“ General War Analysis Number 2 “

by S. Jovian Radheshwar for Radheshwar.com

Huntington Beach, California, March 31^st, 2003

It appears as though the propaganda of the US Military establishment has had an effect on nearly every western commentator with regard to the illusion of quick victory in Iraq. This week, for those of us with some knowledge of Vietnam, with some knowledge of the Soviet’s experience in Afghanistan, and with an understanding of the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the illusion has been shattered by the reality on the ground. Which, incidentally, I am proud to suggest that CNN is finally starting to depict in the US. Fox news and MSNBC, of course, are still looking to keep Prince Siddhartha in the palace and prevent his reaching enlightenment through exposure to the circumstances of the majority of world. As I write this week’s editorial, MSNBC has even gone to the preposterous length of firing Peter Arnett, whose reports from Baghdad in 1991 I remember with clarity, for his apparent questioning of the US invasion on Iraqi television. This is not only shocking in its disrespect of journalistic freedom, but is disturbing in the extreme due to the relatively iron-fisted control over information that the US and British military have exerted in this conflict. Now, I know that people can make the argument that embedded reporters can provide up to the minute minutia, but that’s precisely what their coverage has become at this point. I am so overwhelmed with news coverage and information, thanks to bloody digital cable, that I must calmly drink tea and think quietly for hours to sift through it and make sense of it all. With the removal of Mr. Arnett from the television screens around the world (he now works for the Daily Mirror, a left-leaning British Newspaper), the process of information collation has become even more complicated for myself and many others seeking the truth.

Here’s what we know at the end of the last week and the start of this one: Baghdad is continuing to come under relentless bombing, American troops and British troops on the ground are not moving forward due to stiff resistance and over-stretched supply lines, and increasingly the Arab world is more and more shocked at the brutal imprecision of the US and UK’s so-called guided weaponry arsenal. In addition to these major themes, some tangential themes have emerged, including the US presence in the north of the country, its purported alliance with the Kurdish pesh-merga fighters, the sales of Russian military technology to Iraq by route of Syria, and of course, along the same lines, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s verbal barbs aimed at the Syrians for that said offense. Included in Rummy’s diatribe was the country of Iran, whom he accused of providing various types of support to Saddam and of infiltrating Iraq with its own Shiite fighters. This reflects outdated Cold War thinking of the worst possible variant, as the now belligerent United States must begin correcting, in its view, all the dominos of falling rogue states and islamic fundamentalists. Certainly, this is nothing new when considering that Bush himself is the one who first made the indication that this would be our “new” foreign policy that would now define our post-cold war existence, and included North Korea and, somewhat stupidly, Iran, in his new “Axis of Evil”. This, of course, is nothing but a linguistic ploy engineered to play on our fears and provincialities as Americans, afraid of the world of brown people, who will be attacked, and yellow people who will thence be feared.

The major military development, for the reporting of which Mr. Arnett was fired, has been that the Iraqis have been effectively using small-scale guerrilla operations to harass and hamper US and UK forces (just in case you were wondering why I don’t use the phrase “coalition” to describe this grouping, I think that the use of such a phrase gives the reader an incorrect impression as to the breadth of those included in that grouping, so on this website, it’ll always be US and UK when referring to both nations’ forces), slowing their blitzkrieg attempt and more or less preventing the US and UK forces from reaching and felling the defenders of Baghdad in the record time they sought to accomplish this formidable task in. Now comes the war of attrition the US and UK sought to avoid, whereby the troops of the west will have to go into the cities of southern Iraq to fight against the regular and irregular forces scattered there with the explicit purpose of fighting to the death, and resisting the invasion by whatever means necessary. In this manner, the US and UK can expect to meet with all variants of combat techniques, including ones that are supposedly in contravention of the Geneva Convention. This can only result in two potential outcomes, the first being the loss of many troops on all sides of the conflict, and two the indiscriminate killing of civilians, as evidenced by the massacre of seven Iraqis, innocents, by US forces at a checkpoint earlier today. Likely, what we will see will be yet a third outcome, whereby the US and UK lose a politically unacceptable number of men, and whereby the Iraqi people will continue suffer directly on occasion, and indirectly as their supplies of food and water expire, opening the floodgates of disease, starvation and clannish fighting over what little sustenance remains for those who survive the bombs, the cholera of untreated sewage being unscientifically reclaimed and the general starvation and dehydration of the coming hot summer of the Middle East. It is quite wonderful, really, that we can utilize so much expensive weaponry to combat the Iraqi regime, but with that group's use of guerrilla combat our technological superiority is rendered useless and every cruise missile is merely "pounding sand" (as Mr. Bush described Clinton's strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, from "Bush at War" by Bob Woodward), or at best a deserted government building, long emptied by rightly afraid Baathists seeking shelter from the hail of explosions that have ensued. It is almost as if the Generals in the military and the Generals on Fox News were caught napping for thirty years of the Vietnamese Revolution, where all our technological prowess was brought to to its knees by unequipped and underfed fighters, only a heart of gold in their holster. This view does not absolve in any way the methods of the fedayeen, or the vietcong, for that matter, as both groups used and continue to use unorthodox, at times morally repugnant tactics, and in the case of the former, continue to use some of the most brutal conscription and torture techniques ever conceived. However, focusing only on this repressive aspect of these organizations has led to a policy-myopia where the US and UK's top brass cannot fathom that the Iraqis will view the US and UK troops as invaders, to be resisted before the possibility of resistance against Saddam's forces. Saddam's tacit alliance with islamists and related parties has paid off, and has effectively countered all western propaganda. Certainly, the US and UK have managed to commit their own atrocities in this war, increasing the now seemingly pervasive mistrust between the US/UK forces and the Iraqi people.

With Phil Donahue and now Peter Arnett as journalistic casualties of this war, the direction of US and British media in its war coverage will take on a decidedly more biased view. MSNBC has indeed become an overnight Fox News, complete with gorgeous Barbie-dolls running the coverage (all white, suburban looking girls), likely placed in their positions of anchor-ship to soften the impact of this living room war. Fox News, with Greta’s face job, and Donna Fiducia and Carol Iovanna’s incredible and quick weight loss, is no longer the king of the sexy, conservative, highly militaristic white chicks, and must now compete with Bianca Solarzano and her cohorts at MSNBC. CNN is basically a weak station, too afraid to say anything negative, and all the while maintains its own store of attractive women anchors, although they certainly seem less flighty and ditzy than their cable news counterparts. In fact, I even felt sad for Daryn Kagan, the attractive brunette working in Kuwait, who seems genuinely depressed over the outbreak of the war and the nature it has now taken. Anyway, I am only including this gossipy section of this essay to highlight the extent to which news coverage is about appearances and not about news, it seems, anymore. I know that Peter Arnett and Phil Donahue are both ugly old men, but hey, they’ve got other assets to offer. But it seems that in its drive to brainwash America, the Military-GOP-Fox News-Christian Right and now MSNBC axis only want to feed us the bland pleasantries we Americans have become defined by in our meaningless, increasingly shallow, increasingly hegemonic lives. Try watching cable news for more than five minutes before a complete repetition of their information cycle occurs. It is impossible, I’ve tried (and lament those many wasted hours).

As more becomes evident on the ground, I’ll analyze military developments more, but for now, I anticipate a growing ground stalemate, and increased civilian casualties in Baghdad. At last count, the civilian casualties were reported to be in the four-hundreds of dead, and ten times that number injured. This is unacceptable, and Rumsfeld and Bush have utterly failed here, and in a utopian vacuum of international law, they are guilty of illegal aggression and murder, as no war has been declared, and thus every death is a murder (so too, for that matter, is Ariel Sharon, and other Likudniks who have abandoned the peace process brought to us by that Arkansas-fella we all wish was still in charge). Please refer to my newly included links page to access alternative and international media resources to combat Bush’s informational fog of war.