Section 48 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 June 28 Saturday.
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Yesterday, coming home on the train, I was reading in the newspaper about the ongoing guerilla war in Iraq, which seems to be heating up - snipers shooting at American soldiers, grenades being dangled from overhead bridges, British military police killed in a firefight with the local population in some Iraqi town someplace. Obviously the situation is deteriorating. So I was surprised to turn on the Internet today and find Donald Rumsfeld doing his best to wriggle away from reality.

On what seems to be an American news site run by some outfit called mercurynews.com I found an article by Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press, datelined Washington. It starts:-

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday declined to attribute violence against U.S. soldiers in Iraq to guerrilla warfare, instead blaming scattered, disorganized remnants of the ousted Iraqi government.

When asked whether the attacks could be considered guerrilla warfare, Rumsfeld told reporters, "I don't know that I would use that word." He noted that thousands of Iraqis had been turned out of prisons, and "they're doing things that are unhelpful to the Iraqi people."

Now, plainly, in the face of a growing military problem, Rumsfeld is indulging in a little semantic spin doctoring. The problem is that semantics don't win wars.

What really startles me is:-

(a) That, as the crisis grows, Rumsfeld is persisting with his "no problem" attitude ("Stuff happens"); and

(b) That, in general, the American media are not calling him on this.

I've read, here and there, that the American media have lined up behind the American government on the Iraq war and other matters, and that seems to be very much the case here. The Defense Secretary comes out and does his bit of spin doctoring, and the American media, by and large, kicks off by quoting him, and doesn't do much more than quote him.

To get a different perspective, I went to:-

The New Zealand Herald

Here I got another surprise in the form of an article datestamped "28.06.2003 12.00pm" (New Zealand time, presumably.) The article is datelined Baghdad and opens:-

A US soldier was shot in the head and critically wounded while shopping in a Baghdad store on Friday, the latest target in a surge of attacks that analysts say could explode into open revolt.

The words that really surprised me were the words "that analysts say could explode into open revolt."

Over the last few weeks I've pretty much stopped thinking about Iraq. My feeling about Iraq could be summed up as follows:-

"Well, it's a mess, and the Americans are making a real hash of things by trying to run Iraq on the cheap, but I guess it'll sort itself out in the end."

However, the statement that Iraq "could explode into open revolt" indicates that maybe things will not sort themselves out. Furthermore, this statement makes a certain amount of sense, given the increasing tempo of attacks on British and American troops.

According to the article in The New Zealand Herald, a "risk consulting company" called Kroll has told corporate clients "that an Iraqi revolt against occupying forces was one of two most likely scenarios in 2003. The other was a so-called wobbly landing with some instability but not outright revolt."

The article deals with the American response to the situation like this:-

US officials blame die-hard supporters of fallen leader Saddam Hussein for attacks on their troops but many Iraqis say there is widespread anger at the occupation and the failure to provide basic services and security.

At the foot of the article there's a credit to "REUTERS," so presumably this piece of journalism came out of the Reuteurs machine and went to news organizations around the world, and is not unique to The New Zealand Herald.

However, of the online accounts that I looked at today, the one in The New Zealand Herald was the one which best followed the traditional conventions of mainstream journalism: providing coverage of the official line, but, at the same time, endeavoring to give some background and perspective.

The New Zealand Herald, by the way, could be described as being neither pro-American nor anti-American. If you want objective, professional news updates, it's a reasonably good place to start.

With Rumsfeld and guerilla war in mind, I went back to the blog of Salam Pax in Baghdad:-

Salam Pax Baghdad

A few days back, Salam was writing about a terrifying taxi ride he had in Baghdad with a taxi driver who apparently had a grenade with him. This is part of what Salam writes about the taxi driver:-

Now you might say that he is part of that movement which calls itself al-Auda [the return] and is planning attacks here and there (I wish people would stop calling them sporadic but I will get to that in a moment). What makes this guy even more dangerous is that he is not part of the Ba'athi underground plot to re-emerge. He is one of the loonies who have taken the call to Jihad issued by the Imam of the abu-Hanifa mosque seriously. And these people just play so easily into the hands of the Auda. Anyway this auda rumor needs some serious confirmation because I haven't seen anything, banner or graffiti, that actually names them.

The taxi driver whom Salam is describing is not a common criminal (that is, he is not someone who is intent of breaking the law for personal gain.) Rather, he's a one-man guerilla army. Or, to look at things from a different perspective, a head case, an accident waiting for a place to happen.

Salam next turns to the question of the "sporadic attacks." I think it's fair to sum up his treatment of this question as follows:-

(a) an attack happens, and the American response is severe, for example "A convoy goes thru the village and gets attacked, RPGs or Kalashnikovs are fired. It is night and the visibility is pretty low, as a retaliation and self-defence you have the convoy shooting left and right down the road for the next couple of kilometers."

(b) However, according to the local people "the attackers were strangers, not from the area."

(c) Therefore it seems reasonable to argue that these "sporadic" attacks are engineered to provoke an American response which will stir up the Iraqi people against the Americans. Salam gives a couple of examples then says:-

This sort of thing repeats itself and kind of snowballs from grumbles to calls for Jihad, just like what happened in the Adhamiya district near the abu-Hanifa mosque after the confrontation between Iraqis and American soldiers ended with two dead Iraqis.

Now, Donald Rumsfeld, who is not in Iraq, and who is not currently displaying any signs of being particularly well connected to reality, is not prepared to accept that organized guerilla resistance to the American occupation is emerging.

However, Salam, who is living in Iraq, suggests that the recent attacks by Iraqis on American forces are in fact strategy-driven. It's not criminals doing criminal stuff because they have poor impulse control or because they're evil creatures driven by motiveless malignity or whatever. Rather, it's military action in the service of politics, and the name for that kind of action, when it takes the form of this kind of small-scale military activity, is guerilla warfare.

Writing on 2003 June 26 Thursday, Salam speaks of an incident in which American troops fired on demonstrators, killing some of them. He says:-

From that incident and until today things have been moving in a downward spiral. The "coalition forces" don't feel safe and we don't feel safe either. You can see the distrust in their eyes and the way they hold these big guns towards you when you move close to a check point. And if you ever drive beside a convoy don't look out your window they would be having their guns pointed at you, aimed right between your eyes.

Salam's optimism has obviously taken a hammering in recent days - in his blog, he writes at length about this - and Salam's growing pessimism seems to be more appropriate to the situation than Rumsfeld's free-floating confidence.

The fact is that Donald Rumsfeld is on drugs. For some time now, he's been mainlining a drug called hubris, and he's now as high as a kite, free floating, nearer to nirvana than to the prosaic world of mud and blood and dust and sweat which is inhabited by the increasingly frustrated inhabitants of Iraq.

Today I checked out a couple of other Iraqi blogs. One is by Salam's buddy G:-

Gee in Baghdad

G. says (2003 June 25 Wednesday):-

The Iraqis are so fed up with wars, suffering, party propaganda, regulations and obnoxious people telling you what to do and where to go. I wouldn't be very far from the truth if I say that the foremost concern now for the Iraqis is the economical situation/security/services.

Its not that we r desperately waiting to indulge our selves in the global world of Starbucks and MacDonald's-which I think we are-but for most of the people they just want to live properly without fear, hunger, or secret police

That sounds reasonable. Given what the Iraqi people have been through, it's reasonable to think that the broad mass of the population is war-weary. There are undoubtedly some die-hard Saddam supporters, and there are also, evidently, at least a few go-it-alone warriors living out dreams of jihad (or at least playing dangerously with the idea of living out such dreams.) However, the majority would buy into a wage-earning Starbucks-drinking normality, if any such normality were on offer.

If most Iraqis would settle for a job, a properly policed society and a Starbucks on the corner, then, the obvious solution is for the Americans to deliver just that. But so far they haven't.

Right now, on Salam's blog, there's an introduction to Zainab, a female Iraqi blogger. Salam has apparently met this individual (she's someone who really exists, in other words) although he doesn't know her well. Her first posting is on the www.realwomenonline.com site:-

Iraqi female blogger

She writes on 2003 Friday June 27:-

I know that one day there will be agreat revolution against the Americans and now we have the first seeds of that revolution . many Iraqi soldiers have demonstrated on june 18th in front of ORHA(the republican palace) claiming their rights of either having salaries or retired

This raises a question: Why would anyone want to revolt against the nice Americans? After all, the nice Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein, who was a genuine bad guy. As the whole world saw on TV, the Iraqi people really enjoyed pulling down Saddam's statues.

As Zainab analyzes it, during the days of the Saddam regime there was no freedom but "there were safety &work chances(money)." Now there is freedom. However, unfortunately today's freedom is freedom "without safety or public services with very very mini work opportunities." Consequently, it's only natural that there are people who "prefer the past time of saddam." However, all these people really want is is just "to live their life that's all, they even start wishing if they were born in very poor country which doesn't draw anybody's attention."

Zainab writes:-

Naw we keep hearing news about incidents of Americans being missing or killed in different parts of Baghdad or other provinces ,also the Iraqi popular resistance movement have called other liberation movements abroad to come and work together for Iraq's liberation , sparks ,sparks, of big fire , why all that should happen ? All you have to do is forming a decent real government! Is that hard to be done ? or is it been postponed for some hidden reasons which we cant realized naw but maybe later on we can, only God knows.

Which brings us to the question: Why doesn't Iraq have a government yet? Or peace on the streets? Or a reliably supply of electricity? And a reasonable answer seems to be "because Donald Rumsfeld doesn't want to pay for it."

During today's Internet session I came upon a name new to me, that of Ralph Peters, who apparently is a well-known writer on military affairs. I found an opinion piece by him on the site of The New York Post, a piece dated 2003 June 20.

What Ralph Peters says - and what he says seems very reasonable - is that today's American military is too small for the tasks it faces. Today's military amounts to ten divisions. Peters says:-

For the missions we already face, we need an Army of at least 12 divisions. But the Army won't get those additional forces. Stymied in his attempt to chop several divisions from our already-lean ground forces, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld now proposes to transfer a quarter of a million military jobs to the private sector as a gift to big business.

I promise you: None of our soldiers wants FedEx delivering the ammunition during a firefight, which is essentially what Rummy's scheme proposes. It's a low-down shell game, designed to cheat our soldiers and our citizens.

Ralph Peters seems to be an all-American patriot of the "yeah, sure, let's have another war if necessary" type. I can't say that his politics are really to my taste. However, even so, what he says about the military and about Iraq makes sense to me:-

We are going to be in Iraq for a long time. It's a worthwhile mission, on many counts, but it won't be a short one or a small one. And long after Rumsfeld's K-Mart commissars have moved on to cushy private-sector jobs, Sgt. Jones, faced with his fourth unaccompanied tour in Baghdad and his second divorce, is going to call it quits.

An old saying has been running through my head: "Artillery conquers, infantry occupies."

Because American firepower was vastly superior to anything the Iraqis possessed, smashing up the Iraqi military opposition was accomplished with relative ease. However, get an American-friendly resolution to the ongoing problems in Iraq, there is going to have to be more in the way of a commitment to basic security, which necessarily entails greater military expenditure.

It seems to me that the situation in Iraq is as follows:-

(i) In the bad old days, when Saddam Hussein was the ruler, there was poverty and fear. Nobody was particularly happy, a certain proportion of the population was living in hell. Even so, the system worked, up to a point. If you switched on the air conditioner, the power kicked in and you got air conditioning. If you left your house to go to work, you didn't have to worry about looters trashing the place while you were gone. If you worked in, for example, a school or a hospital or a university, then, up to a point, life was reasonably normal, at least for much of the time.

(ii) The Iraqis were glad to be liberated from Saddam Hussein.

(iii) Unfortunately, the liberated Iraqis find themselves living in a state of anarchic chaos.

(iv) Most Iraqis are war-weary and would happily settle for jobs, money, a policed state and a Starbucks on the corner. However, what they have, instead, is a lawless junkheap.

(v) Washington (as personified by Donald Rumsfeld) seems to take the attitude that, "Hey, there's nothing wrong that can't be fixed by twenty years and some petro dollars." However, what's going to happen (real soon) may be a revolt.

For the American TV viewing audience, the Iraq war of 2003 made an enjoyable war movie. (At least, when I was watching CNN, the commentators and journalists certainly seemed to be getting a buzz out of it.) However, the war movie's over. We're into real life. The problem is, however, that the current American administration seems to be hopelessly unprepared for dealing with any kind of problem which can't be solved by administering suitable quanities of high explosive.

Personally, I think the root cause of the problem is that the American empire has always operated on a franchise basis. The American empire doesn't have what the British Empire used to have: a cadre of professionals who spent their entire lives running the empire. Instead, the American approach (in Iran, for example, back in the days of the shah) has been to find some friendly dictator and let him take charge. However, the franchise approach can't work in Iraq for the simple reason that things have been too badly smashed up. Nothing works anymore.

So what are we left with? Well, on the one hand, we've got Donald Rumsfeld floating around on his cloud, smiling beatifically, remote from the demands of reality. And, on the other hand, we've got a blood and guts ultraviolence movie waiting to be made in Iraq, a red knives and slaughter movie to be called, perhaps, "Revolt in Baghdad!" or perhaps (who knows?) "Vietnam Reloaded."

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2003 August 02 Saturday. Guerilla war Iraq - update.

There is a little piece on war news on the site of The Village Voice. Quote:-

In response to the continued killing of Yankee soldiers, U.S. commanders are staging raids on whole neighborhoods - killing those thought to be guerrillas, rounding up hundreds of others, ransacking homes. Last week, the American military kidnapped the wife and child of an Iraqi general and held them as ransom until the man turned himself in. On Sunday, a man got out of his car to tell American troops searching an area that he was not involved. They shot him.

The article quoted above is dated July 29th, 2003, and is by James Ridgeway.

The Iraqi blogger Salam Pax writes about the Americans shooting people not in his blog

Salam Pax Baghdad

but, rather, on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian.

Quote:-

Take for example the Task Force 20 raid a couple of days ago in Mansur. They got some "intelligence" and surrounded an area that they had bombed with bunker-busting bombs just four months ago. They were not even being shot at or anything. These are people who were driving in their cars through their neighbourhood streets. And got the sheikh of the biggest tribe in Iraq angry in the process. Great job.

The article quoted above is very interesting and is well worth reading in full. It deals with Salam's trip to Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. The article is dated Wednesday July 30, 2003.

One of the nice things about the article is that the editors of The Guardian have not tried to clean up Salam's ever so slightly foreign English, letting his natural voice shine through clearly. This is particularly nice if you have gotten into the habit of reading his blog (see link above) and have gotten used to that voice.

On his blog, however, Salam is at liberty to use language which would never make it into The Guardian:-

You get people saying the Americans are slow, the Americans are not fulfilling their promises. Don't fucking lose it, you are really stretching your luck, act act act. You came and gave people big hopes and you let them fall flat on their faces.

I found a site www.military.com and on it I found the following quote in an article dated June 29, 2003, which starts "One afternoon last week" and talks about a National Public Radio broadcast:-

The subject of the dialogue centered on the declaration, earlier in the day, by Gen. John Abazaid, who as commander of Central Command leads all U.S. forces in Iraq, that the United States was now involved in a classic guerrilla war in that country. This has been an issue that has been gnawing on me for weeks as we have watched our soldiers in Iraq fall like bowling pins.

The article quoted above is by J. David Galland. If you want an informed American opinion about the current guerilla war in Iraq, this seems a good place to start. The writer says "As a past participant of our strategic failure in Vietnam, I am well aware that guerrilla wars are not something that the United States does well."

As of 2003 July 02 you can read, online, some kind of transcript which at one point features the words of General John Abizaid, the American general who is now in command of the American troops in Iraq.

The transcript is at:-

rtv.rtrlondon.co.uk/2003-07-17/b08ae14.html

The transcript appears to be dated July 16, 2003 (and I assume that this is American time, since just above the date there are the words "WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES") and it says, in part (and the following is a direct quote from Abizaid):-

Well, I think that, you know, all of us have to be very clear in what we're seeing. We're seeing a cellular organization of six to eight people armed with RPGs, machine guns, et cetera, attacking us at sometimes times and place of their choosing, and other times we attack them at times and places of our choosing. They are receiving financial help from, probably, regional level leaders. And I think describing it as guerrilla tactics being employed against us is, you know, a proper thing to describe in strictly military terms.

(RPGs are rocket propelled grenades.)

The site that the transcript comes from is:-

rtv.rtrlondon.co.uk/index.html

This apparently has something to do with the Reuters news service, as the words "Reuters Video News" appear on the index.html page which you can access by clicking the link above. (The page seems to give access to transcripts of Reuters TV news shows.)

Abizaid is quoted on the subject of guerilla war in Iraq in an article from The Associated Press which appears on one of the pages of the Tribune-Review which is available on the www.pittsburglive.com site.

The article, which is dated Thursday, July 17, 2003, is datelined Washington, and starts:-

Some U.S. troops may have to stay for yearlong tours of duty in Iraq to fight an increasingly organized "guerrilla-type campaign" from Saddam Hussein loyalists, the war's U.S. commander said.

So, yeah, now it's official. There's a guerilla war going on in Iraq, no doubt about it, and it's anyone's guess how long this will last.

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