I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KURT WAGNER-Tiny Desk Concert #6 (October 8, 2008).

I have never been a big fan of Lambchop.  It’s just not my kind of music—a little too slow for me.  But I really enjoyed Kurt Wagner in this Tiny Desk performance.  His guitar playing I really beautiful (I loved how he hit the high note on Bob Dylan’s  “You’re a Big Girl Now.”  He plays three Lambchop songs and two covers.

Wagner is from Nashville, and he has an air of Southern propriety about him–apologizing for taking up everyone’s time at work.  He sounds great doing the Dylan song, which I suppose is no real surprise.  The first Lambchop song is a pretty ballad called “Slipped Dissolved and Loosed.”

He is a charming and funny guy, joking about a few things (like working in an office) and then discussing about one of his songs, “National Talk Like a Pirate Day” (which is not as funny as the title might suggest).  Another song is titled “Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King Jr.” (and Wagner waves a fan of MLK Jr. (from a funeral home-(?)) to start the song.

The final song is a Don Williams song called “I Believe in You.”  I’ve never heard of him (and neither had anyone else in the studio).  It’s a really enjoyable, sweet song, and there’s a funny moment when sirens go past and he comments that at least they are in tune.  I still don’t think I’ll be listening to a lot of Lambchop, but I really liked this Tiny Desk show.

[READ: October 8, 2013] “Improvised, Explosive, & Divisive”

Two years after writing about his trip to Vietnam, Bissell returned to another war zone.  This time going to Iraq to get embedded (I suppose that’s the technical term for what he did) with some Marines at Camp Taqaddum in Iraq (17 miles from Baghdad).  This was during the Iraq war (and the Bush presidency), after Mission Accomplished, when the military was searching for a strategy for what to do in the situation.

This article shows interviews with Marines and makes assessments about our then current plans (such as they were) for how to extricate ourselves from a seemingly hopeless situation.  After Mission Accomplished the war went from a “war” to “stability and support operations against an insurgent element” or what is called MOOTW (military operations other than war).  And Bissell acknowledges that it barely seems like any resembling war in Iraq where the soldiers are headquartered.  They cannot drink alcohol, have sex or view pornography (they are trying to remain respectful of their host country), but at the same time they play softball and go to the gym, wear Co-Ed Naked Camel Watching T-shirts and have a Baskin-Robbins ice cream stand.  Not to mention DVD, video game consoles and Coke for sale in the PX.

Some of the article is technical—a side of the fighting that most readers probably don’t know. Like that the troops must be fully protected (and the vehicles as well) just to travel the relatively short distance between camps.

But when he talks to the soldiers he gets a feeling from many of them that the strategy for Iraq is “what strategy” (although very few were actually willing to talk to him about it at all).  They’re not even sure that their training of the Iraqi army is working (most of the Iraqis don’t even know how to use the scope on their guns).

Bissell has done his research and refers to previous insurgencies and how important logistics are in any insurgency.

Bissell goes on a convoy with them to we see what a typical day is like—traveling trough the desert roads watching for IEDs (these low tech explosives have morphed over the years to vaguely more sophisticated dangers). They investigate Iraqi citizens looking for weapons and Bissell is able to watch remotely as a target missile kills four insurgents as they plant an IED.

During the course of the war the strategy has morphed from Bush’s “bring it on” attitude to a more nuanced one (through civil affairs missions), but it may be too late.  Those plans for strategy should have been well-developed before the war.  The Pentagon initially said that the type of conflict they were in was beside the point, even denigrating the insurgency as a not real threat.  Bissell says that many compare Iraq to Vietnam in terms of quagmire, but the real parallel is the war in the Philippines at the start of the 20^th century.  And the parallels are shocking:

President McKinley said that he got down on his knees and prayed to God for light and guidance and that God told him that they should “take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them” and he believed that if we left the war too early the Philippines would degenerate in to anarchy.  (Never mind that most of the country had already been Christianized). But at least the military has learned some restrained since the Philippines when an 8PM curfew was established and any one caught outside after 8PM was executed.  Executed!  And if an American solider was killed a random civilian was taken and executed in retaliation. (Remember these are people the army was trying to help).

Initially in Fallujah the attitude was, if an insurgent flees into civilian house, we would still blow it up, to teach civilians to not let the insurgents around.  Now, restraint is considered much more useful.

The other big difference was the reaction from the Senate after the war in the Philippines, with one Senator saying

What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and sentimentality? You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure.  You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives… You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit…  Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people…into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries cannot eradicate.

Perhaps the biggest surprise from Bissell’s article is how little value translators are given.  There are very few people who speak Arabic.  Those that are hired are paid less than the people who work at the food services commission.  And most soldiers feel that translators are unnecessary–guns do their talking for them.  And in the scene where the soldiers point their weapons at citizens trying to get them to put their hands up or at least sit down, the foolish pantomime is painful.

The article ends with some real, serious questions for the Pentagon. If our wars look to be of this insurgent kind (and this war certainly lasted along enough for it to at least be considered), why are we building more drone planes (which are useless against insurgents who can hide in tunnels) or missile defense (which will not stop a suitcase bomb) or worrying about laser blasts from space (seriously, a member of the Armed Services Committee who says “There are nations out there who are hostile to us, and they are in space.  They have such weapons as lasers, anti-satellite weapons and electromagnetic pulse weapons…”), of course none of these existed then nor do they now.  Bissell also wonders why we are so bad at insurgency warfare when our country was founded on it. The American Revolution was all about individuals fighting for their own land, not a well-mannered and uniformed army. Look how well we dug and in a what we got out of it.  So why don’t we reach back into those tactics to see what won the wars back then.

Victory is a hard word to define, which is why it so is  much easier just to leave soldiers there interrogating and shooting at the civilians they are there to protect.