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THE WAR NOBODY WON
Part 1: Chaos,
crime and incredulity
By Henry C K
Liu
Very few serious observers in the Middle
East, if any, expect the United States to achieve its
declared aims of establishing a democratic government in
Iraq. Some are openly skeptical of US intent, while
others give the US the benefit of the doubt, but
consider its aim a hopeless fantasy.
Three days
after US invasion forces officially announced the fall
of the Iraqi government and proclaimed military control
of the city of Baghdad, they allowed, if not encouraged,
lawlessness to destroy a cradle of civilization on a
scale thousands of times worse than that which the US
accused the Saddam Hussein government of having done to
the Iraqi nation and its people. The war itself has made
a reality of harsh misery out of the abstract discontent
of political oppression, the liberation from which had
been the pretext for the war. Instead of saving the
Iraqi people from alleged oppression, the war has
brought them undeniable destruction.
Liberation
has come in the form of senseless killing, looting and
burning. In the name of defending freedom, the United
States has unilaterally denied the people of Iraq their
freedom to live a normal life for years to come. The war
has robbed the Iraqi people of freedom from lawlessness,
freedom to preserve and enjoy their historical and
cultural treasures, and freedom from foreign occupation.
The wartime suffering of millions has been
aggravated by the postwar loss of even the essentials of
life, such as clean water, electricity, medicine, food
and personal safety. The Geneva Convention regarding
responsibility of occupation powers toward the
population in occupied territory has been ignored,
resulting in a breakdown of security, anarchy,
widespread looting and arson of public property and the
proliferation of violent acts of revenge and lawless of
settling personal and tribal scores.
US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld justified this crime of
barbarism dismissively by telling the press that
"democracy is untidy" and that "freedom includes freedom
to commit crimes". While it may be debatable whether the
definition of war crimes should include the killing of
civilians by uniformed US soldiers as a standard tactic
against urban guerrillas, there is no need to debate
that peace crimes against civilization and humanity have
become part of the collateral damage of the liberation
imposed by US armed occupation of Iraq.
Overwhelming force to shock and awe had been
available to military plans with ample reserve. But the
world's sole superpower pleads powerlessness to protect
civilians and national properties and treasures under
its coercive military control. Despite total US control
of Iraqi airspace, there is no around-the-clock airlift
of humanitarian supplies as in the Berlin blockade,
notwithstanding that the toppling of Saddam's statue in
central Baghdad by a handful was eagerly compared with
the fall of the Berlin Wall by the US media. Apparently,
Arabs don't need food and water as much as Europeans do.
The US military can summon hundred of cruise missiles
and precision bombs to target Saddam on a few minutes'
notice, yet this superpower that spends more on its
military than all the world's other nations combined
cannot provide law and order and basic sustenance for
the people it has just conquered. This is a superpower
only of destruction, and a paper tiger when it comes to
humanitarian rescue.
Presidential palaces were
precision-bombed as war targets despite the fact that
common sense would surmise that Saddam would be stupid
to stay in any of them once hostilities had begun.
Television images of US marines trashing the palaces and
the subsequent looting by lawless mobs waving to
approving GIs were supplemented by embedded media
commentary about popular rejoicing over the fall of
tyranny. Yet these palaces were built with the resources
of the Iraqi people, thus they belong to the people and
should be returned to the Iraqi people for their popular
enjoyment, rather than trashed by an invading horde.
These palaces, albeit not examples of good taste, are
nevertheless national assets that could have been turned
into a Palace for Youth, Palace for Women, Palace of
Science, Palace of Islam, Palace of Freedom, etc.
Instead, they are now useless rubble that will
constitute heavy added cleanup burdens for the
war-battered people of Iraq.
The US Marine Corps
in the past has earned well-deserved respect in the
journals of military valor. In Iraq, its political
officers failed to protect the honor of this once fine
and proud military organization.
If this war is
about spreading US values, it has scored only defeat by
spreading barbarism. The destruction of the Iraqi
network of presidential compounds, government and
cultural institutions and facilities bring to mind the
19th-century burning and looting of the Summer Palace in
Peking by barbaric Western imperialist plunderers.
Contrast that with the flawless protection of
oilfields and the commercial records of the Ministry of
Petroleum while truly priceless artifacts from the dawn
of civilization were looted, some say by foreign
professional thieves, with the theft masked by
subsequent destruction from looting local mobs hailed as
joyful expression of freedom from oppression. So much
for the priorities of US freedom and values.
For
weeks the world has been talking about the war on Iraq.
But in reality, there was no war. There was no formal
declaration of war by the invader and there was no
formal surrender by a vanquished government. There was a
largely unopposed foreign invasion preceded by massive
precision hits from thousands of cruise missiles
launched from distant warships and bombs dropped from
high-altitude planes from distant carriers and air
bases. Tens of thousands of precision cruise missiles
and bunker-busting bombs added up to a slaughter by
remote control. But one side of the conflict did not
fight, for reasons that have yet to become clear. There
were some minor skirmishes and paramilitary resistance
in the initial phase in the south. But there was no war
in the sense of major force-on-force battles and there
was no decisive Battle of Baghdad.
Peter Maass
wrote in the April 20 New York Times Magazine: "To get
to Baghdad, the marines of the 3rd Battalion fought the
old-fashioned way, by shooting as many of the enemy as
they could. The victims weren't all soldiers." The enemy
was Iraqi civilians whom the US had come to liberate.
Maass reported that after a shooting spree that killed a
dozen civilians, the marine squad leader shouted: "My
men showed no mercy. Outstanding."
The Iraqi
government was not vanquished; it merely vanished. After
US forces took control of the capital, there was
widespread looting that finally stopped only because
there was nothing else left to loot, not because of
orderly US postwar planning.
Most of the world's
professional military experts had been misled about the
prospect of urban warfare inside Baghdad, while the US
high command apparently knew it was going to be a
cakewalk into Baghdad. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney knew something that even uniformed officers in
the field did not know, which was that no Iraqi
resistance was going to materialize.
Was all the
pre-invasion bombing merely a fireworks overture to
augment the disinformation that the Iraqi military could
be expected to be a lethal force of tenacious
resistance? The invasion of an enemy capital defended by
hundreds of thousands of elite troops was deftly
accomplished by a small, fast-moving, light forward
force. Is Cheney a military genius, or did he know
something the rest of the world did not know when he
confidently predicted that the "war" would be over in a
matter of weeks?
The "victory" appeared to be
less than honorable, achieved mainly through treason on
the part of the enemy high command induced by bribes.
The Battle of Baghdad was no Iwo Jima or Stalingrad. It
appeared that the massive precision bombing did not
destroy the Iraqi army as much as treason facilitated
through the uninterrupted linkage between the Iraqi high
command and its former handlers in the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon Special
Section. If these conspiracy theories are valid, then
the question arises whether the intensive bombings of
Baghdad and other cities, with tragic collateral damage
of sizable civilian casualty, were militarily necessary,
and whether the chaos after the fall of Baghdad was part
of the war plan.
With the military phase of the
war in Iraq drawing to a close by the third week of
conflict, General Tommy Franks, commander of the US
forces, laid out in a CNN interview a timetable that
could see his troops in Iraq for another year. "The
Iraqi army has been destroyed. There's no regime command
and control in existence right now, but we know there
are pockets of anything from paramilitaries to death
squads," he said. But the winding-up of the military
campaign does not signal a quick US exit from Iraq. "We
have simply bypassed villages and towns, and we will go
to every single one of them to be clear that we don't
have some last small stronghold," Franks said. He added
that if the country remained fractious, the number of US
troops required to stay on for a lengthy period would be
significant.
Le Monde, the French daily,
reported that Maher Sufyan, commander of the Republican
Guard, reached an agreement to cease resistance in
exchange for money and postwar protection for himself
and his top officers. Maher Sufyan is not included in
the infamous "deck of cards" identifying the most wanted
officials in the Saddam Hussein government. Iraq's
information minister, Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf, its
foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and the minister of
health, Oumid Medhat Mubarak, are also not included on
the list. Vladimir Titirenko, the Russian ambassador to
Iraq, told NTV upon returning to Moscow: "I am confident
that the Iraqi generals entered into secret deals with
the Americans to refrain from resistance in exchange for
sparing their lives."
The question then: Is the
"victorious" Iraqi war plan based on treason applicable
to other wars, such as the pending wars on Syria and
Iran? Or have future targets of US preemptive invasion
learned to adopt new strategies of asymmetrical and
unconventional warfare of counter-preemption?
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman defines
Saddamism as an entrenched Arab mindset, born of years
of colonialism and humiliation that insists that
upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the
West is more important than freedom, democracy and
modernization. And he identifies Saddamism as the real
enemy of the United States.
Saddamism will now
form the new basis of pan-Arabism. No one knows for
certain why Saddam did not put up a fight, as expected
by everyone except Rumsfeld, Cheney and Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Perhaps this is Saddam's new
"unconventional" tactic, to turn the fight into a
protracted guerrilla struggle, perhaps not. Either
Saddam is dead or he merely failed to answer the call of
history. Perhaps he was betrayed by the Republican Guard
commanders. But if he did not intend to fight, he should
have given up before the hostilities began. The entire
Arab world is puzzled by his behavior to date and
disappointed by the turn of military events in Iraq.
Whatever actually happened, there was no
superpower victory. It was a fixed match in a superbowl
in which one opponent took a fall. Or the real war has
yet to start with a vanished opponent that has merged
into the general population to fight a protracted
unconventional war. Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi
National Congress favored by the US Defense Department
for a key role in postwar Iraq, told BBC radio on Monday
that his group was tracking Saddam Hussein, who remains
in Iraq and is moving around the country.
Either
way, the potential of Saddamism is very much alive. Many
in the Arab world insist that those Iraqis recorded by
US television stamping and spitting on the fallen statue
of Saddam Hussein were Kurds, not Arabs, or unprincipled
paid hooligans, not freedom fighters. "Millions loved
Saddam" was a common comment throughout the Arab world,
and widely reported in the Arab press.
A
Brookings Institution study by Christine Moss Helms in
1984 (before the official US demonization of Saddam) did
not contain one single word about the Saddam regime
torturing anyone. It characterized the Iraqi Ba'ath
Party as a political organization of clandestinity and
ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists might deviate from strict
interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab unity,
freedom from foreign domination and tribal socialism,
yet Ba'athist doctrine generally set guidelines for
Iraqi policy formulation, such as geopolitical
non-alignment, pan-Arabism and accommodation with
diverse religious and ethnic groups, throughout its
history. Leadership was not hereditary, setting it apart
from other Arab regimes. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as
distinct from Ba'athism in the Arab world in general,
were directed toward specific Iraqi needs and problems,
keeping Iraq from extreme pan-Arabism.
Since the
Iraqi Ba'athists took control of the country in 1968,
the leader had to deal with practical problems of
governance of a less-developed country, by devoting
considerable resources to internal development,
irrigation projects, upgrading of agriculture,
industrialization, education and freedom for women. It
also had to deal with problems facing any oil-producing
nation: economic imperialism, globalized finance and US
dollar hegemony.
Resistance by Arabs to foreign
intervention and influence generally takes two forms
that share diagnosis of the problem but are
diametrically opposed in proposed solutions. The first
is that Islam provides the raison d'etre for
unity, despite a variety of beliefs such as Islamic
modernism, reformism, conservatism and fundamentalism.
Postmodernist foreign interference in the Muslim world
poses increased and profound consequences that push many
Islamic movements to adopt political goals, with a
return to perceived purity of Islamic values.
The second response is Arab nationalism. While
recognizing the importance of Islam, Arab nationalists
feel that it, as an ideology, does not fully encompass
the modern needs of the Middle East. The reasons are
threefold: 1) the region includes non-Arabs and
non-Muslims, 2) there are differences of interpretation
within Islam and 3) Islamic fundamentalism cannot
effectively adapt to changes facing the region. Arab
nationalists are committed to modernization through
secularization that would also facilitate pan-Arab
unity. Nasirism has been generally accepted as the main
representation of Arab nationalism. In contrast to
Nasirism, as espoused in Egypt, which relied more on
personality cult, Ba'athists attained a high level of
organization. Although the leader is also inescapably
tied to supremacy in the tradition of tribal culture,
the Ba'ath Party is designed to function in the event of
the leader's sudden death or ouster.
The
Brookings study warned that it would be erroneous to
assume that all non-Ba'athists opposed the Ba'athist
central government, despite the radical and ruthless
image with which the Ba'ath Party had been portrayed in
the West and by opposition groups in exile. Many Iraqis
benefited from the Ba'ath economic and social policies
during the 1970s and valued the stability of continuous
government since 1968. Many older Iraqis who were not
Ba'athists were proud that their children were party
members. And party membership did not particularly
enhance advancement in the general economy outside of
government. One of the Ba'ath Party's goals was to
broaden the base of support from Iraq's heterogeneous
society. The party launched a Literacy Campaign to
reduce the 44 percent illiteracy rate to 20 percent. The
party emphasized a policy that the wealth of the nation
is in its youth and promoted education for women. The
Agrarian Reform Law of 1970 gave women the right to own
land on an equal basis as men, and equal wages for
female farm-cooperative workers. Women were granted
voting rights, and benefited from marriage reform. It
was not until 1991, at the start of the first Gulf War,
that US demonization of Saddam began in earnest.
Despite US media spin about pent-up Iraqi hatred
for Saddam, looting is not political expression. It is
mere US propaganda that the looting encouraged by the US
military all over Iraq was the joyous expression of an
oppressed people suddenly liberated. The New York Times
reported isolated incidents of looting by some firemen
in the collapsed World Trade Center towers in New York.
Surely, New York firemen as a group are patriotic and
honorable public servants. If massive bombing were to
hit New York, with the sudden disappearance of the
police force, and the absence of the National Guard,
with indifferent foreign troops waving criminals on,
there would also be widespread looting in New York.
Rumsfeld acknowledged as much in his news conference by
pointing out that riots also happened in US cities even
when the government had not collapsed.
Political
freedom is not about senseless destruction. The lootings
of museums and libraries are crimes against
civilization. If only US marines had also failed to
protect the Ministry of Petroleum and the oilfields the
way they failed to protect these cultural institutions
that belong to the all humanity, the excuse of shortage
of troops would be more credible. Rumsfeld's lame excuse
of "catastrophic success" in war would be more credible
if he had not been so confident, in defiance of
common-sense expectation, that the military operation
would be over within weeks, a confidence that even his
own field commanders challenged as unfounded. A war plan
that had taken into account all unforeseen
contingencies, that had miraculously predicted that the
war would end within weeks, had been caught off guard by
"catastrophic success"? It is a no-win argument. You
cannot have it both ways. Either unpreparedness for
success is a poor excuse or predictive confidence in
success has been a bluff.
Next: The new Agincourt
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
(©2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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