From NEWSWEEK, 8/7/03:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/949735.asp?cp1=1
Curiouser and Curiouser
Iraq’s mysteries are of two kinds: no one knows, and no one says
By Rod Nordland
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Baghdad has become the capital of the unknowable.
After the car bombing of the Jordanian Embassy, a small crowd of young
men stormed the smoldering wreckage, darting among the scattered
debris and body parts, to rip down posters of Jordan’s King Abdullah
II and chant "Kill all the Jordanians."
WHY?
NO ONE dared to interview them in that ugly mood, or to point out the
obvious to the brainless, that the dead were only Iraqis, mostly
guards and passersby.
What sense does any of this make?
Such questions come at us from all sides these days.
You could stand on a rooftop in Baghdad this afternoon and see the
deep black plume of smoke rising from that car bomb, off to the
northeast and then look to the southwest and see a similar plume,
narrower and blacker but just as high.
It rose from an American Humvee that had just been hit by a
rocket-propelled grenade on a busy commercial street in the Kerida
neighborhood.
Black Hawk helicopters circled overhead, two dozen Humvees and Bradley
fighting vehicles full of troops stormed the scene, shooting into a
two-story building.
Though the firing went on a long time, the unmistakable sound of
return fire from weapons of a different make was lacking.
Exactly what happened here?
No one seemed to know, and the troops were too busy shooting to talk.
Witnesses say two American soldiers were wounded in their vehicle, but
that’s not confirmed.
Later CENTCOM will issue its usual terse press release, a few lines to
say however many soldiers were shot or killed, with hardly any detail.
The release on this one isn’t out yet, but the night before, CENTCOM
said, two soldiers from the First Armored were killed in a firefight
when they were ambushed somewhere in Baghdad.
Where?
By whom?
Did they get away (as they usually do)?
Was it provoked or an accident?
Iraq’s mysteries are of two kinds: no one knows, and no one says.
Where is Saddam?
The military says he’s in Iraq, but how do they know that?
Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, head of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Division that’s
hunting him in Tikrit, says Saddam is moving every three or four hours
to evade the manhunt.
How does he know this, and if his information is that good, why
haven’t they caught him by now?
A hunted man is much more vulnerable on the run than in a bolthole.
Is Saddam directing the resistance that we’re seeing, or just
inspiring it?
Right up the chain back to Rummy in Washington, the mantra is that
it’s a local or sometimes regionally coordinated resistance, but not
centrally directed.
Then yesterday the Fourth announced that they had arrested one of the
national leaders of the resistance.
And if it’s so local, how do they seem to manage to strike, as they
did last week, on successive days two different points on the
just-reopened railway, separated by hundreds of miles?
Another unknowable is just what the resistance’s strategy is.
For a while it looked like they intended to limit their attacks to
just Coalition troops; even the case of the British journalist killed
a month ago, in broad daylight on a Baghdad street, was put down to
the fact he was wearing military-style clothing.
Then the week before last two strikingly similar killings opened a new
dimension.
Both, which took place near Hilla, south of Baghdad, had the same
modus operandi.
An armed man riding shotgun in a car pulled up on the left of the
target vehicle and shot the occupants.
In the first case, it was a United Nations-marked vehicle belonging to
the International Organization of Migration.
One worker was killed.
Well, the old regime has plenty of gripes against the U.N., people
thought.
But then the next day an International Committee of the Red Cross
vehicle, emblazoned with the well-known red emblems, was hit the same
way; again, one staffer was killed.
So are all foreigners targets now?
Then the head of the Baghdad University was assassinated in front of
his family in his home.
Pro-Baathists, or anti?
They both had a motive to kill a former top Baathist official now
cooperating with the Coalition.
Two days ago, an American civilian contractor was killed when his car
ran over a mine.
The Jordanian Embassy was another soft target, and this was the first
time the attackers employed a car bomb (or what Gen. Ricardo Sanchez
charmingly referred to today as a "remote-controlled,
vehicular-mounted, improvised explosive device").
One thing is clear now.
The lull is over, and the killers are not going to take August off,
however hot it may be (125 degrees).
That lull lasted for all of five days, during which not a single
American soldier died in combat, after months of what seemed like a
kill-a-soldier-a-day campaign.
We started thinking that perhaps the relentless house raids, roundups
and busts up and down the country were finally having an effect.
But that came to a convincing end today.
Now at least 55 Americans have been killed in action since President
Bush declared major combat operations over May 1.
And soldiers and civilians, Iraqis and foreigners, aid workers and
journalists, all of us know that when it comes down to it, what’s
going to happen next is just another unknowable.
_____________________________________________________
Where's Saddam? Where's Osama? Where are the WMD? Where's Bush?
Whoops! Wait a minute. We know the answer to that, don't we. Hey,
maybe they're all on vacation.
Harry
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