People in my Arabic class yesterday were talking about this New York Times story about an Arab-American army recruiter. A photo that ran with the story shows a T-shirt that reads “If you can read this” (in Arabic) and then below, “The National Guard needs you” (in English). But the grammar of the first line seems incorrect. Normally, after the conditional particle, the verb should be in the past, not the present. (I’d like native Arabic speakers to confirm this.) This would hardly be the first or most egregious mistake the US armed forces have made trying to communicate with Arabs..
Tag: us
Nuking Iran?
With recent news of possible major ship deployments in the Persian Gulf and talk a pre- midterm election possible strike against Iran around October 21 (or around the end of Ramadan / beginning of the Eid holidays), it’s rather unnerving to see a major conservative commentator (a former Reagan administration official and WSJ editorial board member) say this:
The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of US (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.
There is already talk of retaliation by Iranian attacks on US warships and troops across the Persian Gulf and major Iranian interference with Shia communities in Iraq and Bahrain if this happens — not to mention the possibility of an attack (probably terrorist) on US soil. At least this is what is being talked about in Iran specialist circles.
The recent North Korean nuclear test must have changed the approach to Iran considerably — clearly if you are against Iran developing nuclear weapons (which most estimates say won’t happen for five years to a decade) you would think that the earlier you strike the better. North Korea shows that if I you can develop nuclear weapon, you should and that there’s little that can be done about it — especially if your neighbor/patron is China.
The article has some small factual mistakes and exaggerations — “Our Egyptian puppet sits atop 100 million [sic] Muslims who do not think that Egypt should be a lackey of US hegemony” — but gets the general regional situation quite right. I remain skeptical on whether a tactical nuke would be used, even though the Bush administration’s military doctrine has emphasized the use of tactical nukes for five years now, but I do find something convincing in the argument that the Bush administration, by its own internal (and electoral) logic, has nothing left to do but escalate. It either stands down or muddles along with a recognized failure in Iraq, or ups the ante. Rien ne va plus.
Have you served in Iraq?
If you haven’t, go see the film “The Ground Truth,” which interviews some who did. Last night NYU hosted a showing of the film and a presentation from three members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
The film is mostly a series of interviews with former soldiers in Iraq, all of whom became opposed to the war at some point (many of them after witnessing or participating in the killing of civilians). The film has them recount their experience, from entering the army to being deployed in Iraq, to returning home (several of them injured for life and suffering from really acute PTSD). While the film has a clear agenda, it isn’t strident, and the interviews–the personalities and stories of the soldiers–are so interesting that they carry the whole thing easily. One thing that becomes very clear is that from basic training on (where the soldiers chant songs about “Hajjes” and shoot at “Bin Ladens”) a willful conflation is created between terrorists and Iraqis, or Afghanis, or whoever the army will fight–and that that conflation only gets worse in Iraq and leads almost inevitably to the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The three veterans, who spoke after the film, were also very compelling. They were all pretty young, two men and a woman, and as far as I remember, two were from the National Guard and one from the Navy.
Several of them talked about how the army had been an economic opportunity for them and also about how the culture of the army had made it very difficult for them to be critical of the war, to speak out, and to ask for conscientious objector status–they said it was seen as a betrayal and a criticism of friends and colleagues.
They also spent some time talking about veteran’s benefits. As Matthew pointed out recently, the number of wounded US soldiers spiked recently. One thing to keep in mind is that “wounded” in Iraq often means losing one or more limbs (basically, losing the part of the body that aren’t protected by body armour). These soldiers come back and face months of red tape to get medical benefits. Also, apparently there is a push to categorize people with PTSD (and one imagines there are many, given the length and strain of current tours of duty) as having “personality disorders” or being “bipolar,” so they won’t get benefits. The government has also cut funding and discouraged doctors from diagnosing TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury)–something that can happen when you are exposed to a lot of explosions.
At one point, a man stood up in the (smallish) audience and said he was a member of the Navy who had served in Iraq and he thought the film was biased. He talked at some length and seemed to me, to be honest, a little strange (although maybe he was just worked up). He said “9/11 was only five years ago, have you forgotten already?” and complained that the film showed the US military in a bad light but didn’t show all the terrible things that “they” (the terrorists) did. He said “Have I seen a lot of action? Definitely. I got more medals than Patton. But I don’t like to talk about it.” He also said, “It was some hardcore shit. We defended American freedom. We were men. We used to hunt those guys down.”
What really impressed me was the reaction of the Veterans Against the War. While the room of NYU students sat in shocked silence and indignation, the veterans responded perfectly: they thanked the man for speaking, thanked him for his service, reiterated the fact that 9/11 was not in fact carried out by Iraqis, reiterated the fact that the insurgency in Iraq is a reaction to US presence there and asked him to come out for a beer after and talk about it all some more. It was a humbling lesson in how to be an effective advocate. If you want to change people’s minds, you have to know how to talk to people you completely disagree with.
One part each
According to a story in The Times, Bush and Rice “have finally noticed that [Iraq] is being partitioned by civil war” and are open to the notion of formal partition (under the guise of “federalization,” mind you).
According to the article, venerable Bush-crony James Baker, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group (sounds like something that meets in the library after class, doesn’t it?) has already met with the Syrians and the Iranians–and the Turks?–and that within the ISG “there is a growing consensus that America can neither pour more soldiers into Iraq nor suffer mounting casualties without any sign of progress.
For a clue what this refers to see today’s Washington Post for an article on rising US casualties.
So anyway, the theory seems to be that if they snip the country into three, at least the Kurds and the Shia’a will be quiet long enough for the troops to be brought home.
Kind of turns that “cutting and running” phrase on its head.
Losin’ it
The other Vanity Fair piece that’s worth a look-see this month is William Langewiesche’s piece on the November 2005 Haditha massacre. It too comes with a photo essay—portraits of Marines from the company alleged to have gone on a killing spree after a roadside bomb attack.
Like the Andersen piece, it’s a great read. In vivid, dense packed and elegantly structured prose, Langewiesche explores the context of the killings and makes the case that there was really nothing very extra-ordinary about them, “just another shitty Anbar morning.â€� He even suggests that some of the killing may have been technically within the rules of engagement—at least those to which the Marines were accustomed. He calls this “…a baseline narrative that becomes the happiest possible version of the morning’s events.â€�
Some people are going to read this as an attempt to smear the morning’s events into something palatable, and others will say that it is an attempt to normalize (for better or worse) civilian deaths.
Neither will do justice to the nuance of the piece.
Langewiesche notes that there is evidence that tells heavily against the Marines: photos and accounts that indicate that five Iraqi civilians who blundered upon the aftermath of the bomb attack were simply executed, and witnesses who say that subsequent killings were far less shadowed by the fog of war than participants later claimed. (Tim McGirk’s May 19 story in Time goes into this in far more detail, however).
The cumulative effect of his evocation of the horror of the killings weighs more heavily, however, than would a more fervent attempt to arrange fragments of evidence into a picture of indictable action.
This is part of his “happiest possible version:�
Nine people had sheltered in that room, three generations of the same family, from an ancient man paralyzed by a stroke to an infant girl just three months old. When the grenade exploded, it blew some of them apart, wounded others with penetrating shrapnel, and littered the room with evil-smelling body parts. In the urgency of the moment the old man forgot that he was paralyzed and tried to stand up. He took rounds to the chest, vomited blood as he fell, and then lay on the floor twitching as he died.
The unfortunate part about this piece is that Langewiesche wants us to understand that it doesn’t really matter whether his blankly horrific “happiest possible version� is correct, or whether something nastier and colder happened that morning in Haditha. No, what matters is the PR disaster that the massacre (however the hell it happened) represents, and its strategic implications.
This is him writing about a video that was shot just after the killings and used by McGirk to peer around the untruths of the marine press releases. The last line of this excerpt is the last line of the article. It is Langewiesche’s last word in a major American magazine on an incident in which, it appears very likely that, unarmed civilians in a land far away were executed by heavily armed American soldiers.
A man cries, “This is an act denied by God. What did he do? To be executed in the closet? Those bastards! Even the Jews would not do such an act! Why? Why did they kill him this way? Look, this is his brain on the ground!”
The boy continues to sob over the corpse on the floor. He shouts, “Father! I want my father!”
Another man cries, “This is democracy?”
Well yeah, well no, well actually this is Haditha. For the United States, it is what defeat looks like in this war.
The horror rings here the more clearly for the hard-edged shallowness of this conclusion, but is this Langewiesche’s intention? In my “happiest possible version� it is. But I have my doubts.
Germany: Part of the US gulag?
This is very interesting…
New allegations are coming up regarding Germany being part of the US-run global gulag in the current “war on terror,” where Islamist suspects are flown around the world, held, interrogated and tortured in secret detention centers.
In an interview I conducted last May with Islamist lawyer Montasser al-Zayat, he said Egyptian cleric Abu Omar was beaten up in a US base in Germany, following his kidnapping in Milan by CIA agents, but stressed his client was not interrogated there:
“He was handcuffed, and blindfolded with a piece of cloth. The plane had flown for about an hour and half, when it landed in unknown location. But he was sure it was a non-civilian place. And it was a very cold place. He felt he was taken to a hall of a vast space. They stripped him off his clothes, and dressed him in blue overalls. They took the blindfold off his face. He saw in front of him a big number of people, wearing special forces’ fatigues. They were all dressed in black, and masked, without exceptions. All of them were masked. They were carrying guns. Then, they wrapped his face, all of it, with a sticking bandage. It was very tight. He said when he arrived in Egypt, and as they took the bandage off, his facial hear, moustache and beard were plucked off his face. Before they board him on another plane, they photographed him in the overalls. ‘Then they wrapped my face with sticking bandage, and put me on another plane,’ he said.�
You also say he was beaten in that base which he thinks in Germany?
“I am a precise person, and that is why I enjoy credibility. I’m saying what my client is saying, and nothing more. He says ‘I was beaten.’ But he didn’t tell me how he was beaten. I assume this was to pacify him. In Egypt, he said, ‘I was tortured.’ There’s a difference that I can understand well. ‘Tortured’ is different from ‘beaten.’ In these places (Italy and Germany) he received punches.
“In the place where he thinks it was the American base in Germany, I’ll read to you what he said: ‘I was beaten. I found a number of persons, masked, dressed in special operations fatigues. They photographed me. They beat me. Then they put me in other clothes, and wrapped my face in a sticking bandage. And then, they took me and put me on board of a plane.’�
If it’s true terror suspects were held and interrogated in Germany, then the German intelligence must have been let in on what’s going on. It’s hard to imagine the US conducting such activities without “someone” at least in the German intelligence knowing about it, if not aiding the operation like in the Italians’ case.
The new allegations put forward by a British legal group representing Gitmo detainees is suggesting, however, the same base Abu Omar was held in might have been used for interrogating terror suspects like Khaled Sheikh Mohamed.
This is could well snowball into another political scandal, similar to the one that followed the disclosure that German BND agents aided the invasion of Iraq by supplying the Americans with coordinates of targets on the ground and Saddam’s plan to defend Baghdad, despite Berlin’s official anti-war position.
I book I recommend on extraordinary renditions of Islamist suspects is Stephen Grey’s:
Media monitoring on steroids
The US Department of Homeland Security is funding a program to get several universities to develop software to monitor foreign media for their sentiments on US policy. Press freedom people don’t like it, but I don’t see why not. What, don’t they know that governments already monitor these things? It’d be nice to have a resource on the foreign media, it’s important for the US government to follow debates in other countries, and they might even learn something from it. For the Arab world it would certainly be nice to have an Arab press monitoring service that doesn’t have an agenda like MEMRI and would place articles in the context of the reputation of their writer and the publications they are printed in. The BBC Monitoring Service, for one, is a quite decent basic source of info of that kind. But people are so suspicious of US security policy these days that they automatically see a threat. It won’t be if it’s done transparently, is peer-reviewed, and doesn’t spin things.
Must-read yellow journalism
The Angry Arab on Bob Woodward and his book State of Denial makes for very interesting reading. I will be in the US in ten days or so and will have to pick up a copy.
Woodward on Ghorbanifar, Ledeen and Cheney
Since we recently mentioned both Bob Woodward’s new book and Middle Eastern arms dealers, take a look at this Tapped post quoting Woodward on how Manucher Ghorbanifar got in touch with Dick Cheney via Michael Ledeen about Iraq’s WMDs. Ghorbanifar being a legendary Iranian arms dealer, of course.
I am constantly amazed that Michael Ledeen is still an influential personality in the Beltway. Or that the American Enterprise Institute is taken seriously at all. There should be a campaign to ban any contacts between elected officials and representatives of think tanks or lobbyists (they are one and the same, mind you.) What’s wrong with university professors if they need experts?
Updated: Have corrected typo in title.
More revolt among generals
It’s been a slowly growing movement for over three years now, but more and more recently retired military officers are speaking out in protest against US policy — and more specifically, about Iraq:
The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.
In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “not a competent wartime leader” who made “dismal strategic decisions” that “resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq.” Rumsfeld, he said, “dismissed honest dissent” and “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.”
This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history–and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld’s ouster represent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerful factor in the future of our democracy. The former generals’ growing lobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publicly opposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance.
I keep hearing this kind of stuff more and more from people close to US military and foreign policy circles — but I’m afraid that the Nation hypes up exactly how much influence these people can have in a media news cycle much better handled by the White House than it was, say, in Nixon’s time.