The Iraqi elections are over.  It will likely take weeks to count the votes, and MSM will report on the results, and are already reporting on the election's success and awesome turnout.  We won't be told about the Iraqi courts ruling that many Sunni candidates could not run for office, or the several candidates who were assassinated, or how many Sunnis pulled out of the election after the Court shut out so many of their brethren.

Jon Stewart, blessed be his name, and John Oliver recently did a piece they'd titled Arabian Rights.  It was exquisite; Oliver was in Iraq covering the election, declaring the War a Victory, and explaining his exuberance over the results.  He and Jon skirmished over the causes of the war, and they put up a Fox News piece showing the current Newsweek cover:  Victory at Last:  the emergence of a democratic Iraq.  The Fox News voiceover-babe said, "It seems that former President Bush got it right."  Jon proceeded to deconstruct that idea, and Oliver took over in the guise of an Oscar-winner making his acceptance speech and congratulating the Coalition Forces.  Non-stop wonderful satire it was.

I got into a brief discussion on these boards a few days ago, and I was being a little cynical about the longer-term outcomes from the election, was challenged, and ended up posting, even more cynically, that I was willing to have it declared it a sublime success for now in order to get our troops home now; we could do the War Post-mortem later; fine with me.

All this led to thoughts about the First Gulf War, and no, I won't say its idiotic name.

It's the Gulf War that many, if not most 'liberals' now find justifiable.  A war in which millions of tons of incendiaries were dropped on a nation that essentially never fought back, never could fight back.  An enemy that was sold as Saddam's Republican Guard: the Strongest and Most Vicious Fighting Force on the Planet.  That they turned out to be mainly 17-year-olds wasn't mentioned so much.  That we 'bombed the country back to the stone age' was cause for glory and applause for many.  Daddy Bush managed the PR well: one member of the press pool could be allowed some minimal access to the war, whatever that meant.  We were shown the same 'smart-bomb' hits over and over...we were shown the bogus preemie-incubators that Saddam allegedly stole from hospitals (WTF?) We won that war, too, though many neo-cons nuked Bush for not marching to Baghdad to kill Saddam.  (not to mention what it did to his son's psyche.)

I read war post-mortems in the Denver Post.  They covered the fact that analysis showed that the performance of the National Guard Units' was a failure, and listed the reasons.  Other areas were covered, but one day I found, buried in the back of the paper a story that US troops had buried thousands of troops alive by bulldozer.  It was head-spinning to read; Iraqis in trenches were overpowered by US troops; some surrendered; the rest were covered by sand pushed by lines of blades mounted on tanks.  No one I knew had read the story.  It wasn't covered on the nightly news.  I had nightmares over it, and while thinking of post-mortems yesterday, I googled it.  Some hits, I chose this and this for you.  And yes, they admit that the numbers of those buried alive are disputed here and there.  But we should have known this; we should have been told that this is what war looks like.

We should have been told about the myth that Marja is a city of 80,000 souls, when in fact it is a loose-knit area of markets and mosques spread over an enormous agricultural valley.  We should have been told the truth.  But since, as David Petraeus admits, "War is about Perception," we won't be told. 

Please read about it.  From the Patrick Sloan piece in the Guardian:

Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the dead had eluded eyewitnesses, cameras and video footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches. They moved swiftly. The operation had been rehearsed repeatedly, weeks before, on a mile-long trench line built according to satellite photographs. The finishing touches were made by armoured combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to small-arms fire, smoothed away any hint of the carnage. "A lot of guys were scared, but I enjoyed it," said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver awarded a Bronze Star for his performance in the battle.

 

How many times?