The News Blog

Possible Disaster in Baghdad
by Olds88
Tue Feb 13, 2007 at 10:44:29 AM PST
The title of this diary may sound vastly understated, even sarcastic. It isn't meant that way. It is meant as an alarm.

The current escalation in Baghdad might not be just more of the same, might not just be worse, it might be a military disaster. From what I have learned, it seems the elements of a large-scale defeat for US forces could be drawing into place in the city. The result could be hundreds of casualties on top of a failed mission.

Below are my observations drawn from current news reports and study of previous operations in Iraq. If my fears are borne out, the current Baghdad security plan leaves our troops vulnerable to almost every weapon at the insurgents' disposal.

Olds88's diary :: ::

"People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory." --1st Lt. Dan Quinn, platoon leader, 1st Infantry Division in eastern Baghdad

THE PLAN SO FAR...
Few specifics about the plan have been released except for the AEI's original map which simply showed Army Brigade Combat Teams sprinkled across the districts of Baghdad. It wasn't clear if the troops would be garrisoned on bases in brigade strength (3,500-4,000 soldiers), battalions (800-1,000), or smaller units. If early operations are any indication, the troop deployments will be modeled on a single house in northeastern Baghdad.

The Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad is the last Sunni enclave on the east side of the Tigris. Despite being only a short car bomb drive from Sadr City, it has stayed Sunni largely because of the presence of US troops. Since August of 2006, an Army company has lived in a house in the neighborhood. They patrol the streets, getting attacked daily from inside the neighborhood by Sunnis or from outside by raiding Shiites. They are a unit of 120 soldiers and they are a long way from friendly forces. When I read about this situation, the first word that popped into my head was, "Alamo." I would never consider using such a cynical term out loud but, hell, that's what the soldiers on the ground are calling it. Its real name is a much more reassuring fort Apache:

[MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT]: We're with Charlie Company, 126th Infantry, based at forward operating base Apache. Although it's not really a base, it's actually a house. A hundred and twenty men in the middle of probably the city's most dangerous area.

HENDRIX: Some guys call it the Alamo, you know. It's just a house in the middle of Adhamiya. Nobody else around. No other units.

HOLMES: They are fired on regularly by insurgents, both Sunni and Shia. The house shows the scars.

A couple of months ago, insurgents attacked her. Charlie Company killed 38 of them. Around here, something as simple as leaving a house after speaking with the owners requires smoke grenades for cover.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We unfortunately, you know, learn some hard lessons.

HOLMES: Since arriving here in August, Charlie Company has never left, never stopped patrolling, 24/7. They've lost five men, two dozen wounded, and earned a fistful of medals for bravery.

(on camera): Is there a day here where something doesn't happen?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No. No.

Surge author and tin soldier abuser Fred Kagan has bitched that soldiers need to get out of their vehicles and make contact with the residents to quell violence. Since early reports suggest there could be a critical vehicle shortage, that part of the plan seems assured. The situation described above is what they may look forward to.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE BATTLEFIELD
Another house was recently set up in the ethnically-cleansed Shiite neighborhood of Shaab just northeast of Adhamiya. You may remember the fighting in Shaab and adjacent Ur around February 6th. A Stryker Brigade was clearing an area of insurgents in order to establish a house for a company from the 82nd Airborne. Those soldiers of the 82nd will have a challenging task of winning hearts and minds if this resident's account of the clearing operation is accurate:

A resident of Ur said about 10 U.S. Stryker armored vehicles had snaked through her neighborhood but became stuck on a narrow street. Unable to turn around, she said, the first Stryker rammed down the walls of a school and drove through it, followed by the rest of the convoy.

Is it just me? Does that paragraph depict a crystal-clear, multi-dimensional problem of interfacing troops with a high-density civilian population? In the event of an emergency, it is likely that these Strykers will be coming to the aid of troops under attack. Situations like the one above are going to kill civilians and vehicle occupants alike as insurgents attempt to turn tight alleyways into incinerators.

Getting back to the houses: they are officially known as JSSs, Joint Security Stations-- buildings where US and Iraqi troops will work and live together... at least until they don't. US officers won't have authority over the Iraqis-- who will take orders from a separate chain of command. Given the infiltration of Iraq's Security Forces, having them within the walls could be incredibly dangerous. A cynic might see them as an early warning system-- the day they disappear is probably the same day the Mahdi Army is planning to attack. Of course, when they do disappear, they will be taking knowledge of the building's layout, weak points, schedules, ammunition storage, supply levels, etc.

In short, this "Surge" plan will expose US soldiers to every weapon the Shiite and Sunni militias have: snipers, mortars, IEDs, car bombs, but most importantly: supply route interruption.

SUPPLY ROUTES
Research for this diary keeps circling back to the events of April 2004. That month is most vividly remembered for the image of four mercenaries killed and suspended from a bridge and the subsequent siege of Falluja. But it was also the month Sadr's Mahdi Army joined the fighting and took over large areas of the South. During the first half of April, his militia took over Karbala, Kufa, Najaf, and Kut,. The result was one of the deadliest months of the war. What was far less reported was the simultaneous and extremely effective attack on supply routes:

The south-north highway, over which all the deliveries out of the main supply hub crossed, was marked with more than 300 bridges. The bulk of these bridges are low, culvert-style structures. Insurgents cut as many as they could in any way possible. They punctured oil pipelines under bridges and set them aflame to inspire a collapse. They detonated explosives to punch ragged holes in the roadway. In one instance, insurgents dissembled a tall bridge spanning a river. They also targeted likely alternative routes. “They effectively shut us down,” he said. “When they took out the bridges ... we lost about seven days. In conjunction, they increased the op tempo in the north, especially in the Fallujah area ... I didn’t sleep for eight days.”

DoD map of attacks on April 7, 2004 (Green arrows are Mahdi Army attacks on cities lining supply routes).

While US forces were dealing with critical shortages and resorting to air resupply across the country, Iraq's militias were joining forces. Within days of the uprising, Sadr militia and ex-Baathist-- hated enemies-- were working together in sophisticated attacks as reported at the time:

"The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization," Pittard said in an interview. He said insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys.

With occupation forces battling Sadr's Shiite militiamen south and east of Baghdad and Sunni Muslim insurgents to the north and west, the timing of the Iraqis' tactical development is nearly as troubling for U.S. forces as its effect. But the explanation for the change is not yet clear, military commanders said.

Here in southern Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Shiite, U.S. officers say the best guess is that former soldiers who served under President Saddam Hussein have decided to lend their expertise and coordinating abilities to the untrained Shiite militiamen.

"It's a combination of Saddam loyalists and Shiite militias," Maj. Gen. John R. Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, said in a brief interview here at FOB Duke, where he was reviewing combat preparations.

The generally accepted conclusion to this episode was that the US entered a stand off in Falluja while decisively beating concentrations of the Mahdi Army in the south. While those events did occur, the timing suggests other forces were at work beyond the battlefield. Around the middle of the month, it was reported that Sadr was ready to negotiate. Shortly after, attacks on convoys lessened. At the time, Sadr's willingness to deal was depicted as desperation to avoid the destruction of his militia. But just three months later, he was given his own 32-seat faction in the new Iraqi Parliament and the health, agriculture, transport, and education ministries. Negotiations appear to have gone well.

Regardless of the backdoor machinations, US combat support units had a job to do: move supplies. Their immediate response was additional escorts, fast driving, and emergency airlifts for critical items like ammunition. After April, alternate routes were added, trucks were armored, and supply points were decentralized. While these changes might help on the open road, they are not applicable to delivering supplies over the last mile in Baghdad. Resupplying dozens of JSS buildings will mean either many small, lightly defended convoys or fewer, but larger, convoys snaking their way through the crowded streets of Baghdad.

HELICOPTERS
Coordinated attacks on road traffic would leave the forward-deployed companies at the JSS buildings reliant on helicopters for supplies, reinforcements, and evacuations-- medical or otherwise. Helicopters, as widely reported, are facing increased threats themselves. Al Qaeda in Iraq has claimed it has a newer "Strella" type shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles [they may be referring to the Strella-3 (NATO-code SA-14), or Igla-1 (SA-16) or Igla (SA-18) missiles that can attack aircraft from any side, not just from behind like the easily-confused, heat-seeking Strella-2 (SA-7), of which Iraq has many]. Al Qaeda in Iraq is also claiming the weapons are being made available to all groups regardless of affiliation (I presume they mean only other Sunni groups, though). Whether this is true or not, there has obviously been effective coordination against helicopters. Even worse, most of the recent attacks have occurred outside of the cities. A helicopter attempting to land or hover in order to drop supplies to a house in Mansour or Sadr City would be an extremely easy target even to RPGs (remember Black Hawk Down?).

By dividing our forces, the plan not only gives the Sunni and Shiites a chance to attack, it gives them a chance to lay siege.

And most frighteningly, it gives Shia and Sunni an strong incentive to work together again.

CAN THEY WORK TOGETHER AGAIN?
Probably. Despite the ongoing civil war, there are individuals and groups with connections across sectarian lines. On the Shiite side, there is Moqtada al Sadr. His organization provided relief supplies to Falluja during the April 2004 siege-- an act that made him a lot of friends among the Sunnis. His relatively nationalistic outlook and his constant call for Americans to leave Iraq roughly lines up with the priorities of non-al Qaeda groups on the Sunni side. That makes Sadr the man who can determine whether Baghdad waits out the American presence, fights, or lays a trap.

At this stage, Sadr's wisest strategy would still be to wait. Whether we leave in 6 months or two years, we are leaving. Despite the ravings of Bush, the Baghdad meat grinder is going to run out of cash and bodies soon enough. Once we're gone, Sadr can ethnically cleanse Baghdad before destroying SCIRI. At that point, it is just a matter of having a giant statue cast for Firdos Square.

The US seems intent on drawing Sadr out though. As I first mentioned in this diary, many of his lieutenants have been captured or killed and several officials have been arrested from ministries he controls. There have also been several strikes within Sadr City in the last few weeks. Provoking Sadr like this makes a limited amount of sense: if you can take him on individually and crush him now, smaller groups would likely refrain from doing the same. Also, a weakened Sadr may lose the the confidence of other groups.

But the greatest danger comes from a coordinated Sunni/Shia planned uprising. If they lay in wait until JSS houses are spread across the city, they could inflict severe casualties at those outposts while paralyzing movement on the roads and in the sky. Eventually, Abrams tanks and Strykers could reach the houses-- but only by cutting wide swaths of destruction trough dense neighborhoods (much like the Stryker path through the school, just miles longer). The mission in Baghdad would be over in many senses: practically, militarily, and morally.

CONCLUSION
The events described here may or may not come to pass. Like Fred Kagan, I am no expert. All I know is what I have read about the situation and how the participants have acted in the past. Our troops will be spread out in vulnerable positions. The Sunni/Shia factions has stopped convoys in the past. They are shooting down helicopters now. Most importantly, they have cooperated jointly in combat before. These are seemingly the perfect conditions for disaster. If theses dangers haven't been addressed, that negligence would be criminal.

UPDATE: I just want to make clear that I am not predicting a defeat for the entire US Army in Baghdad. A siege of the airport, for instance, is incredibly unlikely. Specifically, I am saying it appears the Joint Security Stations are too small to provide adequate protection for US forces manning them. If the stations are vulnerable, the soldiers will not be able to provide neighborhood security. An attack could result in needless casualties and failure of the operation's goal. The Army would in no way be swept from the city though.

Still, the most likely outcome is that the factions wait until we leave. It's sad that could be considered a good outcome.

Word is that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is now the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

This far out from the actual nomination the polls don’t mean much, and I am reasonably certain that Rudy’s candidacy will self-destruct long before the Republican National Convention. There are reasons the people who know him best — New Yorkers — prefer their polarizing Senator, Hillary Clinton, over Rudy Giuliani. There are also reasons why the thought of a President Giuliani scares the daylights out of me.

Here are a few things America really needs to know about Rudy Giuliani:

Had Rudy Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, no one would be talking about what a great leader Giuliani is today.

I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11, and as I was working in Manhattan I spent most of my time there in the days and weeks after. So you can take my word on this: Rudy’s post-9/11 “leadership” amounted almost entirely of the mayor appearing on television. He did a fine job of appearing on television, and he managed to set the right tone and say the right things — abilities Hizzoner did not always draw upon in the past. I give him credit for his performance. But that performance did not constitute “leadership.” It was all public relations. It was all about Rudy.

Jimmy Breslin wrote,

He was a nobody as a mayor and in one day he became a hero. This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in World Trade Center building blew up. He had personally selected it, high in the sky, and with tons of diesel fuel to give emergency power.

And Giuliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York.

Most of this comes from these dazed Pekingese of the Press. … Giuliani was a hero with these news people. He did not pick up a piece of steel or help carry one of the injured off. [Jimmy Breslin, “He Molests the Dead,” New York Newsday, March 7, 2004]

The fact is that Giuliani did little to “lead” rescue or recovery efforts. While Rudy was prancing around on television, a hodge-podge of city agencies loosely — very loosely — coordinated by the Office of Emergency Management went to work deconstructing the remains of the World Trade Center with little input or direction from the Mayor.

Consider also that the World Trade Center was yards away from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, Mayor Giuliani did not have to beg for help getting the debris cleared and electricity hooked up so that the financial district was up and running again as quickly as possible. New York’s business leadership saw to that.

This pro-Giuliani TCS article comparing New York and New Orleans is nothing short of absurd. Conditions in New York after 9/11 and New Orleans after Katrina cannot be compared, because these are entirely different cities and entirely different disasters. There were not, alas, thousands of New Yorkers waiting to be rescued after 9/11, for example. As terrible as it was, the tragedy of 9/11 did not exhaust New York’s resources to deal with it. New York is a rich city, and most of it was untouched.

On that day the survivors of the tragedy simply walked away from it; I remember seeing them, covered in white dust and walking silently as ghosts up 8th Avenue. They had only a few blocks to walk before the air was clear and the infrastructure (and civilization) was intact, and all the food and medical assistance and other help they could possibly want was theirs for the asking.

For those who couldn’t walk, New York’s several state-of-the-art hospitals took it upon themselves to besiege lower Manhattan with ambulances and paramedics and world-class triage units to care for the injured. These medical professionals lingered most of the day with little to do. Those survivors who did need first aid got it very promptly.

In New York, residents who were unable to return to their apartments for the most part had the means to find other shelter on their own without waiting for FEMA to assign them a trailer. They did not have to resort to looting abandoned grocery stores for food or wait for days in unsanitary shelters for buses to take them elsewhere.

To be fair, the mayor did threaten to arrest anyone caught south of 14th Street without permission. That threat, and the solid wall of armed law enforcement officers and New York National Guard who populated 14th Street intersections for several days, no doubt discouraged looting. Manhattan’s geography — the damage was on the tip of an island — made securing the area easier. More important, large numbers of increasingly desperate people were not trapped inside the secured area with no help and no way out.

So exactly what did Mayor Giuliani do to exhibit “leadership”? The fact is that post-Katrina New Orleans was a much bigger mess than post-9/11 New York, and Rudy Giuliani did nothing after 9/11 that would indicate his “leadership” would have made much difference in New Orleans. As Michael Atkinson wrote in the Village Voice last year, “After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV.”

Which takes us to the next item:

Rudy Giuliani’s shoddy “leadership” made the 9/11 tragedy worse.

You might recall that several New York firefighters died when the towers collapsed. Giuliani testified to the 9/11 Commission that firefighters had been given an evacuation order, but they chose to stay because they were rescuing civilians. This testimony was not exactly, um, true.

For all the power of his voice and stature, however, Mr. Giuliani’s account must compete with a substantial and diverse body of evidence that flatly contradicts much of what he and his aides say happened that day, particularly on matters that could be seen as reflecting on the performance of his administration.

On perhaps the most painful of these, the loss of at least 121 firefighters in the north tower, Mr. Giuliani suggested that they stayed inside the trade center because they were busy rescuing civilians — never mentioning that they could not hear warnings from police helicopters, that many of them never learned the south tower had collapsed or that they were having serious problems staying in touch with their own commanders.

Witnesses who escaped from the tower tell a vastly different story than Mr. Giuliani. They say that in the north tower’s final 15 minutes, only a handful of civilian office workers were still in the bottom 44 floors of the building, perhaps no more than two or three dozen. Many of the firefighters who remained in the towers were between the 19th and 37th floors, having made slow progress up the stairs in their heavy gear.

It is clear, witnesses said, that even after the south tower collapsed, many, if not most, of the firefighters had no idea that they were in dire peril, or that it was time for them to leave. In contrast, police officers received strong guidance from their commanders to get out of the building, the commission reported, thanks in large part to the information sent to the ground by police helicopters.

The police could not talk to the firefighters, however, because the two NY departments used different types of radios set on different frequencies. Giuliani offered the 9/11 commission a lame excuse about the limits of technology, which is absurd on its face. In fact, there had been many complaints about the radios before 9/11, and the Mayor had done nothing.

Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins wrote in The Village Voice (”Rudy’s Grand Illusion,” August 29, 1006):

Everyone agrees that a critical problem that day was that the police and fire departments could not communicate; that’s one of the reasons the lack of inter- operable radios became such a focus of fury. If the top brass of the two departments were at each other’s sides, they could have told each other whatever they learned from their separate radio systems. Many of the command and control issues that might have saved lives could clearly have been better dealt with had Giuliani stopped, taken a deep breath, and pushed Kerik and Ganci to fully and effectively join forces. Insisting that Kerik, McCarthy, Esposito, or Dunne stay at the incident post would have established a joint operation.

Wayne Barrett (author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 and Kevin Keating (director of the documentary “Giuliani Time” were interviewed by Amy Goodman recently; see the transcript here. Wayne Barrett said,

The firefighters were using the same radios that they used at the ’93 bombing, even though we found a report that was written in 1990 that said that they were already obsolete and that they were a danger to the life of firefighters. And the firefighters are still carrying those same radios eight years after the 1993 bombing.

Kevin Keating made another point:

Here, our own local channel in New York, New York 1, had the head of the police union, the head of the firefighters union. Both of them were condemning Giuliani. They don’t have to negotiate any more contracts with him. This is not union leaders blustering about a contract. They had to be embodying and representing the vast majority of their membership. They pointed to our book and said our book told the truth about how Giuliani responded. And they denounced him, not just for the lead-up to 9/11, but for what you raise, which is, we have two chapters in the book that point out Giuliani’s terrible responsibility for — look, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 you can understand the chaos. You can understand why firefighters and police officers are out there without respirators. They’re still trying to do rescues. But once it was clear that nobody could be rescued, why there were thousands of construction workers, as well as these first responders, working there without respirators and with no plan to get them respirators, and why they were exposed to these toxins and why we now have thousands of them who have respiratory and even cancer signs right now, severe respiratory difficulties, why that was allowed —

You know, Giuliani, we quote the head of — his own commissioner from the Department of Design and Construction, who ran the ground zero cleanup. He said he dealt with Giuliani every day, that Giuliani only asked him one question: how much debris did you remove yesterday? Are we on schedule? Are we ahead of schedule? All he cared about, even though the fires were still burning and spewing toxins in the air, all he cared about was the public relations. I mean, obviously, it’s five years later. Nothing’s been built there. What was the rush? The public relations question of making it look like they were efficiently cleaning up the site. And the consequences have been dire.

In fact, many of the 9/11 families were so outraged at the gentle treatment Giuliani received at the hands of the 9/11 Commission that hundreds of them refused to go to the final hearings as scheduled. Today, some are threatening to campaign hard against Giuliani’s presidential bid.

Before 9/11: The Real Rudy?

Bob Herbert should be persuaded to publish a collection of his many New York Times columns about Rudy Giuliani. There’s a wealth of juicy bits in them that people really ought to know before they consider making him President.

For example, if you want to know what America would look like under President Giuliani, this Bob Herbert column from March 2000 provides a clue:

The police intercepted the two teenaged boys who were running up Broadway, near 138th Street, and opened fire. This was on the night of Feb. 13, 1997. Robert Reynoso, 18, collapsed to the ground with a bullet in his chest. Juval Green, 17, fell with a leg wound.

The police would later say they thought the boys had a gun. There was no gun. And the boys, who survived the shooting, had not been involved in a crime. Nevertheless, the police arrested them. The charge — incredibly — was criminal possession of a firearm.

This is not a joke.

The Police Department tried to keep the shooting under wraps but I got a tip and wrote about it. When I visited Mr. Reynoso at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, he was handcuffed to his bed. Breathing and swallowing were so difficult for him, and he was in so much pain, that he would at times whisper to relatives, ‘’I just want to die.'’

This shooting typified the over-the-top, overly aggressive behavior that has become the hallmark of policing under Rudolph Giuliani. The cops were responding to a report of shots fired at Broadway and 135th Street, three blocks away. Not only were Mr. Reynoso and Mr. Green shot, but four other innocent people were arrested.

The police were shooting and rounding up people without the slightest clue as to what was happening. Afterward, the department tried to conceal the extent of the madness. Top officials would not even confirm the four additional arrests until I let them know I had obtained a copy of a confidential memo from a police captain, Robert T. Varieur, to the chief of the department, Louis Anemone.

The memo said: ‘’During the confrontation in front of 3395 Broadway, four (4) individuals who were initially thought to be involved in the incident at West 135th Street were taken into custody. Upon investigation it was determined that there was no evidence to link them to that incident and these arrests were subsequently voided. All four (4) individuals were visiting from Baltimore, Maryland.'’

Rudy’s just the guy you want at the head of the nation’s law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies, huh? Just wait; it gets better. Here’s another Bob Herbert column, from February 25, 1999:

It may be that Rudolph Giuliani never has a reflective moment. He just likes to push people around. He’s pretty indiscriminate about it. One day it’s an indisputably worthy target, like violent criminals, the next day it’s jaywalkers. One moment it’s the organized thugs at the Fulton Fish Market, the next it’s cab drivers and food vendors.

Mark Green, Carl McCall, New York magazine — they’ve all been targets. Mr. Giuliani shut down an entire neighborhood in Harlem and buzzed its residents with police helicopters because he didn’t like Khallid Muhammad. Solid citizens trying to exercise their right to protest peacefully have been fought at every conceivable turn. Many gave up, their protests succumbing to fear or exhaustion.

Civil rights? Civil liberties? Forget about it. When the Mayor gets it in his head to give somebody a hard time — frequently through his enforcers in the Police Department — the niceties of the First Amendment and other constitutional protections get very short shrift.

The latest targets are people suspected of driving drunk. The cops have been given the power to seize their vehicles on the spot. Why not? Why wait for a more sober mind — say, a judge — to assess the merits of the case? Why even bother with an annoyance like due process? Hizzoner — who would like to be known as His Majesty — makes the rules. And he says even if the drivers are acquitted they may not get their cars back.

Listen to him: ‘’Let’s say somebody is acquitted, and it’s one of those acquittals in which the person was guilty but there is just not quite enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. That might be a situation in which the car would still be forfeited.'’

Bring on the royal robes and the crown. And get rid of those pesky legislators and judges.

Rudy Giuliani is a man with many facades. The Rudy who spoke to TV cameras after 9/11 wasn’t a complete stranger, but over the years New Yorkers had seen a whole lot less of that Rudy than of the Rudy who usually hosted his weekly call-in radio show, “Live from City Hall.” Amy Goodnough described the mayor’s on-air persona for the New York Times (August 1, 1999):

When Tony from the Bronx called to question the Mayor’s handling of the Amadou Diallo shooting, Mr. Giuliani told him, ‘’Either you don’t read the newspapers carefully enough or you’re so prejudiced and biased that you block out the truth.'’ When Bill in Manhattan asked why it was illegal to hang a flag from city property, Mr. Giuliani shot back, ‘’Isn’t there something more important that you want to ask me?'’

And when David in Oceanside called last month to complain about the ban on pet ferrets, the Mayor of New York City leaned into the microphone on his desk and intoned, ‘’There is something deranged about you.'’

A three-minute diatribe against the ferret advocate ensued, with Mr. Giuliani saying things like, ‘’You should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist with this excessive concern — how you are devoting your life to weasels.'’

Not exactly the transcendent figure the nation thought it saw after 9/11.

Two of his most startling tirades recently came in response to calls from David Guthartz, the ferret advocate — whom Mr. Giuliani said has made repeated phone calls to his aides — and Margarita Rosario, whose son Anthony, an 18-year-old robbery suspect, was shot dead by two police detectives in 1995. Mrs. Rosario called last month, identifying herself only as Margarita from the Bronx, and said that she wanted to discuss Con Edison. But instead she started protesting the shooting, and Mr. Giuliani barely let her speak.

‘’Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up and the things that happened to him,'’ the Mayor told Mrs. Rosario, whose nephew, also a suspect, died in the shooting. ‘’Trying to displace the responsibility for the criminal acts of your son onto these police officers is really unfair.'’

Yep, that’s our Rudy.

If you want a a textbook case of how a public official should not handle a crisis, study Giuliani after the Amidou Diallo shooting. Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, was cornered in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building by four New York City plain clothes cops. The cops fired 41 shots at Diallo, killing him. Diallo was unarmed and not the suspect in any crime; he was just trying to go home.

After the shooting, Americ

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