Central America and beyond: ruminations, speculations & provocations

From a story in today's El Diario de Hoy, I was tipped off to a comment made last Friday (April 9) by an anonymous Coalition official who, in announcing that U.S. forces were moving towards Najaf, noted that Salvadoran soldiers had been the exception to the rule of otherwise reluctant international forces. Unlike other Coalition forces, they'd gone out and fought "heroically:"

"Signaling a strategic shift, the Pentagon has directed elements of the Army's 1st Armored Division, which has patrolled Baghdad since May and was scheduled to go home within weeks, to move south. Those seasoned troops are needed to help retake cities from Sadr's militia and to patrol parts of the country that had been occupied by multinational troops of varying combat readiness.

''We are waiting for American forces to come in and restore the peace,'' said a coalition official in the south who asked for anonymity because his comments were not in keeping with the coalition's upbeat public message. ``The multinational forces will not do this -- they refuse to leave their bases and do routine patrols. In some cases, they've withdrawn and refused to fight or hold their ground against minimal attacks.''

The official said that El Salvadoran soldiers were an exception, acting ''heroically'' in repulsing attacks in Najaf."

This was from a Knight-Ridder wire story published in the Miami Herald last Friday.

Meanwhile, La Prensa Gráfica reports that the wife and mother of one soldier in Iraq, René de Jesús Rivas, visited the Assembly and urged the legislators to bring the troops home, saying that they only received $60 a month from the Ministry of Defense, which was not enough to cover basic living expenses.

The FMLN and CDU introduced a motion in the plenary session yesterday to bring the troops home, saying that they hadn't participated in reconstruction activities, while a motion by the PCN to authorize greater social benefits to soldiers participating in international missions was also introduced. Both bills were sent to the Defense Committee for study. (I suppose I should mention a demonstration by some 50 Salvadorans outside the consulate in Los Angeles, but that seems depressingly too tiny to say much about.)

Far from indicating any selfless, humanitarian motives for sending troops to Iraq, ARENA deputy Renato Pérez was quite direct about why he thought troops should be there: "Since the U.S. is our principal commercial partner, we have to be in solidarity with them." The Minister of Defense, José Martínez Varela, on the other hand, said that retiring Salvadoran troops from Iraq "would be a bad signal to the terrorists, that could increment its attacks against the civilian population."

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Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission.

"I know he doesn't read," one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this.

--Sidney Blumenthal in a column entitled "Hear no evil, Read no evil, Speak drivel," in today's Guardian

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Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington.

In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said.

And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)

--from an excellent piece on Bush's August 2001 vacation, by Fred Kaplan, entitled: "The Out-of-Towner -- While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard" in Slate.

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Commentary from the Style section of the Washington Post is often hard to beat. Here's a couple of examples from today's edition:

One of the striking revelations, as past and present officials of the FBI, CIA and Justice Department testified before the Sept. 11 commission, was just how many secrets those agencies possess without knowing it -- and how many secrets they don't know that they don't know.
--article by David Montgomery, entitled "Top Secret-Keepers: What They Don't Know Can Hurt You"

"When I say something, I mean it," George W. Bush said decisively near the end of last night's prime-time presidential news conference. Nobody called out, "When will you say something?" -- the White House press corps is too mannerly for that -- but some reporters, and some viewers, must have been thinking it.
--lead of the article by television critic Tom Shales

Or this, more worrying, also from Shales:

In contrast to the emotionless delivery of his prepared remarks, during the Q&A Bush appeared passionate at times, answering journalists' questions with an almost religious fervor. Bush said that freedom was given to Americans by "the Almighty" and encouraging freedom throughout the world is "what we have been called to do." Later he said, "It's a conviction that's deep in my soul."

Isn't the mixing of earthly political concerns with religious beliefs one of the things that thwarts and frustrates the United States and its allies in the Middle East?

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A clever letter in today's New York Times:

David Brooks's April 10 column about the recent uprisings in Iraq exhorts us to "take a deep breath": "maybe it is time to pause, to let passions cool."

Here are some of the adjectives he uses to describe Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical Shiite cleric: "lowlife hoodlum," "ruthless," "putschist," "hotheaded murderer," "fascist thug," "vicious" and the "enemy of civilization." Columnist, read thyself.

LEONARD MALKIN
Troy, Mich., April 10, 2004

Comments to dlholiday@yahoo.com

This is a letter I sent last night to the New York Times...

"I respect John F. Burns' reporting, but why does he only comment on the number of American military dead last week (60), and then end his April 13 story by noting Iraqi casualties as 10 times higher?

Surely, Maj. Gen. Kimmitt (cited for the 10x figure) is NOT including civilian casualties here, because if that is the case, it shouldn't be juxtaposed against the number of American military dead.

So why not talk about all coalition deaths (Italian, Salvadoran, Ukranian, etc.), including private security forces like Blackwater, and WHY NOT talk about Iraqi civilian casualties--with at least some kind of rough estimate? Only this would give us an example of the full cost of the bloodiest week of the past year in Iraq."

D.H.
San Salvador


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"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. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are."

--British officer in Iraq, quoted by Sean Rayment of the Telegraph (and cited by Juan Cole) (Rayment notes: "The phrase untermenschen - literally 'under-people' - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925.")

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Bill Barnes pointed me to an article by Corey Robin in the recent Boston Review, entitled Endgame: Conservative after the Cold War. It's worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few good excerpts:

"The ideology of empire, premised as it is on the ability of the United States to control events, cannot accommodate failure, but by avoiding failure, the imperialists are forced to acknowledge that they cannot control events. As former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger has observed, in a discussion of the crisis in the Middle East, Bush realizes "that simply to insert himself into this mess without any possibility of achieving any success is, in and of itself, dangerous because it would demonstrate that, in fact, we don't have any ability right now to control or affect events." This Catch-22 is no mere problem of logic or consistency; it betrays the essential fragility of the imperial position itself.

That fragility also reflects the hollowness of the neocons' imperial vision. Though the neocons see imperialism as the cultural and political counterpart to the free market, they have not yet come to terms with how the conservative opposition to government spending renders the United States unlikely to make the necessary investments in nation-building that imperialism requires. It has been only two years since the United States promised the people of Afghanistan that it would never abandon them, and already it's clear that the Bush administration has done just that….

…Even within and around the military, the ethos of patriotism and shared destiny has given way to the logic of the market. The government's desire not to spend too much money and thereby raise taxes has forced American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq to spend their own money on such items as night-vision goggles, desert-camouflage boots, baby wipes, radios and communications equipment, and rucksacks. Military recruiters admit that they still entice enlistees not with the call of patriotism but with the promise of economic opportunity. As one recruiter puts it, "It's just business as usual. We don't push the ‘Help our country' routine." When patriots burst into a recruiting office and say, "I want to fight," another recruiter explains, "I've got to calm them down. We're not all about fighting and bombing. We're about jobs. We're about education." Recruiters confess that they continue to target immigrants and people of color, on the assumption that these constituencies' lack of opportunity will drive them to the military. The Pentagon publicly acknowledges that it hopes to increase the number of Latino recruits in the military from the current 10 percent to 22 percent. Recruiters in Southern California have even slipped across the border, promising instant citizenship to poor Mexicans willing to take up arms on behalf of the United States. According to one San Diego recruiter, "It's more or less common practice that some recruiters go to Tijuana to distribute pamphlets, or in some cases they look for someone to help distribute information on the Mexican side."

The fact that the war has not yet imposed the sort of sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," writes the Times's R.W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?" A former aide to LBJ says, "People are going to have to get involved in this. So far it's a government effort, as it should be, but people aren't engaged." Without consecrating the cause in blood, Americans will not have their commitment tested, their resolve deepened...."

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