Category: Current Affairs

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Rage Against the News

So, a journalist videotapes something we’d rather not believe can happen — a Marine killing a wounded, unarmed enemy. The official response is that the incident is under investigation. And the unofficial response is: from people who feel the war is a misguided, ruinous dead end — people like me — that the incident somehow shows how senseless and tragic the whole adventure is. And from people who appear to feel that all the devastation of life and treasure in Iraq is just part of the cost of preserving our freedom and security — a view I find mind-bendingly out of touch with reality — there’s rage: that a reporter would dare do his job, that the actions of one of our soldiers would be questioned, that anyone could second-guess the need to blow away a wounded enemy, regardless of the circumstances.

Of course, the reactions on the other side (here and here for instance) go a lot farther than that. Kevin Sites, the journalist who shot the pool video, is now the enemy, “a turd,” “a slimy bastard,” and worse. Another blogger urges: “Note to all soldiers: If a prize-greedy journalist films something you don’t want aired because you know it could get your fellow soldiers killed, take the camera and destoy [sic] the film. You have the permission of the people who support you and NOT the savages you are so rightly killing.” Some posts even advocate violence against the journalist.

What’s stunning is the desire, on one hand, to deny what the pictures show, and on the other to punish or even shut down the source of the information. The right-wing site MichNews (“Most In-Depth, Conservative Honest News & Commentary) ran a column today that made the modest, unhysterical charge that Sites is an accomplice to al Qaida and Saddam Hussein and decrying how the video besmirched the “heroic warrior.” The column, by someone named Irwin Graulich, calls for a boycott of NBC and its owner, General Electric for “their despicable practices.”

OK, I was moved enough by that last piece of writing to send a letter in response:

Dear Mr. Graulich:

Regarding your piece “Fahrenheit Fallujah,” two points:

First, have you seen the videotape? If so, you would seem to be intentionally mischaracterizing it. The individual or individuals involved did not face any kind of “split second decision [sic]” in this case. Indeed, one voice can be heard identifying the wounded enemy as casualties from the previous day, then other voices discuss whether one of the wounded men is feigning death; then comes the shooting. If it’s improper to jump to the conclusion that the videotape

shows a Marine committing what amounts to murder, it’s also improper to characterize the tape as showing a Marine facing a life-and-death situation with no time to assess the situation.

Second, your comments about Kevin Sites amount to slander of a journalist who has a long and very accessible record of sympathetic coverage of our troops in Iraq. Far from portraying them as heartless killers, he’s done as much as any U.S. journalist I’m aware of to put a human face on a group of people who’ve been called upon to do an inhuman job in inhuman circumstances. Don’t take my word for it — check out his independent writings on the war at kevinsites.net.

The truth of this war is ugly and savage. It’s also ugly and savage to so casually condemn those who honorably and professionally try to convey that truth.

Respectfully yours,

Dan Brekke

Trying to respond reasonably and respectfully in this situation may be absurd. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, comes back in response.

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TomDispatch.com

TomDispatch.com is a blog published by Tom Engelhardt, an editor and journalist who teaches at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It’s a challenging, thoughtful site. Especially worth reading as soon as you have the time are a couple long posts he put up a few weeks ago dealing with Iraq: “The Costs of War,” a piece from a Texas woman named Teri Wills Allison whose son has been sent to the war, and a followup with reader reaction to her account. Among the many passages from Allison’s essay that struck a chord:

“For the first time in my life, and with great amazement and sorrow, I feel what can only be described as hatred. It took me a long time to admit it, but there it is. I loathe the hubris, the callousness, and the lies of those in the Bush administration who led us into this war. Truth be told, I even loathe the fallible and very human purveyors of those lies. I feel no satisfaction in this admission, only sadness and recognition. And hope that –given time — I can do better. I never wanted to hate anyone.”

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Winning Iraq, One Iraqi at a Time

Sometimes soccer balls aren’t enough to win the battle for hearts and minds. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. As in Falluja, where it’s hard to avoid the echo of the legendary (and, naturally, disputed) Vietnam quote reported by Peter Arnett, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” But beyond the spectacle of blowing the town to bits in order to make it safe for democracy, our mission to destroy the most evil of the evildoers produced an incident that’s sure to make us even more beloved not just throughout Iraq, but everywhere in the world where people are just hoping we’ll show up to spread our special brand of liberty. Not to be too elliptical, NBC reporter Kevin Sites (check out his blog; it’s excellent) witnessed a Marine execute a wounded Iraqi insurgent in a mosque.

From MSNBC’s online account of the incident:

“Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.

“One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

“The Marine could be heard insisting: ‘He’s f—ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f—ing dead.’ Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

” ‘Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.

“When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: ‘I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.’ ”

One may object to this incident being singled out since, hell, we’re up against savages and after all, this kind of thing happens in every war. Maybe so. But part of the mission ought to be to cling to whatever separates us from the savages, and the fact this happens in every war is no endorsement for it; in fact, it’s the strongest argument for making war the absolute last resort.

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Progress in Iraq

According to the Iraq Coalition Casualties site, 65 U.S. troops died in the first 12 days of the Iraq war in March 2003. Between Monday and Saturday last week, six days, 59 63 64 U.S. troops were killed, about two-thirds of them in the Falluja fighting (and let’s not forget the 1,200 Iraqis the U.S. says it terminated during the last week and whatever civilian casualties were inflicted). So, in Month 20 of the Great Regime Change, we’re experiencing the most intense and deadly combat to date. Now, of course, things are bound to get better.

(Update: The Iraq casualties web site updated the number of killed earlier today, so that’s why I’ve changed it above).

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Der Österreicher Kommt

The dark cloud on America’s political horizon is growing a little more ominous. No, not the ultrafundamentalist, ultraright, the-Bible-is-law crowd (they’re not on the horizon; they’re directly overhead, raining all manner of hail and hell on the heads of the unbelievers). No, I’m talking about California’s favorite Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As noted previously, there’s a fairly serious though so far fairly quiet move afoot to amend the U.S. Constitution to remove the requirement that the president must be born a U.S. citizen; that way, Arnold could run and bring his brand of bombastic, hit-and-run populism to all the people of America.

Now the campaign is getting aggressive. A new organization somewhat disingenuously called “Amend for Arnold and Jen” — at amendforarnold.org — is launching a series of TV ads promoting a change in the Constitution. I say disingenuous because the site name attempts to make the effort look as if, gee, it benefits all qualifying immigrants, even Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who hails from British Columbia. But it’s clear looking at the site that this is purely an effort to try to get The Austrian into das Weißhaus.

Some of Arnold’s rich Silicon Valley friends are behind the drive, The main mover appears to be Lissa Gaye Morgenthaler-Jones (she’s also known by various permutations of that collection of names). A Google search shows:

–She’s been a heavy contributor to and participant in Schwarzenegger’s various California campaigns.

–She’s an investment banker and analyst and daughter of David Morgenthaler, an early Silicon Valley venture capitalist; in campaign finance statements, she’s said to be head of something called Laeta Capital, though I haven’t found anything on the firm tonight.

–She’s a moderate, pro-choice Republican who’s contributed to the WISH List — a Republican knockoff of the Democratically-focused Emily’s List; the WISH List steers money to pro-choice Republican women candidates on the local, state, and federal level.

It’s really hard for me to look at this calmly, never mind objectively. It’s clear that the principal reasons that foreign-born Americans were barred from the presidency are no longer relevant and that’s it’s reasonable for long-ago naturalized citizens to stand for president. When it comes to talent and ability, there’s nothing magic about being born in the United States. Just look at the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the other hand, amending the Constitution to benefit one man just stinks of opportunism. Of course, that fits the Arnold mold perfectly: He’s the opportunist’s opportunist. He proposed a measure to create a rich statewide after-school program for all de children of Colly-fornia; but he forgot to include any way to pay for it. He’s governing a state in the midst of a profound fiscal crisis, and his solution is to foist the bill off on the next generation. Meantime, he proposes balancing the budget by slashing education spending. And to get his way, he blusters up and down the state and bullies anyone who tries to stand up to him (his current civics project involves getting rid of the Democratic majorities in the state Legislature and its congressional delegation by putting an amendment on the ballot that would create a new reapportionment commission). And as far as his moderation goes: The guy stood by Bush, a conservative radical, and helped him get re-elected. I think the Austrian would be a friggin’ menace in the White House.

So, my ambivalence aside, I’ll be counting on the narrow-minded knee-jerk xenophobia of my fellow Americans to win out over their slack-jawed drooling love of celebrities in general and The Terminator in particular to keep foreigners out of the White House. For a little while, anyway.

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Guilty Bastard

After my extensive experience as a journalist and legal observer (I’ve put in hundreds if not thousands of hours watching top-notch crime dramas such as “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” “Law and Order” in regular, special, and extra-crunchy criminal flavors, “CSI” episodes set in venues as varies as Las Vegas, Miami, and New York City; not to mention formative undergraduate stints as a watcher of “Dragnet,” “Adam 12,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders,” and even “Burke’s Law“), I was unconvinced that Scott Peterson was guilty of anything but being a lying, conniving bastard (with a dash of sociopath thrown in). But that’s why we have a legal system in this country: to tell when people like that are also murderers. In any case, he’s guilty. At least until the case goes into overtime.

The best part of catching the verdict coverage early this afternoon (this can be read as an admission that I failed to occupy my time with more meaningful business; no need for a trial on that one) was the proliferation of mugging nitwits who showed up in the courthouse shots of every channel covering the story (I checked CNN, Court TV, MSNBC, and Fox News; the two specimens pictured here were captured on MSNBC). I mean, of course it’s nothing new. But it is kind of extraordinary that we’re all so conditioned to the presence of cameras that this kind of behavior — now apparently accompanied by cellphones, so we can talk to our buddies while we’re on screen — has become sort of automatic.

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Arafat, Sponsored by Israel

A nice segue on one of Charles Osgood’s CBS Radio spots this morning: He did a news item on the strange drama surrounding Yasser Arafat’s decline, and ran a soundbite from one of Arafat’s aides that went something like this: “He will live or die based on his body’s strength and the will of God.” Then Osgood comes on and says, “More after this, from the American Jewish Committee.” The message turned out to be an ad for Israel. A lovely unplanned moment of irony.

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Notes on the New Iraq

A reading: The New Yorker (Nov. 15 edition) has a harrowing piece from Jon Lee Anderson, its principal Iraq correspondent, on the consequences of the U.S. decision to try to break up the Baath Party and the Iraqi Army. I think a lot of this stuff has been said before — that abolishing the party and disbanding the army simply through Iraq’s best and brightest, on one hand, and most desperate and well-armed on the other — into the street with little to do but oppose or fight the occupation. But he presents a couple of tragic examples of what happened to individual Baathists in the wake of "de-Baathification," suggests how poorly the purge program was run, and collects some interesting opinions on the ground from U.S. military and civilian officials who questioned the purge when it was ordered.

"The order had an immediate effect. … ‘We had a lot of directors general of hospitals who were very good, and, with de-Baathification, we lost them and their expertise overnight,’ [Stephen Browning, the U.S. official in charge of Iraq’s Ministry of Health] told me. At the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which was another of his responsibilities, ‘we were left dealing with what seemed like the fifth string. . . . Nobody who was left knew anything.’

"An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer’s twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, ‘I had my guys coming up to me and saying, "Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?" They all have to feed their families.’ He went on, ‘The problem with the blanket ban is that you get rid of the infrastructure; I mean, after all, these guys ran the country, and you polarize them. So did these decisions contribute to the insurgency? Unequivocally, yes. And we have to ask ourselves: How well did we really know how to run Iraq? Zero.’ "

Even if you’ve been paying attention, Anderson’s article is helpful in explaining how our whole Iraq show has fallen apart.

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Mission Accomplished! Again!

Sands
My dad suggests that there’s a little irony in U.S. troops going into Fallujah, in sort of latter-day "Sands of Iwo Jima" style, 18 months after the president and friends declared "mission accomplished." But maybe the new battle is an excellent public-relations opportunity. We could stage a "Mission Accomplished! Again!" event. Maybe George "Two-Term" Bush could land a chopper in the middle of town, or whatever is left of it after all our precision-munitions work. Maybe someone could drape a big "Mission Accomplished! Again!" banner on the bridge from which those four American security contractors were hung after insurgents killed and burned them earlier this year. And maybe we can get out of Iraq before we need to accomplish the same mission again, in Fallujah or Najaf or some other town we have to blow to hell to liberate.

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My Votes

The night before the election, I was feeling optimistic about a Kerry victory, but aware that because so much was unknown about what was really going on with voters in what the French call les états d’oscillation (Florida, Ohio, Michigan et al.), that I was talking myself into my optimism. That brought to mind my first presidential vote, in 1972; I had just turned 18, my participation was a gift of the 26th Amendment. The race, insofar as it was a race, was McGovern versus Nixon, an ultraliberal antiwar candidate who chose, then dropped, a mentally fragile running mate versus a paranoid lush who was not only making a historic diplomatic opening to China but also, it turned out, working overtime to entangle himself in Watergate.

I voted for McGovern, of course. I was in the midst of my first newspaper job, working as a copy boy for Chicago Today, and worked a double shift on election night. Despite what all the polls said — and though I haven’t gone back and read them, I’m sure they were saying McGovern was going to get his ass kicked — I was hopeful. I wore a McGovern button into the office. Despite that breach of unspoken newsroom etiquette, no one told me to take it off; the reporters and editors probably looked on with a mixture of amusement and pity at my delusion, long hair, and odd, sometimes bad-tempered idealism. Nixon, who had just squeaked through in 1968, won in a landslide. McGovern won Massashusetts, probably still in the thrall of the Kennedys, and the District of Columbia, whose electorate is charmingly immune from the world outside. He didn’t even win his home state. I only remember that it was a painfully long shift, with the outcome known pretty much as soon as the polls closed.

Somewhere back there in my asthmatic and thick-lensed boyhood, I had gotten the idea that the Democrats owned the White House. My mom was a precinct captain in 1960, and we had a huge Kennedy poster in our front window. His victory was a big bright spot in a bleak year, and I remember watching his inauguration on our black-and-white TV. In 1964, Johnson won. A fifth-grade classmate, Ron Crouch, wrote me recently to remind me that we had made up LBJ signs to put up in our classroom; it seemed natural to me (though I remember I thought the Goldwater bumperstickers that used the chemical abbreviations for gold and water — AuH20 — were really clever), but Ron’s Republican parents were horrified. When I got old enough, I saw some history in the notion that Democrats won the White House: in the 10 elections before I first voted, the Democrats won seven (FDR in 1932, ’36, ’40, ’44; Truman in ’48; Kennedy; and Johnson). To me, Nixon’s victory in 1968 seemed an anomaly that could be explained by the tragic death of the most inspiring candidate in the race, Bobby Kennedy.

In 1972, I was appalled by the idea that Nixon would get four more years, but, boy, did the people speak. Then, of course, the Watergate conspiracy and Nixon’s role in it was laid bare, and he was out. So in 1976, the Democrats were up again and I got to vote (absentee, because I was in Japan) for a winner (though, despite having been crippled by the Nixon scandal and having a candidate who insisted on national television that the Iron Curtain didn’t exist where Poland was concerned, the Republicans nearly won; in retrospect, that narrow victory should have been a sign of what was to come for the Democrats).

So, my votes since then:

1980: Carter

1984: Mondale

1988: Dukakis

1992: Clinton

1996: Clinton

2000: Gore

2004: Kerry

I note that I have been nothing if not a faithful Democrat. And also that there’s only one winning candidate on that list. So after nine presidential elections, my record is three wins and six losses. Not exactly what my teen-age self expected when I cast my first vote. I know history isn’t this simple, or maybe it is but we’re in love with the notion it’s far more complex, but: I noted that in the 10 elections from 1932 through 1968, the Democrats won seven times. However, in the nine elections from 1896 through 1932, the Republicans won seven (McKinley in 1896 and 1900; Roosevelt in ’04; Taft in ’08; Harding in ’20; Coolidge in ’24, and Hoover in ’28). So maybe there’s a cycle at work here. The earlier Republican cycle was ended by a national calamity, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression; the ensuing Democratic cycle ended with another national crisis, highlighted by the Vietnam War; and now we’re deep into a Republican cycle, with all the elements of a crisis on hand.

As I said, I believe history is more complex than this, and that the cycles I’m talking about might be only as meaningful and useful as a horoscope. Still, I think it’s apparent that the easy assumptions after a smashing electoral victory — for instance, that the Republicans and their values are supreme — can unravel with amazing speed.