Entered Before Dawn With Shock And Awe, Exited At Dawn Whimpering

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

The first stanza of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” serves as a perfect inscription for any monuments erected to commemorate the eight-year, eight-month, 28-day fiasco of the war in Iraq:
        We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together
        Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together
        Are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass
        Or rat’s feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

The first of the hollow men was President George W. Bush, although I can’t blame him too much. He was a small man in many ways, not dumb, but never smart enough to know one has to be curious about his surroundings to retain information in order to make sound judgments. The second of the hollow men was Vice President Dick Cheney who was stuffed with his own importance, never realizing, even in his memoirs, that most of his musings and answers were wrong.

The third straw man was Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, the scarecrow wearer of the straw headpiece who fired Army General Eric Shinseki for suggesting we would need about 500,000 men on the ground to control the tribal regions of Iraq. Responsible for most of the broken glass and broken bodies in Iraq, he estimated the war would be over in six weeks—or at the most, six months.

The fourth hollow man was Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who said the war would not cost us a dime because we would use Iraqi oil to pay for it.  Director Larry Lindsey of Lurch’s Economic Council said it would cost $200 billion. He was fired as if he had submitted the high bid. Cheney estimated $1 billion would easily take care of it. We have already spent $800 billion with final medical and disability costs running perhaps as high as $2 trillion for the 32,300 seriously wounded vets before they die.

From Kissinger’s Lap Dog To An Army General Defending The Alamo

The fifth hollow man was Army General Tommy Franks, whose main qualifications for commanding the Iraq debacle seemed to be his birth in Texas. Perhaps he had spent too much time on the Alamo walls. He never searched out bombs and artillery ammo in Saddam’s innumerable ammo depots used in the infamous Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that killed about 1,300 of our troops in Iraq, blew thousands of limbs over the landscape, and muddled brains by the thousands. In 2003 over 500 IEDs a month were implanted. In 2008 over 5,000 a month raised hell with our troops. Here was another general who was fighting the last war, never seeming to understand, in a war with no front and with each step thinking IED, a soldier cannot retain complete sanity facing death 24/7 for a tour lasting a year.

Every team needs a sixth man. In this case it was the hollow Paul Bremer, Henry Kissinger’s lap dog, who was appointed the czar of Iraq. Among an absolute galaxy of mistakes, he disbanded the Iraqi Army, putting 400,000 men without paychecks strutting around the country, all carrying AK-47s and cellphones. He also “de-Baathized” society, where you had to be a member of Saddam’s Baath Party if you wanted a job—or if you wanted to stay alive. Bremer proved he knew nothing of Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, tribes, clans, governing, and Iraq.  These six guys put us in the position of playing a serious hockey game without a stick or puck.

At times we did replace some of the hollow and stuffed men with thinking, problem-solving people, but by that time it was too late to recover. The maelstrom had formed. While I am writing this on December 22, 18 bombs have killed 69 and wounded over 200 in bombings scattered around Baghdad, the worst single day in years.

The Blundering Efforts To Rebuild Iraq Recorded By A State Department Veteran

I used material from 23-year State Department veteran Peter Van Buren briefly in a previous column, but his 261-page book, “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose The Battle For The Hearts And Minds Of The Iraqi People,” outlines so many mistakes made by hollow men that it’s like watching 100 monkeys pounding 100 typewriters trying to come up with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”  Many of these incidents seem to be caused by total ignorance or baboons throwing darts at balloons containing “nation-building” projects.

Before he even gets to Iraq, Van Buren is confronted by the mystery of a project called My Arabic Library, a shipping container with $88,000 worth of books. Someone in the State Department had come up with this idea: “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families… “

We all know Saddam was a first-rate bastard, but he ran a fairly modern, literate nation compared to the rest of the Muammar Gaddafis in the Middle East. Like Gaddafi, these dictators think like he did: “They love me….They will die to protect me, my people.” And then his head was blown off by one of his “people.”

Among the thousands of books translated from Mark Twain English to Saddam Hussein Arabic were such classics as “Tom Sawyer,” “The House of the Seven Gables,” Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” “The Crucible,” and “ Moby Dick.” No Iraqi schools wanted the books so they were dumped behind a high school–-but only after none was sold on the black market.

How Rumsfeld’s Pentagon Lost $8.7 Billion

Van Buren writes: “We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables….adult supervision, strategic guidance, and commonsense…The one thing we didn’t lack was money.” In that Iraqi banks were inoperable after Baghdad fell, all aid money directed at building a “democratic” Iraq had to be in cash. Cash was flown in on huge C-130 cargo planes on pallets loaded with new $100 bills, millions on each pallet. There was so much cash available early on that Van Buren’s State Department handed out $5,000 mini-grants to any Iraqi who thought he could start a business. No strings attached, according to Van Buren: “If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball machines, it was no matter.”  An audit in 2009 revealed the Pentagon had no record of how $8.7 billion was spent. They only knew it had disappeared!

Buying the cooperation of Iraqis was not easy. Many fruit trees were destroyed in “shock and awe” bombing, so the State Department offered Iraqi farmers free fruit tree seedlings to replace them. The farmers often spat on the ground in disgust at the offer, and said: “You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?” We found out early we couldn’t buy love except in alleys. The Army tried to make friends by distributing food bags to many Iraqis at a cost of $1 million. That “Welcome Wagon” idea didn’t work either.

In The Government Of The Blind There Aren’t Even Any One-Eyed Kings

The “nation-building” efforts of the State Department and the Army were symbolized by the selection of a diligent Young Republican whose only business experience was peddling an ice cream cart in his neighborhood. Because of his political connections, he got a $250,000 job as director of the Iraqi stock market in Baghdad.

Most projects were run by Provisional Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Most PRTs acted like Keystone Cops captained by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy with a lot of Rube Goldberg thrown in. Our tax money was not a determining factor, as you can see from these examples:

**  One PRT spent almost $25,000 buying 225 bicycles with training wheels as part of a community development program. But Baghdad streets were so filled with trash, shell and bomb craters, wild dog packs that attacked bike riders because they were hungry, and dead dogs that riding a bicycle was impossible. For awhile IED bombers loaded the carcasses of dead dogs with explosives and set them off when American troops drove by. This PRT also bought $6,950 worth of weightlifting equipment for neighborhood use!
** A local artist in Baghdad was hired by a PRT to paint a mural on the side of a gym. The contract called for “An aesthetically pleasing sight upon entry, helping to bring a sense of normalcy for the citizens in the area and for those passing through.”  The residents of Fargo-Moorhead helped pay $22,180 for paintings of Iraqi weightlifters on the wall.
** The director of a PRT in Anbar Province decided it would be a good place to grow wheat, so he purchased the best, most expensive wheat seed he could find and distributed it to the locals. In that Anbar is mostly desert, the locals knew the seed wouldn’t grow. The locals sold the seed at a good profit to farmers that could grow wheat in other areas, bought cheap seed, and threw it on the ground. Gee, it didn’t grow. The cost? Van Buren didn’t know, but he thought it was a “priceless” story.
**  This project would fall under the category of “What Were They Thinking.” Paul Bremer approved a $200,000 expenditure to repair and remodel a large medical gases factory south of Baghdad. It failed because any truck delivering big gas cylinders was stopped at every checkpoint because bombmakers used the same cylinders as IED bomb casings. Delivery to hospitals was next to impossible.
**  I loved this one.  Van Buren’s PRT decided that Baghdad, a city of over five million, needed Yellow Pages so that people could contact businesses easily. The crew putting the book together could only convince 250 businesses to advertise in it. The PRT printed hundreds of copies but door-to-door deliverers were shot because Americans were involved with the production. The PRT finally hired a local contractor at $7.00 a copy to deliver them.
** The State Department, Army, and the Department of Agriculture (the “Big Three” in Iraq)
agreed that if Iraqi TV could show citizens visiting a Baghdad zoo it would convince the world that everything was returning to normal in such a wretched country. Everybody’s favorite general David Petraeus contributed $1 million from Army funds to build a waterpark at the zoo. The pumps immediately broke down. State spent loads setting up Internet and computer contact with U.S. zoos. As it was one of Saddam’s old zoos, it had such attractions as his white horse, a flag with Koranic verse written in Saddam’s own hand, his son Uday’s trained cougar, a large carp with a tattooed Iraqi flag on its side, and bears which were fed alcohol every day to keep them drunk and listless! But the biggest attraction for the TV audience was the daily feeding of live donkeys to the caged lions. Van Buren said he could not come up with the countless millions fed into the zoo to keep parts of it operating.
When the last planes loaded with troops left Iraq, many drove military vehicles to the air field, turned them off, and left the keys in the ignitions for anyone to take. It reminds one of helicopters leaving from the roof of our embassy in Saigon almost 40 years earlier.
 
“This Broken Jaw Of Our Lost Kingdoms”
I have combined sections of Eliot’s poem to summarize what we have done, what we are presently doing to Iraq—and what we have done to ourselves in this decade of military and diplomatic idiocy:

          “This is the dead land, this is the cactus land, here the stone images
          Are raised. The eyes are not here. There are no eyes here
          In this valley of dying stars, in this hollow valley.
          This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms, in this last of meeting places
          We grope together and avoid speech gathered on this beach
          Of the tumid river.  This is the way the world ends,
          This is the way the world ends,
          This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

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