Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Wed 10 Nov 2004 With Bush back, Blair begins the distancing FRASER NELSON
ON THE eve of the American presidential election, Tony Blair was preparing himself for a President John F Kerry. His briefing from the Foreign Office pointed to a defeat for the Republicans - which, his officials said, was probably a good thing. The Prime Minister listened to arguments about how he would work with Mr Kerry to remould a fresh US-Europe alliance, and win his own election easier without George W Bush as a political backdrop. Mr Bush, they argued, had become a liability. When the president breezed back into the White House, hearts sank across the British government. This is why, in spite of the bond between Mr Blair and Mr Bush, who meet tomorrow, the Atlantic alliance is crumbling behind the scenes. On the surface, the reverse seems true. For the last three years, we’ve seen nothing but unstinting British support for America. Deploying the Black Watch to central Iraq is an extraordinary act of solidarity. And for the last few weeks, Mr Bush has toured America boasting of his closeness with Mr Blair - shamelessly using him as a campaign tool, to prove that he does have friends in the world in spite of what nasty John Kerry says. "I was speaking to Prime Minister Blair only this morning," went one typical remark in Ohio. In Florida, he glowingly compared Mr Blair to Churchill. Every time he was accused of bullying unilateralism, Mr Bush said: "Tell that to my friend Tony." This all adds up to an almighty favour that the leader of the world’s last superpower owes to the householder of 10 Downing Street. But, to Mr Blair’s dismay, the White House has been frustratingly reluctant to pay out such credit. The war on terror was never a quid pro quo. Mr Blair instinctively sided with the US: the words "shoulder to shoulder" came from his lips only hours after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 - British support was emphatic, and unconditional. When the Pentagon offered Britain an opt-out on the eve of war, saying American troops could take Iraq alone, Mr Blair refused. With the kind of clarity which often evades him in domestic affairs, he wanted to join a battle of right versus wrong. But he had credit to spend - and the Foreign Office decided that Mr Blair should use leverage with the White House to demand progress on the Middle East peace process, which Britain lacks the clout to pursue. And this would become the new British foreign policy. Rather than using its own diplomatic muscle, London would use its influence to steer the hand of a giant. It would become America’s First Friend. Three years on, there’s not much to show for this policy. The last time Mr Blair visited Mr Bush, the US president broke with decades of precedent by saying it was understandable for Israel to keep its illegal West Bank settlements. When Britain protested against US steel tariffs slapped on our exports, or President Bush’s decision to tear up the Kyoto climate-change treaty, the White House turned a deaf ear. While Mr Blair is philosophical, the Foreign Office is furious. The Bush administration is all give and no take, it argues - there’s no point building up "credit" with a White House which doesn’t pay out. The despair has spread to the Ministry of Defence. Four months ago Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, wrote to the Pentagon threatening to stop buying American goods unless Britain was allowed to share secrets in US military technology. The US refused - and, last month, Britain placed its biggest-ever military-truck order with a German rather than an American supplier. This was a taste of a far larger, and fundamental, defence decision which has profound implications. Britain is signing up to the Galileo project - a scheme run by the European Commission to ring the world with navigation satellites. Its sole purpose is to rival the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, owned and run by the Pentagon. Anyone can use the Americans’ GPS, which today helps Londoners find the nearest taxi from their mobile phones, or helps Scottish truck drivers navigate without maps. But its military potential is the stake at the heart of NATO. The Iraq war proved that missiles and trucks can also use GPS - but this is too much for the French, Germans and Belgians to swallow. Jacques Chirac, president of France, says using GPS makes Europeans a "vassal" of America. Today, as armies around the world prepare for a digital revolution, they must also make their decision: which satellite platform to use? When China signed up to Galileo, it took shape as an un-American, almost anti-American, alliance. Time was when diplomacy decided strategic alliances between nations. Today, it’s technology - and the lack of co-operation between Whitehall and the US government has meant that Britain will throw in its lot with the Europeans. ALL this makes the Pentagon determined to share no military secrets with Britain: it fears - understandably - that such information will leak to its enemies. It sees NATO being replaced by a space-satellite alliance which runs from London to Beijing. Intelligence-sharing, long the bedrock of the UK-American alliance, may well be next. This happens because the American government contrasts what Mr Blair says with what his government is doing. It pays more attention to the deeds than to the words. And what when Mr Blair goes? Imagine a summit with Prime Minister Gordon Brown next to Mr Bush in the White House rose garden - it’s a difficult mental image to conjure. Even the Tories have started taking swipes at the US. So, no matter how much personal gratitude Mr Bush owes Mr Blair, their governments are moving away from each other: the next prime minister, from whichever party, will want to be far more critical towards Washington. Diplomatically, Britain and America stand united. Modern world history has been the story of dictators rising and English-speaking people uniting to defeat them. In each case, the only foreign ground permanently occupied is the graves of our fallen. But militarily, Britain is siding with Europe - having been reluctantly forced into this choice by the onset of a digital age. The remote-controlled armies of the future are too expensive for Britain to stand independently between the two. Mr Blair emphatically denies this in public, but is too clever a politician not to see what’s going on. With a decline in UK-US relations inevitable, he can afford to open up the distance he needs before election time. He has worked out by now that Britain can only ask for what the White House will deliver anyway: namely the Middle East peace process and helping AIDS-stricken Africa. If Mr Blair is lucky, Mr Bush - keen to be seen to have friends overseas - may drop his name into any popular policy which emerges. But the dreams of forcing Mr Bush’s hand have been shattered by years of experience. So once he comes back from Washington, Mr Blair may as well start actively to disagree with the American president, with next year’s general election in mind. He will start to make political distance. We can prepare ourselves for manufactured splits over the Kyoto treaty, which Mr Bush could not sign if he wanted to because the US Senate is implacably opposed to it. Perhaps, as a friend, Mr Bush will offer advance forgiveness for Mr Blair’s pre-election posturing - and profuse thanks for British troops in the Sunni Triangle. But the Black Watch’s service marks the end of an era unlikely to outlast Mr Blair.This article: http://news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=1296192004 Fraser Nelson: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=230
ON THE eve of the American presidential election, Tony Blair was preparing himself for a President John F Kerry. His briefing from the Foreign Office pointed to a defeat for the Republicans - which, his officials said, was probably a good thing. The Prime Minister listened to arguments about how he would work with Mr Kerry to remould a fresh US-Europe alliance, and win his own election easier without George W Bush as a political backdrop. Mr Bush, they argued, had become a liability. When the president breezed back into the White House, hearts sank across the British government. This is why, in spite of the bond between Mr Blair and Mr Bush, who meet tomorrow, the Atlantic alliance is crumbling behind the scenes. On the surface, the reverse seems true. For the last three years, we’ve seen nothing but unstinting British support for America. Deploying the Black Watch to central Iraq is an extraordinary act of solidarity. And for the last few weeks, Mr Bush has toured America boasting of his closeness with Mr Blair - shamelessly using him as a campaign tool, to prove that he does have friends in the world in spite of what nasty John Kerry says. "I was speaking to Prime Minister Blair only this morning," went one typical remark in Ohio. In Florida, he glowingly compared Mr Blair to Churchill. Every time he was accused of bullying unilateralism, Mr Bush said: "Tell that to my friend Tony." This all adds up to an almighty favour that the leader of the world’s last superpower owes to the householder of 10 Downing Street. But, to Mr Blair’s dismay, the White House has been frustratingly reluctant to pay out such credit. The war on terror was never a quid pro quo. Mr Blair instinctively sided with the US: the words "shoulder to shoulder" came from his lips only hours after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 - British support was emphatic, and unconditional. When the Pentagon offered Britain an opt-out on the eve of war, saying American troops could take Iraq alone, Mr Blair refused. With the kind of clarity which often evades him in domestic affairs, he wanted to join a battle of right versus wrong. But he had credit to spend - and the Foreign Office decided that Mr Blair should use leverage with the White House to demand progress on the Middle East peace process, which Britain lacks the clout to pursue. And this would become the new British foreign policy. Rather than using its own diplomatic muscle, London would use its influence to steer the hand of a giant. It would become America’s First Friend. Three years on, there’s not much to show for this policy. The last time Mr Blair visited Mr Bush, the US president broke with decades of precedent by saying it was understandable for Israel to keep its illegal West Bank settlements. When Britain protested against US steel tariffs slapped on our exports, or President Bush’s decision to tear up the Kyoto climate-change treaty, the White House turned a deaf ear. While Mr Blair is philosophical, the Foreign Office is furious. The Bush administration is all give and no take, it argues - there’s no point building up "credit" with a White House which doesn’t pay out. The despair has spread to the Ministry of Defence. Four months ago Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, wrote to the Pentagon threatening to stop buying American goods unless Britain was allowed to share secrets in US military technology. The US refused - and, last month, Britain placed its biggest-ever military-truck order with a German rather than an American supplier. This was a taste of a far larger, and fundamental, defence decision which has profound implications. Britain is signing up to the Galileo project - a scheme run by the European Commission to ring the world with navigation satellites. Its sole purpose is to rival the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, owned and run by the Pentagon. Anyone can use the Americans’ GPS, which today helps Londoners find the nearest taxi from their mobile phones, or helps Scottish truck drivers navigate without maps. But its military potential is the stake at the heart of NATO. The Iraq war proved that missiles and trucks can also use GPS - but this is too much for the French, Germans and Belgians to swallow. Jacques Chirac, president of France, says using GPS makes Europeans a "vassal" of America. Today, as armies around the world prepare for a digital revolution, they must also make their decision: which satellite platform to use? When China signed up to Galileo, it took shape as an un-American, almost anti-American, alliance. Time was when diplomacy decided strategic alliances between nations. Today, it’s technology - and the lack of co-operation between Whitehall and the US government has meant that Britain will throw in its lot with the Europeans. ALL this makes the Pentagon determined to share no military secrets with Britain: it fears - understandably - that such information will leak to its enemies. It sees NATO being replaced by a space-satellite alliance which runs from London to Beijing. Intelligence-sharing, long the bedrock of the UK-American alliance, may well be next. This happens because the American government contrasts what Mr Blair says with what his government is doing. It pays more attention to the deeds than to the words. And what when Mr Blair goes? Imagine a summit with Prime Minister Gordon Brown next to Mr Bush in the White House rose garden - it’s a difficult mental image to conjure. Even the Tories have started taking swipes at the US. So, no matter how much personal gratitude Mr Bush owes Mr Blair, their governments are moving away from each other: the next prime minister, from whichever party, will want to be far more critical towards Washington. Diplomatically, Britain and America stand united. Modern world history has been the story of dictators rising and English-speaking people uniting to defeat them. In each case, the only foreign ground permanently occupied is the graves of our fallen. But militarily, Britain is siding with Europe - having been reluctantly forced into this choice by the onset of a digital age. The remote-controlled armies of the future are too expensive for Britain to stand independently between the two. Mr Blair emphatically denies this in public, but is too clever a politician not to see what’s going on. With a decline in UK-US relations inevitable, he can afford to open up the distance he needs before election time. He has worked out by now that Britain can only ask for what the White House will deliver anyway: namely the Middle East peace process and helping AIDS-stricken Africa. If Mr Blair is lucky, Mr Bush - keen to be seen to have friends overseas - may drop his name into any popular policy which emerges. But the dreams of forcing Mr Bush’s hand have been shattered by years of experience. So once he comes back from Washington, Mr Blair may as well start actively to disagree with the American president, with next year’s general election in mind. He will start to make political distance. We can prepare ourselves for manufactured splits over the Kyoto treaty, which Mr Bush could not sign if he wanted to because the US Senate is implacably opposed to it. Perhaps, as a friend, Mr Bush will offer advance forgiveness for Mr Blair’s pre-election posturing - and profuse thanks for British troops in the Sunni Triangle. But the Black Watch’s service marks the end of an era unlikely to outlast Mr Blair.This article: http://news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=1296192004 Fraser Nelson: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=230
washingtonpost.com
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U.S. Forces Battle Into Heart of Fallujah Units Meet Scattered Resistance; Attacks Continue Elsewhere
By Jackie Spinner, Karl Vick and Omar FekeikiWashington Post Foreign ServiceWednesday, November 10, 2004; Page A01
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 9 -- U.S. forces pushed into the heart of Fallujah on Tuesday, encountering roadside bombs, rockets and gunfire on the second day of a battle to wrest control of the city from insurgents.
Army and Marine units that entered Fallujah from the northeast and northwest on Monday night had fought their way to the city center and beyond by Tuesday night, U.S. commanders said.
Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.
"There were multiple groups running around shooting at us," said Air Force Senior Airman Michael Smyre, 26, of Hickory, N.C., an airstrike spotter attached to the 1st Infantry who was wounded when a rocket hit his armored vehicle. "You could see a lot of rubble, trash everywhere. It was real nasty-looking."
Marines fighting to the west of the Army units advanced to the main east-west highway that divides Fallujah and reported persistent resistance from insurgents firing from mosques.
The U.S. military said 10 troops and two members of Iraq's security forces were killed in the first two days of the battle, the largest military operation since the U.S.-led invasion last year. U.S. and Iraqi leaders hope the assault will break the grip of insurgents who have held Fallujah for nearly seven months.
Some Iraqi political and religious groups condemned the push into Fallujah, a stronghold of the Sunni Muslim minority. A leading Sunni organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, quit the country's interim government, and Sunni clerics on Tuesday made good on threats to call for a boycott of January elections. Harith Dhari, head of the pro-insurgency Association of Muslim Scholars, said balloting would occur "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah."
Insurgents elsewhere in Iraq, meanwhile, continued a strategy of mounting attacks. In Baqubah, a restive city northeast of Baghdad, armed bands attacked two police stations. Police officials and the U.S. military said the attacks were beaten back. A car bomb at an Iraqi National Guard camp outside the northern city of Kirkuk killed three people and wounded two. And two U.S. service members were killed in a mortar attack on a base in Mosul, also in the north.
In Baghdad, where insurgents on Monday night detonated a car bomb outside a hospital treating victims of two car bombs outside churches, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi imposed a curfew from 10:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. U.S. fighter jets made low passes over the capital, a show of strength rarely seen since the 2003 invasion.
At a news conference in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the commander of foreign military operations in Iraq, said the assault on Fallujah had so far "achieved our objectives on or ahead of schedule." He added, "I think we're looking at several more days of tough urban fighting."
The general said the battle plan as a whole was on course. "We felt like the enemy would form an outer crust in defense of Fallujah. We broke through that pretty quickly and easily," Metz said. "We also then anticipated him breaking up into small three- to six-person detachments or squads, which we've seen throughout the day, today especially."
Witnesses said that by Tuesday night, U.S. and Iraqi forces controlled the Jolan, Mualimeen and Askali neighborhoods in the north of Fallujah. They also held the Rawdha Muhammediya mosque, headquarters of the insurgent fighters and the mujaheddin shura, the city's self-appointed government.
The assault pushed insurgents into Shuhada and other neighborhoods in the southernmost part of the city, where they are fighting and hiding behind buildings and houses, witnesses said.
Metz said that because U.S. forces formed a "very tight" cordon around the city Sunday night, the enemy "doesn't have an escape route" and eventually would be cornered.
But Sheik Abdul-Sattar Edatha, the spokesman for the shura council, said most foreign fighters had already left the city. The U.S. military had estimated that there were 2,000 to 3,000 foreign fighters in the city, many of them part of a network linked to Jordanian-born guerrilla leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.
"Militarily speaking, the city falls under the U.S. forces' control," Edatha said. "The foreign fighters won't stay here and die. They lost the battle. They spread in other places."
On Tuesday night, Fallujah's eerily empty streets were littered with shattered concrete and dead bodies, said a resident shaken by a missile strike on the second story of his family home. Insurgents cloaked in checkered head scarves carried wounded fellow fighters to mosques.
Civilians caught in the crossfire were gathered in a hospital donated by the United Arab Emirates and flying a blue and white UNICEF banner. There, medical workers low on bandages and antiseptic bound wounds in ripped sheets and cleaned torn skin with hot water.
The Jolan and Askali neighborhoods seemed particularly hard hit, with more than half of the houses destroyed. Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujah's oldest neighborhoods. Blood and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses said, and the streets were full of holes.
Some of the heaviest damage apparently was incurred Monday night from air and artillery attacks that coincided with the entry of ground troops into the city. U.S. warplanes dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on the city overnight, and artillery boomed throughout the night and into the morning.
"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.
Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujaheddin which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
In addition to ripping open entire neighborhoods, the armor assault also brought into the open an insurgent command that until this week remained shadowy even to Fallujah residents. Ex-generals from the former Iraqi army's Republican Guard passed written orders, complete with official stamp, to subordinates who snapped salutes, witnesses said.
Iraq's new army, formed after occupation authorities dismantled the armed forces that had served during the rule of Saddam Hussein, is taking part in the fight against insurgents in Fallujah, primarily as a rear element to help clear areas once U.S. forces have moved through. Marine commanders have declined to comment on the offensive, deferring to Iraqi officers. On Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Qadir Muhammed Jasim characterized the offensive as "a holy task to fight for Fallujah people."
"We will fight to the last drop of our blood to free our people," he said at a news conference just outside the city. "We will fulfill the tasks we've been asked to do, with the cooperation of our friends."
Jasim said that resistance had been lighter than expected and that the Iraqi soldiers were in good spirits and eager to finish the operation.
"The operation is going very precise and with a very small number of casualties," he said. "In every place we finish an operation, our forces start to distribute aid, food, clothes, blankets and even money. . . . We are very sure that we are moving in the right way and will do the tasks we are asked to do very precisely."
Metz repeatedly praised Iraqi forces, saying they had "acquitted themselves very well in this fight." Metz said the Iraqi soldiers had been used especially to search the city's 77 mosques. "In several mosques today, lots of munitions and weapons were found, and they were found by those Iraqi soldiers," he said.
Metz's account suggested a marked improvement among the Iraqi troops in recent months. In April, the last time U.S. commanders tried to use Iraqi forces in Fallujah, a battalion of freshly trained Iraqi troops refused to go.
A senior Iraqi official said it was too early to tell how the Iraqi forces performed. "During the operation you always hear they're doing good," said Industry Minister Hachim Hasani. "After the operations are finished, we'll find out."
Hasani's political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, quit the interim government Tuesday to protest the Fallujah offensive. But Hasani, who opposed the U.S. Marine siege of the city earlier this year, quit the party Tuesday and retained his cabinet post. "Iraq is larger than any party," Hasani said. "Things should be done through the government, not outside the government."
Vick and special correspondent Bassam Sebti reported from Baghdad.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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U.S. Forces Battle Into Heart of Fallujah Units Meet Scattered Resistance; Attacks Continue Elsewhere
By Jackie Spinner, Karl Vick and Omar FekeikiWashington Post Foreign ServiceWednesday, November 10, 2004; Page A01
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 9 -- U.S. forces pushed into the heart of Fallujah on Tuesday, encountering roadside bombs, rockets and gunfire on the second day of a battle to wrest control of the city from insurgents.
Army and Marine units that entered Fallujah from the northeast and northwest on Monday night had fought their way to the city center and beyond by Tuesday night, U.S. commanders said.
Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.
"There were multiple groups running around shooting at us," said Air Force Senior Airman Michael Smyre, 26, of Hickory, N.C., an airstrike spotter attached to the 1st Infantry who was wounded when a rocket hit his armored vehicle. "You could see a lot of rubble, trash everywhere. It was real nasty-looking."
Marines fighting to the west of the Army units advanced to the main east-west highway that divides Fallujah and reported persistent resistance from insurgents firing from mosques.
The U.S. military said 10 troops and two members of Iraq's security forces were killed in the first two days of the battle, the largest military operation since the U.S.-led invasion last year. U.S. and Iraqi leaders hope the assault will break the grip of insurgents who have held Fallujah for nearly seven months.
Some Iraqi political and religious groups condemned the push into Fallujah, a stronghold of the Sunni Muslim minority. A leading Sunni organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, quit the country's interim government, and Sunni clerics on Tuesday made good on threats to call for a boycott of January elections. Harith Dhari, head of the pro-insurgency Association of Muslim Scholars, said balloting would occur "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah."
Insurgents elsewhere in Iraq, meanwhile, continued a strategy of mounting attacks. In Baqubah, a restive city northeast of Baghdad, armed bands attacked two police stations. Police officials and the U.S. military said the attacks were beaten back. A car bomb at an Iraqi National Guard camp outside the northern city of Kirkuk killed three people and wounded two. And two U.S. service members were killed in a mortar attack on a base in Mosul, also in the north.
In Baghdad, where insurgents on Monday night detonated a car bomb outside a hospital treating victims of two car bombs outside churches, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi imposed a curfew from 10:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. U.S. fighter jets made low passes over the capital, a show of strength rarely seen since the 2003 invasion.
At a news conference in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the commander of foreign military operations in Iraq, said the assault on Fallujah had so far "achieved our objectives on or ahead of schedule." He added, "I think we're looking at several more days of tough urban fighting."
The general said the battle plan as a whole was on course. "We felt like the enemy would form an outer crust in defense of Fallujah. We broke through that pretty quickly and easily," Metz said. "We also then anticipated him breaking up into small three- to six-person detachments or squads, which we've seen throughout the day, today especially."
Witnesses said that by Tuesday night, U.S. and Iraqi forces controlled the Jolan, Mualimeen and Askali neighborhoods in the north of Fallujah. They also held the Rawdha Muhammediya mosque, headquarters of the insurgent fighters and the mujaheddin shura, the city's self-appointed government.
The assault pushed insurgents into Shuhada and other neighborhoods in the southernmost part of the city, where they are fighting and hiding behind buildings and houses, witnesses said.
Metz said that because U.S. forces formed a "very tight" cordon around the city Sunday night, the enemy "doesn't have an escape route" and eventually would be cornered.
But Sheik Abdul-Sattar Edatha, the spokesman for the shura council, said most foreign fighters had already left the city. The U.S. military had estimated that there were 2,000 to 3,000 foreign fighters in the city, many of them part of a network linked to Jordanian-born guerrilla leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.
"Militarily speaking, the city falls under the U.S. forces' control," Edatha said. "The foreign fighters won't stay here and die. They lost the battle. They spread in other places."
On Tuesday night, Fallujah's eerily empty streets were littered with shattered concrete and dead bodies, said a resident shaken by a missile strike on the second story of his family home. Insurgents cloaked in checkered head scarves carried wounded fellow fighters to mosques.
Civilians caught in the crossfire were gathered in a hospital donated by the United Arab Emirates and flying a blue and white UNICEF banner. There, medical workers low on bandages and antiseptic bound wounds in ripped sheets and cleaned torn skin with hot water.
The Jolan and Askali neighborhoods seemed particularly hard hit, with more than half of the houses destroyed. Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujah's oldest neighborhoods. Blood and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses said, and the streets were full of holes.
Some of the heaviest damage apparently was incurred Monday night from air and artillery attacks that coincided with the entry of ground troops into the city. U.S. warplanes dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on the city overnight, and artillery boomed throughout the night and into the morning.
"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.
Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujaheddin which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
In addition to ripping open entire neighborhoods, the armor assault also brought into the open an insurgent command that until this week remained shadowy even to Fallujah residents. Ex-generals from the former Iraqi army's Republican Guard passed written orders, complete with official stamp, to subordinates who snapped salutes, witnesses said.
Iraq's new army, formed after occupation authorities dismantled the armed forces that had served during the rule of Saddam Hussein, is taking part in the fight against insurgents in Fallujah, primarily as a rear element to help clear areas once U.S. forces have moved through. Marine commanders have declined to comment on the offensive, deferring to Iraqi officers. On Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Qadir Muhammed Jasim characterized the offensive as "a holy task to fight for Fallujah people."
"We will fight to the last drop of our blood to free our people," he said at a news conference just outside the city. "We will fulfill the tasks we've been asked to do, with the cooperation of our friends."
Jasim said that resistance had been lighter than expected and that the Iraqi soldiers were in good spirits and eager to finish the operation.
"The operation is going very precise and with a very small number of casualties," he said. "In every place we finish an operation, our forces start to distribute aid, food, clothes, blankets and even money. . . . We are very sure that we are moving in the right way and will do the tasks we are asked to do very precisely."
Metz repeatedly praised Iraqi forces, saying they had "acquitted themselves very well in this fight." Metz said the Iraqi soldiers had been used especially to search the city's 77 mosques. "In several mosques today, lots of munitions and weapons were found, and they were found by those Iraqi soldiers," he said.
Metz's account suggested a marked improvement among the Iraqi troops in recent months. In April, the last time U.S. commanders tried to use Iraqi forces in Fallujah, a battalion of freshly trained Iraqi troops refused to go.
A senior Iraqi official said it was too early to tell how the Iraqi forces performed. "During the operation you always hear they're doing good," said Industry Minister Hachim Hasani. "After the operations are finished, we'll find out."
Hasani's political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, quit the interim government Tuesday to protest the Fallujah offensive. But Hasani, who opposed the U.S. Marine siege of the city earlier this year, quit the party Tuesday and retained his cabinet post. "Iraq is larger than any party," Hasani said. "Things should be done through the government, not outside the government."
Vick and special correspondent Bassam Sebti reported from Baghdad.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
dispatchesEmbedded in NajafThe twin torments of a departing reporter: survivor guilt and second-guessing.By Alex BerensonUpdated Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Tent C-5, a Dorm Room in the DesertPosted Monday, Nov. 1, 2004, at 1:59 PM PT
Life in Iraq is a hotter version of the movie Groundhog Day, an endless loop where time seems to have stopped. The sky is always blue, the air is always dry, and rain is as unimaginable as peace. A weatherman would die of boredom. (Just after Saddam was ousted, an English-language newspaper popped up in Baghdad, a cheery tabloid produced by American reporters hoping to profit from the reconstruction boom. I remember a forecast from September 2003: "Monday: Sunny, 42 C/108 F; Tuesday: Sunny and hot, 43 C/110 F." The newspaper—I can't remember its name—is gone now, like the reconstruction boom and so much else.)
I like hot weather, which is lucky for me since I spent August in Najaf, an Iraqi city that is home to the shrine of Imam Ali. The Shiites believe that Ali is the rightful heir to the prophet Mohammed, and they revere the shrine, which supposedly holds Ali's remains. I was there as a guest of the U.S. Marine Corps, as an embedded journalist.
The battle for Najaf started in early August, when a Marine unit new to the area confronted guerrillas loyal to Muqtada Sadr. A fierce battle ensued, and the Marine press office arranged for reporters and photographers to fly down to the Marine camp in Najaf, Forward Operating Base Hotel.
Despite the military's love of red tape, embedding is surprisingly casual, especially at the front lines, where commanders worry mostly about keeping their troops alive. We didn't have minders to watch our movements; in fact, the officers at Hotel seemed surprised when we told them we planned to stay a while. They found us a spare tent, C-5, in a cluster a quarter-mile north of their squat concrete headquarters building. The tents slept about 15 Marines each and were identical except for their colors—some khaki, others pale gray. Even the Marines occasionally mistook one for another. We distinguished ours with a water bottle at the entrance.
For the rest of the battle, C-5 was home. We had no running water, though we did have electricity for our laptops and satellite phones. After a couple days, the place looked like a dorm room, strewn with extension cords and jury-rigged electrical outlets. We also had a 6-foot-tall air-conditioning unit. Still, C-5 wasn't about to be confused with the Ritz. During the day, the air conditioning hardly mattered, and when the wind kicked up, the flapping of the tent's walls made me long for Dramamine. I soon discovered that I preferred being outside. Better 120 degrees in the sun than 100 in a canvas-walled oven.
As more reporters arrived and the tent filled up, I wondered whether we would get along. I hadn't shared a room with a stranger since my freshman year of college, and I hadn't lived in a tent since camp. But the situation worked out more smoothly than I expected. The rules were mostly unspoken: We're here to work, not sleep, so anyone working has the right to keep the lights on, although if you can write in the dark, you'll be greatly appreciated. Keep your voice down when you're on the phone (I'll plead guilty to violating that one). Smoke your cigars outside. Pick up your trash—the Marines aren't providing maid service. Don't try to eavesdrop on other people's feature stories. Don't wander around in your underwear. Basically, don't be a jerk, and respect everyone else's privacy as much as possible. I wouldn't say we became best friends, but considering that we lived and worked within arm's length, we got along reasonably well.
After a few days, more embeds arrived, including crews from CNN and Fox, about a dozen people in all. I wondered what we would do if more cable outlets or the networks arrived with their mountains of gear. I needn't have worried. No one else bothered to come. The average Paris Hilton book signing gets more coverage.
The light turnout highlighted just how weak U.S. coverage of the war has become. Part of the problem, of course, is that working in Iraq is so dangerous. I had a close call in Najaf at the hands of a Shiite mob—microscopically close, as a Marine major put it—and I am hardly the only American reporter in that category. In a country where every Westerner is a walking ransom, even driving the streets in daylight is dangerous. So the war is fading off front pages and TV screens, leaving a vacuum filled with rumors, spin, and misinformation.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Marines Don't Want Press, They Want Good PressPosted Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 12:53 PM PT
The funniest, blackest moment of the month came after a funeral for two soldiers—Spc. Mark Zapata, of Edinburg, Texas; and 2nd Lt. Mike Goins, of Copperas Cove, Texas—who were killed when a guerrilla fighter jumped onto their tank and shot them through its open hatch. I hadn't seen a full military funeral before; they are tightly scripted but moving nonetheless. After friends of the men delivered eulogies, the commander of their squad read roll call.
"Pvt. Jones?"
"Present."
"Spc. Ramirez?"
"Present."
"Spc. Zapata?"
"Spc. Zapata?"
Then, for the third and final time, "Spc. Zapata?"
Despite myself, I hoped to hear a voice and not the silence that followed.
The difficulty came at the end of the ceremony, after the hymns and 21-gun salutes. There are no caskets at military funerals, because the bodies are sent home. The dead are represented by a pair of boots and a helmet mounted atop a rifle. To finish the funeral, soldiers step in front of the boots and helmet and salute, one by one. With two companies of soldiers, more than 200 men, paying their respects, the ritual took quite some time. To cover the silence that accompanied the salutes, sappy country music was piped through the public address system—an awkward end to a touching ceremony.
About then, I mentioned to another reporter how moving I had found the funeral. "Yeah," he said. "But the music sucks. I hate it when they play stuff like this." Of course, I was thinking the same thing. But that didn't stop me from razzing him once we got back to the reporters' tent. Two guys died, and you didn't like the music? Did he have other suggestions about how the funeral could have been improved? Would he have preferred longer eulogies? Shorter? The battalion's commanders would surely appreciate his suggestions—they could be incorporated into future funerals. Oh, how we laughed …
We probably sound like a couple of heartless jerks. I would prefer to think that we were just blowing off steam—and, unconsciously, trying to keep a little psychic distance from the troops around us. On the battlefield, it's us and them, Americans and the enemy. We reporters depend on soldiers and Marines to keep us alive. And some of the people we're fighting are so savage that only a saint could stay neutral. Yet embeds sometimes have to challenge our protectors if we are to do our jobs right.
I felt firsthand the downside of being embedded after I wrote an article that the Marines didn't like. The Marines cultivate reporters, advertising themselves as less bureaucratic and tougher than the Army. The Marine motto is, "Every Marine a Rifleman," and even Army officers admit that the average Marine is a better fighter than the average soldier.
But the Marines have a love-hate relationship with reporters. They don't want press; they want good press. They don't like criticism, and they don't like talking about bad news. This attitude was worse than usual in Najaf, because after the first three days of the battle, the fighting was largely taken over by two Army battalions that had been sent from Baghdad as reinforcements. The Marines hated playing host to the Army and abhorred being stuck on the sidelines of their own fight. A couple of days after we arrived, the Marines stopped letting us into their combat operations center. They claimed that reporters might compromise the security of their missions, as if we were dumb enough to jeopardize soldiers' lives—and our own—by giving advance notice of attacks.
Then I wrote an article explaining how the Marines had escalated the fight against Sadr's guerrillas without getting approval from their higher-ups in Baghdad. The decision was hugely risky, given the importance of the Imam Ali shrine, which Sadr's forces were using as a base. The article infuriated the commanders at Camp Hotel, who stopped talking to me.
Under other circumstances, the silent treatment might have made my job impossible. Fortunately, it didn't matter much in Najaf, in part because the other embedded reporters were princes throughout. Though they suffered from their association with me, they kept me informed on those rare occasions when the Marines told them anything useful. And one of the Army battalions—the 1-5 Cav, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division—was also living at Hotel, and its officers were more than happy to talk.
The 1-5 commanders treated us like reporters, not spies. They gave us full access to their operations room, where a dozen officers sat at computers plotting artillery strikes and mapping suspected enemy locations on a giant flat-panel TV screen. Every day—sometimes every hour—they updated us on their battle plans, which changed as the fighting continued and the Iraqi government negotiated with Sadr.
War is politics by other means, or so I've heard, and during the battle of Najaf, politics and war were inseparable. As a military contest, the battle was no battle at all: the finest army in history against 1,500 poorly armed guerrillas. But the guerrillas had the shrine, and blowing up the shrine wouldn't have looked very good on Al Jazeera.
So the soldiers fought very carefully. The combat operations center had to OK the firing of any tank rounds that could land near the shrine; helicopter attacks and airstrikes needed even higher approval. Sadr's guerrillas took advantage of that by staying close to the shrine, where they couldn't be easily attacked. The delays that resulted cost some Marines their lives, though they were less dangerous for the Army. The Army's tanks and Bradleys offered soldiers protection that the Marines, who fought mostly on foot, did not have. Having the protection of a steel hull takes some of the sting out of being mortared when you can't fire back.
That caution extended beyond the shrine. From everything I saw, the U.S. military made a serious effort to avoid killing civilians, a task made easier because Najaf was basically a conventional battle with defined front lines. Most fighting in Iraq is sporadic, and civilians get caught in the crossfire. In Najaf, everyone knew that the area around the shrine was a combat zone, and civilians evacuated as American soldiers closed in.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: In Many Ways, Base Was More American Than New YorkPosted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 5:32 AM PT
The days blended together as the month went on. Every day another big attack was planned, then canceled. The battle slowed down in the giant cemetery where the fighting had begun, but it intensified in the south of the city. I popped on my flak jacket and headed to the front a half-dozen times looking for action, but I didn't find any. I started to call myself the Buddha.
Meanwhile, I tried to stay sane in the heat, which mainly meant trying to stay clean. The base had no running water, but near our tents were big wooden stalls topped by red plastic tanks. Three days in, I figured out they were showers, and after that, I tried to shower at least every other day. Because water was scarce, we were supposed to take "Navy showers"—rinse, turn off the water, scrub up, and rinse again. In cold weather, a Navy shower would be no fun, but in 120 degree heat, standing naked and covered with soap feels pretty good.
I didn't expect to spend close to a month at the base, so I had only brought one pair of pants and a couple of T-shirts. I washed my clothes every three or four days, but I'm naturally messy, and within an hour of putting on a new shirt, I was the most wrinkled and frazzled person on the base. By the second week, I had given up, and I traipsed around the base in shorts, T-shirts, and Birkenstocks. The other embeds gave me a hard time, telling me I ought to look less like a surfer and more like a reporter, but I decided not to care. The job was hard enough without wearing a sweaty pair of pants as I shuffled from our tent to headquarters or the chow hall.
Chow was surprisingly good, by the way. We always had plenty of food. Nothing too exotic, more or less what you would see at a Midwestern county fair: hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, lasagna, sloppy joes, fried chicken, fries, mashed potatoes, and the occasional corn dog. Fruit and vegetables too: melon, a salad bar, bananas, oranges, and apples. Dessert was blueberry cobbler, bread pudding, and three flavors of ice cream. Plus Gatorade, Slim Jims, trail mix, PowerBars, and all kinds of soda and juice. On Friday nights, they brought in steak and king crab from God-knows-where.
About the only thing we didn't have was booze. Budweiser showed up in the coolers one day, but the red-and-white cans turned out to be nothing more than a tease, near-beer. The soldiers bitched plenty, but I never heard anyone complain about the food. Anyone wearing a flak jacket in Iraq in August doesn't have to worry about counting calories. And I didn't get sick once.
I had never embedded before, and I found the experience of living on base disconcerting. We were in Iraq, and yet Camp Hotel was in many ways more American than New York. We spoke English and ate American food. No one ever left base, except to go on patrol, and Iraqis were almost never allowed inside. The base didn't get any supplies locally; military and Halliburton convoys trucked in every ounce of water and every gallon of gasoline. We burned our own garbage. We were in Iraq, and yet we could have been anywhere; we could have been in a biosphere on the moon.
And yet the camp had compensations, especially at night, when the sun went down, and the tents and tanks and guard towers glowed in the starlight. A half-dozen high-sided trapezoidal boxes were permanently parked just south of the tents. They were Marine personnel carriers, but in the dark, their strange shapes seemed like relics of an alien civilization left in the desert. Some nights the explosions of Marine artillery echoed across the base, and we could see buildings burning red where the rounds had landed 4 miles south in downtown Najaf. But the fighting generally slowed at night, after the insurgents learned the hard way that night-vision goggles gave American soldiers an insurmountable edge in the dark.
On nights when a big raid or attack wasn't planned, the senior officers slept, and captains and lieutenants ran the operations center, joking and waiting. The front lines have a camaraderie and a simplicity that does not exist at home; women (there are no female Marines at the front-line bases) and families and friends fade away, and survival becomes its own reward. Walking through the camp at night, another day done, I understood Robert E. Lee's famous quotation: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Whale Swallows Me WholePosted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 8:43 AM PT
Though the I-5 Cav, the Army battalion fighting in northern Najaf, long ago gave up its horses for Humvees and tanks, Robert E. Lee would have easily recognized its officers. The unit was commanded by Myles Miyamasu, a lean lieutenant colonel who never seemed to lose his cool or even raise his voice. His sole vice was smoking, so far as I could tell. Maj. Bob Pizzitola was second in command, responsible for overseeing the battalion's command center. He would rather have been at the front lines and told everyone as much at least three times a day, frequently in salty language. Pizzitola spoke quickly, clipping his words. One of my colleagues tried to get him to say "attrited," as in, "We attrited the enemy today," but he never pulled it off.
The man who had the job that Pizzitola wanted was Maj. Douglas Ollivant, the battalion's S-3, or senior field officer. Ollivant didn't seem as though he belonged on the front lines. He had taught at West Point, and he clearly craved the chance for contact with civilians; he showed up in the reporters' tent at night to talk.
Yet Ollivant was smooth and efficient under fire. I saw him in action the last night of the battle, as the tanks and Bradleys of the 1-5 rolled up almost to the shrine of Imam Ali. We had taken a position about 200 yards north, on a wide street that connected the shrine and the cemetery, with six- and seven-story buildings on either side.
With the electricity cut, the only lights were the stars and the golden dome of the shrine, illuminated by a generator inside. The guerrillas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The Bradleys—a combination tank/personnel carrier that is devastating in urban combat—responded with streams of 25mm shells that glowed red in the night.
When dawn broke, a half-dozen buildings were burning around us, yet the shrine stood unscathed. I will never forget that night, and my only regret is that I didn't have a camera. None of the soldiers did either, and the photographers were with the Marines, a few hundred yards west.
That fighting took place on a Thursday morning. The next day, the two sides reached a cease-fire, after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told Sadr to leave the shrine. And then I had my close call.
I had ridden down from the base to the front lines, the same position where I had been the morning before. The truce had taken hold. Iraqis walked freely from the shrine past the American Humvees. I decided that I would walk down to the shrine to see what was going on. I knew I was taking a chance, because I didn't have a translator with me, and I don't speak Arabic, but I didn't plan to stay long.
Unfortunately, a few minutes later, at the northwest edge of the shrine—out of sight of any American soldiers—I ran into the wrong guy. He decided I was an American spy, and things got very hairy very fast, cease-fire or no. Sadr's guys had watched the American military kill their friends for three weeks, and their blood was up. It's amazing how fast a mob can form. Beyond that, I'd rather not go into details.
But they got me to Sadr's office, and after another rocky hour, I was free. Inshallah, as Muslims often say: It's God's will. The whale swallowed me whole and spat me out; the knife stayed sheathed—who knows why? Inshallah. I say grace now at meals, when I remember.
And that was that. Groundhog Day ended. The cease-fire held. Sadr's guerrillas left the mosque, and the American forces pulled out of the Old City that surrounds it. We reporters said goodbye to the 1-5 and the Marines, the ones were talking to us, and looked for a helicopter north. Three days later, I was having a beer—actually a whole bunch of beers—at the New York Times compound in Baghdad. I never thought Baghdad would look so good.
Ten Marines and soldiers died in the fighting, along with several hundred guerrillas and lots of civilians—though exact civilian casualty counts don't exist. Still, the battle turned out to be a provisional victory for the U.S. military and the Iraqi government. Sadr left the shrine without blowing it up, and he and his fighters seem ready to join the political process.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Survivor Guilt and Second-GuessingPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
Even as the United States took a small step forward in Najaf, Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle went to hell. Western Iraq is now basically out of control. Unlike the Shiites, many Sunnis have no interest in politics or elections, which isn't surprising since they are less than 25 percent of the population.
The Sunni fighters fall into three broad groups: the Baathists, who are mostly secular and want back the power they had under Saddam; the local fighters around Fallujah, who are motivated by both religion and a desire for respect; and the Wahhabists, who are both foreign and Iraqi and who want a holy war. The Wahhabists are the most dangerous of the three. When I think of them, I can't help but think of a line from The Terminator, as Kyle tries to explain to Sarah Connor the danger she faces: "That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.
This strategy is risky, of course. If we go into the Sunni Triangle in force, the casualties will be high, and we may wind up alienating residents past the point of no return. The Shiites in the south may decide to revolt as well. In that case, American forces will be facing a full-scale national insurrection. But I don't think the Shiites will rebel; they know that the Wahhabists and Baathists are not their friends. In any case, our military may have no choice but to act. The insurgents have the initiative now, and Iraqis who are on the fence may go to their side—out of fear, out of anger at the chaos we have brought, or simply to make a buck—unless they believe that the United States can turn things around.
The United States could also just pull out. But that would probably provoke a civil war, as the Sunnis and the Shiites scrap for control and the Kurds declare the north independent. In the worst-case scenario, a regional war might follow, as the Iranians step in to help the Shiites and the Turks try to crush the Kurds.
I left Baghdad about 10 days after I got back from Najaf. I was exhausted, but a lot of me wishes that I had stayed longer. That reaction may seem surprising, but many reporters are sorry to leave. The story is so important. If Iraq collapses, the Middle East will move much closer to chaos. Also, I had survivor guilt: Why should I get to leave when my friends—reporters, soldiers, or Iraqi staffers—had to stay? And I felt I had failed as a reporter, that I should have done more, written better, found the magic key that would show everyone at home the depths of the chaos I saw.
In that, at least, I know I'm being unfair to myself. I did my job as best I could, and if I didn't fully convey the truth of the situation, it was not for want of trying.
People often ask me if I ever expect to go back to Iraq. I don't know. We have almost reached the point at which the danger to reporters is so great that covering the story in any meaningful way is impossible. I know this much, though: Unless the United States intends to let Iraq fall into anarchy, I'll have plenty of time to go back. Because we've got a lot more war ahead of us.Alex Berenson is a reporter for the New York Times and author of the book The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. He lives in New York City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2108995/
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Tent C-5, a Dorm Room in the DesertPosted Monday, Nov. 1, 2004, at 1:59 PM PT
Life in Iraq is a hotter version of the movie Groundhog Day, an endless loop where time seems to have stopped. The sky is always blue, the air is always dry, and rain is as unimaginable as peace. A weatherman would die of boredom. (Just after Saddam was ousted, an English-language newspaper popped up in Baghdad, a cheery tabloid produced by American reporters hoping to profit from the reconstruction boom. I remember a forecast from September 2003: "Monday: Sunny, 42 C/108 F; Tuesday: Sunny and hot, 43 C/110 F." The newspaper—I can't remember its name—is gone now, like the reconstruction boom and so much else.)
I like hot weather, which is lucky for me since I spent August in Najaf, an Iraqi city that is home to the shrine of Imam Ali. The Shiites believe that Ali is the rightful heir to the prophet Mohammed, and they revere the shrine, which supposedly holds Ali's remains. I was there as a guest of the U.S. Marine Corps, as an embedded journalist.
The battle for Najaf started in early August, when a Marine unit new to the area confronted guerrillas loyal to Muqtada Sadr. A fierce battle ensued, and the Marine press office arranged for reporters and photographers to fly down to the Marine camp in Najaf, Forward Operating Base Hotel.
Despite the military's love of red tape, embedding is surprisingly casual, especially at the front lines, where commanders worry mostly about keeping their troops alive. We didn't have minders to watch our movements; in fact, the officers at Hotel seemed surprised when we told them we planned to stay a while. They found us a spare tent, C-5, in a cluster a quarter-mile north of their squat concrete headquarters building. The tents slept about 15 Marines each and were identical except for their colors—some khaki, others pale gray. Even the Marines occasionally mistook one for another. We distinguished ours with a water bottle at the entrance.
For the rest of the battle, C-5 was home. We had no running water, though we did have electricity for our laptops and satellite phones. After a couple days, the place looked like a dorm room, strewn with extension cords and jury-rigged electrical outlets. We also had a 6-foot-tall air-conditioning unit. Still, C-5 wasn't about to be confused with the Ritz. During the day, the air conditioning hardly mattered, and when the wind kicked up, the flapping of the tent's walls made me long for Dramamine. I soon discovered that I preferred being outside. Better 120 degrees in the sun than 100 in a canvas-walled oven.
As more reporters arrived and the tent filled up, I wondered whether we would get along. I hadn't shared a room with a stranger since my freshman year of college, and I hadn't lived in a tent since camp. But the situation worked out more smoothly than I expected. The rules were mostly unspoken: We're here to work, not sleep, so anyone working has the right to keep the lights on, although if you can write in the dark, you'll be greatly appreciated. Keep your voice down when you're on the phone (I'll plead guilty to violating that one). Smoke your cigars outside. Pick up your trash—the Marines aren't providing maid service. Don't try to eavesdrop on other people's feature stories. Don't wander around in your underwear. Basically, don't be a jerk, and respect everyone else's privacy as much as possible. I wouldn't say we became best friends, but considering that we lived and worked within arm's length, we got along reasonably well.
After a few days, more embeds arrived, including crews from CNN and Fox, about a dozen people in all. I wondered what we would do if more cable outlets or the networks arrived with their mountains of gear. I needn't have worried. No one else bothered to come. The average Paris Hilton book signing gets more coverage.
The light turnout highlighted just how weak U.S. coverage of the war has become. Part of the problem, of course, is that working in Iraq is so dangerous. I had a close call in Najaf at the hands of a Shiite mob—microscopically close, as a Marine major put it—and I am hardly the only American reporter in that category. In a country where every Westerner is a walking ransom, even driving the streets in daylight is dangerous. So the war is fading off front pages and TV screens, leaving a vacuum filled with rumors, spin, and misinformation.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Marines Don't Want Press, They Want Good PressPosted Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 12:53 PM PT
The funniest, blackest moment of the month came after a funeral for two soldiers—Spc. Mark Zapata, of Edinburg, Texas; and 2nd Lt. Mike Goins, of Copperas Cove, Texas—who were killed when a guerrilla fighter jumped onto their tank and shot them through its open hatch. I hadn't seen a full military funeral before; they are tightly scripted but moving nonetheless. After friends of the men delivered eulogies, the commander of their squad read roll call.
"Pvt. Jones?"
"Present."
"Spc. Ramirez?"
"Present."
"Spc. Zapata?"
"Spc. Zapata?"
Then, for the third and final time, "Spc. Zapata?"
Despite myself, I hoped to hear a voice and not the silence that followed.
The difficulty came at the end of the ceremony, after the hymns and 21-gun salutes. There are no caskets at military funerals, because the bodies are sent home. The dead are represented by a pair of boots and a helmet mounted atop a rifle. To finish the funeral, soldiers step in front of the boots and helmet and salute, one by one. With two companies of soldiers, more than 200 men, paying their respects, the ritual took quite some time. To cover the silence that accompanied the salutes, sappy country music was piped through the public address system—an awkward end to a touching ceremony.
About then, I mentioned to another reporter how moving I had found the funeral. "Yeah," he said. "But the music sucks. I hate it when they play stuff like this." Of course, I was thinking the same thing. But that didn't stop me from razzing him once we got back to the reporters' tent. Two guys died, and you didn't like the music? Did he have other suggestions about how the funeral could have been improved? Would he have preferred longer eulogies? Shorter? The battalion's commanders would surely appreciate his suggestions—they could be incorporated into future funerals. Oh, how we laughed …
We probably sound like a couple of heartless jerks. I would prefer to think that we were just blowing off steam—and, unconsciously, trying to keep a little psychic distance from the troops around us. On the battlefield, it's us and them, Americans and the enemy. We reporters depend on soldiers and Marines to keep us alive. And some of the people we're fighting are so savage that only a saint could stay neutral. Yet embeds sometimes have to challenge our protectors if we are to do our jobs right.
I felt firsthand the downside of being embedded after I wrote an article that the Marines didn't like. The Marines cultivate reporters, advertising themselves as less bureaucratic and tougher than the Army. The Marine motto is, "Every Marine a Rifleman," and even Army officers admit that the average Marine is a better fighter than the average soldier.
But the Marines have a love-hate relationship with reporters. They don't want press; they want good press. They don't like criticism, and they don't like talking about bad news. This attitude was worse than usual in Najaf, because after the first three days of the battle, the fighting was largely taken over by two Army battalions that had been sent from Baghdad as reinforcements. The Marines hated playing host to the Army and abhorred being stuck on the sidelines of their own fight. A couple of days after we arrived, the Marines stopped letting us into their combat operations center. They claimed that reporters might compromise the security of their missions, as if we were dumb enough to jeopardize soldiers' lives—and our own—by giving advance notice of attacks.
Then I wrote an article explaining how the Marines had escalated the fight against Sadr's guerrillas without getting approval from their higher-ups in Baghdad. The decision was hugely risky, given the importance of the Imam Ali shrine, which Sadr's forces were using as a base. The article infuriated the commanders at Camp Hotel, who stopped talking to me.
Under other circumstances, the silent treatment might have made my job impossible. Fortunately, it didn't matter much in Najaf, in part because the other embedded reporters were princes throughout. Though they suffered from their association with me, they kept me informed on those rare occasions when the Marines told them anything useful. And one of the Army battalions—the 1-5 Cav, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division—was also living at Hotel, and its officers were more than happy to talk.
The 1-5 commanders treated us like reporters, not spies. They gave us full access to their operations room, where a dozen officers sat at computers plotting artillery strikes and mapping suspected enemy locations on a giant flat-panel TV screen. Every day—sometimes every hour—they updated us on their battle plans, which changed as the fighting continued and the Iraqi government negotiated with Sadr.
War is politics by other means, or so I've heard, and during the battle of Najaf, politics and war were inseparable. As a military contest, the battle was no battle at all: the finest army in history against 1,500 poorly armed guerrillas. But the guerrillas had the shrine, and blowing up the shrine wouldn't have looked very good on Al Jazeera.
So the soldiers fought very carefully. The combat operations center had to OK the firing of any tank rounds that could land near the shrine; helicopter attacks and airstrikes needed even higher approval. Sadr's guerrillas took advantage of that by staying close to the shrine, where they couldn't be easily attacked. The delays that resulted cost some Marines their lives, though they were less dangerous for the Army. The Army's tanks and Bradleys offered soldiers protection that the Marines, who fought mostly on foot, did not have. Having the protection of a steel hull takes some of the sting out of being mortared when you can't fire back.
That caution extended beyond the shrine. From everything I saw, the U.S. military made a serious effort to avoid killing civilians, a task made easier because Najaf was basically a conventional battle with defined front lines. Most fighting in Iraq is sporadic, and civilians get caught in the crossfire. In Najaf, everyone knew that the area around the shrine was a combat zone, and civilians evacuated as American soldiers closed in.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: In Many Ways, Base Was More American Than New YorkPosted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 5:32 AM PT
The days blended together as the month went on. Every day another big attack was planned, then canceled. The battle slowed down in the giant cemetery where the fighting had begun, but it intensified in the south of the city. I popped on my flak jacket and headed to the front a half-dozen times looking for action, but I didn't find any. I started to call myself the Buddha.
Meanwhile, I tried to stay sane in the heat, which mainly meant trying to stay clean. The base had no running water, but near our tents were big wooden stalls topped by red plastic tanks. Three days in, I figured out they were showers, and after that, I tried to shower at least every other day. Because water was scarce, we were supposed to take "Navy showers"—rinse, turn off the water, scrub up, and rinse again. In cold weather, a Navy shower would be no fun, but in 120 degree heat, standing naked and covered with soap feels pretty good.
I didn't expect to spend close to a month at the base, so I had only brought one pair of pants and a couple of T-shirts. I washed my clothes every three or four days, but I'm naturally messy, and within an hour of putting on a new shirt, I was the most wrinkled and frazzled person on the base. By the second week, I had given up, and I traipsed around the base in shorts, T-shirts, and Birkenstocks. The other embeds gave me a hard time, telling me I ought to look less like a surfer and more like a reporter, but I decided not to care. The job was hard enough without wearing a sweaty pair of pants as I shuffled from our tent to headquarters or the chow hall.
Chow was surprisingly good, by the way. We always had plenty of food. Nothing too exotic, more or less what you would see at a Midwestern county fair: hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, lasagna, sloppy joes, fried chicken, fries, mashed potatoes, and the occasional corn dog. Fruit and vegetables too: melon, a salad bar, bananas, oranges, and apples. Dessert was blueberry cobbler, bread pudding, and three flavors of ice cream. Plus Gatorade, Slim Jims, trail mix, PowerBars, and all kinds of soda and juice. On Friday nights, they brought in steak and king crab from God-knows-where.
About the only thing we didn't have was booze. Budweiser showed up in the coolers one day, but the red-and-white cans turned out to be nothing more than a tease, near-beer. The soldiers bitched plenty, but I never heard anyone complain about the food. Anyone wearing a flak jacket in Iraq in August doesn't have to worry about counting calories. And I didn't get sick once.
I had never embedded before, and I found the experience of living on base disconcerting. We were in Iraq, and yet Camp Hotel was in many ways more American than New York. We spoke English and ate American food. No one ever left base, except to go on patrol, and Iraqis were almost never allowed inside. The base didn't get any supplies locally; military and Halliburton convoys trucked in every ounce of water and every gallon of gasoline. We burned our own garbage. We were in Iraq, and yet we could have been anywhere; we could have been in a biosphere on the moon.
And yet the camp had compensations, especially at night, when the sun went down, and the tents and tanks and guard towers glowed in the starlight. A half-dozen high-sided trapezoidal boxes were permanently parked just south of the tents. They were Marine personnel carriers, but in the dark, their strange shapes seemed like relics of an alien civilization left in the desert. Some nights the explosions of Marine artillery echoed across the base, and we could see buildings burning red where the rounds had landed 4 miles south in downtown Najaf. But the fighting generally slowed at night, after the insurgents learned the hard way that night-vision goggles gave American soldiers an insurmountable edge in the dark.
On nights when a big raid or attack wasn't planned, the senior officers slept, and captains and lieutenants ran the operations center, joking and waiting. The front lines have a camaraderie and a simplicity that does not exist at home; women (there are no female Marines at the front-line bases) and families and friends fade away, and survival becomes its own reward. Walking through the camp at night, another day done, I understood Robert E. Lee's famous quotation: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Whale Swallows Me WholePosted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 8:43 AM PT
Though the I-5 Cav, the Army battalion fighting in northern Najaf, long ago gave up its horses for Humvees and tanks, Robert E. Lee would have easily recognized its officers. The unit was commanded by Myles Miyamasu, a lean lieutenant colonel who never seemed to lose his cool or even raise his voice. His sole vice was smoking, so far as I could tell. Maj. Bob Pizzitola was second in command, responsible for overseeing the battalion's command center. He would rather have been at the front lines and told everyone as much at least three times a day, frequently in salty language. Pizzitola spoke quickly, clipping his words. One of my colleagues tried to get him to say "attrited," as in, "We attrited the enemy today," but he never pulled it off.
The man who had the job that Pizzitola wanted was Maj. Douglas Ollivant, the battalion's S-3, or senior field officer. Ollivant didn't seem as though he belonged on the front lines. He had taught at West Point, and he clearly craved the chance for contact with civilians; he showed up in the reporters' tent at night to talk.
Yet Ollivant was smooth and efficient under fire. I saw him in action the last night of the battle, as the tanks and Bradleys of the 1-5 rolled up almost to the shrine of Imam Ali. We had taken a position about 200 yards north, on a wide street that connected the shrine and the cemetery, with six- and seven-story buildings on either side.
With the electricity cut, the only lights were the stars and the golden dome of the shrine, illuminated by a generator inside. The guerrillas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The Bradleys—a combination tank/personnel carrier that is devastating in urban combat—responded with streams of 25mm shells that glowed red in the night.
When dawn broke, a half-dozen buildings were burning around us, yet the shrine stood unscathed. I will never forget that night, and my only regret is that I didn't have a camera. None of the soldiers did either, and the photographers were with the Marines, a few hundred yards west.
That fighting took place on a Thursday morning. The next day, the two sides reached a cease-fire, after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told Sadr to leave the shrine. And then I had my close call.
I had ridden down from the base to the front lines, the same position where I had been the morning before. The truce had taken hold. Iraqis walked freely from the shrine past the American Humvees. I decided that I would walk down to the shrine to see what was going on. I knew I was taking a chance, because I didn't have a translator with me, and I don't speak Arabic, but I didn't plan to stay long.
Unfortunately, a few minutes later, at the northwest edge of the shrine—out of sight of any American soldiers—I ran into the wrong guy. He decided I was an American spy, and things got very hairy very fast, cease-fire or no. Sadr's guys had watched the American military kill their friends for three weeks, and their blood was up. It's amazing how fast a mob can form. Beyond that, I'd rather not go into details.
But they got me to Sadr's office, and after another rocky hour, I was free. Inshallah, as Muslims often say: It's God's will. The whale swallowed me whole and spat me out; the knife stayed sheathed—who knows why? Inshallah. I say grace now at meals, when I remember.
And that was that. Groundhog Day ended. The cease-fire held. Sadr's guerrillas left the mosque, and the American forces pulled out of the Old City that surrounds it. We reporters said goodbye to the 1-5 and the Marines, the ones were talking to us, and looked for a helicopter north. Three days later, I was having a beer—actually a whole bunch of beers—at the New York Times compound in Baghdad. I never thought Baghdad would look so good.
Ten Marines and soldiers died in the fighting, along with several hundred guerrillas and lots of civilians—though exact civilian casualty counts don't exist. Still, the battle turned out to be a provisional victory for the U.S. military and the Iraqi government. Sadr left the shrine without blowing it up, and he and his fighters seem ready to join the political process.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Survivor Guilt and Second-GuessingPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
Even as the United States took a small step forward in Najaf, Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle went to hell. Western Iraq is now basically out of control. Unlike the Shiites, many Sunnis have no interest in politics or elections, which isn't surprising since they are less than 25 percent of the population.
The Sunni fighters fall into three broad groups: the Baathists, who are mostly secular and want back the power they had under Saddam; the local fighters around Fallujah, who are motivated by both religion and a desire for respect; and the Wahhabists, who are both foreign and Iraqi and who want a holy war. The Wahhabists are the most dangerous of the three. When I think of them, I can't help but think of a line from The Terminator, as Kyle tries to explain to Sarah Connor the danger she faces: "That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.
This strategy is risky, of course. If we go into the Sunni Triangle in force, the casualties will be high, and we may wind up alienating residents past the point of no return. The Shiites in the south may decide to revolt as well. In that case, American forces will be facing a full-scale national insurrection. But I don't think the Shiites will rebel; they know that the Wahhabists and Baathists are not their friends. In any case, our military may have no choice but to act. The insurgents have the initiative now, and Iraqis who are on the fence may go to their side—out of fear, out of anger at the chaos we have brought, or simply to make a buck—unless they believe that the United States can turn things around.
The United States could also just pull out. But that would probably provoke a civil war, as the Sunnis and the Shiites scrap for control and the Kurds declare the north independent. In the worst-case scenario, a regional war might follow, as the Iranians step in to help the Shiites and the Turks try to crush the Kurds.
I left Baghdad about 10 days after I got back from Najaf. I was exhausted, but a lot of me wishes that I had stayed longer. That reaction may seem surprising, but many reporters are sorry to leave. The story is so important. If Iraq collapses, the Middle East will move much closer to chaos. Also, I had survivor guilt: Why should I get to leave when my friends—reporters, soldiers, or Iraqi staffers—had to stay? And I felt I had failed as a reporter, that I should have done more, written better, found the magic key that would show everyone at home the depths of the chaos I saw.
In that, at least, I know I'm being unfair to myself. I did my job as best I could, and if I didn't fully convey the truth of the situation, it was not for want of trying.
People often ask me if I ever expect to go back to Iraq. I don't know. We have almost reached the point at which the danger to reporters is so great that covering the story in any meaningful way is impossible. I know this much, though: Unless the United States intends to let Iraq fall into anarchy, I'll have plenty of time to go back. Because we've got a lot more war ahead of us.Alex Berenson is a reporter for the New York Times and author of the book The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. He lives in New York City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2108995/
November 10, 2004
Even Digital Memories Can FadeBy KATIE HAFNER
he nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work." Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.
So dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general that the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's preparedness for digital preservation.
Jim Gallagher, director for information technology services at the Library of Congress, said the library, faced with "a deluge of digital information," had embarked on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project, with an eye toward creating uniform standards for preserving digital material so that it can be read in the future regardless of the hardware or software being used. The assumption is that machines and software formats in use now will become obsolete sooner rather than later.
"It is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals," said Ken Thibodeau, director for the electronic records archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration.
In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, even the larger 5¼-inch floppy disks from the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's and other backup formats.
But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature.
And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable. Unlike, say, faded but readable ink on paper, the instant a digital file becomes corrupted, or starts to degrade, it is indecipherable.
"We're accumulating digital information faster than we can handle, and moving into new platforms faster than we can handle," said Jeffrey Rutenbeck, director for the Media Studies Program at the University of Denver.
Professional archivists and librarians have the resources to duplicate materials in other formats and the expertise to retrieve materials trapped in obsolete computers. But consumers are seldom so well equipped. So they are forced to devise their own stop-gap measures, most of them unwieldy, inconvenient and decidedly low-tech.
Philip Cohen, the communications officer at a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, is what archivists call a classic "migrator." Since he was in elementary school, Mr. Cohen, 33, has been using a computer for his school work, and nearly all of his correspondence has been in e-mail since college.
Now Mr. Cohen's three home computers are filled with tens of thousands of photos, songs, video clips and correspondence.
Over the years, Mr. Cohen, who moonlights as a computer fix-it man, has continually transferred important files to ever newer computers and storage formats like CD's and DVD's. "I'll just keep moving forward with the stuff I'm sentimental about," he said.
Yet Mr. Cohen said he had noticed that some of his CD's, especially the rewritable variety, are already beginning to degrade. "About a year and a half ago they started to deteriorate, and become unreadable," he said.
And of course, migration works only if the data can be found, and with ever more capacious hard drives, even that can be a problem.
"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"
For some PC users, old machines have become the equivalent of the bin under the bed. This solution, which experts call the museum approach to archiving, means keeping obsolete equipment around the house.
Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. "I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up," he said.
Peter Schwartz, chairman of the Global Business Network, which specializes in long-range planning, says that a decade or two from now, the museum approach might be the most feasible answer.
"As long as you keep your data files somewhat readable you'll be able to go to the equivalent of Kinko's where they'll have every ancient computer available," said Mr. Schwartz, whose company has worked with the Library of Congress on its preservation efforts.
"It'll be like Ye Olde Antique Computer Shoppe," he said. "There's going to be a whole industry of people who will have shops of old machines, like the original Mac Plus."
Until that approach becomes commercially viable, though, there is the printout method.
Melanie Ho, 25, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been using computers since elementary school. She creates her own Web sites and she spends much of her day online.
Yet she prints important documents and stores a backup set at her parents' house 100 miles away.
"As much as a lot of people think print will be dead because of computers," she said, "I actually think there's something about the tangibility of paper that feels more comforting."
Proponents of paper archiving grow especially vocal when it comes to preserving photographs. If stored properly, conventional color photographs printed from negatives can last as long as 75 years without fading. Newer photographic papers can last up to 200 years.
There is no such certainty for digital photos saved on a hard drive.
Today's formats are likely to become obsolete and future software "probably will not recognize some aspects of that format," Mr. Thibodeau said. "It may still be a picture, but there might be things in it where, for instance, the colors are different."
The experts at the National Archives, like those at the Library of Congress, are working to develop uniformity among digital computer files to eliminate dependence on specific hardware or software.
One format that has uniformity, Mr. Thibodeau pointed out, is the Web, where it often makes no difference which browser is being used.
Indeed, for many consumers, the Web has become a popular archiving method, especially when it comes to photos.
Shutterfly.com and Ofoto .com have hundreds of millions of photographs on their computers. Shutterfly keeps a backup set of each photo sent to the site.
The backups are stored somewhere in California "off the fault line," said David Bagshaw, chief executive of Shutterfly.
But suppose a Web-based business like Shutterfly goes out of business?
Mr. Bagshaw said he preferred to look on the bright side, but offered this bit of comfort: "No matter what the business circumstances, we'll always make people's images available to them."
Constant mobility can be another issue.
Stephen Quinn, who teaches journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., moves frequently because of his work. He prefers to keep the amount of paper in his life to a minimum, and rarely makes printouts.
Dr. Quinn keeps a box in the bottom drawer of his desk that contains an eclectic set of storage disks dating back to the early 1980's, when he started out on an Amstrad computer.
All of Dr. Quinn's poetry ("unpublished and unpublishable" he says) and other writings are on those various digital devices, along with his daily diaries.
At some point, he wants to gather the material as a keepsake for his children, but he has no way to read the files he put on the Amstrad disks more than 20 years ago.
He has searched unsuccessfully for an Amstrad computer.
"I have a drawer filled with disks and no machinery to read it with," Dr. Quinn said.
That is becoming a basic problem of digital life. Whatever solution people might use, it is sure to be temporary.
"We will always be playing catch up," said Dr. Rutenbeck, who is working at pruning his own digital past, discarding old hard drives and stacks of old Zip disks.
"It feels really good to do," he said, "just like I didn't keep a box of everything I did in first grade."
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today's papersFull-on in FallujahBy Eric UmanskyPosted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 12:35 AM PT
The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox, and Los Angeles Times all lead with the offensive into Fallujah. About 10,000 soldiers and Marines—backed up by 2,000 Iraqi troops—are part of the battle, and it's not clear yet how it's going. Two Marines near town drowned when their bulldozer flipped into the Euphrates. No word on casualties. USA Today fronts the battle, but leads with a study of African-Americans with heart failure that showed a new combo of drugs cut their death rate by nearly half. Though USAT doesn't dig into it, many researchers said the exclusive focus on African-Americans—to the point where, at least the papers say, FDA might approve the new pill for African-Americans only—is bogus. "All you can tell from the data is that [the drug] works against heart failure," one scientist told the LAT. "The patients happened to be black, but you can't make any claims based on the data."
According to early morning reports, guerrillas killed 45 policemen in Baquba and wounded dozens.
So far, little info is coming from the city. Among the unknowns: the number of GI and Marine casualties (some of the papers say seven wounded, but the LAT says that's probably a partial count); the number of Iraqi casualties (the LAT quotes a doctor saying 15 dead and 20 wounded, including some civilians); and how many civilians are left in the city. Not everybody conveys that sense of uncertainty: USAT's subhead: "Two Marines, 42 Insurgents Killed." The 42 figure comes via "U.S. officials"—and nobody else mentions it.
In its overview piece, the NYT says that as of early this morning, the most forward U.S. unit had advanced 800 yards, while others "took hours to advance past a single line of houses."
The Times' Dexter Filkins is embedded with about 150 Marines—who apparently were in the latter group cited above and pinned down. "This is crazy," said one. "Yeah," said his buddy, "and we've only taken one house."
In a late-update, the LAT cites witnesses saying the U.S. has bombed the city's main first-aid clinic.
Another unknown is how the Iraqi forces are faring. Everybody flags NPR reporter Anne Garrels' report that about two-thirds of one 500-man battalion have gone AWOL.
The NYT speaks with a Fallujah resident who that said unlike back in April, the cordon around the city is tight and basically impassable.
Slate's Fred Kaplan says the U.S. will win in Fallujah—and things won't get any better.
In other guerrilla attacks around the country: One GI was killed along with one Brit soldier as were about a dozen Iraqi civilians. The NYT says the U.S. is "losing ground" in the northern city of Mosul, where insurgents "poured out into the streets at a major intersection at 3 p.m. to fire at American troops." Two car bombs exploded outside churches in Baghdad and then a mortar round hit outside the hospital where the wounded had been taken. Seven people were believed killed in those attacks. One military official told the NYT the number of bombs against U.S. forces has doubled "recently."
In a nice move, the Post fronts a dispatch from a freelancer who was with guerrillas in Fallujah until a couple of days ago. He describes the cell he hung with as an Arab rainbow coalition: "Five Saudis, three Tunisians, and a Yemeni. Only three were Iraqis." But it was the Iraqis who were in charge and the foreigners who were cannon fodder. They all talked big about dying. "I had a vision yesterday that tomorrow I would finally be granted the martyrdom," said a Saudi. "This is not fair," replied the Yemeni. "I have been here for months now."
Most of the papers front a federal judge halting the one ongoing military tribunal at Gitmo, ruling that it doesn't meet minimum standards of justice or the Geneva Conventions. There were other tribunals planned, and now those are effectively on ice, too. For one thing, the judge said, detainees facing trial haven't had a "competent tribunal" conclude that they are really enemy combatants. President Bush has ruled that the detainees are, and the administration says that's good enough. The judge responded, "The President is not a 'tribunal.' " The Justice Department has requested an immediate stay.
The NYT mentions that Fidel Castro, in an apparent attempt to boost currency reserves, has now officially ended the circulation of U.S. dollars on the island. The headline: "CUBA: THE BUCK STOPS."Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109382/
The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox, and Los Angeles Times all lead with the offensive into Fallujah. About 10,000 soldiers and Marines—backed up by 2,000 Iraqi troops—are part of the battle, and it's not clear yet how it's going. Two Marines near town drowned when their bulldozer flipped into the Euphrates. No word on casualties. USA Today fronts the battle, but leads with a study of African-Americans with heart failure that showed a new combo of drugs cut their death rate by nearly half. Though USAT doesn't dig into it, many researchers said the exclusive focus on African-Americans—to the point where, at least the papers say, FDA might approve the new pill for African-Americans only—is bogus. "All you can tell from the data is that [the drug] works against heart failure," one scientist told the LAT. "The patients happened to be black, but you can't make any claims based on the data."
According to early morning reports, guerrillas killed 45 policemen in Baquba and wounded dozens.
So far, little info is coming from the city. Among the unknowns: the number of GI and Marine casualties (some of the papers say seven wounded, but the LAT says that's probably a partial count); the number of Iraqi casualties (the LAT quotes a doctor saying 15 dead and 20 wounded, including some civilians); and how many civilians are left in the city. Not everybody conveys that sense of uncertainty: USAT's subhead: "Two Marines, 42 Insurgents Killed." The 42 figure comes via "U.S. officials"—and nobody else mentions it.
In its overview piece, the NYT says that as of early this morning, the most forward U.S. unit had advanced 800 yards, while others "took hours to advance past a single line of houses."
The Times' Dexter Filkins is embedded with about 150 Marines—who apparently were in the latter group cited above and pinned down. "This is crazy," said one. "Yeah," said his buddy, "and we've only taken one house."
In a late-update, the LAT cites witnesses saying the U.S. has bombed the city's main first-aid clinic.
Another unknown is how the Iraqi forces are faring. Everybody flags NPR reporter Anne Garrels' report that about two-thirds of one 500-man battalion have gone AWOL.
The NYT speaks with a Fallujah resident who that said unlike back in April, the cordon around the city is tight and basically impassable.
Slate's Fred Kaplan says the U.S. will win in Fallujah—and things won't get any better.
In other guerrilla attacks around the country: One GI was killed along with one Brit soldier as were about a dozen Iraqi civilians. The NYT says the U.S. is "losing ground" in the northern city of Mosul, where insurgents "poured out into the streets at a major intersection at 3 p.m. to fire at American troops." Two car bombs exploded outside churches in Baghdad and then a mortar round hit outside the hospital where the wounded had been taken. Seven people were believed killed in those attacks. One military official told the NYT the number of bombs against U.S. forces has doubled "recently."
In a nice move, the Post fronts a dispatch from a freelancer who was with guerrillas in Fallujah until a couple of days ago. He describes the cell he hung with as an Arab rainbow coalition: "Five Saudis, three Tunisians, and a Yemeni. Only three were Iraqis." But it was the Iraqis who were in charge and the foreigners who were cannon fodder. They all talked big about dying. "I had a vision yesterday that tomorrow I would finally be granted the martyrdom," said a Saudi. "This is not fair," replied the Yemeni. "I have been here for months now."
Most of the papers front a federal judge halting the one ongoing military tribunal at Gitmo, ruling that it doesn't meet minimum standards of justice or the Geneva Conventions. There were other tribunals planned, and now those are effectively on ice, too. For one thing, the judge said, detainees facing trial haven't had a "competent tribunal" conclude that they are really enemy combatants. President Bush has ruled that the detainees are, and the administration says that's good enough. The judge responded, "The President is not a 'tribunal.' " The Justice Department has requested an immediate stay.
The NYT mentions that Fidel Castro, in an apparent attempt to boost currency reserves, has now officially ended the circulation of U.S. dollars on the island. The headline: "CUBA: THE BUCK STOPS."Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109382/
fighting wordsBush's Secularist TriumphThe left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.By Christopher HitchensPosted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT
Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats. "Kerry won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast, to whom the Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a combination of Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for Bush for reasons too sinister to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis, whose last communication to me had predicted an annihilating Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a day or so before forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada. Thus do the liberals build their bridge to the 20th century.
Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong exception to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case, and that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.
I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills' church (which was the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local history (as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the United States, and the sponsor of the cruel "annulment" of Joe Kennedy's and John Kerry's first marriages). As far as I know, all religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first place.
But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and Basra.
So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).
One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between Bin Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. I would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a tape that with equal fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove (and do please by all means cross yourself at the mention of this unholy name), it might have garnered some more attention. The Bearded One moved pedantically through Moore's bill of indictment, checking off the Florida vote-count in 2000, the "Pet Goat" episode on the day of hell, the violent intrusion into hitherto peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the division between Bush and the much nicer Europeans. (For some reason, unknown to me at any rate, he did not attack the President for allowing the Bin Laden family to fly out of American airspace.)
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.
Correction, Nov. 9, 2004: The original version of this article incorrectly referred to Robert Ingersoll as "Ralph" Ingersoll.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is published this month.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats. "Kerry won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast, to whom the Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a combination of Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for Bush for reasons too sinister to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis, whose last communication to me had predicted an annihilating Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a day or so before forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada. Thus do the liberals build their bridge to the 20th century.
Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong exception to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case, and that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.
I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills' church (which was the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local history (as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the United States, and the sponsor of the cruel "annulment" of Joe Kennedy's and John Kerry's first marriages). As far as I know, all religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first place.
But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and Basra.
So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).
One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between Bin Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. I would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a tape that with equal fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove (and do please by all means cross yourself at the mention of this unholy name), it might have garnered some more attention. The Bearded One moved pedantically through Moore's bill of indictment, checking off the Florida vote-count in 2000, the "Pet Goat" episode on the day of hell, the violent intrusion into hitherto peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the division between Bush and the much nicer Europeans. (For some reason, unknown to me at any rate, he did not attack the President for allowing the Bin Laden family to fly out of American airspace.)
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.
Correction, Nov. 9, 2004: The original version of this article incorrectly referred to Robert Ingersoll as "Ralph" Ingersoll.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is published this month.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
News Home - Help
Fallujah Violence Leaves 12 Troops Dead
22 minutes ago
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. troops powered their way into the center of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Tuesday, overwhelming small bands of guerrillas with massive force, searching homes along the city's deserted, narrow passageways and using loudspeakers to try to goad militants onto the streets.
AP Photo
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Militant Attacks Kill 14 Across Iraq(AP Video)
Latest headlines:
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Prosecutors: Marine Major Set Bad Example AP - 19 minutes ago
·
Insurgents Warn Iraqis to Stay Home AP - 20 minutes ago
·
Fallujah Violence Leaves 12 Troops Dead AP - 22 minutes ago
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As of Tuesday night, the fighting had killed 10 U.S. troops and two members of the Iraqi security force, the U.S. military announced. The toll already equaled the 10 American military deaths when Marines besieged the city for three weeks in April.
U.S. officials issued no estimate of insurgent casualties, but one American commander said his battalion alone had killed or wounded up to 90 guerrillas.
As the offensive moved into a second full day, up to eight attack aircraft — including jets and helicopter gunships — blasted guerrilla strongholds and raked the streets with rocket, cannon and machine-gun fire ahead of U.S. and Iraqi infantry who were advancing only one or two blocks behind the curtain of fire.
Small groups of guerrillas, armed with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns, engaged U.S. troops, then fell back. U.S. troops inspected houses along Fallujah's streets and ran across adjoining alleyways, mindful of snipers.
A psychological operations unit broadcast announcements in Arabic meant to draw out gunmen. An Iraqi translator from the group said through a loudspeaker: "Brave terrorists, I am waiting here for the brave terrorists. Come and kill us. Plant small bombs on roadsides. Attention, attention, terrorists of Fallujah."
Faced with overwhelming force, resistance in Fallujah did not appear as fierce as expected, though the top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) said he still expected "several more days of tough urban fighting" as insurgents fell back toward the southern end of the city, perhaps for a last stand.
Some U.S. military officers estimated they controlled about a third of the city. Commanders said they had not fully secured the northern half of Fallujah but were well on their way as American and Iraqi troops searched for insurgents.
U.S. and Iraqi troops captured two key landmarks Tuesday — a mosque and neighboring convention center that insurgents used for launching attacks, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter embedded with U.S. forces.
"I'm surprised how quickly (resistance) broke and how quickly they ran away, a force of foreign fighters who were supposed to fight to the death," Lt. Col. Pete Newell, a battalion commander in the 1st Infantry Division, told CNN.
Newell was quoted on CNN's Web site as saying his battalion had killed or wounded 85 to 90 insurgents.
The move against Fallujah prompted influential Sunni Muslim clerics to call for a boycott of national elections set for January. A widespread boycott among Sunnis could wreck the legitimacy of the elections, seen as vital in Iraq's move to democracy. U.S. commanders have said the Fallujah invasion is the centerpiece of an attempt to secure insurgent-held areas so voting can be held.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi declared a nighttime curfew in Baghdad and its surroundings — the first in the capital for a year — to prevent insurgents from opening up a "second front" to try to draw American forces away from Fallujah. Clashes erupted in the northern city of Mosul and near the Sunni bastion of Ramadi, explosions were reported in at least two cities and masked militants brandished weapons and warned merchants to close their shops.
In Fallujah, U.S. troops were advancing more rapidly than in April, when insurgents fought a force of fewer than 2,000 Marines to a standstill in a three-week siege. It ended with the Americans handing over the city to a local force, which lost control to Islamic militants.
This time, the U.S. military has sent up to 15,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops into the battle, backed by tanks, artillery and attack aircraft. More than 24 hours after launching the main attack, U.S. soldiers and Marines had punched through insurgent strongholds in the north and east of Fallujah and reached the major east-west highway that bisects the city.
"The enemy is fighting hard but not to the death," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the multinational ground force commander in Iraq, told a Pentagon (news - web sites) news conference relayed by video from Iraq. "There is not a sense that he is staying in particular places. He is continuing to fall back or he dies in those positions."
Metz said Iraqi soldiers searched several mosques Tuesday and found "lots of munitions and weapons."
Although capturing or killing the senior insurgent leadership is a goal of the operation, Metz said he believed the most wanted man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had escaped Fallujah.
It was unclear how many insurgents stayed in the city for the fight, given months of warnings by U.S. officials and Iraqis that a confrontation was in the offing.
Metz said troops have captured a very small number of insurgent fighters and "imposed significant casualties against the enemy."
Before the major ground assault that began Monday night, the U.S. military reported 42 insurgents killed. Fallujah doctors reported 12 people dead. Since then, there has been no specific information on Iraqi death tolls.
The latest American deaths included two killed by mortars near Mosul and 11 others who died Monday, most of them as guerrillas launched a wave of attacks in Baghdad and southwest of Fallujah. It was unclear how many of those died in the Fallujah offensive, but the 11 deaths were among the highest for a single day since last spring.
But the toll in Fallujah could have been higher. Early Tuesday, a helicopter gunship destroyed a multiple rocket launcher aimed at the main American camp outside of the city.
"That saved our lives," Col. Michael Formica, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told the crew. "We have no idea how many soldiers here were saved by your good work."
U.S. commanders said the operation was running on or ahead of schedule, and Iraqi officials designated an Iraqi general to run the city once resistance is broken.
However, the American command said the insurgents were massing in the southern half of the city, from which U.S. troops were receiving mortar fire. Some U.S. units were reported advancing south of the main highway but not in strength.
Formica said the security cordon around the city will be tightened to ensure insurgents don't slip out.
"My concern now is only one — not to allow any enemy to escape. As we tighten the noose around him, he will move to escape to fight another day. I do not want these guys to get out of here. I want them killed or captured as they flee," Formica said.
U.S. officials said few people were attempting to flee the city, either because most civilians had already left or because they were complying with a round-the-clock curfew. A funeral procession, however, was allowed to leave, officials said.
Electricity has been cut off in Fallujah, once a city of 200,000 to 300,000 people. Residents said they were without running water and were worried about food shortages because most shops were closed.
Anger over the assault grew among Iraq's Sunni minority, and international groups and the Russian government warned that military action could undermine elections in January. The U.N. refugee agency expressed fears over civilians' safety.
The Sunni clerics' Association of Muslim Scholars called for a boycott of the elections. The association's director, Harith al-Dhari, said the Sunnis could not take part in an election held "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah."
The call is expected to have little resonance within the rival Shiite Muslim community, which forms about 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people. Sunnis make up the core of the insurgency, and U.S. officials have expressed hope that a successful election could convince many Sunnis that they have a future in a democratic Iraq.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Robert Burns in Washington; Edward Harris in Fallujah; and Tini Tran, Mariam Fam, Katarina Kratovac and Maggie Michael in Baghdad.
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Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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News Home - Help
U.S. Pushes Into Fallujah; 10 GIs Killed
2 hours, 1 minute ago
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. troops powered their way into the center of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Tuesday, overwhelming small bands of guerrillas with massive force, searching homes along the city's deserted, narrow passageways and using loudspeakers to try to goad militants onto the streets.
AP Photo
AP Photo
Slideshow: Iraq
Militant Attacks Kill 14 Across Iraq(AP Video)
Latest headlines:
·
Prosecutors: Marine Major Set Bad Example AP - 5 minutes ago
·
Insurgents Warn Iraqis to Stay Home AP - 6 minutes ago
·
Fallujah Violence Leaves 12 Troops Dead AP - 8 minutes ago
Special Coverage
As of Tuesday night, the fighting had killed 10 U.S. troops and two members of the Iraqi security force, the U.S. military announced. The toll already equaled the 10 American military deaths when Marines besieged the city for three weeks in April.
As the offensive moved into a second full day, up to eight attack aircraft — including jets and helicopter gunships — blasted guerrilla strongholds and raked the streets with rocket, cannon and machine-gun fire ahead of U.S. and Iraqi infantry who were advancing only one or two blocks behind the curtain of fire.
Small groups of guerrillas, armed with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns, engaged U.S. troops, then fell back. U.S. troops inspected houses along Fallujah's streets and ran across adjoining alleyways, mindful of snipers.
A psychological operations unit broadcast announcements in Arabic meant to draw out gunmen. An Iraqi translator from the group said through a loudspeaker: "Brave terrorists, I am waiting here for the brave terrorists. Come and kill us. Plant small bombs on roadsides. Attention, attention, terrorists of Fallujah."
Faced with overwhelming force, resistance in Fallujah did not appear as fierce as expected, though the top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) said he still expected "several more days of tough urban fighting" as insurgents fell back toward the southern end of the city, perhaps for a last stand.
Some U.S. military officers estimated they controlled about a third of the city. Commanders said they had not fully secured the northern half of Fallujah but were well on their way as American and Iraqi troops searched for insurgents.
The move against Fallujah prompted influential Sunni Muslim clerics to call for a boycott of national elections set for January. A widespread boycott among Sunnis could wreck the legitimacy of the elections, seen as vital in Iraq's move to democracy. U.S. commanders have said the Fallujah invasion is the centerpiece of an attempt to secure insurgent-held areas so voting can be held.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi declared a nighttime curfew in Baghdad and its surroundings — the first in the capital for a year — to prevent insurgents from opening up a "second front" to try to draw American forces away from Fallujah. Clashes erupted in the northern city of Mosul and near the Sunni bastion of Ramadi, explosions were reported in at least two cities and masked militants brandished weapons and warned merchants to close their shops.
In Fallujah, U.S. troops were advancing more rapidly than in April, when insurgents fought a force of fewer than 2,000 Marines to a standstill in a three-week siege. It ended with the Americans handing over the city to a local force, which lost control to Islamic militants.
This time, the U.S. military has sent up to 15,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops into the battle, backed by tanks, artillery and attack aircraft. More than 24 hours after launching the main attack, U.S. soldiers and Marines had punched through insurgent strongholds in the north and east of Fallujah and reached the major east-west highway that bisects the city.
"The enemy is fighting hard but not to the death," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the multinational ground force commander in Iraq, told a Pentagon (news - web sites) news conference relayed by video from Iraq. "There is not a sense that he is staying in particular places. He is continuing to fall back or he dies in those positions."
Metz said Iraqi soldiers searched several mosques Tuesday and found "lots of munitions and weapons."
Although capturing or killing the senior insurgent leadership is a goal of the operation, Metz said he believed the most wanted man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had escaped Fallujah.
It was unclear how many insurgents stayed in the city for the fight, given months of warnings by U.S. officials and Iraqis that a confrontation was in the offing.
Metz said troops have captured a very small number of insurgent fighters and "imposed significant casualties against the enemy."
Before the major ground assault that began Monday night, the U.S. military reported 42 insurgents killed. Fallujah doctors reported 12 people dead. Since then, there has been no specific information on Iraqi death tolls.
The latest American deaths included two killed by mortars near Mosul and 11 others who died Monday, most of them as guerrillas launched a wave of attacks in Baghdad and southwest of Fallujah. It was unclear how many of those died in the Fallujah offensive, but the 11 deaths were among the highest for a single day since last spring.
But the toll in Fallujah could have been higher. Early Tuesday, a helicopter gunship destroyed a multiple rocket launcher aimed at the main American camp outside of the city.
"That saved our lives," Col. Michael Formica, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told the crew. "We have no idea how many soldiers here were saved by your good work."
U.S. commanders said the operation was running on or ahead of schedule, and Iraqi officials designated an Iraqi general to run the city once resistance is broken.
However, the American command said the insurgents were massing in the southern half of the city, from which U.S. troops were receiving mortar fire. Some U.S. units were reported advancing south of the main highway but not in strength.
Formica said the security cordon around the city will be tightened to ensure insurgents don't slip out.
"My concern now is only one — not to allow any enemy to escape. As we tighten the noose around him, he will move to escape to fight another day. I do not want these guys to get out of here. I want them killed or captured as they flee," Formica said.
U.S. officials said few people were attempting to flee the city, either because most civilians had already left or because they were complying with a round-the-clock curfew. A funeral procession, however, was allowed to leave, officials said.
Electricity has been cut off in Fallujah, once a city of 200,000 to 300,000 people. Residents said they were without running water and were worried about food shortages because most shops were closed.
Anger over the assault grew among Iraq's Sunni minority, and international groups and the Russian government warned that military action could undermine elections in January. The U.N. refugee agency expressed fears over civilians' safety.
The Sunni clerics' Association of Muslim Scholars called for a boycott of the elections. The association's director, Harith al-Dhari, said the Sunnis could not take part in an election held "over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah."
The call is expected to have little resonance within the rival Shiite Muslim community, which forms about 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people. Sunnis make up the core of the insurgency, and U.S. officials have expressed hope that a successful election could convince many Sunnis that they have a future in a democratic Iraq.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Robert Burns in Washington; Edward Harris in Fallujah; and Tini Tran, Mariam Fam, Katarina Kratovac and Maggie Michael in Baghdad.
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Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 29, 2004
REPORT FROM IRAQ SECOND OF SIX PARTSBattle for Fallujah intense, often `overwhelming'Sniper fire, the sights and smells of death, and earaches punctuated the house-to-house fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.BY TOM LASSETERKnight Ridder News Service
FALLUJAH, Iraq - 11.9.04, Tuesday.
Thirteen hours after the U.S. push into Fallujah began, Capt. Sean Sims, commander of Alpha Company, of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2, and his men looked gray and worn.
Dirt was beginning to cover their faces and uniforms. Their ears ached. After two hours of sleep on a concrete floor of an abandoned house, their eyes were dulled.
''At first, last night, when we came in and heard all the AK-47 fire, we freaked out,'' said Sgt. Brandon Bailey, 21, of Big Bear, Calif. ``But now, as long as it's not coming right at us, we're fine.''
Later, Bailey said it felt as if the enemy was coming from every direction.
''So we just went apeshit with the cannon, shooting everything,'' he said.
How many people did they kill? Bailey shrugged.
Sims' temporary headquarters was a mostly empty house. It stood on the north side of Fallujah's main road, which, like all east-west roads there, was given a woman's name by military planners: Fran. On the other side stood the beginnings of the city's industrial district, where more insurgents lay in wait.
Tanks were parked up and down Fran, and ordnance disposal teams were already identifying the homemade bombs -- improvised explosive devices, in military lingo -- that lined the road. They were densely packed, but with no one to detonate them, the bombs sat idle as Army trucks rolled by.
Inside the house, the family that fled left handwritten verses of the Koran on the doorways, a tradition intended to keep homes safe. Baby formula was scattered around, and a kerosene heater was stored in a utility closet. A painting of Mecca, Islam's holiest city, hung on the wall in the front room.
Bullet holes pocked the walls of the house. Its windows were shattered. Pieces of plaster and concrete were strewn about.
Staff Sgt. Jason Ward was sitting outside the house in his M-113 vehicle -- an armored box on tank tracks, used to cart casualties off the battlefield.
Ward, from Midland, Texas, had a deeper accent than Sims, a square jaw and a blank expression. He was chewing on a Slim Jim. Ward said he had ferried at least 10 injured soldiers the night before.
`VERY INTENSE'
''It's been very intense,'' he said. ``For a lot of our younger soldiers, it's overwhelming.''
He wore a bracelet with the name ''Marvin Sprayberry III'' etched on it, just above ''KIA'' and ``True Friend.''
Sprayberry was Ward's best friend. He was a good man. He was killed on May 3 when the vehicle he was in rolled over during a firefight. That was all Ward had to say on the matter.
Resting in a Humvee nearby, 1st Lt. Edward Iwan was scrolling down a flat blue computer screen, mounted to the dashboard, that showed the location of every Army and Marine unit in Fallujah. Iwan, Alpha company's executive officer, noted that his men were deeper in the city than any other unit.
''It's a fairly complex environment, like we thought it would be,'' said Iwan, 28, of Albion, Neb. ``Cities are where people die. That's where you take most of your casualties.''
Iwan looked out through the Humvee's window at a thicket of buildings in every direction.
''There are 8,000 places to hide,'' he said, shaking his head.
Across the street, a long row of shops, once home to mechanics and carpenters, lay in ruins. Tin cigarette stands leaned on their sides, pocked with bullet holes.
Sims was on the roof of the house, sitting against a wall, his legs crossed at the ankle with a map on his lap. A little past dawn, after a lull of an hour or two, the shooting started again.
A reporter offered Sims a satellite phone to call his family. No, thanks, he said. He wanted to talk with them when he got somewhere quieter. He had an infant son, Colin, whose brown hair and small ears, which poked out on the sides, looked just like his father's.
SNIPERS ACTIVE
Sims wondered aloud if the bullets flying by were aimed at him. During the next couple of minutes, several ricocheted off the roof near him.
''OK, that's a sniper right there,'' he said with a small grin as his men grabbed their guns and crouched so that only the top of their heads showed above the roofline.
Sims picked up the radio and called in an artillery strike to ''soften'' the sniper positions. His call sign was Terminator Six.
Cpl. Travis Barreto, of Brooklyn, N.Y., moved his rifle slowly, scanning the cluster of houses nearby. ''He's somewhere from my 11 o'clock to my 3 o'clock,'' he muttered.
Spc. Luis Lopez, 21, was too short to rest his M-14 sniper rifle on the roof, so he created a step from a metal box containing a child's Snoopy sneaker.
The company radio squawked with sightings of snipers, and everyone adjusted aim: a circular window to the southwest, a rooftop to the southeast, a crevice in a wall to the southwest. With every new location, the men clenched their triggers, and shell casings flew up in the air. The sniper rounds stopped. And then they began again.
''He shot right at me,'' yelled Barreto, ducking. ``He shot right at me.''
Those soldiers who were not on sniper rotation sat on the roof with their brown Meal Ready to Eat packets, finding the main meal -- bean burrito, country captain chicken, beef teriyaki -- and dunking it with water in the cooking pouch, which smelled of cardboard and chemicals.
They talked about Steve Faulkenburg, the battalion sergeant major, shot in the head the night before. What the hell was he doing out there? they asked. Directing traffic, trying to get a truckload of Iraqi national guardsmen out of the line of fire.
The tough 45-year-old was from Huntingburg, a small town in southern Indiana where there are cornfields and a population of about 5,500. There's a Victorian-style downtown district there with brick-lined sidewalks and streets named Chestnut and Washington. Thousands of miles from home, he'd fallen dead, in the dark, on a street with no name.
''Friendlies coming up, friendlies coming up,'' other soldiers yelled as they climbed the stairs to the roof.
BLASTS AND FLAMES
A building a few blocks away quaked with fresh explosions that sent ashes falling like snowflakes. Flames shot into the sky.
The radio squawked: ``OK, I've got an injury to sergeant . . . and I'm unaware if it is a gunshot wound to the groin or a shrapnel wound to the groin.''
Another report came in: A second sergeant had been shot. The soldiers on the rooftop with Sims paused, shook their heads, then turned back to the fight.
When they got bored or scared of being on the rooftop, some of the men -- young and with an awkward day's stubble on their upper lips -- went outside and around the corner to see the Fat Man.
The Fat Man lay in his own blood. He was an Iraqi insurgent who had hidden in an alley next to a garbage dump, waiting for the Army to come by. A couple of 25mm high-explosive rounds, shot from a Bradley, blew off his left leg and, from the looks of it, punched a hole through his midsection. Two or three others died with him.
A group of insurgents managed to drag the others away, but the Fat Man was too big. His arms were still splayed back from where his comrades tried to pull him through the narrow alley.
His eyes were open, peering out from his dirty face and scraggly beard, staring at the heavens. A traditional red and white Arab headdress was wrapped around his waist, and a bag with slots for RPG rounds -- all empty -- lay on the ground next to him.
The Fat Man was the first dead person many soldiers had seen. They grew solemn as they leaned over his body and peered into his eyes, but never too close, never close enough to touch his skin or take in too deep a whiff of death.
© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miami.com
