REVISIONIST
HISTORY
McCaffrey
protests: "This is nonsense, this is revisionist history!"
But revisionism is far from nonsense, as anyone familiar with
the concept knows, for revision is precisely what history
requires. Left to our court intellectuals and sycophantic
journalists, the historical record would consist of little
more than a series of paeans to the wisdom and beneficence
of our rulers – and this is doubly true when it comes
to the history of our various wars. World War I was depicted,
at first, as a noble crusade against an inherently evil enemy,
but this simplistic account was later corrected; as historian
William L. Neumann noted in his essay in honor of Harry Elmer
Barnes, the dean of World War I revisionism, "In April of
1917, many leading historians had already figuratively pulled
off their academic robes and donned uniforms." It was only
later, in the wave of disillusion that followed the signing
of the Versailles treaty, that the Muse Clio regained her
composure and historians were able to make a reasoned reassessment
of the events leading up to the first global conflagration.
As documents are made available, and researchers have time
to make inquiries, the truth comes out and the historical
record is revised – to bring it into line with
the facts. In derisively referring to Hersh's revelations
as "revisionist history," the General says more than he intends.
For revisionism is what history is all about –
the unearthing of previously overlooked facts, the exposure
of hidden motives, the exhumation of old bones.
OLD
BONES
Quite
a few old bones, it seems, have been sticking up out of the
desert sand, and Hersh has all but exhumed the bodies of McCaffrey's
Iraqi victims. The truth about the so-called "Battle of Rumailia,"
McCaffrey's great triumph, which sources within the military
– his own commanders – liken to a "turkey shoot,"
is that the retreating Iraqis had no reason to attack vastly
superior forces after a unilateral ceasefire had been declared
by the US. In response to dubious claims that Iraqis had opened
fire on armored American tanks, McCaffrey ordered an all-out
assault that killed untold thousands of Iraqis, civilians
as well as soldiers, including children. McCaffrey's fellow
soldiers, those who served with him in the wartime headquarters
of the 24th Division, contradict his assertion
that American soldiers were attacked after the ceasefire:
almost uniformly, they describe quite the opposite, an endless
column of ragged boys and bedraggled old men, without equipment
or even uniforms, utterly incapable of putting up much of
a fight, even if they were so inclined. As one American soldier
put it, he came away from the Gulf War thinking that he had
been part of "the biggest firing squad in history."
A
GIANT HOAX
The
ambitious and apparently widely-hated McCaffrey has his enemies
in the Pentagon, and Hersh tells us there was a veritable
mutiny when he was being considered for chief of operations:
his megalomania is legendary. McCaffrey is trying to play
this to his advantage, by claiming that these are outrageous
lies spread by his enemies and motivated by professional jealousy
and jockeying for position. Yet it is the testimony of some
of his top officers that the battle of Rumailia is "a giant
hoax," that there never was an Iraqi attack, and that, therefore,
there was never any need to launch a counter-attack. As Hersh
shows, this murderous assault certainly resulted in the death
of hundreds if not thousands of civilians as well as Iraqi
soldiers who had already surrendered. These accusations
are not the result of professional jealousy, but of professional
disdain – a real soldier, at least an American soldier,
would never violate the rules of engagement so blatantly and
expect to get away with it.
BETRAYAL
IN THE DESERT
One
incident described by Hersh stands out for its pathos, and
encapsulates the tragedy and criminality of McCaffrey's ersatz
"victory." An advance team was assigned to block off a main
highway while the American tanks refueled – and soon
becomes a magnet for all the Iraqi soldiers in the immediate
vicinity. The Iraqis weren't attacking – they were surrendering,
in droves, coming out of the hills and down the road in all
sorts of contraptions, stolen cars, camels, whatever, waving
white flags. The Iraqis were throwing down their weapons in
such numbers that the Americans were soon outnumbered. A hospital
bus pulled up, filled with wounded Iraqis, and an Iraqi doctor
who had gone to school in Chicago was among their by now hundreds
of captives. "One of the first guys who came in was bawling,"
one Scout told Hersh, "so happy that he was safe. I told him
'You've surrendered. You're safe. Nothing is going to happen
to you.'" Ah, but a lot happened to him, and to all
the others who had surrendered, thinking they were safe, believing
the propaganda that had rained from the skies, along with
hellfire, promising them that they would live to see their
families only if they surrendered. The Scouts gave them their
MREs (meals-ready-to-eat, for the militarily challenged) and
radioed to headquarters that they had a good number of prisoners,
including a hospital bus clearly marked with a red crescent.
The team received an order from headquarters to take all the
weapons they had confiscated and blow them up, and, before
this could be done, they were ordered to move out. The charge
was lit, and the platoon took off. The prisoners were left
sitting in rows, in a kind of holding pen formed by two captured
Iraqi trucks and the hospital bus. And then the Bradley tanks
came charging up the rear, machine guns spitting fire: according
to one eyewitness, "I could tell they were hitting close to
the prisoners, because there were people running. There were
some who could have survived, but a lot of them wouldn't have,
from where I saw the rounds hit."
A
SLICE-OF-WAR
One
of the soldiers, John Brasfield, was in the habit of taping
radio transmissions: he thought vaguely that he would send
the tapes home, as a kind of slice-of-war audio verite. As
his Humvee barreled across the sand, away from the spectacle
of armored tanks mowing down unarmed prisoners, his radio
crackles with irony, and a voice is heard: "There's no one
shooting at them [the tanks]," someone says over the platoon
radio-net, "why'd they have to shoot?"
A
PEP TALK – McCAFFREY-STYLE
Why
indeed. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the text of what
Hersh calls a "pep talk" that McCaffrey gave to his troops
shortly before the war, in which the General declared:
"If
you're driving through a village and someone throws a rock
at you, shoot them! If they shoot at you, turn the tank main
gun on them. If they use anything larger than small arms,
call for artillery. It's as simple as that. Obey the rules
of war but protect yourself."
THE
McCAFFREY PRINCIPLE
If
the "rules of war" now include a provision sentencing rock-throwers
to death, then this is the first that any civilized person
has heard of it. Although the General doesn't say what the
proper response would be to an attack by enemy tanks, by this
standard nuking them would not be overkill – just the
McCaffrey Principle in operation.
"KILL
THE BASTARDS"
Don't
tell me "shit happens" and "war is hell," – and cut the
crap about "the fog of war": those prisoners were deliberately
killed by the oncoming Bradleys. As one witness put it:
"They knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were
unarmed. They knew the hospital bus was there, and they knew
we were blowing the [Iraqi weapons] up." The Iraqis, a pathetic
crowd huddled about a dilapidated bus, were no threat to the
Americans, who "were all buttoned down in their vehicles."
So why did they turn their guns on a hospital bus? In the
general atmosphere of slaughter, in which the Iraqis offered
little if any real resistance, the Americans were like gods:
they did it because they could do it. According to
an anonymous letter obviously written by an insider and sent
to the Pentagon, McCaffrey had expressed a desire to "kill
some of those bastards." The General's frustration, when the
ceasefire was announced, was reflected in the field: here
they had trained so long and so hard, they had come all the
way here and hadn't slept in days and still they had
never come up against any real opposition. When the ceasefire
was first announced, McCaffrey gave orders that the men were
to be sure to have an opportunity to fire their weapons –
for the moment at inanimate targets, such as old sheds and
the few standing structures. Meanwhile, the General went looking
for a fight. . . .
HAIL
CAESAR!
As
Hersh shows, McCaffrey overrode the objections of his own
staff to launch an attack that violated the terms of the ceasefire
– without consulting his superiors. It is as if we have
somehow slipped back in time, back to the days of the old
Roman empire when all sorts of generals and commanders would
suddenly, without authorization from either the Emperor or
the Senate, take off on his own and conquer some distant land.
He would then return to Rome in triumph, and be crowned with
laurel leaves – his political career assured. This is
what happened with McCaffrey, who disobeyed orders and yet
returned, the conquering hero, to become the Clinton administration's
point man in the "war on drugs" – and the leading advocate
of escalating US intervention to prop up the beleaguered government
of Colombia.
COVER-UP
The
President of the United States was nearly impeached for much
less covering up than was engaged in by McCaffrey. There were
several investigations, but key evidence was either unknown
or withheld: Hersh's article presents new evidence,
and lots of it, that points not only to the general savagery
of an unnecessary "battle," but directly implicates McCaffrey's
bloodlust as motivating factor behind the massacre. Particularly
damaging to McCaffrey is the fact that Hersh has his sources
in the CIA and the Pentagon, who suspected McCaffrey's veracity
from the start and are now apparently convinced that the man
is indeed, guilty of war crimes. Driven by ambition, and his
bloodthirsty doctrine of overkill, McCaffrey repulses the
honorable men of the military who see his record as a stain
on their own. Hersh is not attacking the military – for
all of the General's accusers are military men, or ex-military,
who want only to uphold their own honor. McCaffrey has the
nerve to say that in exposing his own murderous role in the
Gulf War, we are impugning all of those who fought in that
war, and specifically those under his command. But his own
soldiers have come forward to tell the real story of what
went on that fateful and bloody day, of who gave the orders
and under what circumstances they were given.
TROPHIES
OF WAR
Hersh
lays out the whole pattern of McCaffrey's insatiable need
to cover himself with glory, and the details are telling:
in a typical incident, he ordered his men to scour the battlefield
for trophies – flags, guns, and other memorabilia of
the massacre he wanted to pretend was a "battle." He even
had his men procure a couple of camels, which were to be transported
back to Division headquarters in the US; health officials
wouldn't let the poor creatures into the country – and
so they picked up a couple of camels from somewhere in the
US. The General never knew the difference.
SWORD
OF DAMOCLES
Seymour
Hersh's "Overwhelming Force" so overwhelms the reader with
interwoven accounts of atrocities, official complicity, cover-up,
and McCaffrey's insufferable arrogance, that no honest person
could deny that something is not quite right about
Barry McCaffrey. Is this the man we are going to send abroad,
to hotspots like Colombia – an accused war criminal?
Is this who we want as the chief warrior in the fight
against drugs – somebody who thinks that the only proper
retaliation against rock-throwers is to blow their brains
out? The charge of war crimes hangs over his head like a sword
of Damocles: how soon before it falls? I say: the sooner the
better. For how can he possibly do his job as Drug Czar when
he spends all of his time defending himself against Hersh's
article? Surely he deserves his day in court – and if
there is any justice in this world, that is where he will
wind up – but in the interim he needs to resign from
this administration, so as to devote full-time to his defense
– at his own expense, of course. In short, McCaffrey
must go – and the sooner the better. At a time when the
Clintonistas are posing as the great "humanitarian" saviors
of the world, can they really afford to harbor an accused
mass murderer like McCaffrey in their midst? I think not.
THE
RIGHT THING
Hersh
has more on McCaffrey than the International War Crimes Tribunal
in The Hague has on Slobodan Milosevic, yet the Clintonistas
have defended him so far, in their classic fashion, by going
after Hersh as a "careerist" – apparently a new category
of "hate crime." I wonder how long before the accumulation
of facts and eyewitness testimony becomes so mountainous,
and the furor grows so loud, that they decide to throw him
overboard? Let's try to find out. Let the word go out, to
decent people everywhere, not only in the US but worldwide:
McCaffrey must go. It's the right thing to do.
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