DEAD PARROT

Number 22 -- Saturday, April 26, 2003

RINO WATCH AT THE CLUB FOR GROWTH

If CQ Today, quoted on the web site, is correct, the money-channeling has been highly successful: "When the supply-siders at the Club for Growth decide to back a candidate who favors the economic policies of the Reagan era, donations gush." As befits a "club" in the second sense, this one also menaces the heads of those who have chosen not to heed God's marching orders. According to Rep. Jeff Flake (his real name), who the CFG hopes will unseat notorious liberal John McCain, "When you have 100 percent of Republicans voting for the Bush tax cut, you know that they're looking over their shoulder and not wanting to have [the Club] recruiting candidates in their district."

Two RINO's on the CFG's hit-list are Olympia Snowe (ME) and George Voinovich (OH). Because they voted to limit the tax cut to a mere $350 billion, CFG has targeted them with TV ads in their states (Boston Globe, 4/19). The ads show the Senators with French flags and compare them to those treacherous ex-friends who tried to frustrate our splendid little war. Though his press release calls them "Franco-Republicans," Moore insists that the Club is not questioning their patriotism.

TIN MAN TRIUMPHANT

PART II

[Last week, Dead Parrot examined two myths about the war on Iraq: that the Bush administration seriously attempted to avoid fighting at all and that, when we reluctantly did fight, brilliant military planning overcame the resistance of a dangerous opponent. Analysis of three other bogus claims concludes the article today.]

3. We fought a clean war that set a new standard for humane concern.

From the first, American spokespeople did set a new standard for efforts to REPRESENT invasion as something akin to a flu shot in both pinpoint accuracy and benign intent. Beginning with Perle and Rumsfeld's rapturous exclamations on the "choreography" of laser-guided ordnance (see DP #18: "All Our Fire Is Friendly Fire"), the chorus of PR on this point was deafening. Because our mission was to kill bad guys, the people we killed WERE bad guys, by definition; and we killed them with remarkable discretion, despite their cunning attempts to disguise themselves as good. The impression our propagandists created was of a 1940's cowboy serial in which the hero shoots a sixgun right out of the villain's hand, leaving him with his fingers ringing but otherwise unharmed and ready to stand trial.

Neither common sense nor reports from Iraq support this image of righteously administered and scrupulously limited force. No need to turn to Al Jazeera for evidence that we killed a very large number of Iraqi civilians: the mainstream American press, despite its strong home-team orientation, carried stories and showed pictures of these deaths every day of the war; and who can doubt that the scenes at which journalists happened to be present and which they chose to report must be multiplied many, many times in order to reach a true estimate of the carnage? Just two articles will have to stand in here for dozens that could be cited. In a courageous piece called "'Good Kills'" (NY Times Magazine, 4/20), Peter Maass proves that a reporter can be embedded without being co-opted. Though he maintains empathy for the Marine unit he was assigned to, Maass unequivocally describes its massacre of civilian refugees in the chaos of fighting for a bridge south of Baghdad. A better account of the uncontrollable destructiveness of combat would be hard to find. In "Pilgrimage of Sorrow: Shiite Faithful Bury Dead" (Washington Post, 4/19), Anthony Shadid reports from the cemetery at Najaf, where one of the staff told him that he and five other workers had each been washing 45 bodies a day for a week. Shadid interviewed Ali Kadhim Subhi, who had brought 10 family members (father, mother, wife, son, two daughters, two sisters, brother, and niece) from Nasiriyah for burial. All had been killed in a US bombing on 3/23 and buried in temporary graves until it was safe to travel. Of 26 people in his family, Subhi was the only one to escape without physical injury.

Iraqi soldiers also count. Many, according to the Pentagon, were coerced into fighting; others may even have entertained the notion that they were defending their country from invaders. Regardless, we slaughtered them efficiently and, the Maass article suggests, enthusiastically. Marine Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, the commander of Maass's unit, struck the keynote when he radioed his superior that "We're killing them like it's going out of style." Later he explained to Maass, "It's smashmouth tactics...There's no sense in trying to refine it. The crueler it is, the sooner it's over."

How many of these "good kills" (another phrase from McCoy's lexicon) the three-week campaign may have produced is a statistic that Vietnam taught the Pentagon not to dwell on. "We cannot look at war as a scorecard," one briefer in Qatar told the Times (4/10) in an article headed "Number of Iraqis Killed May Never Be Determined." However, the US command did claim 2,000-3,000 enemy dead during the first three-hour probe into Baghdad on 4/5. No matter how inflated this estimate may be, it gives an idea of the proportions: a single American was reported lost that day. Suppose that, just to be conservative, we divide the lower figure for Iraqis by three. Extending a 666-1 kill ratio throughout a war in which 128 Americans died (Times, 4/20) indicates that we may have killed roughly 85,000 Iraqis by direct means.

Directly inflicted deaths, moreover, are only a fraction--possibly a small fraction--of deaths caused by war. Others result from the breakdown of infrastructure and of the civil restraints that ordinarily check human enmity and vindictiveness. Of the 40 hospitals in Baghdad, the Times reported (4/13) that 39 had been looted or closed. Ten days later, much of the city was still dark and waterless and the first suspected cases of cholera and typhoid had appeared (Globe, 4/23). In the south, in Najaf, a Shiite cleric brought in by the US to help restore order, was hacked to pieces in a mosque by a mob of rival Shiites (Reuters, 4/10). In the north, in Mosul, Kurds and Arabs went for each others' throats, and American Marines attempting to settle the city wound up killing about 14 in two days of fighting (Times, 4/16-4/17).

No scrutiny of the "clean war" myth would be complete without mention of the looting or destruction of every major museum and library in Iraq. While the culture of millennia was going up in flames or disappearing in the backs of thieves' pickup trucks, the Chicago Tribune reported (4/15), US soldiers were on assignment nearby, at the Al Rashid Hotel. Their mission: to chip away a mural with an irreverent depiction of George W. Bush.

4. We fought for idealistic motives, not for gain.

"Democracy," Bush said in response to Shiite protesters demanding that US forces leave Iraq, "is a beautiful thing" (Globe, 4/21). He had used exactly the same words as he prepared to ignore American protesters in February (see DP #13: "Fairy Tale of the Week"). Democracy in Iraq, it seems, will be much like democracy in America: simultaneously flattered and rendered irrelevant, it will serve as a docile cash cow for companies that underwrite Republican campaigns and staff Republican administrations.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and the General Accounting Office are launching an investigation of the plum rebuilding contracts already awarded (Times, 4/18). We can hope the GAO gets farther this time than it did with its attempt to determine whom Cheney talked to before he decreed our national energy policy. Meanwhile, much is already known about the contractors and their business practices. Here again, two examples, DynCorp and Bechtel, may suggest the flavor of the whole unsavory stew.

The State Department has given DynCorp a multi-million dollar deal to establish a private police force in Iraq (Observer [UK], 4/13). When the company had the same assignment in Bosnia, several of its employees set up a prostitution ring instead, and DynCorp eventually had to compensate a whistle-blower it had sacked in a coverup attempt. The cops that DynCorp is now recruiting for Iraq must be US citizens with experience in police work. They do not, however, have to speak Arabic. An Observer reporter who posed as an applicant and claimed that he had been a law officer in Texas "was told he sounded 'ideal.'" DynCorp is one of about 30 private military companies now operating in the US. According to The American Prospect (5/03), the Pentagon uses them to "lower the psychological and social costs of resorting to force" and to evade Congressional oversight.

Bechtel, a bigger fish, has scored a contract worth up to $680 million over 18 months, with much more gravy still in the pipeline. The company is known around Boston for enormous cost overruns during the interminable Big Dig. An example of its sensitive nose for profits in the developing world appears in Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. In 2000, a Bechtel subsidiary, International Waters Ltd, privatized the Bolivian water system and raised rates 35%. In quelling resultant demonstrations in the city of Cochabamba, police killed six and injured 175. Bechtel, in a press release, alleged that the protests were the work of drug traffickers. (In fact, they were sponsored by trade unionists, academics, and parliamentarians, along with the city's Catholic archbishop.) Bechtel needn't have worried about negative publicity. Mainstream US papers scarcely noticed that anything was going on. The story made p 13 of the Washington Post "Style" section. The Financial Times (London) parroted Bechtel's drug trade accusations and noted, to further discredit people who simply wanted to pay a fair price for a public resource, that their headquarters were decorated with "faded portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro."

As well as a commercial opportunity, Iraq seems certain to become a new US power platform in the Middle East. Pentagon officials told the Times (4/20) that the US would maintain four major military bases in the country and that the plans "do not contradict the administration's official policy of rapid withdrawal." Rumsfeld's indignant denials the next day (Globe, 4/22) are strong evidence that the Times story was accurate.

5. By fighting, we have made the world a safer place.

By lowering the terrorism alert level (Globe, 4/17), the administration seeks to make Americans believe that the war has increased our security. But though Bush and Ridge can paint by the numbers with the color code, they cannot control the war's real consequences, which will play out for decades in the actions of governments and individuals. Both Turkey and India have already used the Bush pre-emptive war doctrine as a rationale for threatening to invade their neighbors (Globe, 4/11). And if you were to enter a room with Ali Kadhim Subhi, would you really feel safer for knowing that the US Air Force had killed his father, mother, wife, son, daughters, sisters, brother, and niece?