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How We Lost the Victory

By Ted Rall, AlterNet

April 16, 2003

NEW YORK – We wanted it to be true. It wasn't.

The stirring image of Saddam's statue being toppled on April 9th turns out to be fake, the product of a cheesy media op staged by the U.S. military for the benefit of cameramen staying across the street at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel. This shouldn't be a big surprise. Two of the most stirring photographs of World War II – the flag raising at Iwo Jima and General MacArthur's stroll through the Filipino surf – were just as phony.

Anyone who has seen a TV taping knows that tight camera angles exaggerate crowd sizes, but even a cursory examination of last week's statue-toppling propaganda tape reveals that no more than 150 Iraqis gathered in Farbus Square to watch American Marines – not Iraqis – pull down the dictator's statue. Hailing "all the demonstrations in the streets," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld waxed rhapsodically: "Watching them," he told reporters, "one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain."

Hundreds of thousands of cheering Berliners filled the streets when their divided city was reunited in 1989. Close to a million Yugoslavs crowded Belgrade at the end of Slobodan Milosevic's rule in 2000. While some individual Iraqis have welcomed U.S. troops, there haven't been similar outpourings of approval for our "liberation." Most of the crowds are too busy carrying off Uday's sofas to say thanks, and law-abiding citizens are at home putting out fires or fending off their rapacious neighbors with AK-47s. Yet Americans wanted to see their troops greeted as liberators, so that's what they saw on TV. Perhaps Francis Fukuyama was correct – if it only takes 150 happy looters to make history, maybe history is over.

Actually, they were 150 imported art critics. The statue bashers were militiamen of the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam outfit led by one Ahmed Chalabi. The INC was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon over CIA and State Department protests. Chalabi is Rumsfeld's choice to become Iraq's next puppet president.

Photos at the indispensable Information Clearing House website place one of Chalabi's aides at the supposedly spontaneous outpouring of pro-American Saddam bashing at Firdus Square.

"When you are moving through this country there is [sic] not a lot of people out there and you are not sure they want us here," Sgt. Lee Buttrill gushed to ABC News. "You finally get here and see people in the street feeling so excited, feeling so happy, tearing down the statue of Saddam. It feels really good." That rah-rah BS is what Americans will remember about the fall of Baghdad – not the probability that Buttrill, part of the armed force that cordoned off the square to protect the Iraqi National Congress' actors, was merely telling war correspondents what they wanted to hear. In his critically acclaimed book "Jarhead," Gulf War vet Anthony Swofford writes that Marines routinely lie to gullible reporters.

ABC further reported: "A Marine at first draped an American flag over the statue's face, despite military orders to avoid symbols that would portray the United States as an occupying – instead of a liberating – force." Yet another lie. As anyone with eyes could plainly see, American tanks are festooned with more red, white and blue than a Fourth of July parade. And that particular flag was flying over the Pentagon at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The Defense Department gave it to the Marines in order to perpetuate Bush's lie that Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attacks.

Patriotic iconography is a funny thing. I've known that the Iwo Jima photo was fake for years, but it nonetheless stirs me every time I see it. Firdus Square's footage will retain its power long after the last American learns the truth.

The Phony War Ends, the Phony Liberation Begins

It was a fitting end for a war waged under false pretexts by a fictional coalition led by an ersatz president. Bush never spent much time thinking about liberation, and even his exploitation is being done with as little concern as possible for the dignity of our new colonial subjects.

What a difference a half-century makes! American leaders devoted massive manpower and money to plan for the occupation of the countries they invaded during World War II. What good would it do, they asked, to liberate Europe if criminals and tyrants filled the power vacuum created by the fleeing Nazis? Thousands of officers from a newly-established Civil Affairs division of the U.S. Army were parachuted into France on the day after D-Day, while bullets were still flying, with orders to stop looting, establish law and order and restore essential services.

GWB is no FDR. Three weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Civil Affairs was still stuck in Kuwait. Rumsfeld's war plan didn't allow for protecting museums and public buildings from looters, or innocent Iraqi women from roving gangs of marauding rapists. At the same time thousands of irreplaceable archeological treasures from the National Museum of Iraq were being sacked by thousands of looters, dozens of American troops were hanging around the Saddam statue videotaping, trying to be quotable.

As priceless ancient Sumerian jewelry and Assyrian sculptures were being carried away on donkeys and carts, archeologist Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad tried to convince Marines manning a nearby Abrams tank to stop the looters. "I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds," he told The New York Times. "But they refused and left."

"Stuff happens," Rummy said. "Freedom's untidy." He has the same taste in art as the Taliban.

This Administration's policy of perpetual war has become a case study in entropy, the distinctly pessimistic notion that no matter how bad things get we can figure out a way to make them worse. Entropy triumphed in Afghanistan, as the world's worst regime was replaced by dozens of thuggish warlords. The end of Saddam Hussein comes as welcome news, even if it's merely the accidental byproduct of a barely-disguised oil grab. But as Iraq's cities burn and its patrimony is hustled off into the black market and its women wail and the rape gangs rule the night, it's hard to escape the conclusion that we've lost this war as well.

Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan", an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.

Iraqis Say Lynch Raid Faced No Resistance

Gizzy and other doctors said no Iraqi soldiers or militiamen were at the hospital that night, April 1, when the U.S. Special Operations forces came in helicopters to carry out the midnight rescue.

By Keith B. Richburg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

NASIRIYAH, Iraq, April 14 -- Accounts of the U.S. military's dramatic rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from Saddam Hospital here two weeks ago read like the stuff of a Hollywood script. For Iraqi doctors working in the hospital that night, it was exactly that -- Hollywood dazzle, with little need for real action.

"They made a big show," said Haitham Gizzy, a physician at the public hospital here who treated Lynch for her injuries. "It was just a drama," he said. "A big, dramatic show."

Gizzy and other doctors said no Iraqi soldiers or militiamen were at the hospital that night, April 1, when the U.S. Special Operations forces came in helicopters to carry out the midnight rescue. Most of the Saddam's Fedayeen fighters, and the entire Baath Party leadership, including the governor of the province, had come to the hospital earlier in the day, changed into civilian clothes and fled, the doctors said.

"They brought their civilian wear with them," said Mokhdad Abd Hassan, who was on duty that day and evening. He pointed to green army uniforms still piled on the lawn. "You can see their military suits," he said. "They all ran away, the same day."

"It was all the leadership," Gizzy said. "Even the governor and the director general of the Baath Party. . . . They left walking, barefoot, in civilian wear."

The disappearance of the Iraqi forces from Nasiriyah -- a crossroads town 200 miles south of Baghdad that was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting and heaviest U.S. casualties in the war -- in many ways mirrored the evaporation of the militia and Baath Party fighters elsewhere in Iraq. From the southern city of Basra, where British troops walked in almost unopposed after a 21/2-week standoff, to the capital, Baghdad, where President Saddam Hussein and his ruling circle vanished without a trace, Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led invasion appears to have followed a well-set and planned pattern: Fight to a point, then disappear.

In Nasiriyah, "it look like an organized manner" of retreat, Gizzy said. The governor arrived in his dark four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, which he left parked in the hospital driveway as he escaped on foot.

The car remains in the driveway , minus its four wheels that a religious group removed to prevent a rival political faction from stealing it. The fleeing Iraqi government hierarchy left behind seven other new and expensive cars, but the doctors said they set fire to them to eliminate the temptation for looters to scale the hospital walls.

U.S. troops have been posted at the hospital to secure it against looters. But at the time U.S. commandos came to rescue Lynch, Gizzy said, "there were no soldiers at our hospital, just the medical staff. There were just us doctors."

Lynch, 19, a supply clerk with the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, was captured March 23 when her unit made a wrong turn near Nasiriyah and was ambushed. Initial accounts reported how she was shot and stabbed and continued battling Iraqi fighters until she ran out of ammunition. But the doctors here who treated her said she suffered fractures to her arms and lower limbs and a "small skull wound," sustained when her vehicle overturned.

Lynch's U.S. doctors have said she suffered fractures in her upper right arm, upper left leg, lower left leg and right ankle and foot. Her father, Greg Lynch Sr., told reporters she had no penetration wounds.

"It was a road traffic accident," Gizzy said. "There was not a drop of blood. . . . There were no bullets or shrapnel or anything like that." At the hospital, he said, "She was given special care, more than the Iraqi patients."

The physician said Lynch was first treated at an Iraqi military hospital before being transferred to the Saddam public hospital. An intelligence agent was posted in the hallway to guard the prisoner of war's first-floor hospital room. An Iraqi man whose wife worked at the hospital noticed the guard, discovered Lynch was the patient and alerted U.S. military personnel. He was sent back to gather more information, and the rescue was carried out April 1.

Hassan and other doctors said they were on duty that evening, when "we heard a big thumping nearby the hospital. And the sound of helicopters -- not just one. Then someone from the hospital, a colleague, said soldiers were entering the hospital from the back door."

"We agreed to stay in one room, not to intervene," Hassan said. The soldiers broke down several doors in the hospital before locating Lynch, and then went to the back of the hospital to recover the remains of nine U.S. soldiers buried in shallow graves. Eight of them, from Lynch's unit, were killed in the same ambush.

"They took Jessica and recovered the cadavers from behind the hospital," Hassan said. He said he believed the U.S. troops were on the hospital grounds for almost three hours.

The doctors at Nasiriyah's public hospital said they welcomed the U.S. and British invasion for having toppled Hussein's government. But that support is tempered by the high number of civilian casualties in Nasiriyah. Many of them, including women and children, remain in the crowded wards, suffering from severed limbs and deep lacerations the doctors said were caused by U.S. tank fire and bombs during the first week of the war.

Doctors said they have no exact documentation, but estimated that 300 civilians were killed in Nasiriyah and 1,000 people were wounded. They said most of the patients were discharged from the 400-bed hospital, but 60 remained on the hospital's third floor.

"I was shot by the Americans," said Akeel Kadhim, 20, a student whose left leg was amputated. "I was running to another wounded person, trying to save him. . . . We are innocent. We were not fighting. We were not resisting. I tried to save an innocent person. Why did they shoot me?"

In the next bed, Hassan Aoda, 28, said he was riding on a bus with 28 other Iraqis when a U.S. armored vehicle opened fire on them at a road crossing on March 25. "I don't know why they shot at us," he said, lying on his back and nursing a fractured left shoulder and arm. "I'm an innocent person. I wasn't fighting the Americans."

He added, "I'm not angry. I'm angry at Saddam Hussein."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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French,

This not towards you just just my opinion...

If this is the guy who is on Bill Maher periodically I have to say

one word for this punk..

LOON..

I sware that every time I see him he makes my blood boil still harping about the 2000 election and the BIG BAD REPUBLICAN party.. he is such a bitchass..

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Originally posted by mr mahs

French,

This not towards you just just my opinion...

If this is the guy who is on Bill Maher periodically I have to say

one word for this punk..

LOON..

I sware that every time I see him he makes my blood boil still harping about the 2000 election and the BIG BAD REPUBLICAN party.. he is such a bitchass..

Rall is also the guy that claims we invaded Afghanistan because of the Afghani pipeline. This guy is a joke. :rolleyes:

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Originally posted by Drunk

Rall is also the guy that claims we invaded Afghanistan because of the Afghani pipeline. This guy is a joke. :rolleyes:

I know.. I sware I would give money to see that bitch on Hannity and Colmes evenn Alan would think he is NUTZ..

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Originally posted by sassa

why is this so hard to believe for you...

I've read the book. Waste of money and waste of time. All Rall does is provide insinuation and no solid FACTS. I won't go into all the reasons why I think he's a farce, but this article sums it up well.

Return of Rall: Oil conspiracy redux

By Bryan Keefer

April 12, 2002

Ted Rall knows something you and I don't: the war in Afghanistan is all about oil, not terrorism. At least, that's what he tries to argue in his latest column, written in response to a critique of a previous piece by my co-editor Brendan Nyhan. As one of the most elaborate and prominent expositions of the war-for-oil theory, which has been repeated by some liberal pundits, Rall's conspiracy theory is worth a detailed look. Not surprisingly, his argument breaks down under scrutiny into little more than a few wisps of circumstantial evidence held together by anti-Bush vitriol and emotionally charged rhetoric.

Rall first began arguing that military action in Afghanistan was about oil rather than terrorism in a syndicated column published in October. Examining the oil politics of Central Asia, he took note of American oil giant Unocal's mid-1990s plan to build a pipeline through Afghanistan to transport the large oil reserves of land-locked Kazakhstan (and other newly-independent Soviet republics) to the Pakistani port of Karachi. The Clinton administration's decision to harden its line against the Taliban in 1998 (in the wake of the terrorist attacks of that year) prompted Unocal to abandon the plan as politically impossible.

Rall suggested that the September 11 attacks provided a pretext to bomb Afghanistan in order to get the Unocal deal back on track, claiming that "[f]inally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. has wanted all along-invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul."

Nyhan noted that there had been little consideration of the politics of oil in Central Asia, but also thoroughly debunked Rall's conspiracy theory. He demonstrated how Rall had misread the recent history of Afghanistan according to his own source, as well as numerous other factual errors. Most importantly, Nyhan argued that Rall trivialized the importance of the publicly-declared motivations of the Bush administration for the actions in Afghanistan: going after Osama bin Laden, his network, and the regime that was sheltering both.

Rall's newest column attempts to refute Nyhan and shore up his earlier theory. In it, he claims his argument is supported by "three painfully obvious truths": That the Bush administration was planning to attack Afghanistan even before September 11; that the war on terror really isn't a war on terror at all; and that the White House doesn't care about the victims of the terrorist tragedies. Each is built on faulty logic and distorted evidence.

As proof that the Bush administration intended to attack Afghanistan even before September 11, Rall provides exactly no evidence - perhaps he thinks the claim is so "painfully obvious" that it needs no justification. Regardless, it is likely that his source is Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, a French book published a month after the terrorist attacks by two investigative journalists. Currently not available in translation, the book charges in part (as summarized by United Press International) that the Bush administration was negotiating with the Taliban over the proposed pipeline last year, and threatened to use force against it to push the project through. The authors claim their source for this information was former FBI agent John O'Neill, who was killed in the September 11 attacks in New York City. A spokesman for the National Security Council, however, flatly denied the report, saying "There's just absolutely nothing to it; it's just not correct," and the State Department has also denied that such negotiations took place. Moreover, the truth of the claim is irrelevant: even if the administration threatened the Taliban before September 11 over oil interests, it does not necessarily follow that those same interests motivated military action after September 11.

His next contention is that "the ersatz 'war on terror' has little to do with reducing, much less preventing, terrorist acts by Islamic extremists." Rall suggests that the White House should have "targeted groups in the countries that carried out the 9-11 attacks - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan." While it is true that the US could have targeted those countries, its decision to bomb Afghanistan instead - which evidence suggested was harboring bin Laden - does not prove that the war is not about terrorism.

He continues with the suggestion that "Ninety-nine percent of the estimated 5,000 to 15,000 Afghans killed by US bombs had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11. That's an atrocity, it's even worse than 9-11, and Arabs know it." Once again, Rall fails to source his claims, which don't stand up to close scrutiny. The Associated Press estimated in February that the campaign had directly caused the deaths of 500 to 600 civilians based on hospital records, interviews, and examinations of bomb sites. Even University of New Hampshire economist Marc Herald, who has been criticized for duplicate sourcing of the casualties, estimated only between 3,100 and 3,800 civilian deaths caused by US forces. None of this, of course, minimizes the tragedy of such deaths. Yet neither do civilian casualty estimates support the claim that the war on terrorism is about oil. This is simply an inflammatory attempt to rile readers' emotions in support of Rall's outlandish theory.

Rall's final contention is that the Bush administration does not care about the victims of September 11, their families, or about women in Afghanistan. Rall notes that "for the first seven and a half months of his presidency, Bush never issued a single statement criticizing the Taliban's treatment of women." Once again, this is irrelevant -- such a lack of direct criticism from Bush does not necessarily contradict the administration's stated motive of going after terrorism by attacking the Taliban. Nor does this have anything to do with oil. It's simply a way of appealing to readers' preconceptions of Bush as hostile to women in order to score emotional points.

Attempting to prove that the White House doesn't care about the victims of 9-11, Rall claims that "the Bushies rushed through legislation depriving survivors of their right to sue the government or airlines. When push came to shove, Bush sold out the victims for a few millionare airline CEOs." Once again, he's just making things up. The airline bailout package included a provision that a person must surrender their right to sue the airlines in order to receive survivor's benefits from the federal government - otherwise they are free to do so, as several already have. Moreover, the financial bailout of the airline industry proves nothing about Bush's motives in the bombings - it's just another example of how Rall's theory is built on circumstantial evidence twisted into inflammatory emotional appeals.

Rall closes his column with a chronology of negotiations that may revive the pipeline project. He writes, "Unocal-related discussions began while the bombs were still falling last October and picked up steam after Bush appointed an ex-Unocal consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad, as his special envoy to Afghanistan." Here he is intentionally confusing one result of the bombings (discussions of reviving the pipeline project) with the purpose of the bombings. By such logic, any outcome - intentional or not - becomes the reason for the military actions: the rise in Bush's approval rating, the resumption of opium production or the pipeline project all become equally valid causes. Rall, as he does throughout his column, fails to give us any reason other than our preconceptions about Bush to believe his elaborate theories.

Like all good conspiracy theories, Rall's is impossible to prove or disprove without access to information that is not available - in this case, internal deliberations or even thoughts in Bush's mind. However, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that the war in Afghanistan is overwhelmingly motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, and only secondarily about other issues such as oil. Rall's flimsy evidence and cheap debating tactics all suggest his conspiracy theory is just that - a theory, and nothing more.

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Originally posted by mr mahs

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

You guys kill me... I kinda hope it is true so it

can pay for the rebuilding of Afghanistan...

:blank: i wonder why then the USA held talks with the Taliban a year before 9/11 concerning the building of a pipeline through Afghanistan into Central Asia. The Taliban refused to let it happen. Surprise...9/11 happened and the Americans invaded.

i'm just saying maybe it's not so far off from the truth as you'd like to believe...

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Originally posted by Drunk

Rall is also the guy that claims we invaded Afghanistan because of the Afghani pipeline. This guy is a joke. :rolleyes:

what pipeline right?...

answer: the one they are constructing right now...

how's that for reality...

but please explain to us why that is a joke...and don't forget to give all the bakground information on this issue...

thanks...

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Originally posted by frenchbread

what pipeline right?...

answer: the one they are constructing right now...

how's that for reality...

but please explain to us why that is a joke...and don't forget to give all the bakground information on this issue...

thanks...

I hope they are beleive me... but to insist that the U.S killed all those people on 911 because of a oil reserve is a PIPE DREAM

(no pun intended) frenchie

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Originally posted by frenchbread

what pipeline right?...

answer: the one they are constructing right now...

how's that for reality...

but please explain to us why that is a joke...and don't forget to give all the bakground information on this issue...

thanks...

Um, you obviously did not finish scrolling through the thread. Read the Keefer article which will answer your question, which is based on LOGIC and FACTS, unlike much of what Rall publishes.

Thanks. . .

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Originally posted by Drunk

Um, you obviously did not finish scrolling through the thread. Read the Keefer article which will answer your question, which is based on LOGIC and FACTS, unlike much of what Rall publishes.

Thanks. . .

i did scroll through...

and i did read your article...

it doesn't answer anything...

where's the logic in: "There's just absolutely nothing to it; it's just not correct,"

oh ok..duh...if you say so...

you want facts, i'll give you facts:

1991-1997

Major us oil companies invest billions in cash in Central Asia to secure equity rights to huge oil reserves. They have no way to get the oil and gas to market.

dec. 4, 1997

Representatives of the taliban are invited to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negociate their support for a pipeline to get the oil out through Afghnistan. The negociations fail.

feb. 12, 1998

Unocal VP John J Maresca testifies before the House that, until a single, unified friendly government is in place in Afghanistan, the pipeline will not be built.

april 1999

Enron, with a $3 billion investment to build an electrical generating plant at Dabhol, India, loses access to liquid natural-gas supplies from Qatar. Its only remaining option is a trans-Afghani gas pipeline to be built by Unocal from Turkmenistan.

1998 and 2000

Former President George Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Carlyle Group. While there, he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family.

oh tell me this...if they were so much after bin laden...

why haven't they caught him yet?...

why go to war against iraq, and use up all these resources when iraq doesn't pause an immediate and clear threat, and when bin laden, who is supposed to be responsible for the attack which for we are attacking iraq, is still at large...

now wouldn't it be great if they caught him, say, just before or during the next presidential elections?...

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