"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
The last day no Americans were killed in Iraq: September 5 (according to the authoritative monthly report at Iraq Coalition Casualties).
The last day no Iraqis were killed in the war? I wonder how far back you have to go for that. March 18, 2003?
Another number from the casualties site: Earlier this month, the number of U.S. troops wounded in the war hit 20,000.
Technorati Tags: iraq
Our president and his crew of new world architects — slogan: “Blowin’ shit up as fast as we can for freedom” — are out on the road with a new message about Iraq: It’s a good war. It’s a necessary war. And if you’re agin’ it, you’re nothin’ but an ol’ appeaser of fascism. (The new pronunciation for “Iraq” is “Sudetenland.”)
That’s nice.
CNN, like everyone else, is covering the story. Reading through one of their newsfeeds, I discovered that someone’s having a little fun, at the president’s expense, in a headline: “Bush 3.0 releases patch for Iraq war.” A good, sharp piece of commentary worthy of The Onion, but markedly different from the story’s actual headline: “Bush begins new push to shore up fight on terrorism, Iraq.”
So what happened? Either someone at CNN is getting playful with headlines, or somehow the page was hacked. I’ve got doubts about either scenario, but whatever happened, it wasn’t an accident. Screenshots below (click for larger images).
[Update: I saw the “Bush 3.0 headlines sometime between 9 and 9:30 a.m. Pacific; it’s now 10:15, and all evidence of the headline has vanished in the updated version of the story. I’ve sent messages through the CNN site asking what gives, but so far no answer.]
The Times worked up a bogus take on our president’s image and poll tribulations a year after Hurricane Katrina caught his administration, and just about everybody else who might have known better, flat-footed. In The Times’s telling, our president’s famous post-Katrina flight over New Orleans, gazing down on the blur of floodwaters and the invisible drama of people losing their grip on life, was a defining and damning moment. In the words of Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican:
“Unfortunately, it may be hard to erase the regrettable photo of him on Air Force One looking down at the destruction and devastation below. That’s a searing and very unfortunate image that doesn’t reflect the president’s compassion.”
Maybe the image is as bad as all that. But you have to ask yourself, what had Bush done before that picture was taken to mark him as such a dynamic, effective leader. What did he have in the asset column that was so thoroughly erased by the decision to view the catastrophe from afar? The Times finds the answer in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, where Bush made a personal appearance three days after the 9/11 attacks to inspire the Ground Zero workers.
I’m more inclined to think of another, more sprawling disaster scene: Iraq. After watching Bush’s handiwork there, his Hurricane Katrina performance seems like it’s par for the course. If that seems too harsh, consider my favorite Katrina Week utterance. No, not “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Not New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin going off on his profane radio tirade. Those were great, but I like this more: Bush’s remarks at a Southern California event while Katrina was still pounding the coast:
“The storm is moving through, and we’re now able to assess damage, or beginning to assess damage. And I want the people to know in the affected areas that the federal government and the state government and the local governments will work side-by-side to do all we can to help get your lives back in order.
“This was a terrible storm. It’s a storm that hit with a lot of ferocity. It’s a storm now that is moving through, and now it’s the time for governments to help people get their feet on the ground.
“For those of you who prayed for the folks in that area, I want to thank you for your prayers. For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be. We are. We’re in place. We’ve got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the — once we’re able to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas.”
Don’t worry, everyone — he’s got us covered.
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina, iraq
The Associated Press is leading its story on Bush’s reaction to the newly reported terror plot with an emphasis on the president’s use of the phrase “Islamic fascists.” The Times’s website editors follow suit by headlining the story “Bush Focuses on ‘Islamic Fascists.’ ” The implication is that this is a new coinage to describe what in a simpler time we could shove into the general Evildoer file.
This might all be just academic, but the president and his people began using a close variant of this idea last fall, when Bush gave several speeches — including one at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage — where he described “Islamo-fascism:”
“… The tragic images of innocent victims can make it seem like these terrorist attacks are random and isolated acts of madness. While these killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks flow from an ideology and a terrifying vision for the world. Their acts are evil, but they’re not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever we choose to call this enemy, we must recognize that this ideology is very different from the tenets of the great religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment — by terrorism, subversion, and insurgency — of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. …”
The New York Times Magazine on Sunday carried a long essay on the Israeli-Hezbollah war by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi. The piece not only offers unqualified support for Israel’s military strategy to date, it declares the conflict inevitable and part of a new global struggle against yes, fascism:
“When I arrived in Israel, it was the anniversary of the day the Spanish Civil War began. It was 70 years ago that the Spanish generals set off the war — civil, ideological and international — that the fascist governments of the time wanted. And I could not help thinking about this as I landed in Tel Aviv. Syria in the wings . . . Ahmadinejad’s Iran maneuvering . . . Hezbollah, which everyone knows is a little Iran, or a little tyrant, taking Lebanon and its people hostage. . . . And behind the scenes, a fascism with an Islamist face, a third fascism, which is to our generation what the other fascism, and then communist totalitarianism, were to our elders’.
Given the history of the past century, one dare not simply dismiss the suggestion we’re up against a new breed of fascism. But now that the suggestion is made, you have to wonder if this — Iraq, Lebanon, resort to blind military might employed with no plan about a future, no parallel attempt to understand or come to grips with the rage fueling support for our enemies — is the best we can do in response to such a threat.
For tonight, at least, I declare the notion of currency is overrated. John, my brother, points out a good Nicholas von Hoffman piece in The Nation on the new United States “embassy” in Baghdad. Another development in plain sight but somehow virtually invisible from these shores:
“Among the many secrets the American government cannot keep, one of its biggest (104 acres) and most expensive ($592 million) is the American Embassy being built in Baghdad. Surrounded by fifteen-foot-thick walls, almost as large as the Vatican on a scale comparable to the Mall of America, to which it seems to have a certain spiritual affinity, this is no simple object to hide.
“So you think the Bush Administration is planning on leaving Iraq? Read on. …”
Yes, read on: Here. By the way, that $592 million price tag — which I’m sure we’ll be able to multiply by two or three or four by the time all is said and done — is two bucks a head for each and every American.
Technorati Tags: iraq
The New York Times’s David Carr had a column yesterday — “Show Me the Bodies” — noting the relative rarity of pictures of U.S. soldiers slain in combat in Iraq. He discusses the factors involved, including squeamishness among media organizations and the many layers of difficulty, from danger to simple logistics, that conspire against such pictures being taken in the first place. He also mentions a notable exception to the general rule: A picture from the November 2004 battle in Fallujah, when Stefan Zaklin, a photographer with the European Pressphoto Agency embedded with an Army company during the fighting. Carr recounts that Zaklin “took a gritty, horrific portrait” of the company commander after he had been shot and killed by insurgent fighters — a picture widely printed at the time in Germany and France but not in the United States until long afterward (as part of stories about unpublished graphic war images.
Without going into the merits of publishing such a picture — I agree entirely with Zaklin’s argument (the picture he shot is at that link) that the image was important both for him to shoot and for viewers to see — I think Carr has missed the principal reason there aren’t more pictures like the one from Fallujah: The soldiers themselves won’t stand for it. Zaklin mentions this in his discussion of the picture:
“I stayed behind with the two men tasked with guarding the body.
One of the men was clearly on the verge of snapping; he was muttering to himself, trying to keep himself calm. It was dark, and my shutter speed was below what you would normally be comfortable using to get a sharp frame with a digital SLR. I focused the camera, and put it down from my eye. I leaned against a doorjamb, and fired two horizontal frames.
“I looked at the two soldiers, trying to gauge their reaction. One looked at me and then went back to watching the doorway he was guarding. The other kept muttering. I checked to see if the frame was sharp. It was. I rotated the camera, and shot two vertical frames. The mutterer stopped muttering, and shot me a look that sent chills down my spine. I didn’t know him as well as the other soldier, and decided to wait until the soldiers I knew better returned.
“In the end, I wasn’t ever able to take another picture of the dead captain.
“I waited two days, well after the captain’s family was notified, before I put the picture out for the world to see. I knew his family had been told because two colleagues had already interviewed the dead captain’s father about his son’s death. Despite the delay and a scrupulous reading of the embed rules, the military was furious that I sent the images at all. Nothing really came of it, I was essentially a convenient target for unfocused grief.”
Zaklin actually downplays the on-the-scene reaction to the incident. Toby Harnden, a British reporter for The Telegraph embedded with the same unit Zaklin was covering, reported on Zaklin’s ejection. After noting how well he got along with the Americans, Harnden wrote:
“But relations did sour towards the end, when a photograph of a dead soldier — whom I had been speaking to minutes before he was killed — appeared in a German newspaper.
“It was a haunting image of the body lying in a dusty kitchen, blood seeping from a bullet wound to the head. For me it summed up much of what had happened in Fallujah and was also a memorial to a brave American who died for his country.
“In the pain of the moment, Task Force 2-2 saw it differently.
” ‘Grab your stuff, asshole, and come with me,’ was how a captain addressed Stefan Zaklin, of the European Picture Agency, when news of the picture reached the unit.
“Zaklin was placed under armed guard and told he had violated the rules of propriety. Nothing in the rules had been broken. The soldiers had seen Zaklin snapping away in the kitchen — but it seemed that this was where the military and the media parted company.”
Carr mentions the frankness of the images that came out of Vietnam, when it became commonplace to see at least a slice of the grisly reality of the fighting. It’s widely observed that the military establishment, which allowed the media virtually free access to combat units, has crafted the current regime of rules for “media embeds” to avoid that kind of access and the uncontrolled flow of disturbing images and observations to the folks at home. The brass has succeeded to the point where it now takes a freedom of information request for us to get to see pictures of flag-draped coffins arriving back in the United States.
But there’s something deeper at work. I’m sure there was an us-and-them feeling at work between soldiers and journalists in Vietnam. But I wonder whether it was so deep as it is now. On one hand, the widely felt antipathy among many toward the media, especially in its connection to this war and its fancied failure to present the “real” (meaning “positive”) news about what we’re sacrificing so much blood and money for. On the other hand, the rank-and-file soldier has changed. In Vietnam, the troops a reporter or photographer encountered were nearly certain to be draftees, people who had landed in the military and sent into combat by happenstance; journalists might have been a nuisance to them, but they weren’t radically different by nature or mission. The soldiers we’re sending to Iraq may never have dreamed they’d find themselves fighting insurgents in the desert, but they’ve all chosen the armed forces, and they’re part of an institution that in many ways views itself as separate from civil society. Journalists are outsiders to this group and bound to be particularly unwelcome when they intrude too far on the lives and sensitivities of the troops. Thus the anger and outrage when a picture of a fallen warrior is run.
Technorati Tags: iraq, journalism
Here’s an item from Iraq, by way of the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle:
Iraqi Tennis Coach, Players Killed
“(05-27) 10:38 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — An Iraqi tennis coach and two of his players were killed because they were wearing shorts, apparently in violation of a warning by Islamic extremists.
“Gunmen stopped the car in which the athletes were riding and asked them to step out before shooting them Wednesday, Manham Kubba, secretary general of the Iraqi Tennis Union, said Saturday. The coach, Hussein Ahmed Rashid, was Sunni, and the two players were Shiite, Kubba said.
“The athletes were in shorts when they were killed and police believe the attack was related to a warning by extremists against such attire, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said. He said the warning was made in leaflets distributed in the Sadiyah neighborhood in southwest Baghdad a week before the attack. …”
First thought: Unbelievable barbarity; the people who did this are beyond understanding.
Second thought: Did this happen the way the authorities say it did? Were these guys killed for wearing shorts, or for being found (Sunni and Shiite) together, or for their car? Was the warning against shorts-wearing distributed in the neighborhood where the attack took place? You have to admit, this story is tailor-made to feed feelings of disgust and revulsion for those who oppose us over there.
Third thought: Without evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to think this really did happen. And that brings me back to my first thought: This is beyond comprehension. But is it really? My tendency is to think that wars of the past — say against Japan or Germany or Korea or Vietnam or even the less direct conflict with the Soviet Union — are easy to understand, at least on a general level. Right on the surface, you find nationalism in one form or other, a battle for territory, and an effort to extinguish competing claims to land and resources. A little below the surface, you find a struggle to impose a particular point of view of the world and our place in it. I think this is more complicated than seeing wars as struggles between fascism and democracy, communism and capitalism, or evil-doers and the rest of us.
The people we’re fighting in Iraq don’t have an army, they don’t appear to be fighting for territory or resources, and they’ve unleashed a wanton, terrorizing violence on the people they live among. So on that surface level, they simply don’t make sense. On that next level, though — exercising violence to impose their will and their view of the world — what they’re doing is as logical as anything any military commander has ever devised.
The question is: How do you oppose it, and where? Our soldiers and weapons are the best, or so we constantly reassure ourselves. But does anyone believe that they have prevailed? Or will ever prevail by themselves?
HBO’s documentary on a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” aired tonight. See it if you can. It’s tough to watch from the bubble of safety in which most of us live because it involves viewing people who have suffered awful, often fatal injuries. On the other hand, the work of the medical people and their commitment to all those who need their help is inspiring to see.
One quote of many that stood out, from Major Martin Harnish, a surgeon:
“This war and the number of lives it’s affecting is just unbelievable. I have to think the people in this country [Iraq] are in a better place for it, or will be in a better for it. I have to believe that, because otherwise this is just sheer madness.”
Quotes like that and the film’s occasional unfiltered glance at the terrible reality that lies behind the casualty statistics is sure to provoke some in the Fox News sphere to denounce it as anti-war propaganda. I prefer to think of it as a glimpse at the price we’re all paying, some way or another, for the war.
Someone recently told me in passing — someone who should know, since he’s there now — that what’s been happening in Iraq the last 38 months “doesn’t really rate the word ‘war.’ ” I think I understand the sentiment. We shouldn’t raise the significance of a battle with a bunch of murderous thugs (“primitive screwheads” is the term my acquaintance used) with such an important appellation. But to me, even sheltered as I am from the reality of what’s really happening over there, the suggestion this isn’t a war just doesn’t ring true. Call it what you want: People are dying by the thousands — by the tens of thousands — in a sustained siege of organized violence. Call it a picnic or a police action or the latest beachhead for democracy, the dead and wounded and the shattered pile up just the same, whether we’re paying attention or not.
HBO is about to air a documentary on one of the remarkable stories of the war: the work of the frontline U.S. military trauma hospitals in Iraq. It is not an untold story: many big media organizations have dipped their toe into it already. The HBO movie, “Baghdad ER,” is a little different, though, in that it’s the product of a longer-term immersion into the world of combat medicine. The makers spent two months filming in a combat trauma hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone. And the movie’s 63-minute length represents more than the usual gnat’s-attention-span treatment that TV news accords such stories.
“Baghdad ER” is scheduled to air on May 21. It’s graphic. The filmmakers say so, and the Army is backing them up, with the service’s surgeon general issuing a memo advising the film may provoke flashbacks or nightmares among those who have served in Iraq.
(The New York Times had a different spin on the story over the weekend. Quoting Army sources, a Saturday article says the Army is backing away from the documentary over concerns “that its grim medical scenes could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war.”)
Technorati Tags: iraq
Last Monday, I posted something I’d found in my daily Iraq reading about a U.S. Army captain, John McFarlin, who had been shot in the head during a firefight with insurgents but emerged unscathed thanks to his combat helmet. I was struck by what I read as the detached, nearly clinical language McFarlin used to describe the event. The Army News Service quoted him saying, “I was suppressed for a moment and then I got back up” and returned fire. I wondered aloud, with a touch of sarcasm, whether “suppressed” was a euphemism for “stunned.” Then it was on to other business. But a couple days ago, I saw a new comment on the post:
“Stunned would be if I were disoriented and didn’t know what happened.
“Suppressed is when you get down because it seemed like the guy who was shooting at you was on target and it was a good idea to drop down for a moment. It’s a technical term and I chose it because it means “the target chooses to conceal itself instead of presenting.”
“When the gunners on the other two HMMWVs [high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles] engaged him, then HE was suppressed.”
The comment was signed “John McFarlin” — the name of the man who had been shot. I was surprised, not stunned, and wrote him back, thanking him for the clarification and “for the dedication it takes to serve in such a challenging environment.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised when a few hours later, an email with a photograph attached arrived.
“Dear Dan,
“No problem!
“I really don’t want to make much of it, but really it felt like an open hand slap on the head. The equipment that we have these days is pretty good–I mean this not only in relative terms, but in absolute terms, as well. Not only was my life preserved, I was able to return to the fight at hand, though I prudently remained down until my fellows engaged the AIF [anti-Iraqi forces] individual who shot me. The photograph attached shows the exit hole of a round that passed through the buttstock of the crew served weapon I was manning. Had I been up, and that butt stock been where it normally is–out against my shoulder–the round would have struck me–although in the armored plate. So, even then, I would have been protected. Anti-climactic, I know.
“By way of letting you know that I am in fact the Soldier mentioned, I send you a photograph of the helmet. I retain the helmet to this day, and will always display it as proof of our nation’s dedication to caring for our Soldiers. This is the bottom line: I was shot in the head, and not so much as a pause in duty, let alone a Purple Heart. That’s the good news to take away from this.
“You’re very welcome, by the way. Go have a beer, lay down in the grass, or do something else pleasant that you like to do, would you? That’s part of the point of what we do as Soldiers.
“Best!
John McFarlin
CPT, AR, USA”
(By the way, all of Captain McFarlin’s remarks in this post are quoted in their entirety; I’ve spelled out some of the acronyms he uses in brackets.)
That last little paragraph rankled me. To me, it’s saying, buddy, don’t you worry about what’s happening over here. Just turn over and go back to sleep. And I told McFarlin so:
“… There’s something implied there that I object to — the notion that you and the millions like you who serve and have served in the armed forces are enduring disruptions in their own lives and putting themselves in harm’s way so that the rest of us can sit on our barstools as if we have nothing to worry about. Don’t get me wrong — I like to have a beer as much as the next guy, and I’m buying if we ever find ourselves in the same neck of the woods — but frankly I don’t want anyone risking life and limb just so I can drink my microbrew unperturbed. If you spent any time perusing my now very occasional comments on the war in Iraq, you know I’m no fan of the enterprise and never have been. In short, I’ve always felt we went into the conflict with only the most casual assessment of what the true long-term costs and effects would be; the people who have paid the immediate price for that carelessness are people like you who undertake their service in good faith and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who, with no say in the matter, have died as we remake their society for them. Ultimately I don’t expect you to agree with any of the above — in fact, I expect you to tell me how short-sighted and misguided a view it is. (But the right to freely express such disagreements — that’s worth serving for). I also think that the least we owe you as citizens is to think seriously, every day, about the war and about how to resolve the conflict before it becomes something we bequeath to the next generation, or the one after that, to take care of.”
At this point, it won’t be a shock to hear that McFarlin wrote back:
“Dan,
“Absolutely you can use anything we write to one another as you wish. Be charitable to my person, even if we may have different points of view–that’s all I ask. I know you’re not a fan of the effort in Iraq (it really doesn’t rate the word “war”), not why it was engaged, nor the sausage-making that’s going on over here as it’s presented in the news. I can appreciate that.
“It takes an effort on my part to even think of how the inconvenience and risk which I take as being part of this effort in Iraq is something I should consider being upset about. I mean, I am a member of what amounts to a modern warrior-monk society. Think about it: no sex, no beer, plenty of privations, and the opportunity for bodily mortification. Many of the discussions about the deeper politics surrounding why we are here never really enter into our minds. Or if they do, they enter them quietly, sit down, read a newspaper and have a smoke, and then tiptoe out the way they came. We’re differently minded people, I guess. Maybe this is some sort of congenital blue-statism. Or maybe there’e something more to it than is easily or glibly explained.
“This thing that happened to me, getting shot. It’s great, a great success story about how a nation graced with smart people, liberty, and money has been able to defeat the weaponry of our would-be killers–a bunch of primitive screwheads without a moral leg to stand on, straight criminals, really. Not with bullets–though we have plenty of those–but with synthetics and ceramics worn by a Soldier on a hot April day in Diyala Province, Iraq. This is both remarkable and anti-climactic. Some person with a twenty-pound brain worked out the material science that permitted me to live. It had nothing to do with heroics or MY effort at all–although some Soldier before me secured the blessings of liberty so that the person with the twenty pound brain could concentrate on material science instead of how to navigate the maze of corruption and race hatred so prevalent in so many parts of the world. I want people to know that I got shot. And lived. And more than that, I wasn’t even hurt. I was right back in the fight, and I think it’s important for people to know that we live in an amazing country, and that the most misguided of adventures (for those who characterize the extraordinary effort in Iraq as such) can result in sublime moments. Moments that throw into sharp relief the difference between who we are as a people, and the peoples of the rest of the world. Even if I died for something as obscure as the right or the opportunity for a skinny, thick-glasses wearing kid to excel in material science, it would be enough. Because that’s worthy.
“But, regarding the notion that the millions who serve don’t do so to allow their countrymen to live in peace and prosperity: If I were to say to you that it is a common saying here–in reference to some idiotic celebrity news headline, or the latest imbroglio over which American Idol contestant is going to continue, or the no holds barred fight over a leather covered ball striking a player in a game where the wages are ridiculously inflated–that we fight so that people in America can live so well, that these are their concerns, rather than the horrid, inhuman concerns that people in Iraq must bear…would you believe it? We look at our countrymen living well in America, and we smile crookedly at our own privations, knowing that the terrorists are losing. BIG TIME. Every beer that is drunk. Every woman who wears a mini-skirt to a bar and goes home with a guy she picks up. Every porno mag that gets bought. Every Jew that says “Shalom” to a Muslim. Every inane television program. These are victories–we live vicariously through our countrymen–and so it’s no stretch at all to say that we enter the heart of our discontent and find solace in the fact that our sacrifices have some meaning in a greater context which, though it can be hard to comprehend day to day, makes some sense in a long view. We say, over our meals while shaking our heads over some idiotic sensationalism, “We fight, so that people can worry about that stupid crap,” and we mean it. Unbelievable, but true. I know you don’t want guys like me putting our lives on the line so you can knock back a nice cold one in comfort while watching Battlestar Galactica, but most of us in uniform are convinced that we already won the lottery, even by being born in the United States, and the least we can do is shoulder a share of the burden.
“I hope that I have presented this strange point of view that drives many Soldiers without being overly pedantic, but there’s something profound in the selflessness of many Soldiers. We talk a good game about how we’re in it for us, and about how we’re going to go buy a Harley when we get back, or blow it all on strippers, or some other misuse of our wages (I personally am getting my credit card debt paid down a bit) but in truth, we’re the workhorses of empire–an empire that every American, whatever his political stripe, shares in, just by virtue of the freedoms and luxuries which they take for granted–or even not for granted–every day. And this empire always existed, and was always secured by force: sometimes bald-faced, sometimes sublimated in some way that was not so offensive to the sensitive.
“I hope that this rambling is comprehensible, and that you understand that not once have I taken any easy path in expressing what must necessarily be a complicated web of thought. As for any differences in opinion we may have: We believe what we believe because it seems right to believe the way we believe, and not because of any fundamental difference in the quality of who we are. So much public discourse is shameful, with accusations and attempts to annhilate those of different perspective–a great waste of energy. I hope that in this case, I have expressed how what I believe provides a context for the decision to volunteer for deployment to Iraq, rather than the very much less worthwhile discussion methodology of trying to convince someone that what they believe isn’t correct.
Best,
John”
I haven’t written back, yet, beyond a small note of acknowledgment. Somehow, in the spirit of the exchange, I feel I need to let him have the last word till I write a more thoughtful response to him. Stay tuned.
Technorati Tags: iraq
