Light a candle – Liberal Street Fighter
Bigger, Stronger Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths
By John Ward Anderson, Steve Fainaru and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 26, 2005; A01BAGHDAD, Oct. 25 — After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, more than half of all American fatalities are now being caused by powerful roadside bombs that blast fiery, lethal shrapnel into the cabins of armored vehicles, confronting every patrol with an unseen, menacing adversary that is accelerating the U.S. death toll.
U.S. military officials, analysts and militants themselves say insurgents have learned to adapt to U.S. defensive measures by using bigger, more sophisticated and better-concealed bombs known officially as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. They are sometimes made with multiple artillery shells and Iranian TNT, sometimes disguised as bricks, boosted with rocket propellant, and detonated by a cell phone or a garage door opener.
The bombs range from massive explosives capable of destroying five-ton vehicles to precision “shaped charges” that bore softball-size holes through thick armor, the main defense of troops in the field, and they are becoming a key factor in the fast-rising U.S. death toll.
It took about 18 months from the start of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to reach 1,000 U.S. deaths; it took less than 13 months to reach 1,000 more. A major reason for the surge, statistics show, is the insurgency’s embrace of IEDs, together with the military’s inability to detect them.
While the criminal Bush Administration repeats the blunders of the past, it seems an insurgency in Iraq is proving to be a veritable graduate school in the art of inflicting death by explosive. The death toll from IED’s is rising, both of “coalition” troops and Iraqi civilians and officials.
According to a former Iraqi army officer who lives in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi and is now a member of al Qaeda in Iraq, the group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, insurgents have advanced beyond the crude bombs they once used, such as dynamite or gunpowder mixed with nails and buried beside a road. Now, he said in an interview, militants have access to TNT from Iran that he said was about seven times stronger than the TNT available in Iraq. He said they were also using old Austrian missiles from the former Iraqi army and detonating them with electric wires, cell phones and other remote-control devices.
An Oct. 15 IED attack on a U.S. convoy in the village of Albu Faraj, just east of Ramadi, illustrated some of the new methods.
Haj Ali Eedan, 52, a farmer who watched the operation, said armed men planted a cylinder that looked like a hospital oxygen tank near a road, then moved it twice before finally hiding it in a pile of discarded nylon baskets. His son, Hussein, 30, said he thought the final site was selected for a reason other than that the cylinder would be well-hidden there.
“They were trying to find a solid place — like metal, iron, or concrete — to put the IED on,” he said. “This makes the explosion three times more powerful than burying it.”
The deadliest such attack came in August, when 14 Marines and an Iraqi civilian died in a single blast near Haditha, 125 miles northwest of Baghdad. The military later said insurgents had detonated a stack of three antitank rounds under an amphibious assault vehicle, the moderately armored personnel carrier used by Marines.
“We got better armor, they started getting better ordnance,” Col. Bob Chase, the operations chief for the 2nd Marine Division, based in Ramadi, said at the time.
The insurgents have hidden the bombs in gunny sacks to disguise them as part of the garbage that litters the streets of Kirkuk, soldiers said. They have embedded them in concrete blocks similar to those used as building materials in new Kurdish settlements. As the Americans adapt their tactics, so, too, do the insurgents.
On the night of their Baghdad patrol this week, a platoon from the Army’s 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division studied every pile of trash on the side of darkened streets for telltale wires and other signs of explosives.
Earlier in the war, “We had an enemy who we could see,” said Sgt. Brian Zamiska, 27, of Bentleyville, Pa., tapping the hood of a black Opel sedan as the patrol passed it. “We didn’t have to worry about looking at every cardboard box in the road or every car like this and wondering if it was going to blow up.”
His platoon mate, Lt. Lennie Fort, 30, of Clarksville, Tenn., said this style of warfare was frustrating.
“There’s no one to shoot back [at], no one to kill,” he said. “Honestly, it just gets us amped up to go out and get someone, but there’s never anyone to get.”
“Now they get a hose and they lay it across the road, and when you drive across it, it ignites the IED,” said Clinton, the Alpha Company sergeant in Kirkuk. “You know years ago, when you had service stations where you’d drive across the rubber hose and it would go, ‘ding, ding, ding’? Here you drive across a little hose and it sends water back into a little bottle with wires sitting there. When water goes back into the bottle, it connects wires, and off goes the IED. It’s just so simple and so stupid.”
Here in the states, politicians continue along this deadly track, refusing to learn the lessons of wars past. Despite growing public sentiment against the war, a war they started despite a sizable minority opposing it, a conflict blundered into on a oily slick of lies and greed and immorality. They continue a headlong and self-righteous insistance on the “legality” of torture, a policy that Vice President Cheney is still pressing:
VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
This nation, which once claimed to be a champion of human rights, which was once moving slowly forward, haltingly trying to correct its mistakes of the past, has a sizable minority on the right cheering on this monster and the President he serves. Frightened, ugly and venal, the United States is a criminal nation, violating international law and it’s own laws and Constitution (signed treaties have the full force of law in our system) in pursuit of blood and black gold.
Opposition has been muted by indifference on the part of our media, and cowardice on the part of the Democratic Party, a party seemingly “led” by a majority of foppish courtiers willing to ignore the rabble’s rising alarm in order to maintain their station.
A philosophical question: if a protest happens in the public square, and no television camera relays it, does it really happen?
Despite the corporate media doing its best Hellen Keller imitation, the protests DO go on, and this week promises to see an escalation as we surpass two thousand officially dead troops in Iraq:
I am in Washington, DC, now and along with a coalition of peace groups and local activists, we will be holding vigils at the White House for the rest of the week from 12 noon to 8 p.m.
Each day, we will be passing out black wrist bands, and we will have each person who picks one up write a KIA troops’ name and number on it. Each wrist band will also stand for 50 innocent Iraqis killed. Every day at 6 p.m., we will have a “die-in.” We will ask everyone who is present at 6 p.m. to lie down and represent a dead soldier. At that point, the park police will give us three warnings before they arrest us. We are not encouraging people to get arrested. That is a very personal decision. I am planning to not get up on the day after the 2,000th soldier is killed. I may be arrested. Then, when they let me out, I will go back and lie back down. We in America have let this criminal administration get away with murder for too long. Enough is enough. It’s time to start practicing non-violent civil disobedience ( C.D.) on a large scale.
On Tuesday the 25th, we will be fasting for the length of the vigil in solidarity with the hardships that Americans and Iraqis are enduring on a daily basis. We are asking America to fast in solidarity with us.
On Wednesday the 26th at 10:30 a.m., we will be going to Arlington Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then to the White House for our vigil.
On Thursday the 27th at 10:30 a.m., we will be delivering a wreath and signed sympathy cards to the Iraqi Embassy. We are asking people who come out to our vigil on the Lafayette Park side to bring sympathy cards. Then to the White House for our vigil.
On Friday the 28th at 10:30 a.m., we will be delivering flowers and get well wishes to Walter Reed Hospital, and we are asking people to bring get well cards to our vigil. Then off to the White House for our vigil.
Tomorrow I will be calling on President Bush to answer my original question: “What Noble Cause?” There is absolutely no noble cause. Our children and the Iraqi people are dying and suffering for no cause except for power and money-greedy criminals.
The numbers are staggering. More American soldiers have been KIA in the first 32 months of Iraq so far than in the first four years of Vietnam. This isn’t another Vietnam, people – this is worse.
We cannot allow the people who are running our country to keep on running it into the ground.
It is time to exercise our sacred duty as human beings.
Let’s get peacefully radical.
We and the Iraqis are currently on inverse learning curves. As we destroy cities, deliver death from above and fail to protect and provide basic services, more and more Iraqis, angered by the deaths and maimings of loved ones, will learn the arts of war. Some will fight. Some will fashion bombs. Some will offer support and encouragement for the insurgents. They are learning at a staggering pace, these people who have fought off invaders before, this sophisticated and educated people who’ve turned away Mongols and Brits are only going to get stronger. There is a long and strong and proud history there, a history demonstrating great cruelty and heart-breaking beauty. Sadly, we have created a cauldren where the fires of civil war will burn as elements of the country resist us and the others side with us.
Can we reverse our headlong plunge into barbaric ignorance? Will we stare into that hard black reflective wall cut into the Mall in DC and look at our past shining a bloody red light; will we allow it to illuminate our crimes before we commit too many more?
We’ve Been Here Before – Anna Quindlen
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tapering wall of black granite cut into the grass of Constitution Gardens. Maya Lin envisioned a scar when she designed it, a scar on this land, which is exactly right. Maybe someday his security detail could drive George W. Bush over to take a look. He’ll be able to see himself in the reflective surface.[…]
The Vietnam Memorial stands, in part, as a monument to blind incrementalism, to men who refused to stop, not because of wisdom but because of ego, because of the fear of looking weak. Not enough troops, not enough planning, no real understanding of the people or the power of the insurgency, dwindling public support. The war in Iraq is a disaster in the image and likeness of its predecessor.
Like Vietnam in some ways, yes, but in many ways much, much worse. We seem a harder and colder people now, two decades after Reagan’s “morning in America” dawned upon a age with a free market worshipped alongside a bloody and angry fundamentalist conception of God, a brutal new America where worth is counted only in dollars, and we have no time or soul left with room for compassion or justice.
Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic Party should take time off from their fund-raisers and visit the Vietnam Memorial, too. They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.
At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead. As I am writing this, the number of American soldiers killed is 1, 992. By the time you read it, it may have topped 2,000. Will I be writing these same things when the number is 3,000, 5,000, 10,000? If we are such a great nation, why are we utterly incapable of learning from our mistakes? America’s sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those whose own children are safe at home. Again.
Isn’t it past time we learned that this rightward tragectory into imperial martial expressions of brute explosive force and unconstrained self-interest is killing us, is killing our future, is killing our planet and making us more and more of a danger to the world around us? Isn’t it time we reversed our joyful expression of our childish, brutish national id and rejoined the civilized world?
When will we learn?
Postscript
Some perspectives on the carnage:
Enemy Body Counts Revived – U.S. Is Citing Tolls to Show Success in Iraq
Rising Civilian Toll Is the Iraq War’s Silent, Sinister Pulse