11.7.2001
In shadows and clouds,
war is now daily routine
By RANDALL RICHARD
Journal Staff Writer
Much has changed since the start of one of America's longest wars -- but probably the biggest change is that most Americans don't even know there is one.
For Col. Anthony B. Basile, not knowing has never been a problem.
When it is, says Basile, that's the day the "golden BB" is going to get him.
For more than 10 years, U.S. and British pilots have been patrolling the skies over northern and southern Iraq -- and dodging that golden BB just about every day.
But no one has been dodging it longer than Basile, the vice commander of the Air National Guard in Syracuse, N.Y.
The golden BB is what veteran pilots in the Gulf call the antiaircraft round -- or the surface-to-air missile -- that is someday all but certain to bring one of them down.
Of the millions of BBs fired during the tens of thousands of combat sorties over Iraq since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, none have been golden -- yet.
And that, Basile says, is nothing short of a miracle -- one the Pentagon fears is about to end.
In the last few months, the Pentagon has become so worried about the golden BB that it is considering scaling down -- or even calling off -- the war that most Americans don't know exists.
In the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, where U.S. and British planes patrol to keep the Iraqis from attacking its restive Shiite population, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who heads the U.S. Central Command, is recommending a sharp cutback in the number of sorties.
In the north, where the United States says the no-fly zone is maintained to protect Iraqi Kurds, Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, the top U.S. military officer in Europe, says he would like to end them altogether.
Both generals quietly made their recommendations to the Bush administration in May based on what they said is the mounting determination by the Iraqis to shoot down an allied plane.
According to one administration official, the Iraqis launched more than 100 surface-to-air missiles at U.S. and British planes last spring and virtually every patrol in the no-fly zones is now drawing antiaircraft fire.
Although the Iraqis are firing blindly -- rarely targeting the planes with their defensive radars, because to do so would make them highly vulnerable to attack -- the Pentagon says the shooting is now so ubiquitous and so concentrated that the Iraqis are almost certain to eventually get a lucky hit.
That it hasn't happened yet, says Basile, is a tribute to the pilots, the planes and the crews who maintain them.
Luck, he says, is part of the life-and-death equation in any war, but it takes more than good pilot karma to keep a no-hitter going for more than decade.
It also takes a lot
more than luck to maintain 10 years of shadow warfare, even one of relatively low intensity, prompting speculation among America's allies that all this recent Pentagon talk about pilot safety and running out of luck is really about finally running out of international support.
Finding backers for the costly no-fly operation -- which was initiated by the United States and Britain without United Nations sanction or approval -- has never been easy. And in recent months -- with some countries even balking at a new U.S.-British formula for continuing economic sanctions against Iraq -- this lack of international enthusiasm borders on open revolt, with several foreign companies quietly doing business with Iraq.
That so little attention is being paid to a conflict in which U.S. pilots are risking their lives every day and routinely dropping bombs on foreign territory is no accident.
More than 250,000 sorties have been flown since March 3, 1991, the day the Gulf war officially ended. But as far as the Defense Department is concerned, the less said about the ongoing conflict -- at least in terms of details that might prove embarrassing, or even newsworthy -- the better.
One reason the Pentagon no longer discloses even the number or the types of missiles and bombs used in Iraq, is that they sometimes go astray, often with tragic consequences.
In February, Iraqi government officials told a group of visiting American peace activists that, in the past two years, more than 300 civilians have been killed in the bombing raids the Pentagon doesn't want to talk about.
Although the Defense Department insists the Iraqis are exaggerating the casualty figures, there have been enough confirmed mishaps to trouble even America's staunchest allies.
One of the most tragic occurred May 12, 1999, when intelligence analysts -- looking at a blurry satellite image -- mistook a water trough for a missile launcher.
It was only after authorizing an F-15E warplane to drop a 3,000-pound bomb on the "missile launcher" that the analysts discovered they had hit a shepherd's camp instead. The blast killed 19 people and wounded 46 others.
Topping a list of other embarrassments the Pentagon refuses to talk about is the contradiction between the official reason for the no-fly missions in northern Iraq and way the Turkish Air Force is allowed to make a mockery of them.
Basile and other pilots interviewed by The Providence Journal have confirmed that they have had to make way, from time to time, for what other U.S. pilots flying out of Incirlik Air Field in Turkey euphemistically call a TSM -- a Turkish Special Mission.
Although the Air Force officially denies any knowledge of them, the Turkish missions became an open secret among U.S. flight crews after American pilots, returning from their patrols over northern Iraq, noticed Turkish jets -- laden with bombs and missiles -- streaking past in the opposite direction.
Within a half hour or so, the once-heavily armed Turkish jets would fly out of Iraq empty, leaving behind smoldering ruins where Kurdish villages once stood.
In 1999, Turkish and U.S. military authorities established separate air corridors so that U.S. aircraft would no longer have to cross paths with the Turkish jets heading in to bomb villages that the Turks suspected were being used as bases by a Turkish faction of Kurdish separatists.
As for Basile, who admits the Turkish raids have raised more than a few eyebrows among U.S. pilots, his job is to do his mission as best he can, not to question what the Turks are doing.
Unlike many combat veterans,
Basile is a career guardsman who has never served with any of the active duty forces.
But in a U.S. military establishment that has come to rely increasingly on guardsmen and reservists to do its fighting, Basile has received plenty of opportunities to see action.
Since the start of the Gulf war, Basile has eluded the golden BB 67 times, giving him the distinction, which he says he never wanted, of logging more combat flight time than just about anyone on active duty who is still flying combat missions.
Most of the pilots in Basile's squadron make their living flying for major U.S. airlines -- but each takes 14 to 17 days off every 18 months to get shot at and, in some cases, drop bombs over Iraq.
In fact, if it wasn't for Air Guard and Reserve pilots like those in Basile's 174th Fighter Squadron, the United States would have been incapable of sustaining a decade of no-fly operations over Iraq.
At any one time, between 20 percent and 40 percent of the 1,200 or so pilots assigned to the patrols are on loan from Guard and Reserve units around the United States.
Basile's squadron, like most of the others, has patrolled the no-fly zones in both northern and southern Iraq. When patrolling in the north, the pilots fly out Incirlik in Turkey. For the patrols in the south, pilots fly out of bases in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
Each zone, Basile says, has its own set of challenges and risks that demand constant vigilance during missions that can last six hours or more.
"I've done it 67 times," he says, "and it's never easy."
"Each time I cross that border and throw the master switch to arm the plane and make it combat ready, it's an uncomfortable feeling. The mouth still gets dry and the adrenaline still starts flowing."
"Personally," Basile says, "I like that uneasy feeling. For me, it's good. It lets me know I'm keyed up, that I'm alert. And there's this sense of awareness of what's going on around you that you just can't describe."
During his squadron's last rotation, over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, Basile had a breakfast encounter with a young F-15 pilot who had been stationed in Kuwait with the Air Force for three months.
"The kid's yawning, complaining that it's going to be another boring mission -- flying circles in the sky -- just like at Tindall [Air Force base]," Basile recalls.
After giving the young pilot a look that made him wish he had kept that thought to himself, Basile suggested icily that it might be time for him to "get a grip."
Basile confided to the young man that he would prefer that all his flights into Iraq were "boring."
But the day he -- or any other pilot -- becomes complacent, he scolded, is the day the first U.S. plane is likely to go down.
That a "weekend warrior" -- rank aside -- has no compunction about scolding a front-line pilot who makes a living flying combat patrols full-time says much, not only about the changing face of the U.S. military, but about the respect guardsmen and reservists have earned over the past 10 years.
Since the end of the Cold War
-- and the military budget cuts that have accompanied it -- the notion of the Guard and Reserve as "weekend warriors" has become outdated.
Although most men and women on active duty are loath to admit it, most of their colleagues in the Guard and Reserve not only have far more experience, both in an out of combat, but often sharper skills as well.
In Basile's squadron, for example, all 30 pilots have combat experience, all have patrolled Iraq's no-fly zones and most fly full-time for a living.
But those active-duty prejudices, according to Maj. Marty Richard, die hard.
Richard, a 10-year veteran of the Air Force who is now with an Air Guard squadron at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, has seen that prejudice from both sides.
During the Gulf war, while still on active duty, Richard viewed the Air Guard as little more than "a flying club" -- a club whose members were all out for themselves, happy to boost their retirement benefits while getting a few kicks one weekend a month.
Now, he admits a bit sheepishly, he realizes just how wrong he was.
The reality, Richard says, is that he's a far better pilot today than he was then.
As with Basile's squadron, most of the pilots at Otis have seen action, not only in Iraq, but during the U.N. peacekeeping campaign in Kosovo, Yugoslavia.
Experience counts -- combat experience most of all -- and the fact is that squadron for squadron, the Guard units have it and the active-duty units don't, he says.
Richard says this difference in experience is simply a function of how the world -- and the military environment -- has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One way that world has changed, he says, is that now, since the end of his Cold War flying days, there are actually people on the ground shooting at you.
Combat experience, he says, stays with you, and it just happens to be working out that the men and women with that experience are migrating from active duty into the Guard.
The other major change is that the Pentagon, in order to meet increasing demands on a shrinking military, have had no alternative but to turn to the Guard and the Reserve for help, all of which tends to keep sharpening their skills while building on the experience they already have.
All that skill sharpening and experience, however, comes at a hefty price.
Part of that price,
according to retired Rear Adm. E.J. Carroll comes from the international community, which has long resented the U.S.-British patrols over Iraq, not simply because they have never been sanctioned by the United Nations, but because they view them as provocative and counterproductive.
Admiral Carroll, who heads a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies U.S. military policy and its implementation couldn't agree more.
The no-fly zones, he says flatly, are useless, both militarily and politically, and have in no way impeded Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his armed forces.
From a military standpoint, Carroll says, the patrols are "too little and too unfocused to impede, in any way, the Iraqis in any military activity they might want to undertake."
And on the political side, he adds, they make the United States seem, at best, both arrogant and impotent at the same time -- arrogant in its failure to get international backing for the patrols and impotent in their complete failure.
Even worse, Carroll says, is the resentment created within the Islamic world whenever routine attacks against Iraqi antiaircraft or missile batteries result in civilian casualties.
Carroll, a former fighter pilot himself, says civilian casualties are inevitable and the longer the shadow war continues, the more there will be.
Ironically, new and increasingly efficient weapons systems, he says, sometimes mean more civilian deaths.
"I've dropped an awful lot of bombs and I've rarely missed a target by more than 100 or 150 feet. But when a guidance munition goes beserk, it can go anywhere.
"The fact is you still can't pinpoint aerial-delivered weapons. You have your precision-guided munitions -- and when the intelligence is good and the precision guidance works and you've punched in the proper target coordinate -- sure, you're going to hit the target more often than not.
"But when the intelligence is faulty, you hit the Chinese Embassy [as in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999]. When the targeting data is wrong, you hit the wrong target. And when the precision guidance doesn't work the way it should, you don't know what you're going to hit. With dumb bombs, you're at least usually in the ballpark."
The problem for the United States, Carroll says, is that no administration seems willing to do what he feels would be the smart thing -- to simply declare victory and come home.
ty.
Once away from the eerie desolation of its airport and the barren stretch of superhighway leading to it, the city quickly becomes deceptively ordinary.
In Baghdad's center, where vendors roast succulent chickens and blend exotic concoctions from colorful mountains of fresh fruit, signs of scarcity have been slowly evaporating over the past several months.
Even in the suburbs, where dozens of merchants at the end of the bus line maintained stalls brimming with spices and produce, the outdoor cafes are alive late into the night with men playing dominoes, sipping tea and puffing sweet, fruit-scented tobacco from elaborate, serpentine hookahs
.
Except for its wide boulevards and a few massive but faded monuments to its former wealth and grandeur, Baghdad, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for just about any other big city in the Arab world.
But first glances, a new visitor to Baghdad quickily learns, like a stranger's smile or a frightened merchant's angry diatribe, can be deceiving.
In Baghdad, you discover, things are rarely as bad as you thought, and never as good as they look.
As in most dictatorships that have incurred America's wrath, truth here for American visitors -- including those firmly opposed to the U.S.-led sanctions regime -- is often elusive and is glimpsed, if it all, only fleetingly and out of the corner of one's eye.
On more than one occasion during Rana's homecoming, several of the more adventurous Americans who were traveling with her decided to shun some of the government organized tours and events to explore the city on their own.
If there is truth to be found, they reasoned, it is likely to be as far as they could get from the watchful eyes of their Iraqi "minders."
What they inevitably found was that much in Iraq is not what it seems -- and that a talent for deciphering body language is as useful as Arabic when it comes to communicating with everyone from shopkeepers and physicians to concert-goers and used-car salesmen.
But it is a lesson learned at a price.
The trick is to limit conversations with Iraqis -- especially in public -- to non-threatening subjects and to always take your cues from the people willing to talk to you.
In a country where talk -- even seemingly innocent talk -- is sometimes dangerous, attempts at even simple communication can have bizarre consequences.
A brief encounter with a shopkeeper early one night in a Baghdad suburb is a case in point.
The man's shop is a liquor store -- a curiosity in a nation where drinking alcohol in public is illegal and where drinking alcohol anywhere, and at any time, is a grave sin according to Islamic law.
When asked about his store, the shopkeeper's first response was simply to smile and invite his three visitors off the street and into his store for a cup of tea.
Unfortunately, his unexpected visitors didn't take the hint.
Instead, after begging off from what would have been a fourth cup of tea in two blocks, his visitors continued chatting with him in front of a curious gathering crowd.
In a minute or two, after spotting a man glaring at him from behind a peanut vendor's kiosk, the shopkeeper's sanguine persona turned to rage.
In a voice loud enough for the man behind the kiosk -- and for everyone else in the neighborhood to hear -- the shopkeeper erupted in a scathing denunciation of his American visitors and their inquisitiveness.
The incident
should have come as no surprise.
During a stopover in Aman, Jordan, before crossing into U.S.-patrolled Iraqi airspace, organizers of the trip tried to alert members of the delegation to the risks that Iraqis face if government agents even suspect them of speaking critically of the regime.
Discretion, they insisted, needed to be observed at all times.
The other major piece of advice for the delegates was to avoid jumping to conclusions.
Don't be misled, they warned, by the amount and variety of items that were on sale throughout the city.
A better way to gauge the impact of the sanctions, they suggested, was to see how often any of those items actually were bought.
For many Iraqis, the painful truth is that much of what is available in the shops is simply cruel window dressing on their poverty. Often the items are family treasures and heirlooms offered for sale on consignment for desperately needed cash.
Still, for some of the delegates -- many of whom had visited or worked in desperately poor Third World countries -- it was difficult to reconcile what they had long been told about the suffering of the Iraqi people with what they were seeing on the street.
According to U.N.
health officials and Iraq's Ministry of Health, there has been a tenfold increase since the end of the Gulf war -- from about 7,000 each year to more than 73,000 -- in the number of deaths of children under 5 from respiratory diseases, diarrhea and malnutrition.
During that same period, says the U.N., low birth weight has soared from about 1 in 20 births to about 1 in 4; cases of marasmus, which causes children to waste away, have increased more than fiftyfold; and by 1998, nearly 2 million Iraqis out of a population of 23 million were suffering from severe and prolonged malnutrition.
Diseases such as cholera and typhoid, rarely seen in Iraq prior to the destruction of its water and sewage systems in the Gulf war, also have returned, according to the World Health Organization; as have a variety of other diseases -- including whooping cough, measles, mumps and polio -- for which vaccines are no longer available.
But for visitors to Iraq it is usually in the country's underfinanced, understaffed and underequipped public hospitals that the victims of these diseases are visible.
On the street -- with the exception of some of the poorer areas of Baghdad, such as Saddam City -- there are few signs of disease or malnutrition.
In central Baghdad,
where Rana's family lived a life of middle-class comfort, even at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, the changes wrought by the sanctions are far more subtle, but in some ways even more disturbing.
As terrible as that grinding war of attrition was, Iraq's oil riches enabled Saddam Hussein to buy enough guns and butter to keep those who weren't killed or maimed at the front relatively healthy and prosperous.
Even as his regime was buying high-tech weaponry from an American government happy to use Iraq as a counterbalance to Iranian influence in the region, there was enough money left over to repair the nation's infrastructure and provide a cradle-to-grave health-care system that was the envy of the Arab world.
But eight years of war with Iran and six weeks of war with America -- weeks that included the most concentrated and blistering bombing campaign of the century -- would have meant only a temporary setback for Iraq's economy if the international community had not added economic sanctions to its arsenal of weapons.
What rockets and bombs had failed to accomplish soon came to pass. Iraq's status as a regional economic power vanished almost overnight.
Except for Saddam Hussein's highly placed cronies, who are still able to live off whatever black market oil can be smuggled out of the country, every segment of Iraqi society has been impoverished by the sanctions.
With no market for its oil there is no money to rebuild Iraq's war-torn infrastructure and without an infrastructure to maintain there are no jobs for engineers such as those in Rana's family.
No one is immune. But the group that had the most to lose -- and the furthest to fall -- was Iraq's well-established middle class.
When it became apparent that the sanctions would not be lifted anytime soon, many of those in the professional class who could leave did. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, had to settle for whatever menial jobs they could find.
University professors became taxicab drivers. Engineers hawked goods if they could get their hands on them -- usually to people like themselves who were also selling the family's best carpets, watches and china for Iraqi dinars that were sinking in value by the hour.
Before the start of sanctions, each Iraqi dinar was worth about three dollars. A teacher's salary of 300 dinars a month got you $900 at the official exchange rate. Today, that same salary of 300 dinars is worth about 15 cents.
Public services and health care deterioriated so rapidly that Iraqis -- especially in the southernmost part of the country, began suffering from diseases and illnesses unique to the poorest of Third World countries.
The war was over, but the tragedy, for most Iraqis, was just beginning.
For 10 years now, doctors and dentists throughout the nation have lacked even the most basic drugs and equipment, engineers have no computers, professors are without textbooks, water-treatment personnel have no chlorine, farmers no fertilizers, ranchers no vaccines, teachers no chalk, and students no desks.
Although it is generally conceded that the situation for much of the population remains desperate, despite some improvement since the U.N. agreed in 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil for food, there is bitter disagreement about who is responsible.
What government spin doctors in both countries have argued about for years is whether the blame lies with the U.N. and its sanctions, or with Saddam Hussein and his failure to do more to alleviate his country's suffering.
The argument out of Washington is that Saddam Hussein, since 1996, at least, has had it in his power to pump more oil under the United Nations's oil-for-food program, and that he could easily get the sanctions lifted altogether by adhering to U.N. demands that he cooperate with its weapons inspectors, which were withdrawn from the country in 1998.
What Washington, and the U.N., say they want, is for Iraq to prove that it is no longer a threat to its neighbors.
The argument out of Baghdad is that the weapons-inspection program was a sham, that the United Nations has no intention of lifting the sanctions, no matter how much sovereignty Iraq surrenders, and that the country is in the absurd position, in terms of whether it poses a threat to its Arab neighbors, of having to prove a negative.
Rana knows both arguments
and is incensed by the finger pointing.
Whether Saddam Hussein is a monster or not, as far as she is concerned, is not the issue.
If he is a monster, she says, he is clearly one who was empowered by the United States to counter the growing regional influence of Iran's brand of religious fundamentalism, and it is America's oil interests -- not whether one Arab dictator is causing trouble for another -- that inevitably determines American Middle East policy.
Even before stepping off the plane at Saddam International Airport, Rana knew, from news accounts, of the economic devastation she would confront during the group's 10-day visit.
What Rana only suspected, however, and finally came to fully appreciate is how much the sanctions are ravaging the mind and the spirit, as well as the body.
She knew, from her weekly telephone calls over the years, of the brain drain. Many family friends had left since the start of the sanctions, not simply for a better life elsewhere, but because the sanctions had made it impossible for them to practice their professions.
Rana's uncles and aunts, all well educated and highly trained professionals, mostly engineers, either have no jobs to go to, or get by as merchants in a country with precious little merchandise.
But even worse, Rana saw, is what was happening to the children who were her age when she went to America.
The cousins she left behind, and the ones who came along since, still go through the motions. They struggle to get into the best schools, they study hard and they excel in their exams.
But they also confided to her during her stay that they know it is all a waste of time.
The skills they are working so hard to master in school, they said, are outdated and the jobs they are training for no longer exist.
One cousin, who is Rana's age, originally planned to follow in the family's footsteps to become an engineer. But space in understaffed engineering schools is scarce and goes mostly to students from families that are politically connected. Rana's family is not one of them. (Neither was her family secure enough to open its homes to strangers from America, even for Rana's friends on the trip.)
Rana's cousin, unable to get into the engineering school, enrolled in a computer-engineering program -- a computer program at a university that has no computers.
With a shrug of resignation, she showed Rana her syllabus.
Not only are there no jobs awaiting her when she graduates, she told Rana, but her training is so archaic she wouldn't have a prayer of getting a job even if she left Iraq.
Rana, after pouring over the syllabus, did not have the heart to tell her she was right.
And now, more than ever, Rana is determined to return to Baghdad to teach -- to somehow, as she had dreamed long ago, make a difference for the children of her country. The children of Iraq, she says, like children everywhere, deserve to live up to their potential.
"People in America think that if you're from Iraq you live atop an oil field -- that you're barbaric and uneducated," she says.
"But there's a saying in the Arab world: Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Baghdad reads."
Yet now, says Rana, even books are denied Iraq's population.
"They're isolated," she says of her family. "They can still get BBC [radio], but in terms of print media very little is available."
Her family, she says, asked for nothing when they learned she was coming -- but she crammed her suitcases with books and magazines, the things she knew they would treasure most.
"Imagine waking up one morning and finding everything has been taken away from you. After all these years, I've adapted to life in the States; so if someone took away from me what is mine -- if they took away my rights, my freedom, my liberty -- I don't think I could be so strong."
Saddest of all, says Rana, is that her cousins "are part of Iraq's lost generation. They will never be the engineers or the doctors they dreamed of being. They are a generation without a future."
Rana
Abdul-Aziz was prepared,
as she stepped onto Iraqi soil for the first time in 11 years, to accept, as her parents' had warned, that nothing would be the same.
But her visit, distressing in many ways, confirmed her fondest memories of Jiddo and Bibi, of Mohammed and all her other cousins, and reaffirmed her belief that it is with them, and in Baghdad, that she belongs.
The poverty and deprivation she expected to see after a decade of economic isolation are there, but for her family, at least, not as bad as she feared.
What she found, however, is a deprivation even more insidious -- one that robs her loved ones of hope for the future -- a starvation, not of the body, but of the soul.
Rana tried hard while with her family to maintain her composure.
In 10 days of visits and all-night pajama parties, she managed to stay upbeat as the family basked in reminiscences and in the promise that, after graduation, she would be with them again.
But one night, on the swing in Jiddo's backyard, she could not contain her heartbreak.
She was with Mohammed, still her leader and confidant, and she wanted from him the same reassurance he had always managed to provide when they were children.
Half a lifetime ago -- with his encouragement -- she sat on this same swing as they dreamed of saving the children of their country.
But this time was different.
This time, instead of reassurance that anything is possible, he kissed her, took her by the hand and walked away from the swing.
He had not been back to the naba
a
-- to the tree of knowledge -- since she had left for Disney World 11 years ago, he confided.
And he would not, he vowed, be back again.
" 'This will be the last time,' " Mohammed told her, " 'because in this land there are no longer dreams to dream.' "
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