Have the Car-bombers Already Defeated the Surge?
The Weapon No One Can Stop
by Mike Davis
 Despite heroic reassurances from both the White House and the Pentagon that the six-week-old U.S. escalation in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province is proceeding on course, suicide car-bombers continue to devastate Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, often under the noses of reinforced American patrols and checkpoints. Indeed, February was a record month for car bombings, with at least 44 deadly explosions in Baghdad alone, and March promises to duplicate the carnage.
Car bombs, moreover, continue to evolve in horror and lethality. In January and March, the first chemical "dirty bomb" explosions took place using chlorine gas, giving potential new meaning to the President's missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Tomgram: Mike Davis, The Missing WMD -- in Trucks in Iraq
The
carnage in Iraq continues, but what did anyone expect? Roadside bombs
(IEDs) take their deadly almost daily toll on U.S. troops in and around
Baghdad (and adjoining provinces). Seventy-five Americans have already
died in March, at least 50 of them from roadside bombs. Of course,
that's a drop in the bucket, when it comes to Iraqi casualties. The now
widely discussed Lancet study of Iraqi "excess deaths" between the
invasion of March 2003 and June 2006 offered an estimated figure of
655,000. Its careful, door-to-door methodology was vehemently rejected
by both George Bush (not "a credible report") and Tony Blair. According
to the British Broadcasting Corporation, however, recently obtained
British government documents indicate that the study's methodology was
indeed sound. ("[T]he chief scientific adviser to the Defense Ministry,
Roy Anderson, described the methods used in the study as ‘robust' and
‘close to best practice'… In another document, a government official --
whose name has been blanked out -- said ‘the survey methodology used
here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring
mortality in conflict zones.'")
None of this is likely to
fully penetrate the mainstream in the U.S. During the week of the
fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, both NBC and ABC in their
prime-time news shows typically continued to cite the figure of 60,000
for Iraqi deaths -- despite the fact that the U.N. Assistance Mission
for Iraq calculated 34,452 Iraqi deaths for 2006 alone and this is
known to be an honest undercount, because some bodies never make it to
morgues or hospitals and, in the embattled no-go zones of the Sunni
insurgency, official reporting of deaths is weak at best.
With
the President's surge plan well underway and "encouraging signs" of
progress in Baghdad already being hailed -- how long can we be
encouraged on the road to hell? -- Iraq is ever more a charnel house, a
killing ground. The latest real surge, as Mike Davis tells us below, is
in car and truck bombs driven by Sunni jihadis. Last April, Davis did a
unique two-part series for this site, "The Poor Man's Air Force" and
"Car Bombs with Wings," which surely represented the first history of
the car bomb ever attempted. The remarkable author of Planet of Slums
has now turned those two pieces into a full-scale, history of this
devastating weapon of our time in a new book, Buda's Wagon: A Brief
History of the Car Bomb. Since, on this roiling planet, the car bomb
may lie in all our futures, this is simply a book not to miss. I
recommend it most highly. Tom
Have the Car-bombers
Already Defeated the Surge?
The Weapon No One Can Stop
by Mike Davis
The sectarian guerrillas who claim affiliation with "al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia" are now striking savagely, and seemingly at will, against
dissident Sunni tribes in al-Anbar province as well as Shiite areas of
Baghdad and Shiite pilgrims on the highways to the south of the
capital. With each massacre, the bombers refute Bush administration
claims that the U.S. military can "take back and secure" Baghdad
block-by-block or establish its own patrols and new, fortified
mini-bases as a realistic substitute for local self-defense militias.
On
February 23rd, for instance, shortly after the beginning of the
"Surge," a suicide truck-bomber killed 36 Sunnis in Habbaniya, west of
Baghdad, after an imam at a local mosque had denounced al-Qaeda. Ten
days later, a kamikaze driver ploughed his truck bomb into Baghdad's
famed literary bazaar, the crowded corridor of bookstores and coffee
houses along Mutanabi Street, incinerating at least 30 people and,
perhaps, the last hopes of an Iraqi intellectual renaissance.
On
March 10th, another suicide bomber massacred 20 people in Sadr City,
just a few hundred yards away from one of the new U.S. bases. The next
day, a bomber rammed his car into flatbed truck full of Shiite
pilgrims, killing more than 30. A week later, horror exceeded itself
when a car bomber evidently used two little children as a decoy to get
through a military checkpoint, then exploded the car with the kids
still in the back seat.
In a demonstration of a tactic that
has proven especially deadly over the past year, a car-bomb attack on
March 23rd was coordinated with an assailant in a suicide vest and
almost killed Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, whose tribal
alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, has accepted funding from the
Americans and been denounced by the jihadis.
When it comes to
the development of suicide vehicles, however, the most alarming
innovation has, without doubt, been the debut in January of truck bombs
carrying chlorine gas tanks rigged with explosives. Of course, "dirty
bombs," usually of the nuclear variety, have been a longtime obsession
of anti-terrorism experts (as well as the producers of TV potboilers),
but the sinister glamour of radioactive devices -- scattering deadly
radiological waste in the City of London or across midtown Manhattan --
has tended to overshadow the far greater likelihood that bomb-makers
would initially be attracted to the cheapness and ease of combining
explosives with any number of ordinary industrial caustics and toxins.
As
if to emphasize that poison-gas explosions were now part of their
standard arsenal, sectarian bombers -- identified, as usual, by the
American military as members of "al-Qaeda in Mespotamia" -- unleashed
three successive chlorine suicide-bomb attacks on March 16th against
Sunni towns outside of Falluja. The two largest attacks involved dump
trucks loaded with 200-gallon chlorine tanks. Aside from the dozens
wounded or killed by the direct explosions, at least another 350 people
were stricken by the yellow-green clouds of chlorine.
As in
April 1915, with the first uses of chlorine gas on the Western Front in
World War I, these explosions sowed widespread panic, underlining -- as
the bombers no doubt intended -- the inability of the Americans to
protect potential allies in al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the
Sunni insurgency. (The recent discovery of stocks of chlorine and
nitric acid in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad will hardly assuage
those fears.)
The shock waves from the March dirty bombs also
rattled windows on the Hudson River, where New York Police Department
(NYPD) experts warned the media that poor security at local chemical
plants raised the danger of copy-cat attacks using stolen ingredients.
An anonymous senior official in the department's Counter-Terrorism
Bureau told Reuters that "the NYPD expected would-be attackers
targeting New York to try to import the tactic." At the same time, New
Jersey's two Democratic Senators -- Robert Menendez and Frank
Lautenberg -- complained that the Bush administration was coddling the
chemical industry by blocking New Jersey and other states from
implementing tougher safety regulations.
Meanwhile, back in
Iraq, the chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected U.S.
troops into a massive, desperate hunt for the "makeshift car-bomb
factories" that Major General William Caldwell, chief spokesman for the
Surge, claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and industrial estates
that ring Baghdad.
The image of a clandestine car-bomb
industry, by the way, is rich with irony. Baghdad's factory belt
contains hundreds of state-owned and private factories that once
manufactured canned food, tiles, baby clothes, transit buses,
fertilizers, commercial glass, and the like. Since the American
invasion, however, the plants are idle, if not derelict, and their once
integrated Sunni-Shiite workforces are bunkered down, jobless, in
increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment in greater Baghdad
is variously estimated in the 40-60% range.
It is unlikely
that the current raids -- using troops who would otherwise be securing
streets and "winning hearts and minds" -- will uncover more than a tiny
fraction of the city's bomb "factories." Indeed, the car bomb -- even
more than the roadside bombs (IEDs) that are filling the Humvee
junkyards -- has proven globally to be an almost invincible weapon of
the ill-armed and underfunded, as well as the one weapon of mass
destruction that the Bush administration has totally ignored. None of
the American commanders in the field in 2003-2004, much less the
imperial daydreamers in neoconservative think-tanks back in Washington,
seem to have foreseen the ubiquity of its use.
According to a
national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq
since the U.S. invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians
(organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated
78,000 Iraqis were killed by several thousand vehicle bombings between
March 2003 to June 2006. Moreover, as I explain in my newly-published
history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, there is little hope for any
technological fix or scientific miracle that will allow reliable
detection of a stolen Mercedes with 500 pounds of C-4 in the trunk or a
dump truck laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives idling in one
of Baghdad's colossal traffic jams. (Checkpoints? Just a synonym for
target of opportunity.)
In the meantime, the bombers are
obviously wagering that if they can sustain current levels of carnage,
the Shiite militias will be forced back onto the streets to protect
their neighborhoods (as the American troops can't), risking a bloody,
all-out confrontation with U.S. forces for the ownership of the vast
Shiite slum of Sadr City and other Shiite areas in eastern Baghdad. On
the other side, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency
expert and mastermind of the Surge, must shut down the car-bombers by
the beginning of the summer or face a likely popular revolt in Sadr
City. With each explosion, his chances of success diminish.
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