Month: April 2003

V-H AWARD I: “Gruesome days for the German foreign minister: Every morning at nine, his staff briefs him on the situation in Iraq in the ministry’s underground situation room. His worst fears are coming true: The US military appears to be stuck in its tracks in the desert, and civilian casualties are multiplying. It has never been so painful to have been in the right, murmurs the foreign minister, with a worried look on his face.” – der Spiegel, March 31.

V-H AWARD II: “I bet you in the Pentagon the military planning assumes 5,000 to 10,000 American casualties and at least 100,000 to 250,000 civilian casualties in downtown Baghdad. All on CNN.” – Gary Hart, Denver Post, March 30, 2001.

V-H AWARD III: “The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we cannot win. “We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. “Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam, but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost.” – Scott Ritter, South African TV.

V-H AWARD IV: “Iraqis, very clearly, do not want to be ‘liberated,’ even many who had long opposed Saddam’s brutal regime. To the contrary, the US-British invasion appears to have ignited genuine national resistance among 17 million Arab Iraqis, just as the 1941 German invasion of the USSR rallied Russians and Ukrainians behind Stalin’s hated regime. … The nasty, bloody urban warfare the Americans and Brits sought to avoid at all costs is now confronting them.” – Eric Margolis, ForeignCorrespondent.com.

V-H AWARD V: “Though Operation Iraqi Freedom has been underway for only two weeks, Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” strategy was a flop. Pentagon strategists expected to have taken Baghdad by Mar. 27. Best-laid plans and all that: U.S. generals, worried that they don’t have enough men on the front lines, are considering whether to lay siege to Baghdad, bomb it to ruins or take it one block at a time. Basra hasn’t fallen. Suicide bombers are on the loose, we’re offing civilians and the Iraqi army has gone guerilla. And we hold a mere 4,000 Iraqi POWs. Only 45 Americans and Britons have died so far–compared to 112 total combat deaths in 1991–but allied casualties will soar if and when ground troops are ordered to take Baghdad… In this respect, Iraqis are no different than we are. Millions of Americans consider Bush to be a hateful, extremist dimwit who seized power twice, once in an unconstitutional judicial coup d’état and again by using the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to expand his personal power and gut the Bill of Rights. They call him names, like the Resident and Commander-in-Thief. But even the most passionately anti-Bush Americans would eagerly join their W-loving compatriots to fight any army that invaded the United States in the name of some theoretical ‘liberation.’ I know I would.” – Ted Rall, April 2.

V-H AWARD VI: “Meanwhile, a German government report due to appear in a newspaper on Monday says that up to two million people could die in a war on Iraq. The report released by the Environment Ministry says many civilians would be unable to get food or clean drinking water. The paper quotes the report as saying that a quarter of the population in southern Iraq already has no access to drinking water.” – Deutsche Welle.

V-H AWARD VII: “These are the last days of relative calm before we start bombing and massacring hundreds of thousands of people and in so doing enter into what many believe will a very long, drawn-out, insanely expensive, volatile, destabilizing, completely unwinnable war against a cheap thug of an opponent who has negligible military might and zero capacity to actually harm the U.S. in any substantive way. U-S-A! U-S-A! This will not be Desert Storm. This will not be quick and painless. This will be 3,000 guided missiles launched on the first day of the war, 10 times that of Desert Storm, turning Iraq into an instant wasteland.” – Mark Morford, Sfgate, March 5.

V-H AWARD VIII: “Have you ever seen such amazing arrogance wedded to such awesome incompetence?” – Molly Ivins, March 16, 2003. No, Molly, I haven’t. The liberal media have had a terrible, terrible war.

Conventional Wisdom Watch, by Newsweek. A down-arrow for Dick Cheney: “Tells ‘Meet the Press’ just before war, ‘We will be greeted as liberators.’ An arrogant blunder for the ages.” Nope, Newsweek. Yours was the “arrogant blunder for the ages.” And on April 7!

VON HOFFMAN AWARD II: “In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall. It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taleban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to Western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get ‘difficult’ only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?” – Simon Jenkins, the Times of London, in an article called – yes! – “Baghdad Will Be Near Impossible to Conquer,” March 28.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD III: “[Al-Jazeera has shown] the resistance and anger of the Iraqi population, dismissed by Western propaganda as a sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes … The idea that Iraq’s population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible … One can only wince at the way weak-minded policy hacks in the Pentagon and White House have spun out the ‘ideas’ of Lewis and Ajami into the scenario for a quick romp in a friendly Iraq … pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally ‘liberated’.” – Edward Said, London Review of Books, April 17.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD IV: “It looked grimly like that scene in A Bridge Too Far, Richard Attenborough’s epic on the Arnhem disaster, in which a British officer walks slowly up the great span with an umbrella in his hand to see if he can detect the Germans on the other side. But I knew the Americans were on the other side of this bridge and drove past it at great speed. Which provided a remarkable revelation. While American fighter-bombers criss-crossed the sky, while the ground shook to the sound of exploding ordnance, while the American tanks now stood above the Tigris, vast areas of Baghdad – astonishing when you consider the American claim to be “in the heart” of the city – remain under Saddam Hussein’s control.” – Robert Fisk, the Independent, April 9, i.e. the day of liberation.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD V: “The huge psychological victory for the coalition produced by the arrival of US tanks in front of the media centre in Baghdad has not finished off the regime, even though this coup came so soon after their shock arrival at the international airport. A compilation of the military detail in reports from journalists in Baghdad and an ear for the changing spin from Centcom gives a less victorious picture of the battle for the Iraqi capital than is shown in the media. For example, for three hours on Saturday Centcom said the US was in Baghdad to stay, not on a raid. Then, after some armoured vehicles had been damaged and some troops killed and injured, it became a raid as the troops withdrew. The selective and censored TV coverage obscures a military reality that has been neither as successful nor as difficult as it has seemed. Now, reports of total victory may be premature.” – Dan Plesch, the Guardian, April 9, the day of liberation.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD VI: “As the war drags on, any stifled sympathy for the American invasion will tend to evaporate. As more civilians die and more Iraqis see their “resistance” hailed across the Arab world as a watershed in the struggle against Western imperialism, the traditionally despised Saddam could gain appreciable support among his people. So, the Pentagon’s failure to send enough troops to take Baghdad fairly quickly could complicate the postwar occupation, to say nothing of the war itself.” – Robert Wright, Slate, April 1.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD VII: “Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as ‘their hoped-for liberators’?” – Eric Alterman, The Nation.

P.S.This award (for awful wartime predictions) is still wide open. Send me your late entries, with a URL address to verify. There’s more accounting to do.