The US, UN & Iraq III

Timber -- You astound me! You talk about this invasion as if it were a real war, against a real enemy, rather than a superpower overrunning a territory the size of one of our larger states, and countered (certainly in Baghdad) by little resistance. "The Museum commanded no overlook of the tactically sensitive routes area. It was not a factor in the ongoing battle, siezing it offered no tactical advantage." This has a Gilbert & Sullivan sound to me -- but without the music.

No. This was billed as a war of liberation and in wars of liberation -- Rumsfeld to the contrary notwithstanding -- you plan for civilian and intrastructure protection and for a continuum of mop-up and temporary quasi-military policing. But what did we do? We sent in a well-trained army following a blitz of techno-shock bombardment ("We aim to please; can't we aim, too, please") and "overlooked" little matters like seven millenia of cultural heritage and a people's pride, not to mention water and electricity and common civil protections.

Even if I were on your side of the issue, the last thing I'd be trumpeting would be "We won!" We didn't. We conquered, we blitzed, we drove forward in a stampede. That's not winning. Did the Soviet Union "win" Eastern Europe? Did Hitler "win" Poland" Did euro-Americans "win" the West? Naw. In every case they took it, and they did so with little if any respect for the inhabitants and all that was dear to them. For shame, Timber.

A SNAFU LOOMING?
This in today's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48297-2003Apr17.html

By Colum Lynch and Robert J. McCartney
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 18, 2003; Page A01



Perhaps someone will introduce another resolution allowing the inspectors a little more time to search for WMD. The UN's policy is now "Trust but Verify", seems I've heard that before... somewhere...hmmmm.

What is France and Russia trying to do? The resolution imposing the sanctions is up on June 3rd. If no WMD are found will they pass an extension of the resolution? Is Bozo the Clown being terminated? Is French President Jacques Chirac applying for the job? Surely he will win out over V.Putin. (Being ex-KGB has got to put Vladimir on the minus side of the ledger on this competition).

Oh well, rules are rules. But this makes the UN look petty. In the first paragraph of the article we find that France and Russia

"...set the stage today for a new battle over Iraq, signaling that the United States must give the United Nations a broader role in reconstruction efforts before sanctions can be lifted."


Does the UN really feel it necessary to extort the coalition, at the expense of the Iraqi people, in order to feign relevance?

JM

I wrote this as a PM to timber, but I'm going to post it here before taking a little holiday from travail.

Kevin

I'm going to tell you personally what I'm thinking, because I'm close to losing my cool on this issue.

There was a full page piece yesterday in the Vancouver Sun regarding a Canadian Museum being planned for Winnipeg. The funding is coming from Izzy Asper, whose family owns the Sun and 70% of Canadian dailies. The Aspers are a Jewish family and deeply involved in the Canadian Jewish Congress (as are a number of friends of mine). He and his papers are consistently pro business, pro Likud, and pro Bush. Editorials have argued Canada should have joined the US in this action. They consistently also complain that too many Canadians are 'anti-American'. He believes, clearly, that we ought to be more like Americans.

In talking about why we need a Canadian museum, he said that Canadians are woefully without celebration of their heroes, and disadvantaged by our lack of myths (heroic culture stories). He pointed to Pierre Trudeau and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which Trudeau had prepared as a replacement for the old British North American act.

The only thing he has right in his thinking here, I truly believe, is the man he mentioned. Trudeau was an extraordinary man, and I doubt I'll see his like again in my lifetime.

But Asper is wrong about everything else. Not least of which is that Trudeau himself would have fought tooth and nail to NOT be projected into some hero myth. Trudeau understood (he was very well educated and terribly bright) probably as well as any Canadian historian, the real heroism and sacrifice of the men and women who were there through the beginnings of Canada's history, but he didn't lionize particular people nor events. He understood very clearly that, as a community, what Canadians might be most proud of was that we did not need nor want mythologies, that they blind as much as they might tell anything true. He knew we were special, but no more special than anyone else, just unique, like everyone else.

So Asper picked the right guy, but for all the wrong reasons. And Asper was wrong about Canadians not knowing about Candians like Trudeau. In the decades after his tenure as PM, it was actually the press who began to build up a story about the fellow. The notions got repeated and became womething like received wisdom. They were preponderantly negative notions. Then, the man died. The outpouring of sentiment from Canadians was without precedent, and it caught the editorial writers completely by surprise. The change in color of those editorials over a period of about a week was remarkable, and remarkably ironic and funny.

I've talked to you before on a number of threads about tendencies I think are dangerous in American culture, and that this would not be important outside of the context of world dominance. But that is the context now, and so they are very very important to everyone in the world.

You are a good guy, I'm really quite fond of you and have great admiration for your ability to rise out of the sludge of unreflective national patriotism. But there truly is no excuse for the Museum losses. Twenty minutes of Rumsfeld's time would have done it. That he didn't care enough, and in contrast to what he does care about, scares the ******* hell out of me. That your president has so little education, so little interest in the world outside of his own country, so little curiosity of history, and is so influenced by evangelical idiocies scares me even more.

It is my perception that it is not merely these few men presently in charge which constitute the problems or dangers, though they make it terribly critical, but that the home town audience they play to are too willing to trust them, and to excuse them, and to move forward into mistakes of pride different only in magnitude from what germans fell prey to in the thirties.

Are you familiar with Greek tragic theatre? The telling of the myth of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is, for me, a most resonant example. Oedipus' deepest flaw and sin was pride. He headed out along a path and ignored all the warnings from others, most particularly from the chorus - which is really the voice of community wisdom. A curious aspect of the chorus in Greek tragedy is that it is never listend to. It has the horrible ineffectualness we feel in a dream where our feet are tangled, where we can't move, where no one can hear our voice as something beastly approaches. I confess I feel like I'm part of your chorus.

James Morrison

When you read the complete article, you quoted, you certainly will some answers to your question.

Tartarin, I'm sure that the pillaging of musuems, gold and other artifacts was for the most part carefully controlled and the Bush family got their share, along with the Rumpfelt's, Wolfowitz's, Cheney's, Limpbags and Coulters. The looters on these sites were professionals and they didn't need any prying military eyes on them!

Blatham: I share your concerns and your feeling about this discussion but not the fondness. It's bad enough that we committed this atrocity. To indulge in self-congratulation (or even self-defense) after the fact is wholly without humanity or decency. Pity and terror are the only possible response.

I'm no fan of the present administration, but this discussion is not elevated by paranoid, unfounded accusations like this, Bill. I mean, Ann Coulter sanctioning and profiting from the looting in Iraq? C'mon - aim a little more carefully.

We all choose to see what we choose to see. I don't argue that Bush The Youinger and crowd "Did the Right Thing for the Right Reasons", in fact I've posted much criticism of their woeful, blundering attempt to "Sell" The Attack. I don't like Bush The Younger and his coherts very much, and I don't trust them a bit, in the overall scheme of things. But when it comes to analysis of military considerations, I take the cold, calculating, purely pragmatic, trained military point of view. The job is to accomplish the mission at the lowest possible cost to one's own forces. Whether or not The Attack was moral, ethical, justified, or otherwise necessary or proper, the military aspect of it went well, and did so beyond even optimistic expectation. My dispassionate appraisal of the military considerations appear to be taken by some here as endorsement on my part of The Grander Scheme. I have said before and say again, the stated reasons, the Selling Points, for The Attack were abysmally handled. The Attack was superlatively handled, and was an astounding demonstration of comprehensive Combined Arms Action and the vigorous prosecution of rapidly developing tactical opportunities. I'm not at all fond of war, but I know it, and I appreciate the masterful execution of CENTCOM's battleplan. I have deep reservation regarding the prospect of The Reconstruction Plan, and of the prospects for consequent stabilization of The Region. It well could go less well than anticipated, and I suspect it may. Ethnic, religious, and ideologic friction within Iraq, stirred by Third Parties, are sure to complicate things. The only given is that much controversy, blame-slinging, and inconvenient, if not downright unpleasant surprise is in store. Our politicians and diplomats are less well prepared and equipped for the battle they face than were our troops for the battle they convincingly won. It is quite possible their astounding achievement will be squandered.

Control your emotions. You could not possibly believe what you have written. Or could you?

JM, it is clearly an attempt to punish the US. By denying Iraq free access to the oil markets, the financial burden presumably shifts to the US alone.

Concurring with every word just posted by Timber, with an aside to AU and Snood: doubt that BillW meant that comment literally.

If either of you plan to go after unsupported enormities - try addressing Tartarin, who grotesquely plagiarized without attribution Aristotle's phrase on Greek tragedy: "pity and terror".

For those who've overdosed on this ceaseless pity, btw, here comes its companion, terror:

<G>

Commentary > The Monitor's View
from the April 18, 2003 edition

The 'Big Debate'

The US wants to help Iraq sell its oil as soon as possible to pay for reconstruction and basic services. Unfortunately, the prewar, antiwar alliance of France and Russia is holding hostage the authority needed from the UN to allow oil exports.

Not only do these two veto-wielding Security Council members want the United Nations to be put in charge of Iraq for now, they also want to protect their prewar oil interests there. They perhaps also have a commercial stake in further oil development.

This diplomatic standoff, known as the "Big Debate," could end up forcing Iraqis to go even longer without necessities - just because these outside powers have issues with each other that don't even relate to Iraq.

The UN has authority over Iraq's oil exports based on sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. A key condition of lifting those sanctions is that Iraq be free of weapons of mass destruction. The United States is hunting for those weapons now and could welcome UN weapons inspectors to join it. That might be the first step in an eventual compromise.

There may also be a legal way for the US to let oil exports start without UN approval. And if an interim Iraqi authority is set up soon, it, rather than the US, can argue on behalf of Iraq's oil interests at the UN.

Enduring another UN lengthy debate, like the one in the few months before the war, won't serve the Iraqi people's urgent needs.

Well, maybe it is not a fault of the UN. Russia and France are making vigorous attempt to minimize damage to their specific interests in Iraq that are endangered by the control that the Coalition forces enjoy over Iraq. So, they try to abuse their position in the Security Council once more, just as they abused it prior to onset of the war.
It seems to me more and more that the war in Iraq is in fact a war between the USA and France (and her allies) on the third party's territory... French have lost it, and now they try to steal the victory from the winners with help of dirty quasi-legal tricks.

blatham,

As regards your post of Thu Apr 17, 2003 10:55 pm in which you state:



I can only try to clarify my earlier post whereby I refer to the destruction and theft of Iraqi antiquities as a sidebar. In that post I essentially agreed with others on this post that these events are sad and troubling. However, surely I do not have to tell you many bad things have, are, and will continue to happen in this world of ours. It is relevance that focuses our individual attention to those particular events to which we feel important.

In this case my comment referred to relevance as pertains to the Iraqi people. The overwhelming majority seems destitute. What they need is food, clean water, and electricity to sustain their lives. In some cases life saving medicines are needed and are not available. These items have also been looted and to some Iraqis are at least as important as food and water. Its not that irreplaceable antiquities are not important, it is that they are not as important as other things are to the Iraqis.

Regarding your statement:



I am not sure which culture you are referring to here but the comparison is at worst disingenuous and at best invalid for the same reasons of relevancy I mentioned before.

Your passion here is admirable and perhaps you can more efficiently expend it thru a venue more suited to remedy the deplorable acts themselves. Some one has mentioned funds to buy back the stolen items, have there been any attempts to initiate such action to retrieve these items?

Respectfully,

JM

I share the horror of the sacking of the great museum of antiquities in Baghdad, eloquently expressed elsewhere.

However according to this article published in The Spectator, this was not only robbery followed by mindless destruction, but a robbery planned by certain international interests particularly in America, and that even before the declaration of war.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-04-19&id=3011

This could offer a credible reason as to why the army was not there when it was needed, even though the vulnerability of these treasures was widely known beforehand.

"Follow the money"

McT

Thanks, McTag, for that link!

Some further reading:
US lobby could threaten Iraqi heritage

I seem to remember from a course about human needs. Only when the primary needs of food and shelter and possibly freedom from fear are satisfied do humans start to worry about other things. I am sure that the Iraqi's are much more concerned about, food, shelter and all the amenities of living than they are about looted museums. We who have all the comforts of living are left to grouse over the loss. I am more concerned with the living than the long lost dead.

ACCP's treasurer, William Pearlstein, is, btw, lawyer for the "National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art".

There are markets for those looted artifacts and they are world wide, not just in the US. As for the degree of planning and organization, archaeologist and antiquities authorities have known for years that looters are organized, and that they are opportunistic. Local groups with ties to the antiquities black market could resonably assume that the fall of Baghdad would offer a window of opportunity for looting. What is outrageous the size of that window offorded to them, the lack of planing to prevent it from opening and unwillingness of the army to close it once it became aware of what was happening.

The short lost dead.

And how did they get to be dead?