Sands of Death

Death creeps up on you in Iraq. The longer you remain amid the country's violence, the more insistent, the more bullying it becomes. Over time, more people you know die, or are left maimed, or have scrapes with death that leave them psychologically scarred.

So begins one of the best reports from journalists in the field in the long, sad, failed Iraq adventure - Luke Baker's evocative Reuters report on living and reporting in Iraq. Baker's article is personal: it tosses away, for a moment, the reporter-subject convention, and portrays the reality of life in Iraq to those around him and the Reuters bureau there. And that reality is death - death in many gruesome forms, death for the sake of politics, for the sake of oil, for the sake of religion, death for the sake of the bloodlust of petty, murderous tyrants and killers. Oh, it is certain that is "is better to fight them in Iraq than in the streets of our cities," as the President and his lackeys insist. It is also certain that a doctrinaire, intellectually incurious, unblooded and stay-at-home gaggle of technocrats led by a faux cowboy from Connecticut unwittingly unleashed this waterfall of blood.

As Mo Dowd commented today (returned to form as she is, finally through with her mid-life crisis and honed like a Schick Quattro Razor to strike at the Bush chin stubble) we have returned to 1968: there is a mounting anti-war movement in America. This time, however, it is different. For one, it is not led by student radicals: we do not have a draft, so the college-bound upper middle class does not worry about the rigors of the battlefield. No, this movement is in the center - not so much the political center (it's heavy with liberals to be sure) as the center of regular American life: people with homes, jobs, cars, retirement plans, vacations, and high-speed Internet access. This is no "Michael Moore fringe" as the righties are keen to say (not that Moore is particularly fringe, given the sales of F-911: millions would have to be "radicals" to have made him as rich as he is). No this movement is very much like the one within the modern Roman Catholic Church in America, the lay movement of Voice of the Faithful, sickened by bureaucracy and yet loyal to the core: its leadership populated by Rosary Society types with plenty of gray hair and mass card buyers among them.

This is the movement of Cindy Sheehan, who has clearly survived the Swiftian smearing of the right to emerge into the broad sun-lit plains of the American mainstream, a brave and embattled Gold Star mother, the type of real-world person (looming divorce, mourning for her son, stricken elderly mother) that Americans can - and do - identify with easily. Camp Casey has become Camp Homeland, as the President's approval ratings slip below Nixon's, and a majority of Americans now oppose the disastrous Iraq adventure. Unwittingly perhaps, television preacher Pat Robertson - in his silly, addled call for assassinating Venezuela's socialist president - spoke for this movement; such an act was cheaper, cost less in lives and fortune. If we are honest, we can admit the Reverend Pat's words were thoughts that connect our Iraqi day-dreams; why didn't we just bump off Saddam?

The symbols have never been more stark: no screenwriter (even those who write farces) could have sold such a script in 2000, before the national election was pickpocketed by James Baker. Too unbelievable. A blithe, play-acting President on a bicycle on the ranch, under siege from a growing camp of aggrieved Americans while the finest, middle class youth of the nation is bled white thousands of miles away in the midst of a religious civil war triggered by the United States - with no hope of victory, no hope of Jeffersonian democracy, no hope for honor. Yes, this does sound like 1968 - minus the bicycle, and with lower approval ratings and a more mainstream opposition.

Yet, of course, the toothless, political cowardice of the Democrats must not slip away into the night of history. Particularly in this Congress, lockstep support for national security in the "time of war" has given the Administration the social checkbook it needs to write the bills for this war. Far too many Democrats went along for the ride, bought too easily into the argument that everything is different after 9-11. They missed the fact that one thing didn't change, despite the panic of the President and his little yelping terriers: we still have some national character in this country, we can't be sold a bill of goods forever, we know when to hold 'em and to fold 'em.

And folks, it's time to fold 'em. When the argument for continuing war is to merely to honor the dead that have gone before with more dead, with more wounded, with more destruction, you know the jig is up, that the military maneuver is merely in the form of a forlorn hope, destined to die for nothing. The Iraqi civil war will rage until there is no Iraq. There never was an Iraq, except as the construct of an empire and a dictator; we had no business in the squabbles of religious tribes. And we have no business in helping to write a consitution that places the lives of women at the mercy of a medieval code of sexist, moralist, symbolist humiliation and punishment. Conspiring with the mullahs against women may be George W. Bush's greatest act of treason against the world's people - and it will live in infamy.

There is nothing to this but to admit failure, and save American lives. Perhaps that is not honorable. Perhaps it leaves a vaccuum in the east, into which the hard-core religionists can step. Too bad: it is done. And we need to be done.

In Luke Baker's story, honest as it is, you can read the hopelessness of the situation between the stark lines of reportage, because this is George Bush's Iraq:

All along there have been stories about it -- those killed by aerial bombardments, children blown apart by suicide bombs, families caught in crossfire, slain at the hands of insurgents or murdered by criminals.

In March last year, I stood in the street in Kerbala as suicide bombers exploded among crowds of Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims, killing more than 100 people, including dozens standing around me -- strangers who became new victims of Iraq's conflict.

But in recent months, the deaths have grown more personalised -- it's not just random people who die anymore, but people you've met, people you've interviewed, some you know quite well, colleagues you work with every day, friends even.

Almost every week, someone on the staff at Reuters, just one of a dozen or so news organisations still operating in the country, has a new tale to tell of a relative -- a brother, a mother, a cousin, or a son -- killed in terrible circumstances.

Last month, one of the team of drivers, Yassin, said he needed some time off to look for his brother, who had been missing from his job as a blacksmith for five days. Relatives searched fruitlessly until, desperate, they decided to look in Baghdad's morgue, a building on the banks of the Tigris that is literally overflowing with bodies.

After trawling through the autopsy rooms, pulling out the cold trays on which the bodies are kept, Yassin found his brother, Ibrahim. He recognised him by the clothes he was wearing and by a tattoo on the inside of his arm.

He couldn't recognise Ibrahim's face because his body had been left outside in the sun after he was killed and the intense summer heat had burned his skin beyond recognition.

Does anyone remember "Mission Accomplished" and laugh? Or that rubber turkey the President was photographed with during his brief in-country photo opp that first Thanksgiving? Or the Pentagon's hidden caskets? Or going to war "with the army you have?" Or the WMD lie at the U.N.? Or Cheney's classic: "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

Lies and worse: incompetence. So now Camp Casey will move from Texas to Washington DC, and indeed, will spread to cities and towns across the United States. And the moral relativist press will be finally shaken from its torpor. Even Russert will admit the waste. Even Andrea Mitchell will see the failture. Even Ruppert Murdoch will turn Fox to oppose the war from the right.

The war itself is over, the retreat will begin shortly, and Iraq will settle in to its own bloody reinvention over the next decade. And America, my country, will reel.

Comments

[Motts McGregor]

Beautiful and shameful all at once -- thank you for writing this.

-Motts

[Al Hill]

Damn...............

[Hootsbuddy]

Sad, sad commentary on a sad, sad sequence of events.

[David]

"And America, my country, will reel."

This is among the chief reasons, if not the chief reason, I - as a liberal - wanted the war to succeed, and the neoconservatives in some sense to be right about the dominoes of democracy gracefully falling throughout the region. We would all be forced to endure the sickening victory parades, and George W Bush circle jerks, and quite possibly the SOB's face on some damn monument somewhere, but winning an important war often turns out bad for the war party (think: Churchill) afterward, and I truly fear what losing this one will mean to a deeply divided country.

[N. Hellerstein]

The war is _not_ over, not by far; it is merely decided. The end is foreknown; and as for the aftermath, remember that fortune favors the prepared mind. So go ahead, be a pessimist, for that is realistic these days; but it may comfort you to reflect that the ones responsible for this mess are optimists.

[Marcia]

"We need to be done"?

Please, no! Leaving Iraq should be the beginning. Those who have died in this invasion of Iraq, everyone of them, should be honored by a commitment to forging a new, just and honorable U.S. foreign policy that will reduce the likelihood of another Vietnam, Iraq, ect.

[Slappy]

A fine piece of writing. Will the country "reel"? Once we start removing troops, the U.S. populace will no longer care and you'll rarely see the word "Iraq" in print again. The few who will care are those related to those who have died. THe American public will want to put this whole thing out of mind as fast as possible and the America I know is very capable of doing this. Our country's greatest sins are long forgotten or even joked with. Native Americans, slavery, sexism, racism, homphobia. None of it taken seriously. "That's the past" they say. And as asoon as Iraq is "the past" it will no longer be heard from again. The Repubs and their cohorts in teh media will bury it like no story before it.

I hate those scumbags.

[busdrivermike]

It is just a shame that none of this will inspire The Democratic Party elite to grow a spine.

Bush probably will bring a substantial number of troops home, while Rove creates the papier mache' illusion of victory, just in time for the midterms.

So, if you feel vindicated by this turn of events in Iraq, great. But it means nothing if America does not change leadership in the House or Senate in 2006.

[Alan Charles]

A good place to remind us all that we simply MUST write our elected representatives in Washington and urge them to do everything they can to ensure a transparent vote count in the 2008 election or all this handwringing will have been for naught.

If we don't rid ourselves of all those evoting machines that leave no paper trail and can be so easily hacked, we will never again see a Democrat in the White House. Remember, it's who COUNTS our votes that count!

[Dan V]

Admit failure, Impeach Bush&CO, ask for the World's help. Only in upholding our Constitution
can we begin to earn Respect

[Bertie]

Linked here from Wolcott; just have to say this might be the finest written blog post I've ever read.

[Tom K]

*There never was an Iraq, except as the construct of an empire and a dictator . . .."

The same is true of Kuwait (substituting "royal kleptocrats for "dictator"). Do you believe we should not have fought the Gulf War? That is not an arugment posing as a question: it is intended as a serious question.

Nothwithstanding your well-written piece (marred as it is by your passing reference to Baker "pickpocketing" the 2000 election, an irrelevant distraction showing contempt for the rule of law, as represented by the Supreme Court's ruling), things in Iraq are going about as well as could be expected by reasonably intelligent and informed people. That is why I thought it was a mistake to go in.

But having gone in, and having thus far avoided the worst of results (civil war, U.S. military fatalities in the tens of thousands, and increased terrorism against the U.S. and its allies), I don't see much of a case for just pulling out. At least, not without explaning to the world how we view our role in the future, generally and especially in that region, to avoid appearing as a feckless, dilitantish and clueless giant.

I would be curious if you could fashion a meaningful statement of what we ought to tell the world in conjunction with a precipitious withrdrawal from Iraq. Presumably, it would need to assure the arab world against our perceived colonial ambitions, without emboldening them to persist in seeking the destruction of Israel. It would need to be consistent with what we intend to do should Iran, say, go nuclear, without constituting a free pass to North Korea.

Tricky business. It is perhaps too easy to say that what we are doing is wrong. The challenge is to say what we should be doing instead.

[Tom K]

The Iraq war never made much sense as a stand-alone operation. It makes a sort of "sense" only as part of a larger program to re-make the shape of the greater middle east by force.

This adventure is only beginning. How so, you may ask, with domestic political support so low?

Well, wait and see. After all, >80% of the voting population was anti-intervention in late 1941, but FDR had a vision for what was needed, and found a way to get us there. (As I've argued before, if you can avoid being blinded by your beliefs as to the respective merits of FDR's and GWB's strategic visions, their means are revealed as similar in certain key respects.)

Although things have gone about as well as could be expected in Iraq, our intervention there is close to becoming a confirmed failure (by any measure other than "did we get rid of Saddam"). But I believe that isn't surprising to the architects of the plan, or at least many of them.

Another major terroist attack on U.S. soil, or maybe two, would be all it would take to get the public back on board for widening the regional conflict, and doing what is necessary to make the fight sustainable (possibly including a draft, though it is questionable how effective a draft army would be.)

The key would be to have the public focus its anger on Iran. According to some, such plans are in the works. See www.amconmag.com/2005_08_01/article3.html.

In the absence of such an attack (or attacks), I agree that public tolerance for the war will wane. (That will leave us in a bad enough quandry, as addressed in my last post; there are no good answers here.)

Why would the jihadists play into such a plan by launching more attacks? Well, that's what they do, and many of them want a wider confrontation. Even more sensible elements in Iran may take inflammatory action, believing that U.S. intervention against them is inevitable. (Just as the example of Wilson getting the U.S. into WWI helped persuade the axis powers that U.S. entry into WWII was inevitable, and a pre-emptive attack against it would therefore serve their interests.)

I believe that Bush believes that the global war on terror can only be won through wide and sustained application of force, mostly in the middle east. The democrats, presumably, have some opinion on the subject, but I have yet to hear it coherently expressed.

In the absence of new domestic terrorist incidents, the Dems. may be able to win in 2006 or 2008 with a "nothing against something" approach. But I wouldn't count on even that and, if there are more attacks, their floundering will give moderates little comfort that they are the ones to turn to in a time of crisis.

[Zane]

Thank you for this post.

[Rex Luscus]

Once again the Thanksgiving turkey myth...

[Slappy]

Tom K:

With all due respect, what a load of B.S. Comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor (Bush to FDR) is such horseshit. Japan attacked us directly. Even Bush admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Your comparison is misleading at best and falls in line with Bush's comparison to WWII recently. Trying desperately to make the war sound like a noble cause and a distraction from the real issues at hand.

World domination doesn't give all of us a hard-on like the Neo-cons. The sad thing is that you presume Bush sent the troops in to spread democracy. The lie here is too transparent to even be debatable. Your arguments for war are based on a lie and therefore false.

And going by the rule of law would dictate that the Supreme Court over stepped their bounds and had no jurisdiction in 2004. It was a state election in which the SCOTUS stepped in and they have no jurisdiction. The President is elected state by state. It is not a federal election. This is still a Republic.

[Tom K]

Slappy:

Let me take your points in turn.

WWII and the Iraq war are very different, in so many ways that I couldn't begin to name them. One difference is that I believe U.S. involvement in WWII was necessary, which I do not believe about the Iraq war. But in each case, we had a president who believed the country's interests were served by getting into a war that the public did not strongly support. (Until Pearl Harbor, FDR faced much greater resistance that GWB did.)

History records that FDR, prior to Pearl Harbor: (i) circulated false intelligence reports, given him by British intelligence, about a German plan to take over South America, and urged the American people to rely on them to become more bellicose; and (ii) made, and kept, a secret commitment to Churchill (the "Downing Street Memo" of its day) to get the U.S. into WWII through a series of provocative actions against the axis nations, intended to provoke a confrontation that would turn public opinion toward intervention.

I've debated this with Tom W at great length on this blog before, and won't go into all the detail again, but I think my statement that these tactics (and others, not detailed here) were in some key respects similar to GWB's is fair, nothwithstanding the many differences in the two situations. Particularly if we project into a future scenario -- as my post did --where a terrorist attack, possibly carried out by supporters of the Iranian regime, might become the basis for widening the war to Iran. (That would be a closer analogy to Pearl Harbor, but that development isn't necessary to make the analogy based on FDR's pre-Pearl Harbor actions).

You refer to my "arguments for war", but I make no arguments for war, and certainly not for the Iraq war. The closest I have come is to ask for particulars as to how Tom W thinks we should present a percepitious withdrawal, to minimize the obvious possibilty that such action will encourage those hostile to us overseas.

Nor do I presume, as you say I do, that GWB went to war in Iraq "to spread democracy". Until shown compelling evidence to the contrary, I assume he did it because he thought it would make the U.S. safer. He has said that he believes spreading democracy makes the U.S. safer -- a doubtful proposition in the near-to-mid-term -- and I believe that, to the extent he seeks to spread democracy, it is a means toward this constitutional duty to protect the US, rather than an end in itself.

As to Bush v. Gore, respecting the rule of law means accepting the Supreme Court's judgment on questions brought before it, including questions about its own jurisdiction. At a certain point, self-arrogation of power by the judicary becomes a legitimate point of objection for those who respect the rule of law. (In the last fifty years, such objectors have largely been old-style conservatives.) But the Court did not arrogate power to itself in agreeing to decide Bush v. Gore. The Court has jurisdiction over disputes involving interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Bush v. Gore turned on interpretation of Article II Sec. 1, which reads in part: "Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legistatrue thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .". The case presented the question of whether the Legislature or the Judicary of Florida had the last say, under the U.S. Constitution. That is a federal question. (True, the Court did not limit its ruling to this ground, as I believe it should have, but that ground was independently sufficient to establish its jursdiction under any fair reading, even if you believe it should then have ruled for Gore by finding that the Fl. legislature had "directed" a procedure that allowed for the state court's intervention.)

[bob h]

Presumably the building plans for the new American embassy in Baghdad include a large helicopter landing pad on the roof. I say open our doors to all who want to come.

[Slappy]

Tom K: To quote you: "It makes a sort of "sense" only as part of a larger program to re-make the shape of the greater middle east by force."

I read this as a justification of the war. I may have misinterpreted your quotation marks around the word "sense."

Here is a "meaningful statement" that I would tell the world as a Democrat elected president in 2008: "We are sorry. Our leadership has changed and will will try to right the wrongs we have done. We will do our best to make sure this never happens again." Im dead serious. This is the only way to regain the world's respect. Neo-cons dont think we need that. I do.

Those that have no argument that we are there for the oils state: Better us than them having control of it. The other argument is for staying in Iraq because "we are already there, what are we supposed to do? Just pull out?" Lame. It is the Repubs who have no answers, not those wanting to pull out. The Dems in Congress are major fuckups and there are signs that the voting public is out to change that.

My solution? Id hand over the rebuilding of Iraq to the U.N. with full cooperation and disclosure from the U.S. The U.N. has handled such matters before, that is its purpose. We also finance the vast majority of the rebuilding as we should. We hand the job over to the U.N. who is the governing body with any legitimacy in rebuilding a torn nation. Not the ideal means of creating a nation but we fucked up, BIG time. Our grandchildren will be ashamed for us.

[fred elliott]

Very good article and responses were interesting. However, Americans today are great-grand children or great-great-grand children of those who permitted (encouraged) genocide against American natives, and I don't think many of us today "feel ashamed"...which in itself is a shame.

[Custer]

Screw the Indians. We should have exterminated all of them.