The Missing WMD – in Trucks in Iraq

by Mike Davis and Tom Engelhardt TomDispatch

The carnage in Iraq continues, but what did anyone expect? Roadside bombs (IEDs) take their deadly almost daily toll on U.S. troops in and around Baghdad (and adjoining provinces). Seventy-five Americans have already died in March, at least 50 of them from roadside bombs. Of course, that's a drop in the bucket, when it comes to Iraqi casualties. The now widely discussed Lancet study of Iraqi "excess deaths" between the invasion of March 2003 and June 2006 offered an estimated figure of 655,000. Its careful, door-to-door methodology was vehemently rejected by both George Bush (not "a credible report") and Tony Blair. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, however, recently obtained British government documents indicate that the study's methodology was indeed sound. ("[T]he chief scientific adviser to the Defense Ministry, Roy Anderson, described the methods used in the study as 'robust' and 'close to best practice'… In another document, a government official – whose name has been blanked out – said 'the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.'")

None of this is likely to fully penetrate the mainstream in the U.S. During the week of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, both NBC and ABC in their primetime news shows typically continued to cite the figure of 60,000 for Iraqi deaths – despite the fact that the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq calculated 34,452 Iraqi deaths for 2006 alone and this is known to be an honest undercount, because some bodies never make it to morgues or hospitals and, in the embattled no-go zones of the Sunni insurgency, official reporting of deaths is weak at best.

With the president's surge plan well underway and "encouraging signs" of progress in Baghdad already being hailed – how long can we be encouraged on the road to hell? – Iraq is ever more a charnel house, a killing ground. The latest real surge, as Mike Davis tells us below, is in car and truck bombs driven by Sunni jihadis. Last April, Davis did a unique two-part series for this site, "The Poor Man's Air Force" and "Car Bombs With Wings," which surely represented the first history of the car bomb ever attempted. The remarkable author of Planet of Slums has now turned those two pieces into a full-scale, history of this devastating weapon of our time in a new book, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Since, on this roiling planet, the car bomb may lie in all our futures, this is simply a book not to miss. I recommend it most highly. Tom
Have the Car-Bombers Already Defeated the Surge?

The weapon no one can stopby Mike Davis

Despite heroic reassurances from both the White House and the Pentagon that the six-week-old U.S. escalation in Baghdad and al-Anbar province is proceeding on course, suicide car-bombers continue to devastate Shi'ite and Sunni neighborhoods, often under the noses of reinforced American patrols and checkpoints. Indeed, February was a record month for car bombings, with at least 44 deadly explosions in Baghdad alone, and March promises to duplicate the carnage.
Car bombs, moreover, continue to evolve in horror and lethality. In January and March, the first chemical "dirty bomb" explosions took place using chlorine gas, giving potential new meaning to the president's missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The sectarian guerrillas who claim affiliation with "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" are now striking savagely, and seemingly at will, against dissident Sunni tribes in al-Anbar province as well as Shi'ite areas of Baghdad and Shi'ite pilgrims on the highways to the south of the capital. With each massacre, the bombers refute Bush administration claims that the U.S. military can "take back and secure" Baghdad block-by-block or establish its own patrols and new, fortified mini-bases as a realistic substitute for local self-defense militias.

On Feb. 23, for instance, shortly after the beginning of the "Surge," a suicide truck-bomber killed 36 Sunnis in Habbaniya, west of Baghdad, after an imam at a local mosque had denounced al-Qaeda. Ten days later, a kamikaze driver plowed his truck bomb into Baghdad's famed literary bazaar, the crowded corridor of bookstores and coffee houses along Mutanabi Street, incinerating at least 30 people and, perhaps, the last hopes of an Iraqi intellectual renaissance.
On March 10, another suicide bomber massacred 20 people in Sadr City, just a few hundred yards away from one of the new U.S. bases. The next day, a bomber rammed his car into flatbed truck full of Shi'ite pilgrims, killing more than 30. A week later, horror exceeded itself when a car bomber evidently used two little children as a decoy to get through a military checkpoint, then exploded the car with the kids still in the back seat.

In a demonstration of a tactic that has proven especially deadly over the past year, a car-bomb attack on March 23 was coordinated with an assailant in a suicide vest and almost killed Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, whose tribal alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, has accepted funding from the Americans and been denounced by the jihadis.

When it comes to the development of suicide vehicles, however, the most alarming innovation has, without doubt, been the debut in January of truck bombs carrying chlorine gas tanks rigged with explosives. Of course, "dirty bombs," usually of the nuclear variety, have been a longtime obsession of anti-terrorism experts (as well as the producers of TV potboilers), but the sinister glamour of radioactive devices – scattering deadly radiological waste in the city of London or across midtown Manhattan – has tended to overshadow the far greater likelihood that bomb-makers would initially be attracted to the cheapness and ease of combining explosives with any number of ordinary industrial caustics and toxins.

As if to emphasize that poison-gas explosions were now part of their standard arsenal, sectarian bombers – identified, as usual, by the American military as members of "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" – unleashed three successive chlorine suicide-bomb attacks on March 16 against Sunni towns outside of Fallujah. The two largest attacks involved dump trucks loaded with 200-gallon chlorine tanks. Aside from the dozens wounded or killed by the direct explosions, at least another 350 people were stricken by the yellow-green clouds of chlorine.

As in April 1915, with the first uses of chlorine gas on the Western Front in World War I, these explosions sowed widespread panic, underlining – as the bombers no doubt intended – the inability of the Americans to protect potential allies in al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. (The recent discovery of stocks of chlorine and nitric acid in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad will hardly assuage those fears.)

The shock waves from the March dirty bombs also rattled windows on the Hudson River, where New York Police Department (NYPD) experts warned the media that poor security at local chemical plants raised the danger of copycat attacks using stolen ingredients. An anonymous senior official in the department's Counter-Terrorism Bureau told Reuters that "the NYPD expected would-be attackers targeting New York to try to import the tactic." At the same time, New Jersey's two Democratic senators – Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg – complained that the Bush administration was coddling the chemical industry by blocking New Jersey and other states from implementing tougher safety regulations.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected U.S. troops into a massive, desperate hunt for the "makeshift car-bomb factories" that Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, chief spokesman for the Surge, claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and industrial estates that ring Baghdad.

The image of a clandestine car-bomb industry, by the way, is rich with irony. Baghdad's factory belt contains hundreds of state-owned and private factories that once manufactured canned food, tiles, baby clothes, transit buses, fertilizers, commercial glass, and the like. Since the American invasion, however, the plants are idle, if not derelict, and their once integrated Sunni-Shi'ite workforces are bunkered down, jobless, in increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment in greater Baghdad is variously estimated in the 40-60 percent range.
It is unlikely that the current raids – using troops who would otherwise be securing streets and "winning hearts and minds" – will uncover more than a tiny fraction of the city's bomb "factories." Indeed, the car bomb – even more than the roadside bombs (IEDs) that are filling the Humvee junkyards – has proven globally to be an almost invincible weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded, as well as the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush administration has totally ignored. None of the American commanders in the field in 2003-2004, much less the imperial daydreamers in neoconservative think tanks back in Washington, seem to have foreseen the ubiquity of its use.

According to a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians (organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by several thousand vehicle bombings between March 2003 to June 2006. Moreover, as I explain in my newly published history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, there is little hope for any technological fix or scientific miracle that will allow reliable detection of a stolen Mercedes with 500 pounds of C-4 in the trunk or a dump truck laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives idling in one of Baghdad's colossal traffic jams. (Checkpoints? Just a synonym for target of opportunity.)

In the meantime, the bombers are obviously wagering that if they can sustain current levels of carnage, the Shi'ite militias will be forced back onto the streets to protect their neighborhoods (as the American troops can't), risking a bloody, all-out confrontation with U.S. forces for the ownership of the vast Shi'ite slum of Sadr City and other Shi'ite areas in eastern Baghdad. On the other side, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, counterinsurgency expert and mastermind of the Surge, must shut down the car-bombers by the beginning of the summer or face a likely popular revolt in Sadr City. With each explosion, his chances of success diminish.

Mike Davis is the author of the just-published Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso), as well as Planet of Slums

Copyright 2007 Mike Davis