Here's an interesting piece about the war on the ground. A serving US Colonel (Col. Stephen Davis, who commands 5,000 troops in Iraq) compares the tactics and strategy of the "insurgency" to the War in Vietnam. This is not a "left-wing" pundit, but a serving Colonel confronted with the day-to-day war in Iraq.
On tv, Bush continues to read prepared remarks from NeoCons speaking of "progress" in a war that never should have been. The labyrinthine politics and inter-factional conflict continues in Iraqi politics, once again, in the midst of official US ignorance about culture, politics and history in the area. US armed forces deaths approach 1900, with 13,000 wounded ( source: Pentagon).
And Bush vows to continue the war as long as he is president.
Including the sniping of Reuters sound-men by US riflemen.
To check the cost of this war, click here:
http://costofwar.com/
Make sure to click some of the other links to see where the money might have been spent.
And, it appears increasingly, the US has engineered the formation of an Iran-like Islamic republic in Iraq, if any clear governmental outcome should cohere . . .
(paste)
Posted on Sun, Aug. 28, 2005
Rebels fight U.S. to Iraq standoff
`A WAR OF ATTRITION' ECHOING VIETNAM CONFLICT HAS SETTLED ON AL-ANBAR
By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder
AL-FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Insurgents in Al- Anbar province, the center of guerrilla resistance in Iraq, have fought the U.S. military to a stalemate.
After repeated major combat offensives in Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi, and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Al-Anbar during the past two years -- including 75 since June 1 -- many American officers and enlisted men assigned to Al-Anbar have stopped talking about winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
Instead, they're trying to hold on to a handful of population centers and hit smaller towns in a series of quick-strike operations designed to disrupt insurgent activities temporarily.
``I don't think of this in terms of winning,'' said Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines in an area of some 24,000 square miles in the western portion of Al-Anbar. Instead, he said, his Marines are fighting a war of attrition.
``The frustrating part for the audience, if you will, is they want finality,'' Davis said. ``They want a fight for the town, and in the end the guy with the white hat wins.''
That's unlikely in Al-Anbar, Davis said. He expects the insurgency to last for years, hitting American and Iraqi forces with quick ambushes, bombs and mines. Roadside bombs have hit vehicles Davis was riding in three times this year already.
``We understand counterinsurgency. . . . We paid for these lessons in blood in Vietnam,'' Davis said. ``You'll get killed on a nice day when everything is quiet.''
Most of Iraq is far quieter than Al-Anbar. But Al-Anbar is Iraq's largest province and home to the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated the government under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. It's the strategic center of the country, and failure to secure it could thwart the Bush administration's hopes of helping to create a functioning Iraqi democracy.
Vietnam tactics
Military officials now frequently compare the fight in Al-Anbar to the Vietnam War, saying guerrillas, who blend back into the population, are trying to break the will of the U.S. military -- rather than defeat it outright -- and to erode public support for the war back home.
``If it were just killing people that would win this, it'd be easy,'' said Marine Maj. Nicholas Visconti, 35, of Brookfield, Conn., who served in southern Iraq in 2003. ``But look at Vietnam. We killed millions, and they kept coming. It's a war of attrition. They're not trying to win. It's just like in Vietnam. They won a long, protracted fight that the American public did not have the stomach for. . . . Killing people is not the answer; rebuilding the cities is.''
Minutes after he spoke, two mortar rounds flew over the building where he is based in Hit. Visconti didn't flinch as the explosions rang out.
During three weeks of reporting along the Euphrates River valley, home to Al-Anbar's main population centers and the core of insurgent activity, military officials offered three primary reasons that guerrillas have held and gained ground: the enemy's growing sophistication, insufficient numbers of U.S. troops and the lack of trained and reliable Iraqi security forces.
They described an enemy who is intelligent and adaptive:
• Military officials in Ar-Ramadi said insurgents had learned the times of their patrol shift changes. When one group of vehicles comes to relieve another, civilian traffic is pushed to the side of the road to allow the military to pass. Insurgents plan and use this opportunity, surrounded by other cars, to drop homemade bombs out their windows or through holes cut in the rear floor.
• The insurgents have figured out by trial and error the different viewing ranges of the optics systems in American tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees.
• Faced with the U.S. military's technological might, guerrillas have relied on gathering intelligence and using cheap, effective devices to kill and maim.
Marines raided a home near their base in Hit and found three Sudanese insurgents with a crude map they had drawn of the U.S. base, including notes detailing when patrols left the gate, whether they were on foot or in vehicles and the numbers of Marines on the patrols.
The three men also had $11,000 in cash in an area in which insurgents pay locals $50 to plant bombs in the road.
One of the two Marine positions in the city receives mortar fire almost daily. Patrols from the other base are hit by frequent roadside bombings.
Instead of referring to the enemy derisively as ``terrorists'' -- as they used to -- Marines and Army soldiers now call the insurgents mujahedeen, an Arabic term often translated ``holy warrior'' that became popular during the Afghan guerrilla campaign against the Soviet Union.
New strategy
U.S. commanders in Al-Anbar hope to fight the insurgency through a multi-pronged strategy of political progress, reconstruction and training Iraqi security forces.
But there's been less political progress in Al-Anbar than in Iraq's Kurdish north and Shiite Muslim south, because the violence has stymied progress in rebuilding towns destroyed in the fighting and Iraqi forces are still a long way from being able to secure the province.
U.S. officials hope that a strong turnout in national elections in December will turn people away from violence. They expressed similar hopes before last January's elections. While they were a success in many parts, in Al-Anbar the turnout was in the single digits.
``Some of the Iraqis say they want to vote, but they're worried there'll be a bomb at the polling station,'' Marine Capt. James Haunty, 27, of Columbus, Ohio, said recently. ``It's a legitimate fear, but I always tell them, `Just trust me.' ''
Less than five minutes after Haunty spoke, near Hit, a roadside bomb exploded down the street.
Many Sunnis in Al-Anbar say they will vote against the constitution in October, having felt excluded from the drafting of the document.
Though fighting has badly damaged many towns and precluded widespread reconstruction, Marines in Al-Fallujah are working to make that city a centerpiece of rebuilding. Al-Fallujah residences sustained some $225 million in damage last November during a U.S. assault aimed at clearing the city of insurgents, according to Marine Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman, who oversees the civil military operations center in Al-Fallujah.
Homeowners have received 20 percent of that amount to rebuild homes, and will get the next 20 percent in the coming weeks, Haldeman said. Families are walking the streets once again and shops have reopened. The sound of hammers is constant, and men line the streets mixing concrete and laying bricks out to dry.
Even so, of the 250,000 population before the fighting, just 150,000 residents have returned. And the insurgency has come back to the area.
Iraqis are still a long way from being able to provide their own security in Al-Anbar. As with much of the province, Al-Fallujah has no functioning police force. Police in Ar-Ramadi are confined to two heavily fortified stations, after insurgents destroyed or seriously damaged eight others.
The Iraqi national guard, heralded last year as the answer to local security, was dissolved because of incompetence and insurgent infiltration, as was the guard's predecessor, the civil defense corps.
The new Iraqi army has participated in all the Marines' recent sweeps in Al-Anbar, in a limited way. While the Iraqi soldiers haven't thrown down their weapons and run, as they have in the past, many of them are still unable to operate without close U.S. supervision.
US COLONEL COMPARES FIGHTING IN FALLUJAH TO VIETNAM
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Zlatko Waterman
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The Short Timers
David Erben, English Department, University of South Florida
Vietnam war fiction is a mixed lot, with many of the texts falling along very traditional and predictable lines, despite the unstable nature of the war itself, so that even if a Vietnam war novel cannot embrace "victory" it can at least fall back on totalizing notions of "brotherhood" and "defeat with honor." One of the richest and most challenging texts to come out of the war, however, and one which directly confronts the totalizing tendency of traditional narratives (including history) is The Short Timers. I read this novel as a network, a network that crosses various boundaries and aligns itself with a number of poststructuralist concerns. The Short Timers was first published in 1979 and is the work upon which the late Gustav Hasford's popular fame rests. Hasford was a former Marine who served in Vietnam. He wrote a text, The Short Timers, which follows a character, Private Joker, through Marine boot camp and into the Vietnam war. The Short Timers interrogates western notions of history, and in particular the notion of history as fixed and stable.
One way the novel interrogates history is by demonstrating the power, and danger, of metaphors. Almost everything in this novel is born of or becomes a metaphor, including the "Marines," "Vietnam," "America" and the individual characters (for example, "Joker," "Cowboy," "Gomer Pyle," and "Animal Mother"), a strategy which links The Short Timers to what poststructuralist critics argue is the operation of language itself. That is, that language is always already metaphorical, it is just that some things have been metaphors so long (like "honor" and "justice" and "birth" and "America") that we have forgotten they are metaphors. Interestingly, the thoroughgoing metaphoricity of language comes from the same place that this novel begins, that is, Nietzche. Nietzche is the one who reminds us early on that language is metaphor and that it is tied to what in Latin is usura, which is both "usury," that is the question of surplus value and exchange that you normally associate with the verb usury, and also a constant wearing down or rubbing away until something is effaced.
What Nietzche and others argue is that a lot of the metaphors which are very powerful and which dominate western culture have been metaphors so long we have forgotten they are metaphors and behave towards them as if they are truths. A lot of what happens in Hasford's novel is that characters take metaphor for truth. The difference between truth and metaphor, of course, is that metaphors do not always have to arrive at their destination. With truth that's not supposed to be possible.
Take, for example, the nicknaming that Gunnery Sergeant Hartman does at the beginning of the text. The first thing that the Marine Drill Instructor does when the recruits arrive is to rename them, turn them into supposedly transparent metaphors, metaphors that somehow characterize each recruit. These first few scenes are where "Joker," "Gomer Pyle," and "Cowboy" are "born" (Hartman will, in fact, on the last day of boot camp tell Gomer that he is "born again hard.") Later in the novel, the former recruits engage in naming themselves, nicknaming "Rafter Man, "Crazy Earl," and "Mr. Payback," fellow marines who are named in the context of the war, and "Zipper Heads" and "gooks," the Vietnamese enemy. One of the things that happens over the course of this novel is that power is linked to who names things, who gets to create the dominant metaphors. In boot camp it is Sergeant Hartman who has this power; in Vietnam the former recruits, now "grunts," at least have acquired the power to nickname each other, their enemy, and the people responsible for their fighting (who they call "lifers" and "REMFs"). Power is fought over the right to call something something, and therefore legitimize it, regardless of whether it is for or against the system, the "green machine." Naming things is tied up to the business of writing history, that is, the act of naming is the business of writing history so that history is written by those who get the chance and have the power to name. This naming, which the text demonstrates is arbitrary, implies a chance relationship in terms of the relationship between objects in the world and what they are called, because obviously objects can be called one thing when one group is in power and something different when another group is in power, both names functioning, but in a specific context.
Another way that The Short Timers undermines fixed notions of history is through repetition, but repetition with a difference. This sense of difference is inscribed in the novel so that, even if you return to a place marked as being a place where history was enacted once, that place is different. For example, in the scene in Hue where Joker and Rafter Man are examining the mass grave, a lot of what happens in the novel is capsulated. First of all, Joker comes to a place where history has allegedly occurred. But the history cannot be exactly written because it is thoroughly contaminated by excess. History is found, but it is overgrown with excess, with "worms," and "damp earth" and excess story-telling. What you get, what is left over, is a monument. And by a monument, what I mean is something of a memorial nature, marking both the passing of and in the honor of something that no longer is. The mass grave becomes a monument to a massacre and also a monument to Joker's cynicism, as he "creates" a text for Stars and Stripes by forming a nuclear family out of the corpses, going so far as to break limbs to get the corpses to fit together, and binding them with barbed wire. It seems to me that a lot of what goes on in this text is what happens to the business of monumentalizing. Over and over in this novel what happens is that characters try to monumentalize things, memorialize them, pay homage to the past and what happens is that these memorials tend to get overrun and altered and so what you are left with (and this is the effect of too many stories being told about the memorials) is the impossibility and necessity of monumentalizing the past: and this unstable process, the novel demonstrates, is "history."
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixti ... imers.html
I am looking forward to the novels coming out of Iraq. Don’t know what else good will come out of it. I posted Short Timers to the litchicks blog a couple of times. Never got one reply. Not serious or hip enough I suppose. Gustav Hasford's a beat marine if there ever was one. There it is….
David Erben, English Department, University of South Florida
Vietnam war fiction is a mixed lot, with many of the texts falling along very traditional and predictable lines, despite the unstable nature of the war itself, so that even if a Vietnam war novel cannot embrace "victory" it can at least fall back on totalizing notions of "brotherhood" and "defeat with honor." One of the richest and most challenging texts to come out of the war, however, and one which directly confronts the totalizing tendency of traditional narratives (including history) is The Short Timers. I read this novel as a network, a network that crosses various boundaries and aligns itself with a number of poststructuralist concerns. The Short Timers was first published in 1979 and is the work upon which the late Gustav Hasford's popular fame rests. Hasford was a former Marine who served in Vietnam. He wrote a text, The Short Timers, which follows a character, Private Joker, through Marine boot camp and into the Vietnam war. The Short Timers interrogates western notions of history, and in particular the notion of history as fixed and stable.
One way the novel interrogates history is by demonstrating the power, and danger, of metaphors. Almost everything in this novel is born of or becomes a metaphor, including the "Marines," "Vietnam," "America" and the individual characters (for example, "Joker," "Cowboy," "Gomer Pyle," and "Animal Mother"), a strategy which links The Short Timers to what poststructuralist critics argue is the operation of language itself. That is, that language is always already metaphorical, it is just that some things have been metaphors so long (like "honor" and "justice" and "birth" and "America") that we have forgotten they are metaphors. Interestingly, the thoroughgoing metaphoricity of language comes from the same place that this novel begins, that is, Nietzche. Nietzche is the one who reminds us early on that language is metaphor and that it is tied to what in Latin is usura, which is both "usury," that is the question of surplus value and exchange that you normally associate with the verb usury, and also a constant wearing down or rubbing away until something is effaced.
What Nietzche and others argue is that a lot of the metaphors which are very powerful and which dominate western culture have been metaphors so long we have forgotten they are metaphors and behave towards them as if they are truths. A lot of what happens in Hasford's novel is that characters take metaphor for truth. The difference between truth and metaphor, of course, is that metaphors do not always have to arrive at their destination. With truth that's not supposed to be possible.
Take, for example, the nicknaming that Gunnery Sergeant Hartman does at the beginning of the text. The first thing that the Marine Drill Instructor does when the recruits arrive is to rename them, turn them into supposedly transparent metaphors, metaphors that somehow characterize each recruit. These first few scenes are where "Joker," "Gomer Pyle," and "Cowboy" are "born" (Hartman will, in fact, on the last day of boot camp tell Gomer that he is "born again hard.") Later in the novel, the former recruits engage in naming themselves, nicknaming "Rafter Man, "Crazy Earl," and "Mr. Payback," fellow marines who are named in the context of the war, and "Zipper Heads" and "gooks," the Vietnamese enemy. One of the things that happens over the course of this novel is that power is linked to who names things, who gets to create the dominant metaphors. In boot camp it is Sergeant Hartman who has this power; in Vietnam the former recruits, now "grunts," at least have acquired the power to nickname each other, their enemy, and the people responsible for their fighting (who they call "lifers" and "REMFs"). Power is fought over the right to call something something, and therefore legitimize it, regardless of whether it is for or against the system, the "green machine." Naming things is tied up to the business of writing history, that is, the act of naming is the business of writing history so that history is written by those who get the chance and have the power to name. This naming, which the text demonstrates is arbitrary, implies a chance relationship in terms of the relationship between objects in the world and what they are called, because obviously objects can be called one thing when one group is in power and something different when another group is in power, both names functioning, but in a specific context.
Another way that The Short Timers undermines fixed notions of history is through repetition, but repetition with a difference. This sense of difference is inscribed in the novel so that, even if you return to a place marked as being a place where history was enacted once, that place is different. For example, in the scene in Hue where Joker and Rafter Man are examining the mass grave, a lot of what happens in the novel is capsulated. First of all, Joker comes to a place where history has allegedly occurred. But the history cannot be exactly written because it is thoroughly contaminated by excess. History is found, but it is overgrown with excess, with "worms," and "damp earth" and excess story-telling. What you get, what is left over, is a monument. And by a monument, what I mean is something of a memorial nature, marking both the passing of and in the honor of something that no longer is. The mass grave becomes a monument to a massacre and also a monument to Joker's cynicism, as he "creates" a text for Stars and Stripes by forming a nuclear family out of the corpses, going so far as to break limbs to get the corpses to fit together, and binding them with barbed wire. It seems to me that a lot of what goes on in this text is what happens to the business of monumentalizing. Over and over in this novel what happens is that characters try to monumentalize things, memorialize them, pay homage to the past and what happens is that these memorials tend to get overrun and altered and so what you are left with (and this is the effect of too many stories being told about the memorials) is the impossibility and necessity of monumentalizing the past: and this unstable process, the novel demonstrates, is "history."
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixti ... imers.html
I am looking forward to the novels coming out of Iraq. Don’t know what else good will come out of it. I posted Short Timers to the litchicks blog a couple of times. Never got one reply. Not serious or hip enough I suppose. Gustav Hasford's a beat marine if there ever was one. There it is….
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