Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Any man's death may diminish me but I'm prepared to accept that there are cases which may be an exception to that rule.

I find a delicious irony in that yesterday two gravely ill patients finally died: Chris Hitchins and, officially, the U.S. "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Hitchens never wavered from his love for the Third Gulf War, and, in retrospect, he might have done better to have gone to fight and sought a more merciful death there, stopping his ears before the inevitably dirty and sordid little finale to this ridiculous mess of hubris, treachery, lies, foolishness, and error made something tawdry and mocking of his ferocity in fighting the "war" from behind his keyboard.

I wonder (because I can't and won't ever know how ill he was at the end)...did the news of the official ignominious retreat from the Bush Salient contribute to ol' Hitch's willingness to depart this Vale?

Because if so he might well be included in the wretched toll this reverse-Machiavellian nonsense exacted from the West.

And as for OIF, well, that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.

It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations.

What a congeries; Saddam, Dubya, Darth Cheney, Hitchins...can you imagine a more seedy and disparate group when they foregather in Hell twenty years from now?

Saddam peering at the others with his shifty, bluffing eyes hard in his dough-face, looking, as always, for the openings of fear or avarice that bullies always recognize, even after years of devilish torment still the Tikriti hardman.

Cheney snarling and defiant, knowing that he's still the smartest guy in the room, even in Eblis.

Dubya, still his patrician bobo, with that look of earnest and clueless vacancy still on his mug, at the same time gormless and venal - he can't understand why a Good Christian Man like him should be here with the Devil getting red-hot pokers shoved up his jacksie three times a day.

And Hitchins, drink in hand, fleering and mocking the other three idiots while, perhaps, just perhaps, recognizing the same hint of bully and grifter in himself; for all his faults he was a perceptive man. He may well have the worst of it; lacking the supreme egotism of the dictator, the dupe, and the schemer beside him he may just have a dark glimmering of the disaster they helped create between them and, worse, feel some sort of dim shame at the results.

Because all around them, the shades; the children ripped to pieces in a Ramadi street, the women buried in rubble of a Fallujah home, the trooper missing a leg that the landmine tore from his body, the widow dead of suicidal despair, the orphan raped and murdered by his captor, the hopeless, the fool, the martyr, the criminal, the lost, and the devoured.

And for what?

This fucking disaster is now just another day for most of the rest of the world, and I have little hope that it will be long remembered or regarded in my own country, either. Saddam and Hitch are beyond penalty, and neither Dubya nor Dick will ever pay the price they should. It's just done and dusted.

So all I can hope for is that somehow my vision might be accomplished; that in some future afterlife these dead men find a little of the misery and despair of the ghosts their evil created. That it penetrates the group around that table there in Hades, and that the sorry bastards enjoy a long, bitter draught of it before their tormentors herd them back to the Fires that they so deeply deserve.

What Dreams May Come

from Brian Turner's wonderful "Phantom Noise":

Illumination Rounds

Will the girl find a bed among stones?
Will the fighter find a trench?
-Saadi YoussefParachute flares drift in the burn time
of dream, their canopies deployed
in the sky over our bed. My lover

sleeps as Iraqi translators shuffle
in through the doorway- visiting
as loved ones might visit a hospital room,
ill at ease, each of them holding
their sawn-off heads in hand.

Wordless, they wait for me
to dress in my desert fatigues,
my aid pouch with painkillers

of little help in sewing the larynx back,
though I try anyway, suture by suture.

-----------

She finds me at 3am shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig deep.
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.I say, and if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shock or recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could shovel
beside me, straining with the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then she'd begin to see them - the war dead -
how they stand under the lime trees and ash,
papyrus and stone in their hands.She stares at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
stays the shovel I hold, to say -
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

Sigh

So the Wikileaks people have done another infodump regarding the Seven Years' War in central Asia, a.k.a. the Third Gulf War (counting Iran-Iraq as one and 1991 as two) or, if you insist on the silly DoD "code name" (a "code" which would have a hard time fooling Shaggy and Scooby), Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As usual, there is no shocking revelation here. There is nothing we haven't heard of, seen, or suspected, since the days when the shock came with a side order of awe.What is just depressing to me as an old soldier, though, is the pure predictability of the information we're seeing in the sitreps and TOC logs the Wikileaks people have amassed.

1. Iran was heavily involved in messing with our operations in Iraq. I'm shocked, shocked! After the way the Chinese left us alone in Korea in the Fifties and the Chinese and Sovs stayed out of our hair in Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies, who'd have thought it?No wonder the finest geostrategic minds within the Beltway were utterly blindsided by this!

2. The Iraqi "government" we sponsored - in a crude, post-Ottoman, ethnically-divided, bitterly impoverished, historically kleptocratic- and thuggish pseudostate, mind you - turned out to be as or nearly as brutal and arbitrary as Saddam's.Well, Damn.

Didn't see that one coming.

3. We killed more hapless civvies at places like checkpoints and from the air than we did the muj. I predicted this one from back in '03, knowing what I did about our Army's obsession with force protection. If you capped an Iraqi mama-san you risked at worst a slap on the pinkie. If you let a car-bomb do one of your roadblocks? Kiss that OER goodbye, sir. So we capped assloads of innocent people.

No, duh?

The cumulative thing that makes this frustrating is the same-same-ness of it all. Back in the Seventies Dan Ellsberg took a pretty huge personal risk to expose the mountain of lies that the Vietnam War was built over and the national response was a collective yawn.

Now we're reading - again - that this fucking Mess-o-potamia was built on lies and lies about lies.

Don't get me wrong here. My country has lied its way into war, lied about its conduct in war, time and again. No, the Mexicans didn't invade the Nueces Strip, the Spanish didn't sink the Maine, and the the Vietnamese didn't attack the C. Turner Joy, either. Yes, we bombed civilian targets in WW2, we burned out downtown Panama in 1989 and lied about it. Churchill, no stranger to the politics and strategems of war, said that in it truth needed a bodyguard of lies.

But, as these documents remind us - again - this damn war didn't just have a bodyguard of lies. It had a recon and security screen of lies - lies about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and model airplanes filled with death from above. It had a main line of resistance of lies, lies about flowers and candy, lies about easy peasy, lies about body counts, lies about Iraqi exiles and Iraqi politics, lies about reconstruction and "coalition" provisional authorities. It had reserves of lies, lies about Shiites and Sunnis, lies about weapons and where they went, lies about Al Qaeda and muj and Sadrists. It had a logistical and support base of lies, lies about no-bid contracts and mercenaries and political and diplomatic conditions. It had a no-bid contract of lies, an entire Third Shop of lies, a theatre-level of lies, an entire Base Section and CONUS-full of lies and spin and bullshit.

And all these lies, for what?

Yes, Saddam is gone. In 1918 many an Englishman or Frenchman would have told you that the defenstration of the Kaiser was the best thing that could happen to Germany and that they couldn't imagine anything worse, and many a Russian, a Pole, or a Ukranian would have told you that the fall of the Tsar was a victory for Everyman everywhere inside the old Russian Empire.

And within twenty yearstwo menwould make those wishful-thinking optimists long for the old autocrats.

We had an uneasy arrangement with Saddam for decades. It wasn't good, it sucked for the Iraqis, it was expensive and irritating and we wanted things to be better. So in a moment of hubris and willful ignorance we kicked it to splinters and had to lie our asses off to do it and what did we get in return?

I don't think we even know yet. I think we will have no idea what we will see there for a decade, or two, and whether it will make us long for Saddam's mere brutality as a zek perishing in Stalin's lead mines may have pined for the Tsar.But this leaked pile of crap reminds us that what we do know is that whatever rough beast is slouching towards Baghdad to be born was engendered and midwived by lies, fucking lies, piles and heaps and mountains of lies upon lies.

(cross-posted from MilPub)

Now they have.

"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
(Hilaire Belloc)

Jason over at Armchair Generalist has a good little discussion about the icon of modern rebellion, the AK-47. Jason objects, sensibly, to the sensationalist journalism that labels the rifle a "weapon of mass destruction" but points out that

"What makes the AK-47 such a distinctive weapon system isn't its accuracy or the number of widgets that you can add onto the rifle. It's a cheap, long-lasting, low-maintenance system that has an overwhelming abundance of available ammunition (that is )not the best weapon to use against other militaries, but works fine against noncombatants and poorly-armed security forces."

For what it's worth, I would opine that the combination of the cheap, rugged, low-tech automatic weapon and the mine are what has made colonialism such a mug's game since the middle 1940's.Back when it was us having the Maxim gun and they had not it was pretty simple to run an empire on the cheap. But now every dimestore Westbumfuckian Liberation Front can lay their hands on a couple of shiploads of AKs and a bunch of PMD shoebox mines (or just some Semtex and a Palestinian- or Iraqi-for-hire to show them how to wire the things for sound) and all of a sudden the White Man's Burden becomes hard for low-population-growth, expensive Western volunteer armies to bear.As the Sri Lankans showed us, crushing these groups is possible, but you have to be able to use genocidal-level force, and for a Western occupier in the age of CNN/Al Jazeeera I'm not sure that's possible anymore.

So the Sunni rebellion in Iraq is controllable, either by buying out the rebels as "Sons of Iraq" or by arming their Shia and Kurdish rivals and letting them do the genocide. But absent a truly competent government, and given the strength of the rebel forces on the outside, this may not be possible in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan, and for the Western press and governments to pretend otherwise seems extremely irresponsible.

Obviously it's hard to predict the arc of competence here, but I would suggest that if the ANA/AP haven't managed to outperform their rivals after eight years of Western instruction the window for their doing a Sri Lanka on the Talibs is closing fast.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Sunday Morning 11:30am

We've had a lovely Labor Day weekend. Yesterday's morning cleanup yielded a deucluttered house, the trip to Oaks Park was fun, and the planked salmon made a delicious dinner.

This morning we had an "Avatar" sort of morning, enjoyed good coffee and bacon, looked at wedding pictures (again) to sate Little Miss' desire to see Mommy in her pretty dress. And we're getting ready for the Nickel Arcade.

So I had just a moment to stop and read the news. Which is, as always, filled with the most ridiculous crap - it is an ever-verdant source of wonder to me how much bandwidth the three (what, five?) conglomerates that own the news media can cram with worthless celebrity gossip and badly-informed "reportage".

So I pretty much skimmed over most of the "news". But this BBC article caught my eye. It's not really "news" to anyone who a) has been paying attention and b) isn't viewing the world through their "war on terror" goggles. This phrase caught my attention;

"Yet many Iraqis fear that with the Americans no longer here in force, and the Iraqi army and police still lacking sufficient training, the violent extremists on both the Sunni and the Shia sides could start fighting again."

And I paused, for a languid Sunday morning moment and wondered just exactly how many times we will have to hear that phrase again.

The U.S. Army and the various mercenary organizations associated with our mess-o-potamia have been "training" the IA and IP since, when, about 2004? At least since 2007 or 2008. So the senior IA units have at least 2-3 years and possibly as many as 6 years of guerrilla combat time?

And this isn't exactly crossing the Rhine or meeting the GSFG in the Fulda Gap, here. It's your basic light-infantry fight; IMTs, squad-to-company tactics...shoot, move, communicate. Basic trainees get it in 13 weeks. I went from civilian to combat unit in less than a year, expected to perform under fire. Entire armies like the Kitchener battalions of WW1 learn to do it in months, certainly in under a year.

How t'fuck much "training" do these mooks need..?




Just a idle thought for a holiday Sunday morning.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Operation: FAIL

This sort of thing is why we fail.And the Brits are usually better at this than we are.

I love the U.S. Army, but my experience over 22 years of service was that we really hated to have to learn hard lessons drawn from failure. Field problems were seldom, if ever, "free play", which would have allowed tactically shrewd officers to make fools of tactically incompetent ones. Even when they were - as was my ARNG brigade's deployment to JRTC in 2005 - the incapable officers or NCOs are seldom relieved, seldom even retrained or counseled. The caissons just keep rolling along.We are engaged in a soon-to-be decades long foolish attempt to hustle the East. It has gained us little and, though costing us little as well, has gone a long way to keeping our eye off the geopolitical ball (why do we hear so little about the dangerously-close-to-collapse condition of Mexico, for example, other than in the paranoid screeds of the Arizona Republican Party?) as well as earning us a fair degree of enmity in a part of the world where we really have no reason NOT to be an honest broker.

At any rate, one would hope that at the very least what we could get out of this mobile clusterfuck would be a good after-action report/lessons learned assessment of how we managed to copulate this rottweiler. But no. Afraid that a report detailing the hubris, stupidity, venality and incompetence of the "leadership" of their country the British have chosen to hide these scumbags' moronity under the Cone of Silence. One is left to marvel about the depths of idiocy that the report must have detailed.

And for all that, we here in the U.S. have not even attempted such a self-examination. How much worse must our fucktardry have been that we dare not even begin to examine it?Sigh. It's like we're fucking half of a Bourbon. We forget nothing because we don't even try to learn anything.