons, set part of his house on fire, and fled. The governor has since announced that he will resign if his sons are returned.
This then is George Bush's Iraq and, however much media fatigue there may be about it here, and however much people may imagine it as a kind of unchanging backdrop to the upcoming three-month presidential campaign and the three scheduled presidential debates, it is neither a constant, nor even a stable situation. Between now and November, it is likely to devolve further and more spectacularly, and so drive the Bush administration toward November 2 in an ever greater state of panic.
Companions to the killing fields in speech after presidential speech were the "torture chambers," "rape rooms," and "children's prisons" of Saddam's Iraq. "By our actions, our coalition removed a grave and gathering danger. We also ended one of the cruelest regimes in our time. Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers and children's prisons are closed forever."
Well, maybe not forever... and this is but one of a number of stories likely to board American consciousness in the weeks to come. Note, by the way, that according to al-Jazeera, the attempt by that Iraqi group to tally their own war dead ended (as so much has ended there) when "one of the group's workers was arrested by Kurdish militias and handed over to US forces in October 2003. The fate of the worker remains unclear."
Ghost children and dog piles
As with violence fatigue, so with the Abu Ghraib story and the larger tale of our offshore mini-gulag. These have largely disappeared from media sight since the Pentagon's Inspector General conveniently issued his whitewash report on the subject on the day the 9/11 Commission's report was also released. So many "bad apples," so little time. Let's move on.
(By the way, check out a piece by Michael Uhl, former counterintelligence officer in Vietnam and later antiwar activist, at antiwar.com on the subject of Abu Ghraib. He even reminds us that President Nixon spoke of the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre as "a few bad apples." Over the years, it seems, we've planted enough mutant apple trees to make Johnny Appleseed toss in his grave.)
In the meantime, the CIA with its ghost detention centers and its ghost detainees, its "extraordinary renditions" (now so common as to be ordinary renditions) -- the turning over of "high value" al-Qaeda "targets" to regimes willing to employ straightforward torture without blinking -- and its corps of "water-boarders" remains remarkably untouched; the desire for high-value intelligence from our Iraqi prisons evidently unstaunched, and media pieces about all of this once again being written in the coded language that fits Washington comfort levels. Take the following paragraph from a recent front-page New York Times piece by Douglas Jehl (A High Qaeda Aide Retracted Claim of Link With Iraq) about a captured "senior al-Qaeda leader," al-Shaykh al-Libi, who claimed that the organization had ties with Saddam's Iraq (providing Cheney and crew with the "evidence" for their endless claims), and then recanted (without stopping Cheney for a second):
"Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in December 2001, is still being held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a secret interrogation center, and American officials say his now-recanted claims raise new questions about the value of the information obtained from such detainees."
Now what's missing from this description? Two implied words: "...from such detainees by torture." You would think, given all that's gone before, that somewhere in such a piece the subject of torture methods and their notorious ability to extract unreliable information from victims might at least be raised. (Juan Cole, always provocative, offers an alternate theory on why Libi made these claims -- to lure the Bush administration into a war in Iraq much desired by al-Qaeda.)
But as is often the case in our encoded imperial press, the Jehl piece, when looked at carefully, really offers up another story entirely. It's the tale of yet one more insider leak. As a start, it's a piece without a single named source. The sources cited are in the plural -- "intelligence officials," "American intelligence officials," and "American officials" (but clearly one and the same as those "intelligence officials"). The leak itself surely represents an attack on a major remaining, endlessly reiterated foundation for the Bush administration's tattered case for war, in fact for much of what's happened since the 9/11 assaults: that al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime had close, even operational ties. On the face of it, behind Jehl's piece is a direct attack on Vice President Cheney, launched from... but from where? It could certainly be from angry and embittered officials inside the CIA itself. There's no way to know. But if so, then perhaps the potential torture frame for such a story might not suit the leakers particularly well. And torture and access, like torture and apples, go so uncomfortably together.
Still -- whatever's not being written at this second about systemic acts in our Bermuda Triangle of Injustice -- this, like Iraq, is an unstable, even devolving situation. Given the many official reports still to come, which are likely to place blame ever higher in the administration, and still-surfacing news stories sure to appear (not to speak of all those leakers, leaking away), the quiet of this moment is unlikely to hold long, no less through November 2.
Among these stories, none is potentially more devastating than the one that seems to combine those missing "children's prisons" and those never-to-be-reconstituted "rape rooms." We know that New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh is on the trail of the story of the rape and sodomizing of young, imprisoned Iraqis, possibly by Americans, or at least viewed by and filmed by Americans, in Abu Ghraib and that he plans to write it up sooner or later. ("The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking...") In the meantime, Neil MacKay of the Glasgow Morning Herald in an investigation (Iraq's Child Prisoners, 8/1/04) based on UNICEF documents writes:
"It's not certain exactly how many children are being held by coalition forces in Iraq, but a Sunday Herald investigation suggests there are up to 107. Their names are not known, nor is where they are being kept, how long they will be held or what has happened to them during their detention."
In other words, we hold not only "ghost detainees" in our global gulag, but "ghost children" in our Iraqi detention system. He reports:
"A detention centre for children was established in Baghdad, where according to ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) a significant number of children were detained. UNICEF was informed that the coalition forces were planning to transfer all children in adult facilities to this 'specialised' child detention centre. In July 2003, UNICEF requested a visit to the centre but access was denied. Poor security in the area of the detention centre has prevented visits by independent observers like the ICRC since last December."
In the meantime, Rolling Stone magazine has gotten its media hands on the 106 "annexes" to the Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib that the Pentagon long held back from Congress. And these, as recounted in an Osha Gray Davidson piece, The Secret File of Abu Ghraib, make grim reading indeed, right down to eyewitness accounts of the sexual abuse of children and, of course, of adults, stripped, beaten, humiliated and then made to climb upon one another, forming what were called "dog piles" for prison-photo ops. This term, unsurprisingly, fits oh so well with the comments of General Geoffrey Miller, commander of our hell-hole in Guantanamo ("Gitmo"), who was dispatched by Donald Rumsfeld himself to get our Iraqi detention system extracting information more efficiently, and considered efficiency and dogs to be one and the same.
"According to Col. Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib, Miller spoke with him about using dogs on prisoners: 'He said that they used military working dogs, and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information.' Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of all military prisons in Iraq, told Rolling Stone that Miller described his plan to 'Gitmo-ize interrogation operations' in Iraq and boasted that prisoners at Guantanamo 'were treated like dogs, because you can never let them be in charge.'"
Top to bottom, it was dogs on the brain, wasn't it?
Acts of thievery and campaign attack dogs
Among the things the Democrats attempted to steal from Republicans at their recent convention were: the flag, militarism, "strength," Reagan-style optimism, and military valor... actually I take back the military valor. This round of Republicans never had that, did they (except in their movie dreams)? As a friend pointed out to me, though Kerry addressed George Bush directly in his acceptance speech, calling for the two of them to be "optimists, not just opponents" and "respect" each other, the convention as a whole was a full-scale, frontal assault on the Bush-Cheney personal "war record" (or lack thereof). After all, we have a President whose "inadvertently destroyed" Pentagon payroll records were just recently inadvertently found again, adding to a growing dog pile of inadvertence -- this is a story not likely to go away easily either -- and a vice president who "asked for and got five student deferments before he turned 26 and became ineligible for the draft in 1967. He is famous for his [Vietnam-era] explanation: 'I had other priorities.'"
There's been much discussion of Kerry's decision to choose John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate -- a politician whose "optimism" (gosh, there's that Republican word again) makes him (supposedly) incapable of saying a negative thing about anyone. Now, common knowledge has it that the role of the veep in a campaign is to be an "attack dog," allowing the presidential candidate to project an above-the-fray presidential-ness (as Kerry did on acceptance-speech night simply by entering the convention hall from the rear through crowds of well-wishers as if he were on his way to his first State of the Union address). Dick Cheney fits the vice-presidential attack-dog mold to a T (as in gnawable T-bone). But Cheney is so unpopular, even unappetizing nationally that he can only attack effectively among the red-meat Republican faithful -- their gatherings being the sole places, other than military bases, where he can show his face. In other words, he can "mobilize the base," growling all the way, but he can't "mobilize" American voters more generally.
As a result, while Kerry (attacking away) has declared himself positive, optimistic and above the fray, and his Veep (with a Tom Cruise smile that, in an extraterrestrial way, lights up his face night or day) accentuates the positive, George Bush, the very day after the Democratic convention, had to rush back to the campaign trail as his own attack dog in a speech meant to "belittle" his opponent.
In Karl Rove's dreams at this point, Dick Cheney would have been unleashed (along with other "surrogates") to travel the country growling away, but the President would have been above the fray, fighting that war on terror, acting... well... presidential (with maybe a major Crawford vacation thrown in). No such luck. George has been plunged into the thick of an up-for-grabs, make-it-up-as-you-go campaign, filled with visible anxiety; a campaign that now has two "attack dogs" at the top of one ticket facing Mr. Swift Boat and his smiling sidekick on the other. I don't think that, in the long run, this is good news for the Republicans, now in the dog-fight of their lives; nor does Josh Marshall of the talkingpointsmemo.com website, a canny observer of Washington who, in the Hill, recently wrote:
"A couple of weeks back, The Washington Post ran an article describing President Bush's novel campaign strategy. Rather than tacking toward the middle to garner the support of swing voters, the president's campaign is focusing its energy on consolidating and energizing its conservative base. As the Post put it, 'Although not discounting swing voters, Bush is placing unusual emphasis so far on rallying the faithful.'
"But is this truly a novel strategy? Not really. It's actually a strategy as old as presidential politics itself -- one so well-known that there's even a name reserved for presidents who use it as a reelection strategy ... one-termers... It's the losers who oscillate between nailing down the base and swinging for the fences with desperate gambits."
Including perhaps raising the alert level to orange with Kerry on the campaign trail and the Republican convention approaching.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]
