I'm Trying to Get This Straight

We invaded and took out an inarguably awful dictator. Without his absolute rule, there was a need for security but not enough U.S. soldiers to provide it. Colonel Paul Hughes worked with officers of the Iraqi military to recall its soldiers into its ranks. Then Paul Bremer arrived and disbanded the Iraqi military, sending 250,000 trained and armed soldiers into the streets, unemployed. This affair is described in detail in The Assassin’s Gate by George Packer.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran said in Imperial Life in the Emerald City that members of the defeated Iraqi military had been hanging around outside the Assassin’s Gate looking for continuing work in the military after the U.S. had set up camp in the Green Zone. When the announcement went out that Bremer had disbanded the Iraqi military, these guys stopped hanging around. Weeks later, Chandrasekaran saw them in a cafe in Baghdad. He asked them what they were doing now that the military had been disbanded. They told him they had become insurgents.

The insurgency gained momentum, and there were reports that former members of the Iraqi military were involved. Also, non-Iraqi al Qaeda members joined, but al Qaeda would not have had this opportunity if we had not invaded.

In 2006 some Sunni tribesmen started to become disillusioned with al Qaeda and its fundamentalism. Also, General Petraeus and other U.S. military leaders started working with Sunni tribesmen to get control of the insurgency. In a Talking Points Memo video made in September 2007, Juan Cole talked about these allegiances -- how Petraeus is to be commended for realizing that working with tribal leaders was the way to get things done in the Sunni regions, but that our support of the tribes amounts to basically bribing them to take our side. Given the fluidity of political relationships in that part of the world, there is no certainty of what these tribes will do in the long run.

By March of 2008 some U.S. military leaders had started to question the long-term ramifications of this empowerment of Sunni militias.

Fred Kagan, even, praised the efforts of the Anbar Awakening against al Qaeda, but expressed concern about reconciliation between the Sunni tribes and the Shiite government.

Now, reports are coming out, linked from two previous posts, that Maliki and the Shiite-lead government is taking an openly antagonistic stance against these Sunni militias. Today two analysts warn Maliki about this. They note that, like the Sunni militias, he has been emboldened by our unconditional support.

So now, the Maliki government and the Sunni militias allied with us, both of have been hailed as manifestations of "progress" in Iraq, both of whom we are aiding and arming, might start renewed fighting against each other.

What was it we were trying to do over there again?

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My Superbowl Commercial

I've found it online, the TV commercial that I did the location audio for back in January. It aired just as halftime started, and only as a local spot. Girlfriend Svetx was an extra in the auditorium.

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Whose Daddy Are We, Exactly?

Maliki's, or the Awakening/Sons of Iraq tribes'?

This growing antagonistic stance by the Maliki government against the Awakening and Sons of Iraq militias is very disturbing. I was just telling a friend this morning how, it seems to me, that the Bush administration never has had a policy in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. It has merely repeated its mantras about "freedom" and "war on terror" and so on. So our military devised what policy it could and started working with tribes and local groups to bring stability to certain areas. But now, with Maliki turning against these groups, it leaves the military reluctantly standing by, as this LA Times article says. What will this mean to the Sons and Awakening people? That we are abandoning them? I fear these (paid) allies of ours, one of our few signs of "progress" in that country, will turn into renewed enemies . . . which is what the "liberal" (i.e. knowledgeable) press and even some military leaders have been warning about for a long time.

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Shifting Bases

It got more surreal today.

The Iraqi government is now openly antagonistic toward the Sons of Iraq and Awakening Council militias. Juan Cole linked to a McClatchy article saying that the Maliki government will not incorporate more Sunni militia members into the Iraqi military than the handful it already has, and Maliki is considering forcing the remaining militia members to give up their weapons by November 1 or face arrest. The NY Times talks of active pursuit of some Awakening movement members by the Iraqi military.

Until now, these Awakening movements in Sunni areas of Iraq have been touted by the pro-war press as one of the major accomplishments there.

This article from February 2008 said that while the success of the Awakening groups leads to a risk of renewed Sunni hubris and friction with the Shiite dominated government, “slowly but surely,” the government is incorporating Sunni militia members into the Iraqi military, a sign of reconciliation.

But now, General Petraeus has said that the Iraqi government has been dragging its feet on incorporating Sunni militia members.

So far this year, according to the McClatchy article, the U.S. military has spent $303 million on Sons of Iraq salaries. There are over 100,000 members of of the Sons of Iraq and Awakening militias.

So if Maliki’s government is not reconciling with these Sunni militia members, and is even taking action against them, then can’t it be said that he is in direct conflict with our proxies? Where does that leave the U.S.?

But I have always felt that this “success” of the Awakening and Sons of Iraq militias in kicking out al Qaeda (which, in Iraq, consisted largely of Iraqis and was not a significant element in Iraq before we invaded) represents a major deficiency with respect to having a unified democracy there. Neither the U.S. army nor the Iraqi army fought al Qaeda as effectively as the tribal militias. This means to me that in the Sunni areas, the true loyalties are to tribes. And these tribes never indicated that they would support Maliki’s government in the long run.

This kind of inherent contradiction is also in the alleged “success” of the Iraqi military’s operation in Basra this past spring. Juan Cole says that the military inducted many members of the Badr corps into its ranks to enable it to fight the Sadr militia. The Badr corps is the militia associated with the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq (SICI). In March of 2008, Dick Cheney thanked the leader of the SICI for his help in advancing the cause of democracy in Iraq. Cheney even called him a “friend.”

But the SICI was born in Iran and, of all political groups in Iraq, seems to be the most heavily influenced by Iran.

Juan Cole gives brief historical sketches of the SICI in several different places. Here is one, in which he says,

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI or SAIRI) was formed as an umbrella group by Iraqi Shiite exiles in Tehran in 1982, in the wake of Saddam's big crackdown on the Shiite al-Dawa Party and other similar groupings. In 1984 it came to be headed up by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, and was until his death in Najaf in a huge car bombing on August 29, 2003. During the 1980s SCIRI developed a paramilitary wing, the Badr Corps, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the brother of Muhammad Baqir. Both were sons of Muhsin al-Hakim, who had been the leading authority in Najaf (the equivalent of Sistani today) circa 1960-1970.

And yet, Iran has been cited by the Bush administration as one of the major threats to world peace and a cause of trouble in Iraq. Here is Seymour Hersh talking about this.

So it appears we support both the Sunni militias and Maliki whose opposition to each other grows; and we support the Iran-influenced SICI while holding Iran in highest suspicion.

Can someone explain this to me?

Or maybe this is all moot. Looks like, whether the next president wants to continue a 100-year presence of military bases in Iraq, he won't be able to. If the Iraqi's ask us to leave anyway, then what basis will McCain have for his campaign?

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All Those Hours Rolling Tape on Their Yammering Just Might Pay Off

This documentary that I worked on -- gosh, must have started in 2004 and run through 2005, 2006, to spring of 2007, and then editing seriously began -- finally is coming out. Go to www.movingmidway.com and check it out. You’ll have to paste that link in your browser’s address bar. Can’t be leaving a link trail, see. Do watch the preview linked off that page, it’s good.

I happen to know that the first couple of edited versions sucked balls. All this brew-ha-ha about moving this house was about as exciting as watching its paint peel naturally, over years, like the skin on my rash-striken foot, down to the original layers laid well before our nation’s birth. Also, I was always upset that they wouldn’t let me hide the body mics. So, I apologize to you, a potential viewer, for the visibility of the microphones. Everyone was too uptight to let me fool with their shirts much. They said they speak in front of people all the time and wear those things, so they could put them on themselves. I didn’t really let them do it themselves, but I did have to slap the mics on them quickly and call it art.

One day, probably summer of ‘07, I was driving home from some other hot outdoor gig, oozing sweat into the cloth seats of my car, and my phone rang. It was the producer, and he said, “I’ve got news. Are you sitting down?”

“Are we gonna get paid?” I said.

“We’ve redone Midway. And it’s good," he said.

And it is pretty darn good, if I may say so. Even if it doesn’t tell the real story about the strife in the family; the reputed failed attempts to farm the land; the need to sell the land and move the house just to stay solvent; the fact that a bypass was being built that would relieve the traffic troubles on the road and reduce the need to move the house anyway; the old jealousies and bitterness that kept the brothers and other family members away on the actual moving day . . .

. . . the intrinsic desire on the part of the homeowner to fire people. One of the main carpenters slated to work on reconstruction after the house was moved, and shown in the movie before the move, was fired and did not actually work on reconstruction.

. . . and one of our production assistants was blamed for the drive shaft on the primary towing truck shearing apart because it was said that he hollered something that sounded like “Ho.” Coming from the boss-man, “Ho” meant “Stop,”which is what the drivers of the two winch trucks which provide auxiliary pulling-power via stranded steel cables did, though nobody knows whether “Ho” was spoken or not, or who said it if it was. When they stopped pulling, the entire weight of the house was left to be born by the main towing truck, causing its drive shaft to shear and a production assistant to be fired, whether it was his fault or not.

But little pity goes to the drive shaft and the folks who paid for extra working time. I had to dive under the house while it was moving because my cameraman did and I was tethered to him by audio cable. We got those awesome shots of its underside moving overhead, like a close encounter with a blue whale. The moving workers were accustomed to all this and spent whole days walking along underneath the house watching the various clusters of wheels to be sure that the hydraulics were working properly. Each set of wheels supported the house on a hydraulic piston, and the pistons were linked by hoses which distributed the fluid among them. The way I understood it, if the ground rose under one set of wheels, it pushed these wheels upward against the piston supporting the house. This pushed hydraulic fluid to other pistons -- or maybe just the opposite corner piston -- which extended to keep equal force on all portions of the house.

Those guys walking under the house also had big levers and ratchets and chains. They would watch all the wheels very carefully to see if any were being pulled out of alignment. The house moved so slowly that they had time to do this as it moved. If some wheels strayed, they worked the levers and tightened chains on the ratchets and pulled the wheels back into line.

When the house first started to move, with us under it, it let out a groan like some monster in a Tolkien movie, and I wished like hell that we had ordered a stereo mic to capture a better sound field. Even so, with only the shotgun mic capturing house noises, I was told that the folks at the answer print screening asked if the house noises had been Foleyed. “No,” the producer told them. “It was [Elrond Hubbard] who got those sounds on the day.”

I had to remind the producer that I did not work on any house moving days after it reached the halfway point which was a holding area in a field. Indeed, really, I only worked on about a third of all the footage that made it into the movie. Other sound guys did the other days -- and, lots of days, 2 or 3 of us worked simultaneously. I think all of us can be glimpsed in the movie at various times. My appearance is near the end, when the elderly Black man is brought to the house by his son for the party to celebrate the house on its new ground. He enters the house and, beyond him down the hall, you can see me cross in the background. Exciting, I know. That’s worth the price of your ticket.

On one of the moving days that I did not work, the audio guy in my place disconnected himself from the cameraman when he dove under the house. That audio guy wasn’t going under there -- not on his pay scale. I should have been that smart. But going under the house was not the most dangerous thing.

The most dangerous place to be was what should have been a no-man’s land, the area right in front of the main towing truck between the stranded steel winch cables going to the auxiliary trucks. That same fearless cameraman was hanging out in that space, getting exciting shots of the slowly turning wheels, the taught cables. The audio guy saw a steel cable making little jumps like a self-vibrating guitar string, dust popping out of the little grooves between strands. He hollered for everyone to look out just as that cable broke and flew BAM into the metal shield on the back of its winch truck. No one was hurt. But remember how that drive shaft was broken? When one towing vehicle stops towing, the weight goes to the others. Right away, the other winch started jumping in the same manner. It too broke and went BAM against the back of its winch truck.

I wasn’t there that day. Someone’s head could have been ripped off by that flying cable, but no one was hurt. Nobody talks about this, and the incident did not make it into the movie.

Other things I did not work on were the sit-down interviews with the filmmaker’s mom. But I did do the audio where she’s riding in the SUV past the shopping center that has been built on the former plantation. I was actually driving and running audio at the same time, looking down at the mixer on the floor between seats, maybe wearing headphones on one ear. Bully for me.

I worked on very little of any scenes or interviews with the NYU professor, though I did do one near Washington Square which I don’t think made it into the movie.

I did work on countless interviews with the house owners in their living room, before the house was moved, much of which never made it into the movie.

I worked on the interview with the owner/husband’s brother who said, “It’s dumb as shit.” He had a lot of good lines. His kids play with lawnmower engines and make go-carts that go 40 mph. A third brother dumps old lawnmowers in their yard for the kids to play with, and he wishes he wouldn’t. We spent two days at the coast shooting him and his artwork and looking for the third brother to shoot but not finding him. We stayed at the family beach house and shot the filmmaker there, but that footage was never used. Someone else had to go back on a different tripo and do the interview with the third brother, the one wearing the paper crown in the movie.

I worked on an interview with Lee Smith and Hal Crowther which did not make it into the movie.

Some stuff in there I don’t remember whether I worked on.

Oh, that conversation between the filmmaker and the owner/husband in the front yard, before the house was moved, talking about the traffic and how the house would be moved, I did work on. That plays pretty well in the movie, after editing.

But you know, you can’t really tell the truth in a documentary because someone’s feelings will be hurt. This is why we have fiction. Tell the truth but change the names and the hair color and nobody gets hurt.

So if you want to see this piece of narrative partial truth and fiction, please come to the Raleigh premiere on September 19 at the Rialto.

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