Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

There was a time—ever so briefly—when Pat Tillman dominated the news cycle. Actually, there were two times: one, when the football semi-star joined the military and become a posterboy for patriotism and self-sacrifice, and another when he died via friendly fire, becoming yet another It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World story in a long string of nonsensical happenings on the other side of the world.

I can’t honestly say that I picked up Where Men Win Glory because of Pat Tillman; football, like most sports, is a cipher to me, and I’d read enough from news reports to understand the gist of the story: an NFL star joins the Army out of sheer, unadulterated love for America and is accidentally shot to death by his own side in Afghanistan. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be much to the story except that our side managed to fuck up, and fuck up with someone that the viewing public will recognize.

My real reason for reading Where Men Win Glory is that I’m a fan of Jon Krakauer: previously, I’ve read Under the Banner of Heaven, Into the Wild, and Into Thin Air, all of which I enjoyed (especially the first). This latest work is in some ways a bit of a different beast for Krakauer—it’s his first real biography since his debut Into the Wild, but it’s classic Krakauer territory: find a person whose decisions appear to defy our cultural common sense, and whose life ultimately ends in tragedy. Pat Tillman fits this bill precisely.

The character of Pat Tillman is in some ways archetypical, and in some ways odd and confounding. Krakauer begins at the beginning, so to speak, illustrating Tillman with vignettes of his formative years. The interesting bits begin in his high school years, most notably his run-in with the law when he got involved in a brawl outside a pizza pub, which for a time threatened his football scholarship to Arizona State University. Tillman’s college and early pro years comprise the second-largest portion of the book, short of his time in the army, and it’s fodder for football fans: Krakauer even devotes a chapter to a blow-by-blow of the Rose Bowl game that Tillman’s team just barely lost. Reader who don’t care for sports—such as me—may find some of this enthusiasm for athletics rather dull, but Krakauer does a fairly good job of making everything that happens to Tillman, whether within a football game or in his private life, somehow illustrative of his character, which is the author’s ultimate goal, anyway.

The book opens with a detailed account of the debacle that lead to Tillman’s death: it is, therefore, not a surprise to readers, nor should it be. Tillman’s death by friendly fire was big news, and it’s a foregone conclusion to anyone reading the book. By the time Tillman is a professional player for the Arizona Cardinals, and witnesses the events of 9/11 (which will eventually prompt his enlistment in the Army Rangers), we’ve almost forgotten that he is already dead—for better or worse, we are well-acquainted with him. To Krakauer’s credit, the picture of Tillman that he paints is so atypical of the usual fawning biography that I’m almost taken aback: Tillman isn’t a stock character: he is something of an oddity, with likable qualities, idiosyncrasies, and damnably strange behaviors.

This, of course, presents the question that burns in everyone’s mind: what the hell was Tillman thinking? More accurately, do we consider Tillman brave or stupid? We may laud and applaud the man to the skies for his self-sacrifice, but as Krakauer takes care to point out, Tillman left behind a grieving family and young wife, never mind the flourishing career. There are more parties to consider in such a sacrifice, after all; Tillman’s sacrifice, therefore, asked all of them to sacrifice, whether or not they wanted to. His formative experiences inculcated in the long-haired footballer an intense sense of justice, the application of which can be both commendable and foolhardy: great umbrage, once taken, can lead to reckless behavior, whether justified or not.

The most interesting part of the book to me was the tale that Krakauer told in parallel to that of Tillman, namely the history of Afghanistan, and the long string of feuding warlords that fought for control of the country—the origins of the Taliban, and of Al Qaeda, and why the country has become the war-torn hellhole that it is. Since all we ever hear about today is Iraq, Afghanistan remains something of a black box to modern readers. Even I, who consider myself relatively well-informed, learned a considerable amount about Afghanistan.

Tillman kept a journal beginning in his college years, and as the book progresses, Krakauer relies more and more on long, block-level quotes directly from the journal. There is nothing, of course, more illustrative of a man’s innermost thoughts than his own journal, but I find this reliance a little cheap on Krakauer’s part: the reason we read Krakauer is for his ability to synthesize his sources into a compelling story, not so we can regurgitate his sources verbatim. In fact, the most of the book lacks Krakauer’s usual editorializing; whereas Into the Wild baldly asked and then attempted to answer the question “Why in the hell would Chris McCandless ever do what he did?” I found Where Men Win Glory seemed to shy away from questioning Tillman himself, perhaps out of fear that it would make Krakauer sound crass and unpatriotic. When the author does eventually venture into the editorial, it was focused entirely on the actions of the army and government in the period following Tillman’s death from friendly fire. Whether conspiracy or idiocy or knee-jerk self-preservation, any one of a number of parties committed errors and possibly crimes in covering up the accidental nature of Tillman’s death, destroying evidence in stark disobedience of military procedure. At this point, unfortunately, Krakauer starts to sound a little like Greg Palast, and it becomes obvious that he dislikes the Bush administration and everything associated with it. It’s not that I don’t necessarily agree with him, but the mudslinging seems peripheral to the story, and ultimately distracting.

By the end, the reader feels disgusting with the whole government and military complex, and there’s been a potent sense of cynicism engendered in us that stands in stark contrast to the bright-eyed patriotism that sent Tillman into the Army in the first place. Can Tillman’s death by his own side serve as an extended metaphor for the armed conflict’s self-destructive nature…. how war eventually consumes the fervor that fuels it? Maybe. Kraukauer’s message is somewhat mixed by the end, as though he lost the thread a bit.

Krakauer could have written a whole book about the history of Afghanistan: this, I think, was the strongest part of the book, and this doesn’t surprise me; just like I preferred Under the Banner of Heaven to Into the Wild, so I prefer his history of Afghanistan to his chronicling of Pat Tillman. This, I realize, is largely a product of my own bias and less a matter of Krakauer’s writing ability. I feel that his journalistic talent tends to be wasted when he spends time acting as an apologist for people doing strange things (especially strange things that ultimately hurt everyone they love). Where Men Win Glory is, therefore, a representative mix of what the best and worst of Krakauer’s Å“uvre. Depending on your own reactions to Krakauer’s subjects, you may like the book less or more. While I would recommend Under the Banner of Heaven before I recommend Where Men Win Glory, it’s still a worthwhile piece of work.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

It occurred to me recent that I’ve read and reviewed Al Franken’s 2005 The Truth (With Jokes) three times since the start of this meme (1, 2, 3), but never its predecessor, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which is arguably an even better book.

Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly hates Media Matters, a website/organization which mostly just documents lies and distortions of conservatives. It’s important to note that there are really no polemics or extended rants of the Ann Coulter variety—the site is, by and large, either transcripts or video clips of the TV appearance/radio show/etc. in question, usually followed by evidence to the contrary. Given O’Reilly’s penchant for dissembling on-air, it is little wonder that he hates them so much.

I tell you this story largely because Franken’s tack in Lies… is along the same lines. Published in 2003, the book takes some shots at the Bush presidency and its major players, but at least half the book is dedicated to notable conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bernard Goldberg. Usually, his critiques come in the form of examples from their appearances or written works which contain a lie or distortion, followed either by a factual rebuttal, or—even better—a separate instance from the same pundit where they claimed something entirely different. There is an especially good story about “Billo.”

At the very least, Franken is an excellent researcher and compelling debater. On the other hand, there are some cases in which the book falls flat. First, while it’s usually clear when Franken is joking, his tendency to lurch back and forth between the two is both distracting and detracting—sometimes, he blurs the line with a self-described “kidding on the square,” which means joking, but really meaning it. Perhaps Franken simply jokes so much so that the book doesn’t come off as 400+ pages of froth-flecked attacks. He is vicious and thorough, and didn’t want it to turn into a screed, easy though it would have been. Of course, the unmentioned side effect is it gives Franken a lot of wiggle room.

While Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot was Franken’s first major foray in punditry, I feel as though it was Lies… which really propelled him to pseudo-stardom in this regard. It was after this that he hit the radio scene with the dubious Air America Radio and followed up with another successful book and (looking successful now) Senate campaign in Minnesota. It’s doubtful that you’ll be reading Lies… if you are already left-leaning. It’s not so much a scholarly critique as it is a scathing, comedic, and surprisingly accurate lambasting of conservative pundits and conservatism generally. So, in many respects, it’s preaching to the choir here. Still, it’s an enjoyable book and I recommend it.

The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken

I read this book once in 2005 when it came out, and then again in 2006.

As this is my third time reading The Truth (With Jokes) since this meme began, it holds a record (as of now) as my most frequently-read book in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme. Why read it a third time? Well, if it wasn’t obvious enough, the recent election had something to do with it. I remembered Franken’s last chapter, modeled as a letter to his eventual grandchildren, about the 2008 election (the book was written in 2005) and how it represented a tipping point in the way the United States did business—read: the conservatives were out, the liberals were in, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Let me set the record straight: while an Obama supporter, I’d like to think that I’m not the sort of starry-eyed fool who thinks that he will sweep into office on swath of pixie dust and happy thoughts and magically right every wrong, effectively excise racism from our national collective conscience, and possibly heal leprosy. At the same time, I can’t help but feel frustrated with 8 years of increasingly cynical government by the right, which is about as two-faced on the national level as I think it’s possible for a political movement to be in the context of a valid democracy; so I’m happy for the change, and feel sprightly and excited in spite of myself. It is from this motivation that I picked up The Truth (With Jokes) again. Also, Franken’s being in the news with respect to the extraordinarily-close Senate race in Minnesota did much to rekindle my interest.

Here’s the thing you have to remember about Franken: though he is a comedian by trade (I don’t find him all that funny, actually), reading one of his books is not like reading one of Bill Maher’s books, for instance, which is a lot of opining and jokes. Franken likes to couch a lot of snarky jabs in humorous paragraphs, yes, but he is in actuality a rather devastating political writer: his facts are generally rock-solid (even his detractors often note the quality of his research, though of course they generally don’t acknowledge the validity of his conclusions). As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, The Truth finds Franken a little more cynical and angry for the events of the 2004 election. All of the grassroots movements of 2003-2004 were not quite enough for a changing of the guard in January 2005, and Franken like most liberals suffered from a general malaise for much of that year—though not enough to keep him from writing this book. It’s very topical as a result, dealing largely with all the detritus littered in a ring around the explosion of the 2004 campaign. That, for instance, the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth were anything but is not surprisingly to me, since all of this was obvious in 2004, but it’s satisfying to watch Franken leave large ragged holes in so many of these ridiculous canards that conservatives like to trot out at election time—especially Karl Rove, Bush’s own personal Mephistopheles, who still manages to take the cake for below-the-belt blows.

In brief reprieves from the proximate timeline, Franken takes us on trips to the mid-90s, when Gingrich’s tidal wave of eager conservatives swept into the legislative branch and proceeded to bust Clinton’s balls for the next six years. Special attention is paid to Jack Abramoff (this before Abramoff was formally indicted in 2006, and some of his friends with him) and the Marianas Islands, a moral black eye on the conservatives prized free-market incubator.

Like MediaMatters (which Bill O’Reilly likes to characterize as a “smear” site), Franken’s most damning passages usually come in the form of the pairing of two quotes: one in which a conservative says something asinine, and then another where they deny that they ever said such a thing. At best, it proves a fundamental dishonesty on the part of politicians in general and conservatives in particular (or so the theory goes); but the regularity and obvious crassness with which the lying is done is enough to disgust you. In comparison to, say, Anne Coulter, whose noxious screeds consist mostly of excoriating liberals and intellectuals for holding differing opinions, Franken tends to focus less on simply slinging mud across an aisle and more on underlining blatant hypocrisy, opportunism, or political cynicism wherever he sees it (granted, usually on the right, as is the thesis of the book).

I still don’t get the whole Franken qua Comedian thing, since I so rarely find his writing funny as opposed to insightful and compelling; but I do enjoy his books, and admit to being more than a little sad that writing has taken a back seat to his Senate campaign in Minnesota. Though a little angrier and (if possible) a little more partisan, The Truth (With Jokes) is a good read, and a solid piece of political journalism.

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

I hadn’t even been aware that Al Gore had written a book; we all know him, of course, as the human klaxon for global warming, but he’s apparently been busy writing a book that’s not at all about climate change. The George W. Bush presidency has inspired not a few polemics, rivaled perhaps only by anti-Clinton screeds by hysterical conservatives during the 1990s, though with noticeably fewer conspiracy theories.

Initially, The Assault on Reason struck me as a sort of mourning for old-fashioned politics. Gore sounds a bit like an old fogey, declaring at one point that the precipitous decline of the print medium in favor of television has inevitably lead to a similar decline in the breadth and quality of the “informed citizenry.” His point here was that television is largely a one-way medium, but wouldn’t it be equally fair to say that print is as well? And doesn’t the internet to some degree change much of this? Gore touches on this point, but doesn’t go far enough with it, I think.

For a while, the book turns into a paean to the U.S. Government of social science textbooks, romanticizing (to a point approaching fellatio) the Founding Fathers and the democratic process, which Gore paints as if the entire bureaucracy was made of Jefferson Smiths prior to Nixon. So, some of it steers dangerously close (or into) starry-eyed flag-waving, which is all good and fine except that we all know it already. Or, at least, we should, though understandably Gore’s point is that many Americans seem to have forgotten the importance of the Bill of Rights (except the 2nd Amendment, which is vital for shooting at brown people).

From there, though, and for the greater part of the book, Gore turns his wrath at the Bush administration. Not to say that I don’t agree with many of his points, but it’s little more than a refresher course in George’s Constitution-shredding. And, of course, he’s preaching to the choir: conservatives won’t give Al the time of day when he talks about something as politically-neutral as climate change; they’re certainly not going to stand still and pay attention when he talks about Bush manhandling the judiciary, quashing decent, making up laws (signing statements, which was genuinely new to me), virtually codifying torture, and giving a big fat middle finger to the rest of the international community. This is old news, anyway.

Imagine an Al Franken book (Lies… or The Truth… With Jokes in particular). Now imagine it not at all humorous, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what The Assault on Reason is like. I can’t really fault it on technical merits, but it’s short on style and tends to lose steam quickly, and you’re left with a scathing criticism that approaches jingoism and repetition.

Bill of Wrongs by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose

When Molly Ivins passed away last year, I realized that I knew her only by a very vague name association (I’d seen her name on a couple of anti-Bush books) and the commentary she did for a documentary about purchasing (illegal) dildos in Texas: funny stuff, even if hearing steadfast liberalism with a Texas twang evoked not a little cognitive dissonance in me.

Ivins last book, published posthumously, is mostly a defense of the Bill of Rights, which she says is the only part of the Constitution that she believes in with religious zeal. Ivins has long been a proponent of civil rights, especially free speech, and a critic of the Bush administration in part due to its abuses of those civil rights, regardless of what Dick Cheney has to say. Bill of Wrongs deals largely with the first—

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

—and then with the middle three, which all kind of go together—

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

Ivins (and Dubose) focus the first half of the book on instances, generally, where a protester—usually someone wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt at a pro-Bush rally, is arrested and forcibly removed from the event, even though their peaceful protest is a protected first amendment right. Galling, too, is that these people are often never actually charged with anything, but instead released as soon as the event is over and the president and his security staff leave town. The Secret Service leave the arrest and detention up to whatever local police official is there—Ivins refers to he/she as a “Barney Fife”—so that it’s the town’s problem instead of the White House’s problem. In this way, the administration is crassly abusing the system to avoid public criticism.

The part having to do with searches and seizures, and the right of the accused, focused on cases involving citizens who found themselves in court, attempting to defend themselves, without ever even know what the charges against them were. Cases of illegal searches by the FBI, and other such abuses of power.

Ivins also, inexplicably, spends a good deal of time over the Intelligent Design case in Dover, Pennsylvania, although how that quite fits into federal abuse of civil rights, I’m not entirely sure.

My problem with the book is this: it essentially just describes a series of court cases, with an occasional snarky Ivins comment thrown in for good measure. Something about this tended to leave me cold, as it felt less like Ivins was arguing something and more like she was merely describing. I get that the crassness of these cases is supposed to lead to a self-evident argument, but I couldn’t help but feel as though there was something seriously lacking in the book. As though it was compiled from notes, rather than written with intent.

Several weeks ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associates maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read accounts like Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Iraq from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion, and its message seems congruent with the cries that have been heard since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. The most important “string”—to borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in the story of Iraq’s fall is the similarities to the ailing Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003, but it was many years in the making—arguably as far back as the original Gulf War. At that time, the first President Bush had foregone a removal of Hussein from power, noting that an invasion of Baghdad would have forced the United States into a position of control in Iraq, alienating Arab allies in the region and generally precipitating a disaster of every conceivable sort—a possibly “barren outcome” (Bush and Scowcroft 489). Bush Senior’s reaction to Iraq was a measured response that sought to establish a precedent for international aggression, a policy fresh from the lessons of the Cold War and Soviet belligerence. In fact, the United Nations was continuing this admittedly cautious policy in 2003, when it refused support for President George W. Bush’s intended invasion of Iraq, supposedly to relieve Hussein of his nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs, no evidence of which had been found at that time by Hans Blix and his team of U.N. weapons inspectors. To date, no evidence of recent illicit weapons programs have been found, save for a specious reference to “Weapons of Mass Destruction-related program activities” (George W. Bush 3), prompting a noisome revision of the United States’ motivations for invading Iraq, namely the removal of the tyrannical Hussein and the installation of democracy and its incumbent responsibilities of self-determination for the Iraqi people. These are perfectly valid reasons, but unacceptable ex posto facto. Journalist Christopher Hitchens cites with some vindication the story of Mahdi Obeidi, a senior scientist under Hussein, who was ordered in 1991 to bury in his backyard the components of a gas centrifuge, an item used for uranium enrichment (Love 464). Hitchens seems to view this as proof positive that Hussein intended to become a nuclear power, but in all fairness there are a number of other rogue states—North Korea being the primary example—with weapon programs considerably more advanced than the buried bits of a centrifuge, but this does not provide a pretext for unilateral invasion. If it did, the United States would have the ludicrous responsibility of toppling governments all across the Eastern hemisphere.

The soi-disant “coalition of the willing” announced by Colin Powell just before the invasion was a motley collection of member nations whose roll included social democracies such as Britain and Denmark as well as less illustrious states like Uzbekistan, which harbors a repressive dictator of its own. Notably absent were any important nations of the Middle East, even those which had sided with the United States in the first Gulf War. It need hardly be stated that the United States’ essentially unilateral aggression against Iraq only exacerbated the region’s antipathy for the former’s continued support of the “Zionist entity” of Israel, but in much of Europe as well, public opinion took on a veritable distaste for America—a nation which had, less than two years prior, the sympathy and support of the entire developed world (Schifferes 2-3).

The ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in their country was nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” (11) was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be, however: coalition forces were in some cases greeted with joy and gratitude (Hitchens, “How to Ruin” 2); in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation languished and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a malevolent despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy, civil war, and a devastated infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing violence was to the architects of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, [...] Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46). Except perhaps among the Baathist elite, there was no ambivalence about Saddam Hussein: on the subject of their dictator, most Iraqis could agree that he was a repressive, megalomaniacal tyrant with a brutish, iron-fisted regime reminiscent of the nadir of Stalinism. His tyranny, however, was the only thing holding the country together: no collective “Iraqi” identity graced the arbitrary boundaries set by the British in 1917; no religious harmony united the fiercely-opposed Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish communities.

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many respects a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam—his multi-billion-dollar expenditures for his war with Iran in the 1980s having largely bankrupted the nation—but also the United Nations and the United States by proxy, whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward; Hussein, though his government was more or less secular, had used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shi’ites and Sunnis (as well as the Kurds and the Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (Garrels 55). What little was imported into Iraq was the result of the United Nations “Oil for Food” program, which died a messy death in 2003 with the start of the invasion and charges of corruption, the truth and impact of which will vary depending on the source. All told, something approaching $65 billion worth of oil was sold in exchange for basic necessities like food; as much as $1.8 billion may have been lost in kickbacks and other schemes by Saddam (Langenkamp 1).

This legacy of corruption would continue even well into the Iraq War, but it would unfortunately be perpetrated by American companies serving as third-party contractors in the rebuilding process. As early as 2004, reports of mismanaged property, missing funds, and fiduciary misconduct were being leveled at contractors such as Halliburton and its business unit, Kellogg Brown & Root. Regardless of the implications of suspicious business connections (some of which were facile and others of which are the vagaries of American politics), the financial management of the U.N.-created “Development Fund” and the billions of tax dollars being funneled into reconstruction seemed a monument to inefficiency and waste (Miller 188-189). In the case of the much-maligned Halliburton, T. Christian Miller writes “The company delivered, but wasted a lot of money doing it” (82). Clearly, there seemed to be no coherent vision for Iraq’s future, nor any sort of comprehensive oversight of the literal warzone pursuant to Hussein’s involuntary abdication. None of the ensuing chaos mitigated the fears and suspicions of the war’s opponents, and the fact that the United States’ immediate priority in post-coup Iraq were the Oil Ministry fostered much distrust among already-ambivalent Iraqis (Garrels 202). Hitchens asserts that oil is, in fact, worth fighting over (“Fault Lines”), and his point is of course true in practical terms: the United States feared that retreating hostile forces would set fire to oil fields and detonate oil reserves, bruising the international market and introducing an enormous logistical problem as it did in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (Garrels 126). The lack of a simple good/evil binary in Iraq—despite the best efforts of certain ideologues to convince Americans otherwise—makes it impossible to successfully balance the necessities of realpolitik with the sort of public relations campaign that the region’s inherent anti-westernism would require of the occupying powers.

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s sudden and violent transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion: even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans, the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (Garrels 26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party soundbytes with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why was the United States not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes. Importantly, U.N. embargoes tended to hurt only the general populace of Iraq: for loyal Party members, money and comfort was still no issue: Garrels makes mention of dealerships selling expensive Mercedes which must only be patronized by oil barons and Baathist elites (53). “While this family [with whom Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

The American motivation for attack remains a problem that hasn’t been explained away by the President’s on-camera jingoism: he may have convinced a slim majority of Americans to support his politics, but the situation in Iraq has deteriorated in complete disregard of Bush’s high ideals. Whence, then, the supposition of America’s legitimacy as a liberating power, especially after half a century of careful political tiptoeing? Hitchens proposes four criteria by which a nation forfeits its sovereignty, submitting as well that Iraq met all four prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The first is invading sovereign neighbors, as was the case with Kuwait in the first Gulf War; the second is genocide, as was again the case with the state-ordered massacre of Kurdish villages; the third is the violation of nonproliferation treaties, which Iraq’s clandestine attempts at a nuclear program ostensibly indicate; the fourth and final is the state sponsorship of international “gangsterism,” which Iraq is supposed to have done in a variety of ways (“Fault Lines”). The problem with Hitchens’ assessment is that the sparse evidence for recent WMD research and manufacturing requires a rather great leap to assume an explicit violation of nonproliferation treaties; the fourth item, as well, is famously false insofar as the 9/11 Commission Report found no evident link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (334), though likely true in that Iraq was and still is a nesting ground for terrorism. The implicit problem, however, is that there are a great many countries in the region which abet “gangsterism”—for instance, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran—as well as one infamous example—Iran—which claims to have not a single, disassembled centrifuge but rather 3,000 fully functional ones (“Iran” 1).

Working under the assumption that Iraq was indeed culpable for all the requisite trespasses, and the United States was justified in its military action, however premeditated,—this is not necessarily a difficult stretch to make—cognizant lookers-on must still then question not the purported moral authority or practical necessity of invasion, but the relative insouciance with which it was executed. Garrels make a critical point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty but deep-rooted religious rivalries more at home in the Dark Ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern by the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate. Like the failed “Hearts and Minds” campaign in South Viet Nam during the 1960s and 70s, winning a foreign war has as much to do with popular appeal as it does with military strategy. It seems as though the more effectively the military does its job of rooting out the phantom of terrorism, the further Iraqis are estranged from the ostensible benevolence of the West. The very idea of popularity seems to have been a foregone conclusion inside of a year: Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek said, “The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but that’s not the point. Their fighting force is based on a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s gang of enforcers. [...] For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda victories every time Americans break their own codes of warfare” (35). With the spectre of Abu Ghraib still looming, the political and civil-rights limbo of Guantanamo Bay still festering, and the historic free elections deepening the cleft of religious and cultural divides with political power, it seems unlikely that comprehensive peace is an implausible goal under the current circumstances—so say Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s close friend and advisor, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor and noted Cold War historian. Fundamentally changing the odds in Iraq would require either a commitment of money and troops far beyond the pale of Americans’ current mood or a change of paradigm with regard to control of operations (A12).

Barring a semantic quarrel, it would be accurate to call the war in Iraq so far a “failure” insofar as it has not produced any of the desired dividends: lasting peace, stable oil, democratic influence, or efficacious disarmament. The only considerable goals which have been achieved are the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the implementation of divisive elections. Understandably, the great hope for the Middle East is not a short-term armistice, but rather a long-term process whereby the benefits of secularism, self-governance, and civil liberty will osmose through the Arabian peninsula; however, the approach to the War in Iraq, in all its various and sundry guises, critically misunderstood what was plain as vanilla to anyone familiar with the region. Garrels summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East: there is no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there, as the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though they are entirely clear to its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the War in Iraq has become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

Works Cited

• Bush, George, and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Bush, George W. “State of the Union.” Washington, D.C. 20 Jan. 2004. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html>.
• Cheney, Dick. Interview. Meet the Press. MSNBC. 14 Sep. 2006. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/>.
• Hitchens, Christopher. “How to Ruin an Occupation.” Slate 5 July 2005. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.slate.com/id/2121996>.
• —. Love, Poverty, and War. New York: Nation Books, 2004.
• —. “Fault Lines: Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine and The Nation.” Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund, Berkley. 8 Dec. 2002.
• “Iran ‘enters new nuclear phase’” BBC News 9 Apr. 2007. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6538957.stm>.
• Langenkamp, R. Dobie. “Putting Oil-for-Food in Perspective.” Jurist. 2 Nov. 2005. University of Pittsburgh School of Law. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2005/11/putting-oil-for-food-in-perspective.php>.
• Miller, T. Christian. Blood Money. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
• National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
• Nordland, Rob, and Babak Dehghanpisheh. “Rules of Engagement.” Newsweek 29 Nov. 2004: 34-36.
• Priest, Dana, and Robin Wright. “Scowcroft Skeptical Vote Will Stabilize Iraq.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2005: A12.
• Schifferes, Steve. “US names ‘coalition of the willing’” BBC News 18 Mar. 2003. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm>.

Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels

Mere days ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associating maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Baghdad from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and its message seems congruent with the cries that we’ve been hearing ever since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. I believe that most important “string”—if I may borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in Naked in Baghdad is the occasional reference to the author’s time in the Soviet Union during its declining years. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20^th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The tragic prescience of Garrels’ reporting is the most revealing aspect of her story: the ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in the country is nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that we would be “greeted as liberators,” was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be: U.S. Soldiers were in some cases greeted with some joy and gratitude; in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation stretched on and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy and a crumbled infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing civil war was to the designers of Operation: Enduring Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, he continues in his very broken English, Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46).

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many cases a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam, for his multi-billion-dollar expenditures on his war with Iran in the 1980s, but also the U.S./U.N., whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward, and Hussein, though his government is more or less secular, has used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shiites and Sunnis (and Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (55).

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion—even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans—the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party lines with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why the U.S. not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes1. “While this family [with which Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

Garrels’ book, when read in 2007, is an exercise in dramatic irony. Her prescient observations, mere likelihoods at the time of writing, are to modern readers foreshadowing of the most potent sort. History has proven most of Garrels’ conclusions correct, but it is all the more foreboding that it has done so: her point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, is that there are shades of Iraq to be teased from so many lessons learned in the past, and that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty religious rivalries more at home in the dark ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern from the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate.

Garrels herself summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East. There’s no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there: the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though it is entirely clear its its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the war in Iraq is become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

When I’m passed an e-mail that is obviously false, my usual reaction is to reply with a link to Snopes: the source is trustworthy enough that the sender believes it, if somewhat resentfully.

When I’m passed National Review, my tendency is to simply ignore them, as stuff from that magazine isn’t particularly opprobrious, but—in my estimation—still wrong.

However, I can’t resist tearing this latest one to pieces. It comes from Investors Business Daily, which seems to me like a less prestigious version of the Wall Street Journal, replete with the conservative ideologues manning the editorial page. But this particular article reads like some awful tripe from Town Hall—it’s that bad.

War On Terror: The party of John Murtha shamelessly seeks to defund and defeat U.S. troops on the battlefield and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Congress the terrorists wanted is doing their bidding.

Really? Are we still dancing with this strawman? I think it should be obvious that it’s not just Democrats calling for troop withdrawal anymore. Everybody wants to get out of there—everybody except Bush. Bush who wants to cut social welfare programs while giving that money to the nation’s billionaires. Bush, the fearless leader who might squander more than a trillion dollars for this nonsense.

Notice how quickly this author (whoever it may be) trots out with the “Terrorists like Democrats” canard that Karl Rove mastered in 2004. He’s not done with it, either.

Now it’s the House of Representatives’ turn, led by Rep. John Murtha, who believes the fine young men and women we send to defeat terror and our sworn enemies are cold-blooded killers.

Yes, like that other traitor, John Kerry, Murtha—like all Democratic veterans—harbor a deep-seated loathing for the men and women of the armed services, which is why they insult and undercut them as much as humanly possible. In fact, I heard that Murtha eats veterans’ babies.

Murtha plans to stop the Iraq War by placing four conditions on combat funds through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The Pentagon would have to certify that troops being sent to Iraq are “fully combat ready” with training and equipment, troops must have at least one year at home between combat deployments, combat deployments cannot be longer than a year, and extending tours of duty would be prohibited.

“We’re trying to force a redeployment not by taking money away, (but) by redirecting money,” explained Murtha.

Further evidence that Murtha hates our troops: he’s insisting that we can’t keep sending them there unless they’re equipped and trained, and we can’t pull any contractual shenanigans by keeping them there past their original tour of duty. Has the man no shame?

As we’ve noted on several occasions, Democratic talk of “redeployment” has encouraged terrorist groups around the world.

Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said before the 2006 vote: “Americans should vote Democratic,” adding that “it is time the American people support those who want to take them out of the Iraqi mud.” The statement could have come from Murtha, Kerry, Hillary or any number of Democrats.

We find it scary that the Democratic and terrorist game plans are indistinguishable.

The rhetoric gets thicker. You’ll notice that this author goes beyond the usual “Terrorists like Democrats” canard insinuating that Democrats are Terrorists. Notice also that he or she does this by turning “Getting the hell out of the Middle East” as a “terrorist game plan.” Might I point out that nobody wanted us to be there in the first place, including us? And might I also point out the countless polls and studies indicating that our presence in Iraq has actually worsened Islamic terrorism rather than mitigating it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]?

As for the story of Jihad Jaara: all you need to know is that this quote came from Aaron Klein, a Bureau Chief for WorldNetDaily, a far-right rag with as much journalistic integrity as FNC. Moreover, the quote is a 2006 recasting of scurrilous 2004 chain e-mail which claimed that Osama bin Laden wanted John Kerry to win the election. Take from that what you will.

You can’t throw a stone without hitting a conservative who still insists that everything that Democrats or anti-war voters do emboldens our enemies. I think it’s clear at this point that the only thing emboldening our enemies is our presence in the Middle East. If we had a “set” enemy, like Nazi Germany, for instance, or some kind of established nation-state, then we wouldn’t be having this problem. But our “enemy” is an amorphous concept spread throughout the Middle East, and the fact is that every day we stay in Iraq, that concept grows in number.

Clinton would leave us with an Iraq as the new base camp for terror, replacing Afghanistan under the Taliban. She has already warned the Bush administration that it must come to the Democratic majority in Congress for permission to deal with an Iran that is providing high-tech explosives to kill American soldiers and developing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.

Iraq, a new base camp for terror? As opposed to right now, when it’s a lovely, manicured garden of Democracy-with-a-capital-D?

I agree that Iran is in all likelihood a threat—at least, its entrenched, fundamentalist leadership is. Good thing we nipped that in the bud, hunh? Oh, wait…

It’s not that the Democrats think we’re losing or that the war is unwinnable. They simply don’t want to win it.

OK, I’ll admit it: they discovered our secret. The entire Democratic party is a secret cabal of terrorists who want America to lose its military engagements. And then we all want to have gay sex and abortions for fun, because we also like to chase people around with butt plugs and coathangers—you know, just for kicks.

Neville Chamberlain’s naivete may have helped bring on World War II, but at least he supported his country when war began. Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and France’s Vichy government under Marshal Petain may have collaborated with the Nazi enemy, but after their countries’ defeats, not before.

We’d have to go back to Benedict Arnold to find Americans as eager as Murtha & Co. to see an American defeat on the battlefield.

It took a bit, but Godwin’s Law has been fulfilled—the author has finally compared Democrats to Nazis (or Nazi collaborators). You’ll notice the deliberate conflation between withdrawal and defeat. In fact, I do believe it was Bush who said “Mission Accomplished.” So if our job in Iraq isn’t done, when will it be done? At what magical point will our continued presence change the simmering resentment Arabia, like a light switch, into one that causes the population to drop their AKs and start bombarding us with flowers and kisses? Oh, can we bring the troops home then?

A special note about the article’s “poll” data:

You may have noticed that the article attempts to confute “common wisdom” by insisting that not only do a majority of Americans think that winning the War in Iraq is important, but also that a majority think that we can. Also that about 30% more Republicans than Democrats feel this way. But if look at the bottom of their cute little graphic, you’ll notice that it’s a poll of only 925 people, and it’s a “IBD/TIPP” poll. TIPP is a legitimate, if unknown, polling service (they also work with the Christian Science Monitor, which I respect), but IBD is, of course, the extremely biased creator of this editorial. Since they offer no other clues as to their methodology, one can only assume that they polled their (925) readers and attempted to pass that off as a representative poll of “most Americans.”