THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
March 2003
Week Four
- March 22: 1,500 Turkish troops enter Iraq from the northeast, with the intention of keeping Kurdish forces and refugees from entering their country.
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The US protests the troop entries. US forces attempt to enter the city of Basra. General Tommy Franks states, "There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And...as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them." - The first days of the invasion go surprisingly well, with the 3rd Army Infantry Division thrusting 150 miles into Baghdad, and the Iraqi forces either defeated or dissolving. But some of the former soldiers are coming back dressed in civilian clothes or in the black-and-white garb of the Saddam Fedayeen, the militia commanded by Hussein's son Uday. Unprotected Iraqi civilian fighters are throwing themselves on armored formations, mostly getting slaughtered. They try insanely suicidal tactics, attacking tanks on foot and trying to ambush Bradley Fighting Vehicles with small arms. Colonel Steve Rotkoff, part of the task force designated to find and neutralize Iraq's WMDs and given to writing impromptu haiku in his personal diary, writes,
- Saddam Fedhayeen
- Where the hell did they come from?
- Everyone missed it.
- Rotkoff's boss, General James Marks, figures that the civilians and irregulars are being forced to fight by Saddam loyalists: get in there and attack the Americans or die right here and now. Marks talks it over with CIA director George Tenet and ground commander General David McKiernan in Kuwait, with Marks saying to Tenet, "So what do you think? You know these guys are fighting. They're coming at us." "I can't f*cking figure it out," Tenet replies. (Washington Post, Wikipedia, State Department, Democratic Underground, Bob Woodward)
- March 22: Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman says,
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"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction." (Washington Post) - March 22: Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke tells the press, "One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD.
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There are a number of sites." Clarke is an employee with the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm, hired by the Bush administration to run the PR side of the war. Along with advertising executive Charlotte Bears, who is hired to improve the image of the US in the Muslim world, it is Clarke's job to sell the war to the American public, and the WMD stories are the premier marketing pitches. (Department of Defense, Chicago Sun-Times, Democratic Underground) - March 22: Pentagon claims that 8,000 Iraqi soldiers -- an entire division -- have surrendered to American troops in southern Iraq turns out to be false
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when the commander of the division stationed near Basra tells press representatives that his soldiers are still deployed and fighting. Psyops specialist Colonel Sam Gardiner says that the announcement, made jointly by the US and UK, is a classic psychological warfare operation. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman) - March 22: Joseph Cirincione, assistant director for the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, tells an American University audience that the Bush administration has no plans to leave Iraq any time soon.
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"The reason there is no exit strategy for Iraq is that some of these guys do not want to leave," he says. "You need to understand that Iraq is part of a grander strategy. This is not about WMD, it is not about terrorism. It's about seeing that the US, the most powerful nation that the world has ever known, uses its power to transform the world. ...They want to start with Iraq, and then they believe that Iraq will let off a 'democratic tsunami' in the region. They believe that with US help we can topple the government of Syria, breaking the Syrian grip on Lebanon, eliminating the operating bases for Hamas and Hezbollah, and thus improving the security situation for Israel. In this process we will transform the Palestinian Authority into a democratic organization, giving the Israelis a reliable negotiation partner for a final peace settlement. The reason this president has not spent more than two hours on Middle East peace is that for him the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. We will also deal with our problem in Saudi Arabia by moving the bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. We will establish a pro-American regime that can host our troops and consolidate a permanent American presence in the Gulf. - "You think I'm making this up?
- Go read the 2002 National Strategy for the United States, which holds that our defense 'will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia.' ...Read the 2000 report from the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century signed by many current administration officials. The report says, 'The US has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in the Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
- "When did the planning of this war begin? It began the day President Bush stopped the 1993 war. There were some people in the administration who never wanted to stop. Paul Wolfowitz sat in the corner in a huff, according to reporters. He never wanted to stop the war. Neo-conservatives thought that we had not finished the job; they wanted us to begin the war again. So they planned and organized. They started with the Wolfowitz draft Defense Policy Guidelines in 1992. There, he talked about establishing the permanent supremacy of US power in the world. No one should be allowed to challenge our power, he wrote. Not regionally, not globally. He advocated adopting a policy of pre-emption. He wrote of being prepared for a war with Iraq -- in 1992. When that plan was leaked to the New York Times...it was considered so outrageous, so extreme, they were forced to withdraw the draft and rewrite it. 'Pre-emption' was replaced with 'containment.'
- "They thought they would get another try with the strategy plans next year, but the American people voted them out of office. Some guy from Arkansas became president, and they were furious. They spent their years in exile well. They learned, studied, and organized, and now as a group they have entered the government and have key positions in the State Department and in the Defense Department, and now have a hammerlock on the national security policy apparatus for the US. For them, Iraq is just the beginning. As one of the officials said to me, 'We have a long to-do list.'" (Joseph Cirincione/Karen Balkin)
- March 22: Rumsfeld renews his efforts to strip Jay Garner of all of his choices to run Iraq's ministries after the fall of Hussein and replace them with his own people,
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an effort he has made since March 13. Garner, on the ground in Kuwait, continues to resist. "You know, it doesn't seem like you're on our team," Rumsfeld says. Garner is deeply offended. "Okay, that's it," he says, ending the teleconference. Garner pens a longhand note to Rumsfeld asserting that they have exactly the same goals. "I am a team player," he writes angrily. Garner later tells reporter Bob Woodward that it was the worst kind of bullying tactic -- if you don't agree with me you are disloyal. (Bob Woodward)
- March 23: US and British forces continue to battle Iraqi forces for control of Basra, and attack the city of Nasiriya.
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The Arabian TV news network al-Jazeera begins showing pictures and video of wounded and dead Iraqis; American media refuses to carry any of the footage, though, over Pentagon objections, they do report on the dozen American casualties. In Belgium, legal complaints against Bush, Cheney, and other American officials are filed, accusing them of war crimes. (Wikipedia, Reuters/Yahoo! News, Frank Rich p.80) - March 23: US general Peter Pace tells CNN that an Iraqi woman was hanged by fellow Iraqis for waving at coalition troops.
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The story is never confirmed, and is never referred to again. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman) - March 23: Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, one of the authors of the Bush invasion of Iraq and a founding member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, writes an article for the Spectator in which he writes that he hopes that the fall of Saddam Hussein will "take the United Nations down with him.
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...What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order." Such statements are echoed by Perle's neocon brethren, including Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol's statement in their book The War Over Iraq, where they state bluntly, "The United Nations? Far from existing as an autonomous entity, the organization is nothing more than a collection of states, many of them autocratic, and few of them as public-spirited as America -- which in any case provides the UN with most of its financial, political, and military muscle." That assertion is untrue: the US provides the UN with 22% of its financing, when it bothers to pay its dues; its participation in UN peacekeeping initiatives, at least under Bush, is negligible, and in light of its stampede away from environmental, foreign aid, and humanitarian issues, is rarely in the majority of the developed states that lead the UN. Kaplan and Kristol quote American Enterprise Institute scholar John Muravchik in saying, "A policeman gets his assignments from higher authority, but there is no higher authority than America." Some may view that as an ultimate assertion of American arrogance, but Kaplan and Kristol call it "a simple fact." "What is wrong with [American] dominance, in the service of sound principles and high ideals?" they ask, ignoring the fact that if America's highest ideal is democracy, then advocating the idea of a country with less than 5% of the world's population dominating the other 95% is not advocating democracy. "If America is dominant," writes Peter Singer, "then the US Congress and the president of the United States dominate the world -- but only American citizens get to vote for them. That isn't 'wishing for others only what we wish for ourselves.'" He adds, "Under Bush's leadership, America's record as a global citizen does not encourage the belief that it can be trusted to wield its global dominance in the interests of all the world's peoples, rather than just Americans."(Peter Singer) - March 23: New York Magazine media critic Michael Wolff, stationed at CENTCOM's sterile press center in Doha, Qatar, finds his popularity with the American military spokespeople dwindling after he refused to stop asking questions like, "[W]hat is the value proposition?
Conservative media slant
Why are we here? Why should we stay? What's the value of what we're learning at this million-dollar press center?" He is told by one general that if he didn't like what he was doing, he could go home. Wolff believes that his, and others', questioning of the soft-pedaled, heavily supervised material provided at the press center's daily briefings were warranted: "Other than the pretense of a news conference -- the news conference as backdrop and dateline -- what did we get for having come all this way? What information could we get here that we could not have gotten in Washington and New York, what access to what essential person was being proffered? And why was everything so bloodless?"For asking questions, Wolff is attacked by the right-wing media mavens: Rush Limbaugh accuses him of being a "potential traitor," and three thousand hate e-mails came to Wolff from irate Limbaugh listeners. Wolff finds himself reporting not so much on the war itself, but the media's response to the war. (Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson) - March 23: Australian TV cameraman Paul Moran is killed by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq.
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His obituary notes that his activities "included working for an American public relations company contracted by the US Central Intelligence Agency to run propaganda campaigns against the dictatorship. ...Company founder John Rendon flew from the United States to attend Mr. Moran's funeral in Adelaide on Wednesday. A close friend, Rob Buchan, said the presence of Mr. Rendon -- an adviser to the U.S. National Security Council -- illustrated the regard in which Mr. Moran was held in U.S. political circles, including the Congress." It is plain that Moran was more than a mere cameraman, but an employee or an associate of the Rendon Company, a public relations firm who has worked extensively on behalf of right-wing interests in Iraq since Desert Storm. Moran and New York Times reporter Judith Miller are the only two journalists to be given access to Iraqi engineer Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, who claimed on Australian TV that he helped build special underground facilities for Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program. (Miller's journalistic objectivity has come under scrutiny for her close ties to Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi opposition group formed in 1992 by Rendon.) The al Haideri report was flashed directly to both George W. Bush and Tony Blair; Bush quoted the report in his infamous 2003 State of the Union address. The underground facilities al Haideri describes have never been found; it is doubtful that they ever existed. (In These Times)
- March 24: The US accuses Russia of supplying arms and material to Iraq.
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The Arab League votes 21-1 to demand the immediate removal of US and British forces from Iraq; Kuwait is the lone dissenter. US ground forces approach Baghdad. (Wikipedia, FactMonster) - March 24: Proving reports of his demise premature, Saddam Hussein surfaces on Arab television taunting the American invaders. (Frank Rich p.80)
- March 24: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says unequivocally, "We have seen intelligence over many months that they [the Iraqis] have chemical and biological weapons,
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and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." In February 2004, after his statement has long been proven to be an outright lie, Rumsfeld will claim, "I don't remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest." (Village Voice)
Rumsfeld personally botches planning and execution of military's most fundamental strategies; shifts blame onto others
- March 25: Responding to early criticism that the invasion of Iraq is going off track, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld takes partial credit for the war plans, saying,
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"We've all been deeply involved, and the plan has been a plan that's been approved by all the commanders, and by -- and needless to say -- General Myers and General Pace and Don Rumsfeld and the president of the United States. And it is a good plan." Three days later, with the march toward Baghdad clearly stalled and the Pentagon's strategy coming under withering fire, Rumsfeld prepares to pin blame: "The war plan is Tom Franks' war plan. It was carefully prepared over many months." (Rumsfeld is referring to General Tommy Franks, head of the US Central Command, or CENTCOM.) Many feel that Rumsfeld is trying to distance himself from a war plan that he is known to have personally devised and drawn up. (Others directly, and deeply, involved in the war plan, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and defense advisor Richard Perle, are, along with Rumsfeld, among those who consistently underestimate the difficulty of the invasion. Perle predicted, "support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.") Rumsfeld also warps the truth by claiming that the current coalition is "larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War of 1991." In reality, virtually all the troops on the ground in Iraq are US and British; most of the 46 nations cited as "coalition members" merely endorse the US invasion without actually contributing money, material, or personnel. The 1991 coalition featured 34 nations that provided troops, aircraft, ships, and/or medics; dozens more endorsed the action. - David Corn writes, "Pumping up a coalition that existed mostly in name, putting out CYA statements, refusing to concede a war plan had obvious problems, hyping one of the more dramatic (and cinematic) moments of the war [the putative rescue of Jessica Lynch] -- none of this was surprising behavior for the Pentagon. But the war and its aftermath revealed a more profound dishonesty, for the Bush administration's conduct in Iraq was far out of sync with its breathless pre-war rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's WMDs. In stark contrast to his claim that the war was absolutely necessary to counter the direct danger these weapons presented, Bush failed to mount anything resembling a top-priority hunt for the WMDs that supposedly imperiled America." Slate's Robert Wright admits, "...I made the mistake of putting some trust in talking heads -- all those can-do TV military analysts, and even people like Wolfowitz and Perle. I had always assumed that the administration's hawks do understand war, even if they don't understand geopolitics. Turns out I was only half right."
- What is not well known outside of the inner circles of the White House and the Pentagon, and certainly not admitted to the media or the public, is that the war is going far less well than is believed. The fault lies not with the troops on the ground, but with the planning, or lack thereof, from Rumsfeld, Franks, and their advisors. In its first week, the campaign falters badly, with attenuated supply lines and a lack of immediate reinforcements; Pentagon officials respond with anger, largely directed at Rumsfeld. Several senior war planners later reveal that Rumsfeld insists on micromanaging the war's operational details instead of leaving those to the generals and field commanders on the ground. (Rumsfeld left the Navy's active reserve in 1975 as a captain. He served much of his career as a flight instructor, and has no military strategic training to speak of.) "Rumsfeld's team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning -- traditionally, an area in which the uniformed military excels -- and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," writes journalist Seymour Hersh. "He thought he knew better," one senior planner tells Hersh. "He was the decision maker at every turn."
- The Iraqi assault is designated as Plan 1003. On at least six occasions, Rumsfeld insists on drastically reducing the number of troops in the assault, placing his faith in precision bombing and streamlined military operations, a faith that is badly misplaced. "[The troops on the ground have] got no resources," says a former high-level intelligence officer. "[Rumsfeld] was so focused on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart," that when the Iraqi paramilitary and irregular forces showed far more fight than Rumsfeld had predicted, no contingency plans for dealing with that resistance are in place.
- Probably the most egregrious error of Rumsfeld's comes when he decides, quite arbitrarily, to abandon the Pentagon's most fundamental and overreaching war planning document, the TPFDL -- time-phased force deployment list -- called by planning officers the "tip-fiddle." The TPFDL is a huge, exhaustively detailed document describing the inventory of forces that are to be sent into battle, the sequence of their deployment, and the logistical backup. "It's the complete applecart," says military history professor Roger Spiller of the US Command and General Staff College. "Everybody trains and plans on it. It's constantly in motion and always adjusted at the last minute. It's an embedded piece of the bureaucratic and operational culture." A retired Air Force strategic planner adds, "This is what we do best -- go from A to B -- and the tip-fiddle is where you start. It's how you put together a plan for moving into the theater." "Once you turn on the tip-fiddle, everything moves in an orderly fashion," says another former planner. "When you kill the tip-fiddle," says a former intelligence officer, "you kill centralized military planning. The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It's the redundancy that saves lives."
- Rumsfeld has never been fond of the assault plan and its accompanying TPFDL. The original TPFDL, presented for Rumsfeld's approval in 2002, called for a wide range of forces from the different branches, including four Army divisions. Rumsfeld rejected it, saying that the plan called for the deployment of far too many forces. He insisted that a much smaller, faster-moving force, supported by overwhelming air power, would do the job at a much smaller cost. He further insisted, to the astonishment of the Joint Staff, that he personally would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zones. These are called RFFs -- requests for forces -- and are typically handled by field commanders and generals on the ground. In this case, Rumsfeld would personally control the deployment of forces. Rumsfeld also decided that the planned use of overwhelming ground armor -- tanks and other heavy armored vehicles -- was a waste. Instead of having enough armor for three or four divisions, he relied on the single armored devision already in place in Kuwait. The 3rd Infantry Division, the only mechanized Army division active inside Iraq in the first week of the war, arrived in the Gulf without their own equipment. "Those guys are driving around in tanks that were pre-positioned," says one of the senior planners. "Their tanks are sitting in Fort Stewart [Georgia]. To get more forces there we have to float them. We can't fly our forces in, because there's nothing for them to drive. Over the past six months, you could have floated everything in ninety days -- enough for four or more divisions. ...This is the mess Rumsfeld put himself in, because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."
- The TPFDL is repeatedly revised and updated, and each time the new version is presented to Rumsfeld, he responds, according to the planner, "You've got too much ground force -- go back and do it again." The planner says that Rumsfeld has two goals in mind: to prove the efficacy of precision bombing and to 'do the war on the cheap.' Rumsfeld and his two main deputies for war planning, civilians Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, "were so enamoured of 'shock and awe' that victory seemed assured," says the planner. "They believed that the weather would always be clear, that the enemy would expose itself, and so precision bombings would always work."
- Personal feelings also cloud Rumsfeld's judgment. He holds many of the senior generals, most who achieved their rank during the Clinton era, in absolute contempt, and takes few pains to hide his feelings. He holds the Army's senior leadership in particular disdain, constantly carping about the Army's insistence on maintaining and relying upon costly mechanized divisions. "In those conditions -- an atmosphere of derision and challenge -- the senior officers do not offer their best advice," says a senior officer who served under Rumsfeld for over a year. In one memorable instance, Rumsfeld chewed out Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki in the presence of many junior officers, waving his hand in Shinseki's face and yelling, "Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?" As time went on, Rumsfeld, through retirement and intimidation, succeeded in replacing many of the senior generals with officers more to his liking. "All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked," says the planner, "and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy."
- In the months leading up to the war, a potentially crippling split developed in the generals and their staffs, with Rumsfeld having the support of Franks and Myers. When Turkey refused to allow the US to land the 4th Infantry Division within their borders, Franks initially argued for a delay in the invasion until the 4th could be brought in by another route. "Rumsfeld overruled him," says a former intelligence official, and Franks gave in. "Why didn't he go to the President?" wonders another former intelligence officer, but, in the words of a former senator, Franks is a commander who "will do what he's told." (Endearing qualities, no doubt, to Rumsfeld.) A Pentagon official recalls that a former senior general used to prepare his deputies for meetings with Rumsfeld by telling them, "When you go in to talk to him, you've got to be prepared to lay your stars on the table and walk out. Otherwise, he'll walk over you."
- The generals, particularly Franks, should not have been surprised by Rumsfeld's duplicity and refusal to shoulder responsibility for his own incompetence. In February 2003, he appeared at the Army Commanders' Conference, a social gathering of all the US's four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to dine with the generals and make an after-dinner speech, in hopes that some fences between the two parties could be mended. All went well until the question-and-answer period after thye speech, when he was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units. Many of the generals in the room knew very well how Rumsfeld micromanaged everything from the Pentagon; they were outraged when Rumsfeld calmly replied, "I wasn't involved. It was the Joint Staff." The former intelligence official says, "We thought it would be fence mending, but it was a disaster. Everybody knew he was looking at those deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff -- it's all about Rummy and the truth."
- Over a dozen military sources tell Hersh that Rumsfeld and his planners failed miserably to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field without the proper reserves and a dearth of armored vehicles. (Troops on the ground confirm that the vehicles they did have were stretched to the limit, to the point where they were breaking down from overuse and lack of maintenance.) Supply lines, inevitably, became overextended and vulnerable to attack, creating critical shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition throughout the first week. The rosy press briefings, lapped up by the media, are treated with bitter contempt by Pentagon officers: "It's a stalemate now," says the former intelligence officer. "It's going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines." The carriers are running out of JDAMs -- satellite-guided bombs that struck targets with extraordinary accuracy. The supply of Tomahawk missiles is rapidly dwindling. "The Marines are worried as hell. They're all committed, with no reserves, and they've never run the LAVs [light armored vehicles] as long and as hard" as they are doing now. Serious maintenance problems are increasing exponentially. "The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come." One of the main bodies of reinforcements, the 4th Infantry Division, the Army's most modern mechanized division, won't be ready to deploy until April because its equipment spent weeks waiting to be delivered until being diverted to the overtaxed American port in Kuwait. The 1st Cavalry Division, from Texas, is ready to be deployed, but by sea will take weeks to reach Kuwait. "All we have now is front-line positions. Everything else is missing."
- The failure of the Republican Guards to mount a serious counterattack actually caused problems for the American planning, as the assault on Baghdad stalled and supplies ran dangerously then. Planners felt that the Republican Guards were holding back for a strong counterattack, and the Army and Marine forces that would bear the brunt of that assault needed to be ready. Meanwhile, the hope was that the air strikes would "chew up" the Guards. "The only way out now is back," says the planner, "and to hope for some kind of a miracle -- that the Republican Guards commit themselves." "Hope," says a retired four-star general, "is not a course of action." The Army's senior ground commander, General William Wallace, gripes to reporters, "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against." Of the Iraqis, a senior administration official privately tells Hersh, "They're not scared. Ain't it something? They're not scared." In contrast, Rumsfeld and Myers tell the press that the war planning is "brilliant."
- Former UN inspector and ex-Marine Scott Ritter tells Hersh that the aerial bombing as relied upon by Rumsfeld to accomplish so much is, in actuality, far less effective, and in some cases actually counterproductive. For example, the bombing of Hussein's palaces free up a brigade of special guards assigned to protect them. "Every one of their homes -- and they are scattered throughout Baghdad -- is stacked with ammunition and supplies," he says. The senior planner says bitterly, "This is tragic. American lives are being lost." The former intelligence official says, "They all said, 'We can do it with air power.' They believed their own propaganda." The former general says that Rumsfeld's approach to the Joint Staff war planning was "McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small cell," referencing the equally haughty and ill-conceived interventions by John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. As for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general calls them Stepford wives. "They've abrogated their responsibility," he says.
- The US has counted on a large, general uprising, or at least real support, of the American and British troops by the Shi'ites in southern Iraq. Factions of the underground Al Dawa faction had been undertaking guerrilla strikes against the Hussein forces since the 1980s, but the war planners refused to take into account the Al Dawa leaders' hostility to American interests. Some intelligence analysts believe that Al Dawa operatives were involved in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost 241 lives and drove Reagan to invade Grenada to distract the American public. The British have courted Al Dawa, whom a former intelligence officer compares to "hardcore Viet Cong," and believed, erroneously, that the coalition could count on their support. Making things more difficult is the belief that many Iraqi exiles are crossing into Iraq by car and bus from Jordan and Syria to fight against the invaders. Former Middle East CIA operative Robert Baer says, "Everybody wants to fight. The whole nation of iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam. They've been given the high sign, and we are courting disaster. If we take fifty or sixty casualties a day, and they die by the thousands, they're still winning. It's a jihad, and it's a good thing to die. This is no longer a secular war." Mujahadeen from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Algeria are pouring into Iraq for "martyrdom operations."
- The civilian planners expected Iran to side with the US in the invasion. Ahmad Chalabi's INC had been in regular contact with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an umbrella group of Shi'ite organizations who opposed Hussein; SCIRI is based in Iran and has close ties to the Iranian intelligence. Chalabi, who is later outed as a spy for Iranian intelligence, predicted time and again that the Iranians would provide support, including arms and even troops, if the Americans invaded Iraq. Instead, the Iraqis choose to support their fellow Arabs against the Western infidels. A Middle Eastern businessman with long-standing ties to Jordan and Syria, whom Hersh has always found reliable, tells Hersh that Iran "is now backing Iraq in the war. There isn't any Arab fighting group on the ground who is with the United States."
- As it turns out, the worst predictions of disaster do not come true. The Army's 3rd Infantry completes a "Hail Mary pass" into the outskirts of Baghdad (a far more desperate and precarious move than is generally understood), the suddenly quiet city falls within days, and the Americans score a major photo-op with the orchestrated toppling of the giant statue of Saddam in Firdos Square. The media is jubilant, the complaints about the failure of planning and air power seem irrelevant and are publicly ridiculed by an effusive Rumsfeld and his subordinates, and the vaunted Iraqi Army and Republican Guard are nowhere to be seen. Then the wholesale looting and destruction begins, without enough American troops on the ground to stop it. The next few days see the beginnings of a well-armed insurgency, a contingency dismissed by Rumsfeld and his planners, and again, there are not nearly enough troops to stop it in its tracks. Hersh writes, "The Bush administration, it turned out, had won a major battle, but still had a war to fight." (Slate, David Corn, Seymour Hersh)
- March 25: Fighting in the southern city of Basra continues;
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British reports of a civilian uprising against Iraqi forces turn out to be false. (Wikipedia)
Bush requests almost $75 billion for invasion
- March 25: After months of refusing to provide an estimate of how much the US needs to spend on the invasion of Iraq, Bush travels to the Pentagon to unveil a budget request of $74.7 billion.
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He says, "Our coalition is...bound together by the principle of protecting not only this nation, but all nations from a brutal regime that is armed with weapons that could kill thousands of innocent people." The next day, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, home of Central Command and Special Operations, he says, "Every victory in this campaign and every sacrifice serves the purpose of defending innocent lives in America and across the world from the weapons of terror." He boasts that US forces have destroyed a terrorist base in northern Iraq that, he says, "sought to attack America and Europe with deadly poisons." It is true that US forces destroyed a base of operations of the fledgling terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, a small but dedicated offshoot of al-Qaeda that opposes American interests. Unfortunately, evidence shows that the 700 to 800 guerrillas at the base had the interest, but virtually no capacity, to produce toxins; its main purpose seems to be fighting the US-backed Kurds in northern Iraq. Bush is exaggerating the threat from this camp of extremists. The specious claims will continue. An NPR reporter says a "top military official" claims the discovery of 20 medium-range rockets containing sarin and mustard gas; the Pentagon denies any knowledge of such a discovery. US military officials will claim to intercept a coded message indicating Iraqi forces are preparing a counterattack using chemical and biological weapons; such an attack never materializes, and Pentagon officials later admit their intelligence was bad. Nevertheless, administration claims that WMDs are just waiting to be found will continue. It is difficult to understand that if such weapons do exist, why the Pentagon doesn't have a systematic plan to locate and destroy these terrible weapons. Nor are they taking steps to ensure that, in the chaos of the invasion, terrorists, government officials, or common criminals can't grab these chemical, biological, or nuclear materials and flee Iraq with them. "I don't sense that this was much of a priority," says former Reagan undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle. In the ensuing weeks, as WMDs remain undiscovered, the administration will downplay their existence and refocus on other rationales for the invasion. (David Corn) - March 25: Bush, having had little to do once the invasion started, begins pumping for a public relations offensive to sell the war and its objectives, both to the American people and to the world.
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"We need to remind people why we are here," he says in a Pentagon briefing. He tells Donald Rumsfeld, "You will remind the world of who we are fighting." The Air Force has three "flying TV and radio stations" housed in giant Commando Solo transport planes broadcasting over Iraq. "How does this look to the average Iraqi?" Bush asks on March 28. The answer is that Iraqis are able to receive the signals for five hours a day, from 6 PM to 11 PM. No video is being broadcast, just still photographs and audio signals. That isn't enough, says Bush. "You have to calibrate it. You have to market programs. People don't turn on television if there's nothing to watch." Three days later, senior war planner General Tommy Franks, in a teleconference from his headquarters in Kuwait, tells Bush that he isn't pleased with the US propaganda efforts. Native Iraqi TV is still on the air, and he wants more translators "to turn up the quality and volume of Arab language broadcasts." Bush promises more translators will be forthcoming. Few actually materialize. On April 4, somebody tells Bush that the electricity is off in Baghdad, though US forces have not yet reached the capital city. "Who turned out the lights in Baghdad?" Bush demands. "Most probably the regime to reposition forces," Franks answers. "But we don't know for sure." "Well, if it's the regime, put out the word that we didn't do it," Bush replies. At an NSC meeting, Bush says breezily, dismissing what he calls "second-guessing regarding the post-Saddam world," "Only one thing matters: winning." Deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley asks Bush privately how he is doing. "I made the decision," Bush says. "I sleep well at night." (Bob Woodward) - March 25: An organization founded by a Republican conservative, Howard Kaloogian, called the "Recall Gray Davis Foundation" is authorized to begin collecting signatures on petitions to force California governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, from office.
Election fraud
The organization must collect almost 900,000 signatures by September 2. The effort proceeds slowly. In May, millionaire Republican businessman and US representative Darrell Issa announces that he will funnel his own fortune into the recall effort. Issa hires professional signature-gathering firms from out of state to blanket California with petitions, and funds a media blitz of advertising and op-eds in California newspapers. Republicans accuse Democratic Secretary of State Ken Shelley with attempting to block certification of the gathered signatures, though many of the signatures are legally contestable, and threaten a recall of Shelley as well. (Wikipedia, Laura Flanders)
- March 26: After an American bombardment of a Baghdad marketplace kills dozens of Iraqi civilians,
Iraq war and occupation
Russia calls for an immediate end to hostilities. The US attempts to blame Iraqi soldiers for the bombing, but investigation reveals that the destruction was caused by a US-made HARM missile. (Wikipedia, Amy Goodman and David Goodman) - March 26: Bush signs an executive order delaying the release of millions of 25-year old classified documents due to be released in April 2003 until December 31, 2006.
Secrecy of Bush administration
The government faced a April 17 deadline for declassifying millions of documents 25 years or older. A provision of the order mandates that all communications from foreign governments be automatically considered classified and not released, no matter what their content. The order also makes it easier for the government to reclassify previously released documents, and gives the CIA director veto power over decisions to declassify documents by the Interagency Security Classifications Appeals Panel. And for the first time, it gives the vice president the power to classify information. The New York Times says, "Offering that power to Vice President Dick Cheney, who has shown indifference to the public's right to know what is going on inside the executive branch, seems a particularly worrying development." (Stephen Pizzo/Daily Misleader, Editor & Publisher, CCR/Break On Through) - March 26: Conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly advocates the complete destruction of Baghdad and all of its 4.5 million citizens:
Iraq war and occupation
"There is a school of thought that says we should have given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge by dropping leaflets and going with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours, you've got to get out of there, and flatten the place. Then the war would be over. We could have done that in two days.... You flatten Baghdad, you flatten all the troops, we know where they go, there's nowhere to hide in the desert. We know where everybody's moving. And you know as well as I do, this war could have been over in two days.... It's just frustrating for everybody to know that we have been fighting this war with one hand behind our back." O'Reilly goes on to pin the responsibility for the noncombatant civilians of Baghdad where he feels it belongs: "Now after we know that the final battle is going to come to Baghdad, that the people who remain in Baghdad, the civilians, bear some kind of responsibility for their own safety. Am I wrong?" O'Reilly's guests agree. (FAIR
- March 27: Tony Blair asserts that two British prisoners of war have been executed by their Iraqi captors,
Iraq war and occupation
charges repeated by Pentagon spokesperson General Peter Pace and by President Bush. On April 5, the British Ministry of Defense admits that no evidence of any such executions exists. On April 7, Rumsfeld attempts to downplay the story by saying, "I had said, 'They have executed POWs,' and I did not say from what country." (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
- March 28: The US accuses Syria of providing military assistance to Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
No evidence of the claim is ever presented. (Wikipedia)
- March 30: Donald Rumsfeld tells ABC, "We know where they [WMDs] are.
Iraq war and occupation
They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." (Department of Defense) - March 30: General Richard Myers says, on NBC's Meet the Press,
Iraq war and occupation
"Nobody should have any illusions that this is going to be a quick and easy victory. This is going to be a tough war, a tough slog yet, and no responsible official I know has said anything different once this war has started." (Air America Playbook)
- March 31: Ten Iraqi civilians are gunned down at a US checkpoint outside Karbala after refusing to halt their Land Rover.
Iraq war and occupation
The civilians are unarmed, and include a number of women and children. Washington Post reporter William Branigin, a veteran war correspondent, contradicts the Pentagon's official report; as it turns out, Branigin's report is accurate. According to Branigin, a Land Rover full of Iraqi civilians drove at speed towards the US checkpoint, ignoring orders to stop. Understandably anxious because of previous suicide bombings, the troops were leery of any such approaches, but as so often happens in wartime, the slaughter commenced because of one nervous trigger finger. Instead of firing a warning shot from the 7.62mm gun mounted in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle at the checkpoint, the gunner waited, then fired the warning shot and almost immediately afterwards opened fire with a 25mm cannon, which shredded the car and its occupants. The commander yells, "You just f*cking killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!" Branigin reports that though the incident was investigated by the US military, it was filed away as an "unfortunate accident," and no punishments were meted out. (Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson) - March 31: Iraqi civilians in Basra throw stones at British occupation forces.
Iraq war and occupation
One refugee tells a reporter, "I have no love for Saddam, but tell me how are we better off when there is no power, nor water. There are dead bodies lying in our streets, and my children are scared to go to bed because of the shelling." (David Corn) - March 31: Journalist Peter Arnett is fired by NBC after giving a report that conservatives complain is unfavorable to the American military.
Conservative media slant
Arnett is immediately hired by the British newspaper Daily Mirror. News commentator Geraldo Rivera is fired by Fox News after he allegedly broadcasts information about American troop movements (the famous "drawing troop movement patterns in the sand" incident). (Wikipedia) - During the first three weeks of the war, an analysis of the media coverage provided by the major evening news shows
Conservative media slant
(ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and PBS) provides the following information:- 64% of sources are prowar.
- 10% of sources are antiwar.
- 71% of US sources are prowar.
- 3% of US sources are antiwar.
- 47% of US sources are from the US military.
- 63% of US sources are current or former government officials.
- 4% of sources are from academia, think tanks, or nongovernmental organizations.
- 68% of US government sources are from the military.
- 840 current and former US government officials are televised.
- 4 antiwar sources are televised.
- 81% of sources shown on Fox News are prowar.
- Ultimately, the strongest reasons for America going to war with Iraq seem to be the ones most personal to George W. Bush.
George W. Bush
Bush justified his desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein by saying, "he tried to kill my daddy." He told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that God told him to strike first at al-Qaeda and then at Iraq. White House sources told the Financial Times that for Bush, the determination to take the US to war was largely a matter of personal pique: "A tinpot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House." Any one of these reasons is enough to cast serious doubts on Bush's judgment and compentency; taken together, one must begin to question his sanity. (CNN/Ha'aretz/Financial Times/New York Times/Eric Alterman and Mark Green, my own conclusion) - Shortly after the war's onset, each American military member in Iraq receives a booklet called "A Christian's Duty" which exhorts them to pray for Bush, and even has a postcard that the soldier can tear out and mail that assures the president that they are praying for him, presumably during the moments where they themselves are not under fire.
Iraq war and occupation
Soon after, Iraqi towns and villages will be overrun with Southern Baptist missionaries armed with blankets, bottled water, and Bibles, there to wage what their Web site calls "a war for souls" and warning that they must work to convert more Iraqis than their competitors, "cult groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses." The American Muslim Council's Ali Abu Karkuk says a year later that Muslims are horrified by such "spiritual carpetbagging," to borrow Mark Crispin Miller's phrase. "The Iraqi people are in a state of siege -- they lack food, water, everything -- and to come to exploit it and to give it in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord is unacceptable," says Zarkuk. "You will be perceived as either dying by the bullet or dying by the Bible through Muslim eyes." Many observers see the exhortations of evangelical Christians in Iraq as dangerous provocations. (Mark Crispin Miller)
"It is the people who scream loudest about America and freedom who seem to be the most intolerant for people with a differing point of view. [The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines] was just expressing a feeling and an opinion, you know. She wasn't trying to incite a riot. I really cannot believe the backlash. It is as if we have not learnt anything from history. It is like McCarthyism all over again." – Rosanne Cash, March 2003, quoted in Buzzflash
"It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children." -- historian Howard Zinn
