Knock, knock

A Reuters article by Samia Nakhoul entitled Cool gunmen hunted down Christians begins with a question asked by Islamic gunmen who seized an expatriate housing complex and killed 22 residents:

"Are you Muslim or Christian? We don't want to kill Muslims. Show us where the Americans and Westerners live," Islamic militants told an Arab after a shooting rampage against Westerners in Saudi Arabia. The four gunmen, aged 18 to 25 and wearing military vests, grabbed Abu Hashem, an Iraqi with a United States passport, in front of his home in the Oasis compound in Khobar, but they let him go when he told them he was a Muslim. "Don't be afraid. We won't kill Muslims - even if you are an American," he quoted them as saying. ... "[The gunman] told me, 'Our jihad is not against Muslims, but against Americans and Westerners'. He asked me to show him which villas had Americans and Westerners."

The shooting "rampage against Westerners" included Indians, Filipinos and Sri Lankans.  The Deccan Herald reported eight Indians killed, mostly janitors. The other dead included three Filipinos, identified by the Arab News as an accountant,  driver and  cook. The victims were neither particularly Western nor obviously Christian. The actual breakdown of deaths was:

Indians	8
Filipinos	3
Saudis	3
Sri Lankans	2
Americans	1
Britons	1
Italians	1
Swedes	1
South Africans	1
Egyptians	1
TOTAL	22

So it was a trick question. But someone who might have known the right answer was Carlos the Jackal, once a Marxist, now a convert to Islam and an international celebrity. A British reporter who lunched with his French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, describes the experience.

[Isabelle Coutant-Peyre] laughs throatily and lights another Cuban cigarillo. We are sitting in the Palais de Justice bar in Paris, where she swaps her lawyer's robe for a chic leather jacket. Gamine, with jetblack hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and a husky voice, she has an air of rebelliousness. Her mobile phone, which has already rung several times, trills again. She lowers her head and mutters into it: "I'll tell you later. Me too, me too." Snapping the phone shut, she announces: "That was Carlos."

There is no need to ask "Carlos who?". Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — alias "Carlos the Jackal" — was once the world's most wanted terrorist before anyone had ever heard of Osama bin Laden. He has been implicated in a number of international terrorist attacks and recently, in an interview on French television, claimed responsibility for killing more than 1500 people in the cause of Palestinian liberation (he is a convert to Islam). He was imprisoned in 1997 for the murder of two French policemen and an informant 22 years earlier. Today he is Madame Coutant-Peyre's husband — and the author of excruciating love poems penned from his cell. "I am jealous of the sun that tans you," he writes. "Of the shade that caresses you; Of your sheets that do not cover me. Of your legs not intertwined with mine."

He would known that the response was not 'I was a just a poor Muslim with a family. Spare me' or 'I am just a Filipino cook who prepares food' or even 'I am a Swedish European who is on your side'. The gunmen at the Oasis Housing complex, weighed each of these lives and decided to pull the trigger, not according to the human worth of their victims, but according to the column inches they would provide. The cooks and drivers were killed the better to hammer home the implacability of terror. Saudi staff were killed to convey the penalties for associating with the kuffar. The assorted Europeans to provide variety. The American Muslim was pointedly spared so Reuters could emphasize the magnanimity of Jihad. Carlos, better than anyone, would have understood that ordinary humanity is a mere canvas upon which the truly elect can write their Message: that in a media driven war blood must ink the presses -- and that the "militant's" first duty is to ensure that the presses never stop. The correct answer was, 'I am one of you'; and the angel of darkness would have passed him by.

The Global Battlefield

Blogger JK and reader TH both sent links to a tongue-in-cheek article by David Wong called I Want a War Sim. Wong says he is fed up with unrealistic simulations in which good guys and bad guys square off in empty, exotic locales. That is totally unrealistic. What he wants is a simulation where the combatants fight in an area where civilian casualties are unavoidable, television crews dog your steps and Congressional hearings second-guess every move.

I want a War Sim where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.

It is a measure of how strange the world has become that Lt. Col. Robert R. Leonhard, U.S.A. (ret) writes in the Army Magazine about how situations similar to Wong's satirical scenario will become the rule rather than the exception (Hat tip, reader MIG). Col. Leonhard argues that Sun Tzu's maxim to fight in cities "only when there is no alternative" is hopelessly outdated because there is nowhere else to fight.

We do not live in Sun Tzu’s world, nor even in that of Clausewitz, Fuller or Liddell Hart. The modern world has urbanized to an unprecedented degree, and it is inconceivable that future military contingencies will not involve urban operations. Sun Tzu lived and wrote (if indeed he was a real person) in the agrarian age, when most of the land was either wilderness or cultivated. Large segments of the population lived outside cities, and warfare typically occurred in flat, open terrain. Such battlefields--the stomping grounds of warriors from Sun Tzu to Napoleon--are becoming scarcer each day. Furthermore, the very success of American joint operations--and joint fires in particular--guarantee that a clever opponent will move into cities for protection. The modern battlefield is urban.

Because such a battlefield is densely populated, modern operations will cease to become purely military in character, instead becoming complex politico-military-media problems. Leonhard maintains that a US military constituted around largely military functions lacks the dimensionality necessary to successfully fight in this new arena. The US military is laboring under the crippling disadvantage of having no dedicated method of dealing with charred teddy bears.

In addition to the familiar tactical issues described above, the urban warrior must deal with refugees, media, curfews, crowd control, municipal government, street gangs, schools, armed citizens, disease, mass casualties, police, cultural sites, billions of dollars of private property, infrastructure and religion, to name but a few factors. In this context, the brigade combat team that dominates the central corridor is woefully inadequate; likewise, the doctrine and force structure behind it.

I have previously tried to demonstrate ("Factors of Conflict in the Early 21st Century," ARMY, January) that the operational level of war is becoming an anachronism because the idea of a theater military campaign is no longer relevant. Theater operations have become so intertwined with global considerations, and military factors have become so integrated with diplomatic, economic and cultural factors, that theater warfare is becoming indistinguishable from global grand strategy. In a similar manner, the challenge of urban operations will serve to redefine the tactical level of war.

The answer to the problem in his view is to break down the traditional walls between military operations and civilian governance. Wars will no longer be fought between armies. They will be fought between societies.

The interagency task force, rather than the joint force, must become the basis for future operations. With the elements of national power coalescing at the tactical level of war, a loose confederation of governmental agencies at the combatant commander level is simply insufficient. An honest look at our recent operations in Afghanistan would reveal a superb performance by our military and a half-hearted, poorly integrated participation by the rest of the U.S. government agencies. As a result, American foreign policy appears to be 90 percent military with a few economic and diplomatic add-ons. This is a recipe for disaster in future urban warfare. We need to graduate to the formation of the interagency task force.

The interagency task force would be built around a Marine expeditionary unit or an Army brigade, reinforced with joint fires. In addition, it would have active participation from the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, Justice, the CIA, the FBI and (as needed) Agriculture, Health and Human Services, the Office of Economic Advisors and Labor. It would also have congressional liaison teams. At present, most of these agencies of the U.S. government lack a mission to assist in foreign policy, but this must change. The elements of national power--the integration of which is crucial to effective grand strategy--reside in these agencies. They must become players in war and peace.

Readers who thought that David Wong's idea of sims with "congressional hearings demanding answers" was funny should consider the Army Time's solemn proposal to deploy congressional liaison teams to the battlefield. After all, if the battlefield will not come to the Congressional hearing, the Congressional hearing will come to the battlefield. Nor are these ideas confined to the academic musings of retired Army Colonels. The Belmont Club linked to press release describing the reorganization of Combined Joint Task Force 7 in Iraq into two components, one dealing with the military fight and the other with the political aspects of the operation.

Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on the tactical fight -- the day-to-day military operations and the maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz will command the corps. Meanwhile, Multinational Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces.

The President's speech at the Army War College marked how far down this path the Armed Forces have already gone. These short paragraphs, describing operations against the enemy in Fallujah and Najaf contain concepts which would have been familiar to Julius Caesar and possibly Napoleon, but totally alien to any Second World War commander.

In the city of Fallujah, there's been considerable violence by Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters, including the murder of four American contractors. American soldiers and Marines could have used overwhelming force. Our commanders, however, consulted with Iraq's Governing Council and local officials, and determined that massive strikes against the enemy would alienate the local population, and increase support for the insurgency. So we have pursued a different approach. We're making security a shared responsibility in Fallujah. Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force, which is now patrolling the city. Our soldiers and Marines will continue to disrupt enemy attacks on our supply routes, conduct joint patrols with Iraqis to destroy bomb factories and safe houses, and kill or capture any enemy. ...

In the cities of Najaf and Karbala and Kufa, most of the violence has been incited by a young, radical cleric who commands an illegal militia. These enemies have been hiding behind an innocent civilian population, storing arms and ammunition in mosques, and launching attacks from holy shrines. Our soldiers have treated religious sites with respect, while systematically dismantling the illegal militia. We're also seeing Iraqis, themselves, take more responsibility for restoring order. In recent weeks, Iraqi forces have ejected elements of this militia from the governor's office in Najaf. Yesterday, an elite Iraqi unit cleared out a weapons cache from a large mosque in Kufa. Respected Shia leaders have called on the militia to withdraw from these towns. Ordinary Iraqis have marched in protest against the militants.

But the really frightening aspect of Col. Leonhard's argument is not that the military and political aspects of warfare have fused, but his realization that foreign battlefields and home front have merged into one integrated area of operations. There is now no real distinction between winning the "media war" and cleaning out a sniper's nest in Ramadi; between Abu Ghraib the prison and Abu Ghraib the media event. Many readers have criticized the Belmont Club's An Intelligence Failure as being too "soft" on the liberal press, arguing that the media's distortions are not simply the effect of incompetence but the result of a deliberate campaign of partisan information. Doubtless many in the liberal press harbor symmetrical resentments. Yet I have held back from framing the argument in these terms until I could place it in the framework of Col. Leonhard's concept of a global battlefield: one in which the WTC towers and the New York Times newsroom are front line positions no less than any corner in Baghdad; and where victory is measured not simply by the surrender of arms but the capitulation of ideas. We have begun the 21st century just as we inaugurated the 20th: at the edge of old familiar places and on the brink of the unknown.

An Intelligence Failure

The New York Times has published a retrospective on its errors in covering stories related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, many of which it now deems are suspect.

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The New York Times attributes these errors to reliance on a poisoned source, Ahmed Chalabi, whose it now suspects had an agenda of "regime change" in Iraq. The Times goes on to say that these false accounts, if they were such, were also lapped up by an Administration who shared his goals and were eager to believe them.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by U.S. officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The problem with this post-mortem is obvious. It ignores the well-documented Clinton Administration belief that Saddam Hussein may had been seeking WMDs too, a fact backhandedly conceded in the fine print: "Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991" -- and which itself threatens its own conclusions of the provenance of its error by counterexample. Nor could the Times have been unaware of Chalabi's desire to topple Saddam. Chalabi virtually trumpeted it. It misdiagnoses the root cause of news inaccuracy as a reliance on sources with an agenda. If the Times or any other news, police or intelligence organization limited its sources to informants with no 'agenda' whatever, there would be no sources at all.

The real source of error was more basic: sloppy fact checking, the lack of collateral confirmation for important stories and the absence of an internal mechanism to detect mounting inconsistencies within the developing story. The Times feebly fumbles at this, but fails to understand its significance. It admits it ran stories based on material provided to it, but "the Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims". The paper found that its own follow up articles on the same story contradicted the own original accounts, but failed to see the significance of it. "Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all." The media inability to make sense of its own story and update the basic account based on new information has been highlighted in Belmont Club's The Wedding Party series. As a consequence, the Times was not even aware that it was refuting itself.

The problem with the media is it cannot accurately keep track of the facts. It is not institutionally equipped to grade the reliability of information brought to its front pages. It has no organized method of collaterally confirming stories based on sources that are unlikely to collude. It has no analysis cells to follow a story and continuously reevaluate the reliability of initial information based on subsequent developments.

Jason Van Steenwyk  convincingly shows, by laying out the verbatim transcript of US Marine General James Mattis and coverage by the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, the New York Times, Reuters, Agence Presse France and the Independent how the basic fact of what Mattis said slipped through the toils of these famous newspapers. Mattis was being asked to comment on an attack on alleged wedding party on the Syrian border. His verbatim response was:

I can't...I've seen the pictures, but I can't...bad things happened. Generally...in Fallujah, I never saw a Marine hide behind a woman or a child or hold them in their house and fire out of the building. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my Marines.

This sentence, first a refusal to comment, then  a basic reaffirmation of faith in his men based on their conduct in Fallujah, was twisted into a cavalier dismissal of civilian casualties. The New York Times rendered Mattis as:

At a news conference in Falluja, west of Baghdad, he said that two dozen men of military age were among those killed. "Let's not be naive," he said. "Bad things happen in wars." "I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men," he added.

The Independent has the least accurate rendition of all:

"These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive," Major General James Mattis, commander of the US 1st Marine Division, said. But he had no explanation of where the dead women and children in the video came from. "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars," he said cryptically. "I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men." 

In the Independent's version, Mattis is quoted as saying he had not seen the pictures, but in the transcript he clearly says he has. The question clearly refers to the alleged attack on the supposed wedding party, but the words "I can't ... I've seen the pictures, but I can't" which clearly indicates a refusal to comment are omitted altogether.

This error did not creep into the accounts of the Times or the Independent or the other newspapers due to a reliance on some 'poisoned source' or a source 'with an agenda' which the Times regards as the fount of mischief. It came from a failure to consult the tape of the interview and a verbatim transcript available. As Jason Van Steenwyk puts it:

Essentially, it looks like they're quoting each other, or some apocryphal Q source material. They're not quoting General Mattis. They didn't even show up at the press conference, and they didn't bother to get a transcript or listen to the tape. But all these reporters are passing their crap off as if they were right from the source material.

The error in this specific case doesn't necessarily have to do with the "liberal bias" that is attributed to these news outlets. It stems directly and plainly from a very poor management of the factual source material. The incident Van Steenwyk describes illustrates the palimpsest-like phenomenon described in Belmont Club's The Wedding Party series, where facts of uncertain provenance all pile on top of one another in a developing story, very often of different dates, with discredited facts receiving equal billing with more reliable information. It is only fair to say that these defects can be found in conservative news outlets as well because the media in general is not organizationally structured to verify and preserve the integrity of information nor to apply rigorous analysis to it.

The incidents of Jason Blair, Andrew Gilligan, Daily Mirror 'fake' atrocity pictures and the Boston Globe 'porno' atrocity pictures should indicate that the basic cause of media error is not the existence sources with 'agendas' but a certain primitiveness in the newsroom. It is inherent in the journalistic process itself as presently practiced. The problem can be fixed when it is recognized. Until then, the public must make do with apocryphal Q.

The Wedding Party 3

Reader WEH sends this email from an American acquaintance in Iraq dated May 21, which may bear upon the story of the Wedding Party video.

I can’t be absolutely sure what happened out there but if you know a few things about Iraq it doesn’t sound so outlandish. These people are members of a clan well known in Anbar province. They are supposedly "shepherds" but they are really more like livestock owners. The herds are large and the business is profitable. After the spring rains end, and they just did, these people and other clans like them follow the herds through the desert. They pick that time because the grazing is better. Along the way they have small houses in oases which serve as something between camps and residences.

They are also into smuggling. Mainly they smuggle livestock into Syria where the prices are better. Do they bring back guns and people? Probably. And it can’t be ruled out they may have been hired to slip some Syrians into the country. Whole families join this migration. And they do get married.

This afternoon a very popular Baghdad wedding singer was buried -- his family and the survivors say he was entertaining at the wedding. The reason so many women and children died is that as is tradition, the women and children sleep together, the men apart often in tents watching the stock.

Some of the people there had traveled from Ramadi for the wedding just as people travel to attend weddings anywhere. There's a romance in Arab culture about the desert. Some Americans get married by lakes or in mountains. The reason they returned to Ramadi, 250 miles away, is because that's the clan's base. And having been out there, there's very little between Ramadi and the Syrian-Jordanian border except a mosque-rest stop and Rutba. The US had Rutba sealed off.

They weren’t seeking medical attention. They brought the victims home to bury them in their version of [our family] cemetery. Ramadi is the "home" of all members of the Bou Fahad clan, which is the one of all the victims. There were at least a dozen children killed. One was decapitated. One little girl about [my granddaughter]'s age had holes all over her legs...and in her chest. One boy was missing half his face. Quite a place, Iraq.

If the wedding party victims are lying, they may be failing to mention that XXX-number of Syrian fighters were camped 100 meters down the road, or that they had rented the place to fighters two days before or something like that. My experience in these things has been that people wouldn’t be faking the deaths of their wives and children. The fact that there was a high proportion of women and children killed adds credence -- the kids sleep with the women and the men sleep separately.

This may start to explain the wonderment of some Belmont Club readers who have written to remark how the Associated Press account of the wedding video contrasts so strikingly General Kimmitt's version of events. One reader said, "they might be talking of two separate places". Or are they talking of one place and two separate buildings?

'Massacre Account"

'Syrian Fighter Safehouse Account'

A videotape has been broadcast which purports to show before-and-after footage of a wedding which Iraqis say the US bombed, killing about 40. The film, released by a US news agency, combines a wedding home movie with video of the aftermath of the attack, which the US says targeted militants. Some victims and survivors appear to be present in the wedding video. ... Associated Press Television News says it cannot confirm the authenticity of the video of the celebrations in Makr al-Deeb, a desert hamlet near the town of Qaim.  ... AP says a reporter and a photographer who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video. It also says its footage of the aftermath shows remnants of musical instruments, pots and pans, and festive brightly coloured bedding.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military introduced more photographs Monday to bolster its contention that American aircraft attacked a safehouse for foreign fighters near the Syrian border -- not a wedding party, as claimed by Iraqi survivors and police and suggested by footage from the scene. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition deputy chief of staff for operations in Iraq (news - web sites), introduced several new photographs Monday — those of a house and white powder he said was being tested for drugs. Kimmitt again showed pictures of items the military said it found at the attack site, including machine guns, rounds of ammunition, a Sudan Airways plane ticket, medical gear, a Sudanese passport and battery packs associated with improvised explosive devises. "These are pictures that are somewhat inconsistent in my mind with a wedding party," Kimmitt said. "One could say, yes, it is true that out in the desert you need to have a rifle to protect yourself against Ali Baba but the necessity for rocket-propelled launchers, rocket launchers in the bottom, special machine guns may be a little much for Ali Baba out there." "What we found on the ground and our post-strike analysis suggests that what we had was a significant foreign fighter smuggler way-station in the middle of the desert that was bringing people into this country for the sole purpose of attacking to kill the people of Iraq," he said.

The working assumption of Wedding Party 2 was that two sites, the Rakat villa and the adjacent structure or tent were struck, largely on the basis of Mrs. Shahib's account in the Guardian. In the light of this new information, it seems the men were in the tent and the women and children in the villa with Mrs. Shahib. First, an earlier AP report claimed finding debris marked 'ATU-35'. "Footage that APTN shot a day after the attack shows bits of musical instruments, pots and pans, and brightly colored beddings scattered around a bombed out tent. It also shows fragments of what appear to be ordnance, one marked 'ATU-35,' similar to markings on U.S. bombs." Reader RIG points out that this appears to be related to the tail unit of a Mk 82 500 pound bomb. Mrs. Shahib would not have survived to rush out of the house during the infantry attack described in Wedding Party 2 had it been struck by a Mk 82 bomb. Her narrative describes the impact of 'shells'. But since the musical instruments of the male band were near the ATU-35 debris, and if it is true that the women and children sleep in one place and men in another, then the bomb hit the tent with the men. The women and children may have been killed in or as they emerged from the villa which was the subject of an infantry assault.

But where are the dead men? The Associated Press wedding video shows mostly men, yet the Guardian report claims that 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children.

The singing and dancing seems to go on forever at the all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride Rutbah Sabah. The men later move to the porch when darkness falls, apparently taking advantage of the cool night weather. Children, mainly boys, sit on their fathers' laps; men smoke an Arab water pipe, finger worry beads and chat with one another. It looks like a typical, gender-segregated tribal desert wedding.

As expected, women are out of sight - but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. Al-Ali was buried in Baghdad on Thursday.

Prominently displayed on the videotape was a stocky man with close-cropped hair playing an electric organ. Another tape, filmed a day later in Ramadi and obtained by APTN, showed the musician lying dead in a burial shroud — his face clearly visible and wearing the same tan shirt as he wore when he performed.

As the musicians played, young men milled about, most dressed in traditional white robes. Young men swayed in tribal dances to the monotonous tones of traditional Arabic music. Two children — a boy and a girl — held hands, dancing and smiling. Women are rarely filmed at such occasions, and they appear only in distant glimpses.

The AP video shows a dead band member almost without a facial mark, peaceful and almost resting. (The very popular Baghdad singer?) Was he the only one killed? If the bomb hit the musician's tent, as indicated by the debris of musical instruments, where are the other dead men? Was there a third structure attacked, the figurative 100 Syrian fighters 'down the road'? Or were there just the two structures?  It would be interesting to compare the AP video with the photographs supplied by General Kimmitt. I don't have the facilities but if anyone could do a frame by frame of the videos and the CENTCOM photos it might be possible to tell if they were the same place.

The Pilgrim's Progress

The story of the 143 MP battalion starts with a prologue -- Operation Iraqi Freedom -- and their war begins around the time that President Bush declared major combat operations over, once the MPs began encountering the chaos, betrayal and dysfunction of Iraq in all its manifestations. The ambiguities asserted themselves from the start.

From 100 yards away, narrow streams of red slashed through the night, lighting up the two National Guard Humvees. ... The order to shoot ignited Hayes. As if slipping into a real-life video game, he let his turret-mounted machine gun roar - short bursts aimed wherever he saw a gun flash. ... Later that night, the squad found a man's body in the area. Residents said there had been four attackers. The surviving three had disappeared, two of them wounded by the American guns. But there was also talk of a home robbery, with shots fired before the soldiers drove by. ... Was this man sprawled out dead from a shot in the head by a well-armed homeowner? Or was he, as would later be put in the military record, an official kill by Hayes, the machine gunner? In this bewildering country, the truth could be either or neither. ... From the turret, Hayes looked down at the body of the man, maybe in his 30s. Hayes hoped he hadn't killed him. But he felt relief, too. He and the others from Hartford's 143rd Military Police Company were still alive.

It was a place of contrasts. Children offered them warm Pepsis. That was expected. But like everything else, the familiar had a twist. The smiles and laughter in the crowd could mean something else.

They all got out of the Humvee. Something had exploded under it, some kind of grenade. A crowd was gathering. The gunner yelled at the Iraqis, "Get back! Get back!" Onlookers were laughing. Rosati put word of the attack over the radio. Another Humvee was nearby and bashed through traffic to get there. Then somebody in the crowd threw a second grenade, which landed in front of Hackett and another soldier.

"Grenade!" Rosati yelled.

The soldiers leapt away. It didn't explode. Whoever threw it neglected to pull the pin that would have triggered it. Rosati decided they needed to get out of there. They piled back into the Humvee, holes punched through its undercarriage by the blast. The other Humvee arrived and provided cover. Somebody had thrown grenades at it, too, but the pins in those were also left in. The damaged Humvee left a smear of oil in the street on its way out. Later, Rosati could hardly believe the restraint of his people, who hadn't fired a shot at the crowd even though it concealed the people trying to kill them. Hackett was going to be OK. The soldier from Putnam would be the first from the unit's Iraq tour to get a Purple Heart, the medal given to wounded soldiers. He wouldn't be the last.

Once the MPs found a group of children who had been killed sawing open abandoned explosives to sell the filler for IEDs. "The children's small hands were working this new trade. They were banging the ordnance on rocks to get at the insides. An explosion tore two of them apart and burned others." The MPs began to secure the site only to find themselves surrounded by crowds and shot at. The crowd was  not grateful, only resentful. Maybe they had interrupted business.

But it was the Iraqi police who proved most incomprehensible. They were corrupt and bound by loyalties in an alternate universe the MPs only suspected existed. The MPs learned that you could trust only those you really knew.

IEDs kept coming, too. On Sept. 19, 4th Platoon was on patrol. The soldiers were following a group of Iraqi police they hadn't worked with before. The Iraqi officers were acting weird. They were lingering on one street for a long time. Then they announced they were done for the night, long before the usual quitting time. They were pulling away very slowly, with 4th Platoon following. The soldiers got impatient and pulled around them. The faces of the Iraqis seemed expectant.

Then the blast came.

Spec. Petsa, riding in the passenger seat, was lifted so violently that he thought for a moment he'd been thrown from the Humvee. Instead, he landed in the back on top of the gunner, Pfc. Hayes. Petsa asked him, "Are you OK?" But he couldn't hear the answer. Petsa had a tiny chunk of concrete in his ear. Hayes had shrapnel wounds to his arm, which would earn him a Purple Heart. A group of Iraqi police was the first to show up and help, but not the ones the soldiers had been working with. Those had disappeared.

Yet as it was their mission to train the local cops, the MPs of 143rd manned Iraqi police precincts with their counterparts even when it was especially rough. One day the station house they were in was mortared heavily. The fire was apparently coordinated by a car that had slowly cruised past the premises, just seconds before the shells began to fall.

Then the ground was shaken by more explosions - mortars. Staff Sgt. Cloutier, a 25-year-old state trooper from East Hartford, yelled at her people to take cover. When the explosions stopped, she hurried toward the screaming. MPs from the 527th had been hit. There was blood everywhere. Somebody was shouting, "Medic! Medic!" ...

"She's not breathing!" somebody yelled over the din.

Members of the 143rd tried to revive Bosveld, 19. Eventually, medics arrived and all three were taken to a combat-support hospital. Bosveld, remembered as a quiet woman who wanted more than anything to go home to Wisconsin after being hurt in a grenade attack the month before, was pronounced dead at the hospital. A piece of shrapnel had passed through her torso. One of the other soldiers lost a leg below the knee, and surgeons saved the legs of the third.

The car was later found to be driven by a man who said he was a coalition interpreter on his way to work. That was the day a lot of police stations were bombed, and the Red Cross headquarters too. The enemy knew the rules of engagement and took full advantage of them. Somewhat later a man was brought in.

One day, Sgt. Lozier watched a man brought in for assault and inciting a riot. He tried to strike the officers and soldiers in the station. When asked what he would do if they let him go, he said he would kill all the Americans he could, and the Iraqis helping them. Afraid of what he might do if they put him in a car to be taken to prison, they decided to deprive him of sleep. After a few days, more docile now, he was driven to Abu Ghraib prison, the main detention center west of Baghdad. As the soldiers of the 143rd often did, they handed the prisoner off to the MPs running the prison. Months later, they found out about the rampant abuse that went on inside the infamous prison. Back home, Lozier saw a photo of a female MP holding a naked Iraqi on a leash. Lozier thinks that man was the unruly one they arrested.

When they returned to Fort Drum, having been rotated home before the heavy April fighting, the men of 143rd found that they while they had lost men in Iraq, in some cases they brought back more than they took. The article, which is classic, ends at church in Trumbull, where Sgt. Sam Defelice and his new bride Spec. Anna Conigliaro, tie the knot. Their baby had been conceived in Baghdad, proof that life will not let death have everything its own way.

And while the prologue is known, the epilogue is not. Although the men of 143rd have not accomplished everything they set out to do, they have clearly accomplished something. Every day that passes without a major terrorist attack, every day we arise to a morning of hope is time we owe to them. For even those who never returned have counted for something and the scales of destiny have felt their weight.

And when he heard the summons, he understood it and called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, "I am going to my Father's; and though  with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage; and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought his battles who now will be my Rewarder." So he passed over; and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
-- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

The Wedding Party 2

This article from the Guardian, 'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one' is the most serious allegation on the wedding incident so far. It has the plethora of detail characteristic of a true story.

As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.

By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.

Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.

Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?" ...

A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.

He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi's own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer's brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.

It answers many of the questions raised in the earlier The Wedding Party, though not in an entirely satisfactory way. In many ways, it provides confirmation for both the US military and the civilian's stories. The wounded, which the Wedding Party predicted would exist, have emerged. Why are they are they at Ramadi, 250 km away? Because they got initial treatment at al-Qaim first and were transferred to the bigger hospital later. What was attacked? "The Rakat villa and the house next door"

The details of the action are remarkably consistent with a raid, on a long surveilled target, not a mistaken random air strike at "celebratory gunfire".

Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.

The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."

Armored military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house," he said.

Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.

The civilians being interviewed were inmates of the Rakat villa, one of the targeted houses.

"We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

A recapitulation of the events based on the Guardian story might fairly be this. Two of twenty five structures in the village of Mukhradeeb by the Syrian border were attacked, by a combination of aerial ordnance, infantry assault and finally demolition charges. A number of civilians appear to have been in the house or the structure beside it at the time and were killed and wounded. The civilian casualties were taken to Qaim (sometimes known as Qusabayah) and later to Ramadi, for subsequent treatment.

From the internal evidence, the "bombs" were probably either 30 mm gunship rounds or 70 mm rockets. Fixed wing ordnance of the 500 pound class would have totally destroyed both the villa and the neighboring structure. There is further corroboration of this supposition in the Guardian account.

She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground. She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell. "I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."

Why would Americans shoot at nonuniformed civilians emerging from a target building? Part of the answer can probably be understood from the account of US Army Specialist Jarob Walsh's account of the April 9, 2004 convoy ambush on the Baghdad western highway, the same convoy in which Thomas Hammill was captured.

My company is fuel transportation. We are the Army Reserve 724th Transportation Company. But in Iraq we have civilian contractors Kellogg Brown and Root. They do all the fuel hauling. So we basically become force protection for convoys. Friday, April 9th, about 7 a.m., my platoon started getting ready for a fuel convoy from LSA Anaconda in Balad to Baghdad International Airport (BIOP). We were running security for 21 civilian fuel trucks. We had 26 in the whole serial. I was in the 21st truck with a civilian, riding shotgun (passenger). I had never ridden with a civilian on a convoy before. The American civilians are non-combatants; they do not carry weapons, so I was the only one in the vehicle with a weapon. It made me extremely uncomfortable, because that means no one has my back if we get attacked.

We left the gates of Anaconda in Iraq about 10 a.m. The convoy was going fine and it was almost a regular day in Iraq; there were cars up and down the four lane highways and there were people everywhere in all the towns; it was a normal day. About an hour and a half into the trip, the people and the cars started becoming fewer. Then, the next thing I knew, my LT (lieutenant) - who is in the lead truck - comes on the radio and says, "We are taking rounds - everyone get ready!" then not even a minute later, someone else comes on the radio and says, "The LT’s truck just blew up and I don’t know where to go or what to do!" I looked at my driver and said "Oh sh** it’s about to get bad." Next thing I know, the truck about a hundred meters in front of us blows up right in front of us.

It was unlike anything I have ever seen in my life. We were in the middle of Baghdad on a main highway being attacked; there were buildings all around us, and people in the buildings firing weapons at us. I looked off to the left at a frontage road and I saw nine cars in rows of three. There was a line of women in front of all the cars, and some of them had children with them. I thought they were just watching us get attacked, and then men started popping up behind them firing at us - they were using the women as shields!! It took me a second to realize that. They were standing on the hoods of the cars behind the women and children; it shocked the hell out of me. Then we started getting hit with small arms fire, which sounded like golf balls hitting metal. I started firing back at them but I couldn’t get passed the women; they were all I could hit, and they started falling down. The men turned around and ran back behind the cars to fire. ...

I turned and looked towards the front of the truck, down the bridge. But before I turned my head all the way toward the front, something hit me in the chest. It hit so hard it felt like Sammy Sosa hitting me with a bat. It knocked me off of my feet, back into the truck. As I laid there, I looked down and saw a round (bullet) buried in the vest on my chest smoking. It smelled awful. I pulled it out of my vest and it burnt the hell out of my hand. I pulled myself back up and got out of the truck. I looked down the bridge in front of my truck and saw two little kids on the bridge, about a hundred to a hundred-fifty meters away. They both had AK-47s; one kid was about ten years old and the other was about seven. The seven-year old was holding his weapon upside down by the magazine, and the ten-year old was firing three rounds at a time at me. His first round hit the driver's side windshield on the truck - right next to my head. I turned around to grab my gun, and when I did, he shot me two more times in the back; the rounds went through me and into the cab of the truck. It infuriated me as he kept shooting me. I grabbed my weapon, jumped out, and fired two rounds over their heads; I didn’t want to shoot them - they were just l'il kids. After I fired over their heads, they turned around and ran down the bridge.

So it is conceivable that American soldiers would shoot at anyone emerging from a targeted structure. Taken as a whole, the Guardian account paints the picture of a raid on the Syrian border on an identified target at which civilian casualties were also inflicted. That is probably what happened. People may judge the event as they will and other details may come to hand to modify this account. Many loose ends remain, principally the identities of the other dead. More than forty deaths were reported at the raid, but only 27 graves are mentioned by the Guardian and not all of them children. But we are a little closer to finding out what happened that night.

Synoptic view

More details on the 'wedding party' attack from CNN:

A senior coalition military spokesman said Saturday that dozens of people killed in a U.S. attack in the Iraqi desert early Wednesday were attending a high-level meeting of foreign fighters, not a wedding. Photos shown to reporters in Baghdad support that contention.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said six women were among the dead, but he said there was no evidence any children died in the raid near the Syrian border. Coalition officials have said as many as 40 people were killed. Kimmitt said video showing dead children killed was actually recorded in Ramadi, far from the attack scene.

"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too." Kimmitt said troops did not find anything -- such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food -- that would indicate a wedding had been held.

Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said. What was found, he said, indicated the building was used as a way station for foreign fighters crossing into Iraq from Syria to battle the coalition.

"The building seemed to be somewhat of a dormitory," Kimmitt said. "You had over 300 sets of bedding gear in it. You had a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing -- apparently about a hundred sets of pre-packaged clothing. "[It is] expected that when foreign fighters come in from other countries, they come to this location, they change their clothes into typical Iraqi clothing sets."

At Saturday's briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt showed photos of what he said were binoculars designed for adjusting artillery fire, battery packs suitable for makeshift bombs, several terrorist training manuals, medical gear, fake ID cards and ID card-making machines, passports and telephone numbers to other countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan. None of the men killed in the raid carried ID cards or wallets, he said. "We feel that that was an indicator that this was a high risk meeting of high-level anti-coalition forces," Kimmitt said. "There was a tremendous number of incriminating pocket litter, a lot of telephone numbers to foreign countries, Afghanistan, Sudan and a number of others."

Now we have the beginning of a convergence in this story, and some contradictory details. First, there is agreement that a particular set of buildings was raided while a group of people were present and that "six women were among the dead". It has been established by common account that there was no mistaken bombing raid on celebratory gunfire from 40,000 feet. It was an attack on a set of buildings, including an infantry assault.

But there is a divergence with regard to the purposes of the targeted building. The Guardian account portrays it as a normal innocent residence. Kimmitt categorically identifies it as something else. "The building seemed to be somewhat of a dormitory," Kimmitt said. "You had over 300 sets of bedding gear in it. You had a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing -- apparently about a hundred sets of pre-packaged clothing. "[It is] expected that when foreign fighters come in from other countries, they come to this location, they change their clothes into typical Iraqi clothing sets."

At this point, either of two things can happen. The press can begin to divide on the credibility of the witnesses. The Guardian may prefer to believe Mrs. Shihab and others prefer to believe General Kimmitt, or it can seek further facts. The problem is that certain sets of facts might turn out to be both true. One possible way to solve the problem of the essential character of the gathering, though not of the house is to examine the dead. Recall that there are 27 graves in Ramadi, some said to contain more than one set of remains said to belong to the victims. At least 25 of them were in identifiable condition.  We know from the Guardian article that "Dr Alusi (of Al Qaim hospital) said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. 'I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village,' he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?" So we would expect nearly all the graves in Ramadi to belong to women and children if Mrs. Shihab's story were true. On the other hand, we would expect to find a lot of buried military age males if it were not.

Trivial Pursuit

Two events -- the attack on a 'wedding party' near the Syrian border and the events swirling around the raid on Ahmed Chalabi's residence -- will provide an interesting backdrop to President Bush's scheduled speech on Monday at the Army War College. The speech is expected to deal with the shape of the transitional government in Iraq, slated to take power on June 30. This report from the Boston Globe hints at the kind of high level horse trading already taking place.

WASHINGTON -- In a sign that a plan for the new Iraqi interim government is beginning to take shape, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told the Italian parliament yesterday that a candidate has been offered a top position in the new Iraqi interim government, but has yet to accept it. ...

With the deadline for a transition to a new Iraqi interim government six weeks away, US officials and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy responsible for brokering the new government, have been under pressure to come up with a list of interim leaders who are acceptable to a majority of Iraqis.

''We have a lot of work to do now in the next 42 days, roughly," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told a meeting yesterday of representatives from countries that have contributed to the US-led effort in Iraq. ''We have been in constant consultations with Lakhdar Brahimi all through his current stay in Iraq. We think he is getting closer to the designation of individuals who will be in the interim Iraqi government."

Powell also said that the ''slate of officers" Brahimi will designate will be brought to the UN Security Council and to Secretary-General Kofi Annan so that they could ''examine the quality of these individuals."

The 'wedding party' attack has been described by the US as a strike against foreign militants on the Syrian border. This is a code word for the long-running fight between US forces and the Syrians centered around Qusabayah. The policy background to the armed confrontation was given in an Executive Order imposing sanctions on Syria. The text reads in part:

"I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, hereby determine that the actions of the Government of Syria in supporting terrorism, continuing its occupation of Lebanon, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining United States and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat."

The other event casting a shadow over Monday's address is the raid on Ahmed Chalabi's house. He has now been openly accused of being an Iranian spy, a matter explosive enough, given that America has also been fighting an undeclared war against Iranian agents operating in the Shi'ite south. But Chalabi's arrest has also been linked to the Oil for Food scandal, which is centered around Kofi Annan, the very man Lakhdar Brahimi represents, and who is "examining the quality of individuals" being put forward to lead the Iraqi interim government.

Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of "miles" of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds. That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe.

Late last year and several months before Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority became involved, Mr Chalabi had amassed enough information concerning corruption in the oil-for-food scandal to realise that he was sitting on explosive material. It was information that would lead to the publication in a Baghdad newspaper in January of a list of 270 businessmen, politicians and corporations, of whom many were alleged to have received money in the form of kickbacks from Saddam's regime. The list published in the newspaper al-Mada included British, Russian and French politicians, among them Benon Savan, who ran the UN's oil-for-food programme.

Some of the contents of the speech President Bush will deliver on Monday are probably already known to insiders. The Las Vegas Sun reported that the President briefed key legislators on Capitol Hill Thursday on the roadmap forward in Iraq. The State Department has been laying the same groundwork with allies overseas.

To exchange ideas about the way forward in Iraq, some three dozen diplomats from coalition nations met at the State Department, where Secretary of State Colin Powell told them, "We have a lot of work to do in the next 42 days." He referred to the June 30 deadline for U.S.-led occupation authorities to hand political power to an as-yet unchosen Iraqi government.

The three metaphorical elephants that will be sitting in the room when President Bush begins his speech on Monday are the unacknowledged belligerence of Syria, Iran and the role the syndicate of corruption centered around the Oil for Food Program plays in shaping postwar Iraq. None of these three forces, which have been vying for influence in post-Saddam Iraq, have been given prominent coverage by the media, which has focused on Abu Ghraib. Yet neither the heavy April fighting, nor the continuing maneuvers against Moqtada al-Sadr nor the brouhaha over Chalabi and most of all the process of selecting the interim government can be understood without them. The shape of the next fifty years in the Middle East will be determined by these hulking, but largely invisible issues while viewers are regaled with the sight of Ba'athists crowned with women's underpants. It will be interesting to see whether President Bush mentions Syria, Iran or the power politics being played through Lakhdar Brahimi at all in his coming speech at the War College, and if he does, how long it will take before the media switch to a replay of the gallery at the 9/11 commission heckling Rudy Giuliani.

The Wedding Party

It's an imaginary scene from World War 2, though it could have happened. Battalion headquarters gets a report over the phone from a front line sector. 'Armor moving to our front, 300 yards out bearing 75 degrees.' The information is plotted in grease pencil on a 1:10,000 map with an an acetate overlay. The position of the platoon reporting is known on the map. A protractor marks out the bearing and ruler paces off the distance. A symbol for enemy armor is drawn on the acetate. Ten minutes later, more details come in. 'Armor is three tanks'. A number is written in beside the enemy armor symbol. Battalion asks the platoon commander if someone can get a better look at the armor. Twenty minutes later, another update is phoned in. 'Sir, I don't know what they are doing there, but the armor is ours.' The map plot is amended, and the symbol for enemy armor is changed to reflect friendly armor.

Sixty years later a reader browsing internet news stories gets breaking news that an American helicopter has killed forty persons at a wedding. But story goes on after he closes the browser.

Link	Time	Text
U.S. Helicopter Fires on Iraqi Wedding	May 19, 2004 18:16 Zulu	By Scheherezade Faramarzi Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. helicopter fired on a wedding party before dawn Wednesday in western Iraq, killing more than 40 people, Iraqi officials said. The U.S. military said it could not confirm the report and was investigating. Lt. Col Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, said between 42 and 45 people were killed in the attack, which took place about 2:45 a.m. in a remote desert area near the border with Syria and Jordan. He said the dead included 15 children and 10 women. Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at 45. Associated Press Television News obtained videotape showing a truck containing bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless.
US helicopter attacks Iraqi wedding	May 19, 2004 20:07 Zulu	A US helicopter fired on a wedding party in western Iraq, killing more than 40 people, Iraqi officials said. The US military said it could not confirm the report and was investigating. Lieutenant Colonel Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, said between 42 and 45 people were killed in the attack, which took place about 2:45am (0845 AEST) in a remote desert area near the border with Syria and Jordan. He said the dead included 15 children and 10 women. Salah al-Ani, a doctor working at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at 45. Associated Press Television News obtained videotape showing a truck containing bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless. Iraqis interviewed on the videotape said partygoers were firing in the air in traditional wedding celebration. American troops have sometimes mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire.
U.S. Aircraft Reportedly Kills 40 Iraqis	May 19, 2004 20:46 Zulu	By Scheherezade Faramarzi Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. aircraft fired on a house in the desert near the Syrian border Wednesday, and Iraqi officials said more than 40 people were killed, including children. The U.S. military said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria, but Iraqis said a helicopter had attacked a wedding party. ... The attack happened about 2:45 a.m. in a desert region near the border with Syria and Jordan, according to Lt. Col. Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, the provincial capital about 250 miles to the east. He said 42 to 45 people died, including 15 children and 10 women. Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at 45. The area, a desolate region populated only by shepherds, is popular with smugglers, including weapons smugglers, and the U.S. military suspects militants use it as a route to slip in from Syria to fight the Americans. It is under constant surveillance by American forces. In a statement, the U.S. Central Command said coalition forces conducted a military operation at 3 a.m. against a ``suspected foreign fighter safe house'' in the open desert, about 50 miles southwest of Husaybah and 15 miles from the Syrian border. The coalition troops came under hostile fire and ``close air support was provided,'' the statement said. The troops recovered weapons, Iraqi and Syrian currency, some passports and some satellite communications gear, it said.
US disputes 40 killed Iraqis were wedding party	May 20, 2004 01:00 Zulu	BAGHDAD - The US army said on Thursday it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border, but disputed reports that the victims were members of a wedding party. ... "At 0300 (11pm NZT Wednesday) we conducted an operation about 85km southwest of al-Qaim...against suspected foreign fighters in a safe house," Kimmitt said. "We took ground fire and we returned fire." Kimmitt said there were no indications that the victims of the attack were part of a wedding party. He said a large amount of money, Syrian passports and satellite communications equipment had been found at the site after the attack. But Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, quoting eyewitnesses, said the raid on the village of Makr al-Deeb before dawn had targeted people celebrating a wedding and had killed at least 41 civilians. "We received about 40 martyrs today, mainly women and children below the age of 12," Hamdy al-Lousy, the director of Qaim hospital, told Al Arabiya. "We also have 11 people wounded, most of them in critical condition." Arabiya showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept. "The US planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man who said he was from the village said on Al Arabiya. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he added.
U.S. airstrike along Syria border in Iraq reportedly kills more than 40; Iraqis say wedding party attacked	May 20, 2004 09:36 Zulu	By Scheherezade Faramarzi, Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) A U.S. air strike near the Syrian border killed more than 40 people, Iraqi officials said, and while the U.S. military said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria, Iraqis said a helicopter had attacked a wedding party. The attack Wednesday happened about 2:45 a.m. in a desert region near the border with Syria and Jordan, according to Lt. Col. Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, the provincial capital about 250 miles to the east. He said 42 to 45 people died, including 15 children and 10 women. Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at 45. The strike came before American soldiers clashed Wednesday with Shiite militiamen in two cities south of the capital, killing at least eight of them, U.S. officials said. Mortars and rockets fell on widely scattered areas of the Iraqi capital.

One of the challenges facing intellectuals at a time when the political and cultural dimensions of war have grown in relation to the purely military is how to make sense of information acquired through the public intelligence system: the news media. Because modern American warfare now involves only a very small percentage of the population it has become a kind of spectator sport where the plays are actually called from the stands. One would hope on good information. Yet a news industry whose techniques were adequate to cover traffic accidents, murders or cumbrous wars in which armies moved a few hundred yards a day must now must cover events whose complexion can alter in hours. The difference is that this time there is no low-tech acetate overlay, maps, or timeline in battalion notebook. Battlefield events are still reported like isolated traffic accidents, conveying no sense of spatial location, temporal development or continuity. To the extent that any symbols are plotted on the public mental map, they remain there, hours or days after the information has been updated. Long after it became clear that the attack may not have been an attack on a wedding party at all, the original accusation soldiered on. On May 20, 2004 at 09:30 Zulu, after the last entry in the table above, the International Committee of the Red Cross "condemned Thursday an 'excessive' use of force by the US military." The story went on to say that "US troops faced further embarrassment amid claims they killed dozens of people at a wedding celebration in a remote western Iraqi town, at a time when the occupation forces are already reeling from a prison abuse scandal." A reaction based on old news had taken twelve hours to work its way through the Red Cross and emerged to spawn further accusations on its own power.

Although the news media functions as the civilian intelligence system, collecting raw data, processing it and distributing it to the public,  for historical reasons it lacks many of the features which professional intelligence systems have evolved over the years: namely a system of grading information by reliability and existence of analytic cell whose function is to follow the developments and update the results. In the example above, AP writer Scheherezade Faramarzi  performed many of the tasks which our fictional battalion intelligence officer undertook. Her stories evolved from a categorical description of an American attack on a wedding party, to a middle stage in which the wedding party attack remained the primary hypothesis disputed by American military officers; and finally to one in which the roles were reversed --  a story of an attack on a militant safe house described by some Iraqis to have been an attack on a wedding party. 

But for other media outlets, there was no tracking on a mental acetate overlay, no update. The armor symbols remained marked as hostile long after they were known to be friendly, or suspected to be doubtful, if they were marked at all, almost as if the battalion intelligence officer had done a Rip Van Winkle, gone to sleep or gone home. Yet all the suspicious indicators which prompted our fictional officer to ask the forward platoon to get a better peek of the reported armor were present. If the newspapers had an institutionalized tracking cell to evaluate initial reports they would would spotted the tell-tales and asked the reporter to go forward for a better look.

Why was a wedding party in full swing at 02:45 am in the middle of the desert? A glance at the map would show the area in which the wedding took place was 250 kilometers from  "Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi," and who "put the death toll at 45."  A long way to go for medical treatment or burial when Qusabayah is 50 kilometers away. Under normal circumstances, there are two wounded for every dead. By the normal ratios there should have been at least 90 injured. There was a videotape "showing a truck containing bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless." A video of the dead, but where were the wounded?

Nothing to discredit the initial report on the face of it, and Faramarzi was correct in reporting the initial details, but there enough for someone to say 'get in closer for a better look'. Long before we found out about the satcom radios, the weapons and the cash at the "wedding party". In a war where battlefield reality is no longer directly experienced by the majority, the 'closer look' is all the public has to on which to base decisions which may spell national victory or defeat. But sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If the newspapers have neither tracking cell, nor map, nor ruler, nor calendar to follow events how can the public tell what really happened? At this writing, 24 hours after the initial story, some newspapers are still reporting the incident as an attack on a wedding party while others describe it as a strike against a militant group. Two versions and no closure. Except in the case of individual news threads, like Faramarzi's, whose content has evolved, the reportage as a whole resembles a palimpsest, a word used to describe a sheet of parchment which has been overwritten many times by different symbols until finally the newer cannot be distinguished from the older. We are collectively no nearer to definitively finding out the truth about the "wedding party" than we are to discovering anything definite about the Oil for Food scandal, WMD stockpiles in Iraq, the anthrax letters or what the deal was in Fallujah.

The ideal situation would be to track events in two dimensions, space and time, on a computer screen, and to be able to double click on it to drill down on all the supporting material, rated by reliability, to discover the underlying basis for its plotted position. Additionally, one should be able to follow its connections to other related events, people or places. Husabayah, also known as Al-Qaim, has been in the news before. It was the scene of intense fighting between the US Marines and Syrian infiltrators all of last year, as described by Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was reported once, like a traffic accident, and then forgotten, deprived of any context. Few readers can make the mental connection between the Marine frontier battles and the "wedding party". But whether software or grease pencil is used, the public and the press needs a better way to make sense of the events which directly affect public policy. Only then can it decide whether this incident was simply an unfortunate accident 'typical' of a 'bumbling' US military or part of a wider largely unreported border war against foreign infiltrators.

P.S.

(Incidentally, I wrote software a few months ago which allows the user to do something very similar to what is described above. It allows the user to define relationships between any arbitrary event, object, person, geographical location or event. The idea was to allow the user to build an unlimited network of connections between any entities so that indirect relationships could be "discovered". The user could then follow the connections or have the whole network displayed from the viewpoint of any chosen node. It took about four days to write and requires Microsoft Access 2000 or better to run. It was the quickest way to prototype the concept. I've sent free evaluation copies to a few bloggers over the last few months. One day I'll do it properly.)

Light posting over the next couple of days

Posting will be light over the next couple of days due to the pressure of work.

The Last Magnolias by the Euphrates

The comparisons between the Iraq campaign and the Civil War occasioned by Magnolia by the Euphrates provoked a storm of email whose quality shows what is possible when people write without rancor in a considered, thoughtful way. Unfortunately, it came in quantities that threatened to lock out my Hotmail account. For that reason I must ask readers not to send any more Civil War related email. The mailbox won't hold it.

MM wrote on May 18. His parallels encompass not simply the Civil War, but the War of Independence.

There is a parallel to Hood's invasion of Tennesse in Nathanial Greene's southern campaign in the Revolutionary War. After Guildford Courthouse Greene moved south, hoping to draw Cornwallis (his British counterpart) after him. Cornwallis, in turn, moved north into Virginia hoping to draw Greene after him. But, Cornwallis moved into enemy territory, whereas Greene campaigned in largely Patriot lands. Patriot thanks to a series of uprisings engineered by people Greene had left behind for just that purpose. Where Cornwallis was effectively without support, Greene had that and to spare.

Hood's situation in Tennesee more closely resembled Cornwallis' in Virginia than Sherman's situation in Georgia resembled Greene's in the Carolinas. However, support for the Conferderate cause was not universal even in South Carolina, and in some areas resistance was active. So while Sherman did not get the support Greene did, he still got more than either Hood or Cornwallis. Most importantly, neither Greene or Sherman faced anything like the resistance Hood and Cornwallis faced in their respective campaigns. Greene succeeded because he had local support. Sherman succeeded because the locals did not support his opponent, and he had the resources needed to achieve his goals. Neither Cornwallis or Hood could gain the suport they needed, nor did they have the resources needed to carry out operations without that support. Plus, both food themselves facing strong resistance. Strong enough to trap them in situations they could not escape.

In Iraq we have the same situation, on a smaller scale, multiplied many times, but essentially the same situation. The terrorists and insurgents are trying to make us react to their movements, and failing. In addition the rebels are losing support as the Iraqi people start to see the Coalition as an ally instead of an occupier. Iraqi and Coalition forces have the inititive, and there is no sign they will be losing it anytime soon. Why? Because we have the resources, plus the local support needed to maintain the initiative in the face of enemy actions. And those resources and the accompanying support are growing on a daily basis.

On May 17, reader LS reflected on the guerilla war that never followed the war between North and South.

I agree with Michael McCanles' reply on the strategy by Grant and Sherman. Indeed, I have argued that Lee was a fool for invading the North, ever: these were political, not military invasions. Had the South had the brilliant leadership its always credited with having, the Confederacy would have ceded much of Virginia and Texas, sucked in its defensive perimeter, and tightened its supply lines rather than expand them. The reason Lee couldn't, of course, was that Jeff Davis refused to give up one inch of Confederate territory, even if it meant winning the war. Thus, Lee had no chance to effect a political solution in the North by bleeding northern armies. Nor did he have the "high ground" that inevitably would have come when the South never invaded the North, but the North constantly invaded the South. Whether that could have translated into British. or French help is dubious, but possible. More likely, it would have extended the war and, without southern invasions, led to even more carping and complaining in the North.

For those who think that political terrorism and car bombings at the entrance to the Green Zone are a new thing, reader MM had some historical observations on May 17.

The period between 1865 and 1876, generally called 'reconstruction', has many parallels with our current 'rebuilding' effort in Iraq

1. The northern army could only effect policies which were supported by a 'media informed' northern electorate. This electorate was fundamentally convinced the south should follow northern election practices. All efforts in the South were gauged in terms of media reports on elections and resulting political harmony. 2. Southern elections increasingly featured the effective use of murder and torture to win elections. The key to effective use of this tactic was keeping the violence out of the northern media. The media policies that emerged were so effective that academic literature on the period still uses the pejorative terms popularized by Southern terrorists (such as the Ku Klux Klan): CarpetBagger: Any white Republican born in the north. Scalowag: Any white Republican born in the south. . 3. Village level violence often included the public torture of victims. 4. Defeated Southern general officers rose to political prestige by mastering (or inventing) election terror techniques. In 1876, General Wade Hampton's revised command staff blended terror and newspaper propaganda to take the South Carolina governorship from a Unionist incumbent. The incumbent had been an officer of Colored Troops in 1865. 5. Southern allies of the invading federal army (colored troops) took leading rolls in occupation police duties, but found themselves increasingly isolated as the occupation continued. Individuals exhibiting leadership or the possibility of leadership were systematically murdered. 6. Unlike the 'media' guided electorate of the north, the south was guided by very pragmatic issues, primarily property rights. At other times in history, members of the defeated army would loose all their property. Victor and allies would divide up the spoil. Thus, the primary focus of defeated Southern soldiers and its officer class was protection of pre-war property rights, including chattel slavery. In general, the southern officer corp was entirely successful in this endeavor, skillfully using the general fear of federal property redistribution to unify a stable electoral majority. Any 'white' voting against the former Confederate political leadership could be branded as 'federal thief', threatening to 'spoil' the south. Yeoman farmers, a group one might expect to enjoy the breakup of large plantations, were neutralized by fears that their property would be 'redistributed' in some '40 acres and a mule' federal program.

Based on this analogy, one can draw the following conclusions

1. Voter intimidation is an inescapable part of post war elections. No occupying army can keep neighborhood gangs from murdering selected neighbors. 2. Threats to local property rights motivate neighborhood gangs. 3. Leaders of the neighborhood gangs are the only agents available for political accomodation. 4. 'Peace' is proclaimed when the 'media' guided electorate accepts a local leadership. The local leadership must master the art of feeding that media interests.

A more complete process than post Civil War American South is the 'modernization' of Highland Scot culture after 1680. Highlanders provide a good example of 'terrorist' for the 18th century. The term 'black mail' comes directly from their protection rackets. The English solution was to convert 'clan leaders' into English aristocrats. This was done by giving them property rights over 'clan' territory'. This effectively made them landlords who would act in predictably civilized manners. They started maximizing rents and production. This in turn forced idle men (former military resources) and their families off the land. Additionally, the new aristocrats found it useful to hang out in London. The political alliances were critical to maintenance of their new wealth. Finally, they started sending their kids to English schools. The tombstone for Highland ethos was constructed by Sir Walter Scott.

With the Highlander modernization program in mind, one can suggest the following principles 1. Focus on tribal leaders and their children. 2. Make tribal leaders the winners of the 'property rights' game currently in play. 3. Adjudicate tribal leader disputes in Washington, expecting their presence at hearings. 4. Mercilessly hound anachronistic ethics.

KG has additional observations on the Civil War that never was.

I've enjoyed the civil war posts.  The notion that civil war "should have" devolved into a full-on guerrilla war after March 1865 but miraculously did not has received some play lately.  In the popular (non-academic) historian Jay Winik recent book "April 1865" he made a big deal out of Lee's refusal to flee to hills and continue the fight with his remaining forces.  "Go home" Lee told his men--Joe Johnston followed Lee's lead and threw in the towel in North Carolina a few weeks later. Makes for interesting "what if" games.  Add Lincoln's assasination into the mix, and things get interesting.  Joe Johnston surrended to Sherman after Lincoln's death.   A fiestier Lee and less gracious Grant at Appomattox, then Lincoln's assassination, and you have the necessary ingredients for a drawn out civil war.  It's unlikely that it would have changed the eventual outcome, but it would have had far-reaching effects, none of them good. How's this related to Iraq?  I don't know.  Perhaps the extreme losses of extended total war left Lee ready to capitulate while our Iraqi foe has not (yet) experienced this. Oh yeah, I'm not a civil war historian so I can't tell you where Winik came up with his thesis.  It's probably an old idea.

David Scribner at Target Blank thinks comparisons between Iraq and the Civil War are inappropriate because among other things, the South was never a repressive tyranny. His argument is elegant and impassioned, but too long to reproduce here. Read the whole thing.

Finally reader MS objected early on to the characterization of the South as having the monopoly of general officer talent. He said on May 14:

I know you didn't touch on it but I think Grant is the most under rated general of that war. He understood hold them by the nose and kick them in the rear. He was the holder. Sherman was the kicker. He was the only Union General to ever pin Lee. He never let lost battles keep him from advancing. And he was in charge of the whole show while being in practical command of the Eastern Armies confronting Lee. Every thing Sherman did was coordinated and agreed to by Grant. B.H.L. Hart writes him off as a pounder, sound though limited tactically, and poor in strategy. I disagree.

I have omitted other letters, including some which argue that comparisons between the Indian Wars and Iraq are more exact -- only from lack of space -- and not for want of merit. Mark Steyn once countered Niall Ferguson's assertion that Americans were so ignorant that not a single US general could possibly know the history of the 1920 Shi'ite uprising against the British by betting ten thousand dollars that he could find a sergeant that did. Steyn named his sergeant. Anyone who has read mail from Belmont Club readers would know he could have named many more.

News Coverage as a Weapon

Historian John Terraine notes that unit casualty rates during the Civil War were close to those experienced by the British Army on the Somme. The 1/Newfoundland Regiment lost 84 % of its men on that fatal July 1, 1916. But the 1st Texas Regiment lost 82.3% in Antietam and the 1st Minnesota lost 82% at Gettysburg. Nor were these exceptional. "In the course of the Civil War 115 regiments (63 Union and 52 Confederate) sustained losses of more than 50 percent in a single engagement". Losses during World War 2 were just as brutal. Although the average loss per individual mission was often under 5% for the pilots who flew in the British Bomber Command, the fact that they flew 30 missions per tour meant a crew had less than a 1 in 4 chance of completing it. Once you signed on, there was a 75% statistical chance you wouldn't survive. Nor were these estimates far from the truth. Almost sixty percent of Bomber Command, a total of 55,000 men, were killed. They had an easy time compared to German U-boat crewmen, who lost 630 men out of every thousand. Nations required a huge pool of manpower and high birthrates to sustain losses on this scale. Russia alone suffered twenty million deaths during World War 2. Even Yugoslavia, a country whose role in the conflict is hardly remembered as central, lost 1.6 million killed. Defeat in that conflict came to those whose armies were driven from the field, whose cities were reduced to rubble and whose manpower resources could no longer continue the struggle.

Viewed in this context, the American "defeat" in Iraq projected by the press must be understood as being something wholly different from anything that has gone before. The 800 odd US military deaths suffered since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom a year ago are less than the number who died in the Slapton Sands D-Day training exercise in 1944. The campaign in Iraq has hardly scratched American strength, which has in fact grown more potent in operational terms over the intervening period. Nor has it materially affected the US manpower pool or slowed the American economy, which is actually growing several times faster than France, which is not militarily engaged. The defeat being advertised by the press is a wholly new phenomenon: one which leaves the vanquished army untouched and the victor devastated; the economy of the vanquished burgeoning and that of the victor in destitution; the territory of the loser unoccupied and that of the winner garrisoned. It is an inversion of all the traditional metrics of victory and defeat. That the assertion is not instantly ludicrous is an indication of the arrival of a new and potentially revolutionary form of political wafare.

It was during the Vietnam War that the Left first discovered the potential war-winning ability of media coverage. The concept itself is merely an extension of the blitzkrieg notion that the enemy command structure, not his troop masses, are the true center of gravity on the battlefield. During the campaign of 1940, Heinz Guderian's panzers bypassed many French formations, leaving them unfought, knowing that if their command structure were severed, the whole musclebound mass would fall to the ground headless. What the Left gradually discovered during the course of the Vietnam war was that Guderian had not been bold enough. Guderian still felt it necessary to win on the battlefield. He had not realized that it was possible to ignore the battlefield altogether because it was the enemy political structure, not his military capability, that was the true center of gravity of an entire campaign. It was General Giap during the Vietnam War who first planned a military operation entirely around its possible media effect. The Tet offensive was a last desperate attempt to gain the upper hand in a war he was losing.

The Communist forces had taken a series of military defeats. the US/ARVN forces had pacified much of the south by the end of 1967 (222 out of 242 provinces). Operation Junction City (February-March 1967) and other sweeps had seriously disrupted NLF activity in the south and forced the COSVN into Cambodia.

At a July 1967 meeting the Communist Party leadership recognized their failures and decided to re-orientate their operations to target two key political weaknesses. Firstly, the deep gulf between the US public and the US government over support for the war and its actual progress. Secondly, the tensions existing between the US military and their Vietnamese allies.

The leadership decided to concentrate on a few high profile operations, that would take place in the public (and the US media) eye rather than fighting the conflict away from major urban centres. This would bolster Northern moral, possibly inspire uprisings in the South and provide the impression, and hopefully the reality, that the US/ARVN were not winning the war and it was likely to be a long time before they did. The new policy also marked a victory for the 'hawks' over the 'doves' in the Communist Party leadership, in late 1967 around 200 senior officials were purged.

Although Giap failed in every military respect, he succeeded in providing the press with the raw material necessary to alter the dynamics of American domestic politics. While he could not alter reality, the Giap could alter the perception of reality enough to give anti-war politicians a winning hand which they played it to the hilt.

The NLF and the NVA lost around 35,000 men killed, 60,000 wounded and 6,000 POWs for no military success. The US and ARVN dead totalled around 3,900 (1,100 US). But this was not the conflict as the US public saw it. Without there being an active conspiracy the US media reports were extremely damaging and shocked the American public and politicians. Apparently the depth of the US reaction even surprised the North Vietnamese leadership, as well as delighting them.

The emergence of the press and media as decisive implements of warfare arose from changes in the nature of late twentieth century war itself. If battlefield reality was paramount in earlier wars it was because literally everyone was there. During the Civil War 15 percent of the total white population took the field, a staggering 75% of military age white males. During the Great War the major combatants put even higher proportions of their men on the line. Even after World War 2 it was still natural for children to ask, 'Daddy what did you do in the War?' and expect an answer. Reality affected everybody. But beginning with the Vietnam War and continuing into the current Iraqi campaign, the numbers of those actually engaged on the battlefield as a proportion of the population became increasingly small. Just how small is illustrated by comparing a major battle in the Civil War, Gettysburg, which inflicted over 50,000 casualties on a nation of 31.5 million to a "major" battle in Iraq, Fallujah, in which 10 Marines died in the fighting itself, on a population of 300 million. A war in which the watchers vastly outnumbered the fighters was bound to be different from when the reverse was true. A reality experienced by the few could be overridden by a fantasy sold to the many. This exchange of proportions ensured that the political and media dimensions of the late twentieth century American wars dwarfed their military aspects.

But whereas General Giap was forced to rely on the Western media to carry his message home, modern day Jihadis have decided to create their own media outlets like Al Jazeera to shape public opinion. Moreover, they have extended proven methods of intimidating the Western media, described by CNN's Eason Jordan in his article in the New York Times to a standard operation of war. This set up a clash between two forces, one enjoying a preponderance in every area of military capability and skill but failing to recognize news coverage as a strategic weapon; and another whose military strategy was literally made for television.

The US discovered how expensive it was to be wholly outmatched in this key combat system. Just how expensive was underscored by the media coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident in which newspapers in the United States and Britain published fake abuse photographs on top of the genuine ones without a rapid rebuttal. This blindness sprang not only from the tradition of keeping the military apart from civilian activities, but also from a reluctance to venture into areas protected by the First Amendment. It was nearly a year after OIF before the US began halting steps to redress the balance by establishing the Arabic Al Hurrah media outlet and creating a series of local television stations under the Spirit of America initiative.

Yet the extension of warfare into the area of media coverage is fraught with great danger, in no small part because it subtly alters the definition of where the battlefield lies and who an enemy combatant is. One of the enduring strengths of Western democracy and of the US Constitution in particular is the delineation between legitimate dissent and enemy activity, a boundary which enables a democracy to continue functioning, albeit in an impaired state, even in wartime. But the changing balance between the political and military aspects of war means that this line will begin to blur as military activities cross over into the political. Already, the Pentagon is beginning to offer direct news from Iraq. It has also reorganized its command structure in Iraq to explicitly recognize the role of political warfare.

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2004 – Two new military commands will stand up in Iraq May 15, replacing the current coalition military organization.

Multinational Corps Iraq and Multinational Force Iraq will replace Combined Joint Task Force 7.

Coalition military spokesman Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, at a Baghdad news conference today, said the change addresses a concern that a combined joint task force headquarters was not sufficient to handle the military workload in Iraq efficiently.

"It's certainly more than a formality," he said. "It is trying to get the proper command structure for the days, weeks and months ahead."

Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on the tactical fight -- the day-to-day military operations and the maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz will command the corps. Meanwhile, Multinational Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces.

The Left's very success at using the media as an arm in hyper-blitzkrieg inevitably invited, indeed necessitated, a riposte, with far reaching and probably regettable effects. One day Al Jazeera may be remembered in the same manner as the Dreadnought: the first in a series of ugly fusions between newly available technology and age-old malevolence; the vanguard in a flotilla of lies.

Addendum:

Reader BU writes to say you can access the Eason Jordan article referred to above for free at the following address:

Eason Jordan's "The News We Kept To Ourselves" April 11, 2003, is available as "The awful news CNN had to keep to itself:  Iraqis' torment" by Eason Jordan (IHT) Saturday, April 12, 2003

Magnolias by the Euphrates 2

I am reproducing reader Michael McCanles reply to Magnolias by the Euphrates, which compared some aspects of the Civil War to the campaign in Iraq, without comment, except to say that events that took place nearly 150 years ago still exercise the imagination. He tackles issues which may be of more than passing interest to those with an interest in Civil War history.

Your citation of a blogged comparison via the 3rd vol. of Bruce Catton's history of the American Civil War between that war and the situation in Iraq deserves, I think, some qualification. Pathetic Earthlings can't have read Catton very closely.

(1) >Once the war actually began, it was perhaps inevitable that the North (with gigantic advantages in everything, save perhaps talent)

A very old canard, this of the talent-laden Confederate army. In a match-up between the two eartern armies, doubtless true up through Gettysburg, but not after. D. S. Freeman's _Lee's Lieutenants_ is a study of precisely just that: the remarkably high rate of loss of brigade and division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia, by comparison with the remarkable growth by way of hard experience of their counterparts in the Army of the Potomac by the time Grant took over in spring, 1864.

In the west, there was no contest. The quality of southern leadership in the Army of Tennessee is notorious in studies today for its crankiness, petulence, and self-willfulness. It was continually racked by political in-fighting, as was its criss-cross parallel, the Army of the Potomac in the east under McClellan and his epigones. The Confederate of Tennessee never had a winning commander--the citation of Johnston in that regard as in any other--is simply not factual. By comparison, at the brigade and division levels the quality of leadership particularly in the Union Army of the Tennessee, commanded first by Grant, then Sherman, then finally in a very interesting twist, by an Army of the Potomac cast-off, O. O. Howard, was extraordinarily high from the time Halleck left command in the west to Grant in 1862, through the very difficult Carolinas campaign under Sherman in winter and spring, 1865. In addition both Grant and Sherman were quick, deft, and successful in quashing political grandstanding, as witnessed by Grant's timing in letting the Lincoln-appointed political general McClernand hang himself by his own incompetence, leaving the War Dept. no choice but to send him back to politicking in Illinois. Sherman was if anything even more wily in dealing with several potential firecrackers, including another Potomac cast-off, "Fighting Joe" Hooker by maneuvering him into resigning.

I won't even go into the comparison between the massive development of a war government under Lincoln, and the pathetic "gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight" devolution of the Richmond regime. A single comparison will do: while Sec'y of War Stanton (Rumsfeld's counterpart for being obnoxious, arrogant, and brilliant) developed what is historically the beginnings of America's modern cabinet-level military institution, the Confederate War Department turned into the increasingly sad comedy of posturing generals, incompetent bureaucrats, and ceaseless office infighting chronicled with running unconscious comedy by a war clerk, John B. Jones. His surviving diary stands today as a singular monument to the truism that stupid governments seldom survive.

(2) >Lee quickly recognized (particularly after the failure at Gettysburg) that the Confederacy’s best chance of victory was to drag the conflict out into a painful stalemate that would sap the North’s will to fight. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fell back into guerrilla mode: stick to known terrain, harass the supply lines, attack where the opportunity arises, and never let the enemy engage in strength. Farther south, Joe Johnston had a like strategy.

This statement is a non-starter re: both Lee's and Johnston's armies. As a matter of fact, Grant foresaw just such a guerilla maneuver as a possible, and had Sherman's army-group in the Atlanta campaign do the same thing Grant did when he went into the field with the Army of the Potomac, still commanded to the end of the war by the winner at Gettysburg, Meade: Grant insisted that both armies do something what was relatively new in maneuvering between large armies at the time--engage the two southern armies intimately 24/7. There was literally no time between May of 1864, and the conclusion of the war in April, 1865 when a major part of of both Union armies were not engaged with their southern counterparts. And as a matter of fact, the initiative was held by the Union armies in both cases, with the result that the maneuverability associated with hit-and-run guerilla warfare was out of the question. Both Lee and Johnston were forced continually to be reactive to counter the superior maneuverability of the two larger forces. The only exception to this generalization is Hood's notoriously failed attempt to do a "Stonewall Jackson in the Valley" move around Sherman after the capture of Atlanta. Hood's invasion of middle Tennessee while Sherman's Amy of the Tennessee marched in a mirror-image move in the opposite direction (a maneuver that would have the faint-hearted types of today in terminal apoplexy) was quashed most miserably at Franklin and Nashville by the other half of Sherman's army group, the Army of the Cumberland under Thomas.

On the subject of "supply lines," a tender subject for both Grant and Sherman on the basis of bitter experience, it is true that Lee attempted the "valley" strategy one more time in 1864, stinging Grant into laying the Shenandoah valley waste so that it could never again be a source of both left-hooks toward Washington and a provider of subsistence. Johnston tried, with the inept Wheeler, to disrupt Sherman's supply line during the Atlanta campaign, but to little effect. When it came to the next move, the Savannah campaign (better known as "the march to the sea"), Sherman indulged one of his favorite fantasies, and it worked. That fantasy was to operate without any base of supply whatsoever. He learned this from watching second-rate Pemberton constantly probing for Grant's "rear" during the crucial maneuvers south and east of Vicksburg, only to be frustrated because there was no rear. Grant then, and Sherman later, lived off the land.

I don't see, on this basis, much comparison with Iraq.

Stadium vs Prison

Reader JB writes to say:

The Iraqi Soccer Team just qualified for the Olypmics for the first time since 1988. It is a HUGE deal in Iraq. They are celebrating in the streets. What do you think about promoting the idea of bringing the Iraqi team to the US to train for the Olympics? We could even have a "friendly" game between them and the US team.

It certainly represents a huge opportunity to offset the negative publicity of Abu Ghraib. A variation on the theme JB suggests is creating a raffle for tickets that Iraqis can win to actually attend the games in Athens. Most Iraqis are too poor to attend the games themselves and their cheering squad, unless filled out by Americans, will be thin at best. Maybe they should have a chance to cheer on the home team themselves.

The Rumsfeld-Myers Mission

Reader DB asks: "Does this explain the  Rumsfeld/Myers pow-wow on the E-4B?" referred to in End of the Beginning? That post, the readers may recall, rhetorically asked what the substantive purpose of Secdef Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Iraq might have been and the significance of both Myers and Rumsfeld traveling together on the sophisticated flying command post. The link, which is a DOD press release provided by DB, describes a major reorganization within the theater. It explicitly recognizes two channels of warfare: political and military.

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2004 – Two new military commands will stand up in Iraq May 15, replacing the current coalition military organization.

Multinational Corps Iraq and Multinational Force Iraq will replace Combined Joint Task Force 7.

Coalition military spokesman Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, at a Baghdad news conference today, said the change addresses a concern that a combined joint task force headquarters was not sufficient to handle the military workload in Iraq efficiently.

"It's certainly more than a formality," he said. "It is trying to get the proper command structure for the days, weeks and months ahead."

Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on the tactical fight -- the day-to-day military operations and the maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz will command the corps. Meanwhile, Multinational Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces.

Multinational Force Iraq "will certainly be involved in the tactical operations, but only to the extent that they have somewhat of an operational and strategic impact on this country," Kimmitt said. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, current CJTF 7 commander who will head MNF Iraq, already has been working the strategic issues, and the new command structure will enable him to focus more of his time and energy in that direction, Kimmitt said.

The most striking thing about this new command arrangement is that appears to be an end run around the Coalition Provisional Authority, a shifting of at least some political functions away from a State Department structure directly into one directly under the DOD. For those who saw the events in April as a defeat for Rummy and a discredit to the DOD policy, this evidence suggests that the President may see things the other way. At first glance it is a high level endorsement of the kinds of negotiations which have transpired at Fallujah at Najaf rather than their condemnation. This reading may not be borne out by subsequent clarifications. But it certainly looks that way.

Magnolias by the Euphrates

There's a great post at Pathetic Earthlings which describes what happens when societies clash in their entirety.

One of Catton’s themes is how complex the North’s motivations and objectives in the Civil War really were. According to the standard narrative, while Southerners were getting increasingly exercised about Federal power intruding on their states’ sovereignty (particularly regarding slavery), Northerners (including both small farmers and a growing mercantilist middle class) were becoming increasingly impatient with the South’s land-based aristocracy and bound labor. This is basically true, but the mix also included radical abolitionists, hard-core Unionists, those with secessionist sympathies, Copperheads of various degree, and lots of folks willing to back any cause for short-term political gain. In more than a few states, it was unclear which side of the battle lines they’d end up on.

Once the war actually began, it was perhaps inevitable that the North (with gigantic advantages in everything, save perhaps talent) would prevail in a head-to-head military campaign. But it was far from inevitable that the Union forces would get that definitive clash. Lee quickly recognized (particularly after the failure at Gettysburg) that the Confederacy’s best chance of victory was to drag the conflict out into a painful stalemate that would sap the North’s will to fight. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fell back into guerrilla mode: stick to known terrain, harass the supply lines, attack where the opportunity arises, and never let the enemy engage in strength. Farther south, Joe Johnston had a like strategy.

... But on one point at least, the comparison is sobering: the long, slow aftermath. Lots of commentators have pointed to the post-WWII occupations of Germany and Japan as examples of the commitment of time and money necessary to rebuild a defeated enemy, and these are apt comparisons. But in the former Confederacy, it was a full century before the region’s institutions (at least with regard to civil rights) were even close to the standards of the civilized world.

Comparisons are never exact and they are sometimes odious. Yet they can be informative in the same way that past personal experience guides future decisions. One of the tragedies of modern celebrity media coverage is that it neither learned, nor wise, nor informed. But it is never shy.

The End of the Beginning

The imposition of US sanctions on Syria is both an acknowledgement of its role in attacking US forces in Iraq and an admission that the US is not willing to confront Damascus militarily -- yet. The Executive Order, whose full text has not been prominently carried by many newspapers, is extraordinarily accusatory.

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, hereby determine that the actions of the Government of Syria in supporting terrorism, continuing its occupation of Lebanon, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining United States and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

The effects of the sanctions, as observers have pointed out, are mostly symbolic and are of a piece with other holding actions on the Sunni front. In the Sunni triangle, the hesitance of traditional leaders to completely throw in their lot with America seems obvious. Mohammed Latif, a former intelligence officer who now heads the Falluja Brigade, appears to be resisting US demands to disarm the insurgents still holed up in town perhaps sensing that he can safely straddle the fence until the US deals with Sadr and Iranian threat. 

But U.S. commanders are losing patience and have said they will renew their offensive if their conditions are not met. Under the truce, some 2,000 Marines backed by tanks and armored vehicles pulled to Falluja's outskirts to allow Iraqi forces to hunt down weapons and crush the estimated 100 foreign fighters believed to be holed up inside the Sunni stronghold. Many residents in Falluja, a heavily tribal and clannish society still largely loyal to toppled leader Saddam Hussein, consider the partial withdrawal of the world's only superpower as a victory.

In contrast,  the US appears to have forged at least a tactical alliance with Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to reduce Moqtada al-Sadr. Recently, one of Sistani's virtually accused Sadr of being a tool of the predominantly Sunni Al-Qaeda. According to AFP press:

Sistani follower and influential moderate cleric Sadreddin al-Kubbanji convened a meeting of Najaf's tribal elders and repeated his earlier calls for the militia of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr to leave the city. Speaking to an emotional crowd of Sistani supporters, Kubbanji called for a demonstration on Friday, the Muslim holy day, to protest "chaos, lies and occupation" and warned of a "treacherous plot being hatched in the name of fighting the US-led occupation."

In a veiled criticism of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, which has taken over the area around the city's holiest shrine, Kubbanji accused "outside elements" of stoking the insurgency in order to drag the Americans into the heart of the sensitive Shiite city. ... Kubbanji said loyalists of jailed former president Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and Wahabis, radical Sunni Muslims such as followers of Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), were behind the conspiracy.

Sisatani has stood idly by as US troops have rounded up Sadr's forces in the environs of the Najaf. The US forces, taking care to avoid the holy places proper, have recently chased the Madhi Army through the necropolis surrounding the town.

A series of loud explosions rocked the southern edge of the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Najaf from about 11:00 am (0700 GMT) on Friday, hours after fighting broke out between US troops and militiamen in the city's vast cemetery. ... The newly appointed governor Adnan al-Zorfi told AFP late Thursday that a "US entry into the centre of Najaf may be imminent," saying that a lot of those around Sadr were "simple men who did not fathom the military might of the United States." "Nobody can set conditions on the Americans," he said, urging Sadr to disband his militia "immediately" and promising that the matter of legal proceedings against him in connection with the murder of a rival cleric last year "could be resolved in Baghdad."

Whether the alliance with Sistani survives Sadr's downfall remains to be seen. But the developments on the two fronts are related. The man coordinating the twin threats by Teheran and Damascus may be Abu Musab Zarqawi. An article by the New York Post suggests he is acting the role of their field coordinator. Zarqawi was reputed to be hiding in Falluja at around the time of the attack on the four Blackwater contractors, and the Shi'ite Kubbanji's accusation that Sadr was treated with Al Qaeda may be more than rhetorical.

May 13, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - Jordanian terror master Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded a massive U.S. military campaign to bring him to justice with help of extensive network of Middle East connections, including rogue elements of the Syrian and Iranian governments, The Post has learned. U.S. military and intelligence officials said last night that Zarqawi, the man who decapitated American contractor Nick Berg and had the horrifying act videotaped earlier this week, has managed to dodge several secret operations by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces over the past year.

Intelligence reports indicate that Zarqawi has also spent time in Iran and Syria since the fall of Saddam as part of a secret arrangement with rogue elements of security services in both of those countries. "Iran and Syria are giving him cover," said a U.S. official with access to sensitive intelligence reports on the situation. "He is taking advantage of the infrastructure that is allowing the movement of money, arms and fighters into Iraq from those countries."

Some of the critical decisions in this two front war and their relation to the technical handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis in June may be part of the reason for the recent Rumsfeld visit (my speculation) to Iraq. Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad on May 13 with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers and met with Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez and Ambassador Paul Bremer. The full purpose of their visit was kept under wraps. "For security reasons, officials are releasing no further details of the visit." Tea leaf readers will have noted two things about the Rumsfeld visit. He did not meet with CENTCOM CINC General Abizaid and both Rumsfeld and Myers traveled together on an E-4B flying command post.

Rumsfeld and Myers departed for the highly secret mission to Iraq aboard a U.S. Strategic Command E-4B National Airborne Operations Center immediately following their joint testimony to a Senate committee on Capitol Hill May 12.

This was the first time Rumsfeld and Myers had flown together, officials said. The two generally fly aboard separate planes due to security concerns. This was also the first time Rumsfeld has flown aboard the National Airborne Command Center, a modified Boeing 747 jet designed to serve as a survivable mobile command center in a national emergency.

(Speculation alert) It may be that Rumsfeld and Myers were considering an important decision specifically relating to Iraq, one already put forward by Abizaid but requiring an independent assessment, one that required them to stay in touch with the President jointly through the E-4B. The political storm over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and, to a lesser extent the decapitation of Nick Berg, has effaced the really important story in the Iraqi campaign: the US has just beaten back a major counteroffensive by Syria and Iran. Regionally, anticoalition forces mounted major attacks on the Jordanian secret service (using gas) and against targets in Saudi Arabia (a car bomb attack against the Saudi security apparatus). Within Iraq, simultaneous attacks were launched in April from both the Sunni and Shi'ite lines of departure. While both inflicted some damage, neither stroke has come close to seriously hurting the US position. It would be natural and not in the least surprising, if Rumsfeld and Myers were not considering what the American riposte should be.

Whether the Syrian sanctions and operations against Fallujah and Najaf are battle-shaping activities for the next phase of the Global War on Terror or simply temporizing, as Ralph Peters seems to feel, is the real strategic mystery. It is one whose answer we desperately need to know, and probably will in due time.

The Search For Greenmantle

Building a functioning Iraqi society means creating working pockets and combining them into a greater whole. This letter from Hugh Hewitt's site describes the preparation for the first joint Marine-Iraqi patrols in Fallujah. (Hat tip: reader TC)

We are approaching a very significant phase in Fallujah. Very soon, we will execute the first "joint patrol" into the city. The concept is that Marines and elements of the new Iraqi force will enter the town together. To suggest that the cessation of hostilities is fragile is an understatement. The environment is very fluid and one day things look better but the next we gather intelligence that suggests we are making a mistake. The leadership has gone way out on a limb here making a tremendous gamble that the course of action decided on will bring some degree of stability to this area.

Of course, in order to allow the Fallujans a chance to stabilize themselves, we must eat a little crow. We know that people are running around the city proclaiming that the Marines were defeated and the insurgents stopped us. To our dismay, this has even been picked up by our own media. Again, I can barely stand to read it. However, we fully realize that the only way the Iraqis will take control of their own destiny is to regain some of their long lost self image/national pride.

It is a step along the road described by Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor (hat tip: reader RA).

"It is beginning to change," says Emad Abbas Qassem, a lieutenant in the Facility Protection Service (FPS), at his post outside a central Baghdad education ministry office. "It's not only the people, but my wife, my family and brothers tell me: 'Go to work and do your duty.' They used to be so afraid."

Indeed, the number of targeted attacks and casualties against security forces has dropped in recent weeks, relative to previous months. At least 350 Iraqi police were killed in the first year of occupation; that rate dropped dramatically to roughly a dozen killed during April. Lieutenant Qassem estimates a 50 percent drop in the past month alone. "Because we were trained by the Americans, [Iraqis] dealt with us like we were Americans," he says.

If General Conway's goal in Fallujah was to drive a wedge between foreign fighters and locals, there are indications he may be succeeding. And the success is not limited to the Sunni triangle. Among the Shi'ites, the combination of political and military warfare is also yielding results. This widely publicized letter from Lt. Steven Oliver of the 16th Engineering Battalion summarizes the interplay eloquently.

"The fighting we are engaged in against the uprising of Muqtada Al-Sadr is one that is extremely sensitive and risks catastrophe. Had we entered this previously, it would not have been possible for us to win. Over the months, we have been involved in preparations and much planning. Thus, today we are scoring amazing successes against this would-be tyrant. I ask that the American people be brave. Don't fall for the spin by the weak and timid amongst you that are portraying this battle as a disaster. Such people are always looking for our failure to justify and rescue their constant pessimism. They are raising false flags of defeat in the press and media. It just isn't true."

"...today are in a climactic battle against him and his militia. When the remnants of Saddam's regime were in full uprising in Fallujah, Sadr thought his time had come to make his bid for total power and to oust the US from Baghdad. He was very wrong. It has been subtle and very well done by our leaders. You should be proud. It would have seemed impossible to have achieved our four main goals against Sadr even just a few months ago. Now today, despite the message of the pessimists who are misleading you into despair, we are have scored all the victories needed to bring this battle to a close. First goal was to isolate Sadr. Second was to exile him from his power-base in Baghdad. Third was to contain his uprising from spreading beyond his militias. And the last goal was to get both his hard-line supporters to abandon him, and to do encourage moderates to break from him. This has been done brilliantly, and now we are on the march in a way that just months ago seemed impossible to do. Sadr is losing everything."

"...Shia leaders are breaking from him now in large numbers. The overall Shia leader of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has left Sadr's call for jihad and uprising to flounder on deaf ears. Bremmer and Gen. Abizaid stunned the overall Shia community by negotiating a calm in Fallujah. That has tail-spinned Sadr and his efforts to intimidate Iraq's Shia leaders. They see the US hand is strong, and that therefore they are making a mistake in kowtowing to Sadr's terror and violence."

Those who might regard Lieutenant Oliver's letter as optimistic will find it corroborated by these developments reported by the New York Times. It describes operations against Moqtada Al-Sadr, following an extensive period in which he was progressively isolated from the Shi'ite clergy and community. Not surprisingly, the spearhead against Sadr's forces were Iraqis themselves.

The fighting at the Mukhaiyam Mosque and the warrens of the surrounding neighborhood brought hundreds of American soldiers within a quarter mile of two of the most sacred places in Shiite Islam, the golden-domed shrines of Hussein and Abbas. Though the Americans say they are determined to destroy Mr. Sadr's forces, they have been cautious about bringing the war to the holy areas here and in Najaf. Invading the city centers of either place, they fear, could stir the wrath of Shiite Muslims around the world, even those who dislike Mr. Sadr.

Tuesday night, the Americans made a high-risk gamble by trying to breach the Mukhaiyam Mosque, situated just west of the Shrine of Hussein. The attack was one of the largest operations carried out in the past year by the First Armored Division, which until now was responsible for controlling Baghdad. Fighting raged on all sides of the mosque, with soldiers scrambling through rubble-strewn streets and ducking sniper shots and rocket-propelled grenades. ...

The two dozen or so Iraqi commandos who helped the Americans in the battle were part of the Iraqi Counter Terrorist Force, trained in Jordan to combat insurgents. They acted under the supervision of Special Forces, who instructed them on clearing munitions from the Mukhaiyam Mosque and shrine and from the high school. Special Forces soldiers guided much of the battle on the ground, storming the mosque and setting up a base there to direct troops.

This was not supposed to happen. April was supposed to mark the death rattle of the American occupation in Iraq. It was never meant to lead to joint Marine-Iraqi patrols in Fallujah or Iraqi commandos hunting down Moqtada Al-Sadr in Najaf. Yet the change did not proceed from "more American boots on the ground" nor from the provision of additional guards for the Baghdadi antiquities or an influx of NGOs. Still less was it the consequence of a grant of legitimacy from the United Nations or the messianic arrival of French troops. In fact it coincided with the departure of the Spanish contingent from Iraq. The change sprang from the correct application of the original strategy: building a democratic and free Iraq by recognizing the leadership which arose from the circumstances. It arose not from an imposed set of politically correct commissars in Baghdad but in complementing indigenous efforts with American strengths.

Nearly a hundred years ago, T. E. Lawrence, surveying the ruins of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, shrewdly judged that it lacked, not money, enthusiasm or a base of support but simply the right men, armed prophets who could send forth the message of freedom among the tribes. He did not seek for them in the cocktail party set of Cairo nor even in Mecca, in what might be the equivalent of the Green Zone. But he found them in the desert. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom he relates his encounter with the man who was to be his chosen instrument against the Last Caliph -- the man who would bring a prophecy, yet not quite the expected prophecy, to a waiting world.

"I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek -- the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colorless face were like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger."

"And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?" Feisal asked.

"Well," replied Lawrence, "but it is far from Damascus."

"Praise be to God there are Turks nearer us than that".

There are Americans in Washington, but praise be to God, there are some nearer to the ground than that.

N. B.

Those curious about the title of this post may want to buy John Buchan's Greenmantle, a favorite of my youth, from Amazon Books or read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

'I did not know that anything could be so light,' he said.

Reductio ad Absurdum

Andrew Sullivan suggests that the mainstream media publish pictures of an American hostage's severed head in order to balance, among other things, the slide show presentations depicting the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Let's start an internet campaign to insist that the major media - including the New Yorker, the networks, the major newsweeklies, and every major paper - run a picture of Zarqawi holding up Nick Berg's severed head. It's time to release the Pearl video and stills too. Enough with the double standards. The media were absolutely right to show the abuse photos. But they are only part of the story. It's about time the media gave us all of it, however harrowing it is.

And yeah, why not. If Michael Getler, the ombudsman of the Washington Post can assert that "the reality of war in all its aspects needs to be reported and photographed. That is the patriotic, and necessary, thing to do in a democracy" there is no logical reason why the video showing the Al Qaeda decapitating a screaming Nick Berg shouldn't be given the same treatment. That is, unless the Getler's premise was false in the first place.

The reductio ad absurdum "is a type of logical argument where we assume a claim for the sake of argument, arrive at an absurd result, and then conclude the original assumption must have been wrong, since it gave us this absurd result." The fallacy in Getler's premise was the claim that the Abu Ghraib photographs were simply a factual documentation of an abuse which the public had the right to know about. The existence of the abuses had been known from January, from CENTCOM itself.

January 16, 2004

Release Number: 04-01-43

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DETAINEE TREATMENT INVESTIGATION

BAGHDAD, Iraq – An investigation has been initiated into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility. The release of specific information concerning the incidents could hinder the investigation, which is in its early stages. The investigation will be conducted in a thorough and professional manner. The Coalition is committed to treating all persons under its control with dignity, respect and humanity. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the Commanding General, has reiterated this requirement to all members of CJTF-7.

What was new about the May coverage was that the press had pictures of the Abu Ghraib abuses and was in a position to project, not a new set of facts, but a new set of powerful emotions upon the public. Getler's claim is really an assertion of the right to invoke outrage, disgust and hatred at a specific act and its perpetrators, and those who may have been indirectly responsible for it. By taking this logic to its limit, Sullivan claims the same right: to unleash a symmetrical set of set emotions at another group -- and demonstrates the absurdity. For it must either be correct to publish both the Abu Ghraib and Berg photos or admit partisanship. Surely, if it is acceptable to run the risk of tainting the entire US military with the brush of Abu Ghraib then there can be no harm in coloring all Muslims with the hues of Al Qaeda. But this is madness.

The Belmont Club predicted that "the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all" -- and the process has already begun. People who only yesterday were beating their breasts at infamy of the 800th MP brigade will be calling for a MOAB to dropped on Fallujah tomorrow. And to the inherent madness of war we will add another lunacy: strategy by manic-depression. 'Are we feeling generous today toward the enemy? Or do we want to get some aggression off our chests? Hmm?'

This is what comes of asserting the right to unleash emotions disconnected from rational perspective as "patriotic". This is what comes of not sticking to facts and they are these. The enemy has attacked America on its own soil and therefore must be defeated utterly. Members of the US military have committed a court-martial offense and therefore they must be punished severely. Any withdrawal from Iraq will not bring safety from enemy action inasmuch as they attacked Manhattan and Washington DC nearly two years before OIF. Any withdrawal from Iraq without first setting up a stable and responsible government there would result in a bloodbath beside which the massacre of the Shi'ites and the gassing of the Kurds by Saddam would be a pale moonlit shadow. Therefore we must persist until victory.

And the final fact is this. The only exit from war's inhumanity is through the doorway of victory. For while it may be mitigated, controlled and reduced to a certain extent fundamentally "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it", though victory can end it. While it continues, as many in the Left who long for a 21st century Vietnam hope, it will unleash unpredictable forces which no one can control. Those who delighted in discovering the photographs at Abu Ghraib little imagined Nick Berg's video. And while we can safely grant Andrew Sullivan's plea and publish both, for reasons the media imagine are laudable, it is what comes next that I am afraid of.

Return to Fallujah

In recent days, Coalition forces have engaged the Madhi Army in a variety of places, arresting Sadr's aides, recapturing sites  seized during the heyday of the "Shi'ite uprising" and generally isolating him from the Shi'a population. Even in the city of Karbalah, Sadr appears to be wearing out his welcome.

Residents of this Shiite Muslim shrine town sit around a hotel lobby cursing the militiamen of radical leader Moqtada Sadr as an influential cleric in the neighbouring holy city of Najaf tells them to leave. The US military appears to be succeeding in its goal of isolating Sadr and his Mehdi Army militiamen and slowly eroding any sympathy that residents of Karbala and Najaf might have felt towards the firebrand young cleric. People in both cities say they have had enough of the "thuggish presence" of Sadr's gunmen around their holy shrines and lament the impact that the standoff, which has gone on for more than a month now, is having on their economy. "The Mehdi Army are a bunch of extremists," says one man from Karbala in his 30s without giving his name. "In fact they are a bunch of thieves and former Ba'athists."

And there were plenty of Ba'athists in Fallujah manning checkpoints with US Marines, partly because the town is full of members of the old Republican Guard. The Washington Post describes how the Marines, despairing of help from Baghdadi politicians, began negotiating with the old generals:

On April 19, after a week of talks, a group of local civic leaders and a few Sunni politicians from Baghdad made a deal with Marine commanders. In exchange for relaxing a nighttime curfew and allowing families to return to their homes, the leaders promised to collect heavy weapons from the insurgents and hand them over to the Marines.

That never happened. All the Marines got was a pile of rusty, antiquated arms. Most of them didn't work. The next day, an interlocutor approached Conway with an enticing offer: A group of former Iraqi army generals was willing to assemble a force that would restore order in Fallujah. ...

Thus far, the generals appear to be opting for a strategy of co-optation instead of confrontation. They have recruited scores of young men who fought against the Marines last month, according to U.S. officials familiar with the new force, called the Fallujah Brigade. The officials said they believed that most members of the brigade participated in the fighting. ...

Conway's aides said they were not alarmed by these developments. More important, they insisted, was improving security in the city and getting Iraqis to take responsibility for restoring order. They said they were encouraged by former fighters joining the brigade. They also said that Iraqis without extensive military service would not have had sufficient clout to take charge in a city such as Fallujah, where a disproportionate number of men served in the army, particularly in the Republican Guard. ...

Although Marine commanders insisted that Conway's superiors were fully briefed about the arrangement and signed off on it, the unorthodox nature of the deal has led senior officials at the Pentagon, the U.S. military command in Iraq and the civilian occupation administration to react with skepticism. "It's Conway's thing," said one U.S. civilian official involved in the issue. "Either it works out, and he emerges as they guy who solved the Fallujah problem, or it turns into a big failure." ...

Marine commanders said they intended to test the new brigade's success in combating the insurgency in a week or two, when they plan to send a convoy through the center of the city. "We're going to see whether anything has changed," one officer said. "If not, we'll just have to go back to where we were."

That convoy has made its way to the center of city. The UK Telegraph reports:

US marines have entered the Iraqi city of Fallujah for the first time in more than a month, according to witnesses. Soldiers drove armored vehicles to the mayor's office in the city center without incident. They were accompanied by Iraqi security forces, who will eventually take over security, witnesses said.

Although hundreds of suspected insurgents have been killed (according to the Post) the original objective of the Fallujah operation to capture those responsible for killing and mutilating four Blackwater contractors has not yet been achieved. But the outstanding arrest warrant has not been served on Moqtada al-Sadr either. While neither operation has achieved its goals, both are still ongoing and much has transpired both on the political and military fronts. US forces have notably been busy driving wedges between Sunni and Shi'ite, between foreign and local fighters and between factions within the Sunni and the Shi'ite, organizing militias and selectively targeting key enemy personnel.

These tactics have deflated -- for the present -- the main danger posed in April: a potential general uprising by a united Sunni and Shi'ite front against US forces, an event probably planned and abetted in both Damascus and Teheran. Yet drawing the fires by playing the factional card may have hastened the very thing both Syria and Iran desire: the de facto division of Iraq into sectarian camps where each would absorb the fragments. The vision of a unitary and democratic Iraq has faltered in the absence of a leadership willing to create it.

Initially the expectation was that an effective central leadership would emerge from representatives of the different ethnic groups. The days immediately following the fall of Saddam Hussein were filled with calls to reconstitute the seat of government. There was an 'international outcry' for the protection of antiquities, the restoration of electricity and the return of oil production. In response, an unprecedented amount of reconstruction money, largely unspent, was earmarked at international pledging sessions for high profile projects. A governing council was organized. Oil ministries were repaired, airports refurbished, a UN headquarters established.

But while the center waxed fat, the field languished.  In the months immediately after OIF, men like General Petraeus were forced to use their meager divisional funds to prop up a local societies in a power vacuum. His success was applauded, but not too loudly, lest his expedients prove too durable for replacements coming down from Baghdad. Possibly to avoid that fate, the Marines deployed to the Sunni triangle in early 2004 resolved to build closer relationships with the local leadership, along with a ton of money. Even during the height of the Fallujah battle on April 19, long before any ceasefire was announced,  the Marines were drafting proposals to spend than $77 million in the town, to achieve by design what Petraeus attempted by improvisation. These measures may indeed create a relatively peaceful Iraq, but not the Iraq America set out to build.

The rout of the UN and the impotence of the Iraqi Governing Council during the April crisis have cast doubt over the prospects of erecting a nation from the center. US efforts around Najaf and Fallujah to deal directly with local leaders with a combination of fighting and alliance constitute may succeed, but at the price of altering the initial vision. It is this unresolved tension between the ideal of a multiethnic, democratic Iraq and the reality of a land divided along sectarian lines that makes the military mission so difficult. If war is politics by other means, then military operations can have no definite object unless the political goals are successively refined. Europe historically opted for plunder, preferring to divide the area under Sykes-Picot, with a map as if idly drawn on a paper napkin, and thereafter busying themselves making making lucrative deals with their pet despots. That model is still on offer today, in French United Nations clothing, the road already taken.

The debate over the way forward is almost entirely political in aspect. The fate of Iraq and the War on Terror will depend as much on the outcome of the Presidential election, the controversy over Abu Ghraib and the diplomatic vision of the Middle East as much as it will on military science.

"Not Unfamiliar"

Just a quick pointer to the Donna Hughes article in the National Review describing the similarities between the events at Abu Ghraib and her own experience with techniques used by sex traffickers in Eastern Europe to beat down the women they intend to merchandise.

A few years ago, I was hired by the Council of Europe to research how new information technologies (mostly the Internet) are used to traffic women and children for purposes of sexual exploitation. I documented and analyzed websites which offered rape videos, live video chat of sexual abuse and torture of victims, sex tours, the sale of Eastern European women for the production of pornography, and mail-order-bride services that are likely front operations for trafficking of women and girls. I found websites with sexualized images of women depicted as being dead or murdered. I saw many images that resembled those from Abu Ghraib.

The images from Abu Ghraib are trophy pictures. The sadistic MPs are shown posing, smiling, and gloating over their victims and what they have made them do. Similarly, I found numerous offers on the Internet from pimps for men to bring cameras and video recorders with them to make trophy images and videos of their sexual use of women and girls.

Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or "adult entertainment"? Why can we easily see the violations of human beings in one set of images, but miss it in others? What if the Iraqi men had been forced to smile, could we be convinced that there was a newly formed "publishing and film production" company in Baghdad instead of sexual abuse and humiliation being perpetrated?

Part of the impact of the Abu Ghraib affair has been the sense of betrayal many supporters of the war have felt at finding that some of those they trusted most were least worthy of it. The shock of discovering a Bishop at peepshow comes not so much from a finding that peepshows exist as in accepting that some Bishops watch them. "Love," John le Carre once remarked, "is whatever you can still betray" and it was the mark of how deeply we loved the troops that the abuses of Abu Ghraib have cut so deeply into the soul of the nation. And every betrayal's trademark is the belated realization that we should have suspected it all along. But betrayal is an old friend. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman remarked about the clarity of some things in hindsight.

This problem goes back a long way. We have been asleep. Just by chance about six months ago, I picked up a book by V. S. Naipaul, one of the great English prose writers. I love to read his short stories and travelogues. The book was titled Among the Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982) and was an account of his travels in Indonesia, where he found that Saudi-funded schools and mosques were transforming Indonesian society from a very relaxed, syncretist Islam to a jihadist fundamentalist fanatical society, all paid for with Saudi Arabian funding. Nobody paid attention. Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.

We have seen throughout the last 20 years a kind of head-in-the-sand approach to national security in the Pentagon. We were comfortable with the existing concept of what the threat was, what threat analysis was, and how we derived our requirements, still using the same old tools we all grew up with. We paid no attention to the real nature of this emerging threat, even though there were warning signs. Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut—241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted United States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when attacked; and they don't even bother to take their dead with them. This was a seminal moment for Osama.

After that, we had our CIA station chief kidnapped and tortured to death. Nothing was done. Then, we had our Marine Colonel [William R.] Higgins kidnapped and publicly hanged. Nothing was done. We fueled and made these people aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism as a tool of jihad. It worked. They chased us out of one place after another, because we would not retaliate.

Cleaning out the military of miscreants is of a piece with ridding it of its institutional blindness. Nothing, least of all illusion, survives contact with the enemy. Neither wishful thinking nor the fantasy of safety in flight will help us in our hour of need. And while we may sincerely say 'my country right or wrong, my mother drunk or sober', better right and better sober.

Light Posting over the Next Few Days

In response to recent requests for a bio, I'd just like to say that I am a software developer, who was once employed in forestry projects in a third world country, and did a short stint in Africa. Prior to that I headed up a nongovernment organization helping mountain tribes title their ancestral lands in largely insurgent-controlled areas and was a staff adviser for about three years to a third world government attempting to reach a negotiated settlement with Islamic rebels. Before that, I led a largely footloose life, including a year as a ragpicker. I have a graduate degree in public policy from a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts and another in applied mathematics from the midwest.

It used to be said that the nice thing about the Internet was that nobody cared if you were a dog: that your presence on the web was wholly separable from your existence as a person. That, as I've discovered, isn't wholly true although it should be; nothing is should truer or more false simply on the basis of provenance. But I should have realized that in this uncertain hour, the words 'who goes there?', so long in disuse, would come to preface every conversation. It is that kind of time and so be it.

Regards,

W.

 

Abu Ghraib

It wasn't till I got to the center of Jolo town in the late 1980s, some days after the fight between Mayor Saud Tan and Vice Governor Kimar Tulawie of Sulu that I became aware of the scale of the damage. There was a burned out area measuring about 1,000 x 1,500 meters that had been reduced to a flat stretch of blackened timber, twisted galvanized iron sheeting and pools of water. The hospital where I stood was on a hill, and therefore seized by Tulawie's men first. They had set up a mortar in the courtyard and machineguns in the windows where they could overlook the mayor's house 800 meters downrange. The doctors related, with a finely honed appreciation for the absurd, how the panicked patients had jumped out of the windows some still clutching bottles of dextrose hooked up to their veins, and scampered for their lives, the halt overtaking the lame. Tulawie's men found the range by walking the shells up to the Mayor's house, which in Jolo is another name for a fortification, and in the process set fire to the shantytown whose ruins stretched out before me. Two or three dozen people died, more than half a square mile burned out, and it didn't even rate a newspaper story in the capital of Manila. It didn't matter: the dead were buried and the warlords reached a modus vivendi .

A year later I ran into then Mayor Herminio (Miniong)  Montebon in Isabela, Basilan (rent Gary Cooper's The Real Glory, a Moro war movie set exactly there) who idly recounted how some of the inland rebels, the precursors of the Abu Sayaf, had picked the previous Christmas Eve to launch a 300 man attack on the town market. On the morning of the attack Montebon was making the final arrangement for the noodles, sandwiches and watery pineapple juice that is the standard holiday fare for a provincial fete, when  an informant breathlessly ran up to him to say that the town would be attacked in two hours. Monteban raced to the Army detachment and barely had time to persuade a Captain, the Colonel being absent, to take a company to the market with a V-150 armored reconnaissance vehicle in support where they ran headlong into the attackers. It was a meeting engagement and all hell broke loose. Montebon remembers thinking, as the gunner fired an M2 .50 above him just how easily the bullets went through the plywood walls and stalls of that poor provincial town.

But that was definitely before I took some time out to help a Muslim mayor of an island municipality in the Tawi-tawi archipelago find some pipes for a water system he hoped to build. We boarded an outrigger in Bongao town and headed out until the extinct volcano that rose behind the provincial capitol had slid into the sea. Once out of sight of land, the firearms came out of the gunwales, insurance against pirates, who waylaid outriggers for their two stroke engines, but not before throwing their occupants into the sea where they would be shot, or more commonly, lacerated with barongs and left to the sharks. He was a gem of man, the sort of person a good Muslim really aspires to be, who didn't smoke, drink or swear and who gave a tithe to his charities. We beached just before nightfall with other outriggers on a stretch of coast protected by reefs, where, to strong coffee and fresh fried rice flour pastries, we planned out the waterworks on a map while women and children, his relatives all, cooked and watched a Michael Jackson video on a set powered by a gasoline generator. The next morning we walked across his island municipality to the dam site, and as it was a peaceful sunny day,  had but four men with FN rifles preceding us. Sometimes we'd pass a group of deserted palm thatch houses abandoned along the coast, their push-up shutters still held open by bamboo props. In response to my queries the Muslim mayor would only say that the former occupants had a dispute with some other residents and had "moved on".

There were certain matters one didn't press. Another time  in Jolo, the day's news consisted of the doings of another Mayor on the eastern coast who had offered to settle a long standing dispute with a rival clan. He invited them to a conciliatory get-together as a symbol of renewed friendship and his rivals duly came in their smuggling boats, twin-screw jobs with double Japanese truck engines, built for skating over reefs, decked out in the best that the Gaisano Bazaar could offer. But as they clambered onto the pier they were shot down to a man by two 30 caliber machineguns which the mayor had sited to enfilade the wharf. The mayor, whose motto was evidently 'waste not, want not' went among the still quivering bodies and looted the dying of their watches and wallets, content that he had solved the clan rivalry for good. There were certain things you didn't ask, because you might meet the same mayor at Alavar's that night for a crab dinner at the table next to the Roman Catholic bishop.

My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce  in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all. 

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today because the Second World War ended in 1945. And if by contrast Palestinians hand out sweets whenever a Jewish orphanage and Old Folk's home is bombed it may be because the UN refugee camps there celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1998. If the outrages at Abu Ghraib hasten the end of war it will not have been in vain, but if they lead, as the Left most earnestly desires, to a Vietnam-like stalemate, it will be not the last but the first of many sad mileposts.

The months after Marcos fell, with the help of Paul Wolfowitz, were a time of goodbyes, many between friends whose real names were being revealed for the first time. And in a small late-night restaurant in a back street, a small man in steel rimmed glasses told me, over fifteen cent beer, how he had attended a party given by some academic types the night before. They turned the evening into Commie-fest and gathered round someone he knew slightly as a minor functionary in the Red guerilla army in the expectation of edifying stories from the dark years. He was an ex-seminarian, quiet and softly spoken, who told them about his first mission to eliminate a Marcos informer somewhere in a village in southern Luzon. They forced the informer down from his thatch hut one evening, and to save money and avoid the noise of gunfire, cut his throat at the doorstep of his own home. The seminarian was given the honors and he remembered sawing the knife against the informer's windpipe. What struck him most of all, was the rubbery resistance of the cartilage and cries of the informer's children. 'Papa! Papa!' It took a long time to cut though his throat. Before the story was over all the academic bravos had slunk off, retreating like Daisy Buchanan into the 'vast carelessness' of their fantasy world, leaving the man in steel rimmed glasses to drink with the ex-seminarian, ironically improving the company.

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses,  sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

Inside Out

Reader B points links to a Scott Peterson report  in the Christian Science Monitor describing events in Fallujah's northern boundary -- the railway embankment.

At the Fallujah railway station Tuesday - a flash point of insurgent fighting until a few days ago - the company commander received 30 Iraqi troops, members of the Iraq Civil Defense Corps (ICDC), to man the position jointly. The preplanned deal was finalized as Captain Stevenson and his Iraqi counterpart sat on a dust-covered marble bench in the station's waiting room.

"Outstanding," Stevenson told his counterpart as he heard the plan for controlling the main railway building. Marines would keep gun emplacements on either flank, a step toward handing Iraqis security control of Fallujah. By nightfall, those ICDC soldiers were patroling by foot along the main road in front of the station. ...

On trial now are plans to put Iraqi forces - in one case, elements of former Iraqi units, led by a Hussein-era general - in control, as the US Marines shift back their positions, maintaining the cordon only in Fallujah's troubled northwest sector. US commandershope that the new force can bring calm to a city that has been in turmoil since the killing of four US security contractors March 31 prompted US offensive operations. ...

The marines say they will wait and see. Though reports from journalists in Fallujah Tuesday indicated that insurgents - ubiquitous recently as they celebrated the Marine pullback - are now barely visible, few think they are gone.

The message broadcast from mosques is also becoming more favorable, despite initial declarations of victory over US forces. Marines say recent messages are: "Return to your homes, don't take up arms, the fight is over."

Interestingly enough, the unit being deployed in the Monitor story is the maligned  Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, not the Fallujah Brigade, whose position on the embankment now makes any attack against the northwestern 'Golan' neighborhood very unlikely, since any assault would have go through the ICDC lines. The impression conveyed is that the cordon around 'Golan' is now very loose. The Washington Times reports that any senior foreign fighters have probably escaped the net already although the Monitor and the Mitchell Prothero Associated Press report (Behind Enemy Lines) of yesterday suggests that there are still plenty of "foreign fighters" left.

A military source said if international terrorist Abu Musaab Zarqawi was ever in Fallujah, as was suspected, he was able to escape. The source said although the Marines blocked roads leading out of the town of 300,000 residents, the cordoning was not "airtight." He said the assessment that senior fighters have left Fallujah is based on intelligence reports. "The problem is they don't know where they have gone," the source said.

The friendly waves and conciliatory messages being broadcast from mosques -- in addition to the reappearance of the ICDC -- may mean that at least one of General Conway's operational objectives has been met. He planned to drive a wedge between the hard core enemy and the regular citizens, to separate anticoalition forces from the idea of an insurgency. Conway was quoted by the Prothero report as saying:

"It got at what was essentially at that point our operational objective, which was to separate out the hard-core insurgents and freedom fighters from the other citizens of the city that may well have taken up weapons against us, based upon the fact that they thought they were defending their city, based upon the call of the imams and those types of things," Conway said.

This would restore mobility to the battlefield since operations against the enemy can now take the form of raids against selected targets instead of the seizing and holding entire city blocks. From this stage onward, operations in Fallujah can no longer be understood in terms of linear operations. How successful this will be remains to be seen, but it is fair to say that the enemy can no longer regard Fallujah as an inviolable sanctuary. Conway's strategy may or may not be the same thing the Belmont Club theorized about back in April 3 that "once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself."  Success will depend on how successfully the Marines can blend civil affairs and military tactics.

Meanwhile, a much more decisive battle is brewing in the Green Zone. Michael Rubin, a former Coalition Provisional Authority staffer, has let fly with both barrels at State Department policy in Iraq in the National Review -- although few other agencies are exempt. The essential indictment is that professional diplomats, from long habit and politically nuanced instincts, attempted to pack the future Iraqi government with the cocktail party set, people who gave a good dinner and spoke fluent English, just the sort of people who would make "Papa Doc" Duvaliers. Rubin writes:

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker became both Garner and Bremer's governance director. He handpicked the political team, staffing it almost exclusively with career Near Eastern Affairs diplomats and members of the Policy Planning Staff. I have worked on the Iraqi issue for several years, and knew many of the diplomats and analysts from de-briefings following the academic year I spent teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan. Few supported Bush administration policy. In a seminar I attended before joining government, one U.S. diplomat spoke about the fallacy of regime change in Iraq. Several diplomats openly disparaged President Bush. One high-ranking career diplomat spoke of his affection for Howard Dean. I was surprised to see that a particular British analyst had joined the governance group. Shortly before the September 11, 2001,terror attacks, he had argued that any Saddam replacement would be "as illegitimate as Israel." Rather than promote democrats and liberals, the Crocker team sought to stack the Governing Council with Islamists, Arab nationalists, and tribal leaders; they largely succeeded.

That ironically would have the effect of recreating precisely what America came to destroy simply for the convenience of the familiar. Rubin warns: "the State Department, CENTCOM, and CIA argument that only a strongman or benign autocrat can govern Iraq creates a self-fulfilling prophecy." Viewed in that light, the events of April may just as ironically have had the effect of freeing American ground commanders to do whatever was practical, dealing with the local councils and leaders which Rubin claims the diplomats were loathe to condescend to. Independence day from the Green Zone.

One of the fascinating things about following events in Fallujah has been watching the USMC adapt to the circumstances as it found them, fulfilling its mission in often surprising ways. How strange that the imperative for survival should enforce a rate of evolution in military formations far faster than for diplomats frozen in their lofty towers. Clemenceau famously said that "war is too important to be left to the generals". Perhaps he should have added that occupation is too important to be left entirely to the diplomats.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

The mystery of John Kerry's inability to decisively overtake George Bush, despite the flood tide of bad news in April has an easy solution: events have discredited his mental model for waging the GWOT even more than President Bush's. Which is not to say that the Bush model has fared well. On the face of it, many of the President's assumptions underpinning the campaign to 'bring freedom to the Middle East' have been falsified though perhaps -- and crucially -- the central assumption has not.

One possible reason for the recent inarticulateness of the White House is that the President cannot restate the key themes of his foundational vision, perhaps best articulated in the November 2003 speech for the National Endowmen for Democracy without sounding naive and Pollyannish.

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy -- and after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy. The former dictator ruled by terror and treachery, and left deeply ingrained habits of fear and distrust. Remnants of his regime, joined by foreign terrorists, continue their battle against order and against civilization. Our coalition is responding to recent attacks with precision raids, guided by intelligence provided by the Iraqis, themselves. And we're working closely with Iraqi citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and take increasing responsibility for their own affairs. As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test. (Applause.)

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people. The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women's rights, and training Iraqi journalists, and teaching the skills of political participation. Iraqis, themselves -- police and borders guards and local officials -- are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. (Applause.) The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution. (Applause.)

Recent events in April have shown that many factions in Iraq want the diametric opposite: sectarian bloodshed, extremism, graft and consuming hatred. Fortunately for the President, John Kerry's own Law Enforcement and International Treaty approach sounds worse than naive. It sounds stupid.

But the fight requires us to use every tool at our disposal. Not only a strong military – but renewed alliances, vigorous law enforcement, reliable intelligence, and unremitting effort to shut down the flow of terrorist funds. To do all this, and to do our best, demands that we work with other countries instead of walking alone. For today the agents of terrorism work and lurk in the shadows of 60 nations on every continent. In this entangled world, we need to build real and enduring alliances. ...

It is time to return to the United Nations and return America to the community of nations to share both authority and responsibility in Iraq, and take the target off the back of our troops. This also requires a genuine Iraqi security force. The Bush Administration simply signs up recruits and gives them rudimentary training. In a Kerry Administration, we will create and train an Iraqi security force equal to the task of safeguarding itself and the people it is supposed to protect. We must offer the UN the lead role in assisting Iraq with the development of new political institutions. And we must stay in Iraq until the job is finished.

The events of April 2004 have put these alternative visions through the crucible. The most striking fact to emerge is that the war in Iraq, despite Operation Iraqi Freedom, has yet to be won. The murder of the German GSG-9 policemen, the ambush of Spanish intelligence agents, the serial bombing of Iraqi police stations, the refusal of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to prevent the mutilation of contractors escorting a food convoy through Fallujah and above all, the bombed out UN building in Baghdad make the President's vision hopelessly premature but John Kerry's totally ridiculous. Possibly the only thing less appropriate than President Bush proclaiming freedom to Moqtada al-Sadr would be the sight of John Kerry offering to return UN power to the widow of Undersecretary Sergio de Mello or to Kofi Annan, now in the public dock for war profiteering.

But the war is being won, most unfortunately, through means that no one prefers to acknowledge -- in the first instance by turning factions against each other. US commanders on the ground have organized militias to pit one faction against the other, both in Najaf and Fallujah. They have used Kurdish Peshmerga as allies in situations where Sunni Arabs simply sat on their hands. They have been fighting Syrian fighters secretly on the border and not-so-secretly in Fallujah. In due time we may learn that they have been fighting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard retainers of Sadr too. American operators must resort to these unacknowledged methods because they live in an unacknowledged world. It is neither the shining world of a unitary Iraq sighing for freedom nor a fantasy universe simply awaiting a scrap of paper awarding legitimacy from the United Nations. It is what it is: a place of good and evil men commingled, where the promise of freedom must be risked at the price of death.

Once President Bush is able to acknowledge these truths he may be able to resume the campaign to bring Arabs freedom in a more forthright and realistic way. By acknowledging the existence of deeply hostile factions in Iraq, of Syrian and Iranian intervention and the deep corruption that blankets the regimes of the region that includes, or perhaps even originates in the highest councils of the United Nations, he will restore the blurry strategic landscape to its true perspective. Only with visible mileposts can the march be measured and then will the public begin to understand the war American soldiers have been fighting and winning. President Bush should do it because John Kerry cannot. If the President's vision of the Middle East is premature, Kerry's is infirm. A timetable can be amended more easily than folly can be spurned. And that, in this comfortless month, is what passes for cheer.

Death and sorrow will be the companions
of our journey; hardship our garment;
constancy and valor our only shield.
-- Winston Churchill

Behind Enemy Lines

This report from Mitchell Prothero describes what an Iraqi UPI reporter saw in the 'Golan'. Hat tip: Reader WG

While U.S. Marine commanders are hopeful that patrols of local fighters will bring peace to Fallujah, -- a city wracked by anti-coalition activity since the arrival of U.S. forces a year ago -- a situation of even greater concern appears to be lurking; an entire neighborhood seems to be completely under the control of foreign Islamic fighters, mostly from Syria.

An Iraqi employee of United Press International entered Fallujah on Saturday with a source who serves as a mid-level official in the Army of Mohammed, the umbrella group of Iraqi resistance opposing the U.S. occupation. The source had agreed to help arrange a tour of the city and interviews with civilians and resistance fighters by a UPI reporter for the following day.

They entered the city using a route that passed a new Fallujah Protective Army checkpoint, which waved them into the center of the city without even a cursory search. After the local guide liaised with Iraqi fighters in Fallujah, the pair was given permission to travel to the city and was supplied with three armed guards from the Army of Mohammed while they attempted to identify damaged parts of the city and arrange interviews. Upon their arrival in the Golan neighborhood in the northern portion of the city, where much of the fighting has taken place, a group of fighters speaking with Syrian accents approached and ordered the resistance fighters to leave and took the two men into custody. ...

Osama (the UPI reporter) said at least 10 Syrians were in the compound he was held in and estimates that far more were hidden in various fortifications around the area.

This report strongly suggests that 1) a large pocket of the enemy is still inside or contained in Fallujah; 2) this pocket may be called the 'Golan' and is in the nothern section of the city; 3) there may be large numbers of Syrian fighters in the 'Golan'. It is implies that the Fallujah brigade is not very careful in discharging its duties or is complicit to some degree with the enemy. The report continues:

And the top officer for the U.S. Marines in the area used a weekend press conference to dispute reports that the Marines would withdraw from Fallujah and turn local security over to the new unit. The initial reports to that effect came from embedded reporters and eyewitness accounts of Marines pulling back from their positions in Fallujah and turning over several checkpoints to the FPA.

"We have chosen not to commingle U.S. and Iraqi units, and that has prompted some realignment of Marine forces," Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said Saturday. "In fact, we have assigned the Iraqi battalion to our least-engaged sector until they can get their feet on deck, absorb the weapons and equipment we are passing their way, and prepare for the next phase of the operation."

This is a categorical denial that the USMC has left Fallujah. General Conway's claim to have turned over "several checkpoints" to the Fallujah Brigade is consistent with the UPI reporters firsthand observation. Conway's assertion that the USMC is still in the city receives implicit support from the fact that the Syrian fighters were still "hidden in fortifications around the area" -- i.e. the 'Golan', something they would not do unless the USMC were present, seeing as they would have little to fear from the Fallujah Brigade in its present condition. The last part of the UPI report is interesting:

Conway said the decision to incorporate local fighters -- some of whom undoubtedly had recently been fighting the U.S. forces -- stemmed from a need to co-opt Iraqis frustrated by the occupation from the most committed anti-coalition fighters.

"It got at what was essentially at that point our operational objective, which was to separate out the hard-core insurgents and freedom fighters from the other citizens of the city that may well have taken up weapons against us, based upon the fact that they thought they were defending their city, based upon the call of the imams and those types of things," Conway said.

Taken at its face value, Conway's statement implies that the USMC appreciates that the enemy consists of an alliance -- something also corroborated by the UPI reporter, who speaks of the "Army of Mohammed", described an "umbrella group" -- and that the explicit goal of the Marines is to drive a wedge between the hard-core and peripheral elements. In General Conway's words: "to separate out the hard-core insurgents and freedom fighters from the other citizens of the city that may well have taken up weapons against us, based upon the fact that they thought they were defending their city".

To recapitulate, the main points are:

• the enemy is probably still in the city
• the enemy may consist, in part, of Syrian fighters
• the USMC is probably still bottling them up otherwise how to account for the enemy containment, and is therefore present in the city, contrary to press reports
• the USMC is attempting to drive a wedge, as per General Conway, between the hard core and the peripheral enemy elements

 

Comments

Although this information is too limited to make wide-ranging predictions, we may use it to adjust a posteriori our degree of belief in the following propositions.

• the USMC has 'capitulated' to the enemy, turned tail and run. I think this proposition, driven by recent press reports, is less likely based on the UPI reporter's observations.
• the US command is clueless as to how to respond to the current crisis. The Marines may be wrong in their appreciation of the enemy, but they are clearly working on the basis of a plan. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen.
• an assault on the 'Golan' is imminent. I this likelihood is diminished by the new information. The enemy is dug in and commingled with the population. The whole point of the Fallujah Brigade seems to separate out the hard core Jihadis from the local population so as to widen the range of Marine military options. Such is the intent. Only time will tell if the plan will work.

None of the information provided by the UPI report bears on the wider, strategic decisions of the war. It says next to nothing about Sunni versus Shia, CPA versus Iraqi Governing Council or the role of Iran. However, it does suggest that there may be a Syrian hand in the recent fighting, or in the words of US officials, Syria has "not been helpful".

It's tempting to compare USMC attempts in Fallujah to drive a wedge between the "hard core" and their supporters to negotiations in Najaf between the US and community leaders as reported by  the Associated Press. Suggestions that the US is trying to isolate Sadr have been augmented by reports in the Scotsman about a mysterious militia called  "Thulfiqar Army" which has recently been killing off Sadr's men. Twenty of Sadr's men have been killed in recent open fighting with US troops. Stay tuned.

The Sunshine Club

It is probably time to explicitly address the issue of whether the Belmont Club is "optimistic" about the outcome of the current Iraq campaign. Enough commentators have remarked on it for Belmont Club to stand guilty as charged, at least atmospherically. Yet why should this be so? From the very beginning this blog began with the most pessimistic, or perhaps the most realistic of assumptions -- that the Marines were not going to flatten Fallujah because it would cause too many civilian casualties. Whether or not observing that constraint would lead to a perception of weakness by the Arab world; whether or not the refusal to smash this nightmare town would convey a message of indecision; whether ruling out an urban battle in Fallujah would ultimately lose the war is another issue altogether. But once large scale civilian casualties were deemed impermissible, everything that followed, from the encirclement, to the Marine incursions, from the ceasefires, to the formation of the Fallujah Brigade would have come as no surprise. Whatever predictive power this blog may have had over the past few weeks came simply from taking that assumption and trying to figure out what the Marines would do to win this campaign within those limitations. Of course, nothing guarantees that the Marines will win or whether victory was even possible in the first place. Perhaps much of the atmosphere of optimism conveyed by the Belmont Club came simply from my subconcious admiration at the skill and bravery with which the Corps attempted this extremely difficult task.

From the technical point of view I have tried, as much as possible, to avoid predicting outcomes unless they were obvious. Instead, I tried to identify elements, pin down places, sketch out maps, construct timelines and infer tactics from correspondent's reports. Doubtless those who have access to classified information will be laughing their heads off at this crude construction, but it was the best I could do. In that spirit that I vehemently recoiled at the press reports that the USMC had been driven from the field and "replaced" by an Iraqi unit headed by a Saddamite general, not out of optimism or pessimism, but simply because I could not, in good conscience, take the Marine units off the map and replace them with a ghost force. I pointed out, rightly as it now seems, that the Iraqi unit didn't even exist as functioning formation. It didn't even have a definite commander. Of the five Marine battalions in Fallujah area, only one left its position in what was long a rear area and even the enemy feared they were being redeployed to a more threatening position. That these elementary and almost self-evident observations have heartened readers is testimony not so much to the optimism of the Belmont Club but to the gloom that has descended on the campaign, or at least its treatment in the media.

What are the facts? It is fairly certain that the USMC has penned up the enemy die hards in the northern part of the city without precipitating a wholesale massacre. That is a huge achievement in itself. It is now apparent that the USMC has been trying to constitute an Iraqi force -- a force that will be needed if a massive urban battle is ruled out.

What are the probables? That both the Fallujah Brigade, its command elements and perhaps militias like the Thulfiquar Army leave a lot to be desired and probably contain a lot of bad eggs. That there are serious disagreements among and between the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Iraqi Governing Council, the various Shi'ite factions, and perhaps the Kurds, who would like their own state and that these will complicate matters.

That is the state of play. And within that web of doubt America must grapple with a single burning certainty: that unless it can bring a functioning democracy to the Middle East and militarily defeat the terrorist threat it will find its very national existence threatened. Optimism is a word for nothing left to lose.

The View From the Iraqi Resistance

A site which claims to be the voice of the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah does not believe that the US Marines have retreated, as per the claims of the regular media. Hat tip: WOSG of the Free Republic.  Al Basrah reports what seems to be a probe and further tightening around the neighborhoods still controlled by the enemy. These reports date from nearly 48 hours ago and have not been collaterally confirmed by the media. Indeed, the time frame given corresponds to the the 'ignominious retreat' ascribed to the USMC. Note, however, that most of the manuevering described in the following accounts have taken place in the local night, which is roughly on "Mecca Time".

Saturday, 1 May 2004.

Towards midnight: US aggressors mass north of al-Fallujah following retreat.

In a bulletin posted at 23:35 Mecca time Saturday night, Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondent in al-Fallujah reports that US aggressor forces have begun to mass north of the defiant city, as the two base centers of the invaders – that to the north west of the city beyond the residential area and that to the north east in the agricultural area behind the railroad tracks – have begun to join up.

The people of al-Fallujah can see this massing from a distance and some are fearful of what it might portend, thinking that the aim might be a military offensive against the city. Another part of the population believe that this is simply the redeployment of US forces as they gather in one place for better protection against Resistance attacks.

Resistance fighters are massing in the northern neighborhoods of al-Fallujah in preparation for any eventuality, or for any US aggressor attempt to storm the city. In the eastern, central, southern, and southwestern parts of the city, however the situation is stable.

Iraqi Resistance turns back major US attack on al-Fallujah’s al-Jawlan neighborhood.

In a report posted at 20:49 Mecca time Saturday night, Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondent in al-Fallujah reported that US aggressor troops launched a powerful and concentrated attack directed at al-Jawlan neighborhood in the northwest side of the city. The correspondent writes that it appears that this American assault is not another effort to cover the US retreat, but a genuine attempt to storm the city from within.

Al-Fallujah’s Resistance fighters waged a fierce battle against the US attackers that lasted some 35 minutes (from 7:45pm to 8:20pm, local time) and were able to repulse the US assault, inflicting losses on the Americans, according to Resistance fighters. The fighters were unable to give exact figures of the US losses.

It is thought possible that the reason for the latest US attack is that it was an American attempt to secure the area around the position their forces occupy opposite al-Jawlan, where the largest number of Resistance fighters are concentrated. Al-Jawlan, at least its lower end closest to the confrontation line with the Americans, is nearly empty of its civilian population at this point, after most residents left during the intense battles of past days.

It should be noted that although American forces have retreated from a number of sectors around al-Fallujah, they retain two positions confronting the city:

1. To the northeast where the agricultural zone beyond the railroad tracks begins, and

2. To the northwest, beyond al-Jawlan neighborhood.

Resistance blocks US advance into al-Jurayfi, killing two Marines.

A powerful explosion shook al-Jurayfi district, north of al-Fallujah on Saturday according to an afternoon report filed by Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondent in the defiant city. The blast occurred, he reports at precisely 3:53pm local time and the sound of the explosion reverberated throughout the area, being audible in various parts of al-Fallujah.

The correspondent reports that the explosion was the result of Iraqi Resistance fighters’ resistance to a simple attack that the occupation forces had launched at al-Jurayfi when they sent in a Humvee accompanied by troops on foot to cover their on-going retreat towards the agricultural area behind the railroad tracks to the north east of al-Fallujah.

Mafkarat al-Islam’s correspondent reported that as soon as the Iraqi Resistance saw the oncoming US aggressor troops trying to infiltrate into al-Jurayfi, they fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the Humvee. They scored a direct hit on the vehicle, destroying it completely and killing two of the Marine invaders who were inside. The troops on foot fled. The correspondent writes that the American forces use this sort of raid to facilitate the withdrawal of their forces, keeping the Resistance busy with these little military engagements.

Al-Fallujah celebrates the retreat of the American aggressors.

The people of al-Fallujah came out into the streets on Saturday flashing “victory” signs in celebration of their triumph over the US aggressor forces that blocaded their city for nearly a month. The demonstrators carried the Iraqi flag on which is emblazoned the motto Allahu akbar (God is greatest!) as they marched through the streets chanting in support of defiance and resistance to the invader forces.

Meanwhile local police and forces carried out patrols in parts of al-Fallujah. MSN reported that the US occupation troops claimed that they would repair a mosque that their attack aircraft had destroyed.

Resistance fighters stay on alert as local police take over former US aggressor positions around al-Fallujah.

The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam in al-Fallujah reported that policemen together with members of the so-called civil defense forces had begun to deploy in al-Fallujah to take the place of retreating US aggressor forces. This has occurred in a number of locations, in particular in the industrial zone and an-Nu‘aymiyah neighborhood. US forces refused to send four Humvees to participate in joint patrols with the Iraqi police – something that was supposed to happen according to the various cease-fire deals that had been worked out in recent weeks. The US refusal was likely out of fear for the safety of the US troops.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Resistance fighters remain in a state of readiness and on alert as they follow what events will result from this hand over.

Evaluation:

The events described above seem describe a move by the USMC into the northeast of the Fallujah (the upper right corner of the 'Golan' box?). The author of the account (whose reliability one has no way of determining) suggests it is part of a wider deployment preparatory to an all-out attack, possibly from two directions, but that is by no means clear. What can be safely said is that the enemy has detected USMC maneuvering which has now forced them to split their units to face in at least two ways. But no definite conclusions can be drawn.

The Fallujah Brigade and the Mahdi Army

Plus New! The Thulfiqar Army

Most of today's accounts of events in Fallujah have given the impression of a beaten Marine Corps in retreat, barely pausing to hand over power to a Saddam-era general as it scuttles to safety. This report by the Boston Globe is more subdued than most:

Covering their faces with checkered headscarves, militiamen loyal to a former Iraqi Army general jubilantly took to the streets of this battle-scarred city yesterday to celebrate what they called a triumph over withdrawing US Marines. ... "We won," said one of the militiamen, a former soldier who gave his name only as Abu Abdullah. "We didn’t want the Americans to enter the city and we succeeded."

But as more details emerge on the actual positions being "evacuated" by the Marines and the state of readiness and deployment of the Fallujah Brigade, a somewhat different picture emerges. This press release from the US Marines describes what the former Iraqi Army general will be taking over:

The unit assumed control of four checkpoints April 30 and has started patrolling Fallujah, he said. Yet, until the Iraqi battalion demonstrates a capacity to effectively man designated checkpoints and positions, Marines will continue to maintain a strong presence in and around Fallujah, said Kimmitt during a press briefing April 30. "We have assigned the Iraqi battalion to our least-engaged sector until they can get their feet on deck, absorb the weapons and equipment we are passing their way and prepare for the next phase of the operation," said Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the I Marine Expeditionary Force commander.

These limited duties are not surprising, given that the new Iraqi Brigade barely has guns, uniforms or boots.

Motivated by a desire to get the Iraqis supplied as soon as possible, the Marines reduced their usual turnaround time, said CSSG-15's operations officer, Maj. Raphael Hernandez, a 35-year-old native of El Paso, Texas. As soon as the fully loaded helicopters hit the ground here, they were met by trucks from pre-staged convoys, which were immediately loaded and sent rolling to marry up with the battalion.The supplies came in two waves, one containing 13 boxes of AK-47s, which left for Fallujah early in the morning, and another made up of 20 crates of uniforms, boots and miscellaneous combat gear, which left later in the evening.

These initial shipments are only expected to satisfy the battalion's initial needs. For now, the Iraqis are asking for very little, Conway said, even turning down flak jackets and opting for berets over helmets. Some of the soldiers already have their own uniforms, but Marines have shipped them the same garb as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps wears. In terms of hardware, the battalion is in need of radios and trucks, which has I MEF burning the midnight oil trying to acquire, the general said.

At present, the Fallujah Brigade is more a political force than actual military entity. This was underscored by the hostile reaction of Chalabi, the incoming Defense Minister and the Islamic Party member of the Iraqi Governing Council to its formation. Kurdish Media reports:

While we refuse the endangering of the lives of civilians, we maintain that the return to service of Saddam’s Republican Guard in Fallujah to the military and political arena is a military initiative of the American Marines and has nothing to do with the new Iraqi Army. We do not bear the responsibility.

We stand strongly against this move because it seriously threatens the security and future of Iraq. The command of the brigade and many of its members repressed the people in the uprising of March 1991 and supported Saddam’s regime throughout his dictatorial rule.

Defense Minister Ali Allawi said "The Fallujah Force is not part of the new Iraqi Army. There is no place in the new Iraqi Army for senior officers of Saddam’s Republican Guards or those who have committed crimes against the Iraqi people." We endorse the statement of the Iraqi Defense Minister.

Ahmad Chalabi, INC, Member Governing Council Dr. Sayed Mohammed Bahrululum, Member Governing Council Adel Abdul Mahdi, Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Alternate Member Governing Council

Baghdad May 1, 2004

"A military iniative of the American Marines". Chalabi and Mahdi are worried about this bootless force not so much for what it is, but what it portends. Indeed, they might be forgiven for thinking that the sudden appearance of this Brigade is some kind of American trick, a reminder that Washington too can play the game of divide and conquer by dealing directly with local political figures and arming factions independent of the new Iraqi Army. The process being used to settle the parallel problem of Sadr's Mahdi Army is an eerily similar combination of force and political negotiation. The Associated Press reports:

Najaf's police chief, Ali al-Yasser, was seeking to meet U.S. officials Sunday to present a five-point proposal, the mediators said. But the top coalition official in Najaf, Phil Kosnett, insisted al-Sadr must "face justice" and said there were no plans for a Sunday meeting. "The coalition is not negotiating with anyone on any five-point plan," he said, though the coalition "meets with local officials every day to discuss the situation."

The plan, put together by tribal leaders after talks with the Najaf police chief, calls for the al-Mahdi Army to leave Najaf and for al-Sadr not to be jailed on a murder charge until a new government is formed, according to Hakem al-Shibli, a tribal leader and member of the negotiating team. He said Najaf's tribes would reject any American demand to arrest al-Sadr, who is wanted for alleged involvement in the slaying of a rival cleric last year. "If the Americans insist on it, despite the compromises that Seyed Muqtada has made, it would not be just," al-Shibli said.

The mediators — made up of tribesmen and a former judge — received the blessing of the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior and influential Shiite cleric, al-Shibli said. However, an al-Sadr spokesman who met with the mediators Saturday, Sheik Qais al-Khazali, was less optimistic, saying all other efforts to end the standoff had failed because of Americans. He said that if the Americans rejected a peaceful settlement, the al-Mahdi Army would fight. ...

Hundreds of U.S. troops are deployed outside the Najaf-Kufa area, and a contingent has moved into a base within the city, about five kilometers (three miles) from sensitive holy sites at the heart of Najaf. The Americans have clashed occasionally with al-Sadr followers outside Najaf. The U.S. military moved to capture al-Sadr after his militia staged an uprising across the south, sparked by the arrest of one of his aides. That uprising has died down, but his militiamen still dominate Najaf, Kufa and Karbala, the three holiest Shiite cities in Iraq.

Here too we see the chessboard-like moves of military units while the coalition "meets with local officials every day" without "negotiating with anyone on any five-point plan". Little wonder that Chalabi and Abdul Mahdi are so nervous. Sadr should be too.

The "Thulfiqar" Army

Hat tip: Salon. The Scotsman reports that a mysterious and shadowy militia is killing Moqtada Al-Sadr's men, one by one.

FOR the past month they have been the rude young pretenders, a rag-tag slum army ruffling the quiet dignity of Iraq’s holiest city. For every day that the United States army fails to act on its threat to crush them, the Shiite militiamen of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have grown in confidence in their stronghold in Najaf.

Now, however, a shadowy resistance movement within might be about to succeed where the 2,500 US marines outside the city have failed. In a deadly expression of feelings that until now were kept quiet, a group representing local residents is said to have killed at least five militiamen in the last four days. The murders are the first sign of organised Iraqi opposition to Sadr’s presence and come amid simmering discontent at the havoc their lawless presence has wreaked.

The group calls itself the Thulfiqar Army, after a twin-bladed sword said to be used by the Shiite martyr Imam Ali, to whom Najaf’s vast central mosque is dedicated. Residents say leaflets bearing that name have been circulated in the city in the last week, urging Sadr’s al-Mahdi army to leave immediately or face imminent death. "I haven’t seen the leaflets myself, but I heard about it when I was down there two days ago," said Ahmed Abbas, a carpenter from Najaf who visited Baghdad yesterday. "It has got some of the Mahdi guys quite worried, I tell you. They are banding together more, when normally you would see them happily walking on the streets alone. I think their commanders have ordered them to do that."

As is the case with most fledgling resistance groups, further details are sketchy. Nobody knows yet who is really behind the group, if the deaths of Mahdi men are its handiwork or, indeed, if it really exists. Questioned about it at a Baghdad press conference on Tuesday, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt would say only: "I am not aware of its existence, although we have had some reports of that nature from the city."

Retreat, Hell!

The guesswork hasn't been too far off. From the beginning it seemed clear that an Iraqi component was always going to be needed in Fallujah, both to process civilians and restore order. On April 2nd, before Valiant Resolve was formally announced, the Belmont Club guess was that:

CPA Administrator Paul Bremer chose a graduation ceremony for Iraqi police cadets to vow that the incident "will not go unpunished", possibly because a large role has been assigned to the Iraqi police in the forthcoming operation. From these elements one can deduce the basic shape of the counterstroke. Since Fallujah and its anti-coalition forces are largely run on tribal (read Mafia) lines, the strategic goal will be to arrest the tribal leadership structure and other ringleaders such as imams. A secondary goal will be to capture the thousands of weapons and magazines that are bound to be present. This will require a block by block reduction of an entire city of 230,000 persons. Hence, a plentiful supply of Iraqi cops is needed for large-scale interrogation. And all this must be accomplished within the limits of acceptable collateral damage levels.

One of the risks to taking the town was always that the defenders would use the opportunity to stage their own Viking funeral pyre by torching the town and roasting as many civilians as they could with it. The answer, it seemed back in April 3 was:

However, if the Marines exert only gradual pressure, and use neighbors or Iraqi police from outside Fallujah to guide other neighbors into processing areas, the defenders will never be presented with a clear opportunity to precipitate a crisis. Once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself.

It is in this context that the perplexing cycle of ceasefires punctuated by nocturnal assaults can be understood. The Corps, besides incorporating the Chinese word Gung Ho into it's vocabulary, may have finally proved to the Arabs that they can out-hudna anyone who ever stood on a patch of sand. By alternately throttling and releasing the enemy, or in cruder terms, by a process of talking and shooting, the USMC seems to have squeegeed the foe into the 'Golan' without ever precipitating the feared crisis. ("Like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet doomed to die" -- Winston Churchill)

When the Press began trumpeting a humiliating Marine withdrawal and their ignominous replacement by Iraqi Fallujah Protection Army, the Belmont Club, although perplexed by the origins of the Fallujah Protection Army, still guessed that the Marines would not be withdrawn, as per innuendo, from around the 'Golan' cordon and that the Iraqis would be employed in stabilization and police duties simply because it was impossible for a force in contact with the enemy to be replaced by a unit which had yet to be constituted.

One of the most difficult operations of war is relieving a unit in contact with the enemy. It first of all requires the existence of the relief force. News accounts which suggest that this-still-to-be formed Fallujah Protection Army (FPA) will take over from the Marines, said to be evacuating "front line positions" within a few days, are only slightly less incredible than a report that Batman, the Hulk and Wolverine have joined the Navy to see the world. ... The most likely scenario is that the FPA will be given charge over city areas free from heavy fighting and assigned general police duties.

Although the appearance of the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA) and its effects still remain to be seen, the mystery of it origins has been solved at last. It appears to be a creature of the Marines themselves, tricked out in Iraqi uniform. This would go a long way toward explaining the kind of training Marines were providing to Iraqis in southeastern industrial area of the city. They were training locals who will be assigned police duties. This April 30 press release from CENTCOM is here quoted in full.

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq - As part of the overall effort to restore security and stability in Fallujah, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is overseeing the formation of the 1st Battalion of the Fallujah Brigade.

The mission of this interim organization, to be completely integrated with that of I MEF, is part of the ongoing aspiration to have Iraqi Security Forces fully cooperate with Coalition Forces to perform security tasks and, eventually, to assume responsibility for security and stability in Fallujah and other cities.

The Coalition objectives remain unchanged -- to eliminate armed groups, collect and positively control all heavy weapons, and turn over foreign fighters and disarm Anti-Coalition insurgents in Fallujah. The Coalition welcomes the assistance of the Iraqi forces, including the 1st Battalion of the Fallujah Brigade, in efforts to achieve these objectives.

Like most of the existing Iraqi Security Forces, this battalion will be recruited largely from former soldiers of the Iraqi Army. The battalion will be employed in Fallujah alongside the 1st MEF to assist in the return of peace and stability for the city. Their employment will facilitate the flow of support and foster rapid reconstruction, thereby stimulating the job market for citizens inside the city. The Battalion will function as a subordinate command under the operational control of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and 1st MEF will provide the resources and equipment necessary to ensure mission accomplishment by this force.

Until the battalion's units demonstrate a capability to man designated checkpoints and positions, Marines will continue to maintain a presence in and around Fallujah. Consistent with our duty to provide security, Coalition Forces will maintain their right of freedom of movement in all areas of the AOR. As calm is restored, families will be allowed to return to the city, and during the transition, the number of families allowed into the city on a daily basis will increase to 200.

After commencing the restoration of law and order inside the city of Fallujah, Iraqi security forces inside the city will assist police with investigations to identify the murderers and mutilators of the four American contractors on 31 March, and the criminals responsible for the 14 February attack on the Fallujah Police Station. When captured, those persons will be tried in the Iraqi judicial system.

If this interpretation proves to be accurate, it will have flowed directly from the basic operational requirements of Valiant Resolve. The goals of that operation would have been to root out enemy cells in Fallujah without massacring everyone in the city. This had to be accomplished against an active resistance schooled in the methods which brought the Russians to grief in Grozny. All with the final goal of wresting control of Fallujah from its gang leaders into the hands of an American-controlled Iraqi administration. And although the final victory remains to be won and 'Golan' still to be reduced, no one should ever, ever, call Marines Jarheads again without meaning it in irony.