Calzoncillo-bomba

...Y de paso, dónde está mi calzoncillo-bomba?

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Perhaps Rajiv Chandrasekaran's key insight in his award-winning non-fiction book is that the dark comedy of Baghdad's Green Zone would in fact be the more lastingly interesting story than the tragic chaos and violence building up outside in the 'Red Zone'.

In other words, while other journalists used the mounting toll of dead bodies to throw into relief the upbeat statements made by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) run by 'Viceroy' L.Paul Bremer III, this senior reporter from the Washington Post chose instead to slowly unpick the internal pyschological drivers of America's imperialist folly.

The CPA existed within the the Green Zone life-support system, devised and managed by Halliburton and featuring many things unknown to Baghdad residents on the outside, such as uninterrupted power and water and eat-all-you-can, southern-style buffets. The teams of mostly young administrators working in this environment, by nature "earnest and parochial" were also generally under-resourced and under-qualified and prone to be deluded by their controlled existence in this 'bubble' into embarking on pet initiatives (like anti-smoking legislation) which were not exactly germane to the immediate problem of rebuilding a shattered nation.

After passing legislation on copyright law and genetically-modified organisms, the Neocons' fiscal experimentation included reducing the basic level of taxation on individuals and companies from 45% to 15% and removing all import taxes. As a result of the latter order, 500,000 cars flooded into Iraq from neighbouring countries and soon Iraq's refineries were unable to cope with all this demand for petrol. American soldiers that found themselves stuck in traffic jams in their Humvees weren't too chuffed about it either. But never mind. Soon someone had gone on the Internet and printed out the traffic code from the state of Maryland and important new rules (such as always keeping both hands on the steering wheel) were being imposed on bemused Iraqi motorists.

Chandrasekaran shows how many of the individuals given key posts of responsibility during the life of the CPA (April 2003-June 2004) had been picked because they said the right things about abortion and the 2000 Presidential election in their interviews. Half of them had needed to get their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. And where security was an issue "I used to be a SEAL" was often the magic, door opening phrase.

Now, whilst the Iraqis were indeed eager for American politics (which many associated with being able to do whatever they wanted) they were altogether less keen on American economics, which made a good many of them unemployed during the occupation, particularly former army members and workers in state industries. The Bremer-mandated process of de-BAATHification was also especially damaging as it left many corporations and academic institutions rudderless.

The Neocons were desperate to create a "robust private sector", but had to contend with the small obstacle of the Hague Convention (1899) which sought to deny occupying powers the right to dispose of other countries' assets as they see fit. Still, finding that the state-run banks had $2bn in deposits yet only $1bn in assets, the CPA decided to forgive the inter-company debts of state run enterprises, which had the effect of ruining some of the better ones and delivering a much undeserved windfall to others.

Unintended, unwanted consequences were the result of their efforts in the political sphere as well. The lack of a recent census meant that it was going to be hard to determine the exact regional representation in the planned new democratic congress, so Bremer cut through the problem and promulgated in CPA Order 96 that Iraq would be a single electoral constituency. This disadvantaged smaller local parties and empowered some of the more virulent nutjobby factions operating at national level. Chandrasekaran also reckons that American attempts at social engineering created divisions between ethnic groups which had never been felt so strongly before.

The end result was not the balanced, secular Jeffersonian democracy devoted to liberal economic principles that the Neocons had surely envisaged.

Yee haw is not a foreign policy - British army graffiti in Baghdad.

The Harry Wales antidote

Mike Hume of Spiked: "There is an assumption that, in contrast to the debacle in Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan is Britain and America’s ‘good war’, launched after the 9/11 terror attacks on America. Yet the Afghan War rather well symbolises the incoherence and lack of purpose in the West’s ‘war on terror’. Those pictures of Prince Harry firing his machine gun into the desert brought to my mind once more Conrad’s description, in The Heart of Darkness, of a French warship blindly ‘firing into a Continent’ off the coast of colonial Africa."

Shooter, 'seeing the elephant'

We all remember the speech made by Lt. Colonel Tim Collins on the eve of the invasion of Iraq:

"We go to liberate, not to conquer.We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.

"There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.

"Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."

Somewhere nearby in Kuwait, Colonel Brian P. McCoy, Darkside Six, of the 3rd Batallion, 4th Marine Division was addressing his own troops, 'the Bull', thus:

"My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals."

There in a nutshell, you might think, is the difference between the modern militaries of our two nations. Yet one of McCoy's subordinates was one Gunnery Sergeant Jack Coughlin, and in this account of his experiences in the days that followed we witness a fascinating tension between a milico mentality glutted on "violent supremacy" and one that occasionally threatens to examine warrior existentialism a bit more critically.

So, at one stage we listen as Coughlin humanises an enemy that he has recently put a couple of bullets into, the only man to survive a shot from his rifle it seems, yet one he would not hesitate to shoot again "if ever we faced each other again on the battlefield."

"War sucks," Coughlin tells us whenever he witnesses its lack of proper discrimination and sense of universal justice. And yet his mood immediately after 9-11 is one of unbridled enthusiasm for the opportunity to ply his deadly trade in earnest. "During Operation Iraqi Freedom alone he recorded at least thirty-six kills, thirteen of them in a single twenty-four hour period," the blurb on the back cover enthuses.

"In the warrior's world, we called dramatic change 'seeing the elephant.' Once you saw it you never forgot it," Coughlin reveals, and there's no question that his memoir has some elephantine insights into the code of the modern western warrior.

Before the invasion Coughlin has spent months trying to persuade his superiors of the merits of a more mobile deployment of snipers. Circumstances on the ground in Iraq see his dreams realised, as he is able to waste countless armed Iraqi fools from the top of a fast-moving Humvee.

There's a certain voyeuristic pleasure in 'glassing' the world of the professional murderer through Coughlin's scope and this is no doubt what put this book on the New York Times bestsellers list. And so the book is full of his arresting descriptions of his one-to-one duels with men that never saw him coming: "I smoke-checked him, bam, and he was dead, his body twitching for a few more moments while his internal systems shut down," whilst another of his rounds "created a hole that is called the 'permanent cavity,' and then the bullet exploded, sending small, jagged fragments spinning off in erratic paths that shattered his organs."

And yet the key moment, one that had certain voices in the media calling for Colonel McCoy to be had up for war crimes, is one where the gunnery sergeant suffers a sudden attack of amnesia. Having secured the strategically vital Diyala bridge "gravity and the physics of momentum" conspire to lead carload after carload of desperate Iraqi citizens towards the itchy trigger fingers of the Bull's grunts, amongst whom Coughlin sits. "It did not come to a stop, because it could not, until our defensive perimeter was set. There was no way to separate the sheep from the wolves," he explains, before adding that he has "no recollection" of many of the bloody moments that ensued.

"Fortunately, no one fired a shot at us, for had they done so, we would have returned a thousand," he had noted earlier in the war as his unit passed through a small town on the highway to Baghdad. Here is a soldier that is all too conscious of his position as valuable asset, one worth defending with indiscriminate gunfire directed against even marginally suspect civilians.

Given Collins's remarks about flags above, it was fortunate that Coughlin was in the square beside Saddam's statue when one of his Marine Corps colleagues tried to wrap the stars and stripes around it's bronze head. His own immediate superior, one Lieutenant Casey had with him a pre-1990 version of the Iraqi flag, which was immediately donated to the angry crowd.

The only way I have ever found to justify the invasion of Iraq to myself is as a continuation of the intent to smother the original aggression unleashed by Saddam in 1990. Not only do none of the other justifications make any real sense, they violate the principle I internalised when I abandoned the pacifism of my childhood: that force should only be deployed as a response to force.

Coughlin's wife stopped writing to him as war broke out and divorced him the moment he returned to California.

Islamic Rage Boy

"The angry young man of Kahmir, and now a blogger's darling."



and...



and...

Books we can't read

Spiked has published a semi-courageous piece on the Five books on terrorism you aren't allowed to read which, at a time when the Saudi monarch is in our midst here in the UK, strongly implies that the totalitarian enemies of freedom understand our libel laws better than many of our authors and publishers do, and can therefore conduct medieval-style book-cremations via a more modern kind of proxy.

The Saudi 'billionaire' in question could well be none other than Central America's favourite creative accountant, Khalid bin Mahfouz.

King Abdullah apparently thinks we're being slack in addressing the threat posed by the Salafist nutjobs that have been his country's second most significant export. (If there was a 'good bit' to The Kingdom it was the opening title sequence which did its best to explain the foundations of Abdullah's power and reminded Americans how many of the 9-11 terrorists had been his subjects.)

How many times can you recall an RPG fired in the direction of the (apparent) good guys that actually frags someone in a recent Hollywood movie? The Kingdom added to the body of explosive near-misses committed to film. I think some FBI guys might have taken a hit in Clear and Present Danger...?

The part of the Spiked article that made me sit up and think was Michael Griffin's assertion that his pre-9-11 account of the Taliban 'whirlwind' was somehow innocent, because subsequently "everything has been shovelled into a ditch of what the West wants everybody to believe about Islam, terror, the Taliban al-Qaeda and so on. You can no longer find books that deal with the pure, unadulterated information about history." Hmmm....all pure information becomes marketable content in its own special way surely.

Rob Lyons, the deputy editor of Spiked was on Breakfast this morning claiming that recycling is generally neither necessary or helpful. Their business plan seems to be to work out what the current groupthink is and then concoct a bendy but not entirely flimsy counterpoint.

Apparently it's still illegal to watch David Kronenberg's Crash in Westminster.

"Unfair at best"

The first American soldier killed in Iraq back in March 2003 was a Guatemalan orphan who had walked his way to the US as a boy and was serving in the Marine Corps in order to pay for a college education.

CNN has this week reported on the case of Mildred, the Guatemalan wife of a US Naval Petty Officer serving his third tour in Iraq. She came to the US illegally as a five year-old and now faces deportation. The couple have a twenty month-old son.



Back in June Specialist Alex Jimenez went missing in Iraq (presumed kidnapped by insurgents), since when his wife has also faced the threat of deportation:



Update: Britain, on the other hand, appears to want to do the decent thing, having offered asylum to a number of translators who have worked with our forces in Southern Iraq.

Terror Camp

On a visit to Afghanistan in 2002 Thomas Dworzak discovered this striking collection of Taliban passport pics:

Two views of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

First up the tough guys with all the hardware. Then the plucky local loons with "a strong will".

Their respective choices of soundtrack should give a clear enough indication of which side you would generally expect to win. My money certainly wouldn't be on the men driving around in armoured vehicles listening to Metallica on their iPods.

Closed for business

I passed the boarded up former Iraqi Embassy at 21 Queen's Gate on Sunday afternoon. Renamed the 'Iraqi Interests Section' after the first Gulf War it was finally abandoned in February 2003. Saddam's flag still flies at roughly half mast above the portico.

A new ambassador for the changed regime finally turned up in late 2004 and found that the building had been extensively burgled. Even some of the antique fireplaces had been carried off.

The thieves had left the safes alone so the new team brought in some professional safe-crackers and in one safe that was located in the second floor office where the Iraqi security service had been based, they discovered a cache of weapons including several Uzis and Kalashnikovs and ten handguns, some of which were fitted with silencers. Elsewhere they found some electric cattle prods, telescopic cameras and various bugging devices.

The Bulgarian embassy and that of Oman are opposite. One imagines that these kind of stashes are not entirely uncommon in the diplomatic community. The Bulgarian embassy used to operate a Duty Free shop where you could buy very cheap bottles of Becks and other goodies. You had to take a friendly Bulgar along with you as your membership card.

Anyway, two years ago the BBC reported that the Iraqi government had decided to rennovate this basically derelict building. Yet here we are in August 2007 and it appears to be in the same state of rennovation as Iraq itself.

Did it drop?

"Those red and white Jee-had towels"

"Todo de negro, con barba terrorista."

Wrong Soundtrack

On a number of occasions over the past couple of years I have found myself trying to explain to my father why it is I am so convinced that the US Army and Marine Corps engaged in the War on Terror are not exactly the same brave/fun-loving bunch of guys that came over and saved Europe in the 1940s.

It's all down to the music they listen to I reckon. The oversexed, overpaid and over here crop from the WWII era all listened to Glenn Miller. Then in the 60s over in south-east Asia their kids were tuned into the Doors. Now it's Linkin' Park that America's finest are into.

Who is going to be more "Dude, we fucked those people all to shit down there"? The GI that listens to In the Mood, or the one that listens to In the End (....it doesn't really maaaatter)?

Rednex on the rampage

More exemplary hearts and minds soldiering from the US Marines in Ramadi.

"Scattered Shias, Sunni spells"

It worries me that tonight's lead story surrounding the US revelation that "a growing body of evidence" points to Iran supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq, fails to acknowlege the obvious fact that the Shia militias that Iran is most likely to support, have proven far less deadly to the invaders than the Sunni ones. 170 coalition deaths are cited. This is really a small percentage of the total. Where are the Sunnis getting their roadside bombs from then? (Answers on a postcard)

Sniffing into a bag

Frode has sent me this abcnews article on the current state of oversensitivities on America's airlines:

"One passenger on a Delta flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City was
arrested for leaving his seat to go to the lavatory less than 30 minutes before
landing (due to the incident, air marshals ordered all passengers to put their
hands on their heads for the rest of the flight)...In September, Seth Stein, a
London interior designer returning from his vacation in Turks and Caicos, was
put in a chokehold and physically pinned to his seat by another passenger on an American Airlines flight. Stein's crime: He used an iPod, went to the lavatory and his tan made him appear 'Arab.'"

The Place of Soldiers

On paper at least, the rationale for the invasion occupation of Afghanistan seemed fairly simple back in 2001. These days it is more likely to appeal to those that prefer their situations to be riddled with sobering contradictions, if not completely intractable.

I am following with great interest Elizabeth Rubin's account of her experiences In the land of the Taliban in which she attempts to uncover the reasons for the recent resurgence of the men in white turbans.

From 1994-2001 the Taliban were an entrenched and isolated medieval regime. In Rubin's words "a cloistered clique". Thanks in part to the Internet − not always a progressive force − this once inward looking rebellion has become part of what may yet become a global insurgency of the Muslim umma. (It's worth recalling here that the genocidal activities of Guatemala's military governments in the 80s ultimately served only to foster something which had not really existed before outside the pages of the National Geographic, a unified Maya identity. )

There are still a great many different interests in play here, many different local counter-narratives that fit to a greater or lesser extent the outside world's understanding of what is at stake. No wonder NATO troops are starting to ponder the identity of their elusive enemy. 'Terrorist' will hardly make much sense to anyone on the ground.

And amongst the jihadis themselves there are several different notions of what the holy war should mean. For some it is a war of liberation, for others a war of self-improvement. Only a minority perhaps have a geopolitical view. For many Afghans lodged in between the warring forces, allegiance is necessarily allocated on a pragmatic basis.

The Taliban too have become more pragmatic. Pre-2001 they suppressed the cultivation of opium poppies. Now they are encouraging it, and reaping the financial benefits.

As nation-builders the Americans are literally cowboys. Unwilling to fill the power vacuum they have allowed the warlords to rally, and to shore up their reestablished power, some of these strongmen have tended to label anyone in their way Al Qaeda, in the hope of drawing in an airstrike from the obliging Kaffirs.

Meanwhile Pakistan's heart feels one thing while its tongue says another. There are many reasons for this. Their bitter rivalry with India, one of Karzai's main supporters along with America, their territorial ambitions, Musharraf's need to appease his country's own religious factions and the suspicion that the Americans have used them "like condoms". As in Guatemala retired army Generals represent a semi-secret power structure that the executive branch can control only loosely.

And then there's Gitmo, lately excused by Olly North in the following manner:

"Of the 247 detainees who have been released thus far, 25 -- more than ten percent -- are believed to have returned to the "jihad." One of them, Abdullah Mehsud, spent two years in Guantanamo after being captured fighting with the Taliban. He was released after convincing U.S. interrogators that he was an innocent Afghan tribesman. Last October, after returning to Pakistan, his "country of choice," he kidnapped two Chinese engineers. He claims that he and his followers will "fight America and its allies until the very end."

"Mullah Shahzada spent two years at a special "seaside house" with fellow teenage detainees. There he was taught English, played sports, and watched videos designed to make him "like us." After swearing an oath against violence he was returned to Afghanistan. Just weeks later he became one of twelve former detainees confirmed killed by coalition forces while fighting with Taliban al Qaeda units. "

I wonder where you can get hold of those become like us videos!

State of Denial

Simon Jenkins has reviewed Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War Part III.

"As for the pretence that Britain was an equal partner in this venture,
the only references to Blair are to how much, or how little, he should be told.
He was not just Bush’s poodle, but one with neither bite nor bark. This is not
just America’s disgrace."

Casualties of War

Samizdata has put the Lancet's figure of 600,000 Iraqi war dead in context, with a view to suggesting that it is "inherently incredible":

• It exceeds by 25% the casualties (450,000) , military and civilian, suffered by Great Britain in all of World War II, including the Blitz, the African, Pacific and European campaigns
• It exceeds by 25% the casualties (460,000), civilian and military, suffered by Italy in all of World War II
• It exceeds the casualties (562,000), military and civilian, suffered by France in World War II, including the initial battles with the Germans, the Occupation, and the reconquest by the Allies.
• It approaches the 3.6% rate experienced by the Japanese in World War II.

There were however said to have been "more than a million" Iraqi casualties in the Iran-Iraq War and Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism claims that over a million have so far perished in the conflict in the Sudan, though recent UN estimates put the figure at around 400,000.

Disgruntled from Yorkshire

In apparently stark contrast to Paul Berman's view that the threat posed by radical Islamic terror is a reconfiguration of "the war between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilisation ever since the calamities of the First World War," Spiked's Brendan O'Neill sees it as "less evidence of any kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ and more the consequence of the decline and fall of Western civilisation and its move into a new era of identity, narcissism and malaise."

Between 9-11 and 7-7 many European commentators exhibited a new-found solidarity with the Palestinian cause. If people were prepared to blow themselves up, they must be being almost incomprehensibly oppressed. Suicide terror became a measure of Zionist guilt. Then a bunch of fairly mainstream British Muslims from Yorkshire self-detonated on London's transport network and a revised explanation was required.

O'Neill for instance, sets about denying non-domestic causality. "The 7-7 atrocity was a very British bombing," as the bombers were just an extreme instance of our society's disgruntlement with itself, particualrly with Bluewater chavs, urban nightclub "slags" and such like. "They were a product of identity politics and victim cuture more than radical foreign Islamism...from their narcissistic elevation of identity to their use of body for transcendence, their terrorist attack was made at home."

So, O'Neill concludes, see not the hand of Liberalism's oldest foe, but instead its growing tendency to self-mutilate. "A scream of rage from within," comparable say to the fashion for body piercing. This is dangerous nonsense.

I don't think the London bombers' apparent lack of contact with ranting Imams should be taken to indicate that they simply used their religion to "contextualise" an already present desire to harm themselves and other random members of a degenerate society. No, in a shift remarkably similar to that which occured when bubonic plague became pneumonic plague, the pathology of Islamism is now "in the air" and it no longer requires direct contact with a radical 'rat' for the epidemic to spread from susceptible individual to susceptible individual.