Iraq, Deep In Your Bones
A war that isn't really a war, the great humiliation that's ours forever. Is there any upside?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 14, 2007


We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves.

It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity.

It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows found a new reason to pule, how many furiously blindered uber-patriots happily ignored all the harsh words from all those naysaying generals or even all the "turncoat" anti-war Republicans and insisted we're really over there to fight some sort of great Islamic demon no one can actually see or locate or define but that we must, somehow, attempt to destroy -- even though doing so only seems to make the situation far, far worse.

There was never any coherent, justifiable heroic cause. Indeed, the truth about Iraq, as evidenced by Gen. David Petreaus' muted, bleak testimony before Congress just this week, is much more simple, nefarious, pathetic. Iraq is, was, and forever will be our very own massive strategic blunder, a failed land grab for position and power in a tinderbox region defined by furious instability and corruption and death.

It's the great unspoken subtext. Iraq has always been a war between our dueling national identities, a battle over how we are to move and breathe and behave in the new millennium. Are we really this violently paranoid bully, this rogue pre-emptive screw-em-all ideological war machine defined by the dystopian Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of permanent, ongoing global conflict?

Or do we try, instead, to move forward and reinvent ourselves over and over again as the world's most commited, forceful peacekeeper, ever striving for balance and cooperation and tact, even in the face of hardship and fundamentalist rage, refusing to be taunted and dragged down lest we take the bait and lose our minds and engage in torture and misprision and ultraviolence and become little better, ideologically speaking, than our taunters? Have we already made our choice?

Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush's massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history.

A waste of money. A waste of time. A stunning, almost unspeakable waste of life. A waste of resources and intellectual capital and a massive waste of national spirit. A waste of energy and hope and a giant squandering of any goodwill or empathy our former allies might've had for America in its post-9/11 state. Heard it all before? Sure you have.

Some scenes remain almost comical in their absurdity. Perhaps you saw that money, those enormous, ridiculous piles of American cash, the photos floating around of American soldiers guarding giant, shrink-wrapped pallets of U.S. currency known as "cashpaks," each reportedly containing about $1.6 million in stacks of $100 bills, all airlifted by the ton straight from the Federal Reserve and set down in the Iraqi sun like rotting fruit, small mountains of your tax dollars earmarked to buy off various warlords and pay for covert, unauthorized operations all over the Middle East in an attempt to buy our way into some sort of impossible, forced stability. Right.

Or maybe it's the bodies, the sheer waste of American flesh, not merely the thousands of U.S. dead or even the countless tens of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens but also the lesser-known horrors, like the epidemic of brain-damaged U.S. soldiers, thousands of them, so many that they're becoming their own category of study in medical textbooks given how they're beginning to exhibit combinations of trauma doctors have never seen before.

What a recruitment poster this is. Come fight in the American military. We're exhausted, overstretched, bewildered, have lowered our entrance barrier to accept D-grade students and former inmates, have almost zero idea what we're actually fighting for, and serve under a Commander in Chief who cares more about trying to shore up his wretched legacy than for the loss of American life. Oh and by the way, odds are extremely high you will return home permanently wounded, traumatized, or brain damaged. How very proud we are.

We all know the current reality: We are not safer. We are not better off in any measurable way. We are not stronger or more unified or prouder or more respected or healthier or wealthier or wiser and we have done exactly zero to stem the flood of radical Islam or the general outpouring of global disgust at what America has become under this president. This is our scar. This is our great American shame.

So, what do you do with it? Or with the prospect of still more weeks, months, even years of this dull slog of war? Because the fact is, as Petreaus' testimony essentially confirmed, we will be in Iraq at least through the (blessed) end of Bush's nightmare term, and likely well beyond, given how entrenched and ensnared our forces have become.

Perhaps we can take the long view, the wide view, the spiritual or karmic view, even, insofar as the short and linear view has become so stifling and deadly and useless.

Perhaps this is the only way.

Because truly, many in the alternative set, the lightworkers and the gurus and the healers and the deep teachers, those who think outside the war room and beyond the bland academic platitudes, these people tend see Iraq, BushCo, the American right and all the sanctimonious bleakness surrounding them as merely the inky remnants of a passing disease, the last, vicious gasp of a dying ideology, the violent struggle of resistance that always erupts before any great cosmic shift.

Which is to say: The screeching of the Christian right, the shrill alarmism from cultural conservatives regarding everything from sex and drugs and music to gays and nipples and creationism, the rejection of science, the attacks on women's rights, the abuse of the environment, all the way up to the bleakest and ugliest manisfestation of all, a brutal and unwinnable war -- taken as a whole, these can, if you so choose, be seen as merely the embers of a hugely failed -- and yes, nearly extinct -- worldview.

Here is the hesitant optimism, the hint of the new, the tentative suggestion that all is not lost: By many measures, the worst of it is over. There really is light coming, a new awareness, a shift away from the bleakness and the rot and the wallowing in bland violence. Perhaps you can feel it. Or perhaps you need to be ready to feel it. Either way, it's there. You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice.

The surge is working...



soylent green

I t's my understanding, that America had no choice but to enter in a war for the protection ,liberation from communisum& the continued freedom of they & war against gene packed pearsons taking over Iraq negoscheations 98yrs ago desided this & more negoscheations 41yrs ago compleated the fact of war against communisumin Iraq Etc & Iraq's protection here on out The war on terror is now being fought against German engerneard gene packed persons such as the sheaks new to Iraq. 13yr 3mo 2 days ago the real sheaks & they family were, GERMAN equavilaint to the (CIA) ousted out of life .Proved FACTby (dna) & actual audio and footage by germany ......we American non -communist are joinning AT record speed & with Intelegence & no draft & no GUN to our heads American Military. We are not escapping life in america we just wish and are willing to do war for other people"s & our own freedoms from communisum let we do our jobs here , IRAQ & ETC.)......misica........possum........catheriwa8. ...

they was a line in nam called the DMZ dont draw a line between we (AMERICAN military & FREEDOMWE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUT AN END TO ALL COMMUNISUM NOT VOTED IN A FREE ELECTION FOR. ME AGAIN

MSNBC TV — COUNTDOWN — 8 November 2007

KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST: Hard to imagine a congressional override of a veto of any kind in say 2002 particularly, of some kind of measure which might have outlawed CIA rendition programs that outsourced torture and in retrospect, just as hard to believe — Congress didn't do something about it then. If it had, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the Bush administration for its war in Iraq, a purported link between Iraq and al Qaeda, would have been shown then to not only have been false but to have been obtained by in effect burying a prisoner alive. The prisoner's name - Ebil Al -sheik al-Ebi (ph) described by the former CIA director George Tenet, as you see here, as the highest ranking al Qaeda member in U.S. custody after 9/11, only he wasn't in U.S. custody, not all the time. The Bush administration having shipped him off to Egypt at one point for, quote, "Further debriefing." There, according to a stunning report from PBS show — FRONTLINE recounted last night at ABCNEWS.com, when he told his interrogators he knew nothing about al Qaeda's connections with Iraq they, quote, "Placed him in a small box approximately 20 inches by 20 inches for 17 hours. When he was let out and still couldn't provide interrogators with answers he did not have, al-Ebi (ph) claiming he was knocked to the ground and punched for 15 minutes and then miraculously he found a way to tell his handlers what they wanted, a story. Only problem, it was a story and it was a story that was not true. Let's turn now to Greg Miller, national security correspondent of the "Los Angeles Times" and a co-author of the book - "The Interrogators." He's also the only American journalist who've been granted access to U.S. interrogators at Kandahar in Afghanistan. Thank you for your time, sir.

GREG MILLER, LOS ANGELES TIMES: Thank you.

OLBERMANN: This evidence obtained from al-Ebi, was used by Colin Powell at the U.N. in February, 2003 and the quote from the general then Secretary of State was - "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in the use — the chemical and biological weapons to al Qaeda." But we now know there were no WMD and setting aside the ethics of torture is this the worst case scenario, you torture somebody, they tell you something to make the pain stop and then you use what he says to go to war?

MILLER: I think that is the worst case scenario in interrogations. Many interrogators that you talked to who practice this will tell you that torture just leads to bad information. In this case it led to bad information that led to a war. And this is just one example of a growing number of examples, where we're starting to learn about detainees who were subjected to the harshest interrogation methods whose claims and information is unraveling rapidly.

OLBERMANN: So do all — all of the information, all the supposed intelligence that was gained from people picked up on battle fields, people connected to al Qaeda, does all of it need to be re-examined? That this isn't a question of cherry picking administration or the information by the administration, it's a question of perhaps everything they think they got is suspect?

MILLER: Well, I think — I don't know if all of it needs to be examined. I mean, the CIA director, Michael Hayden has talked about that enhanced interrogation techniques as the CIA describes that were only used on a small percentage of the detainees who are held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas. But they in fact, already — many of the claims of these detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation methods are being re-examined. Some of these prisoners now are facing some sort of court proceedings and the FBI is investigating these claims to try to get to the bottom of what they really did and what was real behind what they said.

OLBERMANN: I suddenly found myself thinking as we're preparing for this interview of the John Le Carre novel "Tinker/Soldier/Spy" and fiction is always a bad barometer but in this — there's a wonderful lesson in this. The British Secret Service thinks it has a high placed spy in the Russian Secret Service but he's actually a plant, he's a phony double agent, he still works for the Russians and he gives the English terrible information, misdirects them, manipulates them, they keep believing him because of this aura that he is their secret agent inside the Russian infrastructure. Does that carry in this situation? Did the government believe the stuff they got from those they had used enhanced interrogation on because they had used that? Did torture provide credibility in any cases?

MILLER: Well, I think there is this natural inclination to think that harsh interrogation methods, torture is going to help you get to the bottom of the case, of a detainee's information. But I think we also have to keep in mind in this case, that there were government officials throughout this administration and throughout the CIA who were hearing what they wanted to hear from these prisoners as well. They were inclined to believe these prisoners' claims because this is what their preconceptions were before these prisoners were ever captured.

OLBERMANN: In an interrogation instructor, former instructor for the Navy went to Capitol Hill today, a man whose job it was to teach the sailors and marines how to survive torture if they were ever captured. He said that this last little island of now waterboarding is OK, that it was simulated drowning, he said it's not simulated drowning. It is drowning. The only difference is the prisoner doesn't die if you do it exactly right if you're very lucky. Your lungs actually fill up with massive amounts of water. If people understood that, would the cloudiness over waterboarding dissolve? Would it change the dynamics of this debate over this subject?

MILLER: I think if people did understand and had a clear understanding of what was involved in waterboarding it couldn't help but to change the dynamics of this debate. I mean, we read recently about a senior justice department official who's subjecting himself to this technique just so he would have some understanding of it and he came away with no — with no question in his mind that this was torture and this is what led to the sort of rapid unraveling of the initial memos that had authorized these sorts of techniques.

OLBERMANN: Now, to say nothing of the unraveling of his career. Greg Miller, "L.A. Times" national security correspondent, co-author of "The Interrogators" and witness to interrogation in Afghanistan, great thanks for your time and your insight, sir.

MILLER: Thank you, Keith.

I think Mark Morford needs to come to Iraq and experience a few nearby mortar blasts to truly feel Iraq "deep in his bones."