Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

I find it troubling that the US military is using food and water as a tool and is now punishing the Iraqi people who largely do not want to be occupied by the US military. We are coming not as liberators but as invaders to a land where our ‘help’ is not wanted. The so-called Allies (Britain and the US) have cut water and food supplies to the populous city of Basra in an attempt to starve any opposition and to weaken the resolve of the city’s inhabitants.

British and American officials call these problems a “nuisance factor” or “pockets of resistance” that do not affect the overall plan to march to Baghdad and destroy Hussein’s government. Blair, answering questions in parliament about Basra, said, “It’s surrounded, and cannot be used as a base anymore” by government militias and security forces. Blair also promised that water, which was cut, would be restored to the city soon.

But one effect of the siege in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, is the inability to use its international airport to bring in badly need humanitarian aid for Iraqis in the south. Similarly, Umm Qasr would be an important entry point for supplies shipped in by water.

“We need water, we need electricity, we need food,” said Hussein Jabar, a 20-year-old from a local farming family here, who described how his family has to buy water from a tanker truck at 350 Iraqi dinars per liter and store it in barrels. He said electricity to the area has been cut since Wednesday.

In my opinion, I think it’s highly likely that the Bush administration has purposefully stalled humanitarian aid as a tool to suppress Iraqi opposition. By declaring Iraq ‘unsafe’ for US government humanitarian agencies they have effectively closed off ways for refugees and displaced Iraqis to get food. The Red Cross has been able to enter Iraq and provide assistance, however they do not have the resources of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, which acts under the direction of the Bush administration.

Sources:

• A War With No Front Lines
• Aid Efforts For Iraqis Stalled At Border: Bush Promises Assistance Soon

This gives me hope for future wars and the use of state power. Access to the truth can dispel ignorance and propaganda.

`Real-time’ TV coverage a real headache for Bush: U.S. spin doctors can’t control media message Morale-destroying images weren’t part of the plan:

On the weekend, these weren’t supposed to be the television images of Operation Iraqi Freedom: frightened U.S. prisoners-of-war being held in Iraq; a grainy still of slain American soldiers lying on a floor; reporters explaining friendly fire incidents like the downing of a British warplane; and the stark image of a 101st Airborne soldier on the ground, taken prisoner by his own troops after grenades were tossed into officers’ tents in Kuwait with deadly results.

The new team — Office of Global Communications — continues to work with Hughes, as well as key people in the White House, Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council. They work around-the-clock, stuffing each 24-hour news cycle, at home and abroad, with a message of the day, designed to fill every information void and ensure the people stay on that message.

“The idea is to present their view of what is happening, and make it the only view,” says William Lutz, a Rutgers University English professor and expert on “doublespeak.”

“They cloak it with authority … It is the Pope speaking …

“People think, `Hey, the government has more information than I do, their view must be more informed than mine.'”

Hughes, a longtime Bush confidante, has been brought back to Washington to advise Bush. But her $15,000 monthly fee is actually paid by the Republican National Committee.

“This is a grey area,” Charles Lewis, executive director of the Centre for Public Integrity, told the Washington Post.

But, in many cases the government may not be as informed. Decisions are often made by people with a disregard for history.

Okay, in the first place it’s damn cheesy that the Pentagon has euphemisticaly called this war ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. In fact, it’s incredibly tacky. The bigger problem is: the Iraqis do not want to be ‘liberated’ by the Americans. If this be a ‘liberation’ at all it’s a forced liberation and certainly, if anything, a liberation of Iraqi oil resources. I was reviewing this slideshow at the NY Times website and it showed a large assemblage of Iraqis looking for a downed American pilot along the Euphrates river. The funny thing is the caption said: “Iraqi soldiers search for an American or British pilot that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen dropping into the Tigris River by parachute.” EVERYONE was looking for the pilot. In fact, in that photo I didn’t see one soldier. The Iraqis do not want us there. This could be the next Vietnam.

UPI: A ‘Tough Fight’ Indeed:

Yet the war on Iraq was not sold to the American people as a tough fight. It was sold to them as a combination of a walk in the park, an essential operation to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and, most of all, as a crusade to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of President Saddam Hussein.

The curious thing is, almost none of them appear to be want to be saved.

For the past year and a half, the civilian war hawks running the Department of Defense have repeatedly and, according to Pentagon sources, even contemptuously overridden the concerns of regular senior Army and Marine officers about the difficulty of conquering Iraq by relying upon the flood of intelligence provided to them by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. For Chalabi and the INC had assured them that Iraq was straining at the seams and ready to bust apart acclaiming U.S. forces as liberators as soon as they walked in.

As UPI has repeatedly reported and noted, so highly did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz think of this intelligence that they repeatedly injected it into the proceedings of Principals’ and Deputies’ Committees meetings that coordinated the highest policymaking of the United States government without filtering it past the CIA, the State Department or any other organ of government first.

Yet now the drive into Iraq is well underway, what are U.S. policymakers — and their brave, embattled troops in the field finding?

First, the Shiite Muslim majority of Iraqis have not risen up in the south to rally around their American liberators. They have not risen up at all. And they are not raising a finger to oppose Saddam or help the United States.

Instead, as we noted on Saturday, Mohammed Baqir Hakim, head of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite opposition movement in Iraq issued a statement quite specifically telling the Shiites not to aid the United States in any way. And his admonition, broadcast on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network, is being heeded.

Getting Ahead of the Pentagon:

Separately, the Pentagon sent news organizations a memo requesting that they “not air or publish recognizable images or audio recordings that identify POWs. Additionally, we request you not use their names, first or last, or their unit, until next-of-kin notification is complete.” The memo made the same request for the deceased soldiers, citing “respect for the families” and “the principles of the Geneva Conventions.”

The issue sparked a disagreement when ABC anchor Charles Gibson told viewers it was “simply disrespectful” to show the dead bodies. “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel said from Iraq that he had earlier shown pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers in a way that they could not be identified.

Because the media are “ginning up patriotic feelings” before a war, Koppel said, “I feel we do have an obligation to remind people in the most graphic way that war is a dreadful thing. . . . Young Americans are dying. Young Iraqis are dying. To turn our faces away from that is a mistake. . . . To sanitize it too much is a dreadful mistake.”

The US military is discovering that their billions of dollars in high-tech weaponry is vulnerable to ingenuity, guerrilla tactics, and the intelligent application of very low-tech and antiquated technology. Not only that, but many of the precious and hugely expensive weapons systems bought from corrupt defense contractors are fraught with their own problems and have caused many embarrassing situations in the short five days of Bush’s Iraq takeover.

Consider the US missiles hitting Turkey and Iran, or the British plane destroyed by Patriot missiles. Then there’s the ingenious tactics the Iraqis and Iraqi partisans have used. Using cheap rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire to bring down two Apaches helicopters worth more than most Americans (not to mention Iraqis!) will make in a life time (you can see jubilant Iraqis assembled on the helicopter here). The other 30 or so odd Apaches were forced to retreat. The Iraqis have also successfully used portable mortar fire to cause confusion to the US military, captured supply line units, and have downed other planes. There is some evidence that the Iraqis have acquired those Aviaconversia GPS jammers, night-vision goggles, and RPG’s from Russian arms dealers about which the US has whined and complained that this violates the UN sanctions. Since when has the US cared about international law? It doesn’t seem as if the US is ready for any kind of fair fight. They expected the Iraqi people to roll over. On the news yesterday, I heard that over half of all US flights have been to support ground troops by suppressing fire and enemy units. It’s impressive what the Iraqis have done with no air support of their own.

Additionally, the so-called psyops campaign by the US has largely failed. The 5-10 million propaganda leaflets dropped by the military have been an utter failure. While some deserters and a few thousand troops have surrendered to the US invasion force it has not been in the numbers the Pentagon had hoped for. In fact, the Iraqi people appear to be fairly united against this invasion. I would hope we Americans would act the same way should Russian or Chinese troops attempt to invade our cities and rural towns. If anything, this only shows what a bad idea this war is. I hope the Bush administration comes to its senses, but I doubt it. Which reminds me, chemical weapons, the public justification for this war, have yet to be found or used.

Related:

1. Resistance raises fears for the endgame
2. U.S. Losses Expose Risks, Raise Doubts About Strategy
3. US protests at Russian arms sales to Baghdad: High-tech weaponry vulnerable. The Bush administration reserved its highest-level efforts for halting the delivery of the jamming devices, which officials said sell for thousands of dollars apiece and can interfere with global positioning equipment important to aircraft navigation and ground forces.
4. CNN: Russia hits back in shipments row: The Washington Post identified two of the companies as Aviaconversiya, which allegedly supplied jamming equipment, and KBP Tula, an optics company.

   But the Russian official countered the allegations, saying: “On numerous occasions Moscow gave a detailed account of all of this to the American government starting with October of last year.

   “If you ask me why this news appeared lately, my only response would be that it’s just to distract public attention from an illegitimate military operation by the United States government against Iraq and to distract attention from the fact that this war turned out not to be a picnic.”