- Front-page stories announced the greatest battle since
the end of combat in Iraq with fifty-four insurgents killed and not an
American soldier lost. We were given breathtaking details about two separate,
coordinated attacks, the firing of rocket-propelled grenades at American
vehicles, and the fact that many of the attackers wore Fedayeen militia
uniforms associated with Saddam Hussein. Early reports even claimed eleven
insurgents were captured.
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- In addition to headlines, we had sources like CNN pouring
on the infotainment-interviews and instant wisdom. I noticed on the Internet
that the redoubtable Wolf Blitzer exchanged schoolboy fantasies with a
CIA dropout in search of his fifteen minutes. Never mind whether the attack
happened, America learned that it would represent new tactics by insurgents,
massing large forces against an armored American column. Oh, that does
sound ominous and impressive.
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- Gradually, enough bits of information, including a story
that it was actually an attempted heist of new Iraqi banknotes being delivered,
raised serious questions over the battle. The idea of a heist made a little
more sense than insurgents in uniform since Iraq under U.S. occupation
is a country full of angry, unemployed people with streets too dangerous
to walk at night.
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- There were so many doubts, the kinds of clues and irregularities
that make a good detective avoid accepting first appearances. Not a single
American killed by two large forces firing at them? And you had to wonder
what desperate man would come close enough to a 60-ton Abrams tank to be
seen firing a rocket-grenade capable of nothing more than scratching its
paint? And how about those guys, before and after the attack, running around
occupied Iraq in uniform? Where were the captives?
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- On the same day the Washington Post and other major American
publications featured the dazzlingly fuzzy tale, a few sources like al
Jazeera quoted the local hospital as having received the bodies of eight
civilians, including a woman and a child, plus sixty more wounded by American
fire. American tanks and other armored vehicles, said witnesses, had sprayed
heavy fire recklessly over an urban area, including a pharmaceutical plant
where at least one worker was killed
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- We now have enough information to be sure there was no
battle. Yes, there was plenty of shooting and destruction, but not a single
dead insurgent has been produced by American authorities who worked tirelessly
to get pictures of the blood-soaked corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons quickly
beamed around the world. Not a single militia uniform has been produced,
nor any of the dozens of weapons necessarily left behind by dead insurgents
dragged away by comrades.
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- The reports of residents, reports from the hospital,
and the blunt, published observations of at least one American soldier
tell us there was only a big shoot-up by Americans, blasting away at anything
that moved, shattering buildings and the people huddled inside and leaving
the street littered with tank-crushed cars. Who knows, perhaps a landmine
or gunshot somewhere triggered it all, and trigger-happy soldiers, angry
about being in what they regard as a hellhole, let loose enough firepower
to level a city block.
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- It could be that American authorities actually believe
there was a battle, with the dead and wounded having been dragged away
by survivors. There is an irresistible tendency for people to create acceptable
fantasies around the work they do, even when that work is killing.
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- I think it unlikely a retraction is coming. With a number
of senior military men quoted by name that first day on non-existent details,
a retraction would be impossibly embarrassing. Has there been any retraction
of the fantasy about nuclear and other deadly weapons that sent American
armies hurtling into Iraq? Bush just stopped talking about weapons and
started talking about democracy. Good stuff, democracy, and it's hard to
argue even with tongue-twisted platitudes praising its merits.
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- America's press will soon forget the Battle of Samarra,
as it soon forgets everything from which most of the easily-squeezed juice
has been consumed. I very much doubt Iraqis will forget it, certainly not
the relatives, friends, and neighbors of those killed and mutilated by
fear-crazed Americans rolling through their streets with terrible weapons
at the ready.
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- Perhaps the New York Times will do some digging, following
its usual practice of joining the mob in its first bloody howls, and only
later, when ardor has cooled, doing an investigation that keeps the paper
technically accurate for the record. It's a way of enjoying the best of
both worlds, although generally the conclusions of its follow-up investigations
are left ambiguous enough not to embarrass the establishment the paper
serves.
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- The war's main goal - smashing Iraq and resurrecting
it as a liberal democratic state - is also a fantasy, although one on a
vastly greater scale. There is no historical authority whatever to support
even the plausibility of this idea.
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- I recently heard an American academic pontificating on
the subject as though it were something one could study and be expert in,
but it is not. Much like the numerous American experts in terror who make
substantial livings giving scare-lectures to corporate leaders on expense
accounts or Pentagon working lunches, this man is an expert in a subject
at which it is virtually impossible to be expert.
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- Terrorism is not a science, it is an opportunistic approach
to hurting a militarily superior enemy, although it is clearly possible
to put a lot of cumbersome words around the topic. The pseudo-science of
smashing closed societies and rebuilding them as democracies is loaded
with the same kind of coined, self-serving words that fill ephemeral, anecdotal
books on psychology, management, and healthy living. The subjects are close
kin to the junk science that clogs the arteries of America's courts.
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- In the isolated, paranoid, and money-drenched atmosphere
of Washington, junk science is serious stuff. Bush, in making his foolish
decision to invade Iraq, may be seen ultimately as the victim of well-paid
quacks.
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- Perhaps the only cases in history with superficial resemblance
to what is intended for Iraq are those of Germany and Japan after World
War II, but, in truth, there are almost no parallels here.
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- Germany and Japan had suffered war with millions of casualties.
In the massive, late bombing of Japan, before America resorted to atomic
weapons, there were no primary or secondary targets left standing. What
has been inflicted on Iraq is nothing quite so terrible. Japan or Germany
was as close as you can get to being a tabula rasa.
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- The successful conversions of Germany and Japan to liberal
democracy occurred in the extraordinary context of the Cold War. The people
of Germany and Japan were faced with the stark choice of joining one camp
or the other. The correct choice, despite many qualms about America, was
pretty clear with Stalin's terrifying face glowering over the Soviet Union.
Today, the United States is not viewed by the world as the alternative
to a tyrannical, frightening Soviet Union; it is viewed as an arrogant,
privileged land that does pretty much as it pleases.
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- The case is even stronger than that because America today
is so intimately associated with Israel. Even though Arab states are resigned
to Israel's existence, they can hardly be expected to embrace occupation
and constant abuse. Moreover, parallels in the circumstances of occupied
Palestinians to those of occupied Iraqis are unpleasantly close and appear
to grow more so each day.
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- Germany and Japan were both advanced countries, undoubtedly
on the cusp of developing their own democratic institutions, Germany having
already gained some experience between the world wars. Police states simply
do not survive over the long term in advanced countries. Democracy comes
precisely out of the overwhelming force of middle-class interests that
flood an advanced economy.
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- It is almost universally true that poorly-developed countries
are not democracies. There are few enough institutions of any kind in such
countries, and certainly none to sustain democracy. There is no balance
of interests where there is a small privileged group and a great mass of
poverty and ignorance. Purchased courts, purchased police, and laws written
to favor the powerful are the rule. This kind of imbalance is felt even
in the United States. In a poor country, its influence is decisive. Where
such countries are officially designated as democracies, we typically find
rigged elections.
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- Germany and Japan were both old nations with strong identities.
Iraq is an artificial construct of British imperialism dating only to the
last century. It is composed of groups having little in common, having
been held together only by the brute force of a dictator. Each of these
groups is also subject to many external influences, a reflection of the
arbitrary and recently-set boundaries in the region.
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- There is also difficulty with the notion that you can
have popular democracy in a place like contemporary Iraq and yet have a
country friendly to American interests, especially as those interests are
reflected in the activities of an uncompromising, combative, nuclear-armed
Israel. Bush has achieved nothing in pushing Israel towards peace, so why
expect favorable decisions from an Islamic population voting freely?
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- In other places in the Middle East, like Egypt, America
supports a combination of winked-at authoritarian government and substantial
bribe-paying. Why does America support this if there are realistic alternatives?
That was the situation that existed in Iraq until the Gulf War. The populace
of Egypt, so far as we can understand in the absence of genuine measures
of public opinion, is not one that would freely elect a government friendly
to a number of American interests. The same is almost certainly true of
Iraq.
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- Is the U.S. likely to leave behind in Iraq either a highly
unstable government, one whose quick collapse would bring civil war between
the major groups, or a democratically-elected government, stable but hostile
to American interests? These and so many other questions only show how
little Bush thought before he reached for a gun.
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- We are unlikely to learn the truth from officials about
the Battle of Samarra, and so it is with the entire reckless adventure
of invading Iraq. American troops are going to be in Iraq for a long time,
and there is no reason to expect they are going to make any more friends
for America than the boys doing the shooting in Samarra.
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