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10 Years after we let al-Qaeda into Iraq

10 Years after we let bin Laden's al-Qaeda into Iraq
March 7, 2013 by Bruce Wallace, 121Contact

 Did you see al-Qaeda in Iraq's new video? 10 years after the invasion I’m remembering Saddam Hussein and his relationship with al-Qaeda. Most of the U.S. is comfortably forgetting about Iraq. Forgetting the big things like the innocent civilians who died by the tens of thousands; the American soldiers who did their duty, died or returned home damaged forever; the promises; the lies…

 But one little thing about Iraq and al-Qaeda is on my mind today because al-Qaeda in Iraq just released their latest video and it says a lot about the last ten years.

 Saddam hated al-Qaeda. He thought of them as a direct threat to the extremely secular empire he ruled. At the time the U.S. government was accusing him of colluding with al-Qaeda there weren’t any around. If any showed up he wasted no time in eliminating them.

 One of the first things the U.S. did when the invasion was complete was to disband the Army, the Police, and the Administrative Government. This clean-slate approach wasn’t ignored by bin Laden. Al-Qaeda operatives slipped in and hit the ground running with skills honed in Afghanistan. Perhaps this was the start of his global tactic of slipping into weakened countries to foment discord; something we see operating in many African nations today; think Syria; think Mali.

 And al=Qaeda did increase the chaos. And they are still disrupting things today. The new video shows their fighters “firing mortars at Iraqi army targets in Anbar, Baghdad, Ninawa and Salahuddin provinces.” [SITE] That’s a lot of territory; a lot of infiltration, coordination, and influence. And America opened the door.

 But let’s just forget about it. Because it’s too hard to admit the consequences of the amazingly bad decisions we made about Iraq. Now we have a chance to do it all over again in Syria. But if we don't remember we don't have a chance to learn from our mistakes.

It shows their fighters “firing mortars at Iraqi army targets in Anbar, Baghdad, Ninawa and Salahuddin provinces.” [SITE]

Zero Dark Thirty: The Boredom, the Joke, and the Lie.

Zero Dark Thirty: The Boredom, the Joke, and the Lie.
December 13, 2012 by Bruce Wallace, 121Contact

OMG, don't get me started. Too late! I'm already started. Boring! We saw this hyped up Zero Dark Thirty and were disappointed in a couple of ways. With a great opportunity to deliver a caper film about something that really matters, Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal delivered something less exciting, a little boring, and much less important. Yes, it is true that it is hard to draw folks in when they already know the ending, but one can at least try to, perhaps, give us some new facts, viewpoints, or insights to reward our patience. Even a trite view of the intensive Seal training that went into this mission would have been welcome; the mockup site, the over-and-over-till-perfect drills, Lee Marvin pushing the men to their limits and beyond...oops, that was The Dirty Dozen, a really great piece of film!

Zero Dark Thirty did a good job of scaring us with the loud noises of sometimes unexpected exposions, but otherwise left us to sit through a well-known tale while adding very little to our knowledge and understanding of...pretty much anything the film touched on.

The phone 'torture controversy' that the publicists have cooked up is far more controversial that the treatment of torture in the film. That's the joke. The distance between the film's torture and the reality of real-life torture is so far that one can hardly discern the stance of the film. The movie torturers barely show us the joy they get from hurting people for a good cause. You couldn't do that job unless that was true; it would rip you apart. The impact of torture on the prisoners is so mild, and they recover so quickly, that one wonders where the movie makers got their information: from TV, perhaps.

And the Lie? Well, there were a couple, but after all, Zero Dark Thirty is a Hollywood movie and we need some cutting, pasting, and cinetech to liven things up. The big lie, the capital L Lie, has to do with the role of torture in the hunt for Usama bin Laden. In fact, it wasn't important at all.

"After the examination of millions of pages of evidence, the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have publicly stated that coercive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding did not provide the information that led to bin Laden." [NYTimes]

There. You have it. Zero Dark Thirty is a just movie, that's all, and not a particularly good one, either.