Read Riverbend’s Monday post from her family’s neighborhood in Baghdad.
I lived through six years of just such horror during the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s. Including the fiendish kinds of car-bombs (set by “Christian” militias) in which one goes off, people gather to help the wounded, and then ten minutes later another goes off…
They have those in Iraq, too, these days.
I could still describe to you the arrangement of body parts I saw in the street by the time I arrived, reporter’s notebook in hand.
I can still feel the same knot I’d get in my gut if a bomb went off and I thought it was somewhere near where my kids were.
Read Faiza’s latest post in English, too. Faiza is still in Jordan, but it seems to me she has a very clear eye for what’s going on in her homeland, Iraq:
Author: Helena
Wilfred Owen’s gut-socking words
Down in the lengthy Gallipoli discussion commenter Friendly Fire has posted a favorite poem of his, a rather thoughtful piece of war remembrance, “Poppies of war”, by E.M. Warnock.
I’ve always been struck by another British poet of World War 1, myself: Wilfred Owen. That site there says, rather coyly that:
- Owen was injured in March 1917 and sent home; he was fit for duty in August, 1918, and returned to the front. November 4, just seven days before the Armistice, he was caught in a German machine gun attack and killed. He was twenty-five when he died.
The bells were ringing on November 11, 1918, in Shrewsbury to celebrate the Armistice when the doorbell rang at his parent’s home, bringing them the telegram telling them their son was dead.
Well, “injured” in 1917– yes. The guy had a raging case of shell shock. The condition that was later “discovered” by the Yanks as PTSD.
He was sent to the British military hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, where numerous other shell-shocked British warrior-poets were also gathered. (Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, etc.)
The main doctor figure there who seemed vaguely to have an idea what was going on was Dr. William Rivers Rivers. If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s brilliant “Regeneration” trilogy of novels about that convergence of tortured souls, you should.
I seem to recall that in her account, even Rivers– the most humane of the docs there– was certain that the “best” thing for his patients was to get them back to the front. Something to do with “manhood”, as I recall? Of course, issues of homosexuality barely repressed or not repressed at all were enormous at Craiglockhart, as they were throughout the entire history of the British Empire…
By the way, that latter site I linked to is one I just discovered: “The Heritage of the Great War” a bilingual, Dutch-English site with material written by a Rob Ruggenberg. He even has a little slideshow of photos of the Gallipoli battles there…
Anyway, back to Wilfred Owen. Here’s the first of my picks for today:
- Parable of the Old Men and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretch\ed forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son. . . .
Powerful, huh?
Now you’ll have to click on “continue” to read the next one:
Apartheid’s ‘Total Strategy’, contd.
About a month ago, JWN regular Dominic and I were doing some online work together looking at potential areas for comparison between the “total strategy” adopted by the SA apartheid regime in the 1970s and the “Global War on Terrorism” launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.
We’re still really only at the beginning of this work. But if you go to this early-April post you can see some of the exchanges we had– plus some helpful comments from JWN readers, too.
Okay, here’s a bit of an update. First, I have finally managed to scan an excerpt of the text of the TS, as compiled in “South African government documents on the
The caudillo of Samarra
This article by Peter Maass in today’s NYT magazine is really worth reading. It’s about some extremely thuggish ex-Baathists in Iraq whom Allawi’s Interior Minister, Falah Naqib, put in charge of something called the Special Police Commandos.
They have US “advisors” working with them. Naturally. Maass, who knows his way around the world of US Special Thug Forces around the world says many of these guys had extensive experience in the US-backed and very violent rightist movements in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.
(Negroponte’s fingerprints, most likely.)
In Salvador, as Maass reminds us, more than 70,000 people from the 6 million population were killed during that rightist-fueled terror in the twelve-year period 1980-92.
Anyway, this little extract gives some of the flavor of Maass’s latest piece. It’s about an SPC squad who were working unde the “advice” of Capt. Jeff Bennett of the 3rd Infantry Division:
- The officer in charge of the raid — a Major Falah — now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.’s. One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.
Bennett had seen the likes of this before, and he had worked out his own guidelines for dealing with such situations. ”If I think they’re going to shoot somebody or cut his finger off or do any sort of permanent damage, I will immediately stop them,” he explained. ”As Americans, we will not let that happen. In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”
Or how about this:
Missing Marine’s Girl
With everything that’s going on in the world these days, I miss the always compassionate, always passionately anti-war voice of Marine’s Girl.
Her great blog “Acoss the River” got hacked by hostile elements back in early March. Not the first time it had happend. This time, though, she was in the midst of bad, bad treatments for her cancer, her guy had just managed to spring some kind of exit from Iraq to come look after her in Michigan, and she didn’t seem to have the energy or desire to do all the work of fighting back to regain control of her blogspace.
I was thinking about writing something about you, MG, just this past week. I miss you! And I hope-hope-hope the treatments have been going well.
Send us a shout, if you can, and tell us how things are! (And hey, if you have the energy to send a blog post or two into a securely non-hackable–as far as I know– blogspace, just send something in to JWN!)
Also, an admirer of yours called Danya was looking for you, and sent me the following message to post someplace you could see it:
- I’m glad to hear you are OK MG, but your blog is missed. I find myself wondering about your health and your homelife now that your marine is home. I know that is what you need to be concentrating on right now but it’s sad to lose such a strong, smart voice for the side of reason.
Signed, Danya
Democracy possibly proceeding in Iraq?
I have decided to take down– for now!– the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter that has been a feature of the JWN sidebar for more than seven weeks now.
On this day, 88 days after the partially legitimate January 30 election in Iraq, UIA list head Ibrahim Jaafari has won approval from the elected National Assembly for his list for a transitional government.
I realize that the path to sovereign and democratic self-government in Iraq still looks extremely bumpy. (An under-statement, that.)
As that AP report states,
- the 37-member Cabinet [presented to the NA by Jaafari] still has two vacancies, five acting ministers and fails to incorporate in a meaningful way the Sunni Arab minority due to a dispute over the suitability of Baathists who served in Saddam Hussein’s regime…
The historic decision also was made with a third of legislators in the 275-member National Assembly absent.
Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters that decisions over the vacant and acting Cabinet positions will be made in three to four days.
Still, inasmuch as having the counter up on the sidebar expressed a forceful reproach to the US occupation authorities, I think it’s appropriate right now to take it down and “give Jaafari (and everyone else involved) a chance.”
I still have the HTML/script for the counter, however, and shall put it up at a moment’s notice whenever I think it should go back up.
“Empires will tremble!” (as a good friend of mine once said with I think just a touch of irony when I told him the Quakers were about to bring out a report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
A couple more significant details from the AP report:
Discussing ‘Gallipoli?’
The post I put up here Monday about Gallipoli has already started to generate one of the most interesting cross-cultural discussions I’ve ever seen in the blogosphere… It’s definitely worth following the whole flow of the comments there.
Commenters include some fairly vocal Ozzies (oops, sorry, Aussies!) and Kiwis, not all of whom agree with each other– or me!– but all of whom are definitely eager to explain their points of view… a Singing Nun… the descendant of several Lebanese (or perhaps in those days they called themselves Syrians) who had been conscripted into the Ottoman Army and fought to defend the peninsula… and Yankeedoodle of Daily War News in unprecedented (for me) military historian cum “our roving correspondent” mode…
But that’s not all. As I say, definitely worth a peruse.
Note: I want to keep all the Gallipoli discussion in one place– over on that post, not here. So despite possible appearances to the contrary this post is closed to comments.
Wafiq al-Samarai
Yesterday, I noted here that Iraq’s transitional President, Jalal Talabani, has a “security counsellor” called Wafiq al-Samarai.
Commenter “Badr” noted that the position should probably be translated as “national security advisor”, and that “Wafiq al-Samarai was chief of military intelligence under Saddam and a leading opposition figure to the regime later.”
Interesting.
Both that Talabani has his own “national security advisor”, in a system that I had previously understood to be one in which the responsible-to-parliament PM would exercize executive power and the President would perform Queen Elizabeth 2-like ceremonial tasks.
I guess I got that wrong, huh? (But actually, did I?)
If Talabani is really building his own entire parallel ruling apparatus I think the word for that is “divide and rule”?
Also interesting, that Talabani would pick this Samarai person. Can Badr or anyone else give more details to reveal the distance Samarai might actually have traveled from his high-level Baathist past? Also, knowing something about his commitment to democratic principles and the rule of law would, I think, be very informative…
In a related vein, Juan Cole writes today that:
- Jalal Talabani told al-Hayat that he feared that the concerns among the Shiite religious parties about Sunni Arab cabinet ministers being completely free of any Baath association would cause the baby to be thrown out with the bath water. It is this issue of vetting the Sunni Arab ministers that appears to have delayed the finalization of the cabinet, along with continued Sunni Arab demands for some important ministries. Talabani warned against any purge of ex-Baathists, pointing out that there there are a million and a half Baathists in Iraq. He said it was important to distinguish between ordinary party members and the Baath military. The latter had to be kept away from the levers of power, he said, lest it make another coup similar to the one in 1968.
Talabani also warned that for foreign troops to be withdrawn at this point risked provoking civil war. He insisted that Iraq is not occupied[!!!]
Oh, how convenient for Mr. Talabani as, with huge help from his friends in Washington, he gathers powers to himself and is able blithely to contradict the actual standing of his country under international law.
‘Iraqi Press Monitor’ resumes
Yesterday, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting put out the first edition of its once-daily ‘Iraqi Press Monitor’ since February 2nd.
I’m glad they’ve cranked it up again. It’s not perfect but it does provide some interesting tidbits. Like one in yesterday’s edition, from the Chalabist Al-Mutamar newspaper that referred to someone called “Wafiq al-Samarai, security counsellor to the Iraqi president.” Samarai had reportedly issued his “first press release”, in which he
- promised an end to terrorist violence. In particular, he said, foreign insurgent groups would driven out through a combination of national reconciliation, dialogue and employment.
Well, never mind so much what the guy said. But who knew that the Iraqi President would have his own “security counsellor”?
I thought the system of government was supposed to be one in the which the Prime Minister headed the executive power?
In today’s edition of IPM, they had this report from the SCIRI daily, Al-Adalah:
- Jawad al-Maliki, who deputises for Jaafari in the Islamic Dawa Party, said the government should have been announced on January 25 [oops, maybe make that ‘April 25’?] but the decision was postponed for a day as some issues remained unresolved. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zibari described Jaafari
Gallipoli?
Can someone tell me why 20,000 whitefolks– most of them reportedly Ozzies or New Zealanders, and many of them young– would flock to a chilly shore in Turkey early today to commemorate an extremely ill-conceived, British-led assault on the shore of a distant Muslim country that ended up being a complete military fiasco?
It was a big event. Both the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers were there. Britain sent Prince Charles. (I guess Tony was too busy running in his current election campaign and trying to dodge questions about a more recent british assault on a Muslim land.)
On so many different scores, the UK-France-Anzac assault on Gallipoli in 1915 was a deep, deep embarrassment. Why on earth would people from the invading countries even want to remember it (except it as a terrible object lesson in what not to do?) And why would so many of them have flocked to Gallipoli today to “commemorate” the 90th anniversary of one of the campaign’s key battles?
I do recall, growing up in Middle England in the 1950s, that in the semi-public park opposite my home there was a broad plinth built– apparently for some further memorial that never in the end materialized atop it– and it was mysteriously engraved “Gallipoli 1915”.
Maybe better that the memorial there never did get finished?
Here’s the summary of the Gallipoli campaign, culled from that great “First World War. com” website linked to above:
— A young (and rash) Winston Churchill was the Secretary of the Navy. He insisted on launching the operation against the advice of most of the professional military and naval thinkers. (H’mmm.)
— The first attempt to land British and allied forces on Turkish soil at Gallipoli was made in mid-February 1915. It failed. The first successful landings weren’t made till April 25. Three subsequent attempts to enlarge those beachheads were repulsed by the Turks.
— By August or so, the British forces, commanded by Ian Hamilton, had a total of three beachheads. Each was, unfortunately, still overlooked by Turkish positions. “Confidence in the operation in London and Paris was dwindling. Nevertheless Churchill pressed both governments to provide continued support.”
— In October, Hamilton received news that he would soon be ordered to evacuate the peninsula. He protested, and was replaced. London didn’t get its act together to actually order the evacuation till December, by which time the evacuation was extremely hazardous.
— Campaign Summary:
- Some 480,000 Allied troops had been dedicated to the failed campaign. British casualties (including imperial forces) amounted to approximately 205,000. French losses were estimated at around 47,000. Turkey incurred around 250,000 casualties.
Oh my God, can you imagine all those families stripped of their young men? And for what? All of World War 1, everywhere, was simply one long and quite unmitigated disaster.
But my question remains: why on earth would those young Ozzies and Kiwis be so eager to travel to Gallipoli and memorialize what happened there?
The militaristic Ozzie PM, John Howard, blustered on to the effect that,