December 9, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Keep the aspidastra flying
This article by Bing West on Fallujah after the fight opens with a striking paragraph:
The main shopping road through town stretched long and straight, empty of any person or vehicle, the aluminum shutters of hundreds of shops twisted at a thousand angles, buildings ripped open, exposing demolished rooms and sagging roofs, telephone poles snapped and canted, the dangling lines curled and snarled like the webs of giant, crazed spiders. It looked like a savage tornado had roared through the downtown district, smashing all in its path, pausing capriciously to pulverize various buildings before moving relentlessly on.
What I thought immediately was "I hope we're planning to rebuild it."
What I thought second was, "What a piece of work is man."
I mean, even if we don't rebuild it (though I'll be horrified if we don't), the people of Fallujah will rebuild it. I recently watched The Third Man, Orson Welles' lovely noir mystery set in postwar Vienna. The movie is, unsurprisingly, gloriously written, acted, and especially shot, but one of hte things that really affected me was the astonishing amount of rubble in 1949 Vienna. We sacked core axis cities about as thoroughly as the Huns, but people immediately began rebuilding, and within very few years, the cities were banal and bustling, all traces of devastation erased. There's something uniquely horrifying about seeing, for yourself, ordinary dwellings twisted, scattered, and deformed by violence. But there's also something uniquely inspiring about the way human beings pick themselves up after the most awful destruction and go about restoring the devastated places to their former boring selves.
As many of you know, I worked down at Ground Zero for a year after the attack. The pace of the reconstruction disturbed me at first; I didn't want the raw wound to heal. Yet nine months later, when the rubble had been cleared and the ruin was just a big hole in the ground where the basement had been, I shocked and horrified vistors to the site by chatting merrily about the exposed slurry wall. How could I talk about slurry walls at Ground Zero?
But in the end, that's why the human race survives. There have been thousands, maybe millions, of Fallujahs and Ground Zeros in history. And every one of them has been restored to something peaceful, if not pretty.
You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and continue.
Not at all, Jeremy. But war exists. And since it exists, and since we have every reason to believe that it will always exist - by retail (between "champions") if not by wholesale (between armies), in the construction of Heinlein - our choice is to "get over it" the best way we can... or to live and die in the rubble.
Allawi, the interm leader of iraq, announced that of the 17,000 buildings in Fallujah, only 200 were destroyed. Contrary to what you read in the MSM, Fallujah will be back on its feet in no time.
I always thought Shakespeare had had Hamlet say those words with irony.
Separately (a bit of a downer, this): I read once of a city in Afghanistan that had been destroyed by Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes in the 1200s, and never rose again.
Khan's favorite grandson, Mutagen, was killed in Bamiyan (the region containing the famous Buddhas that the Taliban recently destroyed). In revenge for Mutagen's death, Genghis Khan killed every man, woman, and child in Bamiyan--supposedly 150,000 people. He destroyed irrigation systems and in so doing turned fertile soil into permanent desert. The book I read said that the city had never recovered, and I've since read numerous articles that all say similar things (e.g. "since that time [1221] it has never regained its former glory." The population in 1988 was 8,700.
To this day, after 800 years, it remains a shadow of what it once was.
Luckily, we were much nicer to Fallujah than Genghis Khan was to Bamiyan.
Hmm. Another thing I read says Bamiyan's population is 50,000 now, not 8,700. Still a big drop from 150,000 but how accurate can figures from 1219 AD be?
As a child in 1957 London, twelve years after WWII, I remember bombed-out buildings, but just a few. One half-destroyed wall in particular sticks in my mind, in the middle of busy traffic, with a bathtub still hanging from pipes three floors up. From all accounts, the Iraqis have no idea what modern war can do to a city.
Let's get the residents of Fallujah to pick up some shovels and drive some bulldozers ... they'll have to put down their rifles to do it...Can't you just hear the MRS. saying forget the insurgency...fix my kitchen.
87 Million does alot of rebuilding.
Most houses I saw looked quite old anyway. What's the Iraqi word for "condo." Let's watch the free market system take effect as it did in Japan.
That's what has Europe crazed...with all their oil Iraq could emerge as fifth or sixth on the list of economic powerhouse nations.
Mutagen -- sounds like a comic book villain.
That was surprisingly moving. Great post.
One of the comments made by some pundit or other, early on in the war, was that we may have been too quick in our conquest of Iraq. That the way in which we overwhelmingly pacified Japan and Germany in WWII led to the population accepting our role as conqueror. Thus, since we did *not* demolish Iraqi cities on a large scale, the citizens do not recognize us in said role.
Perhaps the Fallujans, between the nastiness the radicals imposed on them, and our total annihilation of said nasties, may become our biggest cheerleaders.
Just thinkin' out loud.
That 87 million figure includes about 60 million in support for our troops. As I recall, only about 20 million was designated for the rebuilding effort. That's still a lot of money, but by the time it trickles down to every little town and city, it's not very much. It's still a lot better than nothing.
our choice is to "get over it" the best way we can... or to live and die in the rubble.
It just seems awful trite to marvel at how the little people will rebuild their city after we blew it to hell, that's all.
Comparisons to Genghis Khan are a bit extreme. The Mongols didn't like cities and gave the same type of treatment to many of them, not just that one. Not a stone left on a stone, not a being left alive....
They killed the men, the women, the children, the infants, the dogs, everything alive, and made sure nothing whatsoever was left standing. That's why John Kerry's claim that the US military razed villages in Vietnam "in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan" was such an extreme accusation.
Wasn't that $87 billion, not million? Or were there both, by chance?
My two main problems with this issue are:
1. We're apparently fighting with one eye on profiteering.
2. We're using depleted uranium shell casings that poison both our troops and Iraqi citizens, while making the areas where these were used uninhabitable.
Problem #1--Apparently in Paul Bremer's scheme, endorsed by the neo-cons, we're not fighting to "liberate" anything except profit for multinational corporations. As detailed in Naomi Klein's article in Harpers, "Bahgdad Year Zero"
>>>Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself."
In other words, apparently we're more interested in building Walmarts in Fallujah, than rebuilding schools, hospitals and libraries.
Problem #2--
Unlike regular bombs and munitions, depleted uranium shell casings are the gifts that keep on giving.
>>>The Pentagon and the United Nations estimate that U.S. and British forces used from 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing munitions made of depleted uranium in Bush's war against Saddam prior to the Fallujah assault. During the Gulf War, 375 tons of DU munitions were fired into mostly unpopulated desert areas, not residential areas, as was done in the current war.
There is nothing "depleted" about this deadly radioactive toxin, so don't be fooled by its name. DU weapons, like dirty bombs, contaminate impact areas with infinitely fine aerosol particles, capable of traveling far and wide, spreading deadly radiation poisoning wherever they lodge.
Depleted uranium recognizes neither friend nor foe, killing indiscriminately. In the earth, DU lasts for 4.5 billion years. Once ingested or inhaled, it never leaves the human body. Lodged in blood cells, the radiation is transported throughout the system. Internalized uranium is acknowledged to cause kidney damage, cancers of the lung and bone, nonmalignant respiratory disease, skin disorders, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects."
http://www.redding.com/redd/op_speak_your_piece/article/0,2232,REDD_18100_3352489,00.html
And these two related articles:
The Futile and Criminal Obliteration of Fallujah:
www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_14194.shtml
Four US Soldiers Tested Positive For Depleted Uranium
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/05/1356241
Also, many scientists have argued that Depleted Uranium weapons violate the U.N.'s ban on "poisonous weapons."
This is fine kettle of fish.....We're using illegal weapons in a war allegedly about disarming Saddam Hussein of illegal weapons.
Everyday the swamp gets deeper.
--Cobra
2. We're using depleted uranium shell casings that poison both our troops and Iraqi citizens, while making the areas where these were used uninhabitable.Repeating long debunked propaganda does not do wonders for one's credibility. While you're at it, why don't you cite Michael Moore as a source?
Faluja was a PR move masquerading as military strategy. Lets tell people engaged in a guerilla war two months ahead of time we are going to bomb the hell out of their supposed base of operations. Does anyone believe insurgents that know they have no chance in direct military confrontation stuck around? They just moved to different locations, and have increased their attacks on the Iraqi police and American military. But it made the Nascar dads and security moms in our poor white trash nation feel better. Strap it on and buckle up, the elections are going to make things alot worse...
Bill writes:
>>>Repeating long debunked propaganda does not do wonders for one's credibility. While you're at it, why don't you cite Michael Moore as a source"
Bill, please show me your SOURCES for this "debunked propaganda." If you use a source from the Pentagon, remember that's the same source that said Agent Orange defoliant posed no health risked to our troops in the field in Vietnam.
I tend to believe INDEPENDENT DOCTORS AND SCIENTISTS, as in the case of the contaminated troops account:
>>>The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes, accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52 properties around the plant," Dietz said....
"...As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late December and collected urine specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes, performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long period. He used a state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies. Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity."
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/180333p-156685c.html
Which brings me back to the point of this thread. If we, as reports indicate, used Depleted Uranium munitions in Fallujah, we've created a wasteland, where the health of both the returning citizens AND our OWN TROOPS may be adversely affected for generations to come.
But hey, Dubya says "Freedom is on the march!"
--Cobra
It is entirely true US armor piercing tank rounds use depleted uranium.
There was a race in WW 2 between the development of tank's armor and armor piercing shells. At a high enough velocity shells of even hardened steel simply shatter against armor plate. Denser, heavier materials such as tungsten were used that would penetrate rather than shatter.
Depleted uranium is super dense. Shells from our M-1's penetrated like butter the armor of Russian made T-72's in Bush Sr.'s Gulf War.
The aspidastra has largely had its wings clipped since the beginning of the 20th century.
Look at what arose after the destruction of Poland in the original blitzkrieg. After five years of the final solution the rebuilding resulted in little that was pretty.
Resideents of Dresden didn't rebuild much of anything pretty.
Whether or not anything pretty will be rebuilt where the twin stories stood remains to be seen. 3,000 odd people died. How many died at Hiroshima and did they rebuild something pretty?
Hoping for "pretty" helps heal a mind that's been hurt, over time, and perhaps bring some solace. Good luck. Think pretty. Hope it works.
Cobra -
Your understanding of economics (and Naomi Klein's) seems weak. You're attacking Bush for wanting to give Iraq a vibrant, healthy capitalist democracy? We're busy building their schools and hospitals already, plus we're trying to give them the ability to have whatever they want in the future. They can have hospitals, schools AND Walmarts (if they want them), if they build their economy. What is the alternative - protectionism? communism? European socialism? European socialism has led to pretty low growth rates, but since they started out rich, their decline hasn't been as painful. Iraq is starting out poor, so steady decline wouldn't be as acceptable.
Bush is trying to bring international best practices to Iraq in terms of government, legal system, financial markets, etc. Would you suggest that they implement failed practices that have impoverished people around the world? Do you want them to go back to UN standards in terms of corruption and excessive bureaucracy?
Ann writes:
>>>Your understanding of economics (and Naomi Klein's) seems weak. You're attacking Bush for wanting to give Iraq a vibrant, healthy capitalist democracy?"
You seem to be ascribing god-like omnipotence to Bush if you feel he has the power to "give" a nation a "vibrant, healthy capitalist democracy."
Epecially considering that OUR capitalist democracy under Bush's watch is now running the highest deficits in history, including billions of dollars owed to COMMUNIST RED CHINA.
Ann also writes:
>>>They can have hospitals, schools AND Walmarts (if they want them), if they build their economy."
Hello? That's the key. IF THEY WANT THEM. You act as if there was an ELECTION taken in March 2003, and the majority of Iraqis voted to have their economic future controlled by foreign multinational corporations. Exactly who, besides American ex-patriates like Chalabi and his profiteering ilk, supports that? Does the Ayatollah Sistani, and his Islamic Shiia majority flock support the profits of Iraqi Oil being spirited out of the country into the coffers of Christian run foreign companies? You already KNOW how the Sunnis feel about American occupation, and their deplacement from power.
>>>Bush is trying to bring international best practices to Iraq in terms of government, legal system, financial markets, etc. Would you suggest that they implement failed practices that have impoverished people around the world? Do you want them to go back to UN standards in terms of corruption and excessive bureaucracy?"
Umm...again, who died and made Bush God? Why aren't we letting the IRAQIS decide the fate of Iraq? I thought we were there to promote FREEDOM. If Iraqis voted for a theocratic Islamic state like Iran, (quite likely given the Shiia majority), would you argue for Bush to dispute the election, and IMPOSE the government of HIS choosing on a population that didn't want our occupation in the first place?
--Cobra
It appears DU fragments can indeed pose a health hazard, and a heavily-shelled site could indeed be dangerous for a time, but for parties wanting a discussion more based in even-toned rationality and less in Cobra's cloak-and-dagger form (however thin said cloak may be), try this:
And here's a BBC archive on DU-related articles:
A note about prettiness: Jane did not say that war-torn areas are always or even often rebuilt as "something pretty"; she said "restored to something peaceful if not pretty" (emphasis mine). That said, it's hard to blame lack of prettiness in postwar Poland on a lack of will to rebuilt something pretty, but easy to blame it on the former Soviet Union's lack of style (to say the least). I'm having zero luck finding a map of former East Germany to determine whether Dresden falls into this category as well, and embarrassingly I don't just know it off the top of my head.
Concerning U236 in general, a side note: the presence of a globally persistent layer of sediment containing this and other radioisotopes is sometimes touted in geological circles as a useful time marker, like the so-called "iridium layer" or "iridium anomaly" at the K-T boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods (marking, roughly, the extinction of dinosaurs and a whole lot else): iridium is very rare in native (earth) rocks, and is common in some asteroids, which gives some credence to the hypothesis that it was a giant asteroid impact that did in three-quarters of living species at that time. Unlike the K-T boundary, the man-made-radioisotope boundary doesn't mark a huge extinction event... but it is relatively easy to identify, from what I've heard, because even a little tiny bit of artificial radioisotopes marks it effectively.
Just as useful as a time marker is the first appearance of "red rocks" or rocks containing oxidized iron, way WAY back, indicating the first appearance of free oxygen in the earth's atmosphere.
So... 1945 is not just an important date historically; it's a geologic cusp too. Weird.
Cobra,
While no one disputes the fact that dust from D.U. shells can be dispersed quite readily, the largest studies in the medical literature consistently fail to show any statistically meaningful health effects. (Just search any medical literature database, e.g. Medline.)
Nearly all publications which state otherwise suffer from small sample sizes (e.g. Gustavsson et al's 2004 study of Swedish soldiers), or, dare I say it, may hint of political bias rather than scientific rigor (e.g. Shawky's paper in 2002, which asserts "considerable" D.U. impact on health, but which supplies precious few data points and hails from King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia). As for Asaf Durakovic, he listed his affiliation as "King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" on his 2001 D.U. paper in the Craotian Medical Journal. If you won't accept publications with "Pentagon" connections, I guess it's at least reasonable to ask about Saudi connections, no? Particularly since other papers from Balkan colleagues suggests that the detectable radiation from D.U. is in the same general range as the natural background radiation in the Balkans. More recently, it looks like most of Durakovic's notoriety came out of a study funded by the "New York Daily News". Hey, I like the Daily News as much as any NYC subway rider, but I'm pretty sure that it's not peer reviewed by the medical community.
Oh, well. Believe what you like. Keep on trollin'...
Jane:
I've recently returned from working on infrastructure reconstruction in Iraq. Before the first shots were fired in Fallujah plans were being made to rebuild the city. Teams were being assembled to go in as soon as the city was subdued to assess the damage and to prioritize reconstruction. In Iraq this is always done with the goal of maximizing the number of ordinary Iraqi's employed.
I also had the opportunity to visit the city of Najaf shortly (about 3 weeks) after the fighting there. It was amazing - it looked like a normal city. There were the occassional piles of rubble, but it did not look like the site of the recent military operations. There was normal hustle and bustle on the streets - people, cars, bicycles as well as the ubiquitous donkey and cart.
Pinetar,
You may feel free to believe I'm a "troll," and there are plenty of individuals who will agree with your opinion on DU's. If you don't like the NY Daily News' researchers, you can try the US government's, in their summary report to Congress.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/du.html
There are findings that agree with your viewpoint here, and findings that agree with mine. The interesting part about the report is the extreme caution that the millitary takes when testing depleted uranium weapons at their facillities, with their "safe boxes"--something people exposed to their use in reality wouldn't have access to.
--Cobra
DU is a heavy metal that is extremely toxic to all organisms when absorbed into their structures.
Two things: A) Lead or Tungsten ain't exactly vitamins either, you may have noticed that lead based paints have been banned because they taste sweet and lead can cause serious brain damage, birth defects, etc, and fishermen are even encouraged to use non-lead weights because fish and birds are ingesting the lead... DU is not replacing perfect weapons that don't cause side effects themselves. B) DU is, um, depleted. In that it is mostly stripped of radioactive isotopes. So, while it is, slightly, radioactive, it has an exceptionally low concentration and very long half-life (so it'll be poison forever!!! oh wait, no, that means that it will have essentially no effect on nearby organisms).
Your utter lack of understanding of chemistry, physics, or the options available is saddening, although exceptionally frequent. You probably get worried when you find out that there are "chemicals" in something or that a substance isn't "natural"
Also, all longlived isotopes are found on earth, and all isotopes of all substances are found in "nature", just that nature may be the heart of a star. To say that the presence of a long-lived isotope is ipso-facto proof of a "radioactive weapon" or a "nuclear process" betrays both a lack of intellect and an unsteady grasp of the english language.
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