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Down the rabbit
hole
By Tom Engelhardt
If we haven't all gone down
the rabbit hole in Baghdad and come out in the
Saigon of another era, you can't prove it by
recent news from catastrophic Iraq. Eerie doesn't
do it justice. In Washington, our leaders plead
for patience; they insist, as they've been doing
for a year or more, as President George W Bush has
done recently, that this - the latest bad news,
whatever it may be, from the urban battlefields
and bomb-implanted highways of Iraq - is
"progress". They swear that the most recent
upsurge in violence and death (49 dead American
soldiers in the first 14 days of this month and
scores on scores of dead Iraqis) represents, in
Dick Cheney's recent phrase, "the last throes" of
the insurgency that will, the vice president
predicted, end within the president's second term
in office.
Think "light at the end of the
tunnel". Think the era of Lyndon B Johnson. Think
of that flood of positive numbers - the "metrics"
of victory - that came pouring out of Vietnam and
now, in the form of numbers of troops armed and
trained for the new Iraqi army, police and
security forces, is flooding out of Iraq.
Top generals back in Washington all lend a
helpful hand. (Joint Chiefs Chairman General
Richard Myers: "Well, first of all, the number of
incidents is actually down 25% since the highs of
last November, during the election period. So,
overall, numbers of incidents are down. Lethality,
as you mentioned, is up ... I think what's causing
it is a realization that Iraq is marching
inevitably toward democracy.") Hang in there,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice similarly
assured just the other night, it's like the period
after World War II when we occupied Germany and
Japan; it takes patience and time to implant
democracy in a defeated country. The growing
strength of the insurgency, Washington officialdom
has been officially saying this past month in all
sorts of ways, is but proof of the progress we're
making. It's just the "last gasp" of a dying
movement.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, American
officers fighting the war tell another story to
reporters. Senior officials now claim not so
privately "that there is no long-term military
solution to an insurgency that has killed
thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 US troops
during the past two years". Brigadier General
Donald Alston, the chief US military spokesman in
Iraq, commented to reporter Tom Lasseter of Knight
Ridder, "I think the more accurate way to approach
this right now is to concede that ... this
insurgency is not going to be settled, the
terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going
to be settled, through military options or
military operations".
Lieutenant Colonel
Frederick P Wellman, who works with the task force
overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops,
told Lasseter, "the insurgency doesn't seem to be
running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by
tribal members seeking revenge for relatives
killed in fighting. 'We can't kill them all',
Wellman said. 'When I kill one I create three'."
General George W Casey, top US commander in Iraq,
called the military's efforts "the Pillsbury
Doughboy idea" - pressing the insurgency in one
area only causes it to rise elsewhere.
Down even closer to the ground, American
soldiers are blunter yet: "I know the party line.
You know, the Department of Defense, the US Army,
five-star generals, four-star generals, President
Bush, [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld: The
Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period,"
said 1st Lieutenant Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long
Island, New York. "But from the ground, I can say
with certainty they won't be ready before I leave.
And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three
or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready
then."
"I just wish [the Iraqi troops
would] start to pull their own weight without us
having to come out and baby-sit them all the
time," said Sergeant Joshua Lower, a scout in the
Third Brigade of the First Armored Division who
has worked with the Iraqis. "Some Iraqi special
forces really know what they are doing, but there
are some units that scatter like cockroaches with
the lights on when there's an attack."
And
in the meantime, in the opinion polls, slowly but
inexorably public support for the war continues to
erode. As Susan Page of USA Today reports in a
piece ominously headlined, "Poll: USA Is Losing
Patience on Iraq", "Nearly six in 10 Americans say
the United States should withdraw some or all of
its troops from Iraq, a new Gallup Poll finds, the
most downbeat view of the war since it began in
2003."
Does no one remember when this was
the story of Vietnam? The desperately rosy
statements from top officials, military and
civilian, in Washington; the grim, earthy
statements from US officers and troops in the
field in Vietnam; the eroding public support at
home; the growth of the famed "credibility gap"
between what the government claimed and what was
increasingly obvious to all; the first hints of
changing minds and mounting opposition to the war
in Congress and the first calls for timetables for
withdrawal?
Excuse me if I'm confused, but
didn't the men (and one key woman) of the Bush
administration pride themselves in having learned
"the lessons of Vietnam" (which, as it happens,
they played like an opposites game until the
pressure began to build when they suddenly began
acting and sounding just like Vietnam clones)?
Isn't our president the very son of the man who,
when himself president and involved in another war
in the Gulf, claimed exuberantly, "By God, we've
kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
Well, here's a news flash then. In Washington
today, they're mainlining Vietnam.
Maybe
we should really be examining the later history of
the Vietnam War for hints of what to expect next.
Certainly, as in Vietnam, we can look forward to
withdrawal strategies that don't actually involve
leaving Iraq. In Vietnam, "withdrawal" involved
endless departure-like maneuvers that only
intensified the war - bombing "pauses" that led to
fiercer bombing campaigns, negotiation offers
never meant to be taken up. Or how about ever more
intense and fear-inducing discussions of the
bloodbaths to come in Iraq, should we ever leave?
For years in Vietnam, the bloodbath that
was Vietnam was partly supplanted by a "bloodbath"
the enemy was certain to commence as soon as the
United States withdrew. This future bloodbath of
the imagination appeared in innumerable official
speeches and accounts as an explanation for why
the United States couldn't consider leaving. In
public discourse, this not-yet-atrocity often
superseded the only real bloodbath and was an
obsessive focus of attention even for some of the
war's opponents. In the meantime, the bloodbath
that was Vietnam continued week after week, month
after month, year after year in all its gore. Or
how about the development of right-wing theories
that the war in Iraq was won on the battlefield
but lost on the home front; that, as in Vietnam,
we were militarily victorious but betrayed by a
weak American public and stabbed in the back by
the liberal media? Watch for all of these, they're
soon to come to your TV set.
Oh, and
speaking about Vietnam-era parallels, how about
this one: It turns out there are two different
races of Iraqis. There are their Iraqis - jihadis,
Ba'athist bitter-enders, terrorists, Sunni
fanatics and even, as Major General Joseph Taluto,
head of the US 42nd Infantry Division, admitted
the other day, "good, honest" Iraqis "offended by
our presence". The thing about all of them is,
without thousands of foreign military advisers, or
a $5.7 billion American-financed program to train
and equip their forces, or endless time to get up
to speed, they take their rocket-propelled
grenades, their improvised explosive devices,
their mortars, their bomb-laden cars, and they
fight. Regularly, fiercely, often well and no less
often to the death. They aren't known for running
away, except in the way that guerrillas, faced
with overwhelming force, disband and slip off to
fight another day.
American military men,
whatever they call these insurgents, have a
sneaking respect for them. You can hear it in many
of the reports from Iraq. They are - a typical
word used by military officers there -
"resilient". No matter what we throw at them, they
come back again. All on their own they develop
sophisticated new tactics. Facing terrible odds,
when it comes to firepower, they are clever,
dangerous, resourceful opponents. The adjectives,
even when they go with labels like "terrorists",
are strangely respectful.
Then there's this
other race of Iraqis, as if from another planet -
our Iraqis, the ones who scatter "like
cockroaches". They are, as several recent articles
on the desperately disappointing experience of
training an Iraqi army reveal, not resilient, not
resourceful, not up to snuff, not willing to
fight, all too ready to flee, and, in the eyes of
American military men on the scene, frustrating,
cowardly, child-like, and contemptible.
Compare that, for instance, to the
following comment on the enemy: "The ability of
the [insurgents] to rebuild their units and to
make good their losses is one of the mysteries of
this guerrilla war ... Not only do [their] units
have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but
they have an amazing ability to maintain morale."
Oh sorry, that wasn't Iraq at all. That was
actually General Maxwell Taylor, American
ambassador to South Vietnam, in November 1964.
Let's face it. This is deja vu all over
again. In Vietnam, their Vietnamese regularly
proved so much more admirable - in the eyes of
American military officers than ours. America's
Vietnamese often seemed like the sorts of thugs
white adventurers in Hollywood films had once
defeated single-handedly. They were corrupt,
cowardly, greedy and rapacious in relation to
their own people, and regularly amazingly
unwilling to fight their own war. The enemy, on
the other hand, often seemed like "our kind of
people". They were courageous, disciplined,
willing to endure terrible hardships, and capable
of mobilizing genuine support among other
Vietnamese.
Major Charles Beckwith, the
chief American adviser to the Special Forces camp
at Plei Me, was not atypical in his reported
comment after a siege of the camp was broken, "I'd
give anything to have two hundred VC [Vietcong]
under my command. They're the finest, most
dedicated soldiers I've ever seen ... I'd rather
not comment on the performance of my Vietnamese
forces."
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch.com and the author of
The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright
2005 Tomdispatch)
(Published with
permission of Tomdispatch.com) |
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