War of the Quailhawks: (A War Against Sheep, Turkey, Fish, and Deer)

Tomgram: Shining a Quailish Light on a Cakewalk

War of the Quailhawks
By Tom Engelhardt

Fighting a War against Sheep, Turkey, Fish, and Deer

Here's the thing: Don't imagine for a second that there's anything idle or far-fetched about connecting the shooting at the Armstrong ranch to the invasion of Iraq: Militarily speaking, top Bush administration officials considered a war against Saddam's Iraq the equivalent of the sort of farm-raised "hunt" that Cheney (and, among others, Vice-Presidential pal and "cabal" partner Donald Rumsfeld) have engaged in for years.
Let's recall the basics here. In 1991, after Saddam had sent his army into Kuwait (possibly believing that the U.S. had given him the green light to do so), George H.W. Bush formed a large coalition of nations and launched Operation Desert Storm against Saddam's forces at a time when they were assumed to be reasonably formidable. In the brief conflict that followed, however, the American military (with its coalition of largely paying, rather than fighting, allies in tow) proved that assessment blindingly wrong by obliterating significant portions of the Iraqi military, while losing hardly a soldier in battle.

Desert Storm was, in truth, less a war than a mass execution (as, historically, colonial wars often were). If Vietnam was America's first "living-room war," this was the first screen war at the front. Cameras shooting through the night-vision gun sights of Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, for instance, caught graphic scenes of confused and helpless Iraqi soldiers being blown to bits by unseen attackers. "The Iraqi soldiers looked like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen -- bewildered and terrified, jarred from sleep and fleeing their bunkers under a hellish fire," wrote the Los Angeles Times' John Balzar, who viewed the film with officers of the 18th Airborne Corps at a briefing tent on the Saudi border. Most of the killing took place this way, from the air or long distance (with the exception of a moment when American troops in bulldozers ploughed-in Iraqi trenches at the Kuwaiti border, burying Iraqi conscripts alive).

The final act of this "war" involved an out-and-out slaughter of Iraqi troops (and the wholesale destruction of their vehicles) as they fled Kuwait City on what came to be known as "the highway of death." American pilots over that highway famously referred to the battle as "a turkey shoot" or as "shooting fish in a barrel," though (had they been rich enough) they might, even then, have said, "Like quail at the Armstrong ranch." Later, Desert Storm Commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf would complain that the President had cut off the "turkey shoot" and ended the war too quickly.

The comparisons of Iraqi enemies to various prey animals certainly indicated that the military had its share of hunters and fishermen, but these were also classic denigrating images of battle in which the enemy loses his humanity altogether, becoming in flight nothing more than a hunted animal. (This language remains a commonplace of American-style war. Just the other day, Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter, laying out the dicey security situation in the Iraqi city of Samarra, described the aftermath of an ambush of an American patrol by Iraqi guerrillas, two of whom were killed, this way: "Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down , pulled two of the insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud. 'Strap those motherf-----s to the hood like a deer,' said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark. The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood… and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.")

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=61927

Great, just a great term.

Joe