This entry was posted on 8/26/2007 2:04 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
The thing about the Blackwater Bridge is that it is not the Blackwater Bridge. It was given that name by American troops who fought insurgents to the death in Fallujah in the grisly, miserable year of 2004. They gave it that name after four American Blackwater contractors who took a wrong turn--or were attempting a shortcut, we're not sure--were dragged from their vehicles, mutilated, set on fire, dragged through the streets to the cheers of thousands of celebrating Iraqis, and finally hanged from the bridge on the northwest corner of town that spanned the Euphrates River.
The call sign of my son's unit, "Dark Horse" was carved into the span by a Marine after the bloody battle that returned the bridge to American control.
(Actually, the full quote read: This is for the Americans that were murdered here in 2004. Semper Fidelis. Fuck you, but Major General James N. Mattis, commander of the Marine forces during the battle, made the young Marine black out the "Fuck you" part.)
And herein lies the crux of the issue: There is a word in the Iraqi language that utterly describes what they did to those American contractors--a literal word, SAHEL, and it is a word that does not exist in the Arabic language anywhere other than Iraq.
It means to VANQUISH UTTERLY, TO DESTROY ON DISPLAY FOR ALL TO SEE.
In other words, what was done to those American contractors--most of whom had served in the military--was not an aberration in the Iraqi culture. It was not a freak event provoked by a few bloodthirsty terrorists and egged on by illiterate masses.
It was sahel.
Edward Wong is a New York Times war correspondent who spent several years living in and covering the most deadly areas of Iraq, and in his final piece from Baghdad, "Iraq's Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory," Wong describes in vivid detail the differences between the way the Iraqis view this war and the way Americans do:
"Other Arabs say, 'You are the country of sahel,'" Wong's Iraqi friend, Razzaq, said. "It has always been that way in Iraq."
But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction--not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds--has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.
Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted. Many say this is only the beginning.
--"Iraq's Vurse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory," Edward Wong, New York Times, June 3, 2007
Wong points out that throughout Iraq's history, power has changed hands only through extreme violence. In 1958, sahel was committed on a prime minister, whose body was hacked apart and the bits dragged through the streets. Saddam Hussein knew this, and this is how he ruled Iraq and kept it together with a small minority of the population in brutal control over the masses.
George W. Bush came crashing into that fragile order with his star-spangled speeches about freedom and democracy, sending in American men and women for that supposed purpose, and promptly unleashed the hounds of hell.
Wong quotes Sheik Muhammed Bakr Khamas al-Suhail, a respected Shiite, who said:
"In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders," he said. "We need strong leaders or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite."
--ibid
Anyone who has lived for any length of time in that bloody country--not Green Zone diplomats or carefully controlled congresspeople--but Arabic-speaking, very brave journalists who live daily with the fear of kidnap and murder for themselves and their Iraqi helpers, echo this same powerful truth.
Sudarsan Raghavan is such a journalist. He works for the Washington Post and has survived more than one bombing. He has lost many, many friends who he says sadly, have to be removed from his cellphone call-list.
In a piece that appeared August 10, he writes:
The soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment searched for the enemy...Silence mocked the unit, for the men had vanished. Soldiers pried open graves searching for the cache and 15 minutes later found four guns and some ammunition. Lt. Thomas Murphy, 32, wondered who the men had been. Members of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Loyalists of the former government? Tribesmen?
"Here we have so many enemies," he said...
Al-Qaida in Iraq--identified by President Bush and his generals as the main U.S. enemy--is just one of myriad armed groups competing here for influence and authority. This arid region nourished by the Euphrates River is a microcosm of the many often-overlapping conflicts that have erupted across the new Iraq...
"We're in the middle of it," said Col. Michael Garrett, commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) of the 25th Infantry Division, "I'm not fighting one sect or another. I'm fighting both. And not only am I fighting both, but at certain points, I have to put my forces in between Sunni and Shia groups to protect the populace."
--"In the Land of the Blood Feuds," Sudarsan Rhagavan, Washington Post, August 10, 2007
Junior officers and ranking officers alike, as well as NCOs and average grunts, detailed for Rhagavan the insanity of trying to mediate between dozens of bloodthirsty sects, tribes, criminal gangs, neighborhoods, and political movements determined to grab power in the sahel way and hang on to it:
"We are in the land of the blood feuds," said Maj. Rick Williams, a liason to tribes in the area...
At Forward Operating Base Iskan, 10 miles west of Kalsu, Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage, commander of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, powered up his laptop. The barrel-chested West Point graduate pulled up a colorful map of his area of operations labeled, "The Faultline and You," which he uses in presentations to his soldiers. It depicts a world divided into sectors representing different levels of threat, from different kinds of enemies.
Balcavage clicked onto the center of the map. A white text box popped up with an arrow pointing at the base.
"REMEMBER...YOU LIVE RIGHT HERE," it read.
--ibid
Rhagavan describes how, sometimes, in the midst of a heated battle in which American troops are trying to intervene between two sects in order to protect innocents, BOTH of the competing sects will then open fire on the Americans, leaving the Americans no choice but to just fight their way out.
Politically, the idea that a central government as it exists right now in Baghdad, can somehow impose order on this chaos is--like everything else with this administration's false assumptions--unrealistic.
Damien Cave, writing for the New York Times just yesterday, referred to Iraq as a "cellular nation, dividing and redividing into competing constituencies that have a greater stake in continued chaos than compromise."
This is crucial to the overall picture of the situation in Iraq:
THE IRAQI PEOPLE PREFER THE CHAOS OVER THE CONTROL UNTIL A POWERFUL LEADER EMERGES THROUGH SAHEL AND MAINTAINS ORDER.
As we speak, Muqtada al-Sadr, the thug of the Baghdad slums, is a likely candidate, but there are others unwilling to concede control--and oil riches--to him. Shiites are fighting Shiites for this dominance, even as Sunnis are sucking up to the Americans for money, arms, and training to enable them to battle it out with whichever Shiite leader emerges.
To them, al-Qaeda in Iraq is a nuisance they are only too happy to rid themselves of. They have no interest in giving up their women, their cigarettes, TVs, and cellphones to a caliphate. Right now, it is in their interests to cooperate with the American military in order to lance that boil on the Sunni ass. Then they will return their attention to taking their country back from the infidel Shiites the Americans put in place.
Then both will start killing Americans with impunity. They want us out of the way so that they can start the bloodbath that will end in sahel, paving the way for a dictator who will keep the country in line in a way that America's "rules of engagement" would never allow.
As Harold Myerson acutely pointed out in the Washington Post:
"Of all the absurdities attending our unending war in Iraq, the greatest is this: We are fighting to defend that which is not there."
--"Dying for an Iraq That Isn't," Harold Myerson, Washington Post, May 30, 2007
The warmongers who sat in their leatherbound armchairs over brandy and cigars and saw an oil-plum ripe for the picking--and an endless flag-waving orgasm of a political campaign that would keep them in power for as long as they could prolong their war--had never heard of the word SAHEL. They did not even know that the Muslim religion was divided into two powerful sects, or that Iraq's history was replete with the littered corpses of previous failed occupations.
And if they did, they did not care.
Now, EVERYTHING is bound up for them into keeping this war going, at all costs--the White House, control of the congress and senate, obscene riches from no-bid contracts with administration-friendly corporations, a stake in the heart of the Mideast. They have themselves convinced that if we just keep on keeping on with this endless battle, that all their wet-dreams will come true and the "Defeatocrats," as the White House privately refers to Democratic congressmen and women, will be utterly defeated themselves, on the bloody deserts of Iraq.
"The more time passes, the more our options narrow," says Kurt Campbell, the chief executive officer of the Center for New American Security (CNAS). "Left unchallenged, the president would fight to exhaustion, and we can't afford to fight to exhaustion."
--"The Real Iraq Debate," E.J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post, June 26, 2007
For the White House, this war is an ongoing political campaign, complete with message-control, media-brainwashing, and congressional seduction. It's pretty well understood that the report they intend to ghost-write for Gen. Petraeus is going to be chock-full of good-news success stories of order American troops have restored throughout Iraq, followed by a request for more patience and more troops.
The fact that the American military is strained to the breaking point, physically, psychically, and equipment-wise, will be irrelevant to the campaign.
Winning is everything. In this case, the fact that this is not a war that can be won is irrelevant to winning the White House and congress for Republicans. Those are the stakes, period, to the Bush administration.
Select congresspeople have been ferried over by the dozens in whirlwind one-day or one-week tours heavily loaded up with power-point presentations and staged photo-op events in areas well-secured ahead of time. The representatives of our government do not have time on these trips to talk to any troops other than generals and high-ranking commanding officers, nor do they interact at all with the Iraqi people unless they are known to be friendly to the Americans.
It is not a war. It is a political campaign. It has always been a political campaign. And I don't care whether we stay there ten more months or ten more years, SAHEL awaits when we leave. There will be no peace imposed on Iraq from without. They will have to do it in their own way from within. In the meantime, all the rest is illusion; smoke and mirrors.
Men and women in uniform are dying, and many of the survivors want desperately to believe that their sacrifices have counted or will count toward a greater good. And if the Iraqi people felt that same way, then we should stay there a full generation if that's what it takes.
But they are only waiting, waiting for us to leave. We can stay in that country ten more years and lose forty thousand MORE troops, as we did in Vietnam, and it will not matter in the long run.
The Iraqi people will not let it matter.
There is something almost pornographic in the conservative Republican and American media lust for war and wartime heroics.
Paul Waldman said it best in the American Prospect:
When the report is released, the nests of conservative partisanship on television, radio, and newspaper op-ed pages will buzz with affirmation. "The surge is working," they will declare, and victory will be ours in the end if we remain firm, turgid, engorged with strength and will and resolve. Considering that the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination recently wrote in all seriousness that the United States was just about to win the Vietnam war in 1972 when we got soft and pulled out in an ignomious victorious interruptus, you can be sure this argument will find eager adherents among those on the right jonesing for their latest does of Iraq Viagra.
--"The Utter Uselessness of the Petraeus Report," Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, August 22, 2007
I thought this was one of the best literary analogies on this war I have seen--the idea of an almost sexual "surge" of troops, muscling their way to conquest--is mirrored in the daily blue-pill dose from the media of exciting graphics and endless hero-stories and gripping narratives.
Most of the people who started this war in the first place and champion its continuation the loudest are soft white men with pudgy hands and smirky smiles who have never in their lives pulled on combat boots and willingly walked into life-threatening danger. They are living this excitement vicariously, hiding their hard-ons behind their smug platitudes and bumper-sticker patriotism while other men's children die.
Waldman writes:
There is no other undertaking in American history that combines the crushing volume of delusion, dishonesty, bad faith, incompetence, and unforeseen yet utterly predictable consequences that is this war. As long as George W. Bush strides purposefull each day into the Oval Office, consumed with looking strong and holding fast, interpreting every feeling that rumbles in his gut as a telegraph from God informing him that he is right in all things, nothing will change.
--ibid
I recently read in the Washington Post--and was so upset that I ripped my print copy into shreds and threw it away, so don't ask me who wrote it or the name of the article--that the White House aides are strutting around pretty smug these days. They believe they have reached the tipping-point in their media war and have begun to convince enough representatives in congress, and enough of the people polled, that the surge is indeed working and that more of the same is the best way to go.
I believe that when the Republican minority blocked the Democratic attempts to control the purse strings and Congress gave the war back to the President back in the spring, that this president was emboldened even further to do whatever he damn well pleases where this war is concerned.
From that point on, I don't believe they have paid the slightest attention to anything any congresspeople on either side of the aisle have said, or any op-eds that oppose them, or anything else that deviates from their narrative. They are so certain of their own success that I now fear much more than I used to that they will indeed bomb Iran.
The thinking will be, Who's gonna stop us?
I don't think any of the upcoming debate that greets their ghost-written report will matter one little bit.
I don't think anything I write or anyone else writes will make a damn bit of difference to how this war is managed.
If the Democrats persist in running Hillary as their candidate, I believe that she will lose by a hairs-breadth heartbreaker that will make the Gore situation in 2000 look like a schoolyard squabble, ripping this country even further in half than it already is, and I believe that Mitt Romney will then be the next president.
He is owned by the conservatives who put Bush in office, and this war will go on for at least another decade.
And through it all, the Iraqis will keep blowing each other up and attacking Americans and blowing them up, and once the Sunnis get what they want with al-Qaeda in Iraq they will renew their bloodshed on the Americans, and we will be unable to effectively fight back because we will be too damn wounded and exhausted from a too-long prolonged battle with too few troops.
In the end, whenever we do leave, SAHEL will arise and a strong dictator will retake Iraq, and all those sacrifices will have been in vain ANYWAY.
Whether we nominate Hillary or not, one thing is certain: This war is now going to drag on at least until January of 2009. Nothing is going to change that.
This is my last word on the subject.
I will turn my attention and talents to the presidential campaign, and work my heart out to see to it that the people who started this obscenity are removed from power and--FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING--dragged through the streets and strung up from the nearest tall bridge.
