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| 5/23 |
| 2007/9/20-22 [Politics/Domestic/911, Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:48126 Activity:nil |
9/20 Independent journalist in Anbar, interesting
Part 1: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001514.html
Part 2: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001517.html
\_ Anyone who appears on the Wall Street Journal opinion page,
Front Page Mag AND the National Review I automatically
dismiss as a fucking idiot.
\_ I was hoping this was Michael J Totten porn but its
not: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Bushs+War
\_ Who is this person and why do we care?
\_ I tend to discount anyone who believes that Zaquarwi
wasn't a US MILITARY FAKE MEDIA construct. he was just
one dude, he did not control all terror in Iraq. |
| 5/23 |
|
| www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001514.html jpg RAMADI, IRAQ - After spending some time in and around Baghdad with the United States military I visited the city of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's notoriously convulsive and violent Anbar Province, and breathed an unlikely sigh of relief. Only a few months ago Ramadi was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It was another "Fallujah," and certainly the most dangerous place in Iraq. Today, to the astonishment of everyone - especially the United States Army and Marines - it is perhaps the safest city in all of Iraq outside of Kurdistan. In August 2006 the Marine Corps, arguably the least defeatist institution in all of America, wrote off Ramadi as irretrievably lost. Abu Musab al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq had moved in to fight the Americans, and they were welcomed as liberators by a substantial portion of the local population. I wrote recently that Baghdad, while dangerous and mind-bogglingly dysfunctional, isn't as bad as it looks on TV. Almost everywhere I have been in the Middle East is more "normal" than it appears in the media. Nowhere is this more true than in Beirut, but it is true to a lesser extent in Baghdad as well. Baghdad isn't a normal city, but it appears normal in most places most of the time. Baghdad suffers from political paralysis, a low-grade counterinsurgency, and a very slow-motion civil war. It doesn't look or feel like a war most of the time, although it does sometimes. It wasn't the surreal sort-of war that still simmers in Baghdad. Two American colonels in charge of the area compared the battle of Ramadi to Stalingrad. "We were engaged in hours-long full-contact kinetic warfare with enemies in fixed positions," said Army Major Lee Peters. "There were areas where our odds of being attacked were 100 percent," Army Captain Jay McGee told me. "Literally hundreds of IEDs created virtual minefields." "The whole area was enemy controlled," said Marine Lieutenant Jonathan Welch. "If we went out for even a half-hour we were shot at, and we were shot at accurately. Sometimes we took casualties and were not able to inflict casualties. jpg Anbar Province is the heart of Iraq's Sunni Triangle, and Ramadi is its capital. Most of the rest live in the also notorious and now largely secured cities of Haditha, Hit, and Fallujah. I haven't visited the other cities yet because I wanted to begin in the province's largest and most important city. Ramadi isn't the most important solely because it's the capital or because it's the largest. It is also the most important because Al Qaeda declared it "The Capital of the Islamic State of Iraq." "You have to understand what every side's end state is in Iraq to really understand what's going on," said Captain McGee in his Military Intelligence headquarters at the Blue Diamond base just north of the city. An enormous satellite photo of Ramadi and the surrounding area that functioned as a map took up a whole wall. Local streets were relabeled by the military and given very American names: White Sox Road, Eisenhower Road, and Pool Hall Street for example. is to establish the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq," he said. "In order for them to be successful they must control the Iraqi population through either support or coercion." jpg Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq Some in the United States are unconvinced that Al Qaeda was really at the center of the conflict in Anbar. So I asked Colonel John Charlton how the Army knows Al Qaeda is really who they have been dealing with. My question seemed to him as if it had come from another planet. We have their propaganda CDs which have Al Qaeda written all over them." It's not a dumb question, though, if a substantial number of Americans aren't sure what's going on in a bottomlessly complicated country eight or more times zones away. And not everyone who underestimated Al Qaeda's presence is a fool. I briefly met Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Eric Holmes from Dallas, Texas, while he was on his way home after volunteering to serve in Ramadi for six months. "I didn't realize until I got here that the problem in Anbar Province was 100 percent Al Qaeda," he said. "The old Baath Party insurgency here is completely finished. That war was won and Americans, including me, had no idea it even happened." Al Qaeda was initially welcomed by many Iraqis in Ramadi because they said they were there to fight the Americans. The spirit of resistance against foreign occupiers was strong. But the Iraqis got a lot more in the bargain than simply resistance. "Al Qaeda came in and just seized people's houses," said Army Captain Phil Messer from Nashville, Tennessee. "They said we're taking your house to use it against the Americans. "Every mosque in the city was anti-American," Captain McGee said. "They were against us, but Al Qaeda made it even worse by ordering them to broadcast anti-American propaganda at gunpoint." was completely controlled by Al Qaeda," Lieutenant Welch said. "They rolled down the streets, pointed guns at people, and said we are in charge. One guy defiantly lit a cigarette and they shot him four times." We dismounted our Humvees near Market Street in the center of one of Al Qaeda's old strongholds. "This is an infamous sniper corner," he said before we had even walked twenty feet. jpg An infamous sniper corner "A few months ago we would be dead standing here," he said. "But there were so many IEDs on this street, and so much piled up garbage, that we could only go out on foot." After Al Qaeda took over Ramadi, the local government was replaced with terrorists who only cared about fighting Americans and violently suppressing Iraqis. Al Qaeda was in charge, but it wouldn't be accurate to say they were the new government. There was no electricity, no running water, no telephone service, and no garbage collection. jpg "Ramadi didn't even have a city government until April," said Colonel Charlton. And the city was down to zero electricity just three months ago." "I'm sure it looks to you like there's lots of trash all over the place," Sergeant Hicks said. There really is a lot less of it now than there was a few months ago." We walked a block or so and came to a series of concrete barriers blocking vehicle traffic. out in the open desert from coming into the city," he said. Children who run at the sight of American soldiers often know something the soldiers do not. They may know an explosion or an insurgent attack of some other kind is imminent. Soldiers know they can gauge the friendliness of an area by the response to their presence of its children. When children just stand there and watch, the area is neutral or possibly hostile. When they flee it usually means the area is violently hostile and the kids need to get out of the way of the fighting that may be coming. Sergeant Hicks raised his weapon and pointed it across the street. Ramadi is a friendly city that has been cleared and pacified. The children were most likely running out of sheer habit. They lived right in the heart of what was recently Al Qaeda's main stronghold. The first kids I ever saw in Ramadi ran from us, but it never once happened again. Only two or three minutes later, children excitedly greeted us as they did every other time I stepped out into the streets of the city and the surrounding countryside. jpg "Three months ago people turned their backs to us," Sergeant Hicks said. Small shops had re-opened since the war ended, but there was still a substantial amount of visible damage. jpg "That pile of rubble at the end of the streets was an observation post," he said. jpg Anbar's Most Wanted "Those posters work," Sergeant Hicks said when he saw me taking a photo of one of Anbar's Most Wanted posters. And, you know, these people really open up to you, automatically, when you're in their houses. They'll just start telling you what it was like living under Saddam - the most unbelievable things." And this is a part of Iraq that was favored by Saddam Hussein. It was much worse in the Shia and Kurdish parts of the country. He and his men lived in a large rented house about the size of a university co-op in the Hay al Adel neighborhood. He gave me his private room next t... |
| www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001517.html jpg RAMADI, IRAQ - In early 2007 Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar Province, was one of the most violent war-torn cities on Earth. By late spring it was the safest major city in Iraq outside Kurdistan. Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq had seized control with the tacit blessing of many local civilians and leaders because they promised to fight the Americans. They turned out not to be liberators at all, but the Taliban of Mesopotamia. Al Qaeda met resistance, after a time, from the Iraqis and responded with a horrific murder and intimidation campaign against even children. The Sunni Arabs of Ramadi then rejected Al Qaeda so utterly they forged an alliance with the previously detested United States Army and Marine Corps and purged the terrorists from their lands. The American military now acts as a peacekeeping force to protect the city from those who recently lost it and wish to return. "Al Qaeda lost their capital," Major Lee Peters said, "and the one city that was called the worst in the world. In July and again in August they did try to retake it and lost pitched battles on the shores of Lake Habbaniya and Donkey Island just on the outskirts. They destroyed a bridge over the Euphrates River leading into the city with a dump truck bomb. Four other bridges in Anbar Province were also destroyed in acts of revenge in the countryside by those who no longer have refuge in cities. And just last week Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the indigenous Anbar Salvation Council that declared Al Qaeda the enemy, was assassinated by a roadside bomb near his house. That murder can't undo the changes in the hearts and minds of the locals. If anything, assassinating a well-respected leader who is widely seen as a savior will only further harden Anbaris against the rough men who would rule them. "All the tribes agreed to fight al Qaeda until the last child in Anbar," the Sheikh's brother Ahmed told a Reuters reporter. Whether Anbar Province is freshly christened pro-American ground or whether the newly founded Iraqi-American alliance is merely temporary and tactical is hard to say. Whatever the case, the region is no longer a breeding ground for violent anti-American and anti-Iraqi forces. "As of July 30," Major Peters said in early August, "we've have 81 days in the city with zero attacks since March 31." "We've had only one attack in our area of operations in the past couple of months," said Captain Jay McGee at the Blue Diamond base. He was referring to the Jazeera area immediately north of the city and including the suburbs. "And we haven't had a single car bomb in our area since February." Violence has declined so sharply in Ramadi that few journalists bother to visit these days. It's "boring," most say, and it's hard to get a story out there - especially for daily news reporters who need fresh scoops every day. Unlike most journalists, I am not a slave to the daily news grind and took the time to embed with the Army and Marines in late summer. jpg When the Army Soldiers at Blue Diamond took me along on their missions I could see why so many reporters write off Ramadi as a place where nothing happens: I was sent along in a convoy of Humvees to the outskirts of the city in a palm grove to attend an adult literacy class for women. The class was cancelled at the last minute, though, so our trip to the palm grove was actually pointless. But Iraqis descended on us from their countryside houses and kept us busy happily socializing for hours. jpg Experiences like this are now typical for the infantrymen of the United States military, but extraordinary for a civilian like me who isn't accustomed to casually hanging out with Arabs in Iraq's notorious Sunni Triangle. jpg I was greeted by friendly Iraqis in the streets of Baghdad every day, but the atmosphere in Ramadi was different. I am not exaggerating in the least when I describe their attitude toward Americans as euphoric. JPG Young men wanted me to take their pictures with their arms around American Soldiers and Marines. The Americans seemed slightly bored with the idea, but the Iraqis were enthusiastic. JPG Children hugged State Department civilian reconstruction team leader Donna Carter. Donna Carter and Iraqi Girl 1jpg Ramadi has changed so drastically from the terrorist-infested pit that it was as recently as April 2007 that I could hardly believe what I saw was real. The sheer joy on the faces of these Iraqis was unmistakable. They weren't sullen in the least, and it was pretty obvious that they were not just pretending to be friendly or going through the hospitality motions. Donna Carter and Iraqi Girl 2jpg "It was nothing we did," said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Drew Crane who was visiting for the day from Fallujah. What he said next surprised me even more than what I was seeing. Without even realizing it, I had taken off my body armor and helmet. I took my gear off as casually as I do when I take it off after returning to the safety of the base after patrolling. jpg Only then did I notice that Lieutenant Colonel Crane was no longer wearing his helmet. jpg Donna Carter helps an Iraqi boy with his English class homework I saw no violence in Baghdad, but I would never have taken off my body armor and helmet outside the wire. I certainly wouldn't have done it casually without noticing it. If I had I would have been sternly upbraided for reckless behavior by every Soldier anywhere near me. But in Ramadi the Marines are seriously considering dropping the helmet and body armor requirements because the low level of danger makes the gear no longer worth it. Protective gear doesn't look intimidating, exactly, but it is hard to socialize properly with Iraqis while wearing it. jpg When we got back in the Humvees I was required to don my helmet again in case we hit a bump in the road. Bumps in the road are now officially seen as more hazardous than insurgents and terrorists in Ramadi. But this kind of juxtaposition is absurdly unthinkable in Baghdad. The Iraqis of Anbar Province turned against Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans in large part because Al Qaeda proved to be far more vicious than advertised. But it's also because sustained contact with the American military - even in an explosively violent combat zone -convinced these Iraqis that Americans are very different people from what they had been led to believe. They finally figured out that the Americans truly want to help and are not there to oppress them or steal from them. And the Americans slowly learned how Iraqi culture works and how to blend in rather than barge in. "We hand out care packages from the US to Iraqis now that the area has been cleared of terrorists," one Marine told me. "When we tell them that some of these packages aren't from the military or the government, that they were donated by average American citizens in places like Kansas, people choke up and sometimes even cry. It is so different from the lies they were told about us and how we're supposed to be evil." The literacy class for women and girls may have been cancelled, but the local would-be students wanted me to take pictures of them at their desks. So the classroom was opened and they sat in their seats for staged photos. It was just obvious, from their beckoning hand gestures, what they wanted me to do. They seemed to be proud that they were learning to read, and that women and girls were allowed to be schooled again now that Al Qaeda is gone. jpg Earlier this year these very same people would have treated me as an enemy to my face had I shown up. Al Qaeda is gravely mistaken if they believe they can flip Ramadi back into their column by assassinating Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha. Shortly before Sheikh Sattar was killed near his home he explained the Anbari point of view to Fouad Ajami, the Johns Hopkins University professor from South Lebanon. "Our American friends had not understood us when they came," he said. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers." The key is to kill existing terrorists and prevent additional recruitment. Al Qaeda must have ... |
| suicidegirls.com/interviews/Bushs+War -> suicidegirls.com/interviews/Bushs+War/ Michael J Totten Jan 19, 2003 The war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was anything but an intellectual's war. If ever in American history a military response was a no-brainer, this was it. On the one hand, Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is self-evidently evil and a menace. Less obvious are the reasons we should go to war with him now as opposed to, say, North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. The rationale behind it is complex and controversial, and it took Clinton Administration official Kenneth Pollack more than 500 pages to explain it all in The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Some are for it, some strongly against it, but most just grouse about it and wallow in incoherent objectionism. There is a near-religious certainty that Bush is an extremist and an idiot, and therefore wrong about everything. "A busted watch is right twice a day" is an insult even by the standard of backhanded compliments. But most liberal intellectuals won't give Bush even that much. The Senate approved the Iraq Liberation Act without dissent when Bill Clinton was president. The overwhelming majority of liberal Democrats approved of the war against Slobodan Milosovic to end his campaign of genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. More than ninety percent of Americans supported regime-change in Afghanistan, uniting nearly every conservative and every liberal in the nation. Apparently, most of these Democrats are the working-class labor union types, rather than the intellectuals and journalists who so regularly opine against it. With only one exception, every anti-war liberal I have talked to admits this is true. After weeks of arguing with one of my colleagues, I finally got him to concede that an American military intervention to depose Saddam Hussein is justified and appropriate. I convinced him by sending him reams of information about the brutal nature of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. He really didn't know, and now he does, and he changed his mind. "This isn't the right American administration to carry out the invasion," he said. Robert Kagan recently wrote "Yesterday's liberal interventionists, in Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti, are today's liberal abstentionists. Anti-war conservatives are much more serious in their opposition. When Brett Scowcroft, for example, defends the Iraqi dictatorship, he means business. He lobbied to prop up the Soviet Union on the eve of its implosion. He wanted to leave Slobodan Milosovic and the Taliban in power. And he is a notorious apologist for the totalitarian regime in Beijing. Liberals place a far higher premium on human rights and democracy than on the supposed upshot of despotism. That liberals ganged up with Scowcroft, a man they should rightly despise, is partly the fault of the Bush Administration. Bush has not emphasized the humanitarian benefits of regime-change in Iraq nearly enough. Bush is squandering the support of these people by making liberalization a footnote in the anti-Saddam campaign. Recently he cited Amnesty International's record on Saddam's history of torture and genocide. Amnesty should have been elated that its work is taken seriously by the adminstration. Instead, Amnsesty's Kamal Samari issued this baffling response: "There's no question that the regime has an appalling human rights record. But what we don't want to see for Iraq or any other country is that the human rights record is used selectively in order to achieve political goals." George Orwell once wrote "The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it." There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them. Orwell was a leftist who took a bullet in the neck fighting fascists in Spain. Writing to his appeasement-minded comrades in Britain, he reminded them of the atrocities in Europe and said "These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened." Ronald Reagan was laughed out of the room for denouncing the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire." That the Soviet Union was an empire is without question. It was animated by an expansionist ideology, it invaded and conquered its neighbors, and it fomented revolutions abroad to drag more countries into its orbit. That the Soviet Union was evil is crashingly obvious, given that its victims outnumber Hitler's by an order of magnitude. But even Reagan's staunchest anti-communist opponents yammered on about his "simplistic" characterization of the Soviets. If Hillary Clinton were to go on television tomorrow and refer to the former Stalinist state as evil, would any liberal intellectual denounce her as a loose cannon or a wing nut? I can't count the number of conversations I have with liberal friends and colleagues that go something like this: Him or Her: Isn't it strange that you're a liberal and you agree with Bush on the war? Me: Well, what are you doing on the same side as Pat Buchanan? Him or Her: (Laughs) They laugh because they know I've got them. No matter your opinion on Iraq, you have unlikely allies. You're either right or you aren't, regardless of who else agrees. On the other hand, if this sort of thing matters to you, isn't it better to have the so-called lesser evil as your unlikely bedfellow than the greater evil? And wouldn't you rather have the Iraqi revolutionaries on your side than the fascist tyrant himself? For decades now, Western liberals and leftists were the strongest and often only advocates of Kurdish liberation in the Middle East. And the hard left, reactionary as it is, forgets the Kurds even exist. Whatever America touches is befouled, leftists think, so they're out. They supported, nay agitated, for invasion and regime-change in Serbia. Without American liberals, Slobo's rampage would have exterminated the Muslims of Europe. The American intervention in the Balkans was launched unilaterally, without UN authorization, while nuanced European sophisticates scrambled to Slobo's defense. Europe still thinks it impolite to root out the thugs in their bolt-holes in the Balkans. Barham Salih, Prime Minister of the precarious Kurdish government in Northern Iraq, recently told Salon magazine, "I hope many of my human-rights activists and liberal friends who were on our side will engage in this debate and articulate their vision as forcefully as some of the other friends." His "friends" sold him out to Saddam for low-rent back-alley partisan points at home, and he's okay with that. Actually, he's not okay with it, but he is awfully gracious about it, especially since this is part of a larger pattern of betrayal. The first president Bush was rightly criticized for abandoning the Iraqis to their deaths at the hands of Saddam after the Gulf War. And rather than side with the current Bush Administration, the American left tragically and stupidly replicates the first President Bush's error. They will let their old friends be massacred before even quietly going along with the Bush Administration. Mainstream liberals not mired in the fever swamps of hate-America leftism have no business chumming it up with this crowd. The Bush Administration and the liberal human rights organizations have much more in common with each other than either will admit. Each may scoff at the suggestion, and counter with the claim that the human rights organizations are opposed to the unilateral use of force. Many liberal intellectuals are natural allies of the Bush Adminstration, and they know it. Paul Berman says "If their language is sincere and there is an idealism among the neo-cons that echoes and reflects in some way the language of the liberal interventionists of the 90's, well, that would be a good thing." This is what separates grown-up liberals from reactionaries and partisan opportunists, who still see America as engaging in a trivial struggle between Democrats and Republicans, rather than America itself engaging in a titanic struggle against theocratic fascism. But Berman still won't get on board, even though he wants to. "Because," he says, "I don't actually ... |