WASHINGTON -
The coalition of Bush administration hawks that was
empowered by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
on New York and the Pentagon agreed on three main
strategic objectives. First, the neo-conservatives and
Christian Right wanted to shift the balance of power
decisively in the Middle East in favor of Israel, so
that it could in effect impose peace terms on the
Palestinians and Syria and anyone else who resisted US
regional hegemony or Israel's legitimacy and territorial
claims.
Second, the more globally oriented
strategists - sometimes called "assertive nationalists"
or Machtpolitikers - wanted to show "rogue states",
particularly those with weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), such as North Korea, that the United States could
and, more important, would take preemptive military
action either to change their regimes or crush them. And
third, they also wanted to demonstrate to any possible
future rival powers that Washington could, and would,
intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf region to deny
them essential energy supplies as a way of reminding
nations of the indispensability of friendly ties with
the United States.
All three objectives, it was
swiftly agreed by the ascendant hawks, could be achieved
by invading and then "transforming" Iraq into a
pro-Western, if not democratic, Arab state.
Moreover, the likely acquisition of more or less
permanent access to military bases in Iraq that would
fit into a larger, global network of scores of military
facilities stretching from East Asia through Central
Asia, and from Arabia and the Caucasus through the
Mediterranean and the Horn all the way to West Africa,
would make it even clearer to all that breaking "Pax
Americana" would risk economic or military ruin.
But to achieve these objectives, the US not only
had to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power,
it also had to occupy the country, and occupy it in a
way that would not require many US soldiers, who would
be deployed elsewhere along the globe-straddling "arc of
crisis" to guard the peace.
"The global strategy
- all their assumptions - rested on the ability of US
forces to move fast, win quickly with overwhelming
force, and move out," according to one official. "Any
prolonged conflict or occupation - like what we see in
Iraq - threatened the whole structure because we don't
have that many forces."
For reasons that are
likely to be debated by historians, political
scientists, and possibly psychiatrists for decades, the
hawks - most of them based in the offices of Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney,
but probably President George W Bush as well - firmly
believed that Iraqis would either be so grateful for
their "liberation" from the depredations of Saddam or so
awed by the show of US military power that they would
support, or at least not actively oppose, a postwar
occupation. Hence they planned to draw down their troops
quickly - from the 160,000 who invaded Iraq to just
about half that number by the invasion's first
anniversary, and to just 30,000 or so by the end of
2004.
The hawks mocked predictions by military
officers with experience in peace operations, who warned
they would need at least 200,000 troops for at least two
years to stabilize Iraq, and by experienced intelligence
officers and diplomats, who warned that US forces would
not be considered "liberators" by important sectors of
the Iraqi population.
Now, 14 months later,
those warnings have proved prescient, and the confident
predictions of the hawks have proved totally unfounded.
What is most remarkable is that they never approved
contingency plans and are now reacting to the situation
in the most ad hoc and incoherent manner imaginable.
Aside from the rising death tolls in clashes
between US forces and Iraqi insurgents, the zigzags over
policy on "de-Ba'athification" (or working with former
members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party) and other priority
issues, Bush's steadily falling approval ratings and the
increasingly sharp exchanges between impatient lawmakers
in Congress and responsible administration officials,
the failure of the hawks' assumptions is most evident in
the numbers of US troops in Iraq.
Under the
original plan, US troop strength should be down below
100,000 at this point in the occupation. But as is well
known, the head of US military operations for the
Central Command, General John Abizaid, has insisted on
retaining at least 136,000 troops on the ground through
this year if not the next, too. And that means all those
soldiers who were supposed to deploy elsewhere to
enforce "Pax Americana" are now stuck in Iraq.
"The greatest limiting factor on the empire
right now is manpower," said Chalmers Johnson, an Asia
specialist at the University of California at San Diego.
"They are running out of it."
Indeed, the stress
on the US Army - and, as significant, on the hawks'
imperial strategy - has become even more apparent this
week.
Paul Sperry of the Hoover Institution says
the Pentagon has just launched a massive nationwide
call-up of former service members - a total of 118,000
Individual Ready Reserves (IRR) - who have not fully
completed their eight-year contractual obligation to the
army. These people, who have all but formally signed
their release papers, are now being ordered to report to
their Army National Guard or Army Reserve units for
possible activation "in support of missions in Iraq,
Afghanistan and other locations".
News of the
IRR activation coincided with Rumsfeld's order to send
3,600 soldiers from the army's 2nd Infantry Division
based near the Demilitarized Zone across from North
Korea, another "rogue state" with WMD, to Iraq. The
troops constitute 10 percent of US forces in South Korea
and one-half of combat-ready ground troops there.
While the Pentagon insisted the shift will not
affect Washington's ability to defend South Korea, the
significance of removing troops confronting North Korea
was missed by few here. As one unnamed administration
official told the Nelson Report, a private newsletter,
"We are pulling out our conventional deterrent force in
the midst of a self-declared nuclear crisis with North
Korea!"
And while Rumsfeld has made no secret of
wanting to move those troops from their position as a
"tripwire", Pentagon plans called for them to move to
the southern part of the peninsula, not to leave the
region altogether.
"The administration has come
to recognize that relying on reserves and the national
guard are not sufficient for the nature of the
occupation they're involved in, and the only ones that
are available are in Asia," noted John Gershman, an Asia
analyst at New York University, who added that the move
suggests to Pyongyang that Washington "is not going to
launch a strike against it any time soon".
"Mobilizing the passive reserves [IRR] is
probably the last thing they can do before either
cutting back on what they're doing, or go to the
military draft, or go hire foreigners, but the country
can't really afford that," said Johnson, whose 2003 book
Sorrows of Empire deals with US military forces
overseas.
So far, however, the Bush
administration - presumably for political reasons - has
rejected all three, which is why the imperial strategy
is failing.
