Finally finished Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, just in time to call it one of my books of the year. (It was published in hardback last year, so it's officially one of the books of last year, but I read it in paperback this year, so fuck off. I rarely read books in hardback, so my books of the year are always books of last year. Ain't it always the way?) Thomas E Ricks is an American journalist with a sound CV of military reporting behind him - he's currently senior Pentagon correspondent at the Washington Post. This book, dedicated to "the war dead" is an exhaustive account of the occupation of Iraq up to mid-2006. It actually begins with George H W Bush's decision not to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991, but concentrates on his idiot son's reign after September 11, 2001, when "everything changed." Ricks constructs his narrative from testimony of everybody from the top down in the US military, quoting emails home from disillusioned grunts and memos sent between departments at the White House and Pentagon. If there is a villain of the piece, it's not George W Bush. He barely features, beyond unconvincingly cheerleading at press conferences and assuring the media that Iraq was going really well. This is not his war.


It's Rumsfeld's war - as set out in even more embarrassing details in Rumsfeld: An American Disaster by Andrew Cockburn, which I've also read and, hey, came out this year! Assisted by Tommy Franks, who certainly aimed to please his masters, if nothing else, it was Rumsfled who underestimated troop numbers, consistently failed to address post-invasion policy (which is why there wasn't one), and overruled the State Department, parachuting in loyal Republicans with no direct experience in the Middle East to help run the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer, who also comes out of all this as a prize dick. So many mistakes were made through sheer arrogance: the failure to seal the border with Syria, through which sympathetic fighters poured when the great public order vaccuum was created; the failure to stop looting after the fall of Saddam, which decimated the infrastructure in Baghdad; the break-up of the Iraqi army (something Bremer seemingly ordered without direct say-so from anyone in Washington), causing further unemployment and fuelling the insurgency; the "de-Baathification" of Baghdad, which left the occupiers with only a few surviving Iraqi ministers to play with, despite the fact that under Saddam, many civil servants joined the Baath party because they had no choice and were not necessarily pro-Saddam fanatics; it goes on. As indeed does the occupation, way beyond the end of this book.

You come out of the other end of it not hating the military. How can you, when they are doing the job that is handed down to them? Certain commanders in certain areas of Iraq did a good job of dealing sympathetically with the locals and attempting to build bridges with them, but this good work was so often undone by a new regiment (with different tactics) taking over the same patch. Although Abu Ghraib is the cornerstone own-goal of the whole sorry mess - the flashpoint at which public opinion, even in flag-waving America, turned against the occupation - the impression given is that it really was a few bad apples on the ground. It would be wrong to imagine that all US troops in Iraq were idiot, hotheaded, frankly homoerotic racists. (It still amazes me that servicewomen were involved in prisoner abuse - and have no real defence as to why they either got involved with those awful photos, or stood by while others did. Just goes to show: you shouldn't have preconceptions, good or bad, based on gender.)


I'm now reading Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the much-admired book specifically about life inside the Green Zone, where a little America was recreated for those working in the CPA's inner sanctum. This book really brings alive what Ricks constructs through testimony. I realise I am obsessed with the Iraq war, or that must be the impression given. In a way, I am. After September 11, I really resisted the received wisdom that "the world had changed" that day. I resisted it because it seemed like a convenient, wound-licking western media concept, but as time has passed, I've come to realise that, sadly, the world did change. Because when American foreign policy changes, or is allowed to change, the whole world changes with it, such is that country's imperial power. Thus, the occupation of Iraq - botched, bloody, almost humorous in its surreal uselessness - becomes the key event of our times. Global security spreads out from the Middle East, and has done since 1991, when the US struck its bases in Saudi Arabia, and the likes of Osama bin Laden found a new focus for their war against the infidel. The rest is history, as they say.

Interestingly, I was stopped and searched today at the train station by police acting in accordance with our very own Prevention Of Terrorism Act. The stop was courteous and the search pretty flimsy - they looked in my bag, that's all - but it still involved my name, address and date of birth being taken down by an officer of the law, which made me feel indignant, to say the least. They gave me a leaflet, which I read on a bench as I waited for my train. Luckily, I got to the bit that said, "If you are stopped and searched you are entitled to a copy of the form, which is completed at the time of the stop." So I went back to the officer and asked for this. She was again courteous, and finished filling it in, so that she could give me my copy. In the reasons for stopping me, she had entered a section of the Act, mentioned that I was heading on a train into London, and that I was "also carrying a black holdall." This makes me a terrorist suspect. Before September 11, 2001, I don't think it would have. So well done, everybody. The other figure who barely gets a mention in Fiasco, the most complete history of the Iraq war, is Mr Tony Blair, who made anyone with a bag going to London a terrorist suspect with his puppy-dog enthusiasm for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld project. What a shame his legacy goes pretty much unmentioned.

Jay Garner, first "viceroy" of Baghdad, replaced by the hapless Bremer, reported back to Rumsfeld and told him what he - a man on the shop floor - felt had gone wrong. Rumsfeld couldn't care less, saying, "Well, we are where we are, there's no need to discuss it." It was, by the way, retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former chief, US Central Command, who provided the quote I have used for the headline. Try getting anyone at the Pentagon to nod sagely at that.

These faraway blunders affect us all. (Except: are they really blunders? It's convenient to think of the Bush administration as idiots, but they're not, are they? I just can't see, having read this and the other books on the subject, how the current mess can benefit them? It may even lose the Republicans the 2008 election, and that's no good, is it? Fiasco and Rumsfeld and Emerald City don't comment on the motives of the Bush administration. That's for raving nutters to speculate upon. But they don't paint a pretty picture, and they're Americans.)

Labels: al-qaeda, books, iraq, terrorism, war

Torture is as the forefront of my mind. I'm reading Naomi Klein's compelling and wide-ranging The Shock Doctrine, as I've mentioned, which I wish was lighter so I could take it out with me on the train - although my "train book" at the moment is Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks, the most detailed book I've read about the Iraq war, which contains a whole section on Abu Ghraib. Last night I caught up with HBO's powerful The Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib, an account of the atrocities that went on at Saddam's old prison and put 12 soldiers in prison, or else they were demoted. This was a clear, unsensational, narration-free documentary, which spoke to a number of soldiers charged with abuse, who tried to describe why they did it. I also saw Rendition on Friday, the first Hollywood blockbuster to directly address America's renamed habit of removing terrorist suspects to other countries, there to interrogate them in what is now a government-sponsored manner. (The definition of "torture" was rewritten after September 11 so that only endangerment of life or acts that might lead to organ failure are now deemed torture: all manner of degradation, psychological tricks and abuse were sanctioned under the signature of Donald Rumsield, about whom I recently read the simply relentless but essential book Rumsfeld: An American Disaster by Andrew Cockburn. One such is making a prisoner stand for four hours at a time, to which Rumsfeld made a footnote: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is there a four hour limit on standing?", missing the point in a way that either suggests pure evil or weapons-grade idiocy, neither of which is very comforting.) And, to add to my current torture-a-thon, last night's Spooks saw Harry cross that particular line, in order to save London from half a million plague fatalities.

In Ghosts, we saw clips of Dr Stanley Milgram's film Obedience, which blew my mind, even though I'd read about the experiments he conducted in 1961. In brief (and I've lifted some of this from Wikipedia to save my typing shoulder, but it tallies with what I already know): the role of the "experimentor" in these tests done at Yale was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a technician's coat, and the "victim" was played by an accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the victim (supposedly another volunteer, but in reality a "confederate" of the experimentor) were told by the experimentor that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations. The "teacher" and the "learner" (apparently chosen by slips of paper, but both slips said "teacher" to guarantee that the real participant would assume this role) were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. (Read on, if you don't know the tests. It's astonishing.)

The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from an electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then made to give word tests to the "learner" - if the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong answer. In reality, there were no shocks. The "learner" just acted a response, increasingly severe as the voltage increased. If you see the footage, you'll see that the acting was good, and as the screams increase, it's totally macabre. After a number of increases, the actor would bang on the wall and protest about a heart condition. At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment. But most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal encouragements from the man in the white coat, the experiment was halted.

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% (26 out of 40) of participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were being paid. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level, despite the screams.

There was, understandably, a lot of ethical criticism of the tests. (Probably from people who wouldn't mind if it was monkeys or mice.) Clearly, this was a very stressful position to put even volunteers into - I'm surprised Balls Of Steel haven't revived it (maybe they have, I only watched it once). The implication was not necessarily that 65% of people would willingly torture, but that they would if they were told to do so by a figure of authority. I wonder if, 46 years on, people would be more, or less likely to comply? Certainly the soldiers on Ghosts, male and female, as we know, blamed their behaviour on the stress of being at war, the need to let off steam, peer pressure, boredom and ignorance. Even though it was later established that 90% of Iraqis being held were innocent, these night-shift military police treated the prisoners as if they were guilty and this abuse, much of it involving nudity and a strangely homoerotic manipulation of bodies, was either punishment for something, or a way of preparing them for interrogation. One soldier, Sabrina Harman, said that she stuck her thumbs in the air and smiled for the camera in the incriminating photos of her with a dead body, and with naked prisoners in a big pile, because that's what she does in photos. She got six months.

I am haunted by the world I live in. So let's stop arguing about the merits of a sitcom for a moment. Anybody else see any of these films or progammes? Anybody else reading Klein, or the other books? Is it just me who's obsessed by all this?

Labels: films, iraq, torture, tv