thedrifter
09-02-07, 05:52 AM
POSTCARDS FROM IRAQ FRONT LINE
By RALPH PETERS
September 2, 2007 -- IT was late and grease-sweat hot in Fallujah. In a sand bagged, black-hole-of-Calcutta room, a half-dozen off-duty Marines sat shirtless in the swelter, crowded around a laptop.
They were watching the film "Black Snake Moan." Chained to a bed, a nearly naked Christina Ricci writhed as if suffering from the worst case of pinworms in history. Whatever the film's cinematic shortcomings, it was a hit with the Marines, who debated in richly expressive language whether it would be wise to date such a girl, given the potential downsides.
Embedded with our troops in Iraq, you find that some of the I'll-remember-this moments aren't grand enough to merit their own column and don't quite fit into any bigger stories. But those vignettes capture a human reality that's often lost in the politicized noise or the headline-drama of war. And too many of us forget that our troops - as well as the Iraqis - are, above all, human.
So here are a few snapshots of Iraq:
* Scrawny Iraqi police recruits chattering like excited birds as they marveled at the tattoos on a Marine weightlifter's torso: A flesh-and-blood metaphor for muscular, over-the-top America and our relationship with malnourished, bewildered Iraq.
* Leaning on the rail along a moonlit arcade in Fallujah, analyzing Civil War campaigns and commanders with 1st Sgt. Howard Kraemer. Speaking earnestly of a bygone conflict in the midst of the present one, we forgot the troubles of the day and the slap-down heat that lingered into the night as we debated Grant's decisions in Virginia and Lee's hushed-up deficiencies.
We were standing in Iraq's Atlanta, discussing Sherman. For one of those lightning instants when you grasp something beyond words, we both felt the timelessness of war and soldiering.
* Sitting in a plywood-partition office in a combat outpost with an American captain and an Iraqi Provincial Security Forces general as the Iraqi "complied" with the captain's request for three bids from local firms to deliver gravel to a dirt motor pool before the rains began.
Eager to close a deal that wouldn't do his own retirement savings any harm, the general laid down three pieces of paper. They were identical, except that one specified $800 per truckload, a second $750 and a third $700.
It was obvious that the bids were all from the same source and that the drill was simply to do things in the peculiar way Americans expected. And when the captain, alert to the legal ramifications, declined to commit the funds, the general began a one-sided bout of haggling, offering additional services at no extra cost. The mutual incomprehension was almost total.
* An old sheik, who had done nicely under Saddam, reminiscing about the days of no-nonsense law and order when he could drive safely on the spur of the moment from Fallujah to Basra. As the polite old man continued telling stories, it became heartbreakingly obvious that much of the post-liberation fighting between Iraqis and Americans had been the result of confounded expectations on both sides.
Living so long under Saddam - and previous stern regimes - men such as the sheik simply couldn't comprehend our rules or assumptions or philosophy, nor did we grasp the accommodations Iraqis had made with the concept of "laws."
We began by shouting past each other, and ended by shooting at each other.
We asked the Iraqis to change not only a government, but their civilization. Fearful, they only fled deeper into that civilization.
* A former Iraqi air force general and I found we had a common language: Russian. He'd trained to fly in the old Soviet Union. What did he miss from the old days? Power? Glory?
He just missed flying. "I feel that the air I breathe and the water I drink has been taken away."
* Billeted in a musty room with five bunk beds in one of Saddam's lesser palaces, I had the greatest strategic insight of my life: Saddam was so cruel because he was frustrated - he didn't really want to be a dictator, but yearned to be an interior decorator specializing in Appalachian trailer-park clients who win the lottery.
Saddam was trapped by history into his strongman role, but he was born to host a home-makeover TV show, perhaps "A Tyrant's Eye for the Tortured Guy."
Memories of other visits to Saddamite palaces over the years reinforced the insight - I only wish I'd had it before we invaded. We could've just offered him an interior-design job in L.A. And his sons could've helped out in the business - their taste was even glitzier than pop's.
If anything could be gilded, fitted with colored glass, encased in crystal or tarted up with marble, Saddam went all atwitter. From the dreadful architecture to the Beverly-Hillbillies-from-Arabia lust for more and more plush velvet, Monsieur Hussein's atelier achieved levels of bad taste that surpassed any casino Donald Trump ever built.
Oh, and attention apologists for the Ba'athist regime: Some of the most extravagant palaces were built with oil-for-food program funds.
Seriously, the bingo-tent splendor of all that Saddam built and furnished literally summed up to a crime against humanity. While his people lived in ponds of sewage without drinking water, jobs or decent nutrition, while he gassed his own citizens or sent them off to die in wars of aggression, Saddam constructed gimcrack monuments to himself that drained the treasury.
And the buildings began to rot the moment they were declared finished.
Those who believe that Saddam should have been left alone to torment his own people don't want to hear about mass graves or torture cells (unless the discoveries can be blamed, however dishonestly, on America). Nor will they discuss the million and a half dead Saddam left behind in his failed wars of conquest and his internal purges. But maybe we could organize a tour that would take them to a few of Saddam's palaces, then to see the squalor in which most Iraqis live.
Afterward, they can tell us all how much better off Iraq was before we came.
Ellie
By RALPH PETERS
September 2, 2007 -- IT was late and grease-sweat hot in Fallujah. In a sand bagged, black-hole-of-Calcutta room, a half-dozen off-duty Marines sat shirtless in the swelter, crowded around a laptop.
They were watching the film "Black Snake Moan." Chained to a bed, a nearly naked Christina Ricci writhed as if suffering from the worst case of pinworms in history. Whatever the film's cinematic shortcomings, it was a hit with the Marines, who debated in richly expressive language whether it would be wise to date such a girl, given the potential downsides.
Embedded with our troops in Iraq, you find that some of the I'll-remember-this moments aren't grand enough to merit their own column and don't quite fit into any bigger stories. But those vignettes capture a human reality that's often lost in the politicized noise or the headline-drama of war. And too many of us forget that our troops - as well as the Iraqis - are, above all, human.
So here are a few snapshots of Iraq:
* Scrawny Iraqi police recruits chattering like excited birds as they marveled at the tattoos on a Marine weightlifter's torso: A flesh-and-blood metaphor for muscular, over-the-top America and our relationship with malnourished, bewildered Iraq.
* Leaning on the rail along a moonlit arcade in Fallujah, analyzing Civil War campaigns and commanders with 1st Sgt. Howard Kraemer. Speaking earnestly of a bygone conflict in the midst of the present one, we forgot the troubles of the day and the slap-down heat that lingered into the night as we debated Grant's decisions in Virginia and Lee's hushed-up deficiencies.
We were standing in Iraq's Atlanta, discussing Sherman. For one of those lightning instants when you grasp something beyond words, we both felt the timelessness of war and soldiering.
* Sitting in a plywood-partition office in a combat outpost with an American captain and an Iraqi Provincial Security Forces general as the Iraqi "complied" with the captain's request for three bids from local firms to deliver gravel to a dirt motor pool before the rains began.
Eager to close a deal that wouldn't do his own retirement savings any harm, the general laid down three pieces of paper. They were identical, except that one specified $800 per truckload, a second $750 and a third $700.
It was obvious that the bids were all from the same source and that the drill was simply to do things in the peculiar way Americans expected. And when the captain, alert to the legal ramifications, declined to commit the funds, the general began a one-sided bout of haggling, offering additional services at no extra cost. The mutual incomprehension was almost total.
* An old sheik, who had done nicely under Saddam, reminiscing about the days of no-nonsense law and order when he could drive safely on the spur of the moment from Fallujah to Basra. As the polite old man continued telling stories, it became heartbreakingly obvious that much of the post-liberation fighting between Iraqis and Americans had been the result of confounded expectations on both sides.
Living so long under Saddam - and previous stern regimes - men such as the sheik simply couldn't comprehend our rules or assumptions or philosophy, nor did we grasp the accommodations Iraqis had made with the concept of "laws."
We began by shouting past each other, and ended by shooting at each other.
We asked the Iraqis to change not only a government, but their civilization. Fearful, they only fled deeper into that civilization.
* A former Iraqi air force general and I found we had a common language: Russian. He'd trained to fly in the old Soviet Union. What did he miss from the old days? Power? Glory?
He just missed flying. "I feel that the air I breathe and the water I drink has been taken away."
* Billeted in a musty room with five bunk beds in one of Saddam's lesser palaces, I had the greatest strategic insight of my life: Saddam was so cruel because he was frustrated - he didn't really want to be a dictator, but yearned to be an interior decorator specializing in Appalachian trailer-park clients who win the lottery.
Saddam was trapped by history into his strongman role, but he was born to host a home-makeover TV show, perhaps "A Tyrant's Eye for the Tortured Guy."
Memories of other visits to Saddamite palaces over the years reinforced the insight - I only wish I'd had it before we invaded. We could've just offered him an interior-design job in L.A. And his sons could've helped out in the business - their taste was even glitzier than pop's.
If anything could be gilded, fitted with colored glass, encased in crystal or tarted up with marble, Saddam went all atwitter. From the dreadful architecture to the Beverly-Hillbillies-from-Arabia lust for more and more plush velvet, Monsieur Hussein's atelier achieved levels of bad taste that surpassed any casino Donald Trump ever built.
Oh, and attention apologists for the Ba'athist regime: Some of the most extravagant palaces were built with oil-for-food program funds.
Seriously, the bingo-tent splendor of all that Saddam built and furnished literally summed up to a crime against humanity. While his people lived in ponds of sewage without drinking water, jobs or decent nutrition, while he gassed his own citizens or sent them off to die in wars of aggression, Saddam constructed gimcrack monuments to himself that drained the treasury.
And the buildings began to rot the moment they were declared finished.
Those who believe that Saddam should have been left alone to torment his own people don't want to hear about mass graves or torture cells (unless the discoveries can be blamed, however dishonestly, on America). Nor will they discuss the million and a half dead Saddam left behind in his failed wars of conquest and his internal purges. But maybe we could organize a tour that would take them to a few of Saddam's palaces, then to see the squalor in which most Iraqis live.
Afterward, they can tell us all how much better off Iraq was before we came.
Ellie