Wednesday, November 12, 2003 BAGHDAD, Iraq â U.S. forces in Iraq on Wednesday launched a planned and coordinated operation codenamed Iron Hammer that targeted pro-Saddam loyalists, a senior military source told Fox News. Based on intelligence collected on the ground, U.S. infantry set a number of traps all over Baghdad (search). Several of those traps â monitored from the air and known as NAIs or Named Areas of Interest â were activated almost simultaneously Wednesday night. In the most dramatic action, about a dozen Bradley armored vehicles used 25mm cannons to destroy a warehouse used by anti-U.S. forces in southern Baghdad. A special forces AC-130 Spectre gunship also took part from the air, targeting the warehouse with precise fire. "The facility is a known meeting, planning, storage and rendezvous point for belligerent elements currently conducting attacks on coalition forces and infrastructure," the Pentagon (search) said in a statement from Washington. "The destruction of this structure will deny enemy forces any use of it in the future." The attack on the warehouse was one of four strikes in Operation Iron Hammer. According to military sources, the other attacks were: â U.S. soldiers observed a group of people firing several mortar rounds from a truck, who then tried to drive away. An AH-64 Apache helicopter was called in to follow the fugitives and it fired on the vehicle, hitting it. Two terrorists were killed and five others were captured. Plus, Americans seized an 82mm mortar. â Infantrymen saw another enemy approach and fire three mortar rounds, aimed at harassing U.S. forces. Americans opened fire using small arms and a Bradley armored vehicle. The vehicle was hit several times but managed to disappear in traffic on a highway. â An American artillery unit fired 12 rounds of 155mm howitzers against an insurgent mortar team that had fired off a few shots in the direction of the "green zone," where the central Coalition military and civilian authority compound is located in Baghdad. This two-square-mile area had been hit by harassing mortar fire on a number of occasions during the past week. The U.S. offensive came on the same day that a truck bomb exploded at an Italian paramilitary police headquarters in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah (search), which killed 18 Italians and eight Iraqis. And the U.S. action came one day after America's top soldier in Iraq said attacks against the U.S.-led coalition were increasing and he vowed a tough response. "The most important message," he continued, "is that we are going to get pretty tough ... but we will do everything possible to minimize the impact on the people of the country," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (search) told reporters. Sanchez said the United States would "send a very clear signal that our intent is to defeat the former regime loyalists, the terrorists and those people that are attacking the coalition and the Iraqi people." In Washington, administration officials vowed to keep the finish the job of stabilizing Iraq. "It's a difficult situation," Secretary of State Colin Powell (search) said of security in Iraq. "But we are confident that our commanders will get on top of it and our intelligence experts will be able to penetrate these remnants of the old regime who are trying to destroy the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people." Analysts said the Wednesday offensive was an indication that the U.S. forces were following through on Sanchez's pledge. "It's great news because it shows we're bringing the fight to them," said retired Col. David Hunt, a Fox News military analyst. Hunt said the attack on the warehouse showed that Americans were getting better human intelligence. "It's never been a problem on the fight," Hunt said. "The problem has been finding these bad guys and this shows there has been a new offensive started."
MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic. GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles â slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government. But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism â the only form of government suitable for such a people. But Jefferson had the most radical view, didnât he? He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document. Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isnât working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boyâs jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didnât care. Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year. This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing. Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young Americaâs two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic? Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale. Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn. Bushâs friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasnât already. No one is punished for squandering the peopleâs money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy. So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. Itâs not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with â even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh â how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time â was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire. In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldnât. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy? Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich. So youâd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I canât think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I donât think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted. But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Trumanâs founding of the national-security state, to LBJâs debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration? No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country â like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged. So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders? No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans â most Americans would not think of them as citizens.
Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans? I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process. Yet you saw in the â60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, donât you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate? I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. Itâs often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. Iâm afraid that 90 percent of Americans donât know where Iraq is and never will know, and they donât care. But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there isnât enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we â° are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago â which of course is ridiculous. And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that. Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year? No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We donât want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isnât their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption? So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He canât lose. But Gore, arenât you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart? Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Trumanâs plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldnât have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last. But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. Heâs made every error you can. Heâs wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People canât find jobs. Poverty is up. Itâs a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power. You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isnât there still a democratic underpinning? No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich. Is Bush the worst president weâve ever had? Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed. How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out? I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it wonât be pretty.
Hey Vinny, How long did it take you to come us with this new handle? Lots of thought went into it, no doubt.
ARogueTrader, good find. Great points. We were having these same discussions here about a year ago. Do you have url?
The Iraqi Monkey Trap By William Raspberry Monday, October 20, 2003; Page A23 There is a legend, the Rev. Earl Neil told the congregation of Trinity Episcopal Church here one recent Sunday, that certain African tribesmen have a clever way of trapping monkeys. They begin by making a paw-sized hole in a coconut, then filling the coconut with rice or some similarly attractive food. A monkey will come along, stick in his paw and grab a fistful of rice -- and then find that he can't get his paw out. "It screams for help, but it is trapped by its own greed," Neil explained. "As you and I can see, all the monkey would have to do is turn loose of the rice. His open hand could easily be withdrawn. The problem is that the monkey places greater value on the rice than on his own freedom." That was the attention-getting windup. Here was the pitch: "The Bush administration has stuck its hand into a coconut called Iraq, grabbed a fistful of oil and control, and now is finding it difficult to get out. It is trapped by its power and its greed. Now it screams for help from the United Nations (which it had earlier dismissed as irrelevant and inconsequential). And all the administration would have to do is to turn loose some control, and it might be able to withdraw with dignity. "But like the monkey, it places greater value on the spoils of war than on freedom for the Iraqi people, reconciliation with the world order and what might very well be the soul of our nation." The analogy isn't perfect. After all, it was the administration that laid the coconut trap in the first place -- against international and domestic advice that there was no need to rush unilaterally into what was likely to be an easy war and a fiendishly difficult peace. But it works well enough. Even the administration itself might agree. Early last week administration officials ponied up a series of what they hoped would be seen as fist-opening concessions in a new resolution adopted Thursday by the U.N. Security Council. It would establish a multinational force to help the American- and British-led forces in Iraq and also provide more money to rebuild that devastated country. In exchange, the United States would grant at least symbolic self-governance to the Iraqi people by declaring that the Iraqi Governing Council and its ministers "will embody the sovereignty of the state of Iraq." The administration clearly wants its hand free of the coconut. But it also wants the rice. The Iraqi Governing Council is seen by many Iraqis as a creature not of Iraq's people but of the United States. And as if to underscore the point, the resolution reaffirms America's authority to administer and rule the country (and its assets?) until we deem it time to turn control over to people we deem worthy of wielding it. If it's hard to know whether the Bush administration wants a freed hand more than it wants the rice, it may be because different influential players in the administration want different things and are willing to pay different prices for them. In many ways, the president's mind has been a battleground for the fighting between pragmatists and ideologues -- between those who see America's interests in more or less traditional terms (trade, good relations with neighbors and some deference to international rule) and those who see America's unchallenged power as a heaven-sent opportunity to reorder the world -- at least that part of it called the Middle East. Perhaps that is why the president is trying to consolidate postwar authority under his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, thus bringing control back to the White House and away from the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz axis of hubris. But pretty soon the president himself will have to do something about that coconut. Does he want the rice -- control of Iraq's oil and lucrative rebuilding contracts for his political friends at Bechtel, Halliburton and elsewhere -- more than he wants the possibility of extracting himself from a mess he was warned about but still blustered into? Will he end up just another trapped monkey?
This the kind of thing that worries me. People actually read interviews like this senile rambling and think that because a celebrity said it, it must be valid. Vidal thinks that no president has so put the Bill of Rights at risk, and that his sainted FDR and the New Deal was the last time anyone cared about the people. Probably this stuff has been edited out of history books now to preserve FDR's legacy, but is anyone here old enough to recall what FDR did to the Japanese-Americans during WW II? Does the phrase "concentration camps" ring a bell? Many of these people were American citizens. And even though the Germans were landing spies on the east coast from subs, this Bill of Rights loving administration saw no need to put German-Americnas under the same restraints. FDR loved the constitution alright. He loved it so much he used it for toilet paper. Probably his lowest moment other than the Japanese internment was the infamous court packing scheme. He came into office determined to impose socialism, but the Supreme Court kept knocking down his various laws and edicts. His solution? Threaten the Court that if they didn't play ball he would use his Congressional majority to "pack" the Court by adding extra justices. He got his way. They suddenly found ways to "interpet" the Constitution so that formerly protected property and contract rights became second class constitutional citizens. Vidal's babbling is not without humor. He actually thinks the Joe Wilson affair will sink Bush. That was a classic slow news cycle, two day story. Voters recognized it as inside Washington game playing and tuned out. Wilson's 15 minutes were over.
Has anyone considered the long term implications for terrorism if the middle east stays poor, backwards and strife ridden? Demographic trends mean that while the populations of developed nations will get dramatically older due to longer life expectancy and lower birth rates, youth populations in areas like the middle east are going to explode. Establishing democracy and building a foothold for rule of law and capitalism now is our best hope to divert the possibility of facing whole new generations of suicide bombers. I think the reason the terrorists are going all out in Iraq is because they know if they lose Iraq, they could lose the ballgame. Imagine if we actually stick out our mission and actually succeed in establishing a culture of democracy and capitalism that lasts... and grows. Countries like Iran are an interesting example of this highly intriguing teeter totter. Iranian youth are torn between democracy and extremism... and which way they fall will largely depend on macroeconomic factors. Will they have opportunity, or will they have bitterness? The same can be said for the middle east as a whole. In the long term success scenario, the younger generations of the middle east could actually shun extremism, embrace rule of law and capitalism, and become a net contributor to world growth. This would be disaster for the terrorists, of course. So they have to kill the hope before it can grow. In the long term failure scenario, we have new armies of bitter, jobless, hate filled Osama Bin Laden recruits. Whether you like Bush or not, long term analysis suggests it is critical- and well worth it for the western world- if we stay long enough to ensure that democracy and rule of law are allowed to take hold in Iraq and have a chance at flourishing. I think the Bush administration has the common sense to see this also, and it's one reason why their course of action won't be swayed by short sighted criticism that doesn't weigh long term consequences. We're going to stick this out and get it done, IMHO. Liberals assume Bush is a craven coward looking for a way out, but they underestimate him- the dumb country hick outsmarts the phD's yet again. Kind of a theme for this presidency. Last but not least, I think the criticism may be peaking early. If we start seeing real successes take hold nine months from now, it could be a whole different ball game by election day. I think those who hate Bush blindly- and hate war blindly- are disserviced by their overly emotional response to what is at heart a logical issue. To pull out now would be a disaster- there is much to gain through action and much at risk from inaction. It's not often you get the chance to avert disaster and be a force for powerful long term change on a global scale.
It is naturally a myopic position that we take thinking we can induce our flavor of democracy on other cultures with a flick of our military wrist. Frankly speaking, it would take a generation or two of brainwashing and mind conditioning to eliminate all the existing thinking patterns of the Iraqi people and replace them with our Judeo-Christian western capitalistic democratic thinking. I was talking to someone the other day, and they did not understand how the Iraqi people would want Saddam to return because he was such a tyrant. I explained that in our society, it is common to see a wife who is the victim of abuse by her husband return again and again to the husband...even though she knows she will get a beating from him. Thinking patterns, even if destructive, are very difficult to change...and we are dealing with a society that is right out of the middle ages and used to being abused by despots. They have thousands of years of mind conditioning to undue.