In the summer of 2004, I went to a peace activist’s house in Berkeley to hear Jo Wilding, a British aid worker who had been in Iraq in the leadup to the U.S. invasion and during early parts of the occupation (February and March of 2003 and November 2003 to May 2004), speak about what she saw. Her presentation covered several different aspects of the U.S. invasion, its aftermath and how different segments of the Iraqi population viewed it, ensuing war crimes, etc. I had gotten permission to interview Wilding afterward. Unfortunately, I have since lost the interview transcript. But I do have the transcript (below) of parts of Wilding’s presentation which was originally published at the Peace Gazette newsletter for the Mt. Diablo Peace & Justice Center in Walnut Creek, California in September/October of 2004. Warning: there are some graphic descriptions of war violence. – Natylie

Having gone once it kind of became part of me, so I went back and arrived the 15th of February 2003. It was very difficult to have open conversations with people because there was so much surveillance. You would manage to have conversations with people riding in the back of a taxi or walking on a crowded street.

There had been a huge amount of damage from the 1991 bombing. Under the sanctions, Iraqis couldn’t replace the sewage system because they weren’t allowed to buy machinery or technical supplies, so there was 500,000 tons of raw sewage being dumped into the fresh water sources every day, and people were hugely affected by that. The river is so polluted, especially in the north and near Kurdistan where people have no other water source. They’re drinking really toxic water.

There were really terrified kids. A leading authority on child trauma who came to Iraq said there was probably not a child in Iraq who wasn’t suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder – bed wetting, aggression, lack of concentration, nightmares, that kind of thing. We had three months worth of funding from USAID and we wrote a report which stated that the actions of the coalition forces were making the children’s trauma worse with bombing at night and going on violent house raids. Our funding was removed and the facility was converted into a center for torture victims of Saddam. Something that was making the coalition look bad was not funded, but if it was something that was focusing on the old government being bad, it was funded.

With the [traveling] circus, we did a show and we would play games. We had a huge bit of red fabric with which we would play parachute games. It taught the kids things like cooperation and communication skills and, instead of just looking at them, we played with them. At one refugee camp close to Shoula there were seventy-five families and a lot of them have a lot of children. They had mostly come up from the south. The kids were asking for blankets because it gets really cold at night in Iraq. People over there were saying that as much as they needed to rebuild the infrastructure, they also needed the psychological reconstruction – they needed some kind of healing process to start.

The second time we went, the girls were a bit more outgoing than the first time; one was just begging to be picked for cat-and-mouse. But there was one little boy called Abdullah and he had a bandage around his head and was scared of everything, just kept hiding behind his mom. It took a really long time for him to just come out of himself and be comfortable around us. We had this little game every time I came where he’d put something on my chair and run away. He just kind of started to come out much more, and kind of remembered what it was like to be a child and to just play.

Especially with the kids who came from Fallujah, you’d give them something to draw with and they’d draw pictures of planes dropping bombs on houses and tanks and things exploding. Their heads are so full of this violence that when you give them something imaginative to do, playing or drawing, that’s what comes out.

You regularly have exploding car bombs and roadside bombs. Often, the U.S. troops start shooting in an area where there has been a roadside bomb and sort of just open fire at random and kind of shoot everywhere, which causes a lot of civilian casualties. I remember seeing ongoing house raids and random arrests. The troops would surround the village and arrest all of the men, and often some of the women as well, especially if the man they were looking for wasn’t there. And then, when they would find out later that it was the wrong house, they would go back and go, “sorry, wrong house,” but they would never let the family members out of prison and they would never give them any compensation for the damage to the property.

People coming out of the prisons have been telling all kinds of stories of torture and abuse. One of the things that hasn’t yet come out in the news is that there are other forms of torture. People are talking about toenails being pried off, not being allowed to sleep, not being given water and enough to eat, being kept in these overcrowded tents. Some of the people said there were rumors of a mass grave under the prison. In one of these big white tents that holds about 300 people, they saw something and went down a few feet and found recently dead bodies from post-Saddam time. Bush has been saying that they want to knock down Abu Ghraib and, of course, that would be sealing up (or destroying) all kinds of forensic evidence.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib didn’t surprise anyone, but what made people angry was that Bush didn’t apologize. He said this isn’t the real America, but he never said I’m really sorry that this happened.

Iraqis were really angry because they had been promised this de-Baathification process. What started to happen was that Baathists were starting to be put back into positions of power. The former members of Mukabarat, the secret police [under Saddam] were being recruited into the new police. Iraqis were seeing all of their former oppressors being given back their positions of power. Promises had been made and gone back on. For months people had been told that there’s no jobs, and suddenly they’ve got 6,000 jobs for old Baath party members.

…The people who were really abused under Saddam, especially people in the south, were patient with the occupation. They were willing to accept having the troops there if it was a means of getting rid of Saddam. Anything was better than Saddam. What they found was that the U.S. troops were not going to leave after all, and that most of the reconstruction wasn’t being done.

The things that are being built – it’s not schools, it’s not hospitals, it’s not roads, it’s military bases. I don’t agree with invading a country as a means of liberating it from someone. There was a whole other array of options that were not explored. But I would say there was a window of opportunity when the U.S. could have isolated the people fighting them by doing a good job for the rest of the country. But they just didn’t see that and now just about everybody in Iraq is opposed to the occupation.

…(After the siege of Fallujah began), they gave us some bandages and bags of water. There were six internationals and six Iraqis and we went in through a desert road because U.S. troops had blocked off the road in. We get to the clinic and it wasn’t an ordinary doctor’s clinic. It wasn’t actually a hospital, but because there were so many casualties and because the U.S. troops had sealed off the main hospital and closed it down, there were a lot of other places operating as field hospitals.

Within about five or ten minutes of us arriving there, a family was brought in. There were two children. They both had bullet wounds in their heads and an old woman who was also injured by a bullet. The family said they had been leaving their house to flee Baghdad, and they had been shot by a U.S. sniper. All three of them died. They had no anesthetic because it wasn’t equipped to be a hospital. The blood bags were stored in a drinks fridge and they were warming them up under the pack in the toilet. It was just an absolutely desperate situation. The doctors had not slept properly in over two weeks since the bombing had started…

…The ambulance was clearly marked. It had “AMBULANCE” written in English across the front, a blue flashing light. It had a siren wailing. As we were driving through the American-held part of town, a shot was fired at the ambulance. We stopped and waited, thinking it was just a warning shot and we’ll be able to move in a minute. And they just opened fire on the ambulance. Countless people were being killed in Fallujah. Lots of people were burying bodies in their homes because they couldn’t take them anywhere. Whole families were living in houses that were bombed. The Pentagon actually issued a statement saying I was lying about our ambulance being shot at. What they say is that, if ambulances are shot, it’s because ambulances get used to transport guns and fighters and they get fired on from ambulances. There’s not actually a single documented case. They haven’t given a single example of when it happened…

…We went off to go get some sick people from one of the houses. As we got to the house, there was a man lying face down in the road and when we turned him on his back, his whole chest had been completely destroyed and so it was pretty clear that he had been shot in the back – shot through the trunk. I mean straight through his heart. The scopes on a sniper rifle are incredibly good and I’m sure it was possible to see that that old man didn’t have a gun in his hand…

…We weren’t being forced to invade that town. The four people that were killed in Fallujah were mercenaries: they were people on military missions; they were armed; they were former Special Forces that were sent in to kill people in Fallujah.

…The people who were fleeing from Fallujah were basically trapped at the checkpoints. The soldiers said: well, we’ll let women and children out. So they had this bunch of men stuck in Fallujah who wanted to leave and the fear was that there was going to be an intensified massacre once most of the women and children had left. So we tried to argue this point with the soldier and he said, “No, we want to keep them all in there because we can kill them all more easily.”

…They basically dehumanized people in Fallujah. They saw them as targets, not has human beings. If you talk to any soldiers, they will tell you that this is all sort of trained into them at the beginning of basic training…

…I would never say that leaving Saddam in place was a good idea. But things have become much worse for Iraqi women. They’re now walking around wearing hijabs. It was coming from fundamentalist groups who were at that point wielding quite a lot of power. They [U.S. troops] closed down Al-Sadr’s newspaper because it criticized the U.S. occupation, but he had been threatening women and labor organizations for a long time. [The women’s] main concern was security. They’d say we just need to feel safe walking down the street and we need to be able to feed our children, send our children to school and know that they’ll be okay. And a lot of girls had stopped going to school because of the fear that [rape] would happen to them, so they’re just being kept at home. So many women have just disappeared into their homes.

…Usually at the end of my talks I give a list of things that people can do – trade union solidarity I think is a really important one. They’ve got a thirty-five year gap. They’ve never really been able to have independent trade unions. Doing direct actions that are really disruptive at the offices of these companies that are making the contracts. And I think it is really an important thing to start telling people about the draft.

Russia analyst and author Gilbert Doctorow has written a 2-volume memoir that takes the reader on a journey through his years as a Russia specialist.  Starting with college and graduate work in Russian history at two Ivy League universities followed by decades of business management and consulting work, Doctorow provides a rare peek into the last days of the Soviet Union and the chaotic transition of the Russian Federation as someone who had a front row seat.  In the process, he dispels many of the myths that persist among widely-published journalists and Russia watchers today.

Both volumes are structured in a unique manner in that roughly the first half to two-thirds sets out the narrative while the remainder consists of the reproduction of a variety of documents to buttress Doctorow’s account.  These include excerpts of diary entries and correspondence with friends and family members during the relevant periods, as well as summaries of newspaper articles noted as significant at the time. 

The first volume primarily covers Doctorow’s early life and education.  Born and raised in the U.S., Doctorow’s grandparents were Russian emigres.  His family background fostered a curiosity about Russia and he studied the country and its history at both Harvard and Columbia, including taking courses under the notorious Richard Pipes.  Ironically, Doctorow viewed most of the Ivy League professors he encountered as “closed-minded” and “complacent,” but he did at least find Pipes to be a colorful lecturer. 

Upon graduating with a PhD, Doctorow prepared to be a professor himself but fled the profession after suffering “stage fright” in front of a classroom.  Having traveled through Western and Eastern Europe on a fellowship, Doctorow received another fellowship that enabled him to study for a year at the state archives in Leningrad and Moscow from 1971-72.  It was during this time that he met Larisa, a young Russian writer who would become his wife. 

To earn a living, Doctorow got a consultancy job for U.S. companies with major industrial projects at the time in the Soviet Union.  Thus began a career that would span through the 1990’s working in management and consultancy positions for companies, mostly in the food processing, liquor and agribusiness industries, throughout Europe and Russia.  In addition to the business savvy that he would acquire as he went, his knowledge of the language and culture of Russia would serve him well professionally.

Some of the unique obstacles to doing business in general in the Soviet Union included the Jackson-Vanik law which made commerce dependent upon Jewish emigration levels, constant surveillance, “random assaults” on foreigners, bureaucratic conflicts and control, lack of incentive for innovation and focus on quantity rather than quality in production goals.  More specifically, problems in the food processing industry that Doctorow spent a significant amount of time in included poor availability of packaging and refrigeration.  This was despite the fact that Soviet leaders genuinely seemed interested in improving the quality and variety of food products for their citizenry.

From 1989 to 1993, Doctorow helped in the building up of UPS in Russia.  The transportation logistics were greatly improved by the fall of the Berlin Wall not long after he started.  As someone on the ground during this important period of transition to a privatized market economy, Doctorow observed very low levels of competence and ethics in the business community in general.  He specifically mentions the challenge of constantly changing customs and regulations which affected delivery times that were an integral aspect of success for UPS.  This type of problem was a recurring theme during Doctorow’s business life in 1990’s Russia:

“One hears of the mafia and extortion, the racket.  One hears of the rapacious tax authorities.  These are indeed frightening aspects of the Russian business predicament.  But what is more general and more dangerous is the entire legal environment, the welter of contradictory laws, administrative circulars, etc. which makes for a totally confusing situation, where one’s rights and obligations are unclear and where only one thing is certain: you are always in violation of one or another regulation.” (pp. 178-179)

Though admittedly a learning curve in how to conduct business efficiently and honestly was to be expected in a country that had little history of it, these challenges were part of a much larger issue with corruption, major societal instability, and the exploitative mentality of western political leaders and business advisers:

“Those political commentators today who speak with such nostalgia about the democratic Russia of Boris Yeltsin as contrasted with today’s supposedly authoritarian Russia are either shamefully ignorant of the realities of daily life back then or are simply vile propagandists for whom the truth has no relevance to their “end justifies the means” mindset.” (p. x)

Doctorow recounts many episodes that characterize the violence of this era in Russia.  One is a gangland murder on the steps of the Hotel Ukraina in which Doctorow was staying at the time as he often did during a period in Moscow.  Around the same time, a pub up the street was bombed because the owner did not pay protection money.

Doctorow also discusses the 1996 murder of Paul Tatum, an American hotelier who had a stake in the Moscow Radisson and was gunned down outside the building.  His naked body laid across the medical examiner’s table was broadcast on television news that evening in what many interpreted as a part warning/part gloating spectacle.   It was one murder in a larger pattern of business contract disputes being regularly resolved via deadly violence and whether one was a Russian or a westerner didn’t matter.  In this case, Doctorow suggests the perpetrators acted “in the spirit of national assertiveness encouraged by then Moscow mayor [and later candidate as a possible successor to Yeltsin] Yuri Luzhkov.” (p. xiii)

While attending a dinner party to celebrate Victory Day with his in-laws in St. Petersburg in 1995, Doctorow relayed one relative’s experience serving in Chechnya as a pathologist for the military.  His job was to examine and identify the war dead amid the utter devastation of the capital of Grozny.  After completing his service, he and those he served with were all treated for “shell shock” before release.   This young man told Doctorow and the other guests that the war seemed to have been needlessly prolonged for political reasons.

There was also the desperate poverty contrasted with the nouveaux riches elite.  A diary entry from mid-January of 1994 noted during a visit to Moscow that western newspapers were celebrating the accord between Yeltsin and Clinton while prices for food and other necessities continued to increase – at that point by 30% within two months.  Filthy streets lined with beggars and desperate Russians selling items that no one wanted were observed, along with a “malevolence” that permeated the political atmosphere.

This atmosphere was too often exacerbated by the kind of westerner drawn to 90’s Russia who, needless to say, wasn’t going to put in the hard work of building a business infrastructure that would provide stability and integrity.  According to Doctorow, they were typically young men looking for sexual adventure and/or were recent graduates in Slavic language/literature with  the intention of going back home to teach, but ended up drawn into lucrative business opportunities without having the relevant skills or experience. 

In one instance he speaks of a predatorial western journalist who became a pimp and “made a fortune serving the sexual appetite of a Russian business tycoon in St. Petersburg.” (p. xvi)

There are some brighter points as well.  Doctorow mentions some honest western businesses who managed to successfully navigate the scene and provide products and services in the country.  He also regularly speaks of the high quality cultural life he enjoyed in both Moscow and St. Petersburg as a result of his work in the luxury goods industry and his wife’s work as a cultural writer – plays, opera, ballet, etc.  For several years during the 90’s he was involved with the Russian Booker Prize, a sister project of the British literary prize that ran in Russia from 1992 to 2017.  The Booker Prize model used rotating juries to determine winners in order to ensure diversity and openness to different styles and voices.  He has an interesting story to tell about when Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s organization took over as financial sponsor of the prize from 2002 to 2005. 

He also observed the emergence of a fledgling middle class that ate and dressed better and looked healthier, noting that those under the age of 40 seemed to be better able to find ways to adjust to the changing times – however chaotic they were.    

While this memoir is very lengthy, I overall highly recommend it for those interested in getting a close-up look at what occurred in the 1990’s in Russia as well as some insights into the latter days of the Soviet Union by someone who was there and carefully documented his experiences and observations.  The more casual reader can choose what areas he or she wants to focus on in terms of the business aspect of the story or the contextual social and political background. 

By Alan MacLeod, Mint Press News, 3/1/21

…Last year, American military planners advised that the U.S. should step up its campaign of psychological warfare against Beijing, including sponsoring authors and artists to create anti-China propaganda. The Pentagon’s budget request for 2021 makes clear that the United States is retooling for a potential intercontinental war with China or Russia. It asks for $705 billion to “shift focus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on the types of weapons that could be used to confront nuclear giants like Russia and China,” noting that it requires “more advanced high-end weapon systems, which provide increased standoff, enhanced lethality and autonomous targeting for employment against near-peer threats in a more contested environment.”

…It appears as if the years of negative publicity against the two countries has had an effect, with Americans’ view of Russia and China even more negative than during the Cold War. Both pro- and anti-war voices have stated that the U.S. is on the cusp of entering a second Cold War. The new Gallup poll suggests that the groundwork for such a conflict has already been laid. 

Read the full article here.

Anyone who follows the news even in a cursory fashion has probably heard about President Biden’s response to what Ben Aris has referred to as a “journalist trap” from George Stephanopoulos during an interview released earlier this week. Stephanopoulos asked Biden if he thought Putin was a killer. Biden said, “Mmhmm. Yes, I do.” The exchange is in the below video:

Stephanopoulos knows his job. Amplify U.S. policy. So he asks Biden if Putin is "a killer." Russia is not having it and recalled their ambassador from the U.S.
The Russiagaters won. It's impossible to have any relationship with Russia.
BTW, Putin didn't kill 1 million Iraqis. pic.twitter.com/1yDmVckuBB

— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) March 17, 2021

Needless to say, this – along with the announcement that US intelligence believes that Russia interfered in the 2020 election and more sanctions may consequently be on the way – didn’t go down well in Russia. Moscow has recalled its ambassador from Washington for “consultations.” According to the Wall Street Journal:

A statement by the Russian foreign ministry said the most important thing for Moscow was to identify ways to rectify the relationship, blaming Washington for bringing relations between the two countries to “a blind alley.”

Furthermore, Putin has commented directly on Biden’s remark, suggesting that Biden was engaging in psychological projection. According to an RT report:

Speaking on Thursday, Putin suggested that Biden may be projecting, noting that evaluating other countries “is like looking in a mirror.”

“When I was a kid, when we were arguing with each other in the playground, we used to say, ‘Whatever you say [about others] is what you are yourself,’” Putin added.

Putin also reportedly said he wished Biden “good health.”

Later in the day, it was reported that Putin had offered to have a live public discussion with Biden in the near future. According to ABC News:

“I’ve just thought of this now,” Putin told a Russian state television reporter. “I want to propose to President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that we do it basically live, as it’s called. Without any delays and directly in an open, direct discussion. It seems to me that would be interesting for the people of Russia and for the people of the United States.”

Some are interpreting this as Putin’s way of implying that Biden doesn’t have the cognitive ability to engage in an intellectual exchange with him.

I agree that it is highly unlikely that Biden will agree to this, especially considering the fact that Biden or his handlers are not even willing to subject him to questions from a lapdog DC press corps. The U.S. president has not given a press conference in which he has taken questions since he took office.

I’ll make a couple of points that are just based on thinking aloud more than anything else.

The first is that Biden has a history of not using discretion and running his mouth off. An example is when he bragged at a think tank years ago that he’d gotten Ukraine’s prosecutor fired by using a major financial package as leverage over the Ukrainian government. There were also numerous examples of him saying insulting and/or just off-the-wall things to people during his presidential campaign. If, in fact, this could be characterized as a “journalist trap” as Aris suggested, then Biden is the perfect target for a journalist to pull this on.

Second, there is reporting within the past couple of days that the U.S. will be participating in a Russian-led conference to be held in Moscow on the future of Afghanistan. According to Antiwar.com:

Beginning Thursday, the Moscow Summit is looking to see Russia and the United States trying to sell the interim government peace proposal to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. This summit is the biggest event in awhile in trying to get the peace process revived.

It’s not Russia’s first bid at having influence on post-war Afghanistan. It is, however, the first time the US has acknowledged such a summit as a real thing, and participated in it. Both the US and Russia seem to be united in their proposal.

There was also the renewal of the New START Treaty as soon as Biden took office. Renewal of that treaty may seem like a no-brainer to any rational person, but rationality when it comes to policy vis-a-vis Russia has been in very short supply in DC in recent years. As someone who has been in national politics for decades, Biden may be thinking that in order to have the space to even accomplish these minimal steps that involve cooperation with Moscow, he will need to placate the hawks that pervade Washington. To do this, he may feel he needs to keep the ugly rhetoric toward Putin at maximum volume.

This is not new. During the Kennedy administration, even though the president wanted to tamp down the Cold War with Khrushchev, Kennedy had to throw a bone to the hardliners once in a while. Those bones did not always come cheap and sometimes they caused serious problems with the Kremlin.

So what do you readers think? Am I wishful thinking about what Biden may be up to? Does Biden even still have the cognitive ability to think strategically like this? Feel free to give your opinions on this in the comments.