In
1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of
defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged
down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say:
‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam
worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’
In
February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed
any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is
unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’
That
same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have any direct
evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its
weapons of mass destruction programmes.’
In
July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from
him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’
On
11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld
said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’
I
heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: ‘How do you capitalise on these
opportunities?’
I
heard that on 17 September the president signed a document marked top secret
that directed the Pentagon to begin planning for the invasion and that, some
months later, he secretly and illegally diverted $700 million approved by
Congress for operations in Afghanistan into preparing for the new battle front.
In
February 2002, I heard that an unnamed ‘senior military commander’ said: ‘We
are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan
to get ready for a future war in Iraq.’
I
heard the president say that Iraq is ‘a threat of unique urgency’, and that
there is ‘no doubt the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of
the most lethal weapons ever devised’.
I
heard the vice president say: ‘Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.’
I
heard the president tell Congress: ‘The danger to our country is grave. The
danger to our country is growing. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and
with fissile material could build one within a year.’
I
heard him say: ‘The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and
from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. Each passing
day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas
or, some day, a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.’
I
heard the president, in the State of the Union address, say that Iraq was
hiding materials sufficient to produce 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres
of botulinum toxin, and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas.
I
heard the president say that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium – later
specified as ‘yellowcake’ uranium oxide from Niger – and thousands of aluminium
tubes ‘suitable for nuclear weapons production’.
I
heard the vice president say: ‘We know that he’s been absolutely devoted to
trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact,
reconstituted nuclear weapons.’
I
heard the president say: ‘Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and
other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister,
one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have
ever known.’
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq
is not imminent. I would not be so certain.’
I
heard the president say: ‘America must not ignore the threat gathering against
us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the
smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.’
I
heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We don’t want the “smoking gun” to be a mushroom
cloud.’
I
heard the American ambassador to the European Union tell the Europeans: ‘You
had Hitler in Europe and no one really did anything about him. The same type of
person is in Baghdad.’
I
heard Colin Powell at the United Nations say: ‘They can produce enough dry
biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people.
Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550
artillery shells with mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors
to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. Our
conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agent. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would
enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square
miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.’
I
heard him say: ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid
sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and
conclusions based on solid intelligence.’
I
heard the president say: ‘Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned
aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons
across broad areas.’ I heard him say that Iraq ‘could launch a biological or
chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given’.
I
heard Tony Blair say: ‘We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those
weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.’
I
heard the president say: ‘We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level
contacts that go back a decade. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida
members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. Alliance with terrorists
could allow the Iraq regime to attack America without leaving any
fingerprints.’
I
heard the vice president say: ‘There’s overwhelming evidence there was a
connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government. I am very confident there
was an established relationship there.’
I
heard Colin Powell say: ‘Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with
al-Qaida. These denials are simply not credible.’
I
heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘There clearly are contacts between al-Qaida and
Saddam Hussein that can be documented.’
I
heard the president say: ‘You can’t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam.’
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass
destruction. It’s not three thousand – it’s tens of thousands of innocent men,
women and children.’
I
heard Colin Powell tell the Senate that ‘a moment of truth is coming’: ‘This is
not just an academic exercise or the United States being in a fit of pique.
We’re talking about real weapons. We’re talking about anthrax. We’re talking
about botulinum toxin. We’re talking about nuclear weapons programmes.’
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘No terrorist state poses a greater or more
immediate threat to the security of our people.’
I
heard the president, ‘bristling with irritation’, say: ‘This business about
more time, how much time do we need to see clearly that he’s not disarming? He
is delaying. He is deceiving. He is asking for time. He’s playing hide-and-seek
with inspectors. One thing is for certain: he’s not disarming. Surely our
friends have learned lessons from the past. This looks like a rerun of a bad
movie and I’m not interested in watching it.’
I
heard that, a few days before authorising the invasion of Iraq, the Senate was
told in a classified briefing by the Pentagon that Iraq could launch anthrax
and other biological and chemical weapons against the eastern seaboard of the
United States using unmanned aerial ‘drones’.
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say he would present no specific evidence of Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction because it might jeopardise the military mission by
revealing to Baghdad what the United States knows.
*
I
heard the Pentagon spokesman call the military plan ‘A-Day’, or ‘Shock and
Awe’. Three or four hundred cruise missiles launched every day, until ‘there
will not be a safe place in Baghdad,’ until ‘you have this simultaneous effect,
rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in
minutes.’ I heard the spokesman say: ‘You’re sitting in Baghdad and all of a
sudden you’re the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped
out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power,
water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and
psychologically exhausted.’ I heard him say: ‘The sheer size of this has never
been seen before, never contemplated.’
I
heard Major-General Charles Swannack promise that his troops were going to ‘use
a sledgehammer to smash a walnut’.
I
heard the Pentagon spokesman say: ‘This is not going to be your father’s
Persian Gulf War.’
I
heard that Saddam’s strategy against the American invasion would be to blow up
dams, bridges and oilfields, and to cut off food supplies to the south so that
the Americans would suddenly have to feed millions of desperate civilians. I
heard that Baghdad would be encircled by two rings of the elite Republican
Guard, in fighting positions already stocked with weapons and supplies, and
equipped with chemical protective gear against the poison gas or germ weapons
they would be using against the American troops.
I
heard Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby tell Congress that Saddam would ‘employ a
“scorched earth” strategy, destroying food, transportation, energy and other
infrastructure, attempting to create a humanitarian disaster’, and that he
would blame it all on the Americans.
I
heard that Iraq would fire its long-range Scud missiles – equipped with
chemical or biological warheads – at Israel, to ‘portray the war as a battle
with an American-Israeli coalition and build support in the Arab world’.
I
heard that Saddam had elaborate and labyrinthine underground bunkers for his
protection, and that it might be necessary to employ B61 Mod 11 nuclear
‘bunker-buster’ bombs to destroy them.
I
heard the vice president say that the war would be over in ‘weeks rather than
months’.
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six
months.’
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say there was ‘no question’ that American troops would be
‘welcomed’: ‘Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing
music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and
al-Qaida would not let them do.’
I
heard the vice president say: ‘The Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami
predicts that after liberation the streets in Basra and Baghdad are “sure to
erupt in joy”. Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of
jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to
advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.’
I
heard the vice president say: ‘I really do believe we will be greeted as
liberators.’
I
heard Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, say: ‘American soldiers will not
be received by flowers. They will be received by bullets.’
I
heard that the president said to the television evangelist Pat Robertson: ‘Oh,
no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’
I
heard the president say that he had not consulted his father about the coming
war: ‘You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There
is a higher father that I appeal to.’
I
heard the prime minister of the Solomon Islands express surprise that his was
one of the nations enlisted in the ‘coalition of the willing’: ‘I was
completely unaware of it.’
I
heard the president tell the Iraqi people, on the night before the invasion
began: ‘If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the
lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes
away their power we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear
down the apparatus of terror. And we will help you build a new Iraq that is
prosperous and free. In a free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression
against your neighbours, no more poison factories, no more executions of
dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be
gone. The day of your liberation is near.’
I
heard him tell the Iraqi people: ‘We will not relent until your country is
free.’
*
I
heard the vice president say: ‘By any standard of even the most dazzling
charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940
or Patton’s romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented
in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties.’
I
heard Colonel David Hackworth say: ‘Hey diddle diddle, it’s straight up the
middle!’
I
heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95 per cent of the Iraqi casualties were
‘military-age males’.
I
heard an official from the Red Crescent say: ‘On one stretch of highway alone,
there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated
inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried
nearby by volunteers. That is what there will be for their relatives to come
and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse.’
I
heard the director of a hospital in Baghdad say: ‘The whole hospital is an
emergency room. The nature of the injuries is so severe – one body without a
head, someone else with their abdomen ripped open.’
I
heard an American soldier say: ‘There’s a picture of the World Trade Center
hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for
these people I look at that. I think: “They hit us at home and now it’s our
turn.”’
I
heard about Hashim, a fat, ‘painfully shy’ 15-year-old, who liked to sit for
hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry
Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the boy’s death,
the division commander said: ‘That person was probably in the wrong place at
the wrong time.’
I
heard an American soldier say: ‘We get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna
turn around and shoot one of the little fuckers, but you know you can’t do
that.’
I
heard the Pentagon spokesman say that the US did not count civilian casualties:
‘Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy’s capabilities, so we never target
civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths.’ I heard
him say that, in any event, it would be impossible, because the Iraqi
paramilitaries were fighting in civilian clothes, the military was using civilian
human shields, and many of the civilian deaths were the result of Iraqi
‘unaimed anti-aircraft fire falling back to earth’.
I
heard an American soldier say: ‘The worst thing is to shoot one of them, then
go help him,’ as regulations require. ‘Shit, I didn’t help any of them. I
wouldn’t help the fuckers. There were some you let die. And there were some you
double-tapped. Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and
you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn’t want any
prisoners of war.’
I
heard Anmar Uday, the doctor who had cared for Private Jessica Lynch, say: ‘We
heard the helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military.
There were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. They
cried “Go, go, go,” with guns and flares and the sound of explosions. They made
a show: an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping
and shouting, breaking down doors. All the time with cameras rolling.’
I
heard Private Jessica Lynch say: ‘They used me as a way to symbolise all this
stuff. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no
truth about.’ Of the stories that she had bravely fought off her captors, and
suffered bullet and stab wounds, I heard her say: ‘I’m not about to take credit
for something I didn’t do.’ Of her dramatic ‘rescue’, I heard her say: ‘I don’t
think it happened quite like that.’
I
heard the Red Cross say that casualties in Baghdad were so high that the
hospitals had stopped counting.
I
heard an old man say, after 11 members of his family – children and
grandchildren – were killed when a tank blew up their minivan: ‘Our home is an
empty place. We who are left are like wild animals. All we can do is cry out.’
As
the riots and looting broke out, I heard a man in the Baghdad market say:
‘Saddam Hussein’s greatest crime is that he brought the American army to Iraq.’
As
the riots and looting broke out, I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It’s untidy, and
freedom’s untidy.’
And
when the National Museum was emptied and the National Library burned down, I
heard him say: ‘The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over,
and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of
some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times, and you think: “My
goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many
vases in the whole country?”’
I
heard that 10,000 Iraqi civilians were dead.
*
I
heard Colin Powell say: ‘I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass
destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it
now.’
I
heard the president say: ‘We’ll find them. It’ll be a matter of time to do so.’
I
heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We know where they are. They’re in the area around
Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north, somewhat.’
I
heard the US was building 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000
soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for
how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what
would be its largest embassy anywhere in the world.
I
heard that it would only be a matter of months before Starbucks and McDonald’s
opened branches in Baghdad. I heard that HSBC would have cash machines all over
the country.
I
heard about the trade fairs run by New Bridges Strategies, a consulting firm
that promised access to the Iraqi market. I heard one of its partners say:
‘Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble would be a gold mine.
One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores. A Wal-Mart could
take over the country.’
On 1 May 2003, I heard the president,
dressed up as a pilot, under a banner that read ‘Mission Accomplished’, declare
that combat operations were over: ‘The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war
on terror that began on 11 September 2001.’ I heard him say: ‘The liberation of
Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally
of al-Qaida, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain:
no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi
regime, because the regime is no more. In these 19 months that changed the
world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the
offence. We have not forgotten the victims of 11 September: the last phone
calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those
attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States.
And war is what they got.’
On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American
soldiers had died in combat in Iraq.
I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to
‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who
opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’
I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say:
‘We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck
in our bellies and say: “Damn, we’re Americans.”’
And later I heard that I could buy a
12-inch ‘Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush’ action figure: ‘Exacting in
detail and fully equipped with authentic gear, this limited-edition action
figure is a meticulous 1:6 scale re-creation of the commander-in-chief’s
appearance during his historic aircraft carrier landing. This fully poseable
figure features a realistic head sculpt, fully detailed cloth flight suit,
helmet with oxygen mask, survival vest, G-pants, parachute harness and much
more.’
I heard that Pentagon planners had
predicted that US troop levels would fall to 30,000 by the end of the summer.
*
I heard that Paul Bremer’s first act as
director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to fire all senior members
of the Baath Party, including 30,000 civil servants, policemen, teachers and
doctors, and to dismiss all 400,000 soldiers of the Iraqi army without pay or
pensions. Two million people were dependent on that income. Since America
supports private gun ownership, the soldiers were allowed to keep their
weapons.
I heard that hundreds were being kidnapped
and raped in Baghdad alone; that schools, hospitals, shops and factories were
being looted; that it was impossible to restore the electricity because all the
copper wire was being stolen from the power plants.
I heard Paul Bremer say, ‘Most of the
country is, in fact, orderly,’ and that all the problems were coming from
‘several hundred hard-core terrorists’ from al-Qaida and affiliated groups.
As attacks on American troops increased, I
heard the generals disagree about who was fighting: Islamic fundamentalists or
remnants of the Baath Party or Iraqi mercenaries or foreign mercenaries or
ordinary citizens taking revenge for the loss of loved ones. I heard the
president and the vice president and the politicians and the television
reporters simply call them ‘terrorists’.
I heard the president say: ‘There are some
who feel that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is:
bring them on! We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.’
I heard that 25,000 Iraqi civilians were
dead.
I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger, then
campaigning for governor, in Baghdad for a special showing to the troops of Terminator
3, say: ‘It is really wild driving round here, I mean the poverty, and you
see there is no money, it is disastrous financially and there is the leadership
vacuum, pretty much like California.’
I heard that the army was wrapping entire
villages in barbed wire, with signs that read: ‘This fence is here for your
protection. Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot.’ In one of
those villages, I heard a man named Tariq say: ‘I see no difference between us
and the Palestinians.’
I heard Captain Todd Brown say: ‘You have
to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force – force,
pride and saving face.’
I heard that the US, as a gift from the
American people to the Iraqi people, had committed $18.4 billion to the
reconstruction of basic infrastructure, but that future Iraqi governments would
have no say in how the money was spent. I heard that the economy had been
opened to foreign ownership, and that this could not be changed. I heard that
the Iraqi army would be under the command of the US, and that this could not be
changed. I heard, however, that ‘full authority’ for health and hospitals had
been turned over to the Iraqis, and that senior American health advisers had
been withdrawn. I heard Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services,
say that Iraq’s hospitals would be fine if the Iraqis ‘just washed their hands
and cleaned the crap off the walls’.
I heard Colonel Nathan Sassaman say: ‘With
a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we
can convince these people that we are here to help them.’
I heard Richard Perle say: ‘Next year at
about this time, I expect there will be a really thriving trade in the region,
and we will see rapid economic development. And a year from now, I’ll be very
surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad named after President
Bush.’
*
I heard about Operation Ivy Cyclone. I
heard about Operation Vigilant Resolve. I heard about Operation Plymouth Rock.
I heard about Operation Iron Hammer, its name taken from Eisenhammer, the Nazi
plan to destroy Soviet generating plants.
I heard that air force regulations require
that any airstrike likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians be personally
approved by the secretary of defense, and I heard that Donald Rumsfeld approved
every proposal.
I heard the marine colonel say: ‘We
napalmed those bridges. Unfortunately, there were people there. It’s no great
way to die.’ I heard the Pentagon deny they were using napalm, saying their
incendiary bombs were made of something called Mark 77, and I heard the experts
say that Mark 77 was another name for napalm.
I heard a marine describe ‘dead-checking’:
‘They teach us to do dead-checking when we’re clearing rooms. You put two
bullets into the guy’s chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room
where guys are wounded, you might not know if they’re alive or dead. So they
teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because
generally a person, even if he’s faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him
there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the
momentum going when you’re flowing through a building. You don’t want a guy
popping up behind you and shooting you.’
I heard the president say: ‘We’re rolling
back the terrorist threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart
of its power.’
When the death toll of American soldiers
reached 500, I heard Brigadier-General Kimmitt say: ‘I don’t think the soldiers
are looking at arbitrary figures such as casualty counts as the barometer of
their morale. They know they have a nation that stands behind them.’
I heard an American soldier, standing next
to his Humvee, say: ‘We liberated Iraq. Now the people here don’t want us here,
and guess what? We don’t want to be here either. So why are we still here? Why
don’t they bring us home?’
I heard Colin Powell say: ‘We did not
expect it would be quite this intense this long.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We’re facing
a test of will.’
I heard the president say: ‘We found
biological laboratories. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations
resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as
time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing
devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.’
I heard Tony Blair say: ‘The remains of
400,000 human beings have been found in mass graves.’ And I saw his words
repeated in a US government pamphlet, Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves,
and on a US government website which said this represented ‘a crime against
humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian
killing fields in the 1970s and the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two’.
*
I heard the president say: ‘Today, on
bended knee, I thank the Good Lord for protecting those of our troops overseas,
and our Coalition troops and innocent Iraqis who suffer at the hands of some of
these senseless killings by people who are trying to shake our will.’
I heard that this was the first American
president in wartime who had never attended a funeral for a dead soldier. I
heard that photographs of the flag-draped coffins returning home were banned. I
heard that the Pentagon had renamed body bags ‘transfer tubes’.
I heard a tearful George Bush Sr, speaking
at the annual convention of the National Petrochemical and Refiners
Association, say that it was ‘deeply offensive and contemptible’ the way
‘elites and intellectuals’ were dismissing ‘the sowing of the seeds of basic
human freedom in that troubled part of the world’. I heard him say: ‘It hurts
an awful lot more when it’s your son that is being criticised.’
I heard the president’s mother say: ‘Why
should we hear about body bags and deaths? Why should I waste my beautiful mind
on something like that?’
I heard that 7 per cent of all American
military deaths in Iraq were suicides, that 10 per cent of the soldiers
evacuated to the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany had been sent for
‘psychiatric or behavioural health issues’, and that 20 per cent of the
military was expected to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
I heard Brigadier-General Kimmitt deny
that civilians were being killed: ‘We run extremely precise operations focused
on people we have intelligence on for crimes of violence against the Coalition
and against the Iraqi people.’ And later I heard him say that marines were
being fired on from crowds containing women and children, and that the marines
had fired back only in self-defence.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say that the
fighting was the work of ‘thugs, gangs and terrorists’. I heard General Richard
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘It’s not a Shiite uprising.
Muqtada al-Sadr has a very small following.’ I heard that an unnamed
‘intelligence official’ had said: ‘Hatred of the American occupation has spread
rapidly among Shia, and is now so large that Mr Sadr and his forces represent
just one element. Destroying his Mehdi Army might be possible only by destroying
Sadr City.’ Sadr City is the most populated part of Baghdad. I heard that,
among the Sunnis, former Baath Party leaders and Saddam loyalists had been
joined by Sunni tribal chiefs.
I heard that there were now thirty
separate militias in the country. I heard the television news reporters
routinely refer to them as ‘anti-Iraqi forces’.
I heard that Paul Bremer had closed down a
popular newspaper, Al Hawza, because of ‘inaccurate reporting’.
As Shias in Sadr City lined up to donate
blood for Sunnis in Fallujah, I heard a man say: ‘We should thank Paul Bremer.
He has finally united Iraq – against him.’
I heard the president say: ‘I wouldn’t be
happy if I were occupied either.’
*
I heard Tony Blair say: ‘Before people
crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a
bit.’
I heard General Myers say: ‘Given time,
given the number of prisoners now that we’re interrogating, I’m confident that
we’re going to find weapons of mass destruction.’
I heard the president say: ‘Prisoners are
being taken, and intelligence is being gathered. Our decisive actions will
continue until these enemies of democracy are dealt with.’
I heard a soldier describe what they
called ‘bitch in a box’: ‘That was the normal procedure for them when they
wanted to soften up a prisoner: stuff them in the trunk for a while and drive
them around. The hoods I can understand, and to have them cuffed with the
plastic things – that I could see. But the trunk episode – I thought it was
kind of unusual. It was like a sweatbox, let’s face it. In Iraq, in August,
it’s hitting 120 degrees, and you can imagine what it was like in the trunk of
a black Mercedes.’
I heard a National Guardsman from Florida
say: ‘We had a sledgehammer that we would bang against the wall, and that would
create an echo that sounds like an explosion that scared the hell out of them.
If that didn’t work we would load a 9mm pistol, and pretend to be charging it
near their head and make them think we were going to shoot them. Once you did
that they did whatever you wanted them to do basically. The way we treated
these men was hard even for the soldiers, especially after realising that many
of these “combatants” were no more than shepherds.’
I heard a marine at Camp Whitehorse say:
‘The 50/10 technique was used to break down EPWs and make it easier for the HET
member to get information from them.’ The 50/10 technique was to make prisoners
stand for 50 minutes of the hour for ten hours with a hood over their heads in
the heat. EPWs were ‘enemy prisoners of war’. HETs were ‘human exploitation
teams’.
I heard Captain Donald Reese, a prison
warden, say: ‘It was not uncommon to see people without clothing. I was told
the “whole nudity thing” was an interrogation procedure used by military
intelligence, and never thought much about it.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘I have not
seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the
process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes.’
I heard Private Lynndie England, who was
photographed in Abu Ghraib holding a prisoner on a leash, say: ‘I was
instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there, hold this leash, look at
the camera, and they took pictures for PsyOps. I didn’t really, I mean, want to
be in any pictures. I thought it was kind of weird.’
Detainees 27, 30 and 31 were stripped of
their clothing, handcuffed together nude, placed on the ground, and forced to
lie on each other and simulate sex while photographs were taken. Detainee 8 had
his food thrown in the toilet and was then ordered to eat it. Detainee 7 was
ordered to bark like a dog while MPs spat and urinated on him; he was sodomised
with a police stick while two female MPs watched. Detainee 3 was sodomised with
a broom by a female soldier. Detainee 15 was photographed standing on a box
with a hood on his head and simulated electrical wires were attached to his
hands and penis. Detainees 1, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 26 were placed in a pile
and forced to masturbate while photographs were taken. An unidentified detainee
was photographed covered in faeces with a banana inserted in his anus. Detainee
5 watched Civilian 1 rape an unidentified 15-year-old male detainee while a
female soldier took photographs. Detainees 5 and 7 were stripped of their
clothing and forced to wear women’s underwear on their heads. Detainee 28,
handcuffed with his hands behind his back in a shower stall, was declared dead
when an MP removed the sandbag from his head and checked his pulse.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘If you are
in Washington DC, you can’t know what’s going on in the midnight shift in one
of those many prisons around the world.’
*
I heard that the Red Cross had to close
its offices because it was too dangerous. I heard that General Electric and the
Siemens Corporation had to close their offices. I heard that Médecins sans
Frontières had to withdraw, and that journalists rarely left their hotels. I
heard that, after their headquarters were bombed, most of the United Nations
staff had gone. I heard that the cost of life insurance policies for the few
remaining Western businessmen was $10,000 a week.
I heard Tom Foley, director of Iraq
Private Sector Development, say: ‘The security risks are not as bad as they
appear on TV. Western civilians are not the targets themselves. These are
acceptable risks.’
I heard the spokesman for Paul Bremer say:
‘We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.’
I heard that, no longer able to rely on
the military for help, private security firms had banded together to form the
largest private army in the world, with its own rescue teams and intelligence.
I heard that there were 20,000 mercenary soldiers, now called ‘private
contractors’, in Iraq, earning as much as $2000 a day, and not subject to Iraqi
or US military law.
I heard that 50,000 Iraqi civilians were
dead.
I heard that, on a day when a car bomb
killed three Americans, Paul Bremer’s last act as director of the Coalition
Provisional Authority was to issue laws making it illegal to drive with only
one hand on the steering wheel or to honk a horn when there was no emergency.
I heard that the unemployment rate was now
70 per cent, that less than 1 per cent of the workforce was engaged in
reconstruction, and that the US had spent only 2 per cent of the $18.4 billion
approved by Congress for reconstruction. I heard that an official audit could
not account for $8.8 billion of Iraqi oil money given to Iraqi ministries by
the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I heard the president say: ‘Our Coalition
is standing with responsible Iraqi leaders as they establish growing authority
in their country.’
I heard that, a few days before he became
prime minister, Iyad Allawi visited a Baghdad police station where six
suspected insurgents, blindfolded and handcuffed, were lined up against a wall.
I heard that, as four Americans and a dozen Iraqi policemen watched, Allawi
pulled out a pistol and shot each prisoner in the head. I heard that he said
that this is how we must deal with insurgents.
On 28 June 2004, with the establishment of
an interim government, I heard the vice president say: ‘After decades of rule
by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people
of Iraq.’
This was the military summary for an
ordinary day, 22 July 2004, a day that produced no headlines: ‘Two roadside
bombs exploded next to a van and a Mercedes in separate areas of Baghdad,
killing four civilians. A gunman in a Toyota opened fire on a police checkpoint
and escaped. Police wounded three gunmen at a checkpoint and arrested four men
suspected of attempted murder. Seven more roadside bombs exploded in Baghdad
and gunmen twice attacked US troops. Police dismantled a car bomb in Mosul and
gunmen attacked the Western driver of a gravel truck at Tell Afar. There were
three roadside bombings and a rocket attack on US troops in Mosul and another
gun attack on US forces near Tell Afar. At Taji, a civilian vehicle collided
with a US military vehicle, killing six civilians and injuring seven others. At
Bayji, a US vehicle hit a landmine. Gunmen murdered a dentist at the Ad Dwar
hospital. There were 17 roadside bomb explosions against US forces in Taji,
Baquba, Baqua, Jalula, Tikrit, Paliwoda, Balad, Samarra and Duluiyeh, with
attacks by gunmen on US troops in Tikrit and Balad. A headless body in an
orange jumpsuit was found in the Tigris; believed to be Bulgarian hostage
Ivalyo Kepov. Kirkuk air base attacked. Five roadside bombs on US forces in
Rutbah, Kalso and Ramadi. Gunmen attacked Americans in Fallujah and Ramadi. The
police chief of Najaf was abducted. Two civilian contractors were attacked by
gunmen at Haswah. A roadside bomb exploded near Kerbala and Hillah.
International forces were attacked by gunmen at al-Qurnah.’
*
I heard the president say: ‘You can
embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people
by sending mixed messages. That’s why I will continue to lead with clarity and
in a resolute way.’
I heard the president say: ‘Today, because
the world acted with courage and moral clarity, Iraqi athletes are competing in
the Olympic Games.’ Iraq had sent teams to the previous Olympics. And when the
president ran a campaign advertisement with the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan
and the words ‘at this Olympics there will be two more free nations – and two
fewer terrorist regimes,’ I heard the Iraqi coach say: ‘Iraq as a team does not
want Mr Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way
to advertise himself.’ I heard their star midfielder say that if he weren’t
playing soccer he’d be fighting for the resistance in Fallujah: ‘Bush has committed
so many crimes. How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and
women?’
I heard an unnamed ‘senior British army
officer’ invoke the Nazis to describe what he saw: ‘My view and the view of the
British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not
proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t
see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as Untermenschen. They
are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life. As far as they are concerned,
Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them. It is trite, but
American troops do shoot first and ask questions later.’
I heard Makki al-Nazzal, who was managing
a clinic in Fallujah, say, in unaccented English: ‘I have been a fool for 47
years. I used to believe in European and American civilisation.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We never
believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction.’
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We never
expected we were going to open garages and find them.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘They may
have had time to destroy them, and I don’t know the answer.’
I heard Richard Perle say: ‘We don’t know
where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them. I hope
this will take less than two hundred years.’
*
I heard the president say: ‘I know what
I’m doing when it comes to winning this war.’
I heard the president say: ‘I’m a war
president.’
I heard that 1000 American soldiers were
dead and 7000 wounded in combat. I heard that there was now an average of 87
attacks on US troops a day.
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘Not
everything has gone as we would have liked it to.’
I heard Colin Powell say: ‘We did
miscalculate the difficulty.’
I heard an unnamed ‘senior US diplomat in
Baghdad’ say: ‘We’re dealing with a population that hovers between bare
tolerance and outright hostility. This idea of a functioning democracy is
crazy. We thought there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is
breaking loose.’
I heard Major Thomas Neemeyer say: ‘The
only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire
population.’
I heard the CNN reporter near the tomb of
Ali in Najaf say: ‘Everything outside of the mosque seems to be totalled.’
I heard Khudeir Salman, who sold ice from
a donkey cart in Najaf, say he was giving up after marine snipers had killed
his friend, another ice-seller: ‘I found him this morning. The sniper shot his
donkey too. Even the ambulance drivers are too scared to get the body.’
I heard the vice president say: ‘Such an
enemy cannot be deterred, cannot be contained, cannot be appeased, or
negotiated with. It can only be destroyed. And that is the business at hand.’
I heard a ‘senior American commander’ say:
‘We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah needs to be cut
out.’
I heard Major-General John Batiste,
outside Samarra, say: ‘It’ll be a quick fight and the enemy is going to die
fast. The message for the people of Samarra is: peacefully or not, this is
going to be solved.’
I heard Brigadier-General Kimmitt say:
‘Our patience is not eternal.’
I heard the president say: ‘America will
never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers.’
I heard about the wedding party that was
attacked by American planes, killing 45 people, and the wedding photographer
who videotaped the festivities until he himself was killed. And though the tape
was shown on television, I heard Brigadier-General Kimmitt say: ‘There was no
evidence of a wedding. There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people
have celebrations, too.’
I heard an Iraqi man say: ‘I swear I saw
dogs eating the body of a woman.’
I heard an Iraqi man say: ‘We have at
least 700 dead. So many of them are children and women. The stench from the
dead bodies in parts of the city is unbearable.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Death has a
tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.’
*
On the occasion of Iyad Allawi’s visit to
the United States, I heard the president say: ‘What’s important for the
American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form
of the prime minister.’
Asked about ethnic tensions, I heard Iyad
Allawi say: ‘There are no problems between Shia and Sunnis and Kurds and Arabs
and Turkmen. Usually we have no problems of an ethnic or religious nature in Iraq.’
I heard him say: ‘There is nothing, no
problem, except in a small pocket in Fallujah.’
I heard Colonel Jerry Durrant say, after a
meeting with Ramadi tribal sheikhs: ‘A lot of these guys have read history, and
they said to me the government in Baghdad is like the Vichy government in
France during World War Two.’
I heard a journalist say: ‘I am
housebound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled
interview. I avoid going to people’s homes and never walk in the streets. I
can’t go grocery shopping any more, can’t eat in restaurants, can’t strike up a
conversation with strangers, can’t look for stories, can’t drive in anything
but a full armoured car, can’t go to scenes of breaking news stories, can’t be
stuck in traffic, can’t speak English outside, can’t take a road trip, can’t
say “I’m an American,” can’t linger at checkpoints, can’t be curious about what
people are saying, doing, feeling.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘It’s a tough
part of the world. We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in
many of the major cities of America last year. What’s the difference? We just
didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television
every night.’
I heard that 80,000 Iraqi civilians were
dead. I heard that the war had already cost $225 billion and was continuing at
the rate of $40 billion a month. I heard there was now an average of 130
attacks on US troops a day.
I heard Captain John Mountford say: ‘I
just wonder what would have happened if we had worked a little more with the
locals.’
I heard that, in the last year alone, the
US had fired 127 tons of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the
radioactive equivalent of approximately ten thousand Nagasaki bombs. I heard
that the widespread use of DU in the first Gulf War was believed to be the
primary cause of the health problems suffered by its 580,400 veterans, of whom
467 were wounded during the war itself. Ten years later, 11,000 were dead and
325,000 on medical disability. DU carried in semen led to high rates of
endometriosis in their wives and girlfriends, often requiring hysterectomies.
Of soldiers who had healthy babies before the war, 67 per cent of their postwar
babies were born with severe defects, including missing legs, arms, organs or
eyes.
I heard that 380 tons of HMX (high melting
point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive) were missing from
al-Qaqaa, one of Iraq’s ‘most sensitive military installations’, which had not
been guarded since the invasion. I heard that one pound of these explosives was
enough to blow up a 747 jet, and that this cache could be used to make a
million roadside bombs, which were the cause of half the casualties among US
troops.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say, when asked
why the troops were being kept in the war much longer than their normal tours
of duty: ‘Oh, come on. People are fungible. You can have them here or there.’
*
I heard Colonel Gary Brandl say: ‘The
enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to
destroy him.’
I heard a marine commander tell his men:
‘You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as
they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect
yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn’t matter if later
on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians.’
I heard Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Smith say:
‘We’re going out where the bad guys live, and we’re going to slay them in their
zip code.’
I heard that 15,000 US troops invaded
Fallujah while planes dropped 500-pound bombs on ‘insurgent targets’. I heard
they destroyed the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the centre of the city, killing
20 doctors. I heard they occupied Fallujah General Hospital, which the military
had called a ‘centre of propaganda’ for reporting civilian casualties. I heard
that they confiscated all mobile phones and refused to allow doctors and
ambulances to go out and help the wounded. I heard they bombed the power plant
to black out the city, and that the water was shut off. I heard that every
house and shop had a large red X spray-painted on the door to indicate that it
had been searched.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Innocent
civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid
getting into trouble. There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians
killed and certainly not by US forces.’
I heard that, in a city of 150 mosques,
there were no longer any calls to prayer.
I heard Muhammad Abboud tell how, unable
to leave his house to go to a hospital, he had watched his nine-year-old son
bleed to death, and how, unable to leave his house to go to a cemetery, he had
buried his son in the garden.
I heard Sami al-Jumaili, a doctor, say:
‘There is not a single surgeon in Fallujah. A 13-year-old child just died in my
hands.’
I heard an American soldier say: ‘We will
win the hearts and minds of Fallujah by ridding the city of insurgents. We’re
doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy.’
I heard an American soldier, a Bradley
gunner, say: ‘I was basically looking for any clean walls, you know, without
any holes in them. And then we were putting holes in them.’
I heard Farhan Salih say: ‘My kids are
hysterical with fear. They are traumatised by the sound but there is nowhere to
take them.’
I heard that the US troops allowed women
and children to leave the city, but that all ‘military age males’, men from 15
to 60, were required to stay. I heard that no food or medicine was allowed into
the city.
I heard the Red Cross say that at least
800 civilians had died. I heard Iyad Allawi say there were no civilian
casualties in Fallujah.
I heard a man named Abu Sabah say: ‘They
used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small
pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.’ I heard him say
that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned the skin even
when water was thrown on it.
I heard Kassem Muhammad Ahmed say: ‘I
watched them roll over wounded people in the streets with tanks.’
I heard a man named Khalil say: ‘They shot
women and old men in the streets. Then they shot anyone who tried to get their
bodies.’
I heard Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, say
that when she was finally allowed to return to her home, she found a message
written with lipstick on her living-room mirror: FUCK IRAQ AND EVERY IRAQI IN
IT.
I heard General John Sattler say that the
destruction of Fallujah had ‘broken the back of the insurgency’.
I heard that three-quarters of Fallujah
had been shelled into rubble. I heard an American soldier say: ‘It’s kind of
bad we destroyed everything, but at least we gave them a chance for a new
start.’
I heard that only five roads into Fallujah
would remain open. The rest would be sealed with ‘sand berms’, mountains of
earth. At the entry points, everyone would be photographed, fingerprinted and
have iris scans taken before being issued identification cards. All citizens
would be required to wear identification cards in plain sight at all times. No
private automobiles would be allowed in the city. All males would be organized
into ‘work brigades’ rebuilding the city. They would be paid, but participation
would be compulsory.
I heard Muhammad Kubaissy, a shopkeeper,
say: ‘I am still searching for what they have been calling democracy.’
I heard a soldier say that he had talked
to his priest about killing Iraqis, and that his priest had told him it was all
right to kill for his government as long as he did not enjoy it. After he had
killed at least four men, I heard the soldier say that he had begun to have
doubts: ‘Where the fuck did Jesus say it’s OK to kill people for your
government?’
*
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘I don’t
believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had
nuclear weapons.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The
Coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence
of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted because we saw the
evidence in a dramatic new light, through the prism of our experience on 9/11.’
I heard a reporter say to Donald Rumsfeld:
‘Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said they
would welcome us with open arms.’ And I heard Rumsfeld interrupt him: ‘Never
said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody
else. You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two
things you just said I said.’
I heard Ahmed Chalabi, who had supplied
most of the information about the weapons of mass destruction, shrug and say:
‘We are heroes in error . . . What was said before is not important.’
I heard Paul Wolfowitz say: ‘For
bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, as
justification for invading Iraq, because it was the one reason everyone could
agree on.’
I heard Condoleezza Rice continue to
insist: ‘It’s not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without
weapons of mass destruction.’
I heard that the Niger ‘yellowcake’
uranium was a hoax legitimized by British intelligence, that the aluminum tubes
could not be used for nuclear weapons, that the mobile biological laboratories
produced hydrogen for weather balloons, that the fleet of unmanned aerial
drones was a single broken-down oversized model airplane, that Saddam had no
elaborate underground bunkers, that Colin Powell’s primary source, his ‘solid
information’ for the evidence he presented at the United Nations, was a paper
written ten years before by a graduate student. I heard that, of the 400,000
bodies buried in mass graves, only 5000 had been found.
I heard Lieutenant-General James Conway
say: ‘It was a surprise to me then, and it remains a surprise to me now, that
we have not uncovered weapons. It’s not from lack of trying.’
I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld:
‘If they did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this
country?’ I heard Rumsfeld answer: ‘You and a few other critics are the only
people I’ve heard use the phrase “immediate threat”. It’s become a kind of
folklore that that’s what happened. If you have any citations, I’d like to see
them.’ And I heard the reporter read: ‘No terrorist state poses a greater or
more immediate threat to the security of our people.’ Rumsfeld replied: ‘It –
my view of – of the situation was that he – he had – we – we believe, the best
intelligence that we had and other countries had and that – that we believed
and we still do not know – we will know.’
I heard Saadoon al-Zubaydi, an interpreter
who lived in the presidential palace, say: ‘For at least three years Saddam
Hussein had been tired of the day-to-day management of his regime. He could not
stand it any more: meetings, commissions, dispatches, telephone calls. So he
withdrew . . . Alone, isolated, out of it. He preferred shutting
himself up in his office, writing novels.’
*
I heard the president say that Iraq is a
‘catastrophic success’.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘They haven’t
won a single battle the entire time since the end of major combat operations.’
I heard that hundreds of schools had been
completely destroyed and thousands looted, and that most people thought it too
dangerous to send their children to school. I heard there was no system of
banks. I heard that in the cities there were only ten hours of electricity a
day and that only 60 per cent of the population had access to drinkable water.
I heard that the malnutrition of children was now far worse than in Uganda or
Haiti. I heard that none of the 270,000 babies born after the start of the war
had received immunizations.
I heard that 5 per cent of eligible voters
had registered for the coming elections.
I heard General John Abizaid say: ‘I don’t
think Iraq will have a perfect election. And, if I recall, looking back at our
own election four years ago, it wasn’t perfect either.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Let’s say
you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or
four-fifths of the country. But some places you couldn’t because the violence
is too great. Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life.’
I heard an Iraqi engineer say: ‘Go and
vote and risk being blown to pieces or followed by insurgents and murdered for
co-operating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you
joking?’
I heard General Muhammad Abdullah
Shahwani, the chief of Iraqi intelligence, say that there were now 200,000
active fighters in the insurgency.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘I don’t
believe it’s our job to reconstruct that country. The Iraqi people are going to
have to reconstruct that country over a period of time.’ I heard him say that,
in any event, ‘the infrastructure of that country was not terribly damaged by
the war at all.’
I heard that the American ambassador, John
Negroponte, had requested that $3.37 billion intended for water, sewage and
electricity projects be transferred to security and oil output.
I heard that the reporters from the
al-Jazeera network were indefinitely banned. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘What
al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.’
I heard that Spain left the ‘coalition of
the willing’. Hungary left; the Dominican Republic left; Nicaragua left;
Honduras left. I heard that the Philippines had left early, after a Filipino
truck driver was kidnapped and executed. Norway left. Poland and the
Netherlands said they were leaving. Thailand said it was leaving. Bulgaria was
reducing its few hundred troops. Moldova cut its force from 42 to 12.
I heard that the president had once said:
‘Two years from now, only the Brits may be with us. At some point, we may be
the only ones left. That’s OK with me. We are America.’
I heard a reporter ask Lieutenant-General
Jay Garner how long the troops would remain in Iraq, and I heard him reply: ‘I
hope they’re there a long time.’
I heard General Tommy Franks say: ‘One has
to think about the numbers. I think we will be engaged with our military in
Iraq for perhaps three, five, perhaps ten years.’
I heard that the Pentagon was now
exploring what it called the ‘Salvador option’, modeled on the death squads in
El Salvador in the 1980s, when John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras and
when Elliott Abrams, now White House adviser on the Middle East, called the
massacre at El Mozote ‘nothing but Communist propaganda’. Under the plan, the
US would advise, train and support paramilitaries in assassination and
kidnapping, including secret raids across the Syrian border. In the vice
presidential debate, I heard the vice president say: ‘Twenty years ago we had a
similar situation in El Salvador. We had a guerrilla insurgency that controlled
roughly a third of the country . . . And today El Salvador is a whale
of a lot better.’
I heard that 100,000 Iraqi civilians were
dead. I heard that there was now an average of 150 attacks on US troops a day.
I heard that in Baghdad 700 people were being killed every month in
‘non-war-related’ criminal activities. I heard that 1400 American soldiers had
been killed and that the true casualty figure was approximately 25,000.
I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had a machine
sign his letters of condolence to the families of soldiers who had been killed.
When this caused a small scandal, I heard him say: ‘I have directed that in the
future I sign each letter.’
I heard the president say: ‘The
credibility of this country is based upon our strong desire to make the world
more peaceful, and the world is now more peaceful.’
I heard the president say: ‘I want to be
the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years.’
I heard Attorney General John Ashcroft
say, on the day of his resignation: ‘The objective of securing the safety of
Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.’
I heard the president say: ‘For a while we
were marching to war. Now we’re marching to peace.’
I heard that the US military had purchased
1,500,000,000 bullets for use in the coming year. That is 58 bullets for every
Iraqi adult and child.
I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary
confinement, was spending his time writing poetry, reading the Koran, eating
cookies and muffins, and taking care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he
had placed a circle of white stones around a small plum tree.
11 January