[Mb-civic] "Kind of a Shame"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Another glimpse of our tax dollars at work....

"Kind of a Shame" 
Posted by James Wolcott 
>From The Economist, January 1st-7th 2005 (registration 
required; oh just go out and buy the damn thing):
"There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when 
Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes 
screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a 
line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the 
wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except 
one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his 
outstretched hands, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the 
convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty 
marine sargeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at 
his turbanned head, and screams: 'Back this bitch up, 
motherfucker!'
"The old man should have read the bilingual notices that 
American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: 'Keep 
50m or deadly force will be applied.' In Ramadi, the capital of 
central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck 
American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of 
Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, 
they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, 
sometimes they fire at 20 metres: 'If anyone gets too close to 
us we fucking waste them,' says a bullish lieutenant. 'It's kind 
of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent 
people.'"
Kind of a shame, killing the people you're trying to 
democratize, but after awhile, says the same lieutenant, "It 
gets to the point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so 
you start shooting everybody..."
With characteristic dry English understatement, The 
Economist's embedded reporter (Economist pieces are 
unbylined) notes, "[W]hen America's well-drilled and well-fed 
fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems 
arise." Their contempt for Iraqis is undisguised and 
dramatically expressed: a soldier, confronted by "jeering 
schoolchildren," fires canisters of buckshot from his grenade-
launcher at them, and marines busting down doors in Ramadi 
scream at trembling middle-aged women: "Bitch, where's the 
guns?" Small wonder, ventures the correspondent, that "many 
Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of 
insurgents." 
The last grafs of the report recount a big whoopy-do operation 
in the smugglers' haven of Baij involving a convoy of 1000 
troops supported by Apache attack helicopters targeting three 
houses that had been linked to Zarquawi's terrorist band, 
according to a local informant. 
There was no one in the houses except women and children. 
Rather than return to base empty, they pay homage to the last 
reel of Casablanca and round up the usual suspects.
"...they detained 70 men from districts indentified by their 
informant as 'bad.' In near-freezing conditions, they sat 
hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered 
uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been 
detained at random; several had been held because they had a 
Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one 
man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver, and a 
tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the 
ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: 'One, 
two, three, jihaaad!' A middle-tier officer commented on the 
mission: 'When we do this,' he said. 'We lose.'" 
There's a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their 
woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, "So would 
you say you've learned from your mistakes?" and Pete replies: 
"Oh yes, I'm certain I could repeat them exactly."
That seems to have been the Bush administration's approach 
to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and repeat them 
exactly. 
And at that you can't say they haven't succeeded. 
01.02.05 
James Wolcott is a VANITY FAIR contributing editor 
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option 
D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone 
forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an 
email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050109/c3ead20f/attachment.html