by Carl Hiaasen
According to recent intelligence chatter, both Syria and Iran “really hate our guts.” Radical elements within those regimes would snap up Saddam’s weapons technology faster than you can say “Hans Blix.”
As you’re probably aware, American forces did discover two mobile biowarfare laboratories abandoned in Iraq. We know they’re biowarfare laboratories because they resemble the pinlike shapes on those grainy satellite photos that Secretary of State Powell showed to the United Nations—and Secretary Powell is a righteous stand-up guy.
Frankly, I was a little disappointed that no traces of actual bio-crud were found in the mobile labs, which evidently had been scrubbed clean with the Iraqi equivalent of extra-strength Comet. But you should have no doubt, my fellow Americans, as to the sinister purpose and intent of those facilities. Nor should you doubt our resolve to track down Saddam’s hidden arsenal of mass destruction no matter where the trail leads us, even to Iran.
Which, according to our most recent intelligence, is four times larger than California. So please don’t get your hopes too high.
November 30, 2003
Iraq Becomes Operation Sitting Duck
A few days ago, two American soldiers in Iraq were shot, dragged from a truck, and viciously beaten with concrete blocks. Their bodies were left on a dusty street in Mosul, a city once considered one of the safest for U.S. forces.
The murder and mutilation were carried out not by hardened operatives of Al Qaeda but by a gang of Iraqi teenagers, the very generation for whom we’ve been battling to “liberate” the country.
For any civilians to act so barbarously shows a depth of hatred that is chilling. As the months drag on and the flag-draped coffins of fallen Americans keep arriving at Dover Air Force Base, the mission in Iraq makes less sense than ever. What are we doing there? Who are we fighting? How do we get out? The only question that now seems hollow is why we ever invaded in the first place.
The search for the phantom weapons of mass destruction has been reduced to a nightly punch line in Jay Leno’s monologue. No nukes, no anthrax, and no nerve gas have been found; nothing to justify President Bush’s prewar declaration that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to global security.
So far, the most dangerous weapons uncovered are decidedly low-tech—pistols, rifles, homemade bombs, land mines, and RPGs fired from donkey-drawn wagons. Unfortunately, they’re doing a bang-up job of maiming and killing Americans. The atmosphere in Iraq remains so perilous that on Thanksgiving Day, Bush had to sneak into Baghdad on a darkened Air Force One.
Whether the war was launched on false pretenses or merely faulty intelligence will be argued endlessly. The grim fact is that we’re there now, and we’re stuck.
In Afghanistan, the mission was so clear. We were responding to a brazen attack against Americans on American soil. We knew who did it and where they were hiding. The international community was virtually united behind us.
Iraq is another story. Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant, but not even the White House claims that he played a direct role in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The hijackers themselves weren’t Iraqis, nor were those who planned the crime. The man who approved it, Osama bin Laden, was known to detest Saddam. Yet here we are, mired in Iraq, our troops getting picked off by snipers, sappers, and roadside rocket jockeys. Call it Operation Sitting Duck.
The hawks in the administration gripe that the media is focusing only on the bad news out of Baghdad, but where’s the good news?
Last week, U.S. Col. William Darley told reporters that attacks by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. forces had declined from a high of 40 per day in mid-November to about 30 per day now. It hardly makes you want to pop the champagne, knowing that our troops are coming under fire more often than once an hour.
This holiday weekend concludes the bloodiest month for U.S. forces since the so-called end of major combat. More than 60 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire in November. As of Thanksgiving Day, a total of 183 had died since the president triumphantly jet-landed on that aircraft carrier May 1.
Technically, though, the White House was correct. Major combat in the conventional sense ended in Iraq. These days our soldiers are dying by ambush and assassination.
Despite somewhat muted media coverage—Michael Jackson’s arrest received more attention than the GI murders in Mosul—polls show that the war is increasingly a political liability for the White House. Efforts are accelerating to put a new Iraqi government in place.
Bringing the troops home, however, will be a long time in coming. As long as Saddam Hussein remains at large, Bush will keep a sizable fighting force on the ground. His insistence that occupying Iraq is central to the war on terrorism grows more preposterous by the day. Saddam has disappeared, but the much larger evil of Al Qaeda has been lethally busy in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, bin Laden himself is still alive and making dire threats. He’s certainly not in Iraq, and nothing that happens in Iraq will bring us closer to catching him.
The grisly scene in Mosul last week recalled that infamous horror in Mogadishu a decade ago, when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down and the mangled remains of U.S. servicemen were dragged through the streets by a celebratory mob.
It was a demoralizing episode for this country, but at least the soldiers in Somalia went down fighting. In Iraq the enemy is often unseen, indistinguishable from friendly civilians, and the shots and grenades come out of nowhere.
Troops who were trained to wage war are now courageously trying to wage peace. In such a role, they must be visible and ubiquitous in a land where they aren’t universally welcome.
The results have been deadly, though not unanticipated. The question for Bush is how long before the American people decide that the best exit plan is to elect a president with an exit plan.
February 22, 2004
Iraq War Is Boon for Halliburton
McDonald’s sells Happy Meals. Halliburton Co. sells invisible ones.
The mammoth defense firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney has suspended outstanding food bills of $174.5 million until it can resolve an embarrassing dispute with the Pentagon. According to military officials, Halliburton invoiced the government for four million phantom meals that were never served to U.S. troops in Kuwait.
A Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, has the contract to feed all American service personnel in the war zone. Soldiers eat lots of food, and Halliburton has been making lots of money. Too much money, according to the army.
Earlier this month, Halliburton agreed to repay the U.S. government about $27.4 million that it had overbilled for meals at five military bases in Iraq and Kuwait. Auditors are currently reviewing the records at 53 other dining installations operated by KBR. The company says it has done nothing wrong and “is a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars.”
Back when Halliburton was given such a large and lucrative role in U.S.-occupied Iraq—it also got the contract to repair and refit the oil fields—the Bush administration denied that it was handing out favors to the Texas-based conglomerate. Americans were assured that the selection of Halliburton had nothing to do with the Cheney connection, a line that nobody with an IQ over 75 believed.
Not surprisingly, the decision is now backfiring. First came allegations that the firm was overcharging for gasoline being shipped to Iraq, a matter now under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general. Then, in January, the company admitted that two of its employees had pocketed enormous bribes from a Kuwaiti subcontractor servicing U.S. troops. Halliburton promptly coughed up a $6.3 million reimbursement check.
Americans aren’t naive about war. They know it’s a highly expensive enterprise and a profitable one for defense contractors. Still, there will be little public tolerance for findings of price-gouging and overbilling by an outfit with ties to the vice president, who is nearly as invisible as Halliburton’s troop meals.
As the war in Iraq grows increasin
gly unpopular, the company’s windfall looks increasingly obscene. Democrats are already urging voters to connect the dots:
* In 2000, Cheney agrees to leave Halliburton and become George W. Bush’s running mate.
* Halliburton says goodbye to Cheney with a stupefying retirement package worth more than $20 million.
* When Bush decides to invade Iraq, Cheney’s old company gets the biggest chunk of the business.
The White House wants us to believe it’s all coincidence, and maybe it is. Maybe someday I’ll win the Daytona 500, too. In a golf cart.
The war has been a spectacular boon for Halliburton, which last year raked in $3.4 billion for its work in Iraq—about 20 percent of the company’s total revenue, according to Bloomberg News. Wall Street investors are jolly as well. The price of Halliburton stock has shot up about 61 percent since the invasion.
Those are grand statistics indeed, until you stack them up against the half-trillion-dollar deficit that the country is now stuck with, thanks in large part to this pointless war. Or the zero weapons of mass destruction that have been found. Or the 545 U.S. soldiers who have so bravely given their lives on Iraqi soil. Two more were killed Thursday, blown up by a coward’s bomb on a road near Khaldiyah, 50 miles west of Baghdad.
The night before, the U.S. base at Abu Ghraib prison was shelled for 20 solid minutes by unseen insurgents. Thirty-three mortars and five rockets were fired at our troops. Miraculously, none were killed.
Every day brings new attacks, and often a new bloodbath. The latest trend is suicide car bombers who target Iraqi police and civilians. Speaking of which, that’s one statistic nobody has nailed down—exactly how many thousands of Iraqi citizens have died since the bombs began to fall almost a year ago. Perhaps nobody in command knows for sure, or wants to.
Faced with gloomy polls, the Bush administration is eager to start withdrawing forces before the November election. It wouldn’t be the first time that a military exit strategy has been accelerated by political pressure. In the meantime, as U.S. diplomats and local religious leaders debate what kind of democracy the new Iraq should have, our troops will stay where they are—getting sniped at and bombed and rained with mortars.
Halliburton will get richer, even as it argues with the Pentagon over how many meals it’s actually serving to American units.
This week, sadly, there are at least two fewer soldiers on the food line.
June 20, 2004
Why We Went to War Awaits Honest Answer
It’s a good thing that Dick Cheney’s pacemaker doesn’t have a built-in polygraph.
The guy just can’t stick to the truth.
Last Monday he gave a speech in which he declared for the umpteenth time that Saddam Hussein had “long-established ties with Al Qaeda.” Two days later, the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 attacks reported precisely the opposite, shooting another hole in the Bush administration’s flimsy rationale for invading Iraq.
The White House has steadfastly claimed that Hussein maintained close and sympathetic connections with Al Qaeda operatives. Staff reports released last week by the commission say that no such ties—long-standing or otherwise—can be found. This isn’t good news for the White House, which has righteously touted the Iraqi invasion as a blow against a strategic Al Qaeda ally. The vice president was, and continues to be, the loudest peddler of this myth.
While President Bush has never publicly suggested that Hussein played a role in the September 11 plot, Cheney hasn’t discounted the idea. As recently as January, he contended there was no proof “one way or another” regarding an Iraqi connection to the suicide hijackings.
Yet the 9/11 panel had very little trouble reaching a conclusion. It found no “collaborative relationship” between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda and “no credible evidence” that Hussein was involved in the September 11 conspiracy. Moreover, the oft-cited April 2001 meeting between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer never occurred, according to the commission staff. Telephone records and other evidence positively locate Atta here in Florida at the time he was supposedly in Prague, conspiring with the Iraqi operative.
The 9/11 panel, which includes Democrats and Republicans, portrays Osama bin Laden as the main architect of the September 11 plot. Not a single e-mail, cell-phone call, or even a fruit basket was found to have passed personally from bin Laden to Hussein, either before or after attack. According to the commission, bin Laden did meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in 1994, but nothing came of it. The Al Qaeda leader is reported “to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded,” according to the commission staff.
In recent months, as the 9/11 panel’s investigation has unfolded, Bush himself has said little about the increasingly imaginary Hussein–Al Qaeda connection. Cheney, however, hasn’t eased up. Never one to let facts clutter a good speech, the vice president is pitching the same line today that he did in advance of the war. And no one pitched the war more enthusiastically—to Congress, to foreign leaders, to Bush himself. The vice president is a persuasive fellow, and lots of folks believed what he told them. Maybe he believed it himself.
Unfortunately, the reasons given for invading Iraq, the reasons eventually embraced and promoted by the president, have been exposed one after another as bunk.
Hussein’s nuclear program? Can’t seem to find one.
Banned biological weapons? Can’t find them, either.
Chemical stash? Ditto.
To all those never-minds, we now add one more. The theory of a sinister Hussein–bin Laden covenant has been officially discredited, leaving the Bush administration batting .000 on its prewar hype.
We weren’t just misled, we were duped.
Most Iraqis feel the same way. Fifteen months after the invasion, a paltry 2 percent of Iraqi citizens consider U.S. forces to be liberators. That’s according to a survey arranged by the Coalition Provisional Authority—our own guys.
Following last week’s disclosures, President Bush insisted there had been a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, though he offered no new details. He noted the current presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notorious Jordanian terrorist who has sought help from Al Qaeda.
As for Cheney, he refuses to back away from his previous claims, no matter how speculative or unproved. In a doomed effort to justify this messy and sapping war, the vice president is sticking to his original script.
So far, 832 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and many more will die in the long months ahead. Most Americans are eager for us to pull out, but how we got there is a question that still awaits a full and honest answer.
Don’t expect to hear one from Cheney.
May 15, 2005
Iraq’s Numbers, Bodies Keep Piling Up
The number is there. Hunt hard enough through the newspaper stories and you’ll find it.
Last week it surpassed 1,600. This week it will go higher.
You could write it on the blackboard in a hundred classrooms, and probably in 99 of them, nobody could tell you what it stood for.
Here’s the answer: As of Thursday, 1,609 was the number of American soldiers who died in Iraq since we invaded 26 months ago.
That works out to more than two soldiers killed every day, which in actuarial terms isn’t a huge toll when compared with other long wars. Unless it’s your son or daughter or wife or husband coming home in the coffins, in which case the number is devastating.
Americans haven’t completely lost interest in what’s happening to our troops in Iraq, but an inevitable numbness has set in as the casualty figures rise steadily. The tragic has become the routine. Lots more people could tell you the score of the Heat–Wizards play-off game or where the Dow Jones closed on Friday than could tell you how many soldiers died last week in roadside bombings.
They could tell you who got the most votes on American Idol. They could tell you how many times that “
runaway bride” from Atlanta has been busted for shoplifting. They could tell you who won the NASCAR race at Darlington and even the new Nextel Cup standings. That kind of stuff isn’t hard to find. Just park yourself in front of the TV or laptop and relax. It’s one big happy avalanche of entertainment.
Obviously, we in the media have gone numb, too. And let’s be honest—it’s much more fun to write about Paula Abdul than Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He is Iraq’s new prime minister, struggling to put together a cabinet to appease the various religious factions that have detested each other as long as anyone can remember.
The last few weeks have been a bloodbath, with upward of 400 Iraqi civilians and security forces murdered in car bombings and armed attacks. Fourteen American troops were killed between May 7 and May 12, some of them in a bold Marine offensive along the Syrian border. Currently, the insurgency is being led by members of the Sunni minority who are extremely unhappy about having to surrender their long-held political power to the Shiites and the Kurds.
Also at work is an active Al Qaeda cell that, according to our own intelligence analysts, did not exist in Iraq before we invaded. Because of the U.S. military presence, the country is now attracting assassins and suicidal zealots from all over the Muslim world.
As detached about Iraq as Americans seem to be, polls show that many still doubt our reasons for being there. Originally, the stated mission was to “disarm” Saddam Hussein, but even a presidential panel of experts now says there was nothing to disarm. Saddam hoarded no weapons of mass destruction and had no connection whatsoever to the 9/11 hijackings.
Thus, it became necessary to devise a new face-saving reason for invading Iraq. Today the White House says that U.S. troops are there to establish a beachhead for democracy in the Mideast—this, as Bush strolls hand in hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the world.