Dance of the Headless Chickenhawks is available!

Here’s the Barnes and Noble link:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dance-of-the-headless-chickenhawks-ralph-benton/1117503224

Please read, and post a review, good bad, or indifferent.

I open Chickenhawks with an excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Phaeton. The story is about a young Greek whose father is Helios, god of the sun. As he becomes older he questions his patrimony, and then ascends to heaven and meets Helios, who promises him anything he wants (the guilt of an absent father, perhaps?). Phaeton says he wants to drive the chariot of the sun for one day.

Clearly, not a good idea. But Helios has promised, so he gives the reins over for a day, and, of course, disaster ensues. The boy is completely unable to control the fire-breathing horses, and the earth and heavens are scorched by the runaway sun. Finally Zeus kills Phaeton with a thunderbolt before more damage can be done.

Apart from heavenly bolts the parallels should be obvious. Bush the younger treads where his father succeeded and fails miserably, bringing ruin to all. I find it a particularly appropriate tale for this age. Perhaps the verdict of history shall be our thunderbolt.

I am extremely grateful to Anthony (Tony) Kline for the use of his translation. I looked at a lot of versions, but thought his was the best combination of accuracy, readability  and punch. You can find more of Tony’s poetry at his site, Poetry In Translation.

It really was that bad at Abu Ghraib. I don’t condone what the soldiers did, and no one should. What we can do is try to understand what it was like for them, and hopefully prevent a similar set of circumstances again.

They were reservists, who had been promised a ticket home, only to be extended not long after Bush proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.” They were sent to guard all manner of detainees, from common criminals to innocents caught up in the street sweeps that started that summer. They didn’t have the training or supervision for their job. They didn’t have a barbershop, a mess hall, or a PX. Compared to life in the Green Zone they were less than third world.

Add to that the pressure that was increasingly brought to bear to obtain “actionable intelligence.” The general who ran Gitmo came in to tell everyone how to extract more information more quickly. He left, of course, after dropping his pearls of wisdom. Among the obvious differences he somehow failed to notice was the ratio of prisoners to guards. Needless to say, Abu Ghraib wasn’t staffed to quite the same extent as his previous command.

The reservists were Military Police, trained to keep the peace in detainee populations. Now they were told to do the exact opposite, to act as active precursors to interrogation. They were told to use sleep deprivation, dogs, stress positions, and humiliation on the detaineees. All of which still might have been OK, except they had almost no supervision. The units were stretched perilously thin, and the officers were nowhere to be found.

Add it all up: barely trained reservists, on extended duty far from home, stuck in a horrible prison with none of the usual amenities we usually provide the troops, told to actively abuse the detainees with no formal training in interrogation methodology, and limited to no supervision from their officers…

The Army, in its infinite wisdom, managed to jail the enlisted personnel, while letting virtually every officer off. Even the general in charge, Janice Karpinski, later had her reduction in rank reinstated. In my opinion, the whole fiasco is one of the darkest stains on the American military.

After the pictures came to light the Army started a full scale investigation which didn’t pull many punches. You can read the full version of the Taguba Report here.

Chickenhawk: a political term used in the United States to describe a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a War Hawk), yet who actively avoided military service when of age.

Chickenhawks. The White House and Pentagon were packed with ’em in that spring of 2003. And when you’re talking about that generation, you’re talking about what they did in the Vietnam era. Let’s review:

George Bush: Yes, he did serve in the Air National Guard, but even that posting was fraught with intrigue. Your take on Bush the Second’s service will depend almost entirely on your political views. The left sees him as a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, alcoholic, coke-head who used his daddy’s connections to get him out of harm’s way. The right sees him as someone who did his duty as he saw fit. Apparently Bush has never pushed his daughters into military service. His brother Jeb Bush also did not serve.

Dick Cheney: Cheney received five deferments from the draft during Vietnam. And, notoriously, “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” Neither of Cheney’s daughters have served in the military.

Paul Wolfowitz: Wolfowitz, like Cheney, obtained student deferments to avoid service.

So who in the administration and on the Hill that supported the war did serve their time? Not many, Rumsfeld and McCain the notable exceptions. Who did not? A partial listing: Karl Rove, John Ashcroft, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, John Yoo (born in ’67, so too young for Vietnam, but he could have enlisted at any time), and many others.

It is fair to point out that many, many other people (including Clinton!) dodged the draft. But never have so many who ran from service been so quick to send others to war.

At the close of the lightning invasion Rumsfeld could rightly feel vindicated – he had prevailed against the conventional wisdom, and fought the war his way. US troops owned Baghdad in just under three weeks, using a force much smaller than the Pentagon had initially recommended.

And then the looting began. And the end of the story is not close to being written.

Rumsfeld’s comments about how “freedom is untidy” only serve to illustrate his narrow vision when it came to armed conflict. He could only think about tactical planning, not strategic victory. Thomas White, Secretary of the Army under Rumsfeld, called him a pragmatist, not a strategic thinker. And that blinded him to the enormous issues that presented themselves once the official war was over.

As Paul Wolfowitz said a month before the invasion, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would to take to conduct the war itself…” Rumsfeld was in complete agreement, and it crippled the reconstruction effort and, eventually, the entire mission create a new paradigm for the middle east.

Did Rumsfeld really insist, just weeks before the insurgency exploded, that tourism would be a linchpin of Iraqi reconstruction? Yes he did.

“Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved…” Your tour guide, Don Rumsfeld. That was Sept 10, 2003. Less than seven weeks later the Ramadan Offensive kicked off with coordinated car bombs across Baghdad.

Needless to say, the security situation never did improve, and Iraqi tourism remains an elusive goal, if you can imagine that. You can check it the full story here.

His statements are another example of the extraordinary duality of Rumsfeld. War propheteer on the one hand, congenital idiot on the other. In mid-September of 2003 Americans were experiencing a dozen attacks every day, but the resistance was uncoordinated. But the troika insisted, demanded, that there was no insurgency! Evidence to the contrary was simply ignored.

My own feeling was that the political pressure was too intense to admit the truth. They had to ignore the insurgency, because the alternative was too awful to contemplate; that the invasion had been a success, but the occupation was going to be horribly long and painful. At the time of Rumsfeld’s comments the presidential election season would be starting in a couple of months, and the front of unstoppable, unsupportable optimism had to be maintained at all costs.

Far more than Bush or Cheney, I think Donald Rumsfeld is the most interesting person in the Iraq debacle.

From what I can tell Rumsfeld came into the SecDef chair (actually not a chair, he worked at a stand up desk) with a clear goal of moving the tradition-bound and bureaucratic Pentagon into the 21st century. He knew the generals would have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into seeing what networks and information management could do to modern warfare.

In the area of actual warfare he succeeded. During the war-planning in 2002 he demanded of the generals, over and over, that they slim down the troops, the armor, and the footprint of the invasion. They fought him all the time, and he kept demanded a leaner force. Thomas Ricks’ “Fiasco” does a good job describing some of the back and forth between the civilians and military during the war planning.

One beloved piece of software spat out the logistical details of any scenario, and Rumsfeld constantly stomped all over the results. If the system insisted twenty mules had to accompany every chuck wagon, Rumsfeld’s quill would simply scratch out the mules. Many hands were wrung, worried about what would happen if this or that scenario came to pass.

But you know what? Rumsfeld was right. Even in the face of some of the worst sandstorms in memory, the invasion was lightning fast and amazingly successful. (Does every battle seem to occur during some of the worst weather in history?)

So, Donald Rumsfeld, post-industrial military hero? Not so fast.

Ah, the “Assassin’s Gate.” Was there a cooler name in all of Baghdad? A name that evokes an image of generations of black-clad killers, stalking sheikhs and emirs, before returning in the dark of night through the gate that bore their imprimatur. A touchstone of the mysterious and deadly East.

Alas, the truth is far more prosaic.

The first American Army unit to occupy that particular patch of sun-baked, dust-caked pavement was an infantry company that had given themselves that nickname. No Iraqi connection at all. Sold some books though.