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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The clock ticks for
thee By Tom Engelhardt
It had taken much thought and planning
that wartime May Day four years ago when President
George W Bush co-piloted an S-3B Viking
sub-reconnaissance naval jet onto the deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln. Scott Sforza, a former ABC
producer, had "embedded" himself on that aircraft
carrier days before the president landed.
Along with Bob DeServi, a former NBC
cameraman and lighting specialist, and Greg
Jenkins, a former Fox News television
producer, he had planned out
every detail of the president's arrival - as
Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times put it
then - "even down to the members of the Lincoln
crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr
Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission
Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture
the president and the celebratory two words in a
single shot. The speech was specifically timed for
what image makers call "magic hour light", which
cast a golden glow on Mr Bush."
Before the
president could descend jauntily from that plane
into the perfect light of a late spring afternoon,
and onto what was essentially a movie set, the
Abraham Lincoln, which had only recently hit Iraq
with 1.6 million pounds of ordnance, had to be
stopped just miles short of its home base in San
Diego. No one wanted Bush simply to clamber
aboard.
Who could forget his
Tom-Cruise-style "Top Gun swagger" across that
deck - so much commented on in the media in the
following days - to the carefully positioned
podium where he gave his speech? It was to be the
exclamation point on his invasion of choice and
provide the first fabulous photos for his
presidential campaign to come. Only two things
about that moment, that speech, are remembered
today - that White House-produced "Mission
Accomplished" banner behind him and his
announcement, with a flourish, that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended".
If his
landing and speech are today remembered as a
woeful moment, an embarrassment, if those fabulous
photos never made it into campaign 2004, that was,
in part, because of another event - a minor
headline - that very same May day: halfway around
the world, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne
Division, occupying an elementary school in
Fallujah, fired on a crowd of angry Iraqi
demonstrators. Perhaps 15 Iraqis died and more
were wounded. Two days later, in a second clash,
two more Iraqis would die.
On CNN's web
site the day after the president's landing, the
main headline read: "Bush calls end to 'major
combat'." But there was that smaller, secondary
headline as well: "US Central Command: Seven hurt
in Fallujah grenade attack." Two grenades had been
tossed into a US military compound, leaving seven
American soldiers slightly injured.
In the
months to follow, those two headlines would jostle
for dominance, a struggle now long over. Before
May 1, 2004, ever rolled around, "mission
accomplished" would be a scarlet phrase of shame,
useful only to critics of the administration. By
that one-year anniversary, Fallujah had morphed
into a resistant city that had withstood an
assault by the marines. In November, 2004, it
would be largely destroyed by American firepower
without ever being subdued.
Now, the
already failed American method of turning largely
destroyed Fallujah into a giant "gated" prison
camp for its residents is being applied to the
Iraqi capital, Baghdad, where huge walls are
slated to rise around 10 or more recalcitrant
neighborhoods as part of the president's Baghdad
Security Plan, or "surge".
Four years
later, casualty figures are so terrible in Iraq
that the government, locked inside the Green Zone
in the capital, has, for the first time, refused
to reveal the monthly figures to the United
Nations, though figures do show a continuing
epidemic of assassinations of Iraqi academics and
of torture of prisoners, a steep rise in deaths
among policemen, and a rise in "honor killings" of
women by their own families.
Four years
later, those few "slightly injured" men of the
82nd Airborne Division have morphed into last
week's nine dead and 20 wounded from a
double-truck-bomb suicide attack on one of that
division's outposts in Diyala province; over 100
Americans were killed in the month of April alone;
3,350 Americans in all (not including hundreds of
"private security contractors").
Four
years later, the American military has claimed
dramatic success in reducing a wave of sectarian
killings in the capital - but only by leaving out
of its count the dead from Sunni
car/truck/motorcycle-bomb and other suicide-bomb
attacks; with over 100 car bombings last month,
and similar figures for this one, Sunni militants
are outsurging the US surge in Baghdad, making "a
mockery of the US and Iraqi security plan",
according to BBC reporter Andrew North.
Four years later, not only has the Bush
administration's "reconstruction" of the country
been a record of endless uncompleted or
ill-completed projects and massive overpayments,
not to speak of financial thievery, but even the
projects once proclaimed "successes" turn out,
according to inspectors from the Office of the
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction,
to be disasters "no longer operating as planned";
the biggest business boom in a country in which
unemployment is sky-high may be "a run on concrete
barriers" for security, which are so in demand
that sometimes they "are not fully dry when
military engineering units pick them up";
electricity availability and potable water
supplies are worse than ever; childhood
malnutrition is on the rise; no one even mentions
Iraqi oil production which remains well below the
worst days of Saddam Hussein and billions of
dollars of which are being siphoned off onto the
black market.
Four years later, US
prisons, one of the few reconstruction success
stories in Iraq, are chock-a-block full, holding
18,000 or more Iraqis in what are essentially
terrorist-producing factories; Iraq has the worst
refugee problem (internal and external) on the
planet with perhaps 4 million people in a
population of 25 million already displaced from
their homes (202 of whom were admitted to the
United States in 2006); the Iraqi government
inside the Green Zone does not fully control a
single province of the country,
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