Section 21 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 02 Sunday.
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The bad news is that war is coming. The good news is that I have CNN. With this in mind, I wrote a new poem, Sex Metal - Sex metal zex metal zow metal zap metal - / Look, George, look!

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Section 21 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 March 03 Monday.
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It looks like Saddam Hussein is preparing for a bloody battle in Baghdad. This is the latest news direct from Baghdad, from Salam, who notes that The Guardian has already commented on the "freshly dug army trenches filled with oil" - no Iraqi state secrets are been given away here. What Salam saw, and what he posted on Sunday, is this:-

A week ago on the way to work I saw a huge column of blackest-black smoke coming from the direction of Dorah refinery which is within Baghdad city limits, thought nothing of it really. A couple of weeks earlier to that a fuel tank near the Rasheed army camp exploded and it looked the same, stuff like that happens. My father was driving thru the area later and he said it looked like they were burning excess or wasted oil. Eh, they were never the environmentalists to start with; if they didn't burn it they would have dumped it in the river or something. The smoke was there for three days the column could be seen from all over Baghdad being dragged in a line across the sky by the winds. During the same time and on the same road I take to work I see two HUGE trenches being dug, it looked like they were going to put some sort of machinery in it, wide enough for a truck to drive thru and would easily take three big trucks.

A couple of days after the smoke-show over Baghdad I and my father are going past these trenches and we see oil being dumped into the trenches, you could hear my brain going into action, my father gave me the (shutup-u-nutty-paranoid-freak) look, but I knew it was true. The last two days everybody talks about it, they are planning to make a smoke screen of some sorts using black crude oil, actually rumor has it that they have been experimenting with various fuel mixtures to see what would produce the blackest vilest smoke and the three days of smoke from Dorah was the final test. Around Baghdad they would probably go roughly along the green belt which was conceived to stop the sandstorms coming from the western deserts. I have no idea how a smoke screen can be of any use except make sure that the people in Baghdad die of asphyxiation and covered in soot. I think I will be getting those gas masks after all.

Like Salam, I don't have much of an idea of how a smoke screen might fit into Saddam Hussein's plans for the defence of Baghdad. The thought that slides idly through my mind is that lasers do not see well in smoke, and the Americans have a lot of laser-guided weapons. Their tanks have lasers, their bombs have lasers, and so forth.

And it also occurs to me - although the thought is pretty idle - that if there's enough smoke on the battlefield then it would make things a bit tricky when it comes to close air support. One of the great strengths of the American military is their ability to integrate the actions of troops on the ground with close air support.

On the modern battlefield, the Americans can see pretty much anything and everything, but maybe that won't be the case if Saddam Hussein has enough oil to burn.

On top of that I find myself thinking - this is really speculative, but it seems logical enough - that enough fumes in the air from burning gunk might cause problems for any air-sampling gear the Americans are relying on to tell them whether they are or are not under attack from some kind of chemical or biological agent.

The precise details don't really matter. What seems really clear is that Saddam Hussein is going to take a serious shot at fighting. The big question is this: while Saddam seems prepared to fight, is anyone else prepared to fight alongside him? If "No" then the whole show will be over in a couple of days, regardless of how much oil he has to burn. If "Yes" then this could be an extremely bloody battle, like Hue, but on a larger scale.

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Hue is a city in Vietnam which the American marines had to retake from forces loyal to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. I saw some statistics on Hue a few weeks back. If memory serves, the casualty rate amongst Marine Corps troops during the battle for Hue was something on the order of about forty percent.

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Section 21 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 March 03 Monday.
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I downloaded a bunch of stuff about the Bush team's "shock and awe" plan to read on the train. This plan involves a massive aerial attack on Baghdad which one incautious member of the attacking side has described as doing to Baghdad what America earlier did to Hiroshima.

Right now, the train is taking me into Tokyo, a city that an earlier American administration chose to firebomb in the Second World Dar, making a deliberate choice to incinerate tens of thousands of civilians. A bunch of people in the Bush war team now seem keen to do something similar to Iraq.

The point about the firebombing of Tokyo is that it did not break the will of the Japanese people to resist. It took Hiroshima to do that. After Hiroshima, the Japanese figured out that America didn't have to invade Japan to win the war: the Americans could just nuke cities, one by one.

Now it seems that the Bush team is quite seriously thinking about using nukes in Iraq, but against bunkers, not against entire cities. So, unless George Bush is going to nuke Baghdad - and it would be hard for him to do that, given that he loves the Iraqi people so dearly, and bleeds for them as they suffer under Saddam's yoke - the Saddam Hussein team can reasonably believe that any American bombardment of Baghdad will be semi-survivable.

So what are we going to be left with? A heap of dead bodies, mostly Iraqi civilians, the people whom George W. Bush loves so much that he's planning to kill them wholesale.

The "shock and awe" plan has apparently been in the news for about a month or so now, and there's stuff about it all over the Internet, but it somehow slid right by me - so much news, so little time! - and I've only started reading about it today.

There's comment in the Toronto Star - 2003 March 01 - from Ramsey Clark, who was the attorney general of the United States from 1967-69 under president Lyndon Johnson. Ramsey Clark makes the point that George Bush has "an unprecedented, uncompromising obsession for war that threatens peace and economic stability around the world."

He also says (ellipsis as in the original):-

Reverberations from President Bush's bellicosity threatening war, even nuclear assaults, have been heard from India, Pakistan, North Korea ... Colombia, the Philippines and occupied Palestine.

Since I've been paying very close attention to the news coming out of North Korea, I'm confident that, yes, Ramsey Clark is exactly right. The Bush bellicosity (now there's a nice piece of alliteration!) is destabilizing the region in which I happen to live.

.... I started this on the train in the morning but it's now much later in the day. All this news!

Geov Parrish of workingforchange.com has written an article dated 2003 February 24 with the headline "Shock and Yawn" and the subtitle "Plan could kill millions in 48 hours -- why don't Americans care?".

He says "Exactly a month ago Pentagon planner Harlan Ullman, in a CBS-TV interview, publicly revealed for the first time the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" plan for its assault upon Iraq, should (or when) George W. Bush orders it."

And I really thought I was paying attention to the news! But I must have skimmed or skipped this piece of the story.

Here's part of what Geov Parrish has to say about the "shock and awe" plan:-

The United States is planning to suck all the oxygen out of the air with a fireball over the heads of the five million residents of Baghdad -- so that, as another Pentagon interviewee said, "nobody in Baghdad will be safe," whether above ground or below. This has been well-documented public knowledge for a month, widely reported in the rest of the world. But in America it has been roundly ignored, confined to the fringes of the media landscape and probably, by many Americans, dismissed as a result as conspiracist nonsense.

Now I know for a fact that a firestorm can burn so much oxygen so quickly that the inhabitants of a city die of suffocation. That is what happened when the German city of Dresdent was firebombed in World War Two. But, sitting here reading this ... at the end of the day, on a train going out of Tokyo ... I'm finding it hard to believe that the Bush team would go that far.

However, at this point, a few words from the Vietnam War come floating into memory:-

"We had to destroy the village to save it."

And George Bush loves the Iraqi people - right? Did I hear him say something like that on TV, or was I just hallucinating? Let's hope I was just hallucinating. Because isn't there a song that tells us that you always kill the one you love? (Well, maybe I hallucinated that, too.)

I'm never too confident about the accuracy of a whole lot of the stuff that I read on the Internet, and at this stage I'm still at the wondering phase ... could it really be true that the Bush team is planning a massacre of civilians in Baghdad, a massacre which would write Dubya and company into history as a bunch of war criminals?

Well, the Philladelphia Daily news has an article dated 2003 March 02, meaning yesterday, which talks of the "shock and awe" plan and says this:-

CBS News reported late last month that the current Pentagon war plans call for a "Shock and Awe" bombardment of Baghdad if and when a war in Iraq begins. If the report is true, the likely war in Iraq could mark a turning point in modern warfare. It would be the most intense non-nuclear bombing campaign ever - potentially making the aerial assault depicted in Picasso's "Guernica" look like a Monet watercolor.

Which is a very nice piece of writing but still leaves me a bit fuzzy about what exactly is going to happen.

Seeking clarification, I went to www.janes.com/defence which has an extract that non-subscribers can read here, the extract being from an article called "Air Power Over Iraq". This article is dated 2003 February 27.

The extract makes it clear that if you strike from the air then you kill civilians, but, from the extract, it's not clear how many civilians ... but maybe nobody really knows.

Okay, now I've found something that really has me worried ... it's this guy Harlan Ullman, the Pentagon planner who spoke on TV about the "shock and awe" plan. The article is in the St. Petersburg Times and it's an article dated 2003 March 02, and in it there is this:-

"My own sense is that Bush is a guy who had three epiphanies in his life," Ullman said. "His decision to give up drink, his decision to embrace God, and Sept. 11."

Now that's worrying.

A little while ago, I wrote that:-

The day that George Bush gave up drinking was undoubtedly a very good day for George Bush. However, I'm rather inclined to think that it was a rather bad day for the other inhabitants of planet Earth. It was probably George's first big step toward the Osama bin Laden mode of relating to reality, and unfortunately he seems to have taken quite a few more since then.

But I was only two-tenths serious. I mean, this is Dubya we're talking about, right? This guy doesn't dream dreams and see visions ... does he? Well, Ullman seems to think that maybe he does.

Earlier, back on 2003 February 15 Saturday, I wrote about how I still haven't figured out how George Bush ticks but I speculated that "I'm starting to think, more and more, that George Bush is driven by a religious vision."

Well, now I don't think that. I don't think that George is on a mission from God. Rather, having read what Ullman has to say about him, I think that George is on a mission from Uncle Sam.

George has become the Defender of America, a heroic figure who must do whatever it takes to survive in a world of dangerous foes. If he really has to bomb Baghdad (or nuke it - who knows?) then that's sad, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

George W. Bush, in other words, is living in a video game rather than the real world.

Yeah, that kind of fits. It seems to explain why the world I'm seeing in the newspaper headlines looks more and more like a Judge Dredd comic strip and less and less like anything I could possibly think of as normative reality.

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Section 21 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 March 04 Tuesday.
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Today's useful piece of Japanese: "shinkei gassu," meaning "nerve gas". Television is very educational. Checking the dictionary - yes, "shinkei" does mean "nerve" or "nerves" - I find the term "Shinkei ga togatte iru," meaning "(One's) nerves are on edge." Well, let's get this show on the road. Today's entry is about George Bush, groupthink, and the Bay of Pigs.

While reading about the Bush team, I've noticed numerous comments about what a tight-knit groupthink bunch they are, squeezed together in the bunker in one big happy mindmeld, nobody quite sure where Colin Powell ends and Condoleeza Rice begins, or whether that's Dick Cheney's id sticking out of George Bush's ego.

(I was a little horrified when Colin Powell's identity collapsed and he dissolved into the gloop of the cognitive gelatine of the blob monster which presently rules all the parts of planet Earth that really count - but, hey, it's a horror movie, right? So what can you expect?)

Dubya City: groupthink capital of the world. And how does this tie in with the Bay of Pigs, the scene of a disastrous invasion of Cuba sponsored by American president John F. Kennedy? Well, way back when, I read something about the Bay of Pigs military misadventure. Before Kennedy's porcine piece of history-making, the Kennedy team, too, was one big glob of cohesive cognitive glue.

However, after the disaster of 1961 April 17, Kennedy, or someone on the Kennedy team, decided that they had to rethink the way they did business. So when the Cuban missile crisis came along (Soviets are putting nukes in Cuba, maybe testing our resolve over Berlin, so is this where we start World War Three?) the Kennedy team did things differently.

Now, at this point, memory gets blurry, and I don't remember the fine detail, but the guts of it (the guts of the analysis that I read) is that when the Cuban missile crisis started getting toxic, the Kennedy team set up some kind of second-guessing think tank - a group of people who sat well away from the body heat of everyone else and functioned as a "let's rethink this gig" diabolus advocatus. (That's my stab at the Latin for "devil's advocate," but, like a lot of George Bush's English, it's just a stab in the dark.)

So what's the relevance? Do I think that the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq is going to be a military disaster like the Bay of Pigs? No, not a bit of it. I'm picking that direct casualties to the American military are going to be fewer than a thousand and that the whole thing will be over and done with inside of thirty days from the opening cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

The relevance is North Korea.

John F. Kennedy learnt the right lessons from the Bay of Pigs, and managed to get through the rest of the early sixties without planet Earth suffering a major shipwreck. However, George Bush is going to learn precisely the wrong lessons from Iraq, and those lessons (the wrong lessons) are going to be guiding his hand when he turns his attention to North Korea (assuming that North Korea's Kim Jong Il waits patiently for his turn and doesn't take the preemptive route).

George's schooling in the kindergarten of war is really not going to help him when he takes on a high school problem like North Korea, which is going to be a considerably tougher proposition than Afghanistan (a notional country, really) or Iraq (a tough guy dictator with most of his weapons gone and with nobody who really wants to fight for him.)

My take on North Korea is that it's socially cohesive in the same sense that Japan was socially cohesive during World War Two. I believe that when push comes to shove then those guys will fight. And the problem here is that North Korea is not an island.

Japan is an island nation, so, during World War II, American forces could sit offshore and destroy cities one by one, firebombing some and nuking others.

In a similar way, Afghanistan is an island, albeit an island ringed by mountains rather than an island ringed by sea. And Baghdad, analogously, is an island ringed by desert and uninhabited mountains. (Well, there are Kurds, of course, up in the mountains, but the historical record seems to indicate that Kurds don't really count.)

In contrast, North Korea is jammed hard up against South Korea, and North Korea's Kim Jong Il has the option of a land invasion into South Korea. He might or might not make this move (best done preemptively, before the American warmachine is fully geared up). But, even without a land invasion, Kim Jong Il can inflict horrific casualties just by using artillery.

And Kim Jong Il, who has nukes, may well have absorbed the Bush doctrine, which tells us that it's okay to use nukes if you really need them.

And if nukes get used, then everyone else in the region is going to start thinking, "Well, hey, welcome to the wonderful era of nuclear war!" And that gives us the answer to the big question everyone has been asking for the last three years. The question is "What kind of century is the Twenty-First Century?" And the answer is "It's the Nuclear War Century!"

I'm picking, then, that North Korea is going to be where George Bush comes unstuck. Or, rather, George Bush does just fine - he has a good propaganda team, after all, and very few of the people in that big heap of bodies are going to be American citizens. No, it's not George Bush who is going to come unstuck. It's the region in which I live which is going to come unstuck.

As for Iraq, it's not going to be a replay of the Bay of Pigs. Rather, it's going to be a cakewalk. There will, of course, be a few unpleasant jobs to do in the aftermath, such as burying the civilian dead, but presumably the Iraqis will do that for themselves.

My own estimate of civilian casualties is that there will be 200,000 dead in Baghdad, the scientific method for determining this being "take a number, double it, call this sum X, then produce a result Y by multiplying X by the George Bush quotient of 0.475, then add X and Y together."

(In other words, no, I don't think George is going to permit the deliberate incineration of the whole of Baghdad in one big lung-sucking firestorm. There are going to be no deliberately engineered civilian casualties in this war, just the routine collateral dead, their bodycount a statistic which American military science is going to be very, very careful not to analyze.)

So I'm picking that this is going to be a quick, clean war, and I figure that the Iraqis should just get used to the idea that 200,000 of them are shortly going to be dead, because, after all, Saddam Hussein was alive and well on the day that a team of terrorists from Saudi Arabi and other places flew a couple of planes into New York skyscrapers on a mission planned by a bunch of Saddam's enemies who were hanging out in Afghanistan at the time. And Saddam did, after all, send along zero of his own people for the plane ride.

So George Bush, legitimately angry at 9/11, and legitimately determined that there will never be a repeat, is perfectly within his rights to go kill 200,000 innocent civilians who had absolutely nothing to do with this. And he's within his rights to kill Saddam Hussein, too. Because the plain truth, on which the whole world of commentary agrees, is that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the conception, planning, financing or executing of the 9/11 attacks.

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Section 21 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 March 04 Tuesday.
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Okay, here we go! The president of Japan's National Defense Academy makes a "personal comment" about what Japan might have to do if a diplomatic solution to the problem of North Korean nukes cannot be found. Japan could work with the United States and South Korea to inspect North Korean ships in international waters. And:-

Japan could also provide support for U.S. forces to lay mines in major North Korean ports, so as to further squeeze the already devastated North Korean economy. Pyongyang has declared that it would regard any sanctions as an act of war and Japan should be prepared for North Korean military retaliation.

Source: the International Herald Tribune as published (in English) in Japan, issue dated 2003 March 04 Tuesday, page 8, introduced with a small headline reading "A Growing Threat • by Masashi Nishihara" and a larger headline reading "Japan needs to protect itself against North Korea."

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