Dance of the Reptiles
Still, it’s significant that nine million Iraqis risked their lives to vote in January. There’s bedlam and carnage in the streets, but the country at least has the framework of an elected government. It’s also got a foreign army of occupation, historically not a beneficial ingredient in the making of a new democracy.
So how long do we stay, and at what final cost? Nobody has a clue. U.S. troops are busily training the Iraqi military and security forces, but the Pentagon has provided no timetable for returning control of the country to the people who live there. Meanwhile, the heavy numbers keep piling up, although some are even more difficult to find than the death toll.
In addition to the 1,609 U.S. soldiers lost, the Department of Defense lists 12,350 as wounded in action. Many have crippling injuries, and others are returning home with emotional damage that will take years to heal, if ever. As for the Iraqi casualties, we don’t even count them. Nobody is sure how many civilian noncombatants—men, women, and children—have died since the night we started bombing Baghdad.
Here in the United States, we’re a long way from the car bombs and the mangled corpses, horrific images briefly glimpsed on CNN. Most of us remain comfortably buffered from the war by the reams of fluff and celebrity scandal that now pass for front-page news.
Yet the coffins quietly keep coming home from Iraq, on the average of two a day. That’s two more funerals, two more families left to mourn and wonder and hope that someday it all adds up to something noble and enduring.
Something more than another stark number in a history book.
January 28, 2007
In Veep’s World, We’re Safer Now Than Before Iraq
The wacky, upside-down world of Dick Cheney keeps getting weirder. Last week he went on CNN and defiantly declared that the situation in Iraq is not so terrible.
This must have been surprising to the families of the 88 Iraqi civilians who were slaughtered the day before by car bombers at a busy Baghdad market.
Surprising to the loved ones and comrades of the 27 American troops who died last weekend, one of the costliest for coalition forces since the occupation.
Surprising to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, soon to be commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who two days earlier had informed a Senate panel that the situation there was “dire.”
Surprising to Sen. John Warner and other top Republicans who have warned that Iraq is sliding into chaos, and have publicly questioned the decision to send more troops.
Surprising to Cheney’s own boss, President Bush, who in a recent interview conceded that the administration’s original game plan for Iraq was heading toward “slow failure.”
Yet in his interview with Wolf Blitzer, Cheney brushed away as “hogwash” any suggestion that the war has been mishandled. “Bottom line is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes,” he said.
There are several possible explanations for the vice president’s bizarre performance:
He’s crazy as a loon.
He’s a compulsive liar.
He’s gotten his prescriptions mixed up with Rush Limbaugh’s.
Whatever the clinical reason might be, Cheney continues to float blissfully through a smug and surreal fog. “The pressure is from some quarters to get out of Iraq,” he said. “If we were to do that, we simply validate the terrorists’ strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.”
Oddly, Cheney’s stout appetite for battle never manifested itself when he was of draft age, during the Vietnam War. Five times he declined his country’s call to serve there. Now, as the last cheerleader for the fiasco in Iraq, Cheney revels in the self-imagined role of Tough Guy. In fact, he is simply the Guy Who’s Never Been Right.
Before, during, and after the invasion, it was Cheney who most strenuously promoted the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. It was Cheney who insisted there was a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 coconspirators, long after U.S. intelligence agencies had discredited the idea. It was also Cheney who predicted that American soldiers would be welcomed as “liberators” on the streets where they are now being blown up. And it was he who in 2005 confidently asserted that the insurgency was in its “last throes.”
On the topic of Iraq, the vice president has been uncannily wrong about everything, yet he seldom bypasses an opportunity to play the pompous stooge. Here are some true statements that you will never hear from Cheney’s lips:
The war has so far cost American taxpayers at least $500 billion, or 10 times more than the administration’s initial estimate.
The combat toll on our military now exceeds 3,065 dead and more than 22,000 wounded, many permanently disabled.
No one is sure how many Iraqi civilians have perished since the invasion, but at least 34,000 are known to have died in 2006. About two million Iraqis have fled the country to escape the continuing violence.
Osama bin Laden, the man who green-lighted the 9/11 attacks, is still alive and free—and he’s not hiding in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Taliban fighters who harbored Osama and his cohorts in Afghanistan are resurging with a vengeance.
And the next murderous generation of Al Qaeda fanatics has a new outpost of operations, a place where they were unwelcome for years. It’s called Iraq.
This is the truth that the vice president would prefer not be reported, much less discussed openly. Naturally, he blames the media for turning the public against the war, a trick borrowed from the old Vietnam hard-liners.
Hey, what about all those markets in Baghdad that weren’t car-bombed last week? How come you guys don’t write about them?
Without cracking a smile, Cheney told Blitzer that “the world is much safer today” because Bush took military action against Iraq.
That the invasion has galvanized Islamic extremists worldwide seems not to concern the vice president even slightly. We’re all safer than we were before—that’s what the man said. If Hussein were still in power, Cheney added somberly, “we’d have a terrible situation” in Iraq.
In contrast to the peaceful, safe, and stable situation that exists now …
Only in the daffy, disconnected mind of Dick Cheney.
March 23, 2008
Iraq: No Light at the End of the Tunnel
On the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush declared that the United States is on the way to winning the war.
He made this stupefying pronouncement in the safe confines of the Pentagon, where it’s unacceptable to question the commander in chief, no matter how dense or self-deluded he might be. If Bush had dared to make the same speech in a public town hall, among civilians, the reception would have been chillier. According to almost every opinion poll, about two-thirds of all Americans now stand opposed to the war in Iraq. When reminded last week of this statistic, Vice President Dick Cheney responded: “So?”
Bush sent Cheney to Baghdad to mark the dubious anniversary of their costly, misbegotten adventure. What better way to buoy the spirits of the 160,000 U.S. soldiers who are now stuck in Iraq—a surprise visit by the Man Who’s Never Been Right.
True to form, the vice president repeated his dark assertion that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had close ties with Al Qaeda, a claim discredited and rejected by every U.S. intelligence agency. Cheney also described the American effort to bring stability and democracy to Iraq as “a successful endeavor.” Compared to what—the landing of the Hindenburg?
There’s still no stable, functioning democracy in Iraq. Provincial elections might finally be held in October, although the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites continue to fight about how power should be apportioned. It’s an ancient argument that won’t subside anytime soon.
After years of training, the Iraqi armed forces still aren’t prepared to keep order in the country, and senior U.S. military commanders don’t know when that particular miracle will come to pass.
Bush acts like there?
??s a light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is, it’s not a tunnel—it’s a pit.
As of March 19, the American toll in Iraq stood at 3,982 deaths and nearly 30,000 combat injuries. An additional 145 U.S. soldiers have committed suicide there. Such heavy losses are difficult to absorb, impossible to rationalize. Nobody knows for sure how many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed during the U.S. occupation—at least 18,600 are known to have died in 2007 alone.
The monetary cost of the war is so high that the administration cannot—or will not—give Congress an accurate figure.
Five years ago, the Bush-Cheney brain trust said the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would cost between $50 billion and $60 billion. That number was every bit as reliable as the assertion that Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon now says the war has cost about $600 billion, while congressional estimates put the sum in excess of $1 trillion—roughly 20 times more than the administration predicted. Currently, Bush and Cheney’s Iraq rodeo is sapping between $8 billion and $12 billion every month from U.S. taxpayers, just what a battered and shaky economy needs.
Five years ago, we were assured that Iraqi oil revenues would finance the rebuilding of the country after we bombed it to rubble. It was one more false promise to be discarded with all the others.
The president is feeling upbeat these days because the troop surge, which he initially resisted, has succeeded in reducing sectarian bloodshed in Baghdad, as well as U.S. casualties. Other forces have been able to leave the city and hunt down insurgents who’ve been targeting our troops.
However, equally important factors in the lower death toll are a cease-fire declared by a key Shiite militia and an unexpected Sunni backlash against extremists. These two key ingredients for peace could evaporate soon if the Iraqi government doesn’t get its act together. The fact that fewer U.S. soldiers are dying is welcome news, but it’s not the same as winning the war. We’re more deeply mired in Iraq today than we were in the spring of 2003. Suicide bombings against civilians and police continue, and less than two weeks ago, five American soldiers were blown up inside a house rigged with bombs.
In the bitterest of many ironies, the American occupation has given Al Qaeda a foothold in a country where the terrorist organization had never previously been tolerated. Meanwhile, the spiritual father of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, remains alive and well, delousing his beard somewhere in the caves of Afghanistan.
Among the presidential candidates, only John McCain shares the president’s view that the tide has turned in Iraq and that it is there we must ultimately fight until jihadist terrorism is vanquished. McCain has said that the United States should keep its forces in Iraq for a hundred years, if necessary. It’s a statement bound to haunt him in the coming months, no matter who his opponent turns out to be. The American people have had enough.
No matter who the next president is, the road out of Iraq will not be swift or smooth. Long after Bush is chopping brush back on the ranch in Texas, young American men and women will still be coming home from Baghdad in coffins.
No. 3,982 was Lerando J. Brown, 27, an army specialist from Gulfport, Miss.
You can put the number beside his name, but you can’t put a true price. The same can be said for this war.
September 10, 2011
The Dumb Deed Before the Terror Attack
Osama bin Laden knew what he was doing when he implanted several of the key 9/11 hijackers in Florida. There was no better place for his suicide crews to be overlooked, as they not so invisibly prepared for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
On the day after Christmas in 2000, flight controllers at Miami International Airport were annoyed to peer out at one of the crowded taxiways and see a small Piper Cherokee. The plane wasn’t moving, and the cockpit was empty. One official in the flight tower spotted two men walking away, crossing the airfield in the direction of the main general aviation hangar.
Even in Miami, this doesn’t happen every day. Even rookie pilots know to radio the tower if their aircraft conks out while rolling toward the runway. Nobody just abandons a plane in a line of waiting commercial jetliners. The men who pulled this stunt were named Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta. Nine months later, they would be infamous, but on December 26, 2000, they seemed just like two more knuckleheads in the Knucklehead Capital of America.
They had learned to fly at Huffman Aviation in Venice, near Sarasota. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, both men earned their private pilot licenses on August 14, 2000. Atta spent only 69 minutes on the test and scored 97 out of 100. Al-Shehhi scored an 83 and took 73 minutes to finish.
The Piper Cherokee that stalled at MIA had been rented from Huffman that day by the two future hijackers. They weren’t supposed to fly it all the way to Miami, so the general manager of Huffman was surprised to get a phone call from the men, asking how to restart the plane. Not long afterward, a flight official at MIA dialed Huffman to say the Piper had been abandoned, forcing other aircrafts to taxi around it. It was about 5:45 P.M., one of the busiest periods for commercial takeoffs and landings. “Any time the tower calls, they are not in the best of moods,” the manager of the aviation firm told Jim Yardley of The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Atta and al-Shehhi were renting a car to drive back to Venice.
The Federal Aviation Administration later demanded the maintenance records of the Piper. It turned out that the engine might have flooded because of a loose spark plug. In grim hindsight, it’s natural to wonder why authorities evidently made little or no effort to track down Atta and al-Shehhi after the MIA incident. The reality is that not much would have happened to the men, anyway—perhaps a small fine or a warning. Even in the unlikely event that their pilot licenses had been yanked, it wouldn’t have prevented the horrific events to come. These guys would have already gained what they’d come to Florida to get: working knowledge of aircraft controls.
On the morning of September 11, Atta steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, al-Shehhi crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower.
During the months preceding the attack, Atta and several hijackers had moved their base of operations from the Sarasota area to South Florida, where they continued to blend in splendidly. The martyrs-in-waiting worked out in local gyms, hung out at sports bars and even strip joints, presumably not searching for virgins.
In April 2001, Atta got pulled over in Broward County for driving without a license. A month later, he legally got a Florida license, as did al-Shehhi and 11 other hijackers. But in the manner of thousands of scofflaw Floridians, Atta blithely ignored the driving ticket he’d received. When he didn’t show up in court, a bench warrant was issued—again, no cause for alarm. His puny case was but one in a judicial system swamped by bigger ones. Atta had a better chance of dying from a bee sting than of being arrested.
Bin Laden and his organizers clearly anticipated that the young hijackers would make some mistakes in America. That’s why Florida was such an obvious staging area—the bar of dumb behavior here is so high that it’s almost impossible for bumbling newcomers to get noticed.
Even if you abandon a plane between runways at an international airport.
So comfy were Atta and al-Shehhi in their new locale that they didn’t consider the Piper fiasco a close call. When they returned to Venice, the first thing they did was ask the manager of Huffman Aviation to reimburse them for the rental car.
He said no way. Days later they were back in Miami, practicing on a Boeing 767 simulator. The rest is awful history.
PSEUDONEWS
September 9, 2001
Frenzy by the Media, Not the Sharks
The governor and other officials have complained that the frantic media coverage of shark attacks is scaring tourists away from Florida.
To this charge, we must plead no contest.
Every summer sharks bite peop
le, and every summer we pump the story as if it’s something new and extraordinary. We’re really not that lazy, we’re just bored.
Traditionally, this is the slowest time of the year for serious news, so journalists are on the prowl for something juicy and hair-raising.
At the risk of overstating the obvious, let’s just say we’re suckers when it comes to wild critters—especially critters with teeth. Take alligators. They aren’t rare, elusive, or cunning. They’re big, pea-brained, and ubiquitous. Yet local TV stations will use any cheap excuse to run alligator footage. The stories tend to fall into three categories:
a) Gator in sewer drain.
b) Gator under neighbor’s car.
c) Gator in pond behind the condo.
It must seem like the TV folks are trying to insult your intelligence by passing this stuff off as news, but don’t take it personally. Most journalists in Florida come from places that don’t have large predatory reptiles, so they get a little carried away. You’d probably see more gator stories if only they’d bite more people, but they won’t. They’d rather eat garfish.
Which brings us to sharks. As inconceivable as it might seem, your average journalist knows even less about sharks than he or she does about alligators. This is evident from the way they scramble for the satellite truck every time some nitwit nails a dead hammerhead up on the board at the charter docks.
There’s no reason to kill such a fish except to get your big fat face on television or in the papers, and it seems to work. Last week, an eight-foot shark that was caught in California somehow made the local news in Miami, where eight-foot sharks are about as unusual as two-legged chickens. The public’s fearful fascination with sharks is matched only by the media’s goggle-eyed gullibility. Hype is the inevitable result.