Part Eight-end
I heard the President say: "Today, because the world acted with courage and moral clarity, Iraqi athletes are competing in the Olympic Games." Iraq had sent teams to the previous Olympics. And when the President ran a campaign advertisement with the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan and the words "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations-and two fewer terrorist regimes," I heard the Iraqi coach say: "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself." I heard their star midfielder say that if he weren't playing soccer he'd be fighting for the resistance in Fallujah: "Bush has committed so many crimes. How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?"
I heard an unnamed "senior British Army officer" invoke the Nazis to describe what he saw: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen [subhumans]. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later."
I heard Makki al-Nazzal, who was managing a clinic in Fallujah, say, in unaccented English: "I have been a fool for forty-seven years. I used to believe in European and American civilization."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction."
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: "We never expected we were going to open garages and find them."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer."
I heard Richard Perle say: "We don't know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them. I hope this will take less than 200 years."
I heard the President say: "I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war."
I heard the President say: "I'm a war president."
I heard that 1,000 American soldiers were dead and 7,000 wounded in combat. I heard that there were now an average of eighty-seven attacks a day on US troops.
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: "Not everything has gone as we would have liked it to."
I heard Colin Powell say: "We did miscalculate the difficulty."
I heard an unnamed "senior US diplomat in Baghdad" say: "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility. This idea of a functioning democracy is crazy. We thought there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose."
I heard Major Thomas Neemeyer say: "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire population."
I heard the CNN reporter near the tomb of Ali in Najaf, a city that once had 500,000 people, say: "Everything outside of the mosque seems to be totaled."
I heard Khudeir Salman, who sold ice from a donkey cart in Najaf, say he was giving up after Marine snipers killed his friend, another ice-seller: "I found him this morning. The sniper shot his donkey too. And even the ambulance drivers are too scared to get the body."
I heard the Vice President say: "Such an enemy cannot be deterred, cannot be contained, cannot be appeased, or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed. And that is the business at hand."
I heard an unnamed "senior American commander" say: "We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah will be cut out."
I heard Major General John Batiste, outside of Samarra, say: "It'll be a quick fight and the enemy is going to die fast. The message for the people of Samarra is: Peacefully or not, this is going to be solved."
I heard Brigadier General Kimmitt say: "Our patience is not eternal."
I heard the President say: "America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers."
I heard about the wedding party that was attacked by American planes, killing forty-five people, and the wedding photographer who videotaped the festivities until he himself was killed. And though the tape was shown on television, I heard Brigadier General Kimmitt say: "There was no evidence of a wedding. There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too." I heard an Iraqi man say: "I swear I saw dogs eating the body of a woman."
I heard an Iraqi man say: "We have at least 700 dead. So many of them are children and women. The stench from the dead bodies in parts of the city is unbearable."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
On the occasion of Ayad Allawi's visit to the United States, I heard the President say: "What's important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister."
Asked about ethnic tensions, I heard Ayad Allawi say: "There are no problems between Shia and Sunnis and Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen. Usually we have no problems of ethnic or religious nature in Iraq."
I heard him say: "There is nothing, no problem, except on a small pocket in Fallujah."
I heard Colonel Jerry Durant say, after a meeting with Ramadi tribal shaykhs: "A lot of these guys have read history, and they said to me the government in Baghdad is like the Vichy government in France during World War II."
I heard a journalist say: "I am house-bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike up a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "It's a tough part of the world. We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night."
I heard that 80,000 Iraqi civilians were dead. I heard that the war had already cost $225 billion and was continuing at the rate of $40 billion a month. I heard there was now an average of 130 attacks a day on US troops.
I heard Captain John Mountford say: "I just wonder what would have happened if we had worked a little more with the locals."
I heard that, in the last year alone, the US had fired 127 tons of Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the atomicity equivalent of approximately 10,000 Nagasaki bombs. I heard that the widespread use of DU in Gulf War I was believed to be the primary cause of the health problems suffered among its 580,400 veterans. Four hundred sixty-seven were wounded in the war. Ten years later, 11,000 were dead, and 325,000 on medical disability. DU carried in semen led to high rates of endometriosis, leading to hysterectomies, in their wives and girlfriends. Of soldiers who had healthy babies before the war, sixty-seven percent of their babies post-war were born with severe defects, including missing legs, arms, organs, or eyes.
I heard that 380 tons of HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive) were missing from al- Qaqaa, one of Iraq's "most sensitive military installations," which had never been guarded after the invasion. I heard that one pound of these explosives was enough to blow up a 747 jet, and that this cache could be used to make a million roadside bombs, which were the cause of half the casualties among US troops.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say, when asked why the troops were being kept in the war much longer than their normal tours of duty: "Oh, come on. People are fungible. You can have them here or there." "Fungible" means "interchangeable."
I heard Colonel Gary Brandl say: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah and we're going to destroy him."
I heard a Marine commander tell his men: "You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians."
I heard Lieutenant Colonel Mark Smith say: "We're going out where the bad guys live, and we're going to slay them in their ZIP code."
I heard that 15,000 US troops invaded Fallujah, as planes dropped 500-pound bombs on "insurgent targets." I heard they destroyed the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the center of the city, killing twenty doctors. I heard they occupied Fallujah General Hospital, which the military had called a "center of propaganda" for reporting civilian casualties. I heard that they confiscated all mobile phones and refused to allow doctors and ambulances to go out and help the wounded. I heard they bombed the power plant to black out the city, and that the water was shut off. I heard that every house and shop had a large red X spray-painted on the door to indicate that it had been searched.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble. There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by US forces."
I heard that, in a city of 150 mosques, there were no longer any calls to prayer.
I heard Muhammad Aboud tell how, unable to leave his house to go to a hospital, he had watched his nine-yearold son bleed to death, and how, unable to leave his house to go to a cemetery, he had buried his son in the garden.
I heard Sami al-Jumali, a doctor, say: "There is not a single surgeon in Fallujah. A thirteen-year-old child just died in my hands."
I heard an American soldier say: "We will win the hearts and minds of Fallujah by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."
I heard an American soldier, a Bradley gunner, say: "I was basically looking for any clean walls, you know, without any holes in them. And then we were putting holes in them."
I heard Farhan Saleh say: "My kids are hysterical with fear. They are traumatized by the sound but there is nowhere to take them."
I heard that the US troops allowed women and children to leave the city, but that all "military age males," men from fifteen to sixty, were required to stay. I heard that no food or medicine was allowed into the city.
I heard the Red Cross say that at least 800 civilians had died. I heard Ayad Allawi say there were no civilian casualties in Fallujah.
I heard a man named Hammad say: "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them." I heard him say that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on it. I heard him say: "People suffered so much from these."
I heard Kassem Muhammad Ahmed say: "I watched them roll over wounded people in the streets with tanks. This happened so many times."
I heard a man named Khalil say: "They shot women and old men in the streets. Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies."
I heard Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, say that when she was finally allowed to return to her home, she found a message written with lipstick on her living-room mirror: "FUCK IRAQ AND EVERY IRAQI IN IT."
I heard General John Sattler say that the destruction of Fallujah had "broken the back of the insurgency." I heard that three-fourths of Fallujah had been shelled into rubble. I heard an American soldier say: "It's kind of bad we destroyed everything, but at least we gave them a chance for a new start."
I heard that only five roads into Fallujah would remain open. The rest would be sealed with "sand berms," mountains of earth. At the entry points, everyone would be photographed, fingerprinted, and have iris scans taken before being issued identification cards. All citizens would be required to wear identification cards in plain sight at all times. No private automobiles-the vehicle of suicide bombings-would be allowed in the city. All males would be organized into "work brigades" rebuilding the city. They would be paid, but participation would be compulsory.
I heard Muhammad Kubaissy, a shopkeeper, say: "I am still searching for what they have been calling democracy."
I heard a soldier say that he had talked to his priest about killing Iraqis, and that his priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government as long as he did not enjoy it. After he had killed at least four men, I heard the soldier say that he had begun to have doubts: "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government?"
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light, through the prism of our experience on 9/11."
I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld, "Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said they would welcome us with open arms." And I heard Rumsfeld interrupt him: "Never said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like those things you just said I said."
I heard Ahmad Chalabi, who had supplied most of the information about the weapons of mass destruction, shrug and say: "We are heroes in error. What was said before is not important."
I heard Paul Wolfowitz say: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, as justification for invading Iraq, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
I heard Condoleezza Rice continue to insist: "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction."
I heard that the Niger "yellowcake" uranium was a hoax, that the aluminum tubes could not be used for nuclear weapons, that the mobile biological laboratories produced helium for weather balloons, that the fleet of unmanned aerial "drones" was a single broken-down oversized model airplane, that Saddam had no elaborate underground bunkers, that Colin Powell's primary source, his "solid information," for the evidence he presented at the United Nations was a paper, written ten years before, by a graduate student. I heard that, of the 400,000 bodies buried in mass graves, only 5,000 had been found.
I heard Lieutenant General James Conway say: "It was a surprise to me then, and it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons. It' s not from lack of trying."
I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld, "If Iraq did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?" I heard Rumsfeld answer: "You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' It's become a kind of folklore that that's what happened. If you have any citations, I'd like to see them."
And I heard the reporter read: "No terrorist threat poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people." Rumsfeld replied: "It-my view of-of the situation was that he-he had-we-we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that-that we believed and we still do not know-we will know."
I heard Sa'adoon al-Zubaydi, an interpreter who lived in the presidential palace, say: "For at least three years Saddam Hussein had been tired of the day-to-day management of his regime. He could not stand it any more: meetings, commissions, dispatches, telephone calls. So he withdrew.... Alone, isolated, out of it. He preferred shutting himself up in his office, writing novels."
I heard the President say that Iraq is a "catastrophic success."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "They haven't won a single battle the entire time since the end of major combat operations."
I heard that hundreds of schools had been completely destroyed and thousands looted, and that most people thought it too dangerous to send their children to school. I heard there was no system of banks. I heard that, in the cities, there were only ten hours of electricity a day and only sixty percent of the people had drinkable water. I heard that the malnutrition of children was now far worse than in Uganda or Haiti. I heard that none of the 300,000 babies born after the start of the war had received immunizations.
I heard General John Abizaid say: "I don't think Iraq will have perfect elections. But, if I recall, looking back at our own election four years ago, it wasn't perfect either."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or fourfifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great. Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life."
I heard an Iraqi engineer say: "Go and vote and risk being blown to pieces or followed by insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"
I heard General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, the chief of Iraqi intelligence, say that there were now 200,000 active fighters in the insurgency.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "I don't believe it's our job to reconstruct that country. The Iraqi people are going to have to reconstruct that country over a period of time." I heard him say that, in any event, "the infrastructure of that country was not terribly damaged by the war at all."
I heard that the American Ambassador, John Negroponte, had requested that $3.37 billion intended for water, sewage, and electricity projects be transferred to security and oil output.
I heard that the reporters from the al-Jazeera network were permanently banned. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "What al- Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable."
I heard that Spain left the Coalition of the Willing. Hungary left; the Dominican Republic left; Nicaragua left; Honduras left. I heard that the Philippines left early, after a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped and executed. Norway left. Poland and the Netherlands said they were leaving. Thailand said it was leaving. Bulgaria was reducing its few hundred troops. Moldova cut its force from forty-two to twelve.
I heard that the President had once said: "Two years from now, only the Brits may be with us. At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America."
I heard a reporter ask Lieutenant General Jay Garner how long the troops would remain in Iraq, and I heard him reply: "I hope they're there for a long time."
I heard General Tommy Franks say: "One has to think about the numbers. I think we will be engaged with our military in Iraq for perhaps three, five, perhaps ten years."
I heard that the Pentagon was now exploring what it called the "Salvador option," modeled on the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s, when John Negroponte was Ambassador to Honduras and when Elliot Abrams, now White House Adviser on the Middle East, called the massacre at El Mazote "nothing but Communist propaganda." Under the plan, the US would advise, train, and support paramilitaries in assassination and kidnapping, including secret raids across the Syrian border. In the Vice Presidential debate, I heard the Vice President say: "Twenty years we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had a guerrilla insurgency that controlled roughly a third of the country. And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better."
I heard that 100,000 Iraqi civilians were dead. I heard that there was now an average of 150 attacks a day on US troops. I heard that, in Baghdad, 700 people were being killed every month in "non-war-related" criminal activities. I heard that 1,400 American soldiers had been killed and the true casualty figure was approximately 25,000.
I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had a machine sign his letters of condolence to the families of soldiers who had been killed. When this caused a small scandal, I heard him say: "I have directed that in the future I sign each letter."
I heard the President say: "The credibility of the United States is based upon our strong desire to make the world more peaceful, and the world is now more peaceful."
I heard the President say: "I want to be the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years."
I heard Attorney General John Ashcroft say, on the day of his resignation: "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
I heard the President say: "For a while we were marching to war. Now we're marching to peace."
I heard that the US military had purchased 1,500,000,000 bullets for use in the coming year. That is fifty-eight bullets for every Iraqi adult and child.
I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary confinement, was spending his time writing poetry, reading the Qur'an, eating cookies and muffins, and taking care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he had placed a circle of white stones around a small plum tree.
Eliot Weinberger's 9/12 is published by Prickly Paradigm. What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles is forthcoming from New Directions. He lives in New York. |
