US Marines fight for Playboy spirit in Iraqi desert

CENTRAL IRAQ (AFP) Apr 01, 2003

After two months in Kuwait and two weeks in Iraq, many US Marines are grousing about why they are here -- they hate the desert and the gas masks they wear.

They just want to "clobber Saddam" and go home.There is too much time to think. Days, hours drag between the hard pumping action of a firefight and the next adrenaline rush.Often they find themselves logjammed on Iraqi highways, bumper to bumper with hardback and highback Humvees, M1-A1 Abrams tanks and seven-tonne trucks.

They speed by abandoned picnic reststops where yellow umbrella stands have blown off the tables.They broil in their camouflage-green chemical suits and yawn on highways that resemble their home country's famed Route 66 and hope to see American gas stations and convenience stores selling beer around the bend.Bored, they christen their vehicles "The Redneck Rampage", "Disposable Heroes" and "Boyz Gone Wild".They draw pictures of topless women and flash their sketches at the next car and hoot.

One Humvee plays the singalong game called "Vietnam", where they take turns belting out 1960s pop tunes. A mechanic's truck down the way cranks out heavy metal.

The marines thumb copies of Maxim, a magazine of skimpily-clad models that is a thin step up from porn and as such is banned by a US military sensitive to Muslim customs.One marine writes letters to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner."Dear Mr Hefner, old copies of your magazine have raised morale and inspired many marines and sailors here."Your example of the American can-do spirit and innovation is what we're fighting for in Iraq. It would be a great if a couple of marines could meet you after the war."

Rumours spread.Some are charming ... Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez are coming out on tour, some say.Others rattle the mind and morale: US soldiers are said to have been executed on Iraqi television.

Conversations turn to the anti-war protests unfolding around the world. They call the demonstrators "dumb", complain the troops had more support in the 1991 Gulf War and say the protesters have no idea what the marines are really doing on the ground.Others badmouth the BBC news which they receive off shortwave radio, their main source of information. They call it negative, liberal "horseshit".

People talk of hamburger joints and strip clubs, punk rock and Country and Western singer Hank Williams, Filipino curry, God and college basketball.

They wear their patriotism proudly and wrestle with their doubts.An infantryman boasts that he is ready to be part of a modern-day Roman legion to rid the world of terrorists, while a medic wonders how many countries the White House will ask him to invade before the world is safe.A young missile expert says the war is worthwhile, if it eases the suffering of the Iraqi children he has seen clutching their bellies and begging for food.

Nineteen-year-olds from big cities, away from home for the first time, struggle to find strength. They attend impromptu religious services on Sundays if a chaplain turns up, and tell the chaplain they did not believe in God until they arrived in Iraq.

The truth about casualties

BY JOHN LEO
US News and World ReportSun Mar 23

Even if civilian casualties in Iraq are light, expect a great deal of attention to the subject in the days ahead. In a number-obsessed society, focusing relentlessly on the deaths of innocents--and inflating the numbers, if necessary--is a conventional way of undermining support for war. This helps explain why dozens of civilian-casualty articles sprouted in the news media within hours of the first shots in Iraq, even before coalition ground forces swung into action

The news agencies of our chief non-allies--France, Russia, China, and Germany--were quick off the mark. Agence France Presse may have established the modern world record for fastest print coverage of dead bystanders with "U.S. Strikes Leave Civilian Casualties in Baghdad: Official" (3:42 a.m. Thursday, Eastern time). The Iraqi regime, of course, is eager for high numbers. A New York Post report Friday said civilians trying to flee Basra were blocked by Iraqi troops, who, according to Kuwaitis, were hoping to increase civilian casualties.

We have been through this before. On Fox News during the war in Afghanistan (news - web sites), Brit Hume wondered if reporting about civilian deaths was getting out of hand. These casualties, he said, "are historically, by definition, a part of war, really." Mara Liasson of National Public Radio chimed in: "War is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable."

All civilian casualties are tragic. But Hume was asking why these casualties had emerged as a major story line in coverage of the war. This emphasis may have reflected the usual press resentments toward U.S. forces in wartime (lack of candor, lack of access). But it also reflected the antiwar movement's success in convincing the mainstream press that civilian deaths were a big story.

Who's counting? A New York Times article ("Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead") relied heavily on the findings of workers with Global Exchange, which the times identified as "an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages." In fact, Global Exchange is a hard-left, antiwar, pro-Castro group whose numbers on war victims should never be taken at face value. Many groups on the left repeatedly insisted that civilian deaths were scandalously high. But that's what they say during every war. Typical headlines included "Civilian Casualties Mount in Afghanistan" (the World Socialist Web Site) and "U.S. Raids Draw Fire for Civilian Casualties" (Common Dreams News Center).

The most publicized analysis came from Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire, who claims that between 3,700 and 4,000 Afghan civilians died in the war. Herold, an antiwar leftist, says the U.S. military is mostly white and willing to drop bombs on populous areas, thus "sacrificing the darker-skinned Afghans." Admirers credited Herold with meticulous and original analysis of many sources during 12- to 14-hour days on the Internet. Some people loved Herold's numbers because they were said to show that the United States killed more innocent people in Afghanistan than Osama bin Laden killed in New York. But several analysts accused Herold of questionable and ideological treatment of the numbers: double counting, confusing combatants with noncombatants, and, in the words of one commentator, "blind acceptance of deliberately inflated Taliban accounts."

Other less publicized estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are far lower than Herold's. The Los Angeles Times put the number at 1,067 to 1,201. The Project on Defense Alternatives said 1,000 to 1,300. Reuters estimated 1,000 dead.

A similar numbers game developed after the Gulf War large estimates scaled down by calmer analysis. The radical group Greenpeace claimed as many as 15,000 Iraqi civilians died, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government said 20,000 to 50,000, and the American Friends Service Committee/Red Crescent went way overboard and claimed 300,000 civilians died. Accepted estimates are far lower. Human Rights Watch estimated 2,500 to 3,000. A long analysis in Foreign Policy magazine put the number of Iraqi civilian dead at 1,000.

Now the numbers game will resume. The Iraq Body Count Project ("the worldwide update of civilian casualties in the war on Iraq") will be counting deaths for us in what the project calls "the onslaught on Iraq." It is endorsed by Marc Herold and says it will be using his methods. Don't say you haven't been warned

What's gone wrong, and who's to blame

-Frontline report

By Margo Kingston
March 31 2003

International relations lecturer Scott Burchill: "This piece will give you a sense of why the battle plan has gone off the rails. What is significant is that scapegoating has begun, suggesting a lack of confidence in the eventual result which may well fall short of victory as it is commonly understood. One for the armchair strategists."

The piece was first published at Defense and the National Interest, a specialist United States military site with a motto coined by Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in The Art of War: Military action is important to the nation - it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it.

Army's race to Baghdad exposes risks in battle plan

By James Kitfield, National Journal, March 28, 2003

V CORPS FORWARD TACTICAL COMMAND, Central Iraq: The sound came with such suddenness and ferocity that all heads craned skyward as if in supplication: An Iraqi Scud missile was boring back through the atmosphere at terminal velocity. Just to the right of the 110-vehicle convoy, a Patriot anti-missile battery answered, with the sparkling contrails of two missiles clearly visible as they soared toward an impact point nearly six miles overhead.

Along the shoulder of the road, hundreds of soldiers scrambled to don chemical protection suits as a multiwheeled Fox detection vehicle ran down the column "sniffing" for lethal chemical agents. Within minutes, the Patriot battery reported a successful intercept and confirmed that the Scud would have hit the ground less than a third of a mile in front of the convoy.

In one of the convoy's three command vehicles, Lt. Col. Rick Nohmer, a tightly wound Army Ranger and West Pointer with the infantryman's ability to grow more calm as situations become increasingly tense, turned to check the occupants of his Humvee. "Well, I guess that will get everyone's head in the game," he said.

Only hours into the first day of the campaign, or "G-Day," the ground war for control of Iraq was joined.

As the convoy crested a ridge at dusk on March 20, the vista brought home the enormity of the endeavor ahead. Spread out on a high-desert bluff on the far western flank of U.S. forces in Kuwait were the 300-plus vehicles of the 3rd Infantry Division's main command headquarters. Clearly visible in attack position on the desert floor beyond was the "heavy metal"-M1-A2 tanks and armored Bradley fighting vehicles, all painted desert camouflage-part of the division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team.

Other 3rd Infantry elements and a Marine expeditionary force were assigned the objectives nearest to Kuwait in southeastern Iraq and encountered both the most fighting and the majority of the press coverage in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nevertheless, the secret battle plan always envisioned this western task force as the main effort and linchpin of the campaign.

V Corps commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the officer in charge of all Army maneuver forces and the one responsible for overseeing the battle for Baghdad, continually drums into his senior commanders that Iraqi Freedom is about regime change and liberation. The objective is Baghdad. From the earliest stages, planners identified the center of gravity in that fight as the Republican Guard's elite Medina Division, which is guarding the southern approaches to the Iraqi capital. If the Medina chooses to stand and fight, V Corps commanders planned not only to defeat it, but also to send a message by trying to bring the war to a rapid conclusion with the division's utter destruction.

"We always regarded Baghdad as the point where we would eventually have to apply pressure in this fight, and our judgment was that the quicker and more dynamically we applied that pressure, the better off we would be," Wallace told National Journal. "As for the Medina, it's important among the Republican Guard divisions by consequence of its position to the south. And I've told my soldiers and anyone else who would listen that we shouldn't underestimate the Republican Guard, or build our battle plan on the assumption that they might not fight. I'm expecting a tough fight from the Republican Guard."

The forces gathered in the westernmost attack positions on G-Day, including advance support elements of the 101st Airborne Division, were thus poised to conduct a three-day surprise march up the desert wastelands of western Iraq. Their goal was to bring the fight early and decisively to the Republican Guard camped at Baghdad's outskirts.

In terms of tempo, distances covered, and the difficulty of the terrain involved, the march would be the longest and most audacious movement toward an enemy for a U.S. Army corps since Gen. George Patton ranged North Africa stalking the vaunted Afrika Korps of German Gen. Erwin Rommel.

Sometime after nightfall on the first day of the war, the officers and senior sergeants of V Corps's Forward Tactical Command Centercalled a TACgathered on the bluff to witness the 3rd Infantry Division's expected artillery barrage of Iraqi border posts. The very fact that the tactical headquarters of a corps commanding nearly three divisions' worth of combat power would be exposing itself so close to the front line was a clear indication of the primacy put on synchronization and tempo in this campaign. Upon arriving south of Baghdad, the V Corps TAC would immediately begin managing the fight with the Medina.

Behind the decision to engage Iraq's elite forces on multiple fronts was the U.S. commanders' conviction that such relentless pressure might overwhelm Iraqi command-and-control capabilities and maximize chances that the enemy would quit the fight. Iraqi forces reeling from simultaneous onslaughts were also thought to be less likely to mount a coordinated attack with chemical or biological weapons. The greatest defense against such weapons, U.S. commanders reasoned, would be the rapid maneuvering of U.S. forces. Finally, and perhaps most important, keeping Iraqi forces continually on the defensive would mask vulnerabilities and risks inherent in the bold U.S. battle plan.

Right on time at 1700 "Zulu," or Greenwich Mean Time, the big guns and multiple-launch rocket systems of the 3rd Infantry Division artillery brigade opened up on Iraqi border posts. Muzzle blasts flashed across the dark desert floor, the thunderous impact sounding in the far distance like the approach of an agitated giant. For men on the eve of battle, the barrage elicited only quiet commentary. Everyone understood without saying so that, somewhere out there, real people were dying.

Standing on the bluff, Lt. Col. Rob Baker, field commander of the V Corps forward headquarters unit and the corps's deputy operations officer, wondered what daylight would reveal. "I don't think until you see the physical carnage of battlethe dead and bloated bodiesdoes the reality sink in of what this business is all about," said Baker, a West Point graduate who served as an infantry platoon leader during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. A man with the quiet air of natural command, and Wallace's designated eyes and ears for the battle to come, Baker had thought long and hard about what the next days would bring.

"My greatest concern in the early stages of this campaign will be getting all my personnel and equipment to our forward objective as fast as possible, because the move we're about to make will be unprecedented in terms of the pace of our operations and the distance covered," Baker said. "We'll be moving in a matter of days forces that would have taken months to advance during World War II. That's why it's so important that we keep the pressure on the Iraqi army nonstop with deep attack, with Air Force close-air support, and with our maneuver ground forces. We know we're superior technologically to the Iraqi army. The place we'll be taking risks is in stretching our logistics lines over 500 kilometers through territory that may not be that secure once our lead elements have passed."

Modern-Day Blitzkrieg

The genesis of the battle plan was a what-if session over beers among a handful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago. They were all students at the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, known colloquially as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army's most promising planners take a graduate course in strategic campaigns. The young majors brainstormed about a march on Baghdad to dispose of Saddam Hussein. In its earliest versions, the plan envisioned a 125-day campaign by a U.S. force nearly twice the size of that now in Iraq.

Maj. Kevin Marcus, a SAMS graduate now attached to V Corps headquarters, helped develop the plan from a back-of-an-envelope exercise into a PowerPoint presentation that within days of being finished ended up on the desk of the president of the United States. Though any military campaign plan of the size of Iraqi Freedom has many midwivesand for this one, they include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, who prodded planners to think outside the boxMarcus saw it develop from infancy to fruition.

From the very beginning, he says, the need to synchronize a rapid, combined-arms campaign to seize the initiative with "shock and awe"roughly the modern-day equivalent of armored blitzkrieg warfareleapt out at planners determined to limit the opportunity for Iraqi forces to employ chemical weapons, wreak environmental havoc, or organize a coordinated defense. In bullfighter parlance, they wanted to go for a quick kill before the bull learned the trick of the cape.

"The essence of this challenge was always our advantage in technology and mobility against the Iraqi forces' advantage in terrain, because they are occupying defensible terrain," said Marcus, who along with Lt. Col. E.J. Degen is responsible for constantly updating the battle plan at the mobile V Corps headquarters. "That means synchronization and operations tempo are critical to this battle plan. We need to do this fast, so that Iraqi forces can't tell from where they are being hit or how we are hitting them. That way, they can't effectively counter our attack."

From the plan's very inception, the emphasis on rapid movement, and the difficulty of the variable terrain between Kuwait and Baghdad, presented unique challenges. U.S. maneuver forces would be moving and fighting not only over the flat brown expanses of the vast Iraqi desert, but through the fertile and lush Euphrates River valley.

To take the fight quickly into Baghdada city of more than 5 million that dwarfs in size and population either Stalingrad or Berlin during World War IIthese forces would need to seize key bridges and make multiple river crossings with the help of combat engineers. The logistics train supplying critical fuel, ammunition, and food to front-line forces would stretch hundreds of miles. At one point, Army planners even looked at moving supplies by barge up the Euphrates to speed the supply chain, and a special Army railroad unit studied the feasibility of quickly repairing Iraq's north-south railroad line.

And right up until the launch of the war, the plan kept changing. Although every soldier knows that no plan survives the firing of the first shot, in truth the battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom barely survived the dawning of the war's first day. An intelligence intercept of Iraqi signals traffic prompted U.S. commanders to authorize a surprise cruise missile attack in the early hours of March 20. "We almost got the bastard," said an intelligence source at V Corps headquarters. The decision to launch that "decapitation strike" pushed the timelines for the ground offensive up 24 hours and threw off the air-tasking order that determined what aircraft were available to support forward ground troops.

Just days before the war began, U.S. commanders had also seriously considered changing the battle plan to allow for a strategic pause at the key southern crossroads city of An Nasiriya. Such a pause would give U.S. forces time to accept the expected surrender of the 11th Division of the regular Iraqi army that defends that city, and give Republican Guard forces near Baghdad an opportunity to capitulate as well. The plan was dropped at the last minute.

Likewise, the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division's inability to launch a northern front through Turkey, although played down to the media, was also a major setback, because it raised the risk of instability in the north and the possible freeing of the Republican Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division north of Baghdad to reinforce its sister units ringing the city.

Scrapping the Plan

By far the most dramatic and disruptive change to the battle plan, however, was Rumsfeld's decision last November to slash Central Command's request for forces. This single decision essentially cut the size of the anticipated assault force in half in the final stages of planning, and it had a ripple effect on Central Command and Army planning that continues to color operations to this day.

Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or "TipFid," by which regional commanders would identify forces needed for a specific campaign, and the individual armed services would manage their deployments by order of priority. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launching the war, forces identified for the fight continued to pour off ships in the Kuwaiti port of Doha, and not necessarily in the order of first priority.

"A lot of people around here can get very emotional talking about the lack of a TipFid for this operation," said a knowledgeable source at V Corps headquarters. "It would also be awfully nice to have another division to secure the supply routes and cities between An Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad, because we assume a lot of risk [by] leaving that much territory largely unguarded."

The lack of a TipFid and the piecemeal nature of the deployment also necessitated this "rolling start" to the war. In essence, Central Command and V Corps commanders are focusing on fighting the forward battle while trying to manage the unloading and flow of additional forces into the rear. The extra strain this has placed on an already-stressed supply chain has been exacerbated by the fact that critical additional support forces were eliminated when the decision was made to cut the forces in half.

"We basically spent a year building a force package that included very robust command-and-control for our support elements," said Brig. Gen. Charles Fletcher, who heads the 3rd Corps Support Command, called COSCOM, which is responsible for supplying Army forces in the Iraq theater. "When the decision was made to only go with half our force, we only had a very short time to adjust" the shipping orders that would enable us to get the right forces to Kuwait. He continued: "So while that decision may have been smart from a strategic viewpoint, it has had a trickle-down impact on all our operations. I have never received my entire communications package, for instance, complicating secure communications over a supply chain stretching hundreds of kilometers."

The Pentagon's decision not to activate many transportation Reserve units before last Christmas also created personnel shortages. Meanwhile, COSCOM itself has only 150 heavy transport trucks for an operation that Army planners estimate requires 700.

"We're going to war not with what we need, but with what we have on the ground, so we threw away the doctrinal books on this operation a long time ago," said Fletcher, noting that his transport units also have far less maintenance support than normal. "I believe we will still make it all work, but I don't doubt that we face some hard choices in the coming days between supporting our soldiers forward with ammo, fuel, and equipment, and facilitating the continued offloading of ships in port and movement of forces forward."

Desert Dash

In the end, the tremendous synchronization that this rapid operation requires could be seen one night when two Army convoys suddenly converged on a lonely goat trail. The tempers of the convoys' officers were short, and the officers' reflexes were dulled by a more than 30-hour road march through the treacherous wadis and axle-deep sands of the western Iraqi desert.

With the 2nd Brigade's armor screening out front, V Corps's tactical headquarters convoy and its numerous combat support columns topped 1,000 vehiclesand all were jockeying for position throughout the night. At numerous clogged crossroads, senior officers from different units shouted and gestured at one another, trying to maintain the integrity of their convoys in a dust cloud and possibly gain a precious few hours in the march northward. Occasionally, cruise missiles, with their unearthly whine, would fly low overhead on their way to Baghdad.

At the first of three refuel-on-the-move sites, the convoys gathered around fuel trucks at an allotted Global Positioning System set of coordinates on a patch of featureless desert. Soldiers acting as refuelers appeared asleep on their feet, standing under arc lights in a cold rain as they topped off endless lines of vehicles with fuel for the next leg of the trip north. Over the next 18 hours, refuelers would service more than 1,500 vehicles. Nevertheless, before the road march was done after more than 50 hours, some of the convoys would stall in place for lack of fuel.

After the 30-hour mark of ceaseless desert travel, the accidents came in clusters. Riding herd on a convoy of massive machinery stretching eight miles over broken and treacherous terrain may seem simple, but it requires intricate orchestration. By midafternoon on the war's second day, glassy-eyed convoy commanders struggled even to remember their radio call signs, and the heads of many drivers drooped to their chests at each stop.

All along the route, overturned cargo vehicles, fuel trucks, and broken Humvees littered the landscape. Those vehicles that could not be immediately serviced were either left behind or hooked to massive tow trucks, lest a delay encourage the trailing convoy to try to jump the line. But after yet another accident, Baker decided to halt the convoy and let its weary members bed down for the night: A V Corps TAC soldier had fallen asleep at the wheel of a 5-ton transport truck and rear-ended a Humvee and trailer, destroying a generator and in turn being rear-ended by a tow truck, whose radiator was smashed.

Pulling into a "box formation" reminiscent of settlers circling the wagons in Indian territory, Baker placed military police vehicles on the perimeter to guard his soldiers and gave his charges a few hours of well-earned rest. A nine-person maintenance pit crew worked overtime to cannibalize parts and patch together broken vehicles for tomorrow's march. Under a brilliant star-studded sky, the lights of similar encampments were visible stretched across the desert flatlands.

Pointing out the belt of Orion, Sgt. 1st Class David Ball kept an ear to a shortwave radio broadcasting BBC war reports. News of the first American soldiers and marines killed in action came in over the airwaves. "You know, this whole operation is so similar to how we train, that in a way it's hard to grasp that it's real this time," said Ball, a 17-year veteran whose competence and indefatigable good cheer are typical of the noncommissioned officer corps, the backbone of the U.S. Army. "Hearing about those KIAs and casualties kind of makes it hit home," he said.

"Can you pick up any basketball on that radio?" asked Maj. Joe Samek, an engineer attached to the V Corps TAC. "I'm missing March Madness again. Then again, I guess we're having our own March Madness out here."

Stretched Thin

On the 50th anniversary commemorating the Battle of the Bulge, COSCOM commander Fletcher went to Europe and bicycled the same route between Cherbourg and Bastogne in France that Patton's 3rd Army had followed on its famous march to relieve Army forces surrounded by German troops during a last-ditch counteroffensive that began on December 16, 1944. In a desperate attempt to keep Patton from outrunning his supply lines, the Army launched the "Red Ball Express," a transportation bucket brigade that pushed supplies across France hurriedly in the 3rd Army's burning wake.

Fletcher sees strong similarities between that operation and the current effort to resupply V Corps along a 310-mile logistics trail stretching from Kuwait to Baghdad's outskirts. "The Red Ball Express was a defining moment in the establishment of the transportation corps, because it was really the first attempt at resupplying a mobile armored force on a breakout offensive," said Fletcher. "This operation is similar, because we've never operated on these long lines of supply before."

As the adage goes, armchair strategists talk forces while military professionals talk logistics. And the logistics of Iraqi Freedom break down to a set of daunting statistics. An armored or air-mobile division on the move consumes roughly 550,000 gallons of fuel a day. COSCOM, just to supply V Corps's forward forces with the requisite 1 million gallons of fuel, must have 3 million gallons in its pipeline. Each of the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi theater, meanwhile, consumes at least a liter of water an hour. The harder those units and soldiers fight, the higher their ammunition, fuel, and water requirements climb. The longer the logistics pipeline stretches, the greater the strain on inadequate transportation equipment.

Fletcher's COSCOM forces, which outnumber any U.S. fighting division in the theater, are attempting to fill those gaps in capability on the ground with technology and synchronization. "Doctrinally, we typically travel in large formations with short communications lines, so trucks without GPS, and radios with only a 30-kilometer range, are standard," Fletcher said. "With our logistics lines now stretching over 500 kilometers in some cases, we had to turn to satellite communications and other technology."

COSCOM purchased 400 commercial satellite trackers off the shelf so it could always locate its highest-priority vehicles, including many fuel trucks, ambulances, and MP command vehicles. Satellite phones were purchased for many drivers. High-priority cargo containers were labeled with radio-frequency tags that reveal their location and contents at a simple query from headquarters. An Army Movement Tracking System that uses technology similar to "E-ZPass" highway tollbooth cards identifies much of the other cargo. Movement-control teams armed with computer software that has analyzed optimum traffic flow and detours at every key crossroads and intersection on the road to Baghdad will also help manage traffic congestion. In the event all of that should fail, plans are in place to airdrop supplies to isolated units or those running dangerously low on critical supplies.

However, the capture and apparent execution of some members of a lost U.S. maintenance crew, as well as spot reports that some U.S. combat units at the front were running low on fuel and ammo, clearly reveal the substantial risks that U.S. commanders assumed by pushing combat forces so far on such short timelines while leaving hundreds of miles of Iraqi territory unsecured.

Despite the obvious strains on logistics forces, Fletcher pledged to write a new ending for the modern-day Red Ball Express by avoiding a repeat of every logistician's worst nightmare, as occurred in World War II: Patton's lead tank companies ran out of gas and stalled outside of Metz, France, where they became fodder for German Panzers.

"We've accepted some significant risks given the mission and our battle plan, which is all the more reason why we need to win this war quickly," said Fletcher. "But our forces are not going to run out of gas."

Final Dash

Soldiers of the V Corps TAC convoy were pulled reluctantly out of their sleeping bags at 0600 on March 23, and told to pack up and be ready to leave two hours ahead of schedule. Lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division had gotten into a firefight with two Iraqi battalions of loyalists called Fedayeen Saddam at the convoy's forward objective, and they needed the TAC to move forward and set up a "hot" zone in order to be able to call in Air Force close-air support. The MP detachment was warned to prepare to test-fire their weapons, and every soldier in the convoy locked magazines into their M-16 rifles and 9 mm sidearms.

At the oasis town of Al Salman, in the shadow of an old fortress on a hill, the empty western desert finally gave way to palm orchards and camel herds. Many of the villagers lined the sides of the street in flowing robes, with the children and teenagers waving American flags and shouting encouragement. The heady sense of liberation visibly lifted the spirits of American soldiers, most of whom were in a foreign country, uninvited, for the very first time.

"I volunteered for this operation because I only have one more year in the Army, and I wanted to do something with it," said Pfc. Eric Juarez, who was on loan from his normal artillery unit at Fort Sill, Okla. "Seeing these people wave American flags and shout at us, that makes me feel like we're doing something right."

Was the experience enough to make him consider re-enlisting?

"No," Juarez said. "I don't know where the next war will be, but I think I'll catch it on TV."

As the convoy approached its forward objective late that afternoon, the sights and sounds of nearby combat were everywhere. Broken-down M-1 tanks blocked a shoulder of the road, and three plumes of thick smoke marred the near horizon. Over the tactical radio network, lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division could be heard fighting the Fedayeen Saddam, the urgency of combat unmistakable in their voices. Somewhat to the surprise of U.S. commanders, the outgunned Iraqis had stood and held their ground, fighting to the death in some cases (an estimated 80 Iraqis were killed in action). Before another 48 hours had passed, the estimated death toll of Iraqis attempting to block the probing of U.S. forces near Baghdad would climb above 800.

"We all assumed there would be a higher degree of capitulation than we've seen, but intelligence indicates that Saddam has pushed these Fedayeen enforcers out of Baghdad and into the population centers, and they're stiffening resistance and preventing uprisings," Wallace said during an interview in the forward TAC. "The Iraqis are not fighting or holding back out of loyalty to the regime, but because they have a gun to their heads."

Despite the unexpectedly heavy resistance, a nearly corps-sized U.S. Army combat force had traveled 322 miles in 54 hours, over difficult and variable terrain, to strike a blow directly at the enemy's center of gravity. Among the dog-tired troops who made that journey, the knowledge that no other army in the world could have accomplished the task was a point of considerable pride. By nightfall on March 24, four days into the war, V Corps's "hot" TAC operations center was launching Apache attack helicopters from its 11th Aviation Brigade directly against elements of the Republican Guard's Medina Division.

Standing outside the TAC operations tent that night, Lt. Col. Eric Wagenaar, the deputy officer in charge of the V Corps Forward TAC, watched as a flock of Apaches roared past overhead, then became dark silhouettes against the twinkling lights of a distant city. Wagenaar is the affable offspring of Dutch immigrants whose love of their adopted country inspired all three sons to wear the uniform of the U.S. Army. Gazing at the Apaches, he expressed a sense of awe as well as anxiety at what the U.S. military was about to undertake.

"If you can't get a rise out of seeing those Apaches launch out into the night, then something is wrong with you," Wagenaar said, his voice rising to be heard above the backwash of the helicopter rotors. "I worry about those pilots, though. We're sending them against some really tough targets tonight."

A Strange Land

Within hours, Wagenaar's fears proved prophetic. One Apache did not return from the mission. Later in the day, its crew appeared as prisoners of war on Iraqi television. V Corps immediately called in an artillery strike that destroyed the downed Apache. Of the more than 30 aircraft that had taken off the night before, virtually all of the Apaches returned pocked and scarred by enemy fire.

In reviewing the gun-camera video, U.S. commanders noticed a queer thing. As the Apaches approached the outskirts of the urban area, all of the lights in the city appeared to flicker out for a moment, and then to come on again along with a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. It was as if the dimmed lights were a signal to Republican Guard gunners lying in wait.

"You may recall that we had contingency plans for a possible capitulation of Republican Guard forces," V Corps operations chief Col. Steve Hicks told his assembled commanders. "Well, I have a news flash for you. They aren't quitting."

In recent days, 3rd Infantry commanders have witnessed another disturbing phenomenon of this war. Family members of the hundreds of Fedayeen Saddam irregulars killed in recent battles approached U.S. security lines to collect their dead from the battlefield. According to U.S. soldiers who escorted the relatives, many of the Iraqis stood over the bodies of their loved ones and cursed them to Allah for dying in the name of Saddam Hussein. But they cursed the Americans, too.

Even as lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the Euphrates River and seize key bridges in preparation for the final assault, positioning V Corps for what its planners have always envisioned as perhaps the key battle in this war, a freakish storm has blown across this strange land. On March 25, the rays of a late-day sun were trapped in a massive dust cloud, turning the entire landscape an unworldly shade of burnt red. No one can recall ever seeing something so eerie. Under the circumstances, the storm seems full of portent, although its meaning is any soldier's guess. Very soon now, the storm will lift, and the battle with the Medina Division will begin.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/31/1048962686503.html

For Iraq's sake, keep the home ire burning

By Adele Horin
March 29 2003

John Howard has appealed to Australians to support our troops in Iraq regardless of our views on the Government policies that sent them there.

And as Australians have watched the television images of the young, sometimes bewildered, soldiers in the battle zone, opinion appears to have shifted.

The latest Newspoll revealed 50 per cent of Australians were in favour of "Australian troops being involved in military action against Iraq". The question this time failed to include the words "without UN support", which had been asked in previous Newspolls. Their inclusion may have altered the result. Even so, it is clear that opposition to our involvement in the war is softening as Australians rally behind "our team".

That we have seen precious few images of the Australian troops in action - the shadowy SAS is far from the cameras - matters not. The sense that it may be disloyal, even traitorous, to maintain vociferous protest when Australian soldiers are facing death could muffle dissent, derail the critics.

To go softly now would send the wrong message. The Howard Government has played on people's natural sympathies for the troops to harness support for a war Australians never wanted. Back in

February, only 6 per cent of Australians were in favour of war without UN backing.

It is important to maintain the protest to keep the Government honest. The concern shown by the Australian, US and British Governments to minimise civilian casualties is a product, at least partly, of the knowledge that support for this war is paper-thin around the world. It could evaporate overnight if the corpses mount and the "liberators" bring unnecessary death and destruction to the Iraqi people.

The tens of thousands of mums and dads, senior citizens and suburbanites who took to the streets in unprecedented numbers in mid-February have put governments on notice to take care. In the Kosovo and Afghanistan actions, where bombs exacted a terrible toll, there were no such scruples because there were relatively few objectors in the West.

Governments need to know they are being scrutinised, that they don't have free rein. The Australian Government's emphasis on troops respecting the rules of engagement is also strengthened by the protests. If the Government believes for one minute it has the home population unequivocally behind it, who knows what could be unleashed to help secure a victory at all costs?

Even though we are at war, protest and expressed opposition is vitally important. It can act to restrain war's excesses.

If we succumb wholly to barracking for "our team", as if we were watching another round in the World Cup, we will forget the broader context of this war. No matter how scared and vulnerable our troops may be, their anxiety is nothing compared with the suffering of the Iraqi people terrorised by the bombing and shelling. The allied soldiers, though obliged to follow orders, have joined the military of their own free will, and are well paid and fed. Our SAS men are highly efficient professionals, doing what they joined up to do.

On the other hand, five-year-old Doha Suheil was at home with her family in the suburbs of Baghdad when a cruise missile exploded nearby, blasting shrapnel into her legs and spine and leaving her partly paralysed. One day, someone will explain to her that she paid the price for ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (wherever they may be).

Basra's residents, who had nothing to do with September 11, have been left with no clean water, little food and staring into disaster. They are being punished for the sins of their dictator and the ambitions of George Bush.

Even in a careful, tightly targeted war, civilians die, conscript soldiers are slaughtered, wives lose husbands to "friendly fire" and children lose fathers to equipment failures. And Australia is playing its part in these deaths in order to keep the US grateful and on side.

This is the context to keep in mind when the instinct to barrack for our team seems overwhelming. When some US general praises the SAS's achievements and pride swells the national breast, it is important to remember this is an illegal war in the view of many scholars. It will marginalise the UN, unleash a new era of insecurity and free other nations to launch pre-emptive wars.

It will be more likely to inflame rather than quell terrorism. And many military men, including General Peter Gration, who was chief of the Australian Defence Force during the last Gulf War, consider it unnecessary, given that policies of containment and deterrence had already weakened the Iraqi regime.

It is only natural to wish our soldiers well, and to hope the war is over quickly. But this conflict is no cricket match. One-eyed support is impossible. Protest is not disloyalty to the troops. It will keep the Government on a leash. In the end, Iraqis and Australian soldiers may be grateful for the restraint.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/28/1048653852765.html

Bring our troops home

By Margo Kingston
March 31 2003

Despite the fact that our troops are fighting this mad, bad war, Australians must protest for all they're worth to bring our troops home and extricate Australia from this American imperial crusade before it's too late.

Adele Horin's article in Saturday's Herald made a compelling case for continuing, intensive protests to keep the Coalition honest in their conduct of this war.

But there's a broader issue. Australia is at grave risk. This should never have been our war. We would have been obliged to participate if the UN sanctioned this war for the sake of our alliance with the US, but without that we should have done a Canada and stayed out of it. Australia is an innocent abroad in the Middle East. Unlike Britain, we have never been a colonial power. Unlike the US, we have never propped up evil regimes like Saddam's. We must get out, as soon as possible.

It's clear we've been lied to by Bush and by Howard, both about this war's purpose, and its risks. The blind arrogance of Bush and his mates is beyond belief. Bush is in the process of uniting Arab peoples around the world by turning Saddam, of all people, into a martyr for Islam. And the war on terrorism? What chance help from Indonesia, Pakistan and the rest now that their peoples are on the march.

I realised Bush was mad when his army chiefs starting calling suicide bombers and guerilla fighters "terrorists". For God sake, it's their country, and they're facing overwhelming force! The US is INVADING Iraq, to take it over - their bodies are in some cases the only effective weapon they've got.

It's so obvious that what Bush is doing will case an arms race, not reduce it. No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war). It's all there is that can deter a rampaging rogue superpower which has trashed international law and international institutions to get its own way.

And as I've said before, if Australia is attacked, it's no longer terrorism. We have invaded Iraq. Iraq, or its new allies, have every right to attack back. Again, they haven't got the weapons and systems to launch a conventional attack, so why wouldn't they use unconventional methods? Because they would kill civilians? We're doing that right now in Iraq.

There is no comfort at all in knowing that Bush, Blair and Howard knew exactly what risks they were taking and have no excuses. The top level intelligence leaks, the warnings from former top defence brass, the foreign affairs warnings, all were to no avail. What role did Australia play in this misconceived plan of attack? Why did Howard ignore his intelligence advice that this war would increase, not reduce, the risk of terrorism? Why did he deny that the threat to world stability posed by this conflict was far worse than Saddam - head of a third world, internationally isolated, obsessively monitored regime?

In Tony Blair: The whole world's in his hands : I published a Jane's Defence Weekly analysis of March 5 of the disquiet in the British and American intelligence community about what was going on.

An extract:

While Bush administration officials deride opposition to a war against Iraq as the usual "peacenik" reflex, Jane Defence Weekly sources say that dissenting views are now also coming from those who have traditionally supported military action.

...The fundamental questions of why now, and why Iraq, have not been adequately answered, intelligence, military and legislative sources in Washington told JDW. Sources said that the Bush administration's changing arguments for military action appear to confirm that none of them is sufficient to justify the use of military force.

One congressional source said that the arguments in favour of a war increasingly seem to be a "smokescreen" to hide the real reasons the administration is set on war.

Indeed, both the US and UK intelligence information supposedly justifying a war with Iraq raise serious questions. "[Chief of the UN weapons inspectors Hans] Blix's criticism pokes holes in [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell's intelligence," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "And the UK's intelligence dossier was shown to be a complete fraud."

A US military source said that Bush and his inner circle seem to be suffering from what is known in the Department of Defence as incestuous amplification. This is a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation. An illustration of this was Bush's address to the American Enterprise Institute - a right-wing think tank in Washington - last Wednesday on why military action was required.

Today John Bennett sent me "Once more into the swap" by The Toronto Sun's contributing foreign editor Eric Margolis, which includes this chilling summary of the bloindness of the madmen in America:

The immediate uprisings against Great Satan Saddam, the quick, almost effortless "liberation" of Iraq, and the joyous reception by grateful Iraqis promised by the neo-conservatives who misled America into this increasingly ugly war have been exposed as a farrago of lies or distortions.

...The CIA and many American generals warned for months that: a) there might be no mass uprisings against Saddam's regime; b) over-extended U.S. communications would be vulnerable; c) the invasion force lacked sufficient ground troops to conquer Iraq; d) Turkey's refusal to admit the U.S. 4th Mechanized Division would wrong-foot the campaign.

In his eagerness for war, President George Bush ignored these warnings. So did the civilian neo-con war hawks running his administration, few of whom, save Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had ever served in their nation's armed forces.

We've been lied to. Howard has lied to us - witness his dismissal of ONA defector Andrew Wilke, who warned that this war had nothing whatsoever to do with WMDs and would increase the risk of terrorism, not reduce it.

Howard has already proved himself a failure as a war time leader. Instead of trying to pull the country together, he has played his standard wedge politics game - thus further enraging the opponents of war. Webdiarist Chris Munson sums up his latest disgusting trick:

"I notice that John Howard is using his saddening tactic of drawing a false conclusion, and then presenting lots of awesome facts to defend it. Last week it was something like: "I would like to say to those pacifists who declare that the war should have been over by now ..... should take a reality check and be aware that ..."

Well, just like the other great lies of John Howard, I know of no-one who has ever said that. This is the same tactic as "if you are against the war you are against our troops" and "If you believe in giving Saddam and the weapons inspectors more time, then you are participating in the destruction of ANZUS, NATO, the UN and bringing forward the end of the universe".

This tactic is sickening, but it was seemingly successful in the kids overboard and Tampa. So much so that in Canberra only one solitary liberal voice uttered words of concern about our participating in the US/UK/Aust "Axis of 3" That solitary politician said simply that he had concerns about it.

This does not bode well for Australia, for our future Prime Minister was silent, as were the other 40 or more liberal politicians who must also have had concerns. In the face of deputy sheriff John, they all were silent!

Where is Paul Keating now - we need him!

The reality is the opposite, of course. As a Webdiarist wrote recently, it is the pacifists in this debate who were the realists, not the warmongers. It is the American madmen who promised a quick war.

Former Webdiarist Tim Dunlop is tracking the lies, and the new spin, on his wonderful weblog The road to surfdom. He writes:

There is a big conservative campaign going at the moment to rewrite history and pretend that they, the officials who launched this war, have told us from the beginning that it would take a long time. The fact is, it is the antiwar types who have warned that this might drag on, not hawks like Howard. The notion of sacrifice and difficulty has been notably absent from most of the President's public script-reading.

The fact is the pro-war commentary, from the blogs through to the Whitehouse, was filled with endless reassurances that this would be a quick, clean war, in and out like a flash, with the Iraqi people falling at our feet. To pretend now that this is something they warned us about all along is patent nonsense; or if you prefer, par-for-the-course lying. Where they have dealt with the scenario that it mightn't be that quick and easy, they have played it down, mentioned it as an afterthought, and always preceded it with the rosier, "most likely" option.

Listen to Dick Cheney a mere few weeks ago:

MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who's a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he's written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

Now, if we get into a significant battle in Baghdad, I think it would be under circumstances in which the security forces around Saddam Hussein, the special Republican Guard, and the special security organization, several thousand strong, that in effect are the close-in defenders of the regime, they might, in fact, try to put up such a struggle. I think the regular army will not. My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces, and are likely to step aside.

Now, I can't say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad. We have to be prepared for that possibility. But, again, I don't want to convey to the American people the idea that this is a cost-free operation. Nobody can say that. I do think there's no doubt about the outcome. There's no question about who is going to prevail if there is military action. And there's no question but what it is going to be cheaper and less costly to do it now than it will be to wait a year or two years or three years until he's developed even more deadly weapons, perhaps nuclear weapons. And the consequences then of having to deal with him would be far more costly than will be the circumstances today. Delay does not help.

Even at the launch of the war, there was not much attention payed to length and difficulty and again, it was played down. Bush said:

"Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory."

The tone and emphasis now has shifted considerably, as Howard's "reality check" comment shows. In fact, Howard's comments directly contradict the President's as Howard is claiming the moral highground by pointing out the fact that they are using "half-measures" to lessen civilian casualties.

The really stupid thing is that, by almost any standards, this war is going quite quickly and is relatively casualty free. It is still appalling, and the humanitarian disaster is probably in the not-too-distant future, but so far things could certainly have been worse.

As with everything else about this war, the official hawks and their spruikers in the public sphere have oversold and misled creating false expectations. And if you want to to prepare yourself for the next build-up and backdown, you need look no further than the promise that the US will get out of Iraq very quickly. Cheney again, same interview:

MR. RUSSERT: The army's top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and weve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement.

How long before "we" are asked to take another "reality check"?

Labor has betrayed Australia by failing to force Howard to account for his proposed actions before he went to war. It is still betraying Australia by not holding him to account for what he's done. Crean has failed, utterly. A decent ALP would get rid of him and agree on a successor to take over immediately. The ALP has been cowed by Howard's political ascendancy. This must stop now.

Saudi Shiites mistrustful of Americans' motives

U.S. troops met hostility, not hospitality in Iraq Scenes of siege, civilian deaths fuel cross-border anger

MARTIN REGG COHNASIA BUREAU, Toronto Star
Mar. 31, 2003. 01:00 AM

AL-QATIF—Shiite Muslims living in this oil-rich kingdom aren't surprised that their brethren in Southern Iraq haven't welcomed invading troops with flowers and sweet tea.

They think they know why: In the Middle East, America's motives can't be trusted.

People here felt betrayed when their fellow Shiites revolted against Saddam Hussein's rule after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, while the U.S. stood idle. These days, they are exasperated by satellite television broadcasts showing Palestinians suffering in their intifada, while America stands by Israel.

Now, after seeing the scenes of siege and civilian deaths in neighbouring Iraq, Saudi Shiites are even more mistrustful of the U.S. Little wonder, they say, that their brethren across the border are feeling only hostility, not hospitality, toward the Anglo-American interlopers laying siege to Basra in southern Iraq.

"They're not killing Saddam, they're killing ordinary people, old and young," says retired oil worker Saeed Al Saffar, 55, as he cradles his 2-year-old daughter Fatima."Saddam is bad, but the Americans are worse than him," says Al Saffar, a lifelong resident of this oasis town of 400,000 Shiites on Saudi Arabia's east coast."Look what they're doing to the Palestinians. Now they're doing exactly the same thing to the Iraqis."

Coming from Saudis, that's a harsh indictment.This is America's oldest and firmest Arab ally in the Middle East. Its eastern province is home to most of Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority, and repository of the country's oil reserves.Americans have been coming here for decades, extracting oil while pumping money into the local economy. Many Saudis, in turn, have gone to America to study and seen their province benefit from modernization.

Yet for all their fond memories, they say the U.S. has gone too far this time. Shiites feel U.S. soldiers are too close for comfort — and that Saudi Arabia may be next in America's sights.

"I think after Iraq the Americans may go after Syria next, then Iran, and maybe Saudi Arabia," says store clerk Fadil Saleh, 23. "The American military is bombing houses and hospitals, and it's an outrage."

For local writer and political activist Najeeb Al-Khonaizi, the hostility on both sides of the border is to be expected. The liberation of Iraq and liberalization of Saudi Arabia cannot be imposed by force.

"War is war," he says in an interview in his living room. "The U.S. and its allies didn't judge the situation well before they got into this war."

He believes Iraqi Shiites are leery of American plans for post-war occupation. As evidence, he cites televised images of U.S. troops planting the Stars and Stripes on Iraqi soil in the early days of fighting. "You can't link yourself to a foreign power, it is against religious principles," says Al-Khonaizi. "The U.S. lacks the moral qualifications to do it (liberate Iraq), because their hands are not clean because of the Zionists."

Despite the local skepticism, Washington is still holding out hope that the Iraqi Shiites will come onside in the days ahead. Though chastened, many American analysts argue that the Shiites are merely biding their time until Saddam's grip on power is loosened.

At a Senate hearing last week, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued that "they've been repressed, and they are in the present time in Basra assisting us."

But Al-Khonaizi believes that's wishful thinking. Like many Saudis, he believes America's war agenda has been written by influential Jewish officials in Washington who have somehow hijacked policymaking and manipulated the best and the brightest in the capital to do Israel's bidding. Though he is eager to see the Shiites freed of Saddam's rule, he doesn't want it replaced by what he sees as American-Zionist hegemony."On the one hand we are against Saddam and want a change in regime, but we feel that this way of removing it is not human, that's why there are so many tragedies. "War will not make Iraq more free, it will do the opposite."

The suspicions of Saudi Shiites, many of whom have family ties across the border and a shared religious and cultural heritage, may shed light on the sentiments of southern Iraqis. But it also reflects the pent up frustrations toward their own government in Saudi Arabia.

In Iraq, Shiites make up about 60 per cent of the population but have long been dominated by the Sunni minority who back Saddam's regime. They have been subject to brutal repression in the south for decades, which is why some Western analysts were surprised by their reluctance to rise up again.

In Saudi Arabia, it's a different story. Shiites are only about 10 to 15 per cent of the population of 21 million, though they make up a majority in the strategically sensitive, oil-rich Eastern Province. Here, the restive Shiite population suffers from entrenched discrimination and religious intolerance, though their plight cannot be compared to that of the Iraqis.

The schism between the minority Shiite sect and the mainstream Sunni school of Islam goes back to a 1,400-year-old succession struggle in Iraq, which pitted Imam Ali and his son Hussein against the Caliphate. The climactic battles took place in Karbala, which became a pilgrimage site for Shiites.

Now, that city and its surroundings are shaping up as a battleground between American and Iraqi troops.

Al-Jazeera defends images,won't censor war horror

By Jim Wolf

DOHA, Qatar, March 30 (Reuters) - Blasted by Washington and London for beaming distressing pictures from Iraq, al-Jazeera television said on Sunday it would not censor the horrors of war.

"I think the audience has the right to see all aspects of the battle," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for the Qatar-based Jazeera, seen by many as being a major influence in shaping Arab opinion over the U.S.-led war.

The 24-hour, Arabic-language, broadcaster deliberated carefully before beaming pictures that could be especially troublesome to viewers, he said, and denied any political bias.

"We're not catering for any specific side, or any specific idelology. What we are doing is our business as professionally as possible," Ballout added.

Images of bombed Baghdad buildings, bloodied and screaming Iraqi children and slain or captured U.S. and British troops seen by millions of viewers anger Washington and London which seek to portray the war as one to liberate Iraqis.

"If there's a perceived imbalance, it's purely a function of access," said Ballout

He said if the Americans and British gave the station more access to their troops, who invaded Iraq 11 days ago "you would certainly find as much coverage on the ground from there as you would find from the Iraqi side."

The station says it has at least 35 million viewers in the Arab world. In Europe, Ballout said, its subscriber figures doubled to eight million homes in the first week of the war. These came mainly in countries with large Muslim populations such as Britain and France.

The Pentagon initially offered Jazeera several opportunities to travel with U.S. combat units but only one of these "embed" offers worked out, he said.

The others fell through because of visa headaches from Bahrain, a base for allied warships, and Kuwait, launchpad for many journalists covering U.S. and British ground forces.

With many ordinary Arabs protesting angrily at the U.S.-led war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, authorities in some Arab states also object to Jazeera's conflict coverage.

The station has also drawn U.S. ire for its cover in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its broadcast messages from al Qaed leader Osama bin Laden and, more recently, for showing video footage of Iraqi interrogation of U.S. prisoners of war.

"NEGATIVE LIGHT"

"They tend to portray our efforts in a negative light," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with National Public Radio broadcast last Wednesday.The same day, Powell appeared on Jazeera, as have other Bush administration officials to get their messages to Arab viewers.

Britain's military commander in the Gulf, Air Marshal Brian Burridge even suggested the station might have become a tool of Iraqi propaganda and violated the Geneva Conventions. The 1949 protocols bind states, not media organisations.Burridge slammed Jazeera for showing "shocking, close-up" pictures of two British troops later said by Prime Minister Tony Blair to have been executed by Iraqis.

"Quite apart from the obvious distress that such pictures cause friends and families of the personnel concerned, such disgraceful behaviour is a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention," Burridge told a briefing at U.S. Central Commnd's forward headquarters in Qatar last Thursday.

But Ballout, a 45-year-old former London-based journalist of Lebanese descent, dismisses such criticism as hypocritical and self-serving. He said other 24-hour news channels like the BBC and CNN had also used footage of Iraqi POWs, hands bounds and heads bowed, that could have upset viewers.

"We have covered similar incidents, similar conflicts, in Serbia, in Bosnia, in the (Israeli-) occupied territories and in Afghanistan, and nobody said a thing," he said.

"It just strikes me a little bit funny that all the outcrying is taking place" now.

New York Times Editorial defends Al Jazeera

Editorial - Why Al Jazeera Matters
New York Times March 30, 2003

In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Persian Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera. Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the gulf state where our war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people. That is why the decision by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to bar the station's reporters is so repugnant.

The exchanges' complaint against Al Jazeera is that it is not "responsible." This is a cryptic allegation but it seems linked to the television station's decision last Sunday to show images of dead American and British soldiers as well as P.O.W.'s in Iraq. But Al Jazeera says that after the Pentagon asked it to remove the pictures until families had been notified it did so for eight hours, while the television stations of numerous countries continued to show them.

In truth, it seems that New York's exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere — that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if our hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind us, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station we should encourage.

It is the only Arabic television station that regularly interviews Israeli officials. It is also an important forum for American officials. Last week alone, it interviewed three senior members of the American government, including Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Al Jazeera has also been a vital source of information about Al Qaeda. Its reporters have had access to Qaeda leaders, and tapes of Osama bin Laden have found their way to the station's offices. This has been a useful window on a world that for too long has been utterly alien to us.

The ban on Al Jazeera by the princes of the free market puts them in impressive company. Libya and Tunisia have both complained that Al Jazeera gives too much airtime to opposition leaders. Jordan has thrown it out. Kuwait refused visas to its correspondents who were to be placed with American forces based there.

If a free, uncensored press ever arrives in the Arab world, many Americans will be shocked by what it says. Then, the energetic if somewhat tendentious broadcasts of Al Jazeera will seem, in comparison, like the nuanced objectivity of the BBC. For right now, Al Jazeera deserves all the help and support it can get.

Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war

My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it
Al-Jazeera views this war as an illegal enterprise
Faisal Bodi
( Faisal Bodi is a senior editor for aljazeera.net )
Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian

Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m media centre at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.
And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviours.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under "coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time - despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen litte except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.

Amid the battle for hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe" hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war.

As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.

On a stretch of Iraqi highway, an improvised grave

UMM QASR, Iraq (AFP) Mar 31, 2003

Eight Iraqis stand weeping unconsolably next to an empty coffin and a hastily dug grave on the side of the highway leading from Umm Qasr to Basra.

Inside the shallow hole, limbs askew, lies the decomposing body of Bassem Abdu Zara, killed by British troops last week as he and some friends were trying to flee the fighting that had engulfed southern Iraq.

"What fault did my poor son have?" sobs his elderly father, sitting impotent by the side of the road.

On the third day of the war, Bassem and 10 other people were heading north from there homes in Umm Qasr toward Basra, 55 kilometres (34 miles) away, thinking it would be safer up there.Hassem Farah, one of the survivors, recalls: "British soldiers fired on us. First against the car and then, after we all got out with our hands up, they continued attacking us with machine guns."

The van exploded and caught fire. It was completely gutted.Farah, who was wounded in the leg, was limping as he returned to the scene Sunday to help recover the body of his friend.He said that, beside Bassem, the driver of the van was mortally wounded. He died several hours later in hospital in Umm Qasr where other wounded among the group, including a 10-year-old girl, are being treated.

Alongside the van are the remains of a truck, also burnt out.Inside are the skeletons of two people, who witnesses say were machine gunned before their vehicle exploded. In Umm Qasr, no one seemed to know who they were, and no one had come to reclaim their bodies.With no chance to hold a funeral in the middle of the fighting, Bassem's friends buried him where he was killed.

As relatives and others gathered to transfer Bassem's remains into the coffin, a number of cars stopped on the road, their drivers curious to know what was happening. They were quickly waved on for fear of another attack.

A short while afterwards, a British armored car arrives and a soldier gets out, demanding to know what these people are hiding in the hole. When he sees the answer, he somberly withdraws, his head hanging."It's obvious they weren't soldiers," the Iraqis say. "Why did they kill them?"

They were digging as they spoke, first with shovels and then with their hands. As their work proceeded, the stench became overpowering, and they had to put perfume under their noses and cover their faces to keep from vomiting.

Finally, the body appears, unrecognizable, and his friends retrieve it with the help of ropes. The men kneel and weep. A child sitting inside the vehicle that brought them watches on impassively.

"This country didn't need this war; we were better without them," one of the men says as Bassem's body is wrapped in plastic and placed in the wooden coffin, which is hoisted on to the roof of the car.

"He was 30 years old. He only got married four months ago. We were all so happy," his father says, wiping the tears from his eyes as he leaves

Iraqis relearn old means of communication after bombing knocks out phones

BAGHDAD (AFP) Mar 31, 2003

Ahmad Qassem won't really have a day off this week. His day-trip home will be consumed by no less than 15 visits to relay greetings from colleagues cut off from their families by US bombings that have severed telephone lines.

"I keep receiving requests by colleagues to contact their families. Up until now I've been asked by 15 of them, and more seem to be coming," said the 36-year-old as he waited at the Al-Alawi station for the bus to the southern city of Babylon."This is definitely ruining my day off. Instead of spending quiet time with my family, I will have to make visits to 15 neighbors," Qassem said.

A week and a half of massive US and British air strikes have targetted a number of communication centers around Iraq, including at least seven in the capital, cutting off hundreds of thousands of telephone lines.

Each center services about 25,000 homes.International lines have been totally knocked out. Most local lines have been damaged, with many areas suffering complete cuts. In Baghdad, telephone calls can now only be made within a district.

"I can only call my neighbors, but why would I need to do that when I can call them from out my window?" joked Faleh Salim, a grocer on central Saadoun Street."What we need after nights of massive criminal bombings is to speak to our family members in other parts of Baghdad or to anxious relatives in other provinces," he said.

Most people have to drive -- or failing that, to bike -- to spread news to their families or conduct business.

"I sent my family a letter, but they didn't believe the messenger, so I had to go and show them that I was actually safe," said Ali Ahmad, a taxi driver.

The attacks on telecommunication centers are part of the US strategy to "tighten the noose" on the regime in the war aimed at toppling President Saddam Hussein.

But effectively, it is Iraqi civilians who are hit where it hurts most.

"I can't call my family, which must be very worried, and I can't call or fax my business partner in the northern city of Mosul to know what to do with some transactions," said Abu Kamal, who owns a clothing store on Saadoun."I resorted to my grandfather's way of doing business: I sent my partner a letter two days ago. Can you imagine?"

Most Iraqis used to picking up a phone now have to resort to the old-fashioned way of communicating.

The Hafiz al-Qadi parking lot in central Baghdad from where Iraqis drive to Syria and Jordan -- the only two countries they can cross to -- is full. Not full of vehicles, but of people with letters in their hands.

"They are waiting for cars to venture on the dangerous journeys to Damascus or Amman to ask the drivers to carry their letters," explained Ismail al-Kurdi, who runs a small transportation business on the premises."It takes about 12 hours of driving, often under bombing raids," he said.

A message left to one driver reads: "My dearest daughter Nur ... I am sending you this letter with dear brother Sabri, the driver kindly taking this letter to Amman" at a charge of about five dollars.

Sabri said the man "hadn't been able to call his family for weeks, but said he was not worried because 'God will keep Iraqis safe.'"

Badih Shaloub, 43, paced nervously, holding a small folded piece of paper in his clenched fist."I am waiting for a car to leave because I need to find my family. I've lost contact with my wife and my 12-year-old daughter Nawras," he said.

Abu Nawras, as he likes being called, has two numbers on the hand-written page: one in Dubai and the other in Damascus."We lived in Yemen, but my wife didn't want to stay there. So I'm guessing they are at some relatives in either Dubai or Damascus by now," he said."I don't know where they are because I left in a hurry when the war broke out. I wanted to come here to carry arms and defend our neighborhood," he said proudly.

Hometown America watches in horror

The Pentagon told them war would be swift and painless. Now the truth is invading their living rooms and the grim images are of people they love

by Ed Helmore
Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer

Claude Johnson was flicking through TV channels to find cartoons for his granddaughter when a news bulletin mentioned that his daughter Shoshana had been captured by the Iraqis. 'I heard her name but I wasn't sure. Then I got on the internet,' he said. Six hours later, a US military official called to confirm that she was indeed now a prisoner of war.

Soon after that, the Iraqis broadcast footage of Johnson and four other members of the US Army's 507th Maintenance Company captured with her, looking terrified, confused and in some cases injured. That helped bring home to the American public the lesson they have been learning painfully over the past few days: the conflict will not be nearly as quick, straightforward or light on US casualties as Pentagon planners originally believed.

Johnson, a cook, was stationed at Fort Bliss, a sprawling military base of the outskirts of El Paso in Texas, George W. Bush's home state, near the Mexican border.

For many Americans this huge military facility has come to encapsulate the repercussions of going to war. In a single incident last weekend half a company of cooks, welders, drivers and mechanics that took a wrong turn near the city of Nasiriyah, blundered into a firefight and were lost.

Johnson, a 30-year-old single mother with a two-year-old daughter, Janelle, had not even been trained for combat her father said: 'She can defend a perimeter or something like that, but her primary mission is to cook for the company. She can cook anything - chicken enchiladas, cakes. Why was she so close to a firefight?' She was taken during an Iraqi attack on coalition supply lines, a tactic the Americans had not anticipated.

Last week Pentagon officials said that two 507th Maintenance Company personnel are dead, eight missing presumed dead, four wounded and five others taken prisoner. In addition, two Apache helicopter pilots have been captured and 12 Marines are listed as missing in action.

Pictures of a petrified-looking Johnson have revived fears over the fate of personnel captured in previous conflicts. There is also growing concern about the fate of two other missing women from the 507th, privates Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, after reports that two uniforms belonging to female soldiers had been found in a hospital in Nasiriyah, apparently with the dog tags and US flags torn from them. Debate rages about the proper place of the 200,000 females in the American military.

The fate of the members of the 507th in the face of Iraqi resistance has caused a shift in public opinion of the war towards realism: 70 per cent of Americans now believe it could go on for months. Shocking film of dead soldiers, broadcast by al-Jazeera and in sanitised form by US networks, has contributed. Some appeared to have been shot in the head, prompting Pentagon claims that up to seven troops had been executed.

The focus on the PoWs has also given the public a clearer picture of who the troops in the Gulf are. Johnson joined up to learn to cook, Piestewa is a Native American from a Navajo reservation, and captured welder Private Patrick Miller, who told his captors on TV that he was only in Iraq to 'fix broke stuff', enlisted last summer to help pay student loans - all of which has fuelled criticism that the military is weighted towards minorities and poor whites.

Questions are also being asked about Sergeant Asan Akbar, the Marine who last Sunday night turned on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait, throwing grenades into tents where his colleagues slept, killing a captain instantly and injuring 15 other members of the 101st Airborne Division, one of whom later died. He is now in a military jail in Germany, set to be charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer, said the crime could warrant the death penalty.

Military criminal investigators have said that the 36-year-old, a member of a mine-clearing battalion, had an 'attitude problem' and had been reprimanded for insubordination and told he would not be joining his unit's push into Iraq. But the fact that he shouted 'You're here to kill our mothers and daughters!' when he was captured, and his Muslim faith, have prompted his family to deny that he is a terrorist.

His stepfather and younger brother, Ishmael Mustafa Bilal, who live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, maintain he cracked under the pressure not so much of being in the Gulf but of being an African-American and a Muslim in the US Army in the wake of 11 September. Bilal says that is more than just a theory. He was the only Muslim in his squadron, but recently left the Air Force with an honourable discharge, with the help of his Congressman, after citing the same pressure.

Akbar was not allowed to take part in the first Gulf War because of his religion, said his mother, Quran Bilal. 'He said "Mama, when I get there I have the feeling they are going to arrest me just because of my name",' she said. 'He wouldn't try to take nobody's life. He said the only thing he was going to do was blow up the bridges.'

The War in Iraq Turns Ugly. That's What Wars Do.

By JAMES WEBB
March 30, 2003 New York Times

This campaign was begun, like so many others throughout history, with lofty exhortations from battlefield commanders to their troops, urging courage, patience, compassion for the Iraqi people and even chivalry. Within a week it had degenerated into an unexpected ugliness in virtually every populated area where American and British forces have come under fire. Those who believed from intelligence reports and Pentagon war planners that the Iraqi people, and particularly those from the Shiite sections of the southeast, would rise up to greet them as liberators were instead faced with persistent resistance.

Near Basra, as The Financial Times reported, "soldiers were not being welcomed as liberators but often confronted with hatred." In the increasingly messy fights around Nasiriya, Marine units, which earlier were ambushed while responding to what appeared to be a large-scale surrender, had by the end of the week destroyed more than 200 homes.

Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. Snippets of news from Nasiriya give us a picture of chaotic guerrilla warfare, replete with hit-and-run ambushes, dead civilians, friendly fire casualties from firefights begun in the dead of night and a puzzling number of marines who are still unaccounted for. And long experience tells us that this sort of combat brings with it a "downstream" payback of animosity and revenge.

Other reports corroborate the direction that the war, as well as its aftermath, promises to take: Iraqi militiamen, in civilian clothes, firing weapons and disappearing inside the anonymity of the local populace. So-called civilians riding in buses to move toward contact. Enemy combatants mixing among women and children. Children firing weapons. Families threatened with death if a soldier does not fight. A wounded American soldier commenting, "If they're dressed as civilians, you don't know who is the enemy anymore."

These actions, while reprehensible, are nothing more than classic guerrilla warfare, no different in fact or in moral degree from what our troops faced in difficult areas of Vietnam. In the Fifth Marine Regiment area of operations outside Da Nang, we routinely faced enemy soldiers dressed in civilian clothes and even as women. Their normal routes of ingress and egress were through villages, and we fought daily in populated areas. On one occasion a smiling, waving girl — no more than 7 years old — lured a squad from my platoon into a vicious North Vietnamese crossfire. And if a Vietcong soldier surrendered, it was essential to remove his family members from their village by nightfall, or they might be killed for the sake of discipline.

The moral and tactical confusion that surrounds this type of warfare is enormous. It is also one reason that the Marine Corps took such heavy casualties in Vietnam, losing five times as many killed as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea and more total casualties than in World War II. Guerrilla resistance has already proved deadly in the Iraq war, and far more effective than the set-piece battles that thus far have taken place closer to Baghdad. A majority of American casualties at this point have been the result of guerrilla actions against Marine and Army forces in and around Nasiriya. As this form of warfare has unfolded, the real surprise is why anyone should have been surprised at all. But people have been, among them many who planned the war, many who are fighting it and a large percentage of the general population.

Why?

Partly because of Iraq's poor performance in the 1991 gulf war, which caused many to underestimate Iraqi willingness to fight, while overlooking the distinction between retreating from conquered territory and defending one's native soil. And partly because protection of civilians has become such an important part of military training. But mostly, because the notion of fierce resistance cut against the grain of how this war was justified to the American people.

The strategies of both Iraq and the United States are only partly, some would say secondarily, military. The key strategic prize for American planners has always been the acceptance by Iraq's people of an invasion intended to change their government. If the Iraqis welcomed us, the logic goes, it would be difficult for those on the Arab street, as well as Americans and others who questioned the wisdom of the war, to condemn our presence.

Thus, throughout the buildup to war, the Iraqis were characterized to America — and to our military — as so brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein's regime that they would quickly rise up to overthrow him when the Americans arrived. This was clearly the expectation of many American fighting men as they crossed into Iraq.

"Their determination was really a surprise to us all," said Brig. Gen. John Kelly of the Marines on Friday. "What we were really hoping for was just to go through and everyone would wave flags and all that."

On the other side, the Iraqi regime has used both its ancient history and American support of Israel in appealing to the nationalism of its people to resist an invasion by an outside power. It is as yet unclear which argument is succeeding, although early indications are that the American invasion has stirred up enormous animosity.

The initial bombing campaign was political, aimed at Iraqi leaders. The current effort appears to be increasingly strategic, designed to damage the Iraqi military's better units. After that, the next step is likely to be a series of conventional engagements matching American armored and infantry forces against Iraq's Republican Guard. The United States hopes to force Iraq into fixed-position warfare or even to draw them into a wild attack, where American technological superiority and air power might destroy Iraq's best fighting force.

But Iraq's leaders have reviewed their mistakes in the first gulf war and have also studied the American efforts in Somalia and Kosovo. They will most likely try to draw American units into closer quarters, forcing them to fight even armored battles in heavily populated areas nearer to Baghdad. This kind of fighting would be designed to drive up American casualties beyond the point of acceptability at home, and also to harden Iraqi resolve against the invaders.

If American forces are successful in these engagements, the war may be over sooner rather than later. But if these battles stagnate, guerrilla warfare could well become pandemic, not only in Baghdad but also across Iraq. And even considering the strong likelihood of an allied victory, it is hard to imagine an end point without an extremely difficult period of occupation.

In fact, what will be called an occupation may well end up looking like the images we have seen in places like Nasiriya. Do Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein's regime more deeply than they dislike the Americans who are invading their country? That question will still be with this administration, and the military forces inside Iraq, when the occupation begins, whether the war lasts a few more days or several more months.

Or worse, the early stages of an occupation could see acts of retribution against members of Saddam Hussein's regime, then quickly turn into yet another round of guerrilla warfare against American forces. This point was made chillingly clear a few days ago by the leader of Iraq's major Shiite opposition group, who, according to Reuters, promised armed resistance if the United States remains in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is overthrown.

Welcome to hell.

Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while.

James Webb, secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, was a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam. He is an author and filmmaker.

Advisers Split as War Unfolds

One Faction Hopes Bush Notes 'Bum Advice'
By Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 31, 2003; Page A01

The first 11 days of the war have brought back with a vengeance the deep splits that have long existed within the Bush administration and the Republican Party over policy toward Iraq.

Already there is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Republican government officials and party leaders to convince President Bush that the advice he has received from Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz -- a powerful triumvirate frequently at odds with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- has been wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests.

Citing past public statements by Cheney and others about the prospective ease with which the Iraq war could be won and the warm welcome U.S. forces would receive from the Iraqi people, one former GOP appointee said he and his allies were looking at "whether this president has learned something from this bum advice he has been getting."

Other Republicans and Bush administration officials, some close to Powell, also expressed concern that the Iraq war plan, with its "rolling start" using a relatively small force, was based on faulty assumptions that the Iraqi government would quickly collapse. Moreover, there is fear among some officials, especially in the State Department, that postwar diplomacy, if handled poorly, could result in further U.S. estrangement from allies and international institutions.

Bush, who appears to value tension among his top advisers, "has been very Delphic on this and hard to read" on the emerging internal debate, a Bush adviser said.

Powell has stressed his support for the war plan, and those operating behind the scenes said they were acting without Powell's blessing. Indeed, among this group, there is criticism of Powell for failing to combat some of the assumptions about the war with Iraq more forcefully. "Powell won't pick up the fight and won't represent State Department professionals who are appalled by what is about to happen," a former party official said.

Administration officials are generally close-mouthed about their discussions and officially insist there is unity among Bush's senior national security advisers. But they also acknowledge that within this administration disputes among senior Cabinet officials are never really settled. With war now under way, the stakes in the debate over Iraq are much higher, affecting not only the course of the conflict but the world's acceptance of the U.S. invasion and its aftermath.

Officials dismissed complaints about the war's progress as premature. They said that Bush's entire national security team agreed to the plan, which in little over a week has resulted in control over nearly half the country, troops 50 miles from Baghdad and the initial delivery of humanitarian supplies. On Saturday during a teleconference with his senior advisers, the president endorsed Rumsfeld's desire to prepare for an advance on the Republican Guard around Baghdad.

"The president has demonstrated strong leadership and has the unified support of his whole team," a senior defense official said. "My concern about this sort of gossip is that it is very important to maintain the unity of this effort. It is not a time to get weak in the knees." The Iraqi government, the official added, will grab at "every little straw," and thus any suggestion of division in the top levels of the administration "plays into the hands of Baghdad's propaganda." A spokeswoman for Cheney declined to comment.

Powell distanced himself from those questioning the war plan and the administration's unity. "I was briefed regularly on the plan as it was developed," he said yesterday. "I have full confidence in the plan and in the commanders executing it."

A subtext of the debate, expressed by people sympathetic to Powell, is the notion that the secretary of state more closely reflects the internationalism of President George H.W. Bush, who 12 years ago assembled a broad military coalition -- and a force of nearly 500,000 American military personnel -- to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed, the former president, in an interview published this week in Newsweek, twice defended Powell without prompting. "I hate criticism of Colin Powell from any quarter," he said. Some former and current officials viewed the remarks as a message to Powell's opponents within the administration.

"The only one who can reach the president is his father," one former senior official said. "But it is not timely yet to talk to him."

Some within the group of former GOP officials were advocates last summer of going to the United Nations to win broader international support for confronting Iraq rather than moving unilaterally. The president decided to try to obtain U.N. backing -- a course Powell strongly favored -- after his father's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state, James A. Baker III, went public supporting that approach. Administration officials, however, said that Bush always intended to go to the United Nations and was not influenced by his father's former aides.

Since that time, Scowcroft, who currently heads the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, has had limited access to the White House because of his public criticisms of the administration's policies toward Europe, NATO and the United Nations.

Appearing yesterday on ABC's "This Week," Baker defended the administration's conduct of the war. But in the aftermath, he said, Bush should call an Arab-Israeli peace conference, much as his father did in 1991, and insist on implementation of the "road map" to peace -- drafted by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations -- without putting prior conditions on either side. Some have accused the current administration of putting too much of the initial burden for progress on the Palestinians.

"There's clearly a view that the conduct of foreign policy in a multilateral context, led by the United States, has been de-emphasized, and that this isn't a good way to go about doing things," said one person familiar with the argument made by the former GOP officials. "There are fissures in the administration on the bigger point of what kind of diplomacy are we going to be conducting and how does our military force need to be shaped to respond to that foreign policy."

Powell is regarded by his adversaries in the administration as a skilled bureaucratic infighter who somehow appears to emerge unscathed even when he doesn't achieve diplomatic success -- a quality they attribute to manipulation of the media and careful attention to his public image. In interviews, Powell twice last week cited his Gallup poll ratings. "The American people think I was doing a good job by, oh, 83 percent," Powell said.

Powell's high public standing has led some of the secretary of state's skeptics to wonder darkly why people don't blame the nation's top diplomat when diplomacy fails, yet claim the war would be going better if only the president had listened to the top diplomat.

Within the administration, Powell retains close contact with the uniformed military, who often are in conflict with Rumsfeld. Many top officials suspect, though they don't have evidence, that Powell wields influence through this back channel. There is "grumbling among the generals toward the White House" over the direction of the war, a source said.

The president has, at various times, backed both sides of the debate, agreeing with Powell on the need to try to seek broad international support and Rumsfeld on military strategy. Last week, in an interview with National Public Radio, Powell dismissed suggestions that his advice has been ignored. "Personally, I'm very much in sync with the president, and he values my services," he said.

"Rumsfeld wants to put the 'Powell Doctrine' into obsolescence," the Bush adviser said, referring to the military strategy outlined by Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In its broadest sense, the doctrine -- which guided Pentagon thinking during the Gulf War 12 years ago -- calls for decisive force, clear goals and popular support to ensure success.

Rumsfeld wants to retire the Powell Doctrine "first because he truly believes that the new military with the new technology needs to fight different kinds of wars," the adviser said. "Secondly, he sees new kinds of foreign policy challenges, and he ultimately wants to run foreign policy, not just the Defense Department. Those foreign policy challenges require the U.S. to be able to deploy force quickly and with dramatic positive effect in multiple places at multiple times because you're battling these non-state actors."

Occasionally, the fault lines change. In the run-up to the war, sources said, the State Department and the vice president's office pressed the Pentagon to send ships carrying tanks and equipment for the Army's 4th Infantry Division to Kuwait immediately after Turkey rejected a request on March 1 to accept them. But the Pentagon wanted to keep trying to open a northern front through Turkey and won the argument. The ships began to move only last week.

Powell asked whether it is was a problem to not have the 4th Infantry in place before the war started, a source said, and was assured it was not. Powell said in a recent interview that he offered his advice on the war plan, which originally envisioned an even smaller force than the one that headed into Iraq 10 days ago. "I think I have made useful contributions, appropriate to my experience but also appropriate to my current position," he said, adding, "I keep in my own lane."

When Bush on the eve of war pointedly asked each of his senior advisors if they had any problems with the war plan, Powell raised no objection. A senior State Department official said Powell did not recommend a larger force.

Indeed, Powell has publicly denied that the war plan fails to live up to the Powell Doctrine. He also has expressed repeated confidence in the progress of the war. Assertions that the force isn't big enough are "nonsense," Powell told CBS last week. "It's the usual chatter."

Yet, in a series of interviews since the war started, Powell distanced himself from the confident assurances of imminent victory expressed by other senior officials and offered his interpretation of the military campaign. The day that Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the senior Army officer in Iraq, was quoted as saying U.S. forces had faced unexpected problems -- remarks that infuriated White House officials -- Powell said: "I have absolute confidence in the commanders who are running this war. . . . And I know it. I trained them."

Powell also made a comment that was widely interpreted in official Washington as a jab at Wolfowitz, a frequent nemesis who did not serve in the military.

"When war comes, that's [casualties] the price that has to be paid," Powell said on NPR. "And it's paid not by intellectuals but by wonderful young Americans who serve their country and believe in the cause for which they are serving."

After checking with Powell, the senior State Department official said the comment "wasn't directed at anybody; it's just a statement of truth."

Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.

OFFENSE AND DEFENSE

- The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSHNew Yorker - Issue of 2003-04-07

As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein faltered last week, with attenuated supply lines and a lack of immediate reinforcements, there was anger in the Pentagon.

Several senior war planners complained to me in interviews that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers, who had been chiefly responsible for persuading President Bush to lead the country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war’s operational details.

Rumsfeld’s team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning—traditionally, an area in which the uniformed military excels—and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He thought he knew better,” one senior planner said. “He was the decision-maker at every turn.”

On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his deputies were presented with operational plans—the Iraqi assault was designated Plan 1003—he insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld’s faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. “They’ve got no resources,” a former high-level intelligence official said. “He was so focussed on proving his point—that the Iraqis were going to fall apart.”

The critical moment, one planner said, came last fall, during the buildup for the war, when Rumsfeld decided that he would no longer be guided by the Pentagon’s most sophisticated war-planning document, the TPFDL—time-phased forces-deployment list—which is known to planning officers as the tip-fiddle (tip-fid, for short).

A TPFDL is a voluminous document describing the inventory of forces that are to be sent into battle, the sequence of their deployment, and the deployment of logistical support. “It’s the complete applecart, with many pieces,” Roger J. Spiller, the George C. Marshall Professor of military history at the U.S. Command and General Staff College, said. “Everybody trains and plans on it. It’s constantly in motion and always adjusted at the last minute. It’s an embedded piece of the bureaucratic and operational culture.” A retired Air Force strategic planner remarked, “This is what we do best—go from A to B—and the tip-fiddle is where you start. It’s how you put together a plan for moving into the theatre.”

Another former planner said, “Once you turn on the tip-fid, everything moves in an orderly fashion.” A former intelligence officer added, “When you kill the tip-fiddle, you kill centralized military planning. The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It’s the redundancy that saves lives.”

The TPFDL for the war in Iraq ran to forty or more computer-generated spreadsheets, dealing with everything from weapons to toilet paper. When it was initially presented to Rumsfeld last year for his approval, it called for the involvement of a wide range of forces from the different armed services, including four or more Army divisions. Rumsfeld rejected the package, because it was “too big,” the Pentagon planner said. He insisted that a smaller, faster-moving attack force, combined with overwhelming air power, would suffice. Rumsfeld further stunned the Joint Staff by insisting that he would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zone. Such decisions are known in the military as R.F.F.s—requests for forces. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when and where.

The TPFDL called for the shipment in advance, by sea, of hundreds of tanks and other heavy vehicles—enough for three or four divisions. Rumsfeld ignored this advice. Instead, he relied on the heavy equipment that was already in Kuwait—enough for just one full combat division. The 3rd Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia, the only mechanized Army division that was active inside Iraq last week, thus arrived in the Gulf without its own equipment.

“Those guys are driving around in tanks that were pre-positioned. Their tanks are sitting in Fort Stewart,” the planner said. “To get more forces there we have to float them. We can’t fly our forces in, because there’s nothing for them to drive. Over the past six months, you could have floated everything in ninety days—enough for four or more divisions.” The planner added, “This is the mess Rumsfeld put himself in, because he didn’t want a heavy footprint on the ground.”

Plan 1003 was repeatedly updated and presented to Rumsfeld, and each time, according to the planner, Rumsfeld said, “‘You’ve got too much ground force—go back and do it again.’”

In the planner’s view, Rumsfeld had two goals:
(a) to demonstrate the efficacy of precision bombing and
(b) to “do the war on the cheap.”

Rumsfeld and his two main deputies for war planning, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, “were so enamored of ‘shock and awe’ that victory seemed assured,” the planner said. “They believed that the weather would always be clear, that the enemy would expose itself, and so precision bombings would always work.” (Rumsfeld did not respond to a request for comment.)

Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known.

He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions.

In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said.

One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. “He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,” the witness said, “saying, ‘Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?’”

Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view.

“All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and matériel, and the top generals—including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—supporting Rumsfeld. After Turkey’s parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. “Rummy overruled him.”

Many of the present and former officials I spoke to were critical of Franks for his perceived failure to stand up to his civilian superiors. A former senator told me that Franks was widely seen as a commander who “will do what he’s told.”

A former intelligence official asked, “Why didn’t he go to the President?” A Pentagon official recalled that one senior general used to prepare his deputies for meetings with Rumsfeld by saying, “When you go in to talk to him, you’ve got to be prepared to lay your stars on the table and walk out. Otherwise, he’ll walk over you.”

In early February, according to a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld appeared at the Army Commanders’ Conference, a biannual business and social gathering of all the four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to join the generals for dinner and make a speech.

All went well, the official told me, until Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with only five or six days’ notice. To the astonishment and anger of the generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. “He said, ‘I wasn’t involved,’” the official said. “‘It was the Joint Staff.’”

“We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,” the official said of the dinner. “Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff—” The official hesitated a moment, and then said, “It’s all about Rummy and the truth.”

According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. (The military men say that the vehicles that they do have have been pushed too far and are malfunctioning.) Supply lines—inevitably, they say—have become overextended and vulnerable to attack, creating shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition.

Pentagon officers spoke contemptuously of the Administration’s optimistic press briefings. “It’s a stalemate now,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers are going to run out of jdams”—the satellite-guided bombs that have been striking targets in Baghdad and elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy. Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended.

“The Marines are worried as hell,” the former intelligence official went on. “They’re all committed, with no reserves, and they’ve never run the lavs”—light armored vehicles—“as long and as hard” as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. “The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.”

The 4th Infantry Division—the Army’s most modern mechanized division—whose equipment spent weeks waiting in the Mediterranean before being diverted to the overtaxed American port in Kuwait, is not expected to be operational until the end of April. The 1st Cavalry Division, in Texas, is ready to ship out, the planner said, but by sea it will take twenty-three days to reach Kuwait. “All we have now is front-line positions,” the former intelligence official told me. “Everything else is missing.”

Last week, plans for an assault on Baghdad had stalled, and the six Republican Guard divisions expected to provide the main Iraqi defense had yet to have a significant engagement with American or British soldiers. The shortages forced Central Command to “run around looking for supplies,” the former intelligence official said. The immediate goal, he added, was for the Army and Marine forces “to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard divisions get chewed up” by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, “The only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle—that the Republican Guards commit themselves,” and thus become vulnerable to American air strikes.

“Hope,” a retired four-star general subsequently told me, “is not a course of action.” Last Thursday, the Army’s senior ground commander, Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, said to reporters, “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against.” (One senior Administration official commented to me, speaking of the Iraqis, “They’re not scared. Ain’t it something? They’re not scared.”)

At a press conference the next day, Rumsfeld and Myers were asked about Wallace’s comments, and defended the war plan—Myers called it “brilliant” and “on track.” They pointed out that the war was only a little more than a week old.

Scott Ritter, the former marine and United Nations weapons inspector, who has warned for months that the American “shock and awe” strategy would not work, noted that much of the bombing has had little effect or has been counterproductive. For example, the bombing of Saddam’s palaces has freed up a brigade of special guards who had been assigned to protect them, and who have now been sent home to await further deployment. “Every one of their homes—and they are scattered throughout Baghdad—is stacked with ammunition and supplies,” Ritter told me.

“This is tragic,” one senior planner said bitterly. “American lives are being lost.” The former intelligence official told me, “They all said, ‘We can do it with air power.’ They believed their own propaganda.”

The high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld’s approach to the Joint Staff war planning as “McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small cell”—a reference to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his aides, who were known for their challenges to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Stepford wives. “They’ve abrogated their responsibility.”

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of last week was the failure of the Shiite factions in southern Iraq to support the American and British invasion. Various branches of the Al Dawa faction, which operate underground, have been carrying out acts of terrorism against the Iraqi regime since the nineteen-eighties. But Al Dawa has also been hostile to American interests. Some in American intelligence have implicated the group in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost the lives of two hundred and forty-one marines.

Nevertheless, in the months before the war the Bush Administration courted Al Dawa by including it among the opposition groups that would control postwar Iraq. “Dawa is one group that could kill Saddam,” a former American intelligence official told me. “They hate Saddam because he suppressed the Shiites. They exist to kill Saddam.” He said that their apparent decision to stand with the Iraqi regime now was a “disaster” for us. “They’re like hard-core Vietcong.”

There were reports last week that Iraqi exiles, including fervent Shiites, were crossing into Iraq by car and bus from Jordan and Syria to get into the fight on the side of the Iraqi government. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. Middle East operative, told me in a telephone call from Jordan, “Everybody wants to fight. The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam. They’ve been given the high sign, and we are courting disaster. If we take fifty or sixty casualties a day and they die by the thousands, they’re still winning. It’s a jihad, and it’s a good thing to die. This is no longer a secular war.” There were press reports of mujahideen arriving from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Algeria for “martyrdom operations.”

There had been an expectation before the war that Iran, Iraq’s old enemy, would side with the United States in this fight. One Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, has been in regular contact with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or sciri, an umbrella organization for Shiite groups who oppose Saddam. The organization is based in Iran and has close ties to Iranian intelligence.

The Chalabi group set up an office last year in Tehran, with the approval of Chalabi’s supporters in the Pentagon, who include Rumsfeld, his deputies Wolfowitz and Feith, and Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Chalabi has repeatedly predicted that the Tehran government would provide support, including men and arms, if an American invasion of Iraq took place. Last week, however, this seemed unlikely.

In a press conference on Friday, Rumsfeld warned Iranian militants against interfering with American forces and accused Syria of sending military equipment to the Iraqis. A Middle East businessman who has long-standing ties in Jordan and Syria—and whose information I have always found reliable—told me that the religious government in Tehran “is now backing Iraq in the war. There isn’t any Arab fighting group on the ground in Iraq who is with the United States,” he said.

There is also evidence that Turkey has been playing both sides. Turkey and Syria, who traditionally have not had close relations, recently agreed to strengthen their ties, the businessman told me, and early this year Syria sent Major General Ghazi Kanaan, its longtime strongman and power broker in Lebanon, to Turkey.

The two nations have begun to share intelligence and to meet, along with Iranian officials, to discuss border issues, in case an independent Kurdistan emerges from the Iraq war. A former U.S. intelligence officer put it this way: “The Syrians are coördinating with the Turks to screw us in the north—to cause us problems.” He added, “Syria and the Iranians agreed that they could not let an American occupation of Iraq stand.”

William Kristol - Bush's hawkish neo-conservative

He's William Kristol, Not Billy Crystal, and His War's Not Fun Anymore
by Tom Hayden; March 30, 2003

As a snobbish Harvard conservative in 1972, young William Kristol praised Richard Nixon's Christmas B-52 bombing raids over Hanoi as "one of the great moments in American history".

He never had second thoughts, and today is regarded as the foremost promoter of the Iraqi war.

His magazine, The Weekly Standard, funded by Rupert Murdoch, is described by the New York Times as, "Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America".

So towards what cliff is Bill Kristol (not my neighbor, Billy Crystal) pushing us now? A quick resume is needed here.

William's father, Irving Kristol, traveled a path from Trotskyism in the Thirties to a key role in the neo-conservative backlash against the Sixties. Along the way he championed McCarthyism and co-edited an anti-communist intellectual journal called Encounter, covertly funded by the CIA during the Cold War. William's mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a Victorian scholar with a strong affinity for the British empire who became a political and intellectual leader of the backlash against Sixties feminism.

Young William Kristol carried on the family revolt against all things Sixties. He eventually joined up with Ronald Reagan's neo-conservative education czar William Bennett in the mid-Eighties.

Not particularly religious himself, Kristol became a staunch partisan of the fundamentalist Christian Right. Kristol then became a crusading chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle where he approved Quayle's attacks on Candace Bergen's single mother character, Murphy Brown. You get the picture: Kristol quickly became an official point man or strategist for virtually every right-wing crusade of the era. In the Clinton years, he played "cheerleader" to the inquisitive Kenneth Starr and anchored the impeachment movement from the pages of The Weekly Standard .

According to one interviewer, "if not for Kristol's obsessive marshaling of the pro-impeachment forces, said a number of conservatives, independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation might have petered out, and House Republicans might have allowed the public's disapproval of their course to dissuade them from voting to impeach the president". (Easton, 2000, p. 395)

Though never having served in combat or elected office, Kristol has been fearless in urging others to take extreme paths. In a 1985 article that attracted Bennett's attention, Kristol condemned moderate Republican accomodationists, charging that they end up "fighting on others' terrain, at someone else's chosen time and place". In the Clinton impeachment fight, he argued with certitude that the "doomed" President would be forced to resign if the Republicans had "the nerve to fight".

Along the way he bonded with the circle of Republican "chicken hawks" who urged uncompromising war in Iraq, unilateralism in foreign policy, and massive military buildups. His pages bristled with neo-conservative visions of empire and running acclaim for the British imperial era.

After September 11, The Weekly Standard became more like the "Weekly Pander" for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, while issuing steady warnings against Colin Powell's tendency to multilateralism.

Kristol was so convinced of the "cakewalk" thesis of a short, triumphal war in Iraq that The Weekly Standard immediately took paternal credit for the concept of "shock and awe" when the bombing began.

They re-ran their previous editorials like that of September 24, 2001, that called for toppling Saddam Hussein and preparing to "scorch southern Lebanon and Revolutionary Guard dormitories and depot facilities in Tehran". According to the journal's past prophecies, "awe is the sine qua non of politics" in the Middle East where "being seen as 'wobbly' is fatal". (Jan. 19, 1998)…"America's hayba - its ability to inspire awe" - had vanished in the mid-90s, "and once hayba is lost, only a demonstration of indomitable force restores it". (May 14, 2001)…"We have to restore our awe, and the only way you acquire and retain such majesty in the Middle East is through the use of military power". (Sept. 24, 2001) In the run-up to war, Kristol promoted his views of "Baghdad and Beyond" through a new book and continual interviews on Fox News, the television outlet of his patron, Rupert Murdoch.

I will leave the psychoanalysis to others, but this memory with the reader.

Once in the West Bank, in the early Eighties, I came upon a Palestinian family standing with their meager possessions in the road while Israeli soldiers methodically blew up their two-story house. Stunned by the cold-blooded military precision, I interviewed the Israelis as to their purpose.

The Palestinian family didn't appear to be an "enemy", weren't being arrested for anything, but nevertheless were made homeless, displaced on the road. Apparently someone in their extended family was an alleged "enemy", and for that the home had to be destroyed.

You see, said the Israeli spokesman, the only thing the Arab understands is awesome power. It is, you see, the way they are. That was 15 years after the Six Day War which was supposed to teach the Palestinians a lesson, five years before the first intifada, 15 years before the second intifada, and still the Palestinians apparently haven't been awed by the occupier's hayba.

Does anyone besides William Kristol (once again, not to be confused with my neighbor Billy Cristal) believe that Iraqi nationalism has been "awed" by the American and British occupiers? When it doesn't turn out that way, Kristol is unfazed, telegenic. Unable to acknowledge his mistaken prediction , he spins and spins. A man who has no apparent awe himself, except for higher IQs, is vulnerable to hubris.

If he was a real general, instead of a pretender, there might be serious questions, behind closed doors to be sure, about his mental competence, like a mad officer out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Or perhaps he's the Great Gatsby, a spoiled rich boy who leaves destruction behind in the sublime confidence that some lesser, awed people will clean up. Or maybe this is William Kristol"s Excellent Adventure.

He is responsible for manipulating the Congress, the media, perhaps even George Bush, and most of the American people into the illusion that the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the hundreds of millions of them - the wogs! the camel jockeys! The ragheads! The boys! - can be cheaply and easily "liberated" through shock and awe.

No wonder he didn't serve.

God save our beleaguered troops from any more of this man's editorial advice.

Propaganda in print for war in Iraq

Fit To Print
by Mickey Z;
March 30, 2003
Znet

Media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom (sic) has been about as pathetic as expected.

Distortion, spin, and outright lies rule the day. However, outside the reports being generated by journalists in bed, I mean, embedded with the military, the corporate media continues to churn out its steady dose of pro-intervention propaganda.

Two New York Times articles on March 29, 2003 struck me as useful examples.

(1) Edward Rothstein penned a piece called "Churchill, Heroic Relic or Relevant Now?" that began with a reference to Winston Churchill "regularly warning a complacent British Parliament about the imminent threat of German rearmament."

The media just can't enough of the "appeasement" myth.

Rothstein goes on to explain, "Now that the United States is again engaged in battle, Churchill is again an inescapable presence." Churchill's grandson, it seems, wrote in support of a war against Iraq in The Wall Street Journal, noting, "it was my grandfather, Winston Churchill, who invented Iraq and laid the foundation for much of the modern Middle East." Rothstein describes our hero "futilely argued for establishing an autonomous state for the Kurds."

What Rothstein and his editors deemed unfit to print is another chapter in Kurdish history.

In 1919, the Royal Air Force asked Churchill for permission to use chemical weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." Churchill, secretary of state at the war office at the time, promptly consented: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," he explained. Churchill espoused a similar policy in July 1944 when he asked his chiefs of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans "or any other method of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using." Unlike in 1919, his proposal was denied so instead he enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up "a new kind of weather" for Dresden.

Anyone familiar with Churchill's record would not have been surprised by his predisposition towards attacking those he deemed inferior.

In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he proposed the sterilization of 100,000 "mental degenerates," while suggesting tens of thousands of others be sent to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take place in the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its inferior members bred.

(2) Speaking of inevitable declines, the Times' opinion page, on the same day, featured an editorial called "Supplying the Enemy." Rumors of Russia's supplying of weapons to Iraq raised the moral hackles of the Times agenda-setters who chose to omit any mention of U.S. arming of Iraq prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Ever fair and balanced, the Times acknowledged Russian grievances but warned that no such grievance "justifies providing Iraqis with means of killing Americans."

The editorial concludes: "Mr. Putin must understand that if Russian arms are reaching Iraq by any route, and are putting American men and women in harm's way, it is simply not enough to declare that he is not responsible, or to pretend it is not happening...but no Americans will tolerate or forgive having an American tank blown up by a Russian missile."

Take that same paragraph and change a few words and you have Pravda, circa 1980: "Mr. Carter (or Reagan) must understand that if U.S. arms are reaching Afghanistan by any route, and are putting Soviet men and women in harm's way, it is simply not enough to declare that he is not responsible, or to pretend it is not happening...no Russians will tolerate or forgive having an Soviet tank blown up by a U.S. missile."

Pravda, New York Times, or Churchill's orations...propaganda is still propaganda and the highest cost is always hidden behind euphemisms like collateral damage and friendly fire.

Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com ) and an editor at Wide Angle (www.wideangleny.com ). He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net

Peter Arnett, Back in the Minefield

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 31, 2003;

Peter Arnett, who fought off charges of conveying Iraqi propaganda during the first Gulf War, has handed fresh ammunition to those who say he sympathizes with Saddam Hussein's regime.

Arnett, who is in Baghdad covering the war for NBC, MSNBC and National Geographic, granted an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV. In the interview, which aired yesterday, he pronounced the U.S. effort so far a failure and portrayed himself as a minority voice, saying:

"It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces . . . help those who oppose the war. . . .The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I've been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."
"

NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust said that "Peter Arnett and his crew have risked their lives to bring the American people up-to-date, straightforward information on what is happening in and around Baghdad. His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy. . . . His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more."

But Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, called the interview "more evidence that Peter Arnett is an agenda-driven reporter" who is "primed to believe the U.S. military is going to fail" and that "people resisting us must have a heroic aspect to them. And he's saying these things on Gestapo-run TV. It's incredible."

Tom Rosenstiel, who runs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that given the past criticism of Arnett, "this is even more alarming or damaging for him. . . . Blurring the line between reporter and actor in the drama invites that same confusion and maybe even makes it worse."

Two members of Congress chided Arnett on Fox News. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said the reporter's remarks -- including praising the Iraqi Information Ministry for "unfailing courtesy and cooperation" -- were "Kafkaesque" and "just crazy. Let's hope that he's being coerced." The ministry has expelled reporters for Fox, CNN and other Western news outlets.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told the network that Arnett's comments were "absurd."

A White House official said Arnett was "coming from a position of complete ignorance. He's never designed a war plan or implemented a war plan. His judgment is suspect. . . . For him to state that to the Iraqi people is, I'd suspect, a certain level of pandering."

As Arnett noted in the interview, the first Bush administration "got very angry and called me a traitor" when he was a CNN correspondent in Baghdad in 1991. Then-Sen. Alan Simpson apologized for calling Arnett an Iraqi "sympathizer," saying he should have used the word "dupe" or "tool."

During that war, Arnett, whose reporting was censored by Iraqi handlers, interviewed Hussein and took a two-hour guided tour of what Iraq said was an infant-formula factory destroyed by American bombing. U.S. officials said the building was used to make biological weapons, and Marlin Fitzwater, then White House spokesman, accused Arnett of serving as a conduit for Iraqi "disinformation."

Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Associated Press reporting in Vietnam, suffered a major embarrassment in 1998 when he narrated a CNN documentary that had to be retracted over charges that U.S. troops had used nerve gas in that war. Arnett protested that he had contributed "not one comma" to the script, but CNN did not renew his contract the next year.

Reporter Arnett said: U.S. War Plan Has Failed

By DAVID BAUDER
The Associated Press Sunday, March 30, 2003;

Journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance and said strategists are "trying to write another war plan."

Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The Associated Press, garnered much of his prominence from covering the 1991 Gulf War for CNN. He is reporting from the Iraqi capital now for NBC and its cable stations.

The interview could make Arnett a target of the war's supporters. The first Bush administration was unhappy with Arnett's reporting in 1991 for CNN, suggesting he had become a conveyor of propaganda.

He was denounced for his reporting about an allied bombing of a baby milk factory in Baghdad that the military said was a biological weapons plant. The American military responded vigorously to the suggestion it had targeted a civilian facility, but Arnett stood by his reporting that the plant's sole purpose was to make baby formula.

NBC, in a statement Sunday, praised Arnett's "outstanding" reporting from Iraq and said he was trying nothing more than to give an analytical response to an interviewer's questions.

In the interview, Arnett said his Iraqi friends tell him there is a growing sense of nationalism and resistance to what the United States and Britain are doing.

He said the United States is reappraising the battlefield and delaying the war, maybe for a week, "and rewriting the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."

"Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces," Arnett said during the interview broadcast by Iraq's satellite television station and monitored by The Associated Press in Egypt.

Arnett said it is clear that within the United States there is growing opposition to the war and a growing challenge to President Bush about the war's conduct.

"Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States," he said. "It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments."

The interview was broadcast in English and translated by a green military uniform-wearing Iraqi anchor. NBC said Arnett gave the interview when asked shortly after he attended an Iraqi government briefing.

"His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy and was similar to other interviews he has done with media outlets from around the world," NBC News spokeswoman Allison Gollust said. "His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more. His outstanding reporting on the war speaks for itself."

Arnett was the on-air reporter of the 1998 CNN report that accused American forces of using sarin gas on a Laotian village in 1970 to kill U.S. defectors. Two CNN employees were sacked and Arnett was reprimanded over the report, which the station later retracted. Arnett ultimately left the network.

He went to Iraq this year not as an NBC News reporter but as an employee of the MSNBC show, "National Geographic Explorer." When other NBC reporters left Baghdad for safety reasons, the network began airing his reports.

'Friendly-fire' survivor critical of US soldier

ABC (Australia) On Line31st March 2003

A British soldier who survived a fatal friendly fire incident has launched a scathing attack on the US pilot responsible for killing his comrade.

"He (the pilot) had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy... He'd just gone out on a jolly," Lance Corporal Steven Gerrard told The Times of London.

Corporal Gerrard, 33, spoke to one of the paper's reporters from his bed aboard the British hospital ship Argus in the Gulf.

A British soldier was killed and four others were injured last Friday in a friendly fire incident in southern Iraq, the fifth such casualty since the war began.

He was killed after an American A-10 tankbuster plane targeted two armoured vehicles near Iraq's second largest city Basra.

"You've got an A-10 with advanced technology and he can't use a thermal sight to identify whether a tank is a friend or foe. It's ridiculous," Corporal Gerrard said.

"Combat is what I've been trained for. I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me. I'm curious about what's going to happen to the pilot. He's killed one of my friends."

Corporal Gerrard has also criticised the pilot for shooting when there were civilians so close to the tanks.

"There was a boy of about 12 years old. He was no more than 20 metres away when the [US soldier] opened up. There were all these civilians around."

The paper says three of the injured British soldiers, including Corporal Gerrard, were flown home to Britain late on Sunday after being treated for shrapnel wounds and burns.

A fourth remains in the hospital ship's intensive care unit.

"After this I am quite pleased to be going home," one of the wounded, Lieutenant Alex MacEwen, told the paper.

"'Blue-on-blue' has always been one of my biggest fears. It is something that my friends and family joked about. 'Don't worry about the Iraqis, it's the Americans you want to watch'. The proof is in the pudding really."

The fatal incident brought to five the number of British soldiers who have been killed by friendly fire since the US-led war on Iraq began on March 20.

On March 23, a US anti-missile Patriot missile shot down a British Tornado bomber, killing both pilots on board.

A day later, two soldiers were killed when a British Challenger tank mistakenly opened fire on another Challenger tank.

Halliburton’s Axis of Influence

By Frida Berrigan
{Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute.}

March 28.03

Is Dick Cheney still on Halliburton’s payroll?

Even though he supposedly sold off his assets when he moved to Washington, the vice president’s financial records reveal he is receiving between $100,000 and $1 million in “deferred compensation” from the company where he served as CEO for five years. The payment is not a bonus for a job well done: Cheney decided to take his severance package over five years instead of in a lump sum.

Nonetheless, as his former company rakes in millions in new contracts from the war Bush and Cheney are presently pursuing in Iraq, one has to ask, “Who does Cheney work for?”

Even as the war rages on, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is lining up for contracts to rebuild Iraq.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this could be the “largest government reconstruction effort since Americans helped to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II.” And while it is too soon to say exactly how much reconstruction will cost or how much profit is at stake, Michael Urban, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, estimates that Halliburton and other companies could reap $3 billion in infrastructure and restoration work.

But is Halliburton right for the job?

Critics argue that the U.S. Agency for International Development ignored the expertise and experience of well-regarded NGOs with decades of experience in humanitarian work in Iraq in their secretive contract process. USAID asked just five for-profit corporations to submit bids for $900 million in reconstruction contracts for the initial phase of work, scheduled to last just six months. Of course, these companies will be best situated to win billions in future contracts. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences report estimated that the reconstruction of Iraq could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $105 billion over the next decade.

KBR not only has the corner on postwar reconstruction, they were also granted a potentially huge contract to fight oil well fires throughout Iraq, even though they did not submit a bid for the job.

In November, the Pentagon hired KBR to write a classified contingency plan for dealing with the fires, allowing the company to position itself for this job long before the war was a fait accompli. President Bush just asked Congress for $500 million for oil field repair, and KBR is standing by to take the money.

The war on terrorism, which Cheney warned might never end-”at least not in our lifetime”-promises profits almost guaranteed to last a lifetime. In December 2001, the company was granted an open-ended contract for Army troops supply and Navy construction. KBR is providing planning, base camp and facilities maintenance, laundry, food and airfield services, and property accountability wherever U.S. troops go in the next 10 years. So far they have gone to Afghanistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Iraq and probably other countries the public has not yet been told about.

The contract is unique in that there is no ceiling on cost. So while the deal could be worth billions, it’s unclear how many billions. KBR will be reimbursed for every dollar spent plus a base fee of 1 percent, which guarantees profit. On top of that, if the military is pleased with KBR’s performance, they’ll add a bonus, calculated as a percentage of the company’s costs.

Contract expert Steve Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University, described the deal as an unprecedented way of saying, “Come up with creative ways to spend my money, and the more you spend, the happier I’ll be.”

In addition to KBR’s blank check, they have been granted several other contracts related to the war on terrorism:

$2 million to reinforce the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in November 2001;
$100 million to convert the Subic Bay U.S. Navy base in the Philippines into a modern commercial port facility, in the same month;
$16 million to build a prison for captured Taliban fighters at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in March 2002.

All of this has not escaped the attention of critics of the Bush administration.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) recently offered an amendment in the House that would restrict companies that enjoy close ties to the administration from bidding on government rebuilding contracts. The measure was roundly defeated. Waters notes: “Given the suspicion that many Americans have about why we’re going to war and the constant speculation that we’re at war for oil, I think the vice president should do everything he can to remove even the appearance of conflicts of interest.”

American Tragedy

by JONATHAN SCHELL
[from the April 7, 2003 issue of The Nation]

The decision to go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States. It also marks a culmination in the rise within the United States of an immense concentration of unaccountable power that poses the greatest threat to the American constitutional system since the Watergate crisis. This transformation, in turn, threatens to push the world into a new era of rivalry, confrontation and war.

The location of the new power is of course the presidency (whose Augustan proportions make the "imperial" presidency of the cold war look like a mere practice run). Its sinews are the awesome might of the American military machine, which, since Congress's serial surrender of the constitutional power to declare war, has passed wholly into the President's hands. Its main political instrument is the Republican Party. Its financial wherewithal is the corporate money that inundates the political realm. Its strategy at home is restriction of civil liberties, deep secrecy, a makeover in its image of the judiciary, subservience to corporate interests across the board and transfer of personal wealth on a colossal scale from the average person to its wealthy supporters.

Its popular support stems from fear engendered by the attacks of September 11--fear that has been manipulated to extend far beyond its proper objects. Its overriding goal, barely concealed behind the banner of the war on terrorism, is the accumulation of ever more power, whose supreme expression is its naked ambition to establish hegemony over the earth.

The steps in the rise of this power can be traced through international and domestic events. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended, the United States was left in a position of global privilege, prestige and might that had no parallel in history. The moment seemed a golden one for the American form of government, liberal democracy. The American economic system was equally admired. In the previous two decades, a long list of nations--in southern Europe, in Latin America, in Asia--had chosen both systems, largely of their own free will.

Even more astonishing, most of the peoples under the rule of the collapsed Soviet foe were making the same choice. The Soviet system had not only disintegrated; it had discredited itself. No rival was in sight. There were good reasons, even if one did not suppose that "the end of history" touted by Francis Fukuyama had arrived, for hoping that these trends would continue. A basically consensual rather than a coerced world seemed a real possibility.

Who could have guessed that barely a decade later the United States, forsaking the very legal, democratic traditions that were its most admired characteristics, would be going to war to impose its will by force upon an alarmed, angry, frightened world united against it? It's clear in retrospect that somewhere near the root of the problem was the very existence of the unchallengeable American military machine. In part, the imbalance with other nations was accidental. The machine had been built up in the name of containing the considerable military forces of the Soviet Union.

When, against all expectation, the Soviet Union suddenly disappeared like a bad dream, the American giant found itself towering alone over the world. America likes to see itself as a force for good. Yet like all unchecked, unbalanced power, such might had, as the founders of this country knew so well, the potential to corrupt its possessors. The decade that followed was a mixed picture in which the raw arrogance of power was tempered by a lingering respect for the opinions of other nations and a search for common ground in the name of humanitarian objectives.

In the first Gulf War, the will and the muscle to go to war were mainly American, but skillful diplomacy won the support or acquiescence of most nations, and the cause--repelling an act of aggression--won wide acceptance. In Kosovo, the United States acted without explicit United Nations agreement, angering many nations, yet the action was taken in the name of NATO, not merely the United States, and Serbian outrages on the ground helped create a climate of support around the world.

The turning point, of course, came on September 11. Yet even then the United States gained considerable support for its first act of "regime change"--overthrowing the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which many understood as a measure of self-defense in the aftermath of a horrifying attack upon the United States. It was in the year that followed that the ambiguities of the 1990s were resolved in favor of the coherent, radical new policy of dominance asserted through the unilateral, pre-emptive use of force to overthrow other governments. The more clearly the Administration stated this policy, the more the world rebelled.

The path through domestic events to this same destination arguably begins with the impeachment attempt against President Bill Clinton, in which the Republican Party abused its majority power in Congress to try to knock a President of the other party out of the executive branch. The attempt failed, but the institutional siege on the presidency continued in the resolution of the freakishly close vote in Florida in 2000. In a further abuse of government power--in this case the judicial branch--the President was chosen by a vote not of the people of the United States but of the Supreme Court.

The message of Republicans at the time in Congress and the Florida legislature was that if judges did not produce the result they demanded, they would bring on a constitutional crisis in the House of Representatives. A new conception of democracy was born: Freedom is your right to support what we want. Otherwise, you are "irrelevant." You can vote, but you do not decide. "Unilateralism" was born in Florida.

The tragedy of America in the post-cold war era is that we have proved unequal to the responsibility that our own power placed upon us. Some of us became intoxicated with it, imagining that we could rule the world. Others of us--the Democratic Party, Congress, the judiciary, the news media--abdicated our obligation to challenge, to check and to oppose, letting the power-hungry have their way. The government of the United States went into opposition against its own founding principles, leaving it to the rest of the world to take up our cause.

The French have been better Americans than we have. Because the Constitution, though battered, is still intact, we may still have time and opportunity to recoup. But for now, we will have to pay the price of our weakness. The costs will be heavy, first of all for the people of Iraq but also for others, including ourselves. The international order on which the common welfare, including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe damage. The fight for "freedom" abroad is crippling freedom at home.

The war to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or foes.

The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the world.

Stanford U. and the Bush Administration

by EMILY BIUSO

March 28, 2003

As student antiwar activists work to make their case against war persuasive to ambivalent classmates, the leaders of a Stanford University peace group have launched a different kind of campaign--to reform a conservative think tank on campus with dubious ties to the Bush Administration.

The 84-year-old, Stanford-based Hoover Institution, long famous for its influence over national Republican policy, currently wields substantial power at the Pentagon, with eight Hoover fellows sitting on the Defense Policy Board advising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the war in Iraq. But the institution makes an impact, albeit of a different sort, at its home in California, too.

A generous sum of Stanford's endowment goes to Hoover each year (the university donates $1 million in general funds to Hoover's library and archive annually) and some of the institution's right-leaning fellows teach in Stanford's economics and political science departments.

Additionally, the two are linked in name and through shared property, and Hoover's director reports directly to Stanford's president.

The student-run Stanford Community for Peace and Justice (SCPJ) says that such formal ties are a violation of the university's code of academic freedom. The group, about fifty students working for nonviolence, charges that the Hoover Institution is guided by a politically charged mission statement that factors into the hiring of Hoover fellows, some of whom end up in the university's classrooms.

That statement declares, in part, that Hoover seeks to "limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals." In the past it has also defined its mission as "to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx," and previous director W. Glenn Campbell (who led Hoover from 1960 to 1989) had a fundraising strategy that focused on fighting communism abroad and on campus.

John Raisian, Hoover's director, contends that the mission statement is not partisan, but a historical statement: "It annunciates constitutional principles relating to freedom," he says. But activists counter that an institution with such a philosophy is taking a job candidate's political views into account when hiring decisions are made and has no place at a university where academic freedom is guaranteed.

To make their point, in February SCPJ presented to Stanford president John Hennessy a petition signed by more than 600 students protesting the discrepancy between Stanford's academic freedom policy and Hoover's mission statement. SCPJ is calling for Hoover to alter its mission statement; barring that, they want Stanford to sever ties with the institution. "Our basic idea was that as student activists, we need to organize students not just to go to rallies but to empower them to see that they can create concrete changes in their own lives, their own campus and the structures that connect them to war policy," says Calvin Miaw, a senior and SCPJ co-coordinator.

The group set out to publicize their campaign and gain support by canvassing the campus with their petitions. Kate Skolnick, a sophomore and SCPJ co-coordinator, said that the hours she spent circling the dining hall gave her a chance to try her arguments out on people. "Overwhelmingly, people were very hesitant to sign the petition, to put their name on something," she said. And though some students were dismissive, she was encouraged by their interest in debating the issue. "It sounded like people were really thinking about things."

After acquiring about 600 signatures, representatives of five student groups presented the petition to Hennessy in a private meeting.

In addition to SCPJ, the coalition included members from the Muslim Student Awareness Newtwork, the Young Communist League, the Stanford Labor Action Coalition and Students for Environmental Action. Both Hennessy and Raisian maintain that neither the mission statement nor the university's relationship with Hoover will change. "I don't see reason to do either one," Hennessy said. "I don't think they stand a chance," Raisian agreed, calling the campaign "an interesting intellectual exercise."

In response to such blithe dismissal, organizers have decided on a new target to get officials' attention: Stanford's pocketbook. They are urging parents and alumni to set aside their planned donation to Stanford in order to urge the university to act to reform Hoover. They've only recently started publicizing this effort through fliers and the SCPJ website (www.stanford.edu/group/peace/ ); it remains to be seen whether this will be more effective than the petition. "A lot of the reason this is going to be such a challenge for us is he [President Hennessy] is beholden to a lot of conservative, wealthy donors who are very happy to have Hoover here on campus," Skolnick said.

But it isn't just money that stands in the way of SCPJ's objectives. Activists are also facing resistance from students and others who claim the group is only charging a violation of academic freedom because the accused violator is conservative rather than liberal. "Some people think we're the ones suppressing opposing viewpoints, which is a misinterpretation of our intents," Skolnick said. "It's not excluding conservative opinion on campus. We just don't want it to be an institutionalized ideology."

The group freely admits that it is Hoover fellows' involvement in the Bush Administration that prompted their investigation into academic freedom and Hoover's mission statement. Had Hoover fellows been involved in, say, peace advocacy rather than defense strategy, the SCPJ would probably not have sought reform on the basis of violating academic integrity. Still, activists don't think their partisanship dilutes their campaign. "I don't think our motivation destroys the legitimacy of our argument," Miaw said.

Indeed, the argument has been made before--most recently by faculty. During the Reagan presidency, close links between the Administration and Hoover prompted Stanford faculty to draft a petition demanding investigation into the relationship between the university and the think tank. A committee was appointed, but little else was accomplished besides a "rubber-stamping of Hoover," said Ron Rebholz, a professor emeritus of English at Stanford who was closely involved in the Hoover battle during the 1980s.

Faculty also battled the planned construction of the Hoover-backed Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Reagan Center for Public Policy on campus. In 1985 Stanford's trustees, led by chairman Warren Christopher, agreed that the library and a small museum could be built in the foothills overlooking campus but that the Hoover-run policy center would have to go elsewhere. "It was the only victory in my political career at Stanford," Rebholz said. "We had hoped for a divorce between Stanford and Hoover. And that would be very difficult to achieve."

Rebholz, who has met with some of the students, is happy to see them taking up the cause of Hoover again, but he is skeptical that Hennessy or the board of trustees can be convinced. "The trustees are not progressive," he said. "No president has ever supported divorce."

Still, Miaw and Skolnick remain upbeat. "It doesn't matter how he [Hennessy] feels personally, it matters how much pressure we can apply," Miaw said. "We're transforming the power relationship between students and the president."

US forces' use of depleted uranium weapons is 'illegal'

By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor

Sunday Herald - 30 March 2003

BRITISH and American coalition forces are using depleted uranium (DU) shells in the war against Iraq and deliberately flouting a United Nations resolution which classifies the munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction.
DU contaminates land, causes ill-health and cancers among the soldiers using the weapons, the armies they target and civilians, leading to birth defects in children.

Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project -- a former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University and onetime US army colonel who was tasked by the US department of defence with the post-first Gulf war depleted uranium desert clean-up -- said use of DU was a 'war crime'.

Rokke said: 'There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction -- yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves.' He added: 'Such double-standards are repellent.'

The latest use of DU in the current conflict came on Friday when an American A10 tankbuster plane fired a DU shell, killing one British soldier and injuring three others in a 'friendly fire' incident.

According to a August 2002 report by the UN subcommission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing 'poison or poisoned weapons' and 'arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering'. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts.

DU has been blamed for the effects of Gulf war syndrome -- typified by chronic muscle and joint pain, fatigue and memory loss -- among 200,000 US soldiers after the 1991 conflict.

It is also cited as the most likely cause of the 'increased number of birth deformities and cancer in Iraq' following the first Gulf war.

'Cancer appears to have increased between seven and 10 times and deformities between four and six times,' according to the UN subcommission.

The Pentagon has admitted that 320 metric tons of DU were left on the battlefield after the first Gulf war, although Russian military experts say 1000 metric tons is a more accurate figure.

In 1991, the Allies fired 944,000 DU rounds or some 2700 tons of DU tipped bombs. A UK Atomic Energy Authority report said that some 500,000 people would die before the end of this century, due to radioactive debris left in the desert.

The use of DU has also led to birth defects in the children of Allied veterans and is believed to be the cause of the 'worrying number of anophthalmos cases -- babies born without eyes' in Iraq. Only one in 50 million births should be anophthalmic, yet one Baghdad hospital had eight cases in just two years. Seven of the fathers had been exposed to American DU anti-tank rounds in 1991. There have also been cases of Iraqi babies born without the crowns of their skulls, a deformity also linked to DU shelling.

A study of Gulf war veterans showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers.

Rokke told the Sunday Herald: 'A nation's military personnel cannot wilfully contaminate any other nation, cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions.

'To do so is a crime against humanity.

'We must do what is right for the citizens of the world -- ban DU.'

He called on the US and UK to 'recognise the immoral consequences of their actions and assume responsibility for medical care and thorough environmental remediation'.

He added: 'We can't just use munitions which leave a toxic wasteland behind them and kill indiscriminately.

'It is equivalent to a war crime.'

Rokke said that coalition troops were currently fighting in the Gulf without adequate respiratory protection against DU contamination.

The Sunday Herald has previously revealed how the Ministry of Defence had test-fired some 6350 DU rounds into the Solway Firth over more than a decade, from 1989 to 1999.

Don't Censor War's Horror

By Ciro Scotti

America's big media outlets should let Americans decide whether to look at pictures of dead U.S. soldiers -- and confront the reality of war

On Sunday morning, Mar. 23, television viewers in the Arab world and beyond saw grisly footage of dead American soldiers who may have been executed.

Excerpts of that tape, apparently made by Iraqi TV and broadcast by the Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera, were shown on Face the Nation, the CBS news program, as correspondent Bob Schieffer was interviewing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

Except for even briefer images and a few still frames, however, other major American news outlets declined to air the tape. On NBC that Sunday morning, talk-show hosts Katie Couric and Matt Lauer -- whose jobs usually include talking to people in funny hats outside their Rockefeller Center studio -- described the "extremely, extremely disturbing images" but never displayed any, lest they upset the nation.

NO PURPOSE?

According to The New York Times, Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo aired the video but claims it was a technical mistake that will not be repeated. ABC News President David Westin was quoted as saying: "I didn't see the showing of actual bodies as necessary or newsworthy." And Bill O'Reilly, resident angry man at Fox News -- the "we report, you decide" network -- said on Mar. 25: "We might not broadcast brutal images if they serve no purpose."

No purpose, Mr. O'Reilly and all you other U.S. TV journalists and network executives? Why don't you report what you're in the Gulf to report, and let America decide if there's no purpose?

Americans need to know and see what's happening to the young men and women who are being put in harm's way. War is cruel and frightening, but more than anything, it's gruesome. For many young people who have never lived through a war, the carnage of conflict is no more real than a violent video game that can be dispatched with the click of a mouse. And older Americans who have forgotten riveting images like the naked and napalmed little girl screaming down a road in Vietnam must reconfront the brutality of the course the nation has chosen.

MISTAKEN SANITIZATION.

As Nightline anchor Ted Koppel says: "I feel we do have an obligation to remind people in the most graphic way that war is a dreadful thing.... To sanitize it too much is a dreadful mistake." Journalist/provacateur Matt Drudge, who posted images from the tapes on his Web site, wrote in an introduction to the photos: "The Drudge Report has wrestled with providing the complete video feed to its readers. The families of the murdered U.S. troops have been notified. And if anchormen and others in the media have viewed it, why can't the average citizen?"

Some might wonder: What about BusinessWeek Online? Yes, we're the Internet outlet for a major news organization, but we aren't covering the day-to-day combat of the war through visual images. As a matter of editorial policy, these pages don't feature pictures of dead soldiers any more than they feature people murdered or maimed in car accidents. It's just not relevant to what we do. But if we were doing a story that said such images are causing the Bush Administration to rethink its strategy in Iraq, for example, I'd say we should run the photos.

Beyond an almost sacred duty to understand the sacrifices that the country is asking of its troops, it's important that Americans not be spared the gore of battle or the horrific consequences that can befall the captured for this reason: Only by knowing the price that may be paid on our behalf, can we better assess any future call to arms.

KEEPING THE PENTAGON'S FAVOR.

Although the U.S military has allowed the media unprecedented access to the Iraq invasion by "embedding" reporters and TV crews among the troops, the Pentagon isn't keen on having dead troopers shown on the nightly news. On one hand, images such as those of the possibly executed soldiers might serve to bolster the already damning case against the hideous rule of Saddam Hussein. On the other, a steady stream of graphic footage might help sway public opinion against the incursion into Iraq, much as it did during the Vietnam War.

Certainly the networks -- whose access and, therefore, ability to compete depend on the cooperation of the Pentagon -- understand this. For what other purpose can they be shielding American viewers from what the rest of the planet is seeing?

One further reason that we need to see those pictures that are worth a hundred sound bytes and a ream of written words is that we Americans must not be coddled if we're to comprehend the world in which we find ourselves -- and our image in it. If we wish, we must be allowed to witness incinerated civilians and soldiers cut down in our place.

White House spokeman Ari Fleischer sniffed recently that President George Bush prefers to get his information about the war from his advisers. That's probably smart, but maybe once in a while the President should bypass his filters and have a look for himself.

The Al Jazeera tape might be one place to start.

Wolfowitz denies authorship of controversial Iraq memo

By Khalid Hasan
30th March 2003

Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary, denied at a press conference on Friday that he was the author of a much publicised 1991 memo that described the ending of the Gulf war as “premature” and called for necessary steps, even regime change, to assure “access” to Persian Gulf oil.

The memorandum was published by the New York Times first and is frequently quoted to prove that the war in Iraq and the regime change it is aimed at bringing about are all part of an old carefully worked-out plan. Wolfowitz is viewed as one of the principal hawks in the Bush administration.

In a special briefing at the Foreign Press Center for overseas correspondents, Wolfowitz answering a question from Daily Times as to his having any second thoughts on the plan of which he is believed to be an author, replied, “I’m not sure exactly — you have these vague references, and there are so many things attributed to me that I — many of which are simply not true. If we’re talking about a draft that some staff member of mine wrote 11 years ago and appeared in the New York Times before I had even read it, I can comment on that some other time.

“If you’re talking about my belief, which really began at the time of the Shi’a and Kurdish uprisings at the end of the Gulf War, that the Iraqi people deserve to be free, that Saddam Hussein would remain a danger to all of us, frankly that is a belief that at the time was shared by the Arab governments that had fought with us. And I remember listening to conversations between senior Arab leaders persuading — trying to persuade the United States that we should in fact support those uprisings. We’re where we are today. The problem grew over 12 years. I believe the world will be a much better place when the Saddam Hussein regime is gone.”

In answer to another question about growing anti-Americanism in the world because of the Iraq war, Wolfowitz said, “There’s no question anti-American sentiment is a problem and an issue. I think some of the people who stoke it should ask themselves why they do. I think there’s no question that progress on the Arab-Israeli issue, and particularly between Israelis and Palestinians, would be an enormous boon to the entire Middle East, and it would certainly put democrats in Arab countries in a much better position. It’s one of many reasons why we want to pursue that avenue. But I truly believe that it cannot but help democratic movements to see talented people like these people’s countrymen and countrywomen free to demonstrate what Arabs can achieve, and I believe it will be pretty impressive.”

The US official also denied that the United States was trying to impose a government on the Iraqi people. “We’re not trying to impose a particular type of government. The word democracy gets used kind of freely, but if you look around the world, there are 75 different variants of democracy. I think the essential idea is that the government has to represent the people, it has to respect the people through the rule of law, and it has to provide for their freedom. And I think when this regime is gone and Iraqis are free to express themselves,” he added.

In answer the question why the US had not so far found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Wolfowitz said, “We are fighting a war — our men and women are out there fighting for their lives, they’re fighting to achieve a military objective. When that objective is achieved, then we can search this country, which I remind you, is the size of the state of California, for weapons that have been hidden extremely carefully. Then we will have access to people who are free to speak and tell us where things are. We’re not yet on a hunt for weapons of mass destruction.”

Scorned general's tactics proved right

Profile of the army chief sidelined by Rumsfeld
by Matthew Engel
Saturday March 29, 2003 The Guardian

This has been a terrible week at the Pentagon: the worst since the building itself was attacked more than 18 months ago. But as his limo drew up to fetch him last night, one of the most senior figures in the building might just have permitted himself the thin smile of a vindicated man.

His name in General Eric Shinseki. And at a time when generals - whether on active or pundit duty - are the hottest showbiz properties in the world, hardly anyone knows who he is.

Officially, he is Tommy Franks's superior, head of the United States army, a member of the mighty joint chiefs, and two months away from what ought to be honoured retirement at the end of a military career stretching back to the Vietnam war.

But for the past two years Gen Shinseki has been in total eclipse after what appears to have been the most spectacular bust-up with his civilian bosses, in particular Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.

Hardly any of this the reached public domain until last month when Gen Shinseki told a congressional committee that he thought an occupying force in the hundreds of thousands would be required to police postwar Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was "far off the mark".

In semi-private, the Pentagon's civilian leadership was far more scathing. A "senior administration official" told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki's remark was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars".

Then the general said it again. "It could be as high as several hundred thousand," he told another committee. "We all hope it is something less." Most of the media were too distracted by the build-up to war to notice. Serious analysts, however, were staggered by the insubordination.

This appears to have been round two of another, more immediately relevant, dispute about how many troops are needed to win this war. In this case, the military prevailed over the original civilian notion that fewer than 100,000 could do it. As even more soldiers rush to the Gulf to bring the number closer to 300,000, the original Rumsfeld plan looks in hindsight to be what the army said at the time: a recipe for possible catastrophe.

The full reality on the ground may not become known until Saddam Hussein has fallen, but no one can now seriously believe - as many top Pentagon civilians appear to have done a week ago - that the main problem for an occupying force will be what to do with all the floral gifts.

The origins of the Shinseki-Rumsfeld war long predate any mention of Iraq. There are many ironies to it, but the most bitter seems to be that the general has found himself characterised as an obstacle to progress. This is improbable on the most personal level. He is a Japanese-American (as is his wife), born in Hawaii in 1942 when his parents were officially enemy aliens.

He was inspired to join the army by the example of uncles who fought for the US then and eradicated the perception that they might be traitors. In Vietnam, "Ric" Shinseki was terribly injured twice - losing a foot the second time - yet he persisted in the army.

He came into office in June 1999 with a clear vision for "transformation" and talked passionately about the army's need to adjust from thinking about traditional enemies to what he called "complicators", including both terrorists and the then little-known phrase "weapons of mass destruction". Gen Shinseki might thus have relished the arrival of a Republican team equally committed to change.

Unfortunately, the two sides had very different ideas about what the words meant.

The general wanted a new kind of army, one that could combine the adaptability of light infantry and the power of heavily mechanised forces. His new bosses had other ideas. "They had pre-decided what transformation meant," said one Pentagon source. "It meant more from space, more from air and it didn't involve the army much. That was the essence of the conflict."

This erupted over the Crusader mobile artillery system, which Mr Rumsfeld has scrapped. Gen Shinseki told Congress a year ago it would have saved lives during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. By then he had already been turned into a lame duck ("castrated", according to the same Pentagon source) by the apparently unprecedented Rumsfeld decision to announce his successor 18 months in advance.

He seems to have been caught in a classic bind: distrusted by his subordinates for being too radical and by his bosses for being too conservative.

On Japanese-American chatlines, he is characterised as a victim of racism.

Certainly in that community he is an authentic hero: "One of the most gracious, soft-spoken, low-key individuals you could meet with four stars on his shoulder," according to Kristine Manami of the Japanese-American Citizens' League.

Put it all together: a nice man, a wounded veteran - and maybe right when it mattered. Despite the allegations, his politics are unknown.

But if he is a Democrat and chooses to go after one of Hawaii's Senate seats, he might have a platform for some very tasty revenge indeed.

Blood on the Tracks

Bushist Party Feeds on Fear and War - Dick Cheney the Multi-Millionaire
By CHRIS FLOYD
(Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and is a regular contributor to CounterPunch.)
March 29, 2003

Before the first cruise missile crushed the first skull of the first child killed in the first installment of George W. Bush's crusade for world dominion, the unelected plutocrats occupying the White House were already plying their corporate cronies with fat contracts to "repair" the murderous devastation they were about to unleash on Iraq. There was, of course, no open bidding allowed in the process; just a few "selected" companies--selected for their preponderance of campaign bribes to the Bushist Party, that is - "invited" to submit their wish lists to the War Profiteer-in-Chief.

It should come as no surprise that one of the leading beneficiaries of this hugger-mugger largess is our old friend, Halliburton Corporation, the military-energy servicing conglomerate. Halliburton, headed by Vice Profiteer Dick Cheney until the Bushist coup d'etat in 2000, is already reaping billions from the Bush wars--which Cheney himself tells us "might not end in our lifetime."

Cheney is an old hand at this kind of death merchanting, of course. In the first Bush-Iraq War, Cheney, playing the role now filled by Don Rumsfeld--a squinting, smirking, lying Secretary of Defense - directed the massacre of some 100,00 Iraqis, many of whom were buried alive, or machine-gunned while retreating along the "Highway of Death," or annihilated in sneak attacks launched after a ceasefire had been called. When George I and his triumphant conquerors were unceremoniously booted out of office less than two years later by that radical fringe group so hated by the Bushists--the American people--Cheney made a soft landing at Halliburton.

There he grew rich on government contracts and taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign partners - like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid Cheney $73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er, Dick Cheney. And while the Halliburton honcho became a multimillionaire many times over, some of his employees were not so lucky - Cheney ashcanned more than 10,000 workers during his boardroom reign. (At least he didn't bury them alive.)

Old news, you say? Irrelevant to the current crisis? Surely, now that Cheney has been translated to glory as the nation's second-highest public servant, he is beyond any taint of grubby material concerns? Au contraire, as those ever-dastardly French like to say. At this very moment, while the smoke is still rising from the rubble of Baghdad, while the bodies of the unburied dead are still rotting in the desert wastes, Dick Cheney is receiving one million dollars a year in so-called "deferred compensation" from Halliburton. That's a million smackers from a private company that profits directly from the mass slaughter in Iraq, going into the pockets of the "public servant" who is, as the sycophantic media never tires of telling us, the power behind George W.'s throne - and a prime architect of the war.

This is money that Cheney wouldn't get if Halliburton went down the tubes--a prospect it faced in the early days of the Regime, due to a boneheaded merger engineered by its former CEO, a guy named, er, Dick Cheney. In a deal apparently sealed during a golf game with an old crony, Cheney acquired a subsidiary, Dresser Industries--a firm associated with the Bush family for more than 70 years--which was facing billions of dollars in liability claims for its unsafe use of asbestos. Dresser's bigwigs doubtless made out like bandits from the deal, and Cheney left the mess behind when the grateful Bushes put him on the presidential ticket, but there was serious concern that Halliburton itself would be forced into bankruptcy - unless it found massive new sources of secure funding to offset the financial "shock and awe" of the asbestos lawsuits.

Then lo and behold, after September 11, Halliburton received a multibillion-dollar, open-ended, no-bid contract to build and service U.S. military bases and operations all over the world. It also won several shorter-term contracts, such as expanding the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, where the Regime is holding unnamed, uncharged suspected terrorists in violation of the Geneva Convention. With this fountain of federal money pouring into its coffers - and Bushist operatives in Congress pushing legislation to restrict asbestos lawsuits--Halliburton was able to hammer out a surprisingly favorable settlement deal with the asbestos victims. The company--and Cheney's million-dollar paychecks--were saved. Praise Allah!

Halliburton is just the tip of the slagheap, of course. Daddy Bush's popsicle stand, the Carlyle Group - which controls a vast network of defense firms and "security" operations around the world - is also panning gold from the streams of blood pouring down the ancient tracks of Babylon. Junior Bush - who like a kept woman made his own influence-peddling fortune through services rendered to a series of sugar daddies--has conveniently gutted the national inheritance tax, swelling his own eventual bottom line when his father joins the legions of Panamanian, Iranian, Afghan, Iraqi--and American--dead he and his son have sent down to Sheol.

Never in American history has a group of government leaders profited so directly from war--never. Like their brothers-in-arms, Saddam's Baathists, the Bushists treat their own country like a sacked town, looting the treasury for their family retainers and turning public policy to private gain. Like Saddam, they feed on fear and glorify aggression. Like Saddam, they have dishonored their nation and betrayed its people.

But the money sure is good, eh, Dick?

US Insiders Gloomy on Iraq War

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Weekend Edition March 29/30, 2003 CounterPunch War Diary

The situation of the US/UK invading force can be assessed as difficult. The US 3rd Infantry Division, the Marines, Division, the 101st Airborne continue to be plagued by stretched supply lines which yesterday saw one Marine unit entirely immobilized by lack of diesel fuel and the food down to one “meal” a day, with the MREs being decried by the soldiers as not fit for human consumption. Disorganization is rife. The 3rd Infantry Division marches up one side of the Euphrates, while their baggage and supplies proceed up the other, which renders bridges more “strategic” than ever. The helicopter assaults on the Iraqi Medina division left, on one account, seven still serviceable. Two helicopters were lost in the attack and twenty-six were damaged.

It is becoming clear that last week’s violent sandstorm was a very serious blow to the invaders. The Iraqis were able to reinforce their defenses around Najaf and assault launch some damaging attacks. US high tech equipment has been seriously degraded by the sand. Perennial warnings about excessive reliance on hi-tech weaponry and the hype of a supposed Revolution in Military Affairs are now returning in force.

The US/UK forces have taken no major town, are being harassed by guerilla forces and now menaced by suicide units. Five US soldiers of the Third Infantry Division were killed by one such unit on a highway north of Najaf. The British are attempting to win hearts and minds in Basra by aiming their artillery at the food warehouses, and attempting to reduce the city by plague, endeavoring to cut off the water supply. A missile killed 200 in a shelter in Basra, allegedly a “command and control center” which may by US/UK-speak for a civilian shelter, as with the Amariya shelter in Baghdad in 1991.

Even the very base of the supply line in Kuwait is a choke point, not just in the crowded and potential dangerous Persian Gulf but in the port of Kuwait, which has only 21 landing births.

Behind the steady stream of “All according to plan”, and “calm and orderly advance” press releases being pumped out of Qatar (always excepting Wallace’s dissenting squeak that the war wasn’t going according to war-game scenarios), and the Pentagon there is extreme nervousness among seasoned military observers. Serious reinforcements will take weeks to arrive. Optimists suggest that the US Third Infantry Division will soon engage and destroy the Iraqi Medina division and the road to Baghdad will lie open. A less sanguine assessment is that the two divisions will bog down in a First World War-style confrontation, with the US disadvantage of those stretched communications. The third scenario is that the Medina division will outflank the Third ID, take it in the rear and overwhelm it. Then the exultant Arab street will erupt in the humiliation of the Great Satan.

Allah, 1, Jahweh, 0.

And so it will all get much, much nastier. The actual fighting component of the invading US/British force is small because (as anonymous Pentagon officers are now bitterly complaining) Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's preference for Special Forces prevailed over Gen. Tommy Franks's recommendation of a far larger force; also because huge peace demonstrations in Turkey lopped off the northern half of the invading pincers. If urban fighting increases, US strategy will veer toward old-fashioned saturation bombing. The temptation to flatten significant portions of Baghdad by B-52 raids is growing sharply as the land force gets seriously stymied.

As regards the small US/UK force trying to overwhelm Baghdad, imagine a force far less than one of the recent peace demonstrations landing in Corpus Christi, Texas, then advancing towards Phoenix through sandstorms, bypassing all major conurbations and occasionally announcing it has successfully seized significant portions of the deserts of the south west and nervously threatening to declare war on Mexico if it intervenes. (On this latter point note that the Iranian backed Islamic council has told its adherents in southern Iraq not to rise; also that the Kurds are conspicuously sitting on their hands.

The Agitprop War

The propaganda war is not going according to Western plans either. There are plenty of excellent and courageous correspondents and observers in Baghdad, not least Paul Wood of the BBC. Robert Fisk’s account "Bitter Truths of Basra"on this site attests to the importance of the Al Jazeera coverage in Basra. We have the truly extraordinary situation that the Iraqi spokesman in Baghdad is being given more credibility than the far wilder military flacks who have seriously damaged their credibility with numerous baseless claims about the capture of Iraqi towns, and preposterous British allegations that it is necessary to destroy Basra in order to bring it vital humanitarian supplies.

It should also be said that many reporters with major organizations are doing a useful and professional job. We have been reading excellent reports from UPI, Reuters and even AP, as well as Knight Ridder and other papers.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld continues to perform valiantly as a vital Iraqi asset, tremulously discovering the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners or suddenly threatening war against Syria and Iran. Another Rumsfeld propaganda coup: The retired general named as civilian governor of occupied Iraq has visited Israel on a trip paid for by a right-wing group that strongly backs an American military presence in the Middle East. Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the co-coordinator for civilian administration in Iraq, put his name in October 2000 to a statement blaming Palestinians for the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence and saying that a strong Israel was an important security asset to the United States. This piece of information circulated the Middle East with as much rapidity as the resignation of Richard Perle from his chairmanship of the Defense Board and the supposed trip of Vice-President Cheney’s daughter to become a human shield.

Chickens in a Darkening Sky

So the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost, and bedtime reading is Thucydides' account of the disastrous Athenian siege of Syracuse. Start with the amazed discovery of the White House, the Defense Department and the permanently embedded US press corps that nations don't care to be invaded, even if they have been misgoverned by a tyrant for decades. How many Russians died defending the Soviet Union from German invasion after enduring famine and Stalin's terror? This isn't 1991, when Iraqis asked themselves, "Why die for Kuwait?"

Basra? "Military officials," ran a European press report, "later admitted that they had vastly underestimated the strength of Iraqi resistance and the loyalty of Basra's population to Saddam." The report quoted a British officer as saying "there are significant elements in Basra who are hugely loyal to the regime."

Kurdish-held northern Iraq? "Even in Kurdistan," reported the London Independent, (in the person of my brother, Patrick Cockburn), "where the US is popular and where President Saddam committed some of his worst atrocities, there are flickers of Iraqi patriotism. A Kurdish official, who has devoted years to opposing the government in Baghdad, admitted: 'Iraqis won't like to see American soldiers ripping down posters of Saddam Hussein though they might like to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy watching the Stars and Stripes being raised near Umm Qasr.'"

Rumsfeld Visits Geneva

But perhaps the most grotesque chicken now roosting in the coop came in the form of Rumsfeld's sudden discovery of the Geneva conventions regarding prisoners of war. When five captured US soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras, Rumsfeld immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them." True. But the United States does not hold the high moral ground in leveling this charge.

In January 2002 the United States released a photograph of Guantánamo detainees kneeling, shackled and hooded. The Red Cross said the United States may have violated the Geneva conventions by releasing the photo, since no "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever." Under conditions of sleep deprivation, bright light and other techniques, at least 25 prisoners in Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo have tried to kill themselves, some more than once.

The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war" but "unlawful combatants." But as George Monbiot of the London Guardian remarks, "The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war."

On March 6 US military officials acknowledged that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had died during interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul. A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide." The men's death certificates showed that one died from "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." Another prisoner suffered from a blood clot in the lung that was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury."

On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Kunduz to Northern Alliance commander Gen.Abdul Rashid Dostum. A major war crime, with powerful evidence of US participation, ensued. Jamie Doran's 2002 documentary film Massacre in Afghanistan records how 3,000 prisoners were loaded into container trucks, with the doors sealed and the trucks left to stand in the sun for several days. An Afghan soldier said he was ordered by a US commander to fire shots into the containers to provide air, although he knew he would certainly hit some of those inside. An Afghan taxi driver reports seeing a number of containers with blood streaming from the floors. According to one of the drivers, survivors of the transport ordeal were dumped in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif. As thirty to forty US soldiers looked on, those prisoners still alive were shot and left in the desert to be eaten by dogs.

Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them." After an investigation, the German newspaper Die Zeit concluded that "No one doubted that the Americans had taken part." Doran, an Irishman, says in his film that the Pentagon and State Department have tried "by any means possible" to block an investigation.

Inflated Price of Hot Air Dooms Festival

The amount of hot air being put out by official US and UK spokespersons has led to an unexpected surge in the price of this vital commodity. It is feared that unscrupulous entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the recently deregulated market to corner hot air stocks and hold them off the market, thus causing the base price of hot air to rise. Democrats in Congress are calling on the Bush administration to open up the national hot air reserve, now guarded by a mixed force of Wall Street Journal editorial writers carrying their trademark popguns, plus a rabble of fedayeen in civilian clothes press ganged from the Standard, New Republic and CNN.

Bitter Truths About Basra

Al-Jazeera's Harrowing Footage

By ROBERT FISK
March 29, 2003

Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl--victim of an Anglo American air strike--is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress.

An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape--filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad--is raw, painful, devastating.

It is also proof that Basra--reportedly "captured'' and "secured'' by British troops last week--is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein's forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck.

A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming--and presumably British--shells. The short sequence of the dead British soldiers--over which Tony Blair voiced such horror yesterday--is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years, pictures which never drew any condemnation from the Prime Minister.

The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen.

Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers' British Army Jeep and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, which the Jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed.
Also to be observed on the unedited tape--which was driven up to Baghdad on the open road from Basra--is a British pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red and blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked "ARMY'' in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod which probably contains the plane's camera.

Far more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain.

A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming--presumably British--shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.

The al-Jazeera tapes, most of which have never been seen, are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the city's main roads to Baghdad still open--this is how the three main tapes reached the Iraqi capital--but General Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, and telling al-Jazeera's reporter that his men will "never'' surrender to Iraq's enemies. Armed Baath Party militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses near the city's Sheraton Hotel.

Mohamed al-Abdullah, al-Jazeera's correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen conducting interviews with families under fire and calmly reporting the incoming British artillery bombardment. One tape shows that the Sheraton Hotel on the banks of Shatt al-Arab river has sustained shell damage.

On the edge of the river--beside one of the huge statues of Iraq's 1980-88 war martyrs, each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards Iran--Basra residents can be seen filling jerry cans from the sewage-polluted river.

Five days ago the Iraqi government said 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded. Yesterday, it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed.
But Mr Abdullah's tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the Basra hospital mortuary over the past 36 hours. One, his head still pouring blood on to the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent for a Western news agency.

Other harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether American or British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.

But at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued resistance in the city and the failure of the British to capture it. For days the Iraqi have been denying optimistic reports from "embedded'' reporters--especially on the BBC--who gave the impression that Basra was "secured'' or otherwise in effect under British control. This the tape conclusively proves to be untrue.

There is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be US prisoners of war. No questions are asked of the men, who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear nervous and gaze at the camera crew and Iraqi troops crowded behind them.

Of course, it is still possible that some small-scale opposition to the Iraqi regime broke out in the city over the past few days, as British officers have claimed. But, seeing the tapes, it is hard to imagine that it amounted, if it existed at all, to anything more than a brief gun battle.

The unedited reports therefore provide damaging proof that Anglo-American spokesmen have not been telling the truth about the battle for Basra.

And in the end this is far more devastating to the invading armies than the sight of two dead British soldiers or--since Iraqi lives are as sacred as British lives--than the pictures of dead Iraqi children

Iraq and the Lessons of History

For all sides, the other battle is over which historical analogies apply

By Andrew Nagorski
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

JUDGING BY THE rhetorical battle over the putative lessons of history during the run-up to the war in Iraq, George Orwell’s famous dictum resonates today more than ever. If President Bush manages to convince the world that the war was necessary to avoid even worse consequences, a repeat of the disastrous appeasement polices of the 1930s that only encouraged Hitler, then he can emerge morally vindicated. But if the critics can keep much of the world convinced that this is a case, like Vietnam, of American imperial overreach, it will be a public-relations nightmare. A lot—an awful lot—depends on which historical analogy gains popular acceptance.

History can be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as governments and others see fit. There are no perfect historical analogies; each situation is different and has to be judged on its own merits. That said, history is the only guide we have to the possible consequences of our actions, and it deserves careful scrutiny, both in terms of what happened in the past and what might have happened differently. It doesn’t provide a road map, to borrow a term from the Mideast discussion, but it can help. And it’s always a mistake to dismiss the debate over history as a purely intellectual exercise. The implications are practical and sometimes immediate.

The most frequently invoked analogy involves Saddam Hussein and Hitler or Stalin. In its crudest form, it equates the three leaders—and that is simply wrong. Although Saddam relied on wholesale terror and killing to maintain power, there’s a fundamental disproportion of scale here. It in no way whitewashes Saddam’s bloody record to point out that he’s not in the same league as the other two. To do otherwise risks trivializing the horrors inflicted by the worst monsters of the last century.

But if that’s understood, there are legitimate grounds for drawing conclusions from the rise of Hitler in particular. Bush administration officials have argued that inaction on Iraq would have been more catastrophic than the war. While they emphasize the 1930s, others point to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which no one intervened. Writing in The Washington Post on the eve of the current war, Richard Sezibera, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United States, urged the international community “to learn from its mistakes” by recognizing that waiting in such cases is an abdication of responsibility. The new film “Tears of the Sun,” ostensibly set in Nigeria but with a Rwandan-like plot, imagines a group of American commandos stepping in to stop ethnic slaughter. A Hollywood version of what might have been, it ends with the sobering admonition from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

If the greatest danger may be doing nothing, does that mean pre-emptive action is justified? In retrospect, any reasonable person would say that pre-emptive action against Hitler, either by fellow Germans or Western countries, would have been a blessing. One of the reasons my recently published novel, “Last Stop Vienna,” offers a “what if” history of Hitler in the 1920s is to suggest that he could have been—and almost was—stopped on any number of occasions before seizing power. But since this was a time when much of the world hadn’t begun to recognize the danger Hitler represented, such an act wouldn’t have been recognized as the history-changing event it would have been. Truly effective pre-emption is rarely appreciated.

But misguided action can be dangerous as well. Graham Greene’s powerful novel “The Quiet American,” now made into a less convincing movie, is still one of the best portrayals of the arrogance, ignorance and recklessness that plunged the United States into the quagmire of Vietnam. Today’s echo of similar dangers comes from an unlikely source: The Wall Street Journal. While its hawkish editorial page has backed the war in Iraq all the way, the front page trumpeted a story just before the fighting started with the headline: mideast invasions hold many pitfalls, history teaches

If history teaches anything, it’s that there’s nothing predetermined about our actions. When historians and journalists write their books or articles, they look for the patterns and decisions that produced a particular outcome. Intentionally or not, this can convey the impression that the outcome was inevitable. In most cases, that simply isn’t true. Past leaders and peoples could have made different choices and produced different outcomes. That, in turn, reinforces the notion that our actions and choices matter today.

There’s nothing predetermined in what will happen next, in Iraq or elsewhere. We can be informed by history, but never completely guided by it.

In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views

A FAIR STUDYMarch 18, 2003

(FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. )

Network newscasts, dominated by current and former U.S. officials, largely exclude Americans who are skeptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq, a new study by FAIR has found. of all

Among the major findings in a two-week study (1/30/03=2/12/03) of on-camera network news sources quoted on Iraq:

Seventy-six percent of all sources were current or former officials, leaving little room for independent and grassroots views. Similarly, 75 percent of U.S. sources (199/267) were current or former officials.

At a time when 61 percent of U.S. respondents were telling pollsters that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections (2/6/03), only 6 percent of U.S. sources on the four networks were skeptics regarding the need for war.

Sources affiliated with anti-war activism were nearly non-existent. On the four networks combined, just three of 393 sources were identified as being affiliated with anti-war activism-- less than 1 percent. Just one of 267 U.S. sources was affiliated with anti-war activism-- less than half a percent.

FAIR examined the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The study began one week before and ended one week after Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation at the U.N., a time that saw particularly intense debate about the idea of a war against Iraq on the national and international level.

More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources-- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.)-- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war. Even this was couched in vague terms: "Once we get in there how are we going to get out, what’s the loss for American troops are going to be, how long we're going to be stationed there, what’s the cost is going to be," said Kennedy on NBC Nightly News (2/5/03).

Similarly, when both U.S. and non-U.S. guests were included, 76 percent (297 of 393) were either current or retired officials. Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented. Of all official sources, 75 percent (222 of 297) were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that support the Bush administration's position on Iraq; only four out of those 222, or 2 percent, of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war.

Twenty of the 297 official sources (7 percent) represented the government of Iraq, while a further 19 (6 percent) represented other governments-- mostly friendly to the U.S.-- who have expressed doubts or opposition to the U.S.'s war effort. (Another 34 sources, representing 11 percent of officials, were current or former U.N. employees.

Although members of the U.N. inspection teams made statements that were both critical of Iraq's cooperation and supportive of further inspections, because of their official position of neutrality on the question of war they were not counted as skeptics.) Of all official sources, 14 percent (43 of 297) represented a position skeptical or opposed to the U.S. war policy. (Sources were coded as skeptics/critics if either their statements or their affiliations put them in that category; for example, all French government officials were counted as skeptics, regardless of the content of their quote.)

The remaining 96 sources-- those without a current or former government connection-- had slightly more balanced views; 26 percent of these non-official sources took a skeptical or critical position on the war. Yet, at a time when 61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll (2/5-6/03) were saying that they felt the U.S. should "wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time," only sixteen of the 68 U.S. guests (24 percent) who were not officials represented such views.

Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were "persons in the street"; five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization. Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups.

Overall, 68 sources, or 17 percent of the total on-camera sources, represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy-- ranging from Baghdad officials to people who had concerns about the timing of the Bush administration's war plans. The percentage of skeptical sources ranged from 21 percent at PBS (22 of 106) to 14 percent at NBC (18 of 125). ABC (16 of 92) and CBS (12 of 70) each had 17 percent skeptics.

FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001

CONTACT NUMBERS OF US MEDIA

Network/Cable Television

ABC

ABC News
47 W. 66 St., New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-7777
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-222-7777
General e-mail: netaudr@abc.com

ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings:
Phone: 212-456-4040
Fax: 212-456-2795
E-mail: netaudr@abc.com

Nightline:
1717 DeSales St., NW, Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-222-7000
E-mail: niteline@abc.com

20/20:
147 Columbus Ave., 10th fl, New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-2020
Fax: 212-456-0533
E-mail: 2020@abc.com

ABC's Good Morning America:
147 Columbus Ave., New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-5900
Fax: 212-456-7257
E-mail: netaudr@abc.com

CBS

CBS News
524 W. 57 St., New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212-975-4321
Fax: 212-975-1893
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-457-4385

CBS Evening News with Dan Rather:
Phone: 212-975-3691 or 202-457-4385
Fax: 212-975-1893
Email: evening@cbsnews.com

The Early Show:
Phone: 212-975-2824
Fax: 212-975-7133 or 212-975-2033

60 Minutes:
555 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019-2985
Phone: 212-975-2006
Fax: 212-757-6975

60 Minutes II:
Phone: 212-975-6200

CNBC

2200 Fletcher Ave.
Fort Lee, NJ 07024
Phone: (201) 585-2622
Fax: (201) 583-5453
info@cnbc.com
CNN

CNN
One CNN Center, Box 105366, Atlanta, GA 30303-5366
Phone: 404-827-1500
Fax: 404-827-1906
E-mail: cnn.feedback@cnn.com

CNN Washington Bureau
820 First St. N.E., Washington, DC 20002
Phone: 202-898-7900
Fax: 202-898-7923

Crossfire:
Phone: 202-898-7655
Fax: 202-898-7611

Larry King Live:
Phone: 202-898-7690
Fax: 202-898-7686

Fox News Channel

1211 Ave. of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4229
comments@foxnews.com
MSNBC

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453
world@msnbc.com
NBC

NBC
30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112
Phone: 212-664-4444
Fax: 212-664-4426

NBC's Washington Bureau
4001 Nebraska Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016
Phone: 202-885-4200
Fax: 202-362-2009

NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw:
Phone: 212-664-4971 or 202-885-4259
Fax: 202-362-2009
E-mail: nightly@nbc.com

NBC News' Today:
Phone: 212-664-4602 or 202-885-4231
Fax: 212-664-4426
E-mail: today@nbc.com

Dateline NBC:
Phone: 212-664-7501
Fax: 212-664-7864
E-mail: dateline@nbc.com


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Public Broadcasting

PBS

PBS
1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: 703-739-5000
Fax: 703-739-8458

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:
3620 South 27th St., Arlington, VA 22206
Phone: 703-998-2150
E-mail: newshour@pbs.org

NPR

National Public Radio
635 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20001-3753
Phone: 202-513-2000
Fax: 202-513-3329
E-mail: Jeffrey Dvorkin, Ombudsman ombudsman@npr.org

All Things Considered:
Phone: 202-513-2110
E-mail: atc@npr.org

Morning Edition:
Phone: 202-513-2150
Fax: 202-513-3329
E-mail: morning@npr.org


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National Newspapers

Los Angeles Times
202 West First Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: 800-528-4637 or 213-237-5000
Fax: 213-237-4712
E-mail: letters@latimes.com


New York Times
229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-556-1234
Fax: 212-556-3690
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-862-0300
E-mail: nytnews@nytimes.com

USA Today
7950 Jones Branch Dr., McLean, VA 22108
Phone: 800-872-0001 or 703-854-3400
Fax: 703-854-2165
E-mail: editor@usatoday.com

Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281
Phone: 212-416-2000
Fax: 212-416-2658
E-mail: editors@interactive.wsj.com


Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW, Washington, DC 20071
Phone: 202-334-6000
Fax: 202-334-5269
E-mail: ombudsman@washpost.com

Associated Press
50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-621-1500
Fax: 212-621-7523
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-776-9400



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Magazines

Newsweek
251 W 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212-445-4000
Fax: 212-445-5068
E-mail: letters@newsweek.com

Time magazine
Time & Life Bldg., Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-522-1212
Fax: 212-522-0323
E-mail: letters@time.com

U.S. News & World Report
1050 Thomas Jefferson St., Washington, DC 20007
Phone: 202-955-2000
Fax: 202-955-2049
E-mail: letters@usnews.com