Just World News with Helena Cobban

PLANNING FOR THE ‘AFTERMATH’: The military outcome of this war is, at this point in time, completely unpredictable. The currently “best possible” scenario for the US-UK troops could be mean getting into Baghdad within the next 2-3 days; regime collapse there spreads out through the whole country; extension of a measure of US-UK military control over the whole country by the end of April. The “worst possible” scenario would be that sometime between 2004 and 2005 the US decides the still-continuing imbroglio has become so costly that it finally decides to “redeploy offshore” (Reagan’s memorable term for the withdrawal from Lebanon, 1984) and has to plead desperately for the United Nations to facilitate its departure…
Actually, a short-term appearance of that “best case” does not in itself preclude the subsequent realization of the “worst case.” But even in itself, the “best case” scenario as outlined above now looks highly unlikely.
What is clear is that what was envisaged — and actively peddled– by many in the Washington policy community as a sort of hygienic and rapid shift from an “Iraq dominated by Saddam” situation to an “Iraq rebuilt by America” situation has been neither hygienic nor rapid. Instead, the US-UK forces are mired in the mud, fog, and pestilence of combat. Which is the precise fact that the war-peddlers wanted the rest of the world to forget about all along. Hence, what I always called their strong attempt to “elide” the nasty fact that before the “rebuilding by America” phase could begin, there would still, actually, have to be a war.
They made it sound like some wonderful, Iraq-wide urban renewal scheme. Just a few political details to be seen to there– oh, just the collapse of a national government, nothing major– and then the good and the great could get on with their intensely visionary, intensely humanitarian task of building a new Iraq.
Except that three or four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had to be summoned in along the way there.
But no need for me to labor this point any more. I wrote a lot about the “elision of war” move before the war was launched. I guess I do want to make one arcane etymological point, though, while we’re talking about an “aftermath”. This word has no relationship to ordinary math– arithmetic and geometry and such. Instead, the “math” in there is an Old English term for land that has been mowed. (As “filth” is an area that has been fouled, etc.) So to have an “aftermath”, first of all you need to do some “mowing”. And mowing is a totally appropriate term to describe what is being inflicted on the people of Iraq right now…
Example: the Brits are now jumping up and down saying they need to get into Basra because the people there have no clean water. Well, why do they have no clean water? Is it that they’ve never had clean water? No. Is it because the city’s water-pumping plants– whose capacity had previously been reduced by 12 years of UN-US-UK-imposed sanctions on vitals parts– were finally knocked out of business in the first days of this war by a British or American bombardment? Yes: this explanation of what happened is far, far more likely.
And throughout the whole country the same pattern has been observed. Because of President Bush’s inhuman decision to launch this war, major damage has been caused to many pillars of Iraq’s national infrastructure. That is what happens in war. (Which all the eager “urban renewers” in the policy and “humanitarian” communities preferred to forget.)
But then, for the protagonists of this war to say that at this stage they need to continue the fighting in order to “save” the Iraqi people from the consequences of the resulting, and quite predictable, humanitarian disaster– well, this defies all morals and logic.
[The other day, my 17-year-old daughter Lorna Quandt said in amazement: “Mom, has the world always been this crazy?” I said, “Well, love, it’s true that states often treat other states and their citizens very cynically. So I guess at one level it’s always been somewhat like this. But these present claims of ‘humanitarianism’ really are beyond belief.” We agreed that an analogous situation in our neighborhood would be if we set fire to our neighbor’s house, and then as the flames rose higher rushed ostentatiously in to “save” her. And that after that, we would just stay on in her house and say that because we had “saved” her life, now we claimed her house as our own… ]
I actually set out to write about the still-ongoing wrangle inside the Bush administration over who gets to control post-war Iraq. Even though it may seem hard to see just why anyone would want to get stuck with what likes a mammoth tar-baby of a political challenge there. But still, Washington infighting being what it is, everyone there is fighting for a piece of the piece of the “post-” war action. In fact, they’re doing it so hard that few people even look outside Washington and notice that actually, even Tony Blair wants the UN to play a major role in overseeing Iraq’s rebuilding.
The fighting, as so often, has been between the hawkish Pentagon suits and the State Department. Earlier, agreement had been reached that post-war Iraq would be administered by an all-American body headed by a recently retired General, Jay Garner. But who would work under him? (Garner himself comes across as either tight-lipped or very unsure of himself.)
State had earlier rolled out its own plan: to have, under Garner, three very well qualified senior Foreign Service Officers (two females and one African-American) each rule Gertrude Bell-like over a sector of a somewhat federalized Iraq…
But then, the Pentagon countered with a petulant insistence that No! It wanted to have its own favored nominees in control of the whole shebang. One name prominently mentioned was that of Jim Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA in the early Clinton years who is also a Board member of the extremely rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (Garner also has a lesser link with JINSA: he went on a JINSA-sponsored trip to Israel a few years ago.)
In the NYT today, David Sanger has a piece in which he reports that, “On Capitol Hill, however, even the Republican-controlled appropriations committees of both the House and Senate voted today to take control of reconstruction out of the hands of the Pentagon, and give it to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The committees voted to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-conflict aid that the Bush administration sought for the Pentagon under an emergency appropriation.”
So the issue has been resolved for now…. Or has it? Who can tell whether the Pentagon suits might not mount a counter-attack? What about Blair and his continued insistence that the UN has to have a role? And anyway, more fundamentally, who can foresee at this point when it might even be safe to start thinking about starting long-term reconstruction in Iraq, rather than just short-term distribution of emergency rations?
One thing does seem clear. Given that all the promises made by the exiled Iraqi pol, the Great Pretender Ahmed Chalabi, to the effect that “his” people inside Iraq would all rise as one to welcome their US-UK “liberators”, have been proven disastrously misbegotten, that is one person who most likely will NOT be given any role in “rebuilding” Iraq.
Meanwhile, the 60-plus percent of the Iraqi population who are Shi-ites seem simply to be biding their time. It increasingly seems to me that the future of nearly all the non-Kurdish part of the country will lie in their hands, and in no-one else’s.
In a future post– to be written, perhaps, as I take my 40-hour, four-leg journey to Arusha, Tanzania in just a few days’ time– I’ll say a few things about the time I visited the Iraq’s two very holy Shi-ite cities, Najaf and Kerbala, back in 1980.

“PRECISION” GUIDED MISSILES? HOW’S THAT? Every time there’s a war, the Pentagon assures that, “our missiles have gotten a LOT smarter since the last time.” And so now, once again, we’re promised that they’re using the smartest missiles ever.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if a missile is so darned “smart” then it should be able to arrive at, say, a military headquarters without harming a nearby market-place?
But how about this: this time round, the Pentagon has guided missiles that are so unbelievably dumb that they not only miss the intended target building– they also miss the intended target country altogether!!
And this has happened not just once but, according to high-level Pentagon briefer Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post, “about seven times.”
I’m not quite sure what “about” seven radical mis-aims means in this context. But that was the number of times, according to McChrystal, that US Tomahawks and other supposedly “smart” missiles have slammed into countries other than Iraq. At least once into each of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Turkey and Saudi Arabia were both so pissed off by the phenomenon that they rapidly forbade the US from even flying their Tomahawks over their national terrains.
This question of much-dumber-than-promised munitions needs to be taken carefully into consideration when we listen to claims from Pentagon spokespeople about the US conducting this war “in a more surgical way than ever before”, or claims that “the military is actually even exposing its own people to significant risks in order to minimize civilian casualties.”
We need to start with a clear understanding of the lethality of some of these munitions. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive force equivalent to 10-12 kilotons of TNT. The biggest (and also, reputedly “smart”) bombs that the US military is dropping over Iraq these days have an explosive force of 2 kilotons. So six of them would provide the explosive force of one Hiroshima.
In Hiroshima, of course, many of the subsequent fatalities came from the after-effects of the radiation released by the bomb. But nearly all of the physical damage caused by the bomb– the destruction, by fire, of the entire downtown area, and the incineration of the people living there– came from the sheer force of the blast and the many fires it sparked throughout the city.
In Hiroshima, too, the damage was multiplied by the US Air Force’s fiendish decision to set the detonation of the bomb to occur NOT when it reached the ground, but some 600 meters up in the air. That distributed the effects of the blast much more broadly. In the case of the US’s present arsenal, “air burst” of some bombs including the infamous MOAB has come back into vogue again.
So we are talking about some extremely unpleasant and lethal munitions in the US arsenal. Not the kind of “tool” that you would want to give anyone to use irresponsibly.
What does “responsible” mean in this context, I wonder?
It’s a known “fact” of statistics that if a system has a failure rate of X percent, then you can reasonably predict that if you use the system Y x 100 times, you could expect X x Y of those operations to result in failure. So if you know that the guidance system on your “smart” munition is going to fail X percent of the time, then the more missiles you fire, the greater the number of mis-aims.
Gosh, this is SO elementary.
But then, it’s also a known fact of running any kind of complex system, that the more complex its operations become, the greater the chance of human or other error. So as your “Y” value above becomes greater within the same period of time, it ends up multiplying your failure rate by more than a factor of Y.
You get my drift.
These guys have fired thousands of PGMs into Iraq these past ten days. According to that same W. Post article, McChrystal said that just counting the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles alone, 675 have already been fired. (I think each one costs around $2 million, by the way. So that’s $1.35 billion of “our” tax money going whoosh, right there.)
And that’s not mention the heavy stuff being dropped by the B-52s, and the JDAMS, and everything else. Very complex operations indeed.
So it was entirely foreseeable that, in these circumstances, a non-trivial number of these very lethal munitions would end up mis-aiming.
In the W. Post article, reporter Jonathan Wesiman wrote:
“McChrystal told reporters there is no indication of a serious technical problem with the sea-launched cruise missiles. More than 675 have been launched since the beginning of the war, he said. The failure rate at this point is about 1 percent, and in most instances, the errant missiles did not explode. The warhead on a Tomahawk is not supposed to activate until it nears its target. One Pentagon official said that with a weapon system as sophisticated as a precision-guided cruise missile, a failure rate of 5 percent would be considered ‘very good.'”
I think these statements from McChrystal and the nameless Pentagon official need unpacking a little. McC accurately did the math to get figure of 1 percent. (That’s the figure for the number of Tomahawks that fell on the wrong country, remember– not just the wrong house, or the wrong city-block.) And we learn that, “in most instances” the mis-aimed missiles did not explode. He notably did not say, “in all instances.” That’s pretty scary.
And then, this un-named guy (okay, I’m just hazarding a wild guess here as to the gender of Wesiman’s Pentagon official) says that for something like the Tomahawk, even a failure rate of “5 percent” would be considered very good.
How’s that again? If you’ve launched 675 missiles as massively lethal as the Tomahawks, and as “few” of them as 5 percent, that is, 33.75 Tomahawks (or let’s say “about” 38 of them) end up going to the wrong place— the wrong country, say, or the wrong city-block, or even just the wrong building– then that is not just “acceptable”, not just “good”, but “very good”??
These people are– I’ve said it before– very dangerous, and criminally insane.
It’s not just that they treat the rest of us like idiots when they assume we can’t do the math on the consequences of very heavy, very complex bombardments with massive munitions. It’s that they don’t seem even to be able to imagine that the kinds of figure for “failure rates” that they talk about so glibly have actual and devastating consequences on the lives of actual human beings.
So let’s bring this madness to an end. Please. Let’s end the bombing right now. And let’s bring our soldiers home before they do any more damage to the world and to their own, already badly damaged psyches.
Addendum: Bob Fisk had a story in today’s Independent, datelined from the Shu’ale portion of Baghdad, in which he reported on the “at least 62” civilians who were killed by an errant missile there Friday. He reported on a key shard of metal he saw there:
The missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans ? if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter “B” is scratched and could be an “H”. This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon’s “Lot” number. It reads: MFR 96214 09.
The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved only minutes after the missile exploded on Friday evening, by an old man whose home is only 100 yards from the 6ft crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds ? mainly women and children ? and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest 21 and the youngest 12, for example, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner. “We have never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the Al-Noor hospital told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.”
Can someone who reads this help to track down that “manufacturer”, or any other details about the missile? (I’m thinking “ASB” may be air-to-surface ballistic?)