Salam Pax is back!

And he has been since mid-January. Back to being a blogger from Baghdad, and back in full, with archives from the beginning in late 2002.

Who knew? In a bit of bloggy serendipity, I found out about the return in my first visit to Needlenose in almost a year.

I alternate between hope and dread in thinking about the results of the Iraqi provincial elections, and in thinking about Iraq generally. Being able to read Salam's reflections from on the scene makes the news more approachable. It also deepens the feeling of circles closing, new eras beginning -- but with a strong undercurrent of sadness at the unchangingness of so much.

But it wasn't about the oil. Not at all.

On blogs where the Bush administration's proposed "security framework agreement" with Iraq has been discussed, the question has come up of why the July 31st deadline. My answer has been electoral politics: An agreement that extends the U.S. military presence indefinitely is the "victory" and "success" that the regime would like to show for its policy, and that McCain can run on.

But if it's not politics, it's business, Bush's base. Today's New York Times business section brings the news that four oil majors are close to returning to Iraq, having almost wrapped up negotiations on no-bid foothold contracts:

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations. [emphasis added]

So there'll be plenty for President Obama's residual force to do:

Any Western oil official who comes to Iraq would require heavy security, exposing the companies to all the same logistical nightmares that have hampered previous attempts, often undertaken at huge cost, to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

And work in the deserts and swamps that contain much of Iraq’s oil reserves would be virtually impossible unless carried out solely by Iraqi subcontractors, who would likely be threatened by insurgents for cooperating with Western companies.

News from the Ministry of Love

Walter Pincus commits old-school journalism by actually watching what the ruling clique does rather than reporting what they say. In a story that the Washington Post editors place on A11 today, he examines the Iraq-related contracts now being put out and shows how they paint a picture of U.S. occupation stretching far into the future, carried out by contractors with a minimum of overt military presence.

The article deserves to be read in full. But this is the passage that chilled me most (my emphasis added):

Another contract noticed last week previews the opening, apparently in September, of a U.S.-run prison, now labeled a Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center, which is to be located at Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. The new contract calls for providing food for "up to 5,000 detainees" and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility. The contract is to run for one year, with an option year to follow.

The U.S. holds about 20,000 Iraqis at two facilities today, mostly in Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and the rest at Camp Cropper near Baghdad. Along with the facility at Camp Taji, which is expected to hold Iraqis detained in Baghdad, another new reconciliation center, mainly for Sunnis, is being built at Ramadi in Anbar province, where many of these detainees were captured.

In March, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, who runs the detainee program, told reporters that, on average. Iraqi detainees remain in a U.S. facility for 11 months.

But that might not be the case for the roughly 9,000 Iraqis whom he described as having "a very rigorous view of an ideology that we would broadly categorize as al-Qaeda." They are headed to the new reconciliation centers for what could be longer stays.

Did the editors remove scare quotes, or does Pincus assume that his ironic use of the new euphemism is clear?

International Women's Day

These women inspire me. If they haven't given up hope, I have no right to.

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Scores of women rallied outside a Baghdad hotel on Saturday demanding an end to violence and equal social status with men as part of the observations of International Women's Day.

"Stop neglecting women. Stop killing women. Stop creating widows," read a large banner that the women, from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, held at the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad's central Karada neighbourhood.

After the rally, the protesters joined a much larger group that included men and children at a hotel conference room to hear from various speakers.

One of the speakers was Nariman Mahmoud Othman, minister for women's rights, who led a delegation of women to the office of the head of Iraq's parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, with a list of issues concerning women's rights they wanted to discuss.

The list also called for more women to be appointed to positions of power, including ministries and embassies.

Another speaker was Maisoon Al-Damloji, a female member of parliament from the secular Iraqia party.

"We are united today in our desire to spread the peace in our country," she said. "We reject murder, torture and revenge."

Women in Iraq "suffered during Saddam's time and during the embargo, and now are suffering because of sectarian violence," she said.

Iraq's constitution reserves 25 percent of the country's 275 seats of parliament for women, though not all are currently filled because in some cases female candidates were unavailable.

Orbia Tawfiq, a professor at Baghdad's College of Arts, said "we demand that women be given their rights. They should not be oppressed and they should be treated like human beings. "Women must not be treated as commodities. They must be granted freedom in choosing their husbands and careers," she said.

Mohar Abdel Hamid, 38, said that the needs of widows like herself must be addressed. "I hope the government listens to us because women have always suffered in Iraq," she told AFP.

A recent report by US-based Women For Women International said the state of Iraqi women since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has become a "national crisis."

According to the report, released Thursday, 64 percent of the women surveyed said violence against them had increased since the war. "When asked why, respondents most commonly said that there is less respect for women's rights than before, that women are thought of as possessions and that the economy has gotten worse," it said. The report also found that 76 percent of the women interviewed said that girls in their families were forbidden from attending school.

No, it's not a grassroots event. My cynical self knows it's taking place with U.S. encouragement and under U.S. guard. The occupiers may even hope that any demonstration by women will be seen as a sign that "we're bringing freedom." Nobody's fooled, guys. The occupation has been a disaster for the Iraqi people in general, but especially for Iraqi women.

Update: 5:30 pm, 8 March - Speaking of which: Accounts of daily life for non-elite Iraqi women. Be warned, those of you with a heart; these stories will make you want to rip it out.

I'd advise my Iraqi sisters demanding more women be appointed to positions of power not to put too much stock in the results of that. Too few of the women in power here seem to want to end the occupation any time soon.

Yikes redux

Slow news day? The Washington Post runs a front-page story that Patrick Cockburn reported months ago, to very little response: the Mosul dam is in imminent danger of collapse, threatening the inundation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis immediately downstream.

No acknowledgement of Cockburn's report in the extensive Post story. A Lovely Promise's hat tip is cold comfort, no doubt.

Anyone have a lighter?

McClatchy: 'Even sprinkler systems fail at U.S. embassy in Baghdad'

Now would be the best time, before the building is put into "service" -- a giant, moated base full of spooks, inaccessible to Iraqis, performing none of the services of traditional embassies, requiring thousands of troops (or mercs) to defend.

Update: 7:40 pm, 9 Oct - Maybe Sec. Rice will end up wanting to torch it herself:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday he was unable to provide a revised date for the completion of the project [originally September 30]. "We don't have an answer," he told reporters, adding that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was pursuing the matter. "I can't tell you when it will open up."

But McCormack insisted the repairs would be made and that the contractor in question, First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Co., would be required to finish the embassy for the $592 million it agreed to build it for. At the same time, he noted that changes ordered to the original design would cost an additional $144 million. "We're not going to buy ourself a turkey here," he said. "We're going to make sure that we get what we paid for."

Update: 5:45 pm,, 30 Oct - David Phinney has been reporting for a long while on the almost unbelievable levels of corruption involved in the embassy scam: go read this round-up, and check in at his site regularly for more.

Mercenary update

The story burbles along. The front page of today's Washington Post puts an even larger hole into the Blackwater version of the Nisour Square massacre:

U.S. military reports from the scene of the Sept. 16 shooting incident involving the security firm Blackwater USA indicate that its guards opened fire without provocation and used excessive force against Iraqi civilians, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The reports came to light as an Interior Ministry official and five eyewitnesses described a second deadly shooting minutes after the incident in Nisoor Square. The same Blackwater security guards, after driving about 150 yards away from the square, fired into a crush of cars, killing one person and injuring two, the Iraqi official said.

The U.S. military reports appear to corroborate the Iraqi government's contention that Blackwater was at fault in the shooting incident in Nisoor Square, in which hospital records say at least 14 people were killed and 18 were wounded.

Casualties from the incident have quietly risen, I see. The CNN link in the update below says that Blackwater "kill[ed] as many as 20 [civilians] at two scenes in western Baghdad."

Update: 5:15 pm, 13 Oct - Blackwater cover story now swiss cheese:

Fresh accounts of the Blackwater shooting last month ... cast new doubt Friday on statements by Blackwater guards that they were responding to armed insurgents when Iraqi investigators say 17 Iraqis were killed at a Baghdad intersection.

The three witnesses, Kurds on a rooftop overlooking the scene, said they had observed no gunfire that could have provoked the shooting by Blackwater guards. American soldiers who arrived minutes later found shell casings from guns used normally by American contractors, as well as by the American military.

The Kurdish witnesses are important because they had the advantage of an unobstructed view and because, collectively, they observed the shooting at Nisour Square from start to finish, free from the terror and confusion that might have clouded accounts of witnesses at street level. Moreover, because they are pro-American, their accounts have a credibility not always extended to Iraqi Arabs, who have been more hostile to the American presence.

Their statements ...challenge a State Department account that a Blackwater vehicle had been disabled in the shooting and had to be towed away.

In other words, as I said at the time it was issued, the Blackwater/State Department version is a lie from start to finish.

There's a new wrinkle to an incident noted in my earlier post, the jailbreak of a former government minister convicted of embezzling $2.5 billion. Turns out that DynCorp also tried unsuccessfully to get him out before Blackwater succeeded. The perp's in Chicago. Who got him out of Iraq and into the U.S.?

Update: 6:45 pm, Oct 5 - An even more outrageous twist was revealed today in another episode covered in my first post. The drunken Blackwater employee who killed the Iraqi VP's bodyguard on Christmas eve was not only spirited back to the U.S. and faced no charges; within two months he was back working for another private military, Combat Support Associates, on a Defense Dept. contract in Kuwait:

Because the State Department and Blackwater kept the incident quiet and out of Moonen's personnel records, CSA was unaware of the December incident when it hired Moonen.

According to Moonen's personnel record, the U.S. Army tried to call him back to service in April 2007, but canceled the request when they were notified he was overseas. Moonen, 27, had served in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division from April 2002 to April 2005 before joining Blackwater.

Update: 7:45 pm, 9 Oct - Via WIIIAI, this gem from Moonen's lawyer: "Being drunk, yeah, maybe that’s the basis for being fired. But I don’t think it’s necessarily inappropriate for another defense contractor to hire somebody because they happen to be drunk once in their life with some serious consequences."

In other news, the House voted overwhelmingly yesterday (Oct. 4) to put mercenaries under the jurisdiction of the Military Extraterritorial Juridiction Act; the Senate is expected to follow. But given the attitude of the State Department and the Pentagon toward atrocities committed by troops and mercenaries in Iraq so far, and the difficulties for U.S. courts of collecting evidence and testimony about incidents taking place thousands of miles away, how likely are we to see any such cases? The House bill does provide some FBI investigative resources, a step forward.

Update: 10:00 pm, 9 Oct - An interesting Blackwater timeline (which could be usefully supplemented by mine, but who's counting? ;>)
Via Laura Rozen.

Update: 5:10 pm, 13 Oct - Anyone who doubts this is a full-scale private army should take in this Washington Post tour of Blackwater's training base in Moyock, NC. Erik Prince has Ollie North's haircut and attitude, and almost $15 billion in contracts in the last six years:

"If they don't like what we're doing then" -- he snapped his fingers -- "cut off that revenue steam right now."

From your lips to a new administration's ears, pal.

Permanent bases in Iraq

Here they come:

Iraq wants the United Nations Security Council to extend the mandate of the United States-led multinational force in Iraq only through the end of 2008, then replace it with a long-term bilateral security agreement, Foreign Ministry officials said Saturday.

Aides to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the mandate extension for the 160,000-strong force, scheduled to be discussed at the end of this year, would be the last. Iraq would then seek an agreement with the United States like the ones Washington has with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Egypt, they said.

That's more like it!

See updates at end, and helpful clarification from Thomas Nephew in comments.
New Edwards statement on Iraq:

Edwards' plan for Iraq calls for Congress to:

Cap Funds: Cap funding for the troops in Iraq at 100,000 troops to stop the surge and implement an immediate drawdown of 40-50,000 combat troops. Any troops beyond that level should be redeployed immediately.

Support the Troops: Prohibit funding to deploy any new troops to Iraq that do not meet real readiness standards and that have not been properly trained and equipped, so American tax dollars are used to train and equip our troops, instead of escalating the war.
Require Authorization: Make it clear that President Bush is conducting this war without authorization. The 2002 authorization did not give President Bush the power to use U.S. troops to police a civil war. President Bush exceeded his authority long ago, and now needs to end the war and ask Congress for new authority to manage the withdrawal of the U.S. military presence and to help Iraq achieve stability.

End the War: Require a complete withdrawal of combat troops in Iraq in 12 to 18 months without leaving behind any permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. [emphasis added]

Whew; he's ditched the "residual force" b.s., and not a moment too soon. Primary campaigns are truly pointless, massive wastes of money and effort if there's no significant difference among major candidates. This is a healthy step forward. I'd also expect it to help Edwards in Iowa.

Yes, yes, I'm too easily sucked back in. But this does put some much-needed pressure on Congress. Dodd endorses the same plan, blunting the "easy for you to say" retorts from Clinton and Obama supporters who want to rationalize their candidates' passivity.

Update: 4 Sept, 3:35 pm - Hm. The text at the Edwards site linked above has changed since I posted; my excerpt was cut and pasted from the text then.

Update 2: 8 Sept, 6:00 pm - Good for Bill Richardson for laying out his proposal for getting out of Iraq quickly and challenging the other candidates to answer these questions: How many troops would you leave in Iraq? For how long? To do what, exactly? I look forward to hearing Edwards' answer.

Yikes.

Situation in Iraq not bleak or scary enough for you? Try this from Patrick Cockburn:

[T]he wall of a dam holding back the Tigris river north of Mosul city is in danger of imminent collapse.

If it should fail,

a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Experts say the flood waters could destroy 70 per cent of Mosul and inflict heavy damage 190 miles downstream along the Tigris. ... Iraq, the site of the biblical flood,[*] is very vulnerable to inundation because it is very flat south of the Kurdish mountains. ...
[T]he impact of the flood would be felt all along the Tigris river valley. This would mean heavy damage to cities such as Tikrit and Samarra and the floods could reach as far as Baghdad, home to six million people, though by then the force of the floodwaters should have dissipated.

Given that the Iraqi government has only intermittent control of this area north of the capital, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, it is unlikely it could undertake effective measures to save lives if a flood occurred.

Via War in Context

* Have to take issue with this point: I don't believe there's a scientific consensus on the location of "the" Biblical flood.

And now for something completely different

An all-Arab Asian Cup final, Iraq v. Saudia Arabia, coming up in Jakarta this Sunday.

Iraq made it to the final for the first time ever in a shootout, which can be seen here. Brought tears to my eyes.

Celebrations all over the country. Basra and Falluja below.




Inevitably, something completely the same, two car bombs, ruined the celebration in Baghdad.

Still, a moment of united joy and pride is better than no such moment. Best wishes for the final, Team Iraq.

Update: 5:00 pm 28 July - Tony Karon is the only other English-language blogger who appears to have been moved to post about this. Heady company!

Update 2: 12:15 pm 29 July - Iraq wins the Cup! With a header. May the fans be allowed to celebrate in peace for at least today.

Update 3: 1:10 pm 29 July - Enjoyable live-blog at a NY Times soccer site; a later post links to video of the winning goal and players' celebration. Hat tip to Paul Woodward's invaluable War in Context.

Update 4: 5:15 pm 31 July - Bloom officially off rose: Kurdish cops arrest fifty young people for having waved the Iraqi national flag in celebration. Oh, it's a festival of democracy up there in the "autonomous region of Kurdistan".

Riverbend going into exile

Ever since reading the long-ago post in which she recounted her brief, painful return to her former workplace after the U.S. occupied Baghdad, I've felt that this day would come. She will join millions of her compatriots in an enormous, grieving diaspora. The flight of Iraqi refugees has created a massive and still-growing humanitarian crisis, about which our government is doing next to nothing.

[Riverbend via WIIIAI.]

Forty years ago today

Martin Luther King, Jr. Preach, brother.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
...

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

Mr. Big takes a vacation

What a coincidence: A day after Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq and head of the party governing Kurdistan, is flown to a hospital in Jordan, Iraq and Turkey agree to postpone the referendum on the status of Kirkuk.

Originally mandated by the 2005 constitution to take place by the end of this year, the referendum has the potential to feed the violence in and around Kirkuk. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Ba'ath government drove out Kurds there and moved in Iraqi Arabs; after the U.S. invasion, Kurds moved back in large numbers, amid attacks on Arabs. In the last year, in anticipation of the referendum, Kurds have intensified their re-population of the city, but attacks and bombings against them have also risen. Turkmens have also suffered attacks; they are a small but significant percentage of the population in Kirkuk.

Now the referendum might not take place for two years. This news comes on the heels of reports that the Kurdish parties have signed off on the new oil law that hands Iraq's reserves over to the oil majors on a platter. The Kurds were the last obstacle; the Iraqi cabinet approved the law yesterday. Did I mention that most of the oil in northern Iraq is near Kirkuk?

A recent profile of Talabani by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker, 'Mr. Big' [apparently not online], begins by describing how he goes into seclusion during crises. This flight to Jordan sounds like more of the same, as both the approval of the oil law and the postponement of the Kirkuk referendum are serious concessions/defeats for the Kurds.

The horror, the horror

Illegal hockey sticks have been a hot topic in the Lovely Promise household this winter. In particular, Ilya Kovalchuk's too-curvy lumber has caused some low moments for our Atlanta Thrashers. Imagine how startled I was by this slice-of-life detail from Orville Schell, writing about entering the siege world that is Iraq:

At the departure gate [of the Amman airport], a crimson placard warns against carrying FORBIDDEN ITEMS: "Gun Powder, Golf Clubs, Hand Grenades, Ice Axes, Cattle Prods, Hocket Sticks [sic], Meat Cleavers and Big Guns"

No hockey sticks? Huh. Well, I hear it's pretty hard to get ice time, anyway.

Extending the middle finger

More and more it seems to me the Shia majority bloc in Iraq is sending the U.S. occupiers signals of fed-up-ness. A day after Condoleeza Rice and Jack Straw flew in to scold Jaafari in person, talks on forming a government broke off. Pro-Jaafari demonstrations took place in Sadr City. And, most significantly (to me, at least), Saddam was charged with genocide for the 1988 Anfal campaign in which his government gassed the Kurds in retaliation for an uprising.

The subtext of the new charges is that the U.S. government backed Saddam during that period, supplying him with agricultural credits, chemical feedstocks, intelligence, and weapons. U.S. pressure restricted the initial trial to much older offenses exactly because focusing on the anti-Kurdish campaign would put the spotlight on the Reagan administration's backing in that era. The Anfal charges serve at least two purposes for the Shia bloc: a warning to the Bush administration, and an effort to disarm the Kurds, who have been the most vocal of the anti-Jaafari factions. (Kurds may not be terribly impressed.)

Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Blair, and Straw behave as if they were dealing with children. But colonialist mentality dies hard. Their humiliation at the hands of intransigent Shiites may simply feed a determination to attack Iran.

Bitter? Me?

Kevin Drum responding positively to Sen. Feingold's proposal for withdrawal from Iraq: An open-ended commitment in Iraq helps to fuel their civil war, not end it, and it's time to acknowledge this.

But when opponents of the war and occupation were saying this a year ago, it was apparently not yet time. Not because we were wrong, but because all but a few Democrats had made a calculated decision to follow rather than lead.

When, in early 2005, Democrats refused to take a position, planning to "make Bush own the war" without calling for withdrawal -- the only meaningful alternative to the Bush policy -- it struck me as political in the worst sense. Politicians who wanted to avoid the risk of 'soft-on-security' smears were counting on the deaths of Americans to do their political work for them. And they obliged: nearly 900 were killed and more than 2600 wounded seriously enough not to return to duty in the intervening year. (Not to mention, as those same politicians rarely do, the literally uncounted Iraqis killed by U.S. troops during the same period.)

One excuse was that leaving would ignite a civil war. Those of us who pointed out that a civil war was already underway with U.S. troops backing two of the three sides, and that the troops not only were doing nothing to stop it but probably could not do so, were simply met with fingers in ears.

Pretending (or at best wishfully thinking) right along with Bush that some kind of 'success' or 'victory' could be had was another tack. That might have sounded good on the op-ed pages and Sunday talk shows, but how could anyone seriously have believed it? And, from a purely political point of view, why would anyone vote for candidates who offered the same endless stay-the-course as incumbent Republicans?

Now that Bush and war approval are in the thirties, now that it's clear the troops can do nothing to stop civil war (and may easily make it worse; see Juan Cole today), now that approved moderates like Kevin say it's time, using the same arguments opponents of the war and occupation were making a year ago, now it's time.

Incredibly enough, many in the party are still unwilling to back Feingold's call for withdrawal, even now that the president has said that troops will be there for the duration of his term, even when they admit privately that withdrawal is the right policy. If it is, then stand up and and fight for it.

I can get beyond my bitterness, and accept that this is just how politics works. But I have a hell of a time saying honestly to the families of those 3500 men and women that they should have any confidence in politicians of either party, including mine.

Through the prism of Viet Nam

That's how someone of my age sees any U.S.-initiated war.

One of the sources of my deep uneasiness about backing James Webb for Senate is that he stands on the other side of the great gulf in our generation and our party over Viet Nam. Despite Webb's sound and early opposition to the war on Iraq, he makes no connection between it and the Viet Nam war. Far from acknowledging that war as a fundamentally doomed assault based on lies, Webb was actually a proponent of the late 1970s "stabbed in the back" Viet Nam narrative that poisons our politics to this day.

In contrast, William Odom's assessment seems sane and accurate. In Iraq Through the Prism of Vietnam he outlines the three phases of the earlier war and their failures:

Phase One...began with hesitation and a gross misreading of American strategic interests (the “containment of China”). It concluded with the U.S. use of phony intelligence that made it seem that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf without provocation.
...
Phase Two...was marked by a refusal to reconsider the war’s strategic rationale. Rather, debate focused only on tactical issues as the war went sour.
...
Phase Three...was marked by “Vietnamization” and “make-believe diplomacy” in Paris, policies still ignoring the strategic realities at the war’s beginning. ... The key problem in South Vietnam had always been achieving a political consolidation among anti-Viet Cong elites. It was not building effective military and police forces.

Odom goes on to marshal persuasive parallels with the Iraq war, and puts us at late stage two/early stage three. Given how much more quickly we're moving through the stages, unless we withdraw soon, it may not be much longer before the helicopters start to lift off.