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Open season in Iraq
MAMs (military-age males) are back
By Stan Goff
May 24 — In 1963, well before the American public generally
understood where Vietnam was, a young Army captain led a South Vietnamese
unit through the A Shau Valley to systematically burn villages to the
ground. This was to deprive the so-called Vietcong of any base of support,
and was called “draining the sea,” a reference to Mao’s
dictum that the guerrilla is the fish and the population is the sea.
That captain would later write, “I recall a phrase we used in the
field, MAM, for military-age male. If a helo spotted a peasant in black
pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would
circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged
evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but
at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom
I had served... was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs
from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed
nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”
On Mar. 16, 1968, the US Infantry of C Company, Task Force Barker, 11th
Infantry Brigade, Americal Division went into a Vietnamese hamlet designated
My Lai 4 and killed 347 unarmed men, women, and children, engaging in
rape and torture along the way for four hours before a US helicopter
pilot who observed the massacre ordered his door gunners to open fire
on the grunts if they didn’t desist. The chopper pilot, however,
did not report the massacre.
Six months later, a young enlisted man, Spec 4 Tom Glen, sent a letter
to General Creighton Abrams, commander of US forces in Vietnam. Without
specifically mentioning My Lai, Glen said that murder had become a routine
part of Americal operations. The letter was shunted over to Americal
Divison, and then to the office of the same officer who had been leading
the South Vietnamese arson campaign five years earlier, since promoted
to major. He was now the deputy assistant Chief of Staff of the division—a
functionary who was directed to craft a response to this report of widespread
atrocities against Vietnamese civilians.
“In direct refutation of this portrayal,” wrote the officer
dismissively and with no investigation whatsoever, “is the fact
that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are
excellent.” Perhaps he believed that those killed were MAMs, and
therefore outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions and international
law.
That officer is now the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who is still
dutifully spinning out prevarications and excuses for his massahs. Apparently
his perceptions of right and wrong are still dulled by his brief experience
of “combat,” burning people’s houses and barns and crops
and ordering that young men who run from heliborne machine gun fire
be killed because running away from machinegun fire is... “hostile.”
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the MAMs are back.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the rat-faced boy of CENTCOM, with help
from a Marine moron named Mattis, has resurrected the MAM to justify
coordinated air-land attacks against weddings.
At 3 AM, on May 19th, 2004, the Rakat family of Makr al-Deeb—a
village in western Iraq—were winding down after an all night party
celebrating a double wedding, when American war planes suddenly screamed
in from over the dark horizon and dumped a fiery axis of bombs across
the village. In the wake of the bombing “prep,” ground troops
equipped with night vision equipment, explosives, and expensive aimpoint
sights on their weapons, swept over the shattered ruins and through
the terrified and fleeing wedding guests delivering a kind of close-up
coup.
Neil McKay writes a harrowing account in the Sunday Herald, in which
witnesses describe the ground assault as little different than the My
Lai incident, just shorter and on a smaller scale. Troops were razing
buildings and killing people as they were encountered. People’s
children were killed in front of them.
There is an unofficial excuse making the rounds that this was a mistake,
that war planes targeted the wedding because this “alien culture”
fires weapons into the air during celebrations. This comports well with
the notion that being sodomized and sexually humiliated and beaten to
death are “particularly offensive to Arabs,” as if Americans,
for example, would equate this treatment to root canal work—unpleasant
but tolerable.
If it were an error from the air, how in the hell did a ground force
follow through for the air attack? I can tell you how. There was no
error. These planes were not randomly cruising the Iraqi skies at 3
AM, and suddenly responding to ground fire. And ground troops don’t
suddenly show up at the same place. Combined air-ground operations require
detailed planning and coordination, which means this attack was planned
in advance. I don’t know what really happened that killed 45 people
at Makr al-Deeb, but I can assure readers that this premeditation is
part of it.
The official line, adopted as the Abu Ghraib scandal metastasizes into
a political crisis for the Bush administration, is that there was no
error at all, and that there was no wedding. They were combatants, pure
and simple, and goddamit we are not going to apologize to anyone for
it. Foreign fighters every one of them, and that whole fucking village
is just a pack of rag-headed liars.
“How many people go into the middle of the desert to hold a wedding
eighty miles from the nearest civilization?” scoffed Major General
James Mattis of the 1st Marines. “There were more than two dozen
MILITARY-AGED MALES.”
Either Mattis is shameless or he is an idiot. We can’t rule out
either... or both. It’s in the job description for senior officers
right now — probably a line on their officer evaluation reports
— if they want their careers to progress.
Makr al-Deeb is a real village in a real civilization that is, oh by
the way General, a hell of a lot older than the one you hail from.
Kimmitt apparently felt compelled to top Mattis for stupidity when he
blurted out last week that, “There may have been some kind of celebration.
Bad people have celebrations, too.”
The manufacture of evidence is now experiencing a speed-up, with Kimmitt
telling a yet-again-obedient press corps that there were military items
and even possibly cocaine (!) on the site (no fetishes for devil worship...
yet) , and no evidence of a wedding. To bolster this preposterous case,
they have provided snapshots of (gasp) binoculars, and virtually the
entire US press corps has forgotten that Colin Powell presented doctored
photos to the UN just last year. The press forgot, because they never
reported it. Now they are submissively echoing the Kimmitt evidence
photos and the cover story that goes with them. Kimmitt says there is
categorically no evidence of a wedding at all, and he stubbornly denies
that ANY children were killed, even though every Iraqi medical official
says there were at least 15. Liars, according to Kimmitt.
“In direct refutation of this portrayal,” Kimmitt might have
said, “is the fact that relations between American soldiers and
the Iraqi people are excellent.”
Lo and behold, however, there is an independent press still surviving
in the marginal niches of post-modern capitalism—where the image
is all—and they are hauling facts out from time to time that smell
up the area like a pile of decomposing bodies. A video has surfaced
of the site, and there is ample evidence of dead children, musical instruments,
and all the paraphernalia of... a wedding. Oops.
The footage was shown on Al-Arabiya television, whereupon the weasel
Kimmitt and his dour gangsters demanded that Al-Arabiya give them the
name of the cameraman who shot the video. Maybe they planned a Mazen
Dana treatment for the offender — Dana being the Reuters journalist
who was shot dead by US troops when his camera’s eye had drifted
too close to their actions.
We are reaching a point of polarization with respect to this war, where
these oxygen thieves with suits and stars feel they can get away with
the MAM argument, justifying the murder of anyone who is male, military-aged
and brown. We have reached some kind of social baseline of racially-stupefied
consensus, where all that PC posturing is no longer necessary, where
another half-wit in Congress can say he is “outraged at the outrage,”
and there is 35% of the US population that will sit perfectly still
for it, many even cheering it on. For that polarization to be complete,
we need 35% of the population that sets aside their maddening liberal
squeamishness and dithering and demands that these suits and stars be
strung up by their testicles.
We need a good, in-your-face, knock-down, drag-out fight in this place.
Anyone who thinks, at this point, that the election of that hound-dog
from Massachusetts—when he promises to send MORE troops to Iraq—is
going to fundamentally change any of this is smoking angel dust. It’s
getting close to grown-up time, and we’re going to have to put
aside our electoral cake and ice cream.
This place hasn’t had a good old fashioned DEEP-DOWN change since
Reconstruction. It’s time.
Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s
Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and
of the upcoming book “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull
Press, 2003).
