Wham, Bam, Thanks Saddam
Boo, Katherine
Wham, Bam, Thanks Saddam Sory for the mess we lqt behind by Katherine Boo The headless corpse of one of the [Iraqi] soldiers was on its back a short distance from the truck. Another body was...
...It is now clear that the president was committed to war as early as October...
...conquest in terms, not of the Middle East, but of ourselves-a national psychotherapeutic cure: “If the war in the Gulf ends the way it began-with a dazzling display of American technological superiority, individual grit, and, most unexpectedly for Saddam, national resolve-we will no longer speak of postVietnam America...
...General Richard Neal, February 9 Politicians, particularly, have had a hard time resisting the appeal of clean and easy wars...
...When we finally “won” it, the Gulf war had cost us perhaps $30 billion and 91 lives...
...And in that desire, they were remarkably alone...
...The environmental damage may never be reversed...
...As the carnage on the highway out of Kuwait furcourse, Bush did learn a lesson there, one that a year later helped propel us into the Gulf Military bullying gets results faster than wearisome diplomacy...
...To ascertain the profmilitary action, the cles...
...Yet as American troops suit up to become the world’s policemen, historical parallels should make us a little nervous...
...General Charles Homer, commander of the U.S...
...the U.S...
...Wham, Bam, Thanks Saddam Sory for the mess we lqt behind by Katherine Boo The headless corpse of one of the [Iraqi] soldiers was on its back a short distance from the truck...
...For if the history of war is written by the victor, so is the definition of winning...
...General Charles Homer, commander of the U.S...
...in Vietnam, we lost...
...How in the world, he demanded, could one combat “the united and apparently spontaneous action of several millions of people...
...The question is, what results...
...Could it be that this new war, like the old ones, suggests another meaning for the Greeks’ winged victory-something neither fleet nor transcendent...
...In December, the president who had touted sanctions a few months earlier suddenly declared that he had never believed they would work...
...Brig...
...Four months into the conflict, a stunned General Arthur MacArthur warned the White House that victory would be anything but easy...
...I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we’re never going to get into the body count business,” said Norman Schwarzkopf early on...
...General Richard Neal, February 9 Politicians, particularly, have had a hard time resisting the appeal of clean and easy wars...
...declared Vice 0 30 missing 0 9 prisoners of war * Includes 28 killed, 100 injured in Scud attack on Dhahran...
...At the canal I saw a company of [Israeli] tanks disappear in less than a minute,” wrote General Ariel Sharon later...
...Just after the luckless plaintiffs lost the first court battle, the war in the Gulf was over, the issue all but moot...
...And clean wars are the easiest sell-a truth Saddam Hussein himself understands...
...Virtually the same sound track played in Vietnam, where boys in pajamas somehow managed to kill 60,000 exquisitely armed American troops...
...In the wake of Vietnam, the courting of public support for American warfare has become a virtual religion-one that includes such odd rites as open letters from the president to campus newspapers, pleading just cause...
...1 guess we could probably [estimate Iraqi casualties] if we really tried hard, hut we don’t really have thut requirement...
...1 guess we could probably [estimate Iraqi casualties] if we really tried hard, hut we don’t really have thut requirement...
...Only rarely-as when an Iraqi conscript, while surrendering, recognized a Marine from his old Chicago neighborhood-did humanity seem to impinge...
...Fortunately, Bush’s agents in the military, press, and the White House had been doing the advance work for months, peddling victory at discount prices...
...Air Force in the Gulf and architect of Desert Storm, promised “a very efficient military campaign...
...So in August 1914, he waved his troops off at Berlin Station, promising they’d be home before the autumn leaves fell...
...Yet, in a way, no episode better signifies the distance we’ve come since Vietnam...
...President Quayle in December...
...That assessment, of course, doesn’t touch us...
...First we’ll cut off the Iraqi army, and then we’ll kill it...
...With this enthusiasm of the majority, the few that liked it not feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet...
...you could stock a dissertation with hapless folks like the Alabama congressman who in 1861 volunteered his handkerchief to mop up all the blood that would be spilled for Confederate independence...
...Consumers demanded a change...
...Nowhere are predictions of clean war more misleading than in what historians call “asymmetrical wars”: wars between Davids and Goliaths...
...But after the first few days of the Storm, you’d be forgiven for forgetting...
...The world could wait no longer...
...First we’ll cut off the Iraqi army, and then we’ll kill it...
...the Romans read the entrails of chickens...
...A few years ago, prophets like John Muelier and Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that, in the future, first-world nations, obsessed with their economies, would recoil from costly warfare...
...We have already won,” the official responded coolly, “because it wasn’t a two-day war after all...
...In December, the president who had touted sanctions a few months earlier suddenly declared that he had never believed they would work...
...Only rarely-as when an Iraqi conscript, while surrendering, recognized a Marine from his old Chicago neighborhood-did humanity seem to impinge...
...This time, we have no time for body bags...
...The reporters blanched...
...The Washington Post, March 3 As the ground war drew neatly to its close, it seemed the most perverse and peripheral of causes: a group of left-leaning reporters suing the government in federal court to open Dover Air Force Base to the public...
...Pentagon officials, meanwhile, offered a more palatable summary of the Iraqi casualties: 2,085 tanks, 103 aircraft, 962 armored vehicles, 1,005 pieces of artillery...
...So, like the makers of Fords or antiperspirants, he had to establish the obsolescence of the existing product -diplomacy...
...The war lasted a mere 43 days...
...That contemporary paragon of the short war-the Six Day War of 1967-left so many Israelis dead that rabbis were called in to consecrate the parks of Tel Aviv as temporary graveyards...
...Lieutenant Eric Drake of Wilsie, West Virginia Twenty-five hundred years ago, Thucydides described another democracy’s swelling infatuation with war...
...Media campaigns increasingly decide whether or not there will be a war and, if there is one, how long it will last,” reports James Dunnigan’s manual, How To Make War...
...ess, but on widespread public support, as Clausewitz pointed out two centuries ago...
...They wanted us to see the body bags roll in...
...Only once during the war did Pentagon officials willingly deviate from their hardware-only accounting of costs to the other side...
...A new, post-Gulf America will emerge, its self-image, sense of history, even its political discourse transformed...
...you could stock a dissertation with hapless folks like the Alabama congressman who in 1861 volunteered his handkerchief to mop up all the blood that would be spilled for Confederate independence...
...army hangars, five to a cubicle roughly the size of a condominium bathroom...
...quick wars tend to be as ugly as long ones, perhaps because we’ve learned how to wage them so well...
...Air Force in the Gulf and architect of Desert Storm, promised “a very efficient military campaign...
...War is a blunt instrument...
...Sergeant Edward Swanson of Houston, Texas The revolting carnage shouldn’t surprise us...
...The ‘will to fight’ can be sold like cornflakes, and increasingly it is...
...leaders expected to do any fighting at all...
...now we understand why...
...Victory, as the Israelis learned in Lebanon, may be just another word for bellurn interruptum...
...now we understand why...
...It will be quick, massive, and decisive...
...While by the end we could boast of “only” 323 American dead, the words short and clean seemed a little absurd...
...That lesson was not lost on Bush...
...It wasn’t hard to miss the subtext: This victory has restored our faith in weaponry as the wisest political tool...
...in some Pentagon cubbyhole, there’s an image the rest of us will never have to see: a group of young men dropping their dinners and fleeing in panic, before Apache cannon fire rips them in half...
...President Quayle in December...
...Our military analysts can enter one of a dozen air-conditioned simulation centers across the country, type a complex series of variables into a computer, and stage a dress rehearsal of any given war, deriving precise estimates of weapons effectiveness, troop mobility, casualty counts, and combat duration...
...Ties to Chicago somehow gave value to one Iraqi’s life...
...So, like the makers of Fords or antiperspirants, he had to establish the obsolescence of the existing product -diplomacy...
...So insulating is this sort of systems analysis that as bombs slammed into Baghdad, George Bush could consult his analysts and calmly claim, “We are on schedule,” as if warfare were a luncheon with a queen...
...But after the first few days of the Storm, you’d be forgiven for forgetting...
...A century after the fact, no military historian can adequately explain how, in the first battle of the Zulu-British war, 1,500 highly trained English riflemen were slain by native warriors bearing spears...
...Still, most leaders have been unable to forego the optimistic forecast, for obvious reason...
...A swift, decisive onslaught by the Athenian superpower against the “mixed rabble” of Sicily, Alcibiades declared, would make his people master of all Hellas...
...Of course, the Iraqi army was a “them,” not an “it...
...I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we’re never going to get into the body count business,” said Norman Schwarzkopf early on...
...But as we revel in our psychic kill, it’s worth considering the 12th-century Normans who, self-image enhanced by their easy conquest of England, planned a brisk overrun of the farmers and peasants of Ireland...
...He started his war against Iran by promising his people a brief, decisive blitzkrieg...
...The environmental damage may never be reversed...
...And clean wars are the easiest sell-a truth Saddam Hussein himself understands...
...For the Iraqis, the casualties may be more than a thousand times higher...
...Thanks to the efficiency of portable antitank missiles, two weeks of fighting produced casualties of more than 20,000...
...As the war got under way, Lt...
...So in August 1914, he waved his troops off at Berlin Station, promising they’d be home before the autumn leaves fell...
...As the American press cheered the incursion, D.C.’s Spanishlanguage El Latino visited the Panamanian capital, where more than 10,000 homeless people were crammed into U.S...
...The world could wait no longer...
...The antidote to all this restlessness was, of course, war, which is not a simple sell, especially when it involves the liberation of an emirate 7,000 miles away...
...MacArthur’s grim report caused the Springfield, Illinois, Republican to marvel, “Why did all this ‘truthtelling’ become available only after the election...
...Of “I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we’re never going to perhaps, is our consummate detachment from the human cost-a coolness that begins in the way leaders plan and talk about their wars...
...Yet as bridges and buildings smoldered in the Baghdad suburbs, as limbless corpses poked up through the sand, Bush could claim with finality a day after the Gulf war cease-fire, “This war is now behind us...
...Ties to Chicago somehow gave value to one Iraqi’s life...
...Six years later, the Israelis entered the Yom Kippur War poised for an equally swift victory...
...You’re superhuman...
...139 in Iran...
...A week later, Shiite fundamentalists stirred in Basra, armed by their Iranian brethren...
...Tanks were “killed...
...Effective warmaking depends not just on military and administrative prowBy January 16, when Bush announced the air strike, five months of sanctions had evolved into an “endless diplomacy...
...By war’s end eight years later, there were 200,000 fewer Iraqis to remember that empty promise...
...The Athenians were quickly convinced...
...Fortunately, Bush’s agents in the military, press, and the White House had been doing the advance work for months, peddling victory at discount prices...
...The officials shelved the film, sticking with the tank kills...
...It is now clear that the president was committed to war as early as October...
...Yet true victory-political stability, respect for human rights, democratic leadership, even stable oil prices-is no more assured in the Middle East, a region with more conventional weapons than all of NATO, than it was before we dropped 10 times the tonnage of Hiroshima on the Gulf...
...How The Washington Post tallied the dead...
...Exhausted every means...
...conflicts-the Schleswig-Holstein, the Franco-Prussian, the Seven Weeks War-that convinced Kaiser Wilhelm that every modem war might be resolved in a matter of months...
...You’re invincible...
...To the weaker, conflict is not a cool calculus of risk, expense, and expectation, but a fight for national pride in which restraint and compromise are not options...
...You’re rolling into hattle, and nothing can touch you...
...Americans have cleverer tools: hundred-milliondollar computers on itability of a proposed Greeks consulted oraget into the body count business,” said Norman Schwarzkopf early on...
...Today, Americans bear witness to the other extreme: a renewed faith in the power of the short, clean war-restorative, affordable, and preferably a few thousand zip codes away...
...An entire battalion was engulfed and destroyed before they had time to report that they were being hit...
...In late February, Palestinians gathered on the rooftops of the West Bank, cheering the Scud missiles as they arced toward Tel Aviv...
...cleaning the debris from Kuwait, as estimated by bomb-defusers, will take 40 years...
...We’ve “exhausted all reasonable efforts,” Bush intoned...
...ess, but on widespread public support, as Clausewitz pointed out two centuries ago...
...Research conflicts-the Schleswig-Holstein, the Franco-Prussian, the Seven Weeks War-that convinced Kaiser Wilhelm that every modem war might be resolved in a matter of months...
...What should surprise us, ther attests, smart wars-even fast ones-can be just as messy as dumb ones...
...And quick, i t was understood, would mean clean-a fact conveyed in the constant bandyingabout of “clean s we e p , ” “ p r e c i si o n bombing,” and “surgical strikes...
...How The Washington Post tallied the dead...
...The older men thought that they would either subdue the places against which they were to sail, or at all events, with so large a force, meet with no disaster...
...Another body was wedged inside the engine compartment...
...In the midst of the revelry, one couldn’t help remember the spate of brisk little Katherine Boo is uti editor of The Washington Monthly...
...On February 24, they allowed a select group of reporters to screen-test a videotape of Iraqis being mowed down by Apache helicopters...
...A promise, rather, that hovers just out of our grasp...
...At about the same time, Charles Krauthammer could define the impending U.S...
...The critical question was how to market the idea to the American people...
...Objects in crosshairs exploded...
...Consumers demanded a change...
...declared Vice 0 30 missing 0 9 prisoners of war * Includes 28 killed, 100 injured in Scud attack on Dhahran...
...I am glad there were so few [American] casualties, hut I would have liked a little more%resistance...
...The ‘will to fight’ can be sold like cornflakes, and increasingly it is...
...Tanks were “killed...
...We won in the Philippines...
...Objects in crosshairs exploded...
...While by the end we could boast of “only” 323 American dead, the words short and clean seemed a little absurd...
...The object, explained Colonel Frederick Funston, was simply to “sit on and hold down the little brown brothers for a few months” until the Filipinos decided they didn’t want independence after all...
...We don’t find the [dog] tags around the neck very oftertthey’ve been blown away...
...general would later boast, “There were no lessons learned...
...Swift it was...
...Still, most leaders have been unable to forego the optimistic forecast, for obvious reason...
...It seemed strange, then, as British soldiers later sifted through the wreckage, that they found with the Iraqi corpses, not springs and gears and sprockets, but packets of processed cheese and coffee cups painted with flowers...
...It’s easier for us to recall the swift successes in Grenadaor Panama, about which one U.S...
...Exhausted every means...
...Media campaigns increasingly decide whether or not there will be a war and, if there is one, how long it will last,” reports James Dunnigan’s manual, How To Make War...
...those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacles, and had no doubt they should come safe home again...
...And quick, i t was understood, would mean clean-a fact conveyed in the constant bandyingabout of “clean s we e p , ” “ p r e c i si o n bombing,” and “surgical strikes...
...Perhaps because they happen so often, with little lasting international effect, these deadly, highspeed Middle Eastern wars aren’t exactly emblazoned on the American memory...
...By war’s end eight years later, there were 200,000 fewer Iraqis to remember that empty promise...
...In the wake of Vietnam, the courting of public support for American warfare has become a virtual religion-one that includes such odd rites as open letters from the president to campus newspapers, pleading just cause...
...As the war got under way, Lt...
...Effective warmaking depends not just on military and administrative prowBy January 16, when Bush announced the air strike, five months of sanctions had evolved into an “endless diplomacy...
...Today...
...Though Panama lasted only 14 days, the effort to capture one man left perhaps 4,000 Panamanian civilians dead...
...0 962 armored vehicles I * * * I 0 1,005 artillery pieces 0 103 aircraft destroyed...
...which whole conflagrations can be mathematically modeled...
...139 in Iran...
...That lesson was not lost on Bush...
...0 962 armored vehicles I * * * I 0 1,005 artillery pieces 0 103 aircraft destroyed...
...In both places, we earned an animosity that still haunts us...
...It’s a faith at least as old as Agamemnon, who believed Priam’s city would be captured in a day...
...A few years later, American soldiers faced their Zulus in the Philippines, a place where, after the “splendid little war” in Cuba, few US...
...Of course, the Iraqi army was a “them,” not an “it...
...A British lance corporal on burial detail in Kuwait, March 3 In late January, a senior Iraqi official was asked by the BBC how it felt to be losing so badly...
...We’re in love with the splendid little war...
...News reports tallied up to 150,000 Iraqi dead, thousands of them civilians, thousands more blown up in retreat...
...The Athenians got creamed...
...If history has anything to teach us about war, it’s that we should be wary of the term “clean victory,” skeptical of mantras about “kicking ass...
...He started his war against Iran by promising his people a brief, decisive blitzkrieg...
...Victory in two fell swoops...
...We’ve “exhausted all reasonable efforts,” Bush intoned...
...The antidote to all this restlessness was, of course, war, which is not a simple sell, especially when it involves the liberation of an emirate 7,000 miles away...
...And even General Colin Powell grew uncharacteristically giddy...
...And even General Colin Powell grew uncharacteristically giddy...
...still refuses to release its numbers...
...From Troy to Tel Aviv, Berlin to Baghdad, leaders’ faith in short, clean wars has wreaked havoc on humanity...
...Two more lay face up in the bed of the truck, their feet sticking grotesquely over the side...
...cleaning the debris from Kuwait, as estimated by bomb-defusers, will take 40 years...
...Yet as we retool and replenish for further world policing, it’s worth remembering that most countries facing an alien army put up more resistance than the allegedly fearsome Iraqis were able to muster...
...War is a blunt instrument...
...Now we understand why...
...Victory in two fell swoops...
...It will be quick, massive, and decisive...
...Brig...
...All alike fell in love with the enterprise...
...By God,” exclaimed President Bush a week after the war, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...
...It seemed strange, then, as British soldiers later sifted through the wreckage, that they found with the Iraqi corpses, not springs and gears and sprockets, but packets of processed cheese and coffee cups painted with flowers...
...Fool,” chided Homer, “who knew nothing of all the things Zeus planned to accomplish...
...Almost 900 years later, Irish bombs explode in Victoria Station...
...That’s the official Panamanian figure...
...The war lasted a mere 43 days...
...The critical question was how to market the idea to the American people...
...A year after that glorious success, The New York Times reports that Panamanian cocaine exports are as heavy as ever...
...while the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future...
Vol. 23 • April 1991 • No. 4
