Armavirumque, Nov 14, 2004 07:52 AM

Dexter tries again

by Roger Kimball

Readers of this page will remember Dexter Filkins. He’s the doughty New York Times reporter embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq who is straining for this year’s War Correspondent’s award. Dexter must have done well at journalism school after attending college. He opens every piece with a sentence or two of poetic reverie:

Nov. 11 - The stars began to glimmer through a wan yellow-gray sunset over Falluja on Thursday evening. The floury dust in the air and a skyline of broken minarets and smashed buildings combined for the only genuine postcard image this country has to offer for now.

Then Dexter moves on with some bad news: the natives are rioting, U.S. troops are outnumbered or outgunned or outwitted. That’s undoubtedly what he absorbed from college, you see: the U.S. military is incompetent, malevolent, or both. Now he is in a position to tell millions. A few days ago, in his "stars began to glimmer" report, Dexter told us that the Marines were pinned down; this was not the desert warfare they’d trained for; house to house fighting; morale, Dexter implied, was cracking, as were the soliders’ nerves; meanwhile, the "insurgents" were popping up everywhere to harry our boys . . . It looked grim.

One November 12, Dexter was at it again:

Sitting on a third-story roof, Staff Sgt. Eric Brown, his lip bleeding, peered through the scope of his rifle into the haze. Moments before, a lone bullet had whizzed past his face and smashed a window behind him. "God, I hate this place, the way the sun sets," Sergeant Brown said.

Sgt. Sam Williams said, "I wish I could see down the street."

But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He’s in the road, he’s in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"

The flags are the insurgents’ answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.

Dexter, Dexter: Are you frightened by a black flag? Let me introduce you to the AC-130 Spectre Gunship. This is one of dozens of geniunely terrifying pieces of machinery the U.S. has brought to bear in the war in Iraq. (By the way, the "tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon" is rich: as if the band of cut-throats, terrorists, and murderers Dexter is quietly rooting for are prosecuting their battle according to some grand strategy instead of, as is the case, simply taking advantage of every opportunity to butcher people.)

While Dexter was counting black flags, the U.S. military was gobbling up Fallujah. As of 14 November, we own it.

Resistance has dwindled in the last rebel redoubt in Fallujah, US officers said, but explosions still shook the smoke-wreathed city as an Iraqi Red Crescent convoy waited nearby to distribute relief.

�Two days ago they were coming out and fighting us. Last night they were running. It looks like we are about to break their will,� Captain Robert Bodisch, a US tank company commander, told Reuters. �I don�t think it will be long now.�

I look forward to Dexter’s next dispatch: it will doubtless begin with some of his signature fine writing, some wisps of smoke, perhaps, spiraling upwards over the smashed buildings of Fallujah’s while the denizens of that redoubt are pictured padding about tending to their dead and wounded. The implication will be that the carnage was the fault of the Americans, when in fact it is the U.S. military that put a stop to it. One thing you have to say about the men and women in the U.S. military: they are patient souls. They put up with many Dexter Filkinses among them, people of doubtful allegiance who daily flash back incriminating and demoralizing stories to their smug papers in major U.S. cities so that a contented populace can moralize over the barbarity of war while they down their cornflakes and coffee. What was it that Kipling said about "making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep"?