“What I Heard about Iraq," by Eliot Weinberger (2005):

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 organised 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 legitimised by British intelligence, that the aluminium 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 immunisations.

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 practise 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’, modelled 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.

Am American Britney

Yes, we’re amusing ourselves to death with the physical and spiritual deaths of two non-blonde blondes. Neil Postman was right when he said this would be the death of us, the obsession with entertainment, at the price of paying attention to what's actually killing us (ourselves, by way of environmental suicide and warring).

But then again, maybe something needs saying here that's not being said. There’s something else going on in the stories of Britney and Anna Nicole that is all but verboten to utter in the current manly climate. Ridicule rules the day. What passes for feminism these days consists of blaming young women for dyeing their hair and dancing around on stripper poles, and then wondering why no one takes them seriously. It’s all their fault, the whores.

But in the last several days I’ve talked to two women—grown women, in their 40s, both successful—who got really upset when talking about Anna Nicole. One, a friend who works in L.A., called me from her car crying. “I can’t believe this!” she said. Since I’ve never known her to be an Anna Nicole Smith devotee, I was rather surprised. And then I was having lunch with another friend in New York who informed me, “I am just devastated by this."

What the hell? Obviously, this is all “about something else.” But what was the something else that was making them so sad? I think it was the thing we’re not allowed to say anymore, lest we come off like ballbusters, bitches, victims: It was woman pain. It was, as the biggest ballbusting victim bitch of all time, Madonna, said best when she said, “What it feels like for a girl.”

One of these women I was talking to had a man leave her pregnant when she was 16; she raised the boy himself and now he’s all grown up (happy and successful too). My other friend was raped in her college dorm room when she was 19. Yes, everybody has pain; sh— happens to everyone, you say. O.K. But there are things that happen to women that don’t happen to you. But now I’m saying things we're no longer supposed to say...

To even have to argue all this again is tedious, but necessary; it seems like we have to do it all over again and again until things change. But things have changed, you say. Somewhat. O.K. Still, we’re hardly all the way there. Women still don’t make as much money as men; they're still beaten, killed in domestic violence situations every day; they're still left alone with children, with no help from anyone. The current administration would actually like to overturn Roe v. Wade—although they would not like to do anything for single mothers (I mean sluts). America provides its mothers with no affordable daycare, or even housing or health care. Women are just expected to make do. And how does all that feel, for a girl?

As for the media, I think things are actually worse there than when I was a girl back in the Middle Ages. I don’t remember seeing anything like “Girls Gone Wild” ads on TV. Barbie was weird enough. I don’t remember anything like Bratz dolls or Paris Hilton. Where is all this coming from?

I picked up an issue of Newsweek recently, the one with the “Girls Gone Wild” cover (Feb. 12), which said: “Paris, Britney, Lindsay & Nicole. They seem to be everywhere and they may not be wearing underwear. Tweens adore them and teens envy them. But are we raising a generation of 'prosti-tots'?”—which may be the most offensive catchword I've ever heard. The article spent a lot of time delineating the titillatingly bad behavior of these young women. “A recent Newsweek Poll found that 77 percent of Americans believe that Britney, Paris and Lindsay have too much influence on young girls," it said (and what about the Bush Twins? Just asking).

But it went nowhere near any sort of analysis of how big corporations also capitalize on this same sort of sexual advertising (even the magazine itself, selling issues off pictures of the girls). It seems we aren’t allowed to talk about exploitation anymore. It’s all Paris and Britney’s fault; oh, and Nicole’s. Forget about any wider suggestion that the powers-that-be benefit from Paris and Britney et al distracting us to death. Much more fun to think about their lack of underwear than the latest roadside bombing in Iraq. You could talk about how a militaristic society needs to kill the feminine in order to continue murdering; but then you might sound a bit uppity.

I heard from a former schoolmate of one wilding starlet that this girl's father sexually abused her when she was a child. I don’t know if it's true. But if it were, would it make any difference in how we view her strutting around? Instead of hating her, might we not just want to throw our coat over her and put an arm around her? And what about the average girl who yearns to be like her? I remember when I was doing a piece on Hugh Hefner, the young women who were living in "the Mansion" told me it had been their dream to be in Playboy since they were little girls. What kind of a household—or country—had they grown up in that they’d come to think that this qualified as “a goal”?

Anna Nicole Smith dreamed of being in Playboy too; so it was her"choice," her "fault," you say. But maybe nobody ever told her she could do something else. Maybe it wasn’t always that easy to find something else to do. I’ve seen the “Driven” on Britney Spears; she wanted fame, she wanted it bad, from the time she was a little girl. But why? Maybe because our society tells kids that fame is a wonderful heaven on earth, full of adulation and money and toys—and that you should prostitot yourself in any way possible to get it, because boy, are you gonna love it. Then real life creeps in, you have a couple of kids, a man uses you to get some fame of his own, your heart gets broken; and you find yourself on the cover of the Daily News, bald and beating up a car with an umbrella… Poor Britney. But look at it this way, it's probably the realest thing she's ever done in public, her best performance.

When judging celebrity meltdowns, America has always experienced a tension between the compassionate determinism of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the bitchy mean-girlism of The Star (“Given her recent behavior,” it polls online today, “do you think Britney is mentally ill?”). Since the days of Ronald Reagan—coincidentally, when the gossip press exploded—we tend to lean towards the latter. In response to this I'd like to pose another poll, composed by our Lady Madonna: “Do you know what it feels like for a girl/Do you know what it feels like in this world/For a girl?”

Now It’s Time to Say Good Bye to V.P. Dick Cheney

There was a stunning moment in the closing arguments of the Scooter Libby trial yesterday (Tuesday) when Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Theodore Wells, begged the jury, “’Give him back to me.’ With that, Mr. Wells teared up, sobbed audibly and sat down,’” said the New York Times.

Sounds like this guy should be nominated for a Tony. What theater. But if he’s crying it’s probably because he knows his guy is taking the fall here. The real culprit behind the Valerie Plame scandal is, of course, the sly-faced martinet, Vice President Dick Cheney.

There was an astonishing article in the Times on Monday about Vice President Cheney’s role in this whole Valerie Plame affair—in which, again, the name of former CIA agent Plame was illegally leaked to reporters by Libby in an attempt to get back at her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, for writing a New York Times Op-Ed piece which questioned the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain nuclear material in Africa (the now infamous ‘16 words’ in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address).

As the Times said, “Mr. Libby faces charges that he lied to authorities who were looking into whether, in defending against Mr. Wilson’s accusations, the administration intentionally exposed the identity of Mrs. Wilson to undercut her husband and clear Mr. Cheney."

I don’t know anyone who supports this administration anymore—there are fewer and fewer people out there even in the reddest parts of the red states who do; but even the most diehard Bush and Co. fans would have to rethink their support in light of the conduct of this vice president. The man should resign. He’s disgraced the White House, and much worse.

“The evidence in the trial shows Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Libby, his former chief of staff, countermanding and even occasionally misleading colleagues at the highest levels of Mr. Bush’s inner circle as the two pursued their own goal of clearing the vice president’s name with flawed intelligence used in the case for war,” said the Times.

Can a vice president be impeached? What is the procedure? And why isn’t anyone in the newly elected Democratic Congress speaking out against Mr. Cheney’s misuse of power? There should be hearings; Congress should respond. This whole thing makes Watergate look like a cakewalk; no one died in that sleazy little fiasco, while more than 3,000 Americans have perished in Iraq thanks to “flawed intelligence."

“Unbeknownst to their colleagues,” the Times story went on, “according to testimony, the two [Cheney and Libby] carried out a covert public relations campaign to defend not only the case for war but also Mr. Cheney’s connection to the flawed intelligence.”

And let’s not forget that the Iraq war has meant billions in profits for Halliburton/KBR, the company Mr. Cheney formerly CEO’d, thanks to the no-bid, sweetheart contracts brokered by his office. It all stinks of alligator breath.

“Mr. Libby’s notes from a White House meeting of senior presidential advisers on the morning of July 8—the sort of meeting that staff members rarely discuss publicly—read, ‘Uranium story becoming a question of the president’s trustworthiness.’ The notes quote Karl Rove”—a.k.a. “Bush’s Brain”—“the presidential adviser tasked with Mr. Bush’s re-election, as lamenting, ‘Now they have accepted Joe Wilson as a credible expert.’”

Can you believe these guys? They’re not one bit interested in knowing the truth—did Saddam Hussein get uranium from Africa, or didn’t he? Is war really necessary or isn’t it? They’ve already decided American servicemen and women are getting on those planes bound for Baghdad, and their only concern now is spin control.

“The notes reflected a general concern that the White House was not moving swiftly enough to contain the damage. What others present at the White House meeting did not know was that Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were already conducting their own quiet campaign. Its purpose was to show not only that the White House had ample reason to believe the flawed intelligence even after Mr. Wilson’s mission but also to defend against Mr. Cheney’s alleged connection to the uranium claim.”

Here is our vice president: peddling nuclear lies while at the same time making sure keep them very far away from himself; might contaminate him, after all.

He didn’t even have the decency to testify at his devoted chief of staff's, Libby’s, trial, despite the promises of Libby's lawyer that he would—I guess because he would either have had to perjure himself or admit that he had misused his office and engaged in a campaign to send American men and women into war on the basis of some James Bond-sounding hogwash.

“Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that an angry Mr. Cheney had by then already directed him to approach a reporter he regarded as suitable, Judith Miller of the New York Times, to make his case. Mr. Libby was under instruction to describe the vice president’s ignorance of Mr. Wilson’s mission [a fact-finding trip to Africa in which Wilson had found no basis for the uranium claim] and to discuss parts of the National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 as well as another intelligence document showing the CIA continued promoting the theory about Iraq’s efforts to acquire uranium months after Mr. Wilson’s trip."

Basically what happened then was that Cheney got the president to de-classify more “flawed intelligence” so that his right hand-man Libby could go and try and push it on more reporters. I think back on all the conversations I’ve had over the years with people who doubt that our government uses the media—or attempts to use the media—to push its agendas. Well, I guess there’s no doubt about it anymore.

“At a meeting on July 10, Mr. [Stephen J.] Hadley”—then the deputy secretary of national security under Condoleeza Rice—“had suggested to Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney that the intelligence estimate could be leaked to a friendly reporter, Mr. Libby testified that his notes said. But neither he nor Mr. Cheney told Mr. Hadley that they had started trying to do so days earlier.”

Now here’s the vice president of the United States, running around slipping reporters secretly de-classified documents without the knowledge of the guys in national security (documents which they would have leaked themselves if they’d thought of it first! Welcome to the Bush administration).

In the age of 9/11, this is not only an outrage, it's dangerous. But Dick Cheney has shown himself to be concerned only about Dick Cheney. In this whole affair Mr. Cheney has been exposed as a liar, a careerist loose cannon and a threat to what they like to call national security. He should resign, or be asked to leave. The latest CBS News Poll showed his approval rating at 16%, so I don’t think he will be missed.

Jack A Very, Very Bad Man

Check out Jane Mayer’s new piece in the “New Yorker” on torture and the Fox show “24.” Mayer's one of my favorite journalists and I’m grateful to her for writing about something which has long been on my mind, which I've written about here—in Rosebud #14, from September of last year: “Several times in the last week I’ve heard TV commentators make reference to the popularity of the show 24 as some sort of proof that the American people condone the use of torture. Just once I’d like to see 24’s hero, L.A. counter terror cop Jack Bauer, torture or kill a suspect, only to find out later that he, or she, was innocent. ‘You made a mistake, Jack. Was it worth it?’”

There’s never been any proof that torture facilitates intelligence-gathering—on the contrary, torture has been known to lead to bad intelligence, which can potentially endanger U.S. servicemen and women and warp U.S. policy. It’s also illegal and wrong. Mayer goes farther in exposing the warm relationship between the creators and writers of “24” and people in the Bush administration. How could they not love this show? It’s apparently also very popular with cadets at West Point, who idolize the crackerjack terror detective Jack Bauer—a brutal, self-absorbed figure who self-righteously defies orders, a cooler-looking Ollie North.

Mayer was on Brian Lehrer’s “On the Media” on NPR today and someone emailed in to say oh, this just a fictional show and it doesn’t make me approve of torture. Maybe that’s true for some; but if you have any doubts about the close relationship between the entertainment media and the White House, just look back at the letters from FDR to MGM boss Louis B. Mayer about making movies that would help the war effort. Maybe that’s something we can all agree was a good idea at the time; but our government is obviously very interested in using entertainment to shape public opinion; they know its power. It’s naïve to think otherwise. It used to openly be called “propaganda,” even in this country, until Joseph Goebbels gave the word a bad odor.

And speaking of the Nazis: if they’d had TV throughout Hitler’s Germany, would you be surprised to find out that the number one show was one with graphic scenes of people being tortured by cops? Was does it say about our society that we’re so inured to images of people being hurt physically—and so arrogant to think that our torture is somehow “justified,” because we are doing it “for the right reasons”—that we can’t wait to get home to watch that stuff?

But not everyone is inured. Children aren’t; unless we allow them to be. Interestingly enough, the conversation on Brian Lehrer's show veered into the question of whether a parent should allow his or her child to watch “24.” My daughter is only 6, so it isn’t even an issue for me, but I’ll tell you something she said while watching “Home Alone”—not exactly “24,” which is why I let her watch it. It’s supposed to be for kids.

Well, the end of “Home Alone” features a 5-year-old boy essentially torturing two burglars: he pummels them with paint cans, burns them with a blow torch, shoots them, cuts them, tars and feathers them, and causes them to fall down flights of stairs. It’s supposed to be funny.

Watching this, my daughter started to cry. “Why are you crying?” I asked her, alarmed. She said, “Because he’s hurting the men!” And I said, “But they’re the bad guys.” And she said, “Yes but they’re human beings like us!"

I turned it off.

I realized I had a picture of the man I called Orville Redenbacher (in Rosebud #66) at the anti-war march in Washington January 27. Hi, Orville! See him up there in the hat, looking delighted to be exercising his right to dissent? Here is the face of the new anti-Bush protest movement: conservative white men!

I watched the debate in Congress on the Iraq resolution most of the day. It was more entertaining than The Tyra Banks Show. Watching Republicans gnash their teeth on yet another version of why we are in Iraq, trotting out the references to Chamberlain and Hitler, the quotes from Douglas MacArthur. I loved it when Charlie Rangel (who served in Korea) got up and reminded everybody that the last time we saw General MacArthur, he was being hauled back to Washington for trying to defy orders and invade China!

It was great theater. But the stakes are all too real for the American servicemen and women of the Surge. For the ones already over there. For the Iraqis. For us.

Perhaps the most insidious argument made by Republicans was the one that said, if we don't continue the Iraq war, "the terrorists" will see it as a "sign of weakness" and "follow us home." This is fearmongering, irrational and wrong. It's the war that's fueling hatred against America and Americans, the war that has turned Iraq into a terrorist breeding ground. The Al Qaeda members who attacked New York on September 11 (assuming you wholeheartedly accept the government's official story) were mainly Saudis—but Saudi Arabia is our "friend," a friend especially to American corporate interests (and the Bush family). Iraq had no connection to September 11 then and has none now. The problem of global terrorism will never be solved through war, but through police work, intelligence and diplomacy. This war makes us all less safe and less moral.

U.S. out of Iraq! Time to imagine a new and better world.

Dick Seen As Eponymous, By Most

America does not love Dick Cheney. Don’t love him like we love Oprah or even Ellen; don’t like him like we like Bill or even Hill. Only 16% of Americans in a recent CBS News Poll had a favorable view of this vice president. Wonder if he ever wonders why. Let’s see.

Could it be that he resembles a used car salesman trying to sell you a Ford Pinto? Or that he’s almost always smirking?

But no, I don’t believe America’s that superficial—we usually have better reasons for who we love and can’t stand. So what else could it be?

Could it be that he shot his friend in the face?

Could it be that he repeatedly tried to influence reporters in the Joe Wilson scandal? That he responded to Wilson’s New York Times Op-Ed, which criticized the Bush administration's plans for an Iraq war, by “dictating talking points for the news media to subordinates and hastily summoning conservative columnists to a lunch… Most strikingly, Mr. Cheney cleared with President Bush the secret declassification of an intelligence document on Iraqi weapons so that it could be leaked to a reporter Mr. [Lewis "Scooter"] Libby saw as friendly, Judith Miller, then of the Times,” the Times said yesterday.

"Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby said, 'dictated to me what he wanted me to say to the press,' including a 'word-for-word' quote to give Time magazine and 'background material that he wanted me to use'... A few months later, when Mr. Libby was being publicly discussed as a possible target of the criminal investigation, Mr. Cheney weighed in again. He directed Scott McClellan, then the White House spokesman, to publicly clear Mr. Libby just as he had cleared Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political adviser"—a.k.a. "Bush's Brain."

Could it be that the vice president misled us about Iraq having WMDs—continued to insist on it even after the “flawed intelligence” behind the claim had been exposed?

Could it be that he seems to be following the same tragic course now as the wingman for a new, flawed rationale for a military conflict with Iran—a prospect most Americans view as unecessary, not to mention insane?

Could it be that he just keeps saying we're "winning in Iraq"?

Could it be that we wonder who he means by "we"? Certainly not the tens of thousands who have died; not the families of the dead soldiers. Could it be that, since the Iraq war began, Halliburton/KBR, the company Mr. Cheney formerly helmed, has made billions thanks to a sweetheart deal brokered by his office? Could it be that we wonder just what he’s getting out of all that?

Could it be that this is a dangerous and corrupt man?

AEI = American Energy Influence

See the article from yesterday’s Guardian, attached below, on the U.S. plans for a military strike in Iran. The piece mentions the American Enterprise Institute as one of the conservative think-tanks goading Washington into a wider war in the Middle East, at a time when the majority of Americans have made it plain this is not what they want. America wants America out of Iraq.

Let’s just leave aside for a moment the outrageous fact that these partisan think tanks wield such influence on American foreign policy, despite the fact that their members are unelected and often hidden from the public view (until, of course, they use the think tank as a revolving door toward positions of power, as in the case of John Bolton, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who beat the drum hardest on Iraq, and Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, all of whom are AEI fellows) and let’s just take a look at the unabashedly pro-oil and pro-war AEI.

On Feburary 2, the Guardian published an article exposing that members of AEI “had sent letters to scientists, offering $10,000 plus travel expenses and additional payments, asking them to discredit a consensus report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The letters alleged that the IPCC was ‘resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work’ and asked for essays that ‘thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs.’ Scientists who participated in the IPCC report argue that the AEI is merely trying to confuse the public about the scientific consensus on climate change by giving undue prominence to dissenting voices that represent a small minority of scientists, and circumventing the scientific peer review process by offering cash incentives for predetermined scientific conclusions.’”

Meanwhile AEI has received at least $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil, the largest publicly traded oil and gas company in the world. Apparently what they want is permanent war in the Middle East—see some of their further "studies" at www.aei.org, as well as the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" from the Project for a New American Century, co-authored by AEI fellow Frederick Kagan and a must-read for any understanding of the question, "Why are we in Iraq?" and now "Why are they trying to push us into Iran?" (you can find it at cryptome.org/rad.htm#PROJECT%20PARTICIPANTS).

Now let’s take a look at AEI’s latest alarmist push for airstrikes in Iran. P.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, is an AEI fellow as well.

Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring
Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian

US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.

The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."

One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department, Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?

Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.

"I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."

Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.

Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."

Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. "There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be."

In spite of the president's veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.

Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away."

He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war".

The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants' weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.

If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.

"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.

"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly" - George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio

"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point" - Robert Gates

"I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters" - Dick Cheney

"It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux" - Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq

"US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. They are facing a nation." - Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Rat Tales

Check out my new story in the Hollywood issue of Vanity Far (March, 2007) on Rush Hour director Brett Ratner. He said he liked it. This morning his mother called me and said she liked it. So I hope you like it.

The best piece in the issue I think is Craig Unger's story on the U.S.'s reckless plans for an airstrike on Iran: "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq": "The same neocon idealogues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics—alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on W.M.D.—to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?"

This is a please read, a must read. But it isn't enough to read anymore, we have to act. Contact your Congresspeople immediately. I saw the talking heads on Scarborough Country the other night yakking away as if a military encounter with Iran is already a done deal—"inevitable," Scarborough said. Where do they get off? It isn't what most of us want—and it's totally nuts.

No Mo $$ = No Mo War

Calling for the cutting off of funds to the military in Iraq is not "not supporting the troops." Even military families are demanding the cessation of funding as a way of stopping the war; see this press release from Military Families Speak Out:

February 5, 2007 – Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) members today called on Congress to support our troops and honor the fallen by voting against President Bush’s request for a supplemental appropriation that would allow the U.S. military occupation of Iraq to continue. Military Families Speak Out, an organization of over 3,200 military families opposed to the war in Iraq, is the largest organization of military families opposing a war in the history of the United States.

“President Bush is now requesting funds to continue an unjustifiable war that is taking the lives of three U.S. troops and countless Iraqi children, women and men each day,” said Nancy Lessin, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out and stepmother of a Marine who served in Iraq. “Now is the time, and Congress is the vehicle, by which this horrific war can finally end. We call on Congress to support our troops by voting against the funds that would allow this war to continue. To do otherwise would be to abandon our loved ones and the people of Iraq to the unending and worsening violence of this misbegotten war..."

Stopping funding would also be a way of stopping corruption. There was a story on the cover of the New York Times yesterday, Sunday, about concern over corruption in the use of government contractors in Iraq (“Questions of Propriety and Accountablilty as Outside Workers Flood Agencies”). It was the typical palatable, cold cereal of a story. If you want to get a handle on the whole, great big stinking pile of manure, check out "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers," another documentary from Robert Greenwald (the same guy who made Outfoxed, about the Fox News empire). It was released last year, is now available on Netflix and Amazon and in some video stores.

It isn’t anything we don’t already know—big corporations make money off war, while children die and taypayers shoulder the bill—but it’s laid out in a way that can leave you feeling very exposed to the truth. There’s whistleblower testimony, first-hand accounts from soldiers and contract workers. If you’re already involved in the struggle to end this foul war, it’ll make you fight that much harder. If you’re not, yet—see you at the next march in Washington, or wherever this struggle takes us.

The film makes very plain the price we're paying for the revolving door between the government and corporations which act as contractors for the military. "Conflict of interest" is an understatement; it's an Escher painting of a pig sucking on its own teats. Meanwhile the government can say they’ve “cut big government"; but they haven’t. These contractors over-charge by billions, meanwhile giving millions upon millions to the political machines of their (mainly Republican) cronies. So when Vice President Dick Cheney gets on the news and insists we’ll stay the course in Iraq, he’s talking as the former head of Halliburton/KBR, which since the Iraq war began has reaped megabucks in no-bid contracts.

But first let’s talk about CACI. The article in the Times mentions how, in June, when complaints over incompetence and fraud by government contractors began flooding government agencies, the government went and hired another contractor to process the complaints: CACI International, which itself had narrowly avoided suspension from federal contracting.

What the Times doesn't mention, unfortunately, because the public needs to know, is that CACI “interrogators” have been accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Former employees, prisoners and a brigadier general whistleblower, Janis Karpinski, have publicly denounced CACI interrogators for their sadistic practices, which included abuse of prisoners' genitalia. Many of these prisoners were innocent working-class men who were picked up in routine sweeps. As there is no oversight of these contract workers in Iraq, you won’t see any of them going on trial or even being investigated.

CACI, founded in 1962, has its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Its proximity to the heart of the military industrial complex would seem no accident. On its web site, www.caci.com, the company presents itself as a sort of unofficial wing of the military, which essentially it is, but one without accountability. “Ever Vigilant” its motto. Its icon is the American eagle. It has a close relationship with Homeland Security. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, CACI has received 60 billion dollars in taxpayer money for "U.S. Army Intelligence Services." The head of CACI, J.P. London, has earned $22 million in salary.

CACI has been accused of providing bad intelligence which has the potential for putting U.S. servicemen and women in danger. TITAN, another company which provides translators for the military, has been exposed for providing untrained translators who often are not proficient in the languages they claim to know. These are the people our government has hired to grill supposed insurgents on their activities. The heads of TITAN, like CACI, are former military men and women, senior retired military personnel.

"When I came back from Iraq, what was so heartbreaking," Aidan Delgado, a SPC Army Reservist, says in "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers," "is that we weren't always the good guys. It was so disillusioning for me. I had grown up with this dream of America and what America was and when I saw that dream at Abu Ghraib and what it had become I felt heartbroken. I felt like I didn't know what it was to be an American because I saw what I thought America was destroyed and disgraced."

When the Iraq war began, Halliburton/KBR was imediately on the scene, taking on roles formerly performed by the U.S. military. A soldier in the film talks about spending his time training KBR employees to fix simple radios, a job he already knew how to do and which it was his job to do. Military personnel are being "outsourced" for the benefit of companies like KBR. "If you don't know KBR, you haven't been to Iraq," says another soldier.

American working men and women go to work for KBR in Iraq because they need to feed their families, pay for their homes. They also think they're going to "help re-build Iraq," which none of these companies has managed to do very well, despite the exorbitant cost to the American taxpayer. ($45 for a can of Coke?) KBR has also been accused of not protecting its workers. In 2004, a convoy of KBR trucks came under fire and several truckers were killed; they were in the middle of a war zone without any sort of of military training or weaponry. KBR has also been accused of not providing clean water to American soldiers (they run the water plants); 63 of 67 tanks tested were full of contaminants including malaria. This is the water U.S. soldiers drink and bathe in.

Since the Iraq war started, Halliburton stock has quardupled in value. Its CEO, Deavid Lesar, has reaped $47 million in salary since 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney's office coordinated KBR's contract in Iraq; this is well known. And yet there has not been a single hearing about it in Congress.

What I always wonder is how conservatives can justify the awarding of these no-bid, sole source contracts, when it would hardly seem to represent their dream of a free market. It also makes for bad business practices, which in the end hurts American servicemen and women. Soldiers in Iraq sleep on cots that make them sick, they're so germ-infested, while KBR executives and their secretaries live the good life, driving around in lavish cars, Cadillacs, Escalades.

One can only imagine what the average Iraqi thinks of our wonderful American democracy, seeing how we treat our own soldiers versus how these fat cat executives live high in the midst of the war. Or how Iraqis feel about the fact that we are importing American workers to rebuild their country (badly) instead of hiring them to do it.

Senator Leahy of Vermont has been one of the few Congresspeople to speak out against this infuriating and immoral situation. His bill to stop war profiteering was shot down. Let's let the new Congress know we want it to stop. There should be investigations; probably some people should go to jail. It will take a big movement; the first step is knowing the truth.