Doom Doom Doom is that all you Dumacrats ever think of????

Get a life the US will still be here when the next Republican

elected in 2008!!!!

"Rump Ranger" <buttpirate@fadmail.com> wrote in message
news:1105253318.363487.255880@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt33.html

Devastated Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail

Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster: Less
electricity is now being delivered than in the Saddam Hussein years;
infant malnourishment has, according to a Norwegian study, doubled in
the same time period ("It's on the level of some African countries,"
says the deputy director of the institute that conducted the study);
attacks on the country's oil infrastructure are now so severe that no
oil whatsoever is leaving the country heading north; there are far

insurgents and sympathizers (over 200,000 and growing) than American
troops in the country, according to a recent estimate by Iraq's
national intelligence chief; new plans with a distinctly Vietnam-ish
ring to them are being developed to place sizeable numbers of

"advisers" with newly trained Iraqi military units that are under

and crumbling (to "bolster the Iraqi will to fight") - and that just
scratches the surface of this moment.

Perhaps no item catches the moment more eerily than one I found at
journalist Sam Smith's Undernews blog. The "Iraqi capital Baghdad has
degenerated from one of the Middle East's most attractive and

cities in 1990 to 'the least attractive city' in the world to live

for expatriates, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
Mercer's "quality of life" survey just ranked the Iraqi capital last,
beaten out by the Central African Republic's Bangui and the civil-war
riven Congo's Brazzaville.

And that's but a tiny snapshot of the devastating Iraqi present. But
for us memory is short. If it weren't, Americans would be less
continuously surprised about our ever more disastrous Iraq adventure.
Below, freelance reporter Dahr Jamail returns to the early months of
2004 to remind us - from his travels through Iraq - just how much
the seeds of the present lie in what, for us, is an already

past.

Jamail is a remarkable young journalist; in some sense, possibly the
only unembedded American reporter living in dangerous Iraq. The other
American reporters, even when not embedded with the military, are
essentially embedded in their own large media outfits with guards,
fixers, support technicians, and special protective vehicles, and so
almost as constrained as any American official in the capital's Green
Zone. In Iraq, the media itself has, at least in reports that have

to me, an almost military aspect to it (and that's been true since

major papers and TV networks first "mobilized" for war in conjunction
with the Pentagon).

Jamail, on the other hand, moves around as best he can alone (except
for a translator) and quite undefended. He writes me:


"Not a believer in embedded journalism due to the censorship inherent
in the process, I travel among the Iraqi people to get the story from
the ground. Regularly invited into people's homes and businesses, I

to directly report the experience of Iraqis and how they feel about

occupation and events unfolding in their country. Due to my

style of reporting, I can go places where most reporters are unable

and report on stories that are usually overlooked by most mainstream
media outlets."

A former freelancer from Alaska, he's proving in person that other
kinds of reporting than those we normally experience are still

in Iraq. If you want to learn more about him, click here or visit his
own website and blog - or just plunge into his Iraq. ~ Tom

Iraq: The Devastation
By Dahr Jamail


The devastation of Iraq? Where do I start? After working 7 of the

12 months in Iraq, I'm still overwhelmed by even the thought of

to describe this.

The illegal war and occupation of Iraq was waged for three reasons,
according to the Bush administration. First for weapons of mass
destruction, which have yet to be found. Second, because the regime

Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, which Mr. Bush has personally
admitted have never been proven. The third reason - embedded in the
very name of the invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom - was to liberate
the Iraqi people.

So Iraq is now a liberated country.

I've been in liberated Baghdad and environs on and off for 12 months,
including being inside Fallujah during the April siege and having
warning shots fired over my head more than once by soldiers. I've
traveled in the south, north, and extensively around central Iraq.

I saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it was easier for a
foreign reporter to travel the country, offered a powerful - even
predictive - taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the year
(and undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth returning to the now
forgotten first half of last year and remembering just how terrible
things were for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation of

country.

Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of
liberation from - from human rights (think: the atrocities committed
in Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere);
liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning
electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the
streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah,
most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and

means).

Iraqis were then already bitter, confused, and existing amid a
desolation that came from myriads of Bush administration broken
promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi I've gotten to know
from my earliest days in the country has either had a family member

a friend killed by U.S. soldiers or from the effects of the
war/occupation. These include such everyday facts of life as not

enough money for food or fuel due to massive unemployment and soaring
energy prices, or any of the countless other horrors caused by the
aforementioned. The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and

cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 -
and the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown
worse since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it
was, was but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation.
The warning signs were clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all
the torturing, to a burgeoning, violent resistance.

Broken Promises

It was quickly apparent, even to a journalistic newcomer, even in

first months of last year that the real nature of the liberation we
brought to Iraq was no news to Iraqis. Long before the American media
decided it was time to report on the horrendous actions occurring
inside Abu Ghraib prison, most Iraqis already knew that the
"liberators" of their country were torturing and humiliating their
countrymen.

In December 2003, for instance, a man in Baghdad, speaking of the Abu
Ghraib atrocities, said to me, "Why do they use these actions? Even
Saddam Hussein did not do that! This is not good behavior. They are

coming to liberate Iraq!" And by then the bleak jokes of the
beleaguered had already begun to circulate. In the dark humor that

become so popular in Baghdad these days, one recently released Abu
Ghraib detainee I interviewed said, "The Americans brought

to my ***** before they brought it to my house!"

Sadiq Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken from his home

Kirkuk in July, 2003, he was held in a military detention facility

Tikrit before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin General
Hospital by U.S. forces one month later. While the medical report
accompanying him, signed by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, stated that Mr.
Zoman was comatose due to a heart attack brought on by heat stroke,

failed to mention that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the
electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and the bottoms of his
feet, or the bruises and whip-like marks up and down his body.

I visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a nearly empty

in Baghdad. Its belongings had largely been sold on the black market

keep them all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as Zoman

blankly at the ceiling. A small back-up generator hummed outside, as
this neighborhood, like most of Baghdad, averaged only six hours of
electricity per day.

Her daughter Rheem, who is in college, voiced the sentiments of the
entire family when she said, "I hate the Americans for doing this.

they took my father they took my life. I pray for revenge on the
Americans for destroying my father, my country, and my life."

In May of 2004, when I went to their house, a recent court-martial of
one of the soldiers complicit in the widespread torturing of Iraqis

Abu Ghraib had already taken place. He had been sentenced to some
modest prison time, but Iraqis were unimpressed. They had been
convinced yet again - not that they needed it - that Bush
administration promises to clean up its act regarding the treatment

detained Iraqis were no less empty than those being offered for
assistance in building a safe and prosperous Iraq.

Last year, the empty promises to bring justice to those involved in
such heinous acts, along with promises to make the prison at Abu

more transparent and accessible, fell on distraught family members

waited near the gates of the prison to see their loved ones inside.
Under a scorching May sun I went to the dusty, dismal,

razor-wire enclosed "waiting area" outside Abu Ghraib. There, I heard
one horror story after another from melancholy family members

gathered on this patch of barren earth, still hoping against hope to

granted a visit with someone inside the awful compound.

Sitting alone on the hard packed dirt in his white dishdasha, his

scarf languidly flapping in the dry, hot wind, Lilu Hammed stared
unwaveringly at the high walls of the nearby prison as if he were
attempting to see his 32 year-old son Abbas through the concrete

When my interpreter Abu Talat asked if he would speak with us,

seconds passed before Lilu slowly turned his head and said simply, "I
am sitting here on the ground waiting for God's help."

His son, never charged with an offense, had by then been in Abu

for 6 months following a raid on his home which produced no weapons.
Lilu held a crumpled visitation permission slip that he had just
obtained, promising a reunion with his son...three months away, on

18th of August.

Along with every other person I interviewed there, Lilu had found
consolation neither in the recent court martial, nor in the release

a few hundred prisoners. "This court-martial is nonsense. They said
that Iraqis could come to the trial, but they could not. It was a

trial."

At that moment, a convoy of Humvees full of soldiers, guns pointing

the small windows, rumbled through the front gate of the penal

kicking up a huge dust cloud that quickly engulfed everyone. The

of another prisoner, Mrs. Samir, waving away the clouds of dust said,
"We hope the whole world can see the position we are in now!" and

added plaintively, "Why are they doing this to us?"

Last summer I interviewed a kind, 55 year-old woman who used to work

an English teacher. She had been detained for four months in as many
prisons...in Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad and, of course, at Abu Ghraib.
She was never, she told me, allowed to sleep through a night. She was
interrogated many times each day, not given enough food or water, or
access to a lawyer or to her family. She was verbally and
psychologically abused.

But that, she assured me, wasn't the worst part. Not by far. Her 70
year-old husband was also detained and he was beaten. After seven
months of beatings and interrogations, he died in U.S. military

in prison.

She was crying as she spoke of him. "I miss my husband," she sobbed

stood up, speaking not to us but to the room, "I miss him so much."

shook her hands as if to fling water off them...then she held her

and cried some more.

"Why are they doing this to us?" she asked. She simply couldn't
understand, she said, what was happening because two of her sons were
also detained, and her family had been completely shattered. "We

do anything wrong," she whimpered.

With the interview over, we were walking towards our car to leave

all of us realized that it was 10 pm, already too late at night to be
out in dangerous Baghdad. So she asked us instead if we wouldn't

stay for dinner, all the while thanking me for listening to her
horrendous story, for my time, for writing about it. I found myself
speechless.

"No, thank you, we must get home now," said Abu Talat. By this time,

were all crying.

In the car, as we drove quickly along a Baghdad highway directly into

full moon, Abu Talat and I were silent. Finally, he asked, "Can you

any words? Do you have any words?"

I had none. None at all.

Broken Infrastructure

Everything in Iraq is set against the backdrop of shattered
infrastructure and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What the
Americans turn out to be best at is, once again, promises - and
propaganda. During the period when the Coalition Provisional

ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their handouts often read like
this one released on May 21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional

has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in
Ramadi, Kerbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer
balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase 'All of Us Participate in
a New Iraq.'"

And yet when it came to the basics of that New Iraq, unemployment was
at 50% and increasing, better areas of Baghdad averaged 6 hours of
electricity per day, and security was nowhere to be found. Even as

back as January, 2004, before the security situation had brought most
reconstruction projects to the nearly complete standstill of the
present moment, and 9 months after the war in Iraq had officially
ended, the situation already verged on the catastrophic. For

lack of potable water was the norm throughout most of central and
southern Iraq.

I was then working on a report that attempted to document exactly

reconstruction had occurred in the water sector - a sector for which
Bechtel was largely responsible. That giant corporation had been
awarded a no-bid contract of $680 million behind closed doors on

17, 2003, which in September was raised to $1.03 billion; then

won an additional contract worth $1.8 billion to extend its program
through December 2005.

At the time, when travel for Western reporters was a lot easier, I
stopped in several villages en route south from Baghdad through what
the Americans now call "the triangle of death" to Hilla, Najaf, and
Diwaniyah to check on people's drinking-water situation. Near Hilla,

old man with a weathered face showed me his water pump, sitting
lifeless with an empty container nearby - as there was no
electricity. What water his village did have was loaded with salt

was leaching into the water supply because Bechtel had not honored

contractual obligations to rehabilitate a nearby water treatment
center. Another nearby village didn't have the salt problem, but
nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones, cramps, and even cases of cholera

on the rise. This too would be a steady trend for the villages I
visited.

The rest of that trip involved a frenetic tour of villages, each
without drinkable water, near or inside the city limits of Hilla,
Najaf, and Diwaniya. Hilla, close to ancient Babylon, has a water
treatment plant and distribution center managed by Chief Engineer
Salmam Hassan Kadel. Mr. Kadel informed me that most of the villages

his jurisdiction had no potable water, nor did he have the piping
needed to repair their broken-down water systems, nor had he had any
contact with Bechtel or its subcontractors.

He spoke of large numbers of people coming down with the usual list

diseases. "Bechtel," he told me, "is spending all of their money
without any studies. Bechtel is painting buildings, but this doesn't
give clean water to the people who have died from drinking

water. We ask of them that instead of painting buildings, they give

one water pump and we'll use it to give water service to more people.
We have had no change since the Americans came here. We know Bechtel

wasting money, but we can't prove it."

At another small village between Hilla and Najaf, 1,500 people were
drinking water from a dirty stream which trickled slowly by their
homes. Everyone had dysentery; many had kidney stones; a startling
number, cholera. One villager, holding a sick child, told me, "It was
much better before the invasion. We had twenty-four hours of running
water then. Now we are drinking this garbage because it is all we
have."

The next morning found me at a village on the outskirts of Najaf,

fell under the responsibility of Najaf's water center. A large hole

been dug in the ground where the villagers tapped into already

pipes to siphon off water. The dirty hole filled in the night, when
water was collected. That morning, children were standing idly around
the hole as women collected the residue of dirty water which sat at

bottom. Everyone, it seemed, was suffering from some water-born

and several children, the villagers informed me, had been killed
attempting to cross a busy highway to a nearby factory where clean
water was actually available.

In June, six months later, I visited Chuwader Hospital, which then
treated an average of 3,000 patients a day in Sadr City, the enormous
Baghdad slum. Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the head manager there, promptly
began describing the struggles his hospital was facing under the
occupation. "We are short of every medicine," he said and pointed out
how rarely this had occurred before the invasion. "It is forbidden,

sometimes we have to reuse IV's, even the needles. We have no

And then, of course, he - like the other doctors I spoke with -
brought up their horrendous water problem, the unavailability of
unpolluted water anywhere in the area. "Of course, we have typhoid,
cholera, kidney stones," he said matter-of-factly, "but we now even
have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E...and it has become common in our
area."

Driving out of the sewage filled, garbage-strewn streets of Sadr City
we passed a wall with "Vietnam Street" spray-painted on it. Just
underneath was the sentence - obviously aimed at the American
liberators - "We will make your graves in this place."

Today, in terms of collapsing infrastructure, other areas of Baghdad
are beginning to suffer the way Sadr City did then, and still largely
does. While reconstruction projects slated for Sadr City have

increased funding, most of the time there is little sign of any work
being done, as is the case in most of Baghdad.

While an ongoing fuel crisis finds people waiting up to two days to
fill their tanks at gas stations, all of the city is running on
generators the majority of the time, and many less favored areas like
Sadr City have only four hours of electricity a day.

Broken Cities

The heavy-handed tactics of the occupation forces have become a
commonplace of Iraqi life. I've interviewed people who regularly

in their clothes because home raids are the norm. Many times when
military patrols are attacked by resistance fighters in the cities of
Iraq, soldiers simply open fire randomly on anything that moves. More
commonly, heavy civilian casualties occur from air raids by

forces. These horrible circumstances have led to over 100,000 Iraqi
civilian casualties in the less than two year-old occupation.

Then there is Fallujah, a city three-quarters of which has by now

bombed or shelled into rubble, a city in whose ruins fighting

even while most of its residents have yet to be allowed to return to
their homes (many of which no longer exist). The atrocities committed
there in the last month or so are, in many ways, similar to those
observed during the failed U.S. Marine siege of the city last April,
though on a far grander scale. This time, in addition, reports from
families inside the city, along with photographic evidence, point
toward the U.S. military's use of chemical and phosphorous weapons as
well as cluster bombs there. The few residents allowed to return in

final week of 2004 were handed military-produced leaflets instructing
them not to eat any food from inside the city, nor to drink the

Last May, at the General Hospital of Fallujah, doctors spoke to me of
the sorts of atrocities that occurred during the first month-long

of the city. Dr. Abdul Jabbar, an orthopedic surgeon, said that it

difficult to keep track of the number of people they treated, as well
as the number of dead, due to the lack of documentation. This was
caused primarily by the fact that the main hospital, located on the
opposite side of the Euphrates River from the city, was sealed off by
the Marines for the majority of April, just as it would again be in
November, 2004.

He estimated that at least 700 people were killed in Fallujah during
that April. "I worked at five of the centers [community health

myself, and if we collect the numbers from these places, then this is
the number," he said. "And you must keep in mind that many people

buried before reaching our centers."

When the wind blew in from the nearby Julan quarter of the city, the
putrid stench of decaying bodies (a smell evidently once again

of the city) only confirmed his statement. Even then, Dr. Jabbar was
insisting that American planes had dropped cluster bombs on the city.
"Many people were injured and killed by cluster bombs. Of course they
used cluster bombs. We heard them as well as treated people who had
been hit by them!"

Dr. Rashid, another orthopedic surgeon, said, "Not less than sixty
percent of the dead were women and children. You can go see the

for yourself." I had already visited the Martyr Cemetery and had

observed the numerous tiny graves that had clearly been dug for
children. He agreed with Dr. Jabbar about the use of cluster bombs,

added, "I saw the cluster bombs with my own eyes. We don't need any
evidence. Most of these bombs fell on those we then treated."

Speaking of the medical crisis that his hospital had to deal with, he
pointed out that during the first 10 days of fighting the U.S.

did not allow any evacuations from Fallujah to Baghdad at all. He

"Even transferring patients in the city was impossible. You can see

ambulances outside. Their snipers also shot into the main doors of

of our centers." Several ambulances were indeed in the hospital's
parking lot, two of them with bullet holes in their windshields.

Both doctors said they had not been contacted by the U.S. military,

had any aid been delivered to them by the military. Dr. Rashid summed
the situation up this way: "They send only bombs, not medicine."

As I walked to our car at one point amid what was already the
desolation of Fallujah, a man tugged on my arm and yelled, "The
Americans are cowboys! This is their history! Look at what they did

the Indians! Vietnam! Afghanistan! And now Iraq! This does not

us."

And that, of course, was before the total siege of the city began in
November, 2004. The April campaign in Fallujah, which resulted in a
rise in resistance proved - like so much else in those early months
of 2004 - to be but a harbinger of things to come on a far larger
scale. While the goal of the most recent siege was to squelch the
resistance and bring greater security for elections scheduled for
January 30, the result as in April has been anything but security.

In the wake of the destruction of Fallujah, fighting has simply

elsewhere and intensified. Families are now fleeing Mosul, Iraq's

largest city, because of a warning of another upcoming air campaign
against resistance fighters. At least one car bomb per day is now the
norm in the capital city. Clashes erupt with deadly regularity
throughout Baghdad as well as in cities like Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba
and Balad.

The intensification is two-sided. With each ratchet upwards in
violence, the tactics by the American military only grow more
heavy-handed and, as they do, the Iraqi resistance just continues to
grow in size and effectiveness. Any kind of "siege" of Mosul will

add to this dynamic.

Despite a media blackout in the aftermath of the recent assault on
Fallujah, stories of dogs eating bodies in the streets of the city

of destroyed mosques have spread across Iraq like wildfire; and

like these only underscore what most people in Iraq now believe -
that the liberators have become no more than brutal imperialist
occupiers of their country. And then the resistance grows yet

Yet among Iraqis the growing resistance was predicted long ago. One
telling moment for me came last June amid daily suicide car bombings

Baghdad. While footage of cars with broken glass and bullet holes in
their frames flashed across a television screen, my translator Hamid,
an older man who had already grown weary of the violence, said

"It has begun. These are only the start, and they will not stop. Even
after June 30." That, of course, was the date of the long-promised
handover of "sovereignty" to a new Iraqi government, after which,
American officials fervently predicted, violence in the country would
begin to subside. The same pattern of prediction and of a contrarian
reality can now be seen in relation to the upcoming elections.

Three weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a sheikh from Baquba visited
me in Baghdad and we had lunch with Abdulla, an older professor who

a friend of his. As we were eating, Abdulla expressed a sentiment now
widely heard. "The mujahideen," he said, "are fighting for their
country against the Americans. This resistance is acceptable to us."

The Bush administration has recently increased its troops in Iraq

138,000 to 150,000 - in order, officials said, to provide greater
security for the upcoming elections. Such troop increases also

in Vietnam. Back then it was called escalation.

What I wonder is, will I be writing a piece next January still

"Iraq: The Devastation," in which these last terrible months of 2004
(of which the first half of the year was but a foreshadowing) will
prove in their turn but a predictive taste of horrors to come? And

then of 2006 and 2007?

January 8, 2005

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a

of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including
The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He

spent 7 of the last 12 months reporting from inside occupied Iraq.

articles have been published in the Sunday Herald, Inter Press

the website of the Nation magazine, and the New Standard internet

site for which he is the Iraq correspondent. He is the special
correspondent in Iraq for Flashpoints radio and also has appeared on
the BBC, Democracy Now!, Free Speech Radio News, and Radio South
Africa.
=20
Copyright =A9 2005 Dahr Jamail

On 8 Jan 2005 22:48:38 -0800, "Rump Ranger" <buttpirate@fadmail.com>
wrote:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt33.html

Devastated Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail

Odd...I thought it was the attempt at genocide that we objected to.

Rump Ranger wrote:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt33.html

Devastated Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail

Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster:

I measure Iraq in the only way that counts: the chance that Iraqis have
for political freedom and democracy, something they have NEVER had
before.

This article is an example of the petulance and lack of historical
perspective that characterizes the left-wing today.

They seem to have no understanding of the ravages of war that have
always been a part of war.

In World War II, for example, in the struggle to liberate Europe from
Nazism, much of Europe ended up in ruins.

Rump Ranger wrote:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt33.html

Devastated Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail

Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster:

I measure Iraq in the only way that counts: the chance that Iraqis

for political freedom and democracy, something they have NEVER had
before. In what past century was there a functioning democracy

This article is an example of the petulance and lack of historical
perspective that characterizes the left-wing today.

They seem to have no understanding of the ravages of war that have
always been a part of war.

When it comes to political freedom, ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.
But I'll never convince a doctrinaire left-winger of that.