What kind of war is this, sir?

It was a cold and rainy night in Baghdad in November of 2003.  I had been “in country,” as the military saying goes, only a few days, and I was waiting to board a flight on a C-130 to Mosul which as it turned out would never take off.  U.S. forces were using a large, olive drab canvas tent as what they called a PAX terminal – passenger terminal to the rest of us.  Rows of folding metal chairs faced two departure desks that had been cobbled together from 2 by 4’s and plywood where harried air force and army enlisted soldiers toiled, shuffling lists of soldiers and civilian contractors waiting to get to outlying bases or even out of the country, back to Kuwait and from there home to “civilization” as the troops called the United States.

I was idly making notes and straining to listen to a young woman who appeared to be about 25 years old seated two rows in front of me who was telling the person next to her how she came to be working for Oliver North, the infamous Iran-Contra figure who was now a right-wing radio star and host of a Fox News show called “War Stories with Oliver North.”  Here we were in the middle of the biggest war the United States had going on, the young woman and me and not a few others (the tent held about 200 people on rows of folding metal chairs and laid out atop their equipment on the floor), and the decorated ex-Marine war hero Mr. North was back in civilization in a radio or television studio presumably getting ready to tell the next “war story” the young woman would provide to him from the front lines.

But the war in Iraq, like Vietnam and every other regional conflict our country had managed to involve itself in since World War II, didn’t appear to have any front lines, which was what the young woman was complaining about loudly to her acquaintance.  She had been in-country for days and she had yet to see a bullet fired in anger, a fact which was causing her boss, Oliver North to give her copious quantities of grief, because she was failing to provide him with the war stories he needed to feed into the suburban living rooms and onto the television screens of his adoring Fox News viewers.

The young woman was trying to get someplace where there might be a chance that a war might be happening, but like the rest of us, for now she was stuck in this tent in the middle of the BIAP – Baghdad International Airport – waiting on the air force to decide whether or not she was important enough to justify a spot on a flight manifest.  She told her acquaintance that she had thought about using her satellite phone to contact “Ollie,” as she called him, but there was a problem that was at once very modern and very old:  the satellite phone only worked outside where the antenna had a direct angle on a satellite, and the air force specialists in charge of the flight manifests were inside.  She had tried getting one of them to go outside with her, but apparently nobody wanted to talk to Oliver North, because as she was before she took the job, they were too young to be aware of what a famous guy he was. She was stuck.

I had spent the previous night in a minor palace on the Tigris River that had belonged to one of Saddam Hussein’s cousins, and the first thing I had encountered upon entering its lavish halls was the faulty plumbing in each of the many bathrooms.  It quickly transpired that if I wanted to use the toilet, I was going to have to repair its gold-plated plumbing.  So that was what I had been doing the previous day – looking from one end of the Green Zone to the other for the kind of pipe wrench I needed to fix the toilet on my floor of Saddam’s cousin’s palace.

Just as the young woman’s frustration reached a kind of fever pitch, a soldier sat down on the empty seat next to me.  Seeing me with a reporter’s notebook in my hand, he introduced himself as being from a small town in Kentucky and said he was trying to get back to his unit on the base at Balad, just north of Baghdad.  He had been in-country since soon after the capital had been taken by U.S. forces.  He had spent the last few days at Saddam’s main palace on the Tigris which had been seized by the army and was being used as the headquarters for U.S. military forces as well as the so-called CPA, or Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government of Iraq since the American takeover of the country, which was headed up by L. Paul Bremer, a Department of State functionary who had become famous for two things:  wearing tan army combat boots with his suit and tie, and disbanding the Iraqi army and outlawing the Baath Party, which even in November of 2003 were being described as the two dumbest moves any American diplomat had ever made.

The soldier’s job, it turned out, was to install three flat screen TV’s in a ballroom that was being used for the twice-daily BUP, or Battle Update Brief, that was given to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander of Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq, as the army was calling itself these days.  The flat screen TV’s, the soldier was told, would be used to display reports from the various units around Iraq.  The soldier said when the TV’s weren’t being used to display top-secret military information about troop positions and plans, they were – all three of them – tuned to Fox News. 

Other soldiers at The Palace, as the CPA and army headquarters was called, were assigned to install new electrical wiring and plumbing because the stuff they had found there when they took over the place in the summer was so shoddy.  The work had been going on for months.  He was headed back to his unit to pick up some relays and other high-tech equipment he would be using to connect the secure computers at The Palace to a satellite-based encrypted internet system the army had established that stretched from one end of the country to the other.  When they were finished, he explained, nearly every soldier in Iraq would have internet access to email and would be able to talk by video link to their families back in the United States.

“That’s all we’ve been doing,” he said.  “Wiring up our bases all over Iraq so they can communicate in real time within the country and with Central Command and the Pentagon back in the states.  We’ve put flat screen TV’s in the dining facilities that show ESPN and Fox News 24 hours a day.  A guy I know was assigned a couple of months ago to set up the gas, electric and water lines for the McDonald’s and KFC they’ve got across BIAP near all the troop quarters.  They’re flying in whole C-141’s filled with air conditioners they’re going to use next summer to cool every building on every army base in Iraq.” 

The soldier asked me if this was the first war I had been assigned to cover, and when I told him, no, it wasn’t, he said, “This isn’t like any war I ever read about in history class.”  He took a deep breath and asked, “What kind of war is this, sir?”

It’s a question I pondered for the entire time I spent in Iraq and later when I traveled to Afghanistan to cover the war there.  The term used by people in the academy who study conflicts and military historians is “unconventional war,” but that doesn’t cover it any better than wars’ statistics do.  Thousands of young American men and women lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans were killed over the decades we spent in both countries. 

Why?  What were we doing there?  As President Biden faces a reckoning in the form of various studies and investigations into the way he pulled our forces out of Afghanistan, I haven’t seen evidence of anyone facing a reckoning for how we got into both wars and what we did fighting them.  The words “Abu Ghraib” have receded into the dim corners of history.  The letters “WMD” and what they stand for have never been reckoned with. 

Reckoning is similarly missing in Iraq and Afghanistan both.  Families visit the gravesites of thousands of civilians killed in both countries.  Sunnis still fight Shiites over resources and wealth.  The Taliban faces a problem they are utterly unprepared to deal with:  there are no chapters of the Koran devoted to how to run a country’s infrastructure or deal with starvation caused by climate change and the common ravages of abject poverty.

Remove all the flat screen TV’s and secure internet infrastructure and improved palace plumbing and what you have in Iraq is the same country that existed in 2003 before Dick Cheney produced a map in the cabinet room in the White House and showed the leadership of the Bush administration how he and his neocon buddies had divided up the country and labeled the different sections with the names of American oil companies. 

And here I have been sitting and remembering that night in Baghdad so long ago and pondering that soldier’s question about a new war in Ukraine as the headlines scroll by, ever more terrible, ever more senseless, all of them leading to the same questions:  Why?  What are the Russians doing there?

Twenty-four dead in a cruise missile strike Thursday on a shopping area in Vinnytsia, a provincial capital in central Ukraine nowhere near the scene of fighting on the ground between Russian and Ukrainian military forces.  On Saturday, Russian missiles leveled a residential block of apartments in Chasiv Yar, killing 24 civilians.  On Tuesday, Russian rockets destroyed homes and a school in the town on Bakhmut, killing one civilian resident and wounding five more.  On Thursday, Russian rockets hit a hotel in the port city of Mykolaiv killing five civilians.  In June, a Russian cruise missile strike hit a shopping center south of Kyiv in a town on the Dnipro River, killing 18 civilians.  And this does not even account for losses suffered by Ukraine’s military forces which include thousands of civilians who have volunteered to join the war effort.

Meanwhile, the British Ministry of Defense, which has been extremely accurate in its assessments of what is going on in Ukraine, announced that Russian forces have “achieved no significant territorial advances over the last 72 hours” in eastern Ukraine where the great majority of the fighting is going on.

Russia has completely leveled and emptied entire cities in Ukraine with no apparent military objective in mind.  Russian forces have destroyed factories, critical infrastructure, housing, schools, colleges, killed thousands of civilians and moved more than a million Ukrainian citizens into Russia or Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, all of it on the apparent whim of one man, Vladimir Putin.

What kind of war is this, sir?

A murderous war, a criminal war like so many others for which there will never be a proper reckoning.