substantiation, full documents and further resources. - Keith
----
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/09/09_518.html
September 20, 2004
Incident on Haifa Street
By Tom Engelhardt
Are there any statistics from Iraq in recent weeks which don't
indicate trouble? Oil production, which Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz once swore would fund the reconstruction of a
democratic Iraq, is now crippled and well below prewar levels, while
attacks on oil pipelines and facilities have risen sharply; American
deaths are on the rise (53 for just over half of September) as are
the numbers of our wounded, as are attacks on American troops, which
are now averaging more than 80 a day, "four times the number of one
year ago and 25 percent higher than last spring"; while the strains
on American Guard and Reserve units, being called up ever more
frequently, grow greater by the week; Iraqi civilian casualties have
soared in recent weeks; and on the rise are the killings of Iraqi
policemen, targeted by the insurgency, but also of translators,
cleaning women, clothes washers, carpenters, anyone in fact who works
with the occupying forces; "no-go" areas for American troops have
been increasing steadily as parts of Iraq simply blink off the
American map; the kidnapping of foreigners has risen as evidently has
the under-the-table payment of ransom demands; the number of
car-bombings has gone up and they are being ever more carefully
coordinated; estimates of the numbers of insurgents and their
supporters have been rising rapidly; more mortar shells are being
dropped on U.S. bases; desertions from and the infiltration of the
Iraqi battalions the American military has been training are high and
possibly on the rise; the sophistication and deadliness of guerrilla
attacks is on the rise; the number of CIA agents in the country has
risen; American air strikes on heavily populated neighborhoods of
Iraqi cities are on the rise; the fighting is still spreading (as the
battles around Tal Afar, near the Turkish border, indicated last
week); more schoolchildren are dropping out of school at ever earlier
ages to help support their families; more highways are too dangerous
to drive; the number of countries supporting the "coalition" with
even handfuls of troops has been falling as have the numbers of
troops in allied contingents; the number of articles in leading
American newspapers announcing that large swathes of Iraq have passed
from American control is on a precipitous upward curve; the number of
military experts ready to declare the war in Iraq in some fashion
lost is also on a steep upward climb; while -- and nothing could be
more devastating than this -- on advice from its new staff and
ambassador in Baghdad, the Bush administration has gone back to
Congress to switch $3.4 billion in Congressionally mandated
reconstruction funds from two of the most important areas of daily
life -- the generation of electricity and the purification of water
supplies ("'Maku Karaba, Maku Amin' -- no electricity, no security --
is still the cry of Iraqis on the street") -- largely to "security";
that is, to the creation of Iraqi forces that will nominally fight
under the banner of Iyad Allawi's regime but essentially under
American command. (Does no one remember Richard Nixon's disastrous
"Vietnamization" program?) The only number in this last month that
seems not to have risen precipitously, but has remained doggedly at
zero is the number of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear,
biological or chemical) in Saddam Hussein's possession before the
invasion began.
But let's turn from the large and statistical to a single incident
that made the news repeatedly last week, an incident on Baghdad's
Haifa Street, known locally as "Death Street" for the regular
ambushes that take place there. The thoroughfare, part of a Sunni
neighborhood in the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to
the Americans, lies across the Tigris river from, but only several
hundred yards away from what's now being called the "International
Zone" (as in neocolonial Shanghai) but is better known as the Green
Zone, the highly fortified area where the U.S. embassy and the Allawi
government have existed, until recently, in air-conditioned
(relative) splendor.
On Saturday night, September 11, unknown guerrillas began pounding
the Green Zone with mortars. The area had certainly been mortared
before, but on a distinctly hit-and-run basis. This time, there was
evidently far more mortaring and far less running. The initial
September 13 New York Times report (Sabrina Tavernise, "Scores Are
Dead After Violence Spreads in Iraq") commented that "rarely has the
bombardment [there] been so persistent and intense." When the
intermittent mortaring hadn't stopped by morning, the Americans sent
out troops to locate the guerrillas and undoubtedly fell into a
planned ambush, one aspect of changing tactics as the insurgency
grows ever stronger. ("Militants," reports Kim Housego of the
Associated Press, "now follow up roadside bomb attacks with a deluge
of rocket-propelled grenades instead of fleeing, or fire off mortar
rounds to lure soldiers out of their base and into freshly laid mine
fields, [U.S.] military commanders say.")
Those troops, in turn, came under fire, or were attacked by a suicide
car bomber or a car bomb, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were then
sent out to rescue them. One of the Bradley's was subsequently
disabled on Haifa Street, possibly by a suicide car bomber or a car
bomb, and its crew promptly came under fire. In the course of all
this, six American soldiers were wounded, including two of the
Bradley crewmen who were quickly rescued and evacuated leaving the
wrecked vehicle behind. Later, a crowd gathered, including children;
the black and yellow banner of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and
Jihad terrorist group was brought out; members of the Arab media
appeared to do TV reports; time passed -- three hours according to
the BBC -- and then two American helicopters returned, made several
passes over the vehicle with the black banner by now stuffed in the
Bradley's gun barrel and the guerrilla fighters evidently long gone.
At that point, according to Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles
Times, the helicopter pilots let loose a barrage of "seven rockets
and 30 high-caliber machine-gun rounds onto a crowded Baghdad
street," an action American officials later deemed "an appropriate
response." The vehicle was pulverized and thirteen people, evidently
mainly bystanders including a girl, died and many more were wounded.
Most important, in terms of the attention the incident has received,
Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al Arabiya satellite
network of Dubai was killed in the attack while on camera, his blood
spattering the lens, and Seif Fouad, a Reuters cameraman, was
wounded. The scene of Tomeizi dying, while crying out, "Seif, Seif!
I'm going to die. I'm going to die," which briefly made prime-time
news in the U.S., was shown over and over again on Arab networks, to
local and regional outrage.
The American military promptly offered three explanations for the
attack in crowded Baghdad: the helicopters were providing covering
fire for withdrawing American troops; the Bradley had "sensitive
equipment and weapons" that might be looted by "anti-Iraqi forces"
("The helicopters `fired upon the anti-Iraqi forces and the Bradley
preventing the loss of sensitive equipment and weapons,' the [U.S.]
statement said. 'An unknown number of insurgents and Iraq civilians
were wounded or killed in the incident'''); and that the helicopters
took ground fire from the crowd as they passed overhead (though TV
film of the incident indicates that no firing came from around the
Bradley itself, at least in the moments before the attack, nor can
the sound of gunfire be heard before the helicopters let loose their
missiles).
The first of these explanations was withdrawn the next day. The
second has been largely withdrawn since. The third -- that the
helicopters were just returning fire -- stands along with a claim
that, according to the LA Times' McDonnell, "it was unclear what
caused the casualties -- volleys from the helicopters, explosions
from ammunition in the Bradley or insurgent fire." The fog of war is,
of course, a convenient hiding place for military officials in
situations like this as, after a fashion, it was for military
investigators of the acts seen in those photos at Abu Ghraib. There,
as Mark Danner pointed out recently in the New York Review of Books,
they spoke of "'misinterpretation/confusion incidents' (those
committed by military intelligence soldiers, who, however, were
'confused' about what was permitted at Abu Ghraib as a matter of
policy)."
Self-defense based on ground fire was, in fact, the basis on which,
according to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, the commander of
American forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli would, by
week's end, explain the deaths on Haifa Street. He took a rare step
(for Americans in Iraq), addressing Arab and Western reporters in a
conference room at "Camp Victory," the ill-named American military
headquarters, on the incident ("We wanted to explain, particularly to
the Iraqi people, that we do everything we can to eliminate
collateral damage."), defending the military's acts ("The actions of
our soldiers and pilots were well within their rights."),
sympathizing with the families of the dead ("I grieve their losses
and give my condolences to their families."), but not, of course,
apologizing.
Among the unacceptable military explanations for the deaths on Haifa
Street: Frustration, anger ("The Army said it was not the sight of
the insurgent flag on the Bradley vehicle that triggered the
helicopter strike."), or revenge (think: punishment) as in Falluja
last April; and certainly not the fear of sending troops a few
hundred yards from the Green Zone into a possible further ambush.
Many Iraqis are naturally outraged that American helicopters missiled
a crowd in downtown Baghdad, whatever the reason. (Imagine the same
thing happening on, say, Connecticut Avenue in Washington or upper
Broadway in New York.) But what are we to make of this? What does the
incident on Haifa Street tell us about our situation in Iraq?
From no-go to free-fire zones
For the last weeks, there have been a number of front page stories in
major papers about the way in which the insurgency in Iraq has
altered. On Wednesday, for instance, Farnaz Fassihi and Greg Jaffe of
the Wall Street Journal had a front page piece headlined "Rebel
Attacks in Iraq Reveal New Cooperation" with passages like:
"Iraq's once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly
cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily
gaining control of more areas of the countryÉ 'The insurgents are no
longer operating in isolated pockets of their own. They are
well-connected and cooperating,' said Sabah Kadhim, a senior adviser
to Iraq's Interior Ministry, which oversees the police and security
around the country."
In the meantime, information about the first CIA National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq since the infamously cooked NIE of
October 2002 -- this one initiated before former Director George
Tenet left the Agency and perhaps a case of Tenet's revenge -- was
leaked to Douglas Jehl of the New York Times. That paper then
front-paged its gloomy scenarios. These ranged from the maintenance
of a "tenuous," strife-torn country to outright civil war. ("A
classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush
in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq,
government officials said Wednesday.") But until the incident on
Haifa Street, recent reporting had focused on the loss of Falluja or
Ramadi or Samarra or Baquba or the way the "Sunni Triangle" was
blinking off the American map of Iraq. What was remarkable about the
incident on Haifa Street was that a part of Iraq only hundreds of
yards from one of our most fortified strongpoints was blinking off as
well -- so much so that when our commanders decided to take out a
disabled vehicle or offer payback, they chose to do so from the air.
Though headlines about bombing runs over Falluja are increasingly
commonplace, the use of air power is certainly one of the great
missing stories in our ongoing war in Iraq. I've seen a single,
modest AP piece by Robert Burns featuring the subject -- but no
overviews at all; no strategic discussions of the subject even as our
military comes to rely ever more on air power for attacking in urban
Iraq; and certainly no legal or moral discussions of the programmatic
bombing of heavily populated urban areas. Nothing.
In our ability to let loose destructive power at great distances and
by air, the United States military is undoubtedly unparalleled as a
power today. And yet here's the counterintuitive way you have to
think about American airpower in Iraq: Watch where the bombs and
missiles are falling -- starting with Falluja and ending up on Haifa
Street -- and you can map almost exactly where American power is
blinking off. The use of air power, in other words, is a sign of
American weakness. Its use maps our inability to control Iraq. To the
extent that you can monitor our air power, you'll know much about
what's going badly in that country, in part because the resort to air
power in a guerrilla war means the surefire alienation of the
contested population. It means that you've given up on "hearts and
minds," to use a classic Vietnam-era phrase, and turned to the
punitive destruction of bodies and souls.
Air power -- as in Vietnam -- is a harder story to cover than ground
fighting. The planes take off; the reporters don't follow. And yet,
for any reporter looking for a good story, there's a great -- if
horrific -- one here, one with deep history in Iraq. After all, when
the Brits found they couldn't control the country in the 1920s, they
pioneered the use of air power as a weapon of bloody punishment and
retribution in the resistant villages of Iraq.
(There is, by the way, another intertwined missing story here: that
of Western reporters in Baghdad and what they can actually report --
which seems to be next to nothing. If you listen to the New York
Times' John Burns and other American reporters taking up their
nighttime jobs as pundits on shows like Nightline or Charlie Rose,
they sometimes do discuss, at least in passing, the extreme
limitations on their ability to report in person on any story from
Iraq. But have you seen a single piece in any American paper on a day
in the life of a reporter in Baghdad? I think not, although for many
western reporters it is clearly now increasingly perilous simply to
leave one's fortified post or hotel to report within the confines of
Baghdad itself, no less travel anywhere in the country.
If anything, parts of Iraq began blinking off the map of American
reportage long before they disappeared from the military map of the
country. Now our reporters, unless embedded with American forces, are
largely trapped in restricted parts of Baghdad, waiting for the war
to come to the Green Zone. Most of the major papers have hired Iraqi
reporters to help them out, but don't imagine for a second that what
you're reading is simply the news from Iraq. Note, for instance, that
when the helicopters struck in Haifa Street, only several hundred
yards from the Green Zone, Arab television was there but, as far as I
could see, not CNN or the networks. The reasons for all this are
quite understandable. Iraq is now a desperately perilous place for
unarmed, or even armed, westerners. I won't be surprised when the
first American news organizations, like the last of the relief
organizations, simply decide to pull out. What's far less
understandable is that the conditions for reporting in Iraq, for our
"news" on Iraq, go largely unreported.)
In the meantime, as the incident in Haifa Street indicated, Iraq is
blinking off the map of Iyad Allawi's government as well. Unlike
Hamid Karzai ("the mayor of Kabul") in Afghanistan, Allawi turns out
not even to be the mayor of Baghdad. The vast Shiite slum of Sadr
City in the capital, with two million residents, has long been a near
no-go area for American or allied Iraqi troops. But what the incident
on Haifa Street made clearer is that a neighborhood only the
equivalent of three football fields from one of the most fortified
spots in Iraq has also slipped from American -- and Allawi - control,
and so has become a target for air power.
Perhaps the week's most remarkable story appeared in the conservative
British Financial Times which in its editorial pages only the week
before had called for some kind of staged withdrawal of American and
British forces from Iraq. In a September 15 piece headlined, "Green
Zone is 'no longer totally secure,'" James Drummond and Steve Negus
reported that:
"US military officers in Baghdad have warned they cannot guarantee
the security of the perimeter around the Green Zone, the headquarters
of the Iraqi government and home to the US and British embassies,
according to security company employees. At a briefing earlier this
month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone's perimeter
said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating
the compound's defences.
"The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already
been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for
their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad's centre, is one of the
most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have
not been able to penetrate it."
This is a remarkable development actually, far worse than anyone is
yet saying, and our response is to loose air power on the situation.
We still generally claim, of course, that our strikes whether in
Falluja or on Haifa Street, like the Israeli targeted assassinations
in Gaza and the West Bank on which they were originally patterned,
are "surgical," "targeted," "precise," and carefully planned to avoid
"collateral damage." But reports from hospitals in Falluja and
elsewhere indicate that, as is hardly surprising when you bomb
heavily populated civilian areas, this is at best a fantasy of
military planners. In fact, we already seem to be in a process --
familiar enough from our Vietnam experience -- by which "no-go" areas
will slowly be transformed into "free fire zones."
Just this Sunday, a New York Times front-page piece by Dexter Filkins
(U.S. Plans Year-End Drive To Take Iraqi Rebel Areas) reports that,
according to an unnamed senior American commander, "the military
intend[s] to take back Falluja and other rebel areas by year's end"
-- after, that is, the November elections in the U.S. but before the
scheduled Iraqi ones.
Here, then, is a vision of Iraq's future (and ours) not to be found
in the latest National Intelligence Estimate: Barring some
spectacular negotiated deal, we "take," which would mean "flatten,"
Fallujah. (For comparison, just consider what happened to the old
city of Najaf, blocks of which are now in rubble after a couple of
weeks of fighting which ended dramatically with a 2,000 pound bomb
being dropped on a hotel near the holy shrine of the Imam Ali.)
Imagine further whole swaths of urban Iraq being turned into
free-fire zones and transformed into rubble -- and an ever larger
insurgency.
It is in this context that our President now rejects the CIA's July
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and speaks of continuing
"progress" in that country. It is in this context that his press
spokesman decries "handwringers" and "pessimists." It is in this
context that he and his vice-president continue to shellac another
layer of fantasy onto what Jonathan Schell in his most recent column
in the Nation (Organizing Amnesia) calls the "delusions that have
been laid down now, layer after layer, for more than fifty years." In
much of this, from early reporting on Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction through our vaunted "transfer of sovereignty" to the
Allawi interim government, our media and the whole pundit class has
been conjoined with the administration in delusional activities.
But those Iraqi insurgents threatening to make their way into the
Green Zone also threaten to make their way into George Bush's fantasy
Iraq (as the Vietnamese once fought their way into another
President's fantasy of battlefield and political "progress"). Parts
of Iraq are already blinking off the President's map. The only
question is whether he can hold his fantasyland together through
November 2. On this, his opponent has been of great aid and comfort.
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