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The metrics of
losing
By Tom Engelhardt
On March 19, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld discussed the "metrics" of measuring
success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National
Public Radio's Morning Edition. Here is part of
that interview:
NPR: I want to start, Mr
Secretary, with something you said recently. You
were at a meeting with troops, taking questions
from troops. You talked about measuring progress
in Iraq. Metrics, as you called them, that were
important to you. And you said what you measure
improves. How are some ways that you are
measuring progress in defeating insurgents in
Iraq?
Rumsfeld: Well, we've got
literally dozens of ways we do it. We have a
room here, the Iraq Room, where we track a whole
series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and
some of them are outputs, results, and obviously
the inputs are easier to do and less important,
and the outputs are vastly more important and
more difficult to do. We track, for example, the
numbers of attacks by area. We track the types
of attacks by area. And what we're seeing, for
example, and one metric is presented graphically
and it shows that we had spiked up during the
sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked
up again during the election, and are now back
down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are
considerably lower ...
We track a number
of reports of intimidation, attempts at
intimidation or assassination of government
officials, for example. We track the extent to
which people are supplying intelligence to our
people so that they can go in and actually track
down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to
desegregate the people we've captured and look
at what they are. Are they foreign fighters,
jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid
money to go do something like that? Are they
former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try
to keep track of what those numbers are in terms
of detainees and people that are processed in
that way ... No one number is determinative, and
the answer is no. We probably look at 50, 60, 70
different types of metrics, and come away with
them with an impression. It's impressionistic
more than determinative. On May 9,
New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt wrote a (way)
inside-the-paper Iraq update, Rebels Said to Have
Pool of Bomb-Rigged Cars, filled with quotes from
a dozen unnamed "senior" American military
officers as well as unnamed intelligence
officials. A relatively short piece, it was long
on speculation and generally upbeat prediction,
and so typical of that moment, only two weeks old
and now, seemingly, long gone. The car bombings in
Baghdad were just then spiking, causing carnage,
and yet "these officers" suggested that this was
"possibly a last-ditch effort", that such attacks
were aimed at "bolstering insurgent moral that
flagged after the January 30 elections". Brigadier
General John DeFreitas III, the senior military
intelligence officer in Iraq (and a rare named
source in the piece), commented, "When he cranks
up the propaganda campaign it means we've probably
hurt him."
"One senior officer" called the
violence "a predictable attempt by the enemy to
show that they are still a factor, still relevant
and still capable", and complained that the
bombings "grabbed the headlines [and] drowned out
the good news". Another officer, "a general with
extensive command experience in Iraq", wondered
whether the attacks were "an indicator of
insurgent desperation?" The article noted that,
despite the recent car bomb assaults, attacks
"against allied forces" stood at only half those
before the January 30 elections and, after
registering some caveats about the situation,
ended with this anodyne but somewhat upbeat
prediction, "Top commanders said they expected
spikes and lulls in the violence through at least
early next year."
The Times was hardly
alone in this. On April 26, for instance,
Bloomberg news service quoted chairman of the
Joint Chiefs Richard Myers claiming that, despite
an upsurge in attacks, we were "winning" the war
and that the "quality and impact of those attacks
is uneven, indicating an overall weakening of
insurgents as Iraqi security forces improve". He
also said, "There is no shadow of doubt in my
mind, that by the end of the year, we would have
achieved a lot, and probably the back of the
insurgency has already been broken." That
improvement, he predicted, would "speed the
timetable for reducing US Army soldiers and
Marines in Iraq".
Such articles and
predictions were perhaps the last gasp not of the
insurgency but of a drumbeat of positive spin put
on the Iraqi situation by top military men (who
certainly knew better) and George W Bush
administration officials - all of it aimed at
bolstering support on the home front. This spike
in positive speculation followed a series of March
and April reports in which named and unnamed
military officers spoke optimistically of the
possibility of reducing American forces in Iraq
significantly in 2006. For instance, General
Richard A Cody, the army vice chief of staff, on
returning from an inspection tour of Iraq, claimed
somewhat vaguely that troop levels would "probably
decline in early 2006", and under a cloak of
anonymity "senior military officials" rushed to
add that "American troop levels could drop to
around 105,000 by early next year from 150,000
now".
In this the Bush administration was
backed up by allies. In mid-April, British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw chimed in, predicting steady
withdrawals starting in 2006, and on May 1, Iraq's
national security adviser predicted a large-scale
pullout by the middle of next year.
Admittedly, such relatively modest
predictions - Straw, after all, was suggesting a
five-year scheme of withdrawal - always arrived
with qualifiers just in case the spike in violence
then beginning should prove to be less than a last
gasp. Still, it's hard to believe that only a few
weeks have passed. Admittedly, in official
Washington, some familiar notes are still being
sounded. For instance, according to our Baghdad
Embassy's website, "The increased lethality of
insurgent attacks in Iraq is a reaction to
progress in the political sphere in that country,
Stephen Hadley, national security adviser to
President [George W] Bush, said May 15 ... The
transition to the new Iraqi government has not
slowed the effort of the Iraqi security forces,
Hadley said, as the training and equipping program
moves forward and the security forces are
conducting field operations." Similarly, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice "asserted that Iraqi
forces are 'making progress' ... citing the
protection of election sites last January 30
without coalition assistance. She added that they
now engage in joint operations with US forces as
well as 'operations on their own'."
But
the secretary of state's recent rushed and anxious
trip to Iraq spoke volumes - and they weren't
upbeat. More important, a mere 10 days after
Schmitt's New York Times piece appeared, US
commanders - "five high-ranking officers speaking
separately at the Pentagon and in Baghdad, and
through an e-mail exchange from Baghdad" - were
painting quite a different picture (anonymously,
of course) for Schmitt in Washington and his
colleague in Baghdad John Burns (Generals Offer a
Sober Outlook on Iraqi War). They were suddenly
presenting "a sobering new assessment" in a "mood
of anxiety". They were now intent on "inject[ing]
... their own note of realism into public debate".
For many Iraqis, they pointed out, public
services were worse this year than last; the 21
car bombings in Baghdad in the first months of
2005 almost matched the 25 in all of 2004; there
had been "disappointing progress" in the creation
of "cohesive" police units; the buildup of Iraqi
forces "has been more disappointing than
previously acknowledged"; there had been no Iraqi
troops to support a recent much-ballyhooed Marine
operation near the Syrian border around which
there was now an "air of disappointment" (see
below for more); a major "drawdown" of American
troops in Iraq might not just be over the horizon
but "years" away; and the American effort in Iraq
could actually "fail", as could Iraq itself, which
might then "go back into civil war and chaos".
In all of this, with the modest exception
of some comments on an American capability to
"disrupt" a "resilient" insurgency, there was not
a leavening note of "good news". A remarkable
litany of woe and potential disaster, the piece
bore next to no relation to public statements in
Washington or Baghdad over the early months of
2005; it did, however, represent a more reasonable
assessment of the Bush administration's Iraqi
disaster, which active duty military officers had,
until then, largely kept to themselves and their
associates. (As Martin Sieff of UPI commented, US
generals have recently "openly acknowledged [to
Congress] what Pentagon planners have quietly
known for at least a year: the United States will
have to maintain current troop levels, or close to
them, in Iraq for years to come".)
The
Times piece included a curious explanation for why
such an assessment should be offered only
anonymously:
By insisting that they not be
identified, the three officers based in Baghdad
were following a Pentagon policy requiring
American commanders in Baghdad to put "an Iraqi
face" on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders
should be the ones talking to reporters, not
Americans. That policy has been questioned
recently by senior Americans in Iraq, who say
Iraqi commanders have failed to step forward,
leaving a news vacuum that has allowed the
insurgents' successful attacks, not their
failures, to dominate news
coverage. In this single paragraph lie
many of the unsettling conundrums of America's
Iraqi adventure. Through much of last year, that
strange phrase, "putting an Iraqi face" on the
war, policy, sovereignty or anything else, was
popular among American officials in Baghdad and
Washington and could often be found in press
reports. This was a rare reappearance for it and,
folded into a complaint about Iraqi unwillingness
to provide such a face, caught something of the
crisis of the moment. After all, as an image, to
put a "face" on anything means to put a mask of a
face over something already present, which was
(and largely remains) American power in Iraq.
When George Galloway, the antiwar British
parliamentarian, recently arrived in Washington to
defend himself before Congress and called the new
Iraqi regime in Baghdad a "puppet government", it
undoubtedly seemed an outrageous and distasteful
label to many Americans and all of official
Washington; but when our officials and military
men speak of putting an "Iraqi face" on things, it
strikes us as good and sensible policy and we
wonder why the Iraqis continually let us down on
this.
The stunning thing is that tin-eared
officials using the phrase can't hear what this
must sound like to Iraqis. Do we really believe
them to be that stupid? Insensate? Unable to
imagine whose actual face (and rather imposing
body) is to remain behind that Iraqi face being
plastered on? About a year ago, in a somewhat more
hopeful period, Washington officials were using a
different, but no less insulting image. Rumsfeld
was not alone, for instance, in claiming in a
speech to American troops that "the end was almost
in sight. Getting Iraq straightened out, he said,
was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: They're
learning, and you're running down the street
holding on to the back of the seat. You know that
if you take your hand off they could fall, so you
take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty
soon you're just barely touching it. You can't
know when you're running down the street how many
steps you're going to have to take. We can't know
that, but we're off to a good start." Under
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz similarly
spoke of taking the "training wheels" off the
bike, while ensuring that the Iraqi kid didn't
fall off on the first pedal around the block; as,
in May 2004, did the president, who claimed, while
rallying congressional Republicans around his Iraq
policy, that Iraqis were now ready to "take the
training wheels off" by assuming some political
power.
As with the Iraqi "face", so that
infantilizing image of a parent teaching a child
to bike caught something of the American dilemma
in Iraq and the American attitude toward it: of
course, American officials want the child not to
fall and the Iraqi mask to stay in place. Our
military men naturally want their Iraqi
counterparts to "step forward", right out front
where they can be seen, and engage the press
rather than having American commanders do it for
them. It's such a better "message" to send to the
world. But we also want the Iraqis to ride that
bike as we instruct them to and Iraqi military men
to say more or less what we have in mind. We want
a nice infantilized government in Baghdad, but
what we don't want is to give up basic
decision-making, at a military, intelligence, or
economic level. We want them to take over ... but
on our terms. (Any colonial administrator of an
earlier era would recognize both the imagery and
the problems that come with it.)
When the
Iraqis "fail" to do so, our commanders grow
frustrated and begin to complain bitterly; while
frustrated Washington officials, as Paul Richter
and Ashraf Khalil make clear in a recent Los
Angeles Times piece (US Moves to Reassert Itself
in Iraq Affairs), can't resist stepping in to
pressure the Iraqis, while also emphasizing what
they should not do. ("Although Iraqis are making
the choices, the officials said, Washington has
'red lines' that its partners must not cross.")
And, of course, none of this encourages Iraqis to
put that "face" on an American occupation.
It's a dance of frustration which can be
felt in a very specific way in the Schmitt and
Burns article. As it happens, the Iraqi defense
minister had just announced a new government
policy banning military raids on mosques - and he
had clearly acted without consulting American
military commanders who were caught off guard and
disturbed by the new policy. As the Times
reporters write:
Another problem cited by the senior
officer in Baghdad was the new government's ban
on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which
the American officer said he expected to be
revised after high-level discussions on
Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi
officials. The officer said the ban appeared to
have been announced by the new defense minister,
Sadoun al-Dulaimi, without wider government
approval, and would be replaced by a "more
moderate" policy ... [That more "moderate"
policy,] the American officer implied, would
allow Iraqi forces, backed by Americans, to raid
mosques when they are used as insurgent
strongholds. With the above in mind,
here's my nominee for quote of the week from Iraq
(with a small bow to the military paper, Stars and
Stripes):
The reconstituted Iraqi army took
another step Sunday toward leading stabilization
efforts in its own country, opening its first
national headquarters since the US-led invasion.
The Iraqi Ground Forces Headquarters was
inaugurated by a "small group of Iraqi and
coalition dignitaries" at an undisclosed
location in Baghdad, according to Multinational
Force-Iraq officials Monday ... "We are
celebrating today a historical event and the
rebuilding of the Iraqi army. Having the
headquarters of our ground forces here is an
indication of the Iraqi army controlling its own
destiny," Iraqi Ground Forces commander General
Abdul Qadir Jassim said, according to the
statement. The problem, of course, is
with that "here". Try to imagine the
announcement-shoe on the other foot. Consider a
sentence like: "The American Military Headquarters
was inaugurated at an undisclosed location in
Washington, according to officials Monday." This
is headquarters, folks. These are the people whom
the Bush administration has slated to take over
from us so we can "go home". Call it the Iraqi
Pentagon, but the ceremony at an undisclosed
"here" might as well have taken place on the moon.
A small group? No wonder. Imagine what it says
about the country that the address of Iraqi
military headquarters remains a secret.
Body counts and other metrics of a war
of frustration
Numbers, "metrics", ways of
measuring success are now multiplying in Iraq.
This in itself is a measure of frustration.
Victory seldom needs metrics. Okay, maybe once
upon a time, quantifiable loot and slaves
mattered; more recently, the metric of victory was
territory conquered - and when American troops
reached Baghdad and the Bush administration
thought its war a raging success, no metrics were
necessary.
Our iconic metric of war, which
also proved a measure of a losing war, was, of
course, the body count, which we associate with
Vietnam. The body count was, however, an invention
of the later years of the Korean War, a way of
measuring "success" once the two sides had settled
into the bloodiest of stalemates and the taking of
significant territory - in fact, the wild
movements of armies up and down the Korean
peninsula - had become a thing of the past. In a
sense, the body count, aka "the meat-grinder", was
from its inception both a measure of nothing and a
measure of frustration.
It reappeared
quite early in the Vietnam War for reasons allied
to those that called it up in Korea. We were
involved in a struggle with guerrillas for whom
the holding of territory was not the crucial
matter, while our North Vietnamese enemy was
bomb-able but not open to invasion (given the
larger Cold War context). The body count became a
shorthand way of measuring success in a war in
which the taking of territory was almost
meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the
enemy hard to tell from the general population,
and our own in-country allies weak and largely
unable to strengthen themselves. The body count
was, as in Korea, also part of a secondary
struggle - for international "credibility" and for
support at home. Those dead bodies, announced
daily by the military to increasingly dubious
reporters in Saigon, were the most public face of
American "success" in those years. When the dead
bodies and success began ever more visibly to part
ways and, in the terminology of the times, a
"credibility gap" opened gapingly between the
metrics and reality, the body count became a
symbol not just of a war of frustration, but of
defeat itself. It came, post-My Lai, to look both
false and barbaric. Whose bodies were those
anyway?
In our new world of conflict,
where our leaders had imbibed all the "lessons" of
Vietnam, Centcom's General Tommy Franks, then
commander of our Afghan War (now on the board of
Outback Steakhouse, which donated shrimp and steak
dinners to our troops in Afghanistan), declared
that "we don't do body counts". He was not talking
about Iraq, but the principle was later extended
to that country where we were obdurate in our
unwillingness to count enemy dead (or keep any
public tally whatsoever of the Iraqi civilian
dead).
The message was clear: we had
learned our lessons. We had kicked the Vietnam
habit. We were now into victory. Similarly, there
would be no more body bags - the other side of the
Vietnam "body count" - coming home in full view
for the TV cameras to photograph. This would be
the ultimate, the final anti-Vietnam experience.
All of us should have been warned, of
course. When you create an anti-anything, you are
almost invariably preparing the ground - should
the slightest obstacle arise - to summon its
opposite. And the preparations for the kind of war
we were to fight in Iraq, or rather the kind of
war we were going to present to the American
public and the world, were essentially
anti-Vietnam rites of an elaborate sort created by
people who just couldn't get that ancient defeat
out of their brains.
Not surprisingly
then, when the war being fought rather quickly
deviated from expectations (and public
pronouncements) of success, when our leaders,
civilian and military, found themselves mired in
(as it was quickly dubbed in Vietnam shorthand)
the Q-word, and frustration rose and polling
figures on the home front started to erode, the
"metrics" began to return. It was inevitable.
Administration officials began counting furiously,
initially for themselves and in private as they
tried to sort out an insurgency that they never
expected. Later, of course, they couldn't resist
citing the figures - the useful ones anyway. It
turned out that they were counting like mad
despite themselves and before they knew it, it was
deja vu all over again for all of us.
Probably the first public "metrics" of
frustration to return were estimates of how many
Iraqi troops and police we had trained and were
supposedly fielding. Impressive figures were often
batted about. In the presidential debates, for
instance, Bush claimed: "We've got 100,000 [Iraqi
troops and police] trained now, 125,000 by the end
of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year."
Soon, the much-repeated figure became 140,000
troops and police. By March 2005, Rumsfeld was
using a total of 142,000.
The problem was
that on the ground our Iraqis were proving
unimpressive. Most of them either wouldn't or
couldn't fight. Whole police departments fled.
Iraqi soldiers (with the exception of some Kurdish
forces) were considered unreliable by our troops.
New Iraqi recruits deserted in quantity. A number
of them turned out to be ghost recruits (on whom
Iraqi commanders drew salaries). Some, it became
clear, had infiltrated from the other side. Soon
enough those enormous figures began to look
absurd, first and foremost to the men in the
field.
Think of this, then, as a
Tomdispatch rule of war (American-style): In place
of genuine victory or actual success, metrics
multiply. So the next time you see the word
"metrics" or a new set of figures being publicly
kicked around to prove our "success" in Iraq, just
assume that further problems (and yet more
frustration) have arisen.
In the case of
those "trained" Iraqi military men, as things went
from bad to worse, the metrics meant to measure
training success did indeed multiply. As a
Washington Post piece (A Report Card on Iraqi
Troops) indicated just recently, now that 10-man
"transition" teams of American advisers have been
assigned to Iraqi troops in the field (a la
Vietnam), a whole new system of measurement has
come into existence, the Transition Readiness
Assessment (TRA). Just now being tested out in the
field, it's meant to determine the quality, not
just quantity, of "our" Iraqis on the ground. As
in Vietnam, the TRA has a plenitude of categories
of "readiness" (or the lack thereof) - six in all
- and has already been transformed into a set of
nifty, color-coded visuals with, as it turns out,
lots of "red squares".
According to
reporter Bradley Graham, the initial TRA found the
following:
Of 81 Iraqi army battalions
assessed, only three were rated green, able to
conduct operations independently. Of 26 larger
brigade headquarters formed so far, only one
earned such a rating, according to officers
familiar with the confidential
assessment. As happened with similar
systems of measurement in Vietnam, the new ratings
system is already being scammed by Iraqi
commanders eager to rate their forces even lower
than may be justified in order to get ever more US
military aid flowing in to their units.
Behind such measures lies a frustration
that would have been deeply familiar to American
military men in Vietnam: how come it's going to
take us years, if ever, to get our forces up and
fighting effectively, when the other side, without
those 10-man advisory teams or special American
training or much of anything else (except vast
stores of munitions and weaponry left over from
Saddam Hussein's day) are already fighting and
dying with determination? Even when it comes to
foreign jihadis, why are theirs ready to die for
nothing, while ours - the thousands of hired guns,
known as "security contractors" we've imported
into the country from all over the globe - cost a
bloody fortune?
Another early metric that
began to be cited by the administration should be
labeled the "attack count". There's now clearly a
modest-sized industry employed in sorting out
their attacks - on American troops, on Iraqi
forces, on the police (including assassinations
and the like, as Rumsfeld indicated in the
interview that began this piece). There are, it
seems, cumulative totals, comparative totals over
time, and totals by province. Whenever the
cumulative attack totals sink, as after the
January 30 election, the administration trundles
out its figures and begins to crow. When they
rise, you get those "last gasp" explanations. Over
time, while meant to broadcast success, or at
least offer a modicum of "good news", such figures
only lead those broadcasting them deeper into the
mire because they promise a pay-off that never
seems to come (or come for long anyway). The rise
in numbers of trained soldiers, the dips in attack
numbers never lead to lasting success - that is,
to the waning of the largely Sunni insurgency.
And now, that dreaded no-no of the Vietnam
era, the body count, has returned as well.
Actually, it's been on the road back for quite a
while. Over the past year, there have been
increasingly frequent reports in the media in
which the US military offered specific figures for
dead enemy. These may have begun more
systematically with announcements of specific
numbers of "terrorists" killed in air strikes on
sites supposedly being used by the followers of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the months leading up to
the November assault on Fallujah.
Since
then, reports from Iraq offering specific numbers
of insurgent or terrorist dead bodies as signs of
success have been on the rise. This somewhat
haphazard trend burst into something like full
bloom with the recent US Marine operation in
Western Iraq.
The body count and
Operation Matador
Early in May, about the
time all those military statements about last
gasps were emerging and just as Baghdad seemed to
be turning into a sea of car-bomb explosions, the
US military in Iraq launched Operation Matador, a
highly publicized sweep - 1,000 Marines backed by
significant air power - of areas near the Syrian
border previously considered "sanctuaries" for
foreign fighters entering the country. Soon after
the operation began (not particularly well for the
Marines, who were bloodied by unexpectedly
well-armed jihadis on their way to the sweep's
launch point), the first body count emerged and
was promptly headlined in the American press and
highlighted on the television news. As the New
York Times put it in a Vietnam-era-style headline:
"100 Rebels Killed in US Offensive in Western
Iraq"; or, as Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder wrote,
"At least 100 suspected insurgents have been
killed."
The number itself should have
been a signal to the American press. It was such a
suspiciously round number, while American
casualties were being detailed far more
specifically. As Christopher Dickey of Newsweek
online commented in a rare piece on the return of
the Vietnam-era body count: "But of course that's
just a guesstimate, while the toll on the
Americans and their Iraqi allies is all too
concrete." In fact, nothing in Operation Matador
seemed to go as expected. Ellen Knickmeyer of the
Washington Post was embedded with the troops and
she reported that they quickly discovered their
enemy had "had plenty of warning that the Marines
were coming". Generally, they were missing from
the "ghost villages" the Marines entered. As
Knickmeyer put it (again in a sentence that could
have come directly out of the Vietnam War),
"Primed for battle, the Marines found only booby
traps. Sometimes they found them too late."
Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times,
also along on Matador, offered similar
Vietnam-style quotes in a piece aptly titled, An
Unseen Enemy:
"We took constant mortar fire from
over here. Anybody who comes over that bridge
gets lit up," said 3rd Platoon commander Lt
Joseph Clemmey, 26, of Worcester, Mass. "This
was supposed to be the mission from God, and so
far we've been out here and we haven't seen
nothing. This was the climactic moment we were
all waiting for, and no one is here ...". "We're
fighting an invisible enemy," said Sgt Jeffrey
Swartzentruber of Ft Lauderdale, Fla. "They're
like the ... CIA." According to
Knickmeyer, the Marine operation had all the
earmarks of a disastrous anti-"hearts and minds"
campaign. House-to-house searches resulted in
"bust[ing] up wooden furniture belonging to poor
farm families and [the throwing of] their
polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the
floor"; they "beat up suspicious-looking men if
that was what it took to get information that
could save lives" (despite a lack of interpreters,
one of whom in Knickmeyer's unit quit part-way
through the operation); they ousted families from
their homes at night to bivouac in them
themselves. They were, in short, "the recruiting
sergeants of the resistance" in the phrase of
British journalist Patrick Cockburn.
And
where they did meet opposition, as in the town of
Qaim, the results were no less expectable or
disastrous. The US military is badly overstretched
in Iraq and the modest 1,000-man Marine force was
hardly large enough for its task - unless you
assumed, as the military surely did, that
significant parts of its job would be done by
helicopters and planes once resistance of any sort
was met. As it happened, while the offensive was
already in its planning stages, local tribal
leaders who couldn't deal with the armed foreign
fighters in their villages actually called on the
Americans for help. This could have proved an
extraordinary development.
However,
according to Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy
of Knight Ridder (Marine-Led Campaign Killed
Friends and Foes, Iraqi Leaders Say), not only was
there "no effort by the US military to incorporate
local tribes in its assault plans", but despite
limited Marine numbers, no Iraqi troops were along
on the operation either. Not surprisingly then,
when the Marines hit resistant villages or towns,
air and fire power was loosed and the results were
indiscriminate. Here, for instance, is an AP
report on one area:
Flattened homes, bullet-pocked walls
and two charred personnel carriers at the
entrance to the Sunni Arab village stood as
testimony to the violent upheaval. One of the
walls of the local mosque had collapsed, and
dozens of buildings were damaged by shells and
machine-gun fire. A gaping crater in the bridge
linking Rommana and Husaybah reduced traffic to
a crawl across the Euphrates
River. The Knight Ridder report
offered this striking quote:
"The Americans were bombing whole
villages and saying they were only after the
foreigners," said Fasal al-Goud, a former
governor of Anbar province who said he asked US
forces for help on behalf of the tribes. "An
AK-47 can't distinguish between a terrorist and
a tribesman, so how could a missile or
tank?" In the end, as in Vietnam, the
Marines held no territory, but simply termed the
operation a "success", offering a final body count
of 125 dead insurgents. As a last touch from
another era, according to the AP report, "US
forces extended a conciliatory hand Sunday,
dropping leaflets from a helicopter promising a
better future. 'Prosperity will prevail in Rommana
and Husaybah', one of them read. 'We thank
residents for their calls on the local number
which helped us capture armed groups', read
another."
According to Allam and al
Dulaimy:
The US military hails last week's
Operation Matador as a success that killed more
than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it
was a disaster for their communities and has
made them leery of ever again assisting American
or Iraqi forces ... In interviews, influential
tribal leaders and many residents of the remote
border towns said the 1,000 US troops who swept
into their territories in the weeklong campaign
that ended over the weekend didn't distinguish
between the Iraqis who supported the United
States and the fighters battling
it. Measure, then, metrics against
reality - that body count of 125, which represents
the metrics of victory for the Americans, and the
reality on the ground, as the Knight Ridder people
reported it: "When the offensive ended ... angry
residents returned to find blocks of destruction.
Men who'd stayed behind to help were found dead in
shot-up houses."
This is the essence of a
war of frustration where such operations are bound
to fuel further disasters. Among Americans, they
are no less bound, sooner or later, to bring into
question the credibility of the metrics themselves
and so of an administration for which credibility
or image is no small matter. They are also bound
to bring to mind Vietnam - and not only among
American military men in Iraq who have already
indicated their private disappointment over
Operation Matador.
Paul Krugman of the New
York Times made the point in an eloquent column,
War in Iraq: Staying What Course?: "Reports from
the recent offensive near the Syrian border," he
wrote, "sound just like those from a 1960s
search-and-destroy mission, body count and all."
Counter-counts or the metrics of
disaster
As it happens, the
administration's "good news" metrics aren't the
only ones available and no one knows this better
than our military leaders. They can count, after
all. In fact, how could they help but do the math
late into any night, given what they know: there
are about 140,000 overstretched American troops in
Iraq, maybe another 9,000 Brits, and
ever-vanishing numbers of "coalition" forces. (The
Poles and Japanese, among others who haven't yet
withdrawn, are talking about doing so when the UN
"mandate" ends in December.) The Iraqi forces are
- a small number of units excepted - essentially
not in the field (though private Shi'ite and
Kurdish militias, not under American command,
exist in significant numbers). According to our
generals, American troops are now likely to remain
in Iraq at present force levels for years to come.
On the other hand, every possible figure
for the restocking of the American military -
rates of recruitment for the army and Marines,
numbers of soldiers and specialists signing up for
new tours of duty, recruitment rates for the
National Guard and Reserves - has been
significantly on the wane. Only absent without
leave and desertion rates may be on the rise.
In this context, there is a factor not
being counted into the public metrics of the war -
one that goes a long way to explain how the
present situation can continue.
As we all
know, from time to time, "civilians" or "private
security contractors" are reported to have died in
Iraq (most horrifically when four employees of
Blackwater Security Consulting were ambushed in
their vehicle, murdered and mutilated in Fallujah
in March 2004). These days, when a convoy of
private-security SUVs is ambushed in Baghdad or a
helicopter transporting some "civilians" is shot
down, it makes the news. But unlike with the
official military death count - the ever-updated
number of soldiers the Pentagon reports as dead in
Iraq - the deaths of private security contractors
generally are neither recorded, nor tallied,
though a partial list of 237 such "fatalities" can
be found at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
site. Deadly attacks on such "civilians", as long
as they are out of the spotlight and away from the
cameras, evidently regularly go unreported.
In Iraq, the numbers of "private security
contractors" - always referred to politely as such
in the American press, never as "mercenaries" or
"hired guns" - is unknown. There can be no
question, however, that they make up by far the
second largest contingent of "coalition" fighting
forces in Iraq, well ahead of the British.
Estimates of the number of foreign hired guns in
Iraq usually fall in the 15,000-20,000 range, with
possibly tens of thousands of Iraqi hired guns
thrown in as well.
According to Agence
France-Presse, 60 foreign firms, with exotic names
like Blackwater and Custer Battles, as well as 40
Iraqi firms, are in the mercenary business there.
But as with their casualty figures, so their force
numbers exist in a murky world beyond all public
math.
Almost completely unregulated - "In
one of the last decrees issued by the defunct
Coalition Provisional Authority, pro-consul L Paul
Bremer granted immunity from prosecution for
private security contractors working with the
Americans and US-backed Iraqi government" - they
constitute the paramilitary "wild West" of
American Iraq. They not only symbolize the process
of privatizing the Pentagon that has proceeded
apace under Rumsfeld, but are a massive hidden
expense for the American taxpayer as well as a
competitive force when it comes to the
reenlistment of battle-skilled American soldiers.
(The salaries they offer are perhaps four times as
high as comparable ones in the military.) They are
in many ways the hidden force that allows our Iraq
war to continue on its present catastrophic
course. Without such manpower, now increasingly
unavailable to the Pentagon through direct
recruitment methods, an "overstretched military"
would have a different meaning.
Our
jihadis are generally ignored in our media, though
on occasion an article comes out about them. Their
crusading desire, according to the Washington
Post's Ann Scott Tyson, is driven by money, "a
lust for life on the edge", and "a self-styled
altruism". As she describes them, "Sporting blue
jeans, wraparound sunglasses and big tattoos, they
look the part of gun-slinging cowboys."
Back in the Cold War era, when you spoke
of the "war in the shadows", you were referring to
the secret, armed, global intelligence struggle
between the Central Intelligence Agency and their
Russian counterparts. Now, the war in the shadows
- in Iraq at least - is the war of the
mercenaries. They are the metric that makes it all
add up and they remain below the radar screen.
What can be counted on
Numbers
are a tricky thing. Counts of various sorts can
themselves be interpreted various ways. Numbers,
even when accurate, can lead to quite different
conclusions. Sometimes you need a sharp
interpretive brain just to grasp the nature of the
figures coming your way. Sometimes you need just
such a brain to step past the numbers. Considering
the recent Baghdad car bombings, Juan Cole, who
may have the best interpretive brain around on the
subject of Iraq, offered this succinct summary of
the American position in that country at his
Informed Comment website:
Few commentators, when they mention
such news [of car bombs targeting convoys in
Baghdad], point out the obvious. The United
States military does not control Baghdad. It
doesn't control the major roads leading out of
the capital. It does not control the downtown
area except possibly the heavily barricaded
"green zone". It does not control the capital.
The guerrillas strike at will, even at Iraqi
notables who can afford American security guards
(many of them eg ex-Navy Seals). If the US
military does not control the capital of a
country it conquered, then it controls nothing
of importance. Ipso facto, Iraq is a failed
state. Based on recent comments
seeping anonymously out of the military high
command in Baghdad and into the press, it seems
that most of our commanders don't disagree. As
Christopher Dickey of Newsweek put the matter
recently:
If there's good news, it's that
while the Pentagon may obscure this grim reality
in public presentations, it doesn't seem to be
kidding itself, as it did in Vietnam. An
accidentally declassified Pentagon report about
a killing on the road to Baghdad airport at the
beginning of March shows quite clearly how much
worse the overall situation is than the Bush
administration would like us, or even its allies
in the coalition forces, to believe. "The US
considers all of Iraq a combat zone," says the
report, which was wrapped up at the end of
April, three months after the elections that
were supposed to have turned the tide in this
conflict. Here is where the Vietnam
analogy ends up in the dust. In Vietnam, the US
was fighting a mobilized rural populace in a
full-scale, nationwide war for national
independence that was already years old by the
time the first American troops arrived. It was led
by a single party, backed by a highly militarized
half-state to its north with a well-respected and
charismatic leader, in turn backed by the
resources of China and Russia. In Iraq, the Bush
administration and the American military are
fighting a partial war in a near non-state, mainly
in one part of an increasingly riven country,
against an insurgency without a charismatic
leader, a single party or significant backing from
other states elsewhere - and yet, so far, the
stateless results do look eerily similar to those
in Vietnam. The frustration over "our Iraqis" is
only going to rise, as will frustration over our
inability to destroy the insurgency of "their
Iraqis" - and as this process intensifies, and the
administration feels yet more pressure at home
over its Iraqi adventure, look for the public
metrics to multiply and grow ever more
problematic. There's only one word for it:
Incredible.
Tom Engelhardt, who
runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold
War.
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt)
(Published with permission of TomDisptach.com) |
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