Mass destruction, and weapons thereof

(Blogger's note: this post and several others disappeared during our period of technical difficulties. For reference, we have recopied it here, but without the links that were originally included. We hope to restore the links eventually.)

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld laughed yesterday, literally laughed at the hundreds of reports from journalists on the scene in Baghdad, account after account, image after image of looting, anarchy, and chaos as mobs attack building after building, stripping hotels, shops, offices, even hospitals down to bare walls.

"It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said, smug as ever. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase."

He also insisted that U.S. forces now occupying the city are trying to do something about the looting: "Where they (U.S. forces) see looting, they're stopping it. And they will be doing so."

Not only reporters, not only cameras, not only humanitarian workers, but the occupying troops themselves tell a different story, inadvertently contradicting the Secretary of Defense. The BBC's Paul Wood, a credible journalist if ever there were one, reports: "We have seen the Marines standing by as people carry off armfuls of stolen goods. And the Marines will tell you these are not their orders and that they're here as a fighting force, not a police force."

Wood also answered Rumsfeld's charges that the news media were distorting the story by repeatedly showing the same images of an isolated incident. He said that four BBC reporters went out in four different directions yesterday and all four came back with reports, including video, of looting and chaos. "It's not difficult to find," Wood said, reporting from the media center on the roof of the Palestine Hotel. On the street below him, a small but growing group of Baghdad citizens was staging a peaceful demonstration, with signs in English and Arabic demanding a new government as soon as possible to stop the looting and violence. Most of Baghdad still has no electricity, and therefore no television even though the U.S. military is now broadcasting over the Iraqi airwaves, so it seems unlikely that the demonstrators were there because of distorted images they saw on television.

If Rumsfeld is telling the truth, and the reports we've seen and heard from each and every media organization on the scene not just in Baghdad but in Basra, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kirkuk, Mosul and elsewhere are not reports but fabrications and distortions, then why is the U.S. military now trying to get police and other officials from the deposed regime to put on uniforms and weapons again and go back to work? If it were just one person carrying the same vase out of the same building over and over, it would seem unnecessary for the liberating forces to be begging the same people who used to round up citizens for torture or execution to help restore order.

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at yesterday's CENTCOM briefing that "when we entered the city, we found that there were police radios that we'd captured, and the police were calling for (and adjusting?) indirect fire in support of the regime. So putting the police back on is not an easy solution for us."

If the Red Cross and the journalists on the scene are telling the truth, if the buildings we see burning on TV really are burning, if the looters we see gleefully pushing chairs and hospital gurneys down the street loaded with sinks and pipes and refrigerators are really doing what we're seeing them doing, if the hospitals we've seen on TV really have been stripped of everything but the wires that wouldn't come out of the walls, then there really is mass destruction going on in Baghdad.

Mass destruction — as in "weapons of:" the reason the U.S. broke with its own history and invaded another nation unprovoked, as you may recall. The U.S. still insists those weapons are there, somewhere, though the invading forces have had no more luck finding them than the U.N. inspectors before them. If those weapons exist, then what's to prevent the looters from finding them and dragging them home along with the baby incubators and heart monitors they're stealing? Would Iraq, or the world, be a safer place than it was before the invasion and liberation?

The Associated Press reports that yesterday, U.S. Marines found "an enormous cache" of suicide-bomb vests in a Baghdad elementary school, each packed with explosives and ball bearings. There were nearly 50 of them, although it appeared there were a few missing. In a nearby middle school, Marines discovered "hundreds of crates filled with rocket propelled grenade launchers, surface to air missiles, shoulder launched rockets and ammunition," the AP reports. How many other such caches might there be? And how many of them have been discovered by looters rather than the Marines? (By the way, briefing generals: the word "cache" is pronounced like "cash." The word you've been using, "cachet" [pronounced "cash-ay"] is French for stamp, mark, or style.)

The Secretary of Defense says he has "a lot of confidence" that the American people will not believe the reports from journalists and humanitarian workers in Iraq. He did not say whether he had the same confidence about the rest of the world, nor did he respond directly to charges that the U.S. and U.K. are in violation of the Geneva Convention's requirements for occupying forces.

However confident it may be, the U.S. military has also expressed concerns that looters might get their hands on evidence and/or records relating to weapons of mass destruction, and coalition forces are working to keep Iraqi experts on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons from leaving the country. If the records, or the experts, could get loose, then why not the weapons themselves?

I know there are some who sincerely believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq made the world a safer place. Maybe there are even some who believe Rumsfeld's version of the news. There may still be some who believe that opening all Iraq's cities to looters is the best way to find those weapons of mass destruction and get them out of the hands of those who might use them, and some who believe that asking Saddam's henchmen to go back to policing as usual is the best way to solve Iraq's problems. There are some who believe that the invasion of Iraq will change the mood of the much-talked-about "Arab street," so that the increasing numbers of people who have come to distrust and even hate America and Americans will experience, if they haven't already, a change of heart and come to love us. If you're one of those people, then I hope and pray that you're right, and I'm wrong.