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COMMENTARY
Chaos under
heaven
By Tom Engelhardt
"Asked
about continued political challenges such as Iraq
and social security, President George W Bush said
he doesn't care about the polls.
"Question: But power is perception.
"The president: Power is being the
president."
- Bush in an interview with
Texas reporters.
G-SAVE yourself
Last week, the State Department issued an
"updated worldwide caution" about "extremist
violence" against US citizens traveling abroad.
According to Robin Wright of the Washington Post:
The warning said attacks against
private and official targets could come in the
form of assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings
or bombings. The targets could include places
where Americans meet or visit, such as
residential areas, hotels and restaurants, as
well as places of worship, schools, clubs,
business offices and public areas, the caution
said ... as causes of concern, the department
cited spillover from the US intervention in Iraq
in and outside the Middle East ...
. This came not long after other
officials in the Bush administration, who had been
arguing fiercely since September 11, 2001 for a
series of deep links between terrorism and Iraq,
strove hard to deny that the terrorist bombings in
London's subways had anything to do with Iraq. So
the message was clear: don't leave home because
... uh, they hate us (but Iraq has nothing to do
with it). Somebody just hadn't bothered to inform
the State Department.
In the meantime, the
president and his people - who have spent the last
four years reaching for their dictionaries (the
way gunfighters once reached for their six-guns)
whenever they wanted to redefine our world to fit
their needs - suddenly, and quite atypically,
broke ranks over a definition. A week ago, led by
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the
president's top men and women began using a new
phrase. The global war on terror (fondly, if
inelegantly, known as GWOT) was to be no more. It
was now the "global struggle against violent
extremism" (or G-SAVE) and General Richard B
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
explained why. He told the National Press Club
that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war
on terrorism' before, because if you call it a
war, then you think of people in uniform as being
the solution".
Somehow, the new term, and
acronym, hit the planet like one of those
"tripods" from Mars after the germs got to it. The
media ridiculed it, and Bush, our "war president",
agreed. He immediately broke ranks with his own
spinmeisters. In a speech last week, he managed to
use the phrase "war on terror" repeatedly and
"global struggle against violent extremism" a
total of zero times. According to former State
Department counterterrorism official Larry
Johnson, at a White House meeting a peeved "Bush
reportedly said he was not in favor of the new
term ... In fact, he said, 'no one checked with
me'. That comment brought an uncomfortable silence
to the assembled group of pooh-bahs. The president
insisted it was still a war as far as he is
concerned."
But perhaps there's a
compromise here. We wouldn't want to lose this
administration's four-year late recognition that
military power is not the be-all and end-all in
the struggle against terrorism. So how about
combining the two acronyms, saving the "struggle"
against "violent extremism", while not losing the
"war" element that so sets the president's blood
a-boiling. What about G-SAVEGWOT?
An even
surer sign that the Bush version of the summer
not-so-silly season was on us came when al-Qaeda's
number-two man Ayman al-Zawahri (whom the
administration has been incapable of hunting down
in the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan
border) suddenly released a video filled with
threats against the US. ("If you continue the same
policy of aggression against Muslims, God willing,
you will see horror that will make you forget what
you saw in Vietnam.") The president promptly got
up at a news conference at his Crawford, Texas
ranch and responded in kind. It was a performance
that recalled his infamous 2003 "bring 'em on"
comment in relation to Iraq's insurgents. Filled
with his usual resolution, vowing to "stay the
course" in Iraq, refusing to let al-Qaeda "drive
us out of the broader Middle East", he managed to
grant Zawahri the kind of attention that might
otherwise have gone to the head of state of a
major enemy power; that is, he essentially acted
as an unpaid publicist and recruitment officer for
Zawahri Operations. Thus, the path of madness.
The sunny-side of the well-mined
highway
Meanwhile, any time the Iraqi
insurgents change tactics or alter their behavior
in any way, our publicly sunny-side up military
high command immediately offers the rosiest of
predictions. Take, for instance, Major General
William Webster, who heads Task Force Baghdad. In
early July, at the end of a seven-week crackdown
campaign against insurgents in the Iraqi capital,
when attacks fell off significantly - do I need to
explain to anyone the essential principles of
guerrilla war against a more powerful force? - the
general announced, "I do believe ... that the
ability of these insurgents to conduct sustained
high-intensity operations, as they did last year -
we've mostly eliminated that." This was, of
course, only moments before Baghdad was again
drenched in blood and flooded with suicide
bombings.
But give this much to our
commanders, one upbeat prediction after another
about "turned corners" and "tipping points" has
proven wrong - in fact, it would hardly be an
exaggeration to say that not a single positive
Bush administration prediction about Iraq has
proven accurate, and yet that stops no one. At the
end of last week, there was Brigadier General C
Donald Alston, chief spokesman for the American
command, right back up at that prediction podium:
"When I look at the bar charts, the
statistics are a clear indication that the tempo
of suicide attacks has decreased," General
Alston said, noting that the percentage of car
bombings involving suicide bombers was as high
as 60% a few months ago. He expressed optimism
that the flow of foreign fighters was ebbing.
"This is not an expanding insurgency," he
said. Calling General Alston, calling
General Alston ... Perhaps one of these days
someone should G-SAVE one of our generals before
another of these ridiculous statements pops out.
These, too, have something of a "bring 'em on"
quality to them.
If this hadn't all been
going on for so long, we could perhaps just write
it off to some Bush administration version of the
summer silly season - to August when newspeople
search for stories and dog-bites-shark,
president-challenges-terrorist material has
traditionally hit the front pages of papers across
the country. If only ... .
Whether it's
GWOT or G-SAVE or, for that matter, "World War
IV," or the "Long War", or any of the other leaden
phrases this administration and its
neo-conservative followers have specialized in,
there is today a level of global chaos, a kind of
political helter-skelter, that leaves us with
regular headlines like "Two Explosions Hit Popular
Turkish Resort". (Substitute almost any
nationality other than American right now and the
headline still seems to hold). Imagine that, more
than two years after the fall of Baghdad, the
deaths of three or four American soldiers (or
scores of Iraqis) in a day are now so ho-hum as to
be relegated to the deepest inside pages of our
papers.
Today, you evidently need 14
Marines (and an Iraqi translator), all burned to
death in a military vehicle in western Iraq - if,
that is, you want to hit the front pages of major
papers across the country and make it to the top
of the nightly TV news. The question is: six
months or a year from now, will 14 American deaths
in a day have become commonplace enough to be
relegated to the inside pages, while generals like
Alston and Webster will still be claiming that the
insurgency is not expanding, that attacks are on
the wane?
Setting records and five-star
sacrifices
After the London bombings and
with the continuing chaos in Iraq - no connections
please ("Nonsense!" "Discredited!" insisted
Rumsfeld) - it's hard not to feel that the Bush
administration is summoning grim reality from
somewhere deep in its wildest nightmares. Others
might imagine that, under the circumstances, real
policy alterations, actual changes in course,
might be in order. And evidently the president now
feels the same way.
While squabbling over
the definition of his "war" and doing pro
bono work to elevate the status of Zawahri, he
clearly sensed the need to take some meaningful
action, to do something path-breaking,
record-setting - and so he headed off on the most
extended vacation of his two-term presidency, five
weeks in Crawford, the longest presidential
vacation in 36 years. It's the 49th trip he's made
to his ranch and the 319th day that he's spent in
Crawford, according to Jim VandeHei and Peter
Baker of the Washington Post, "roughly 20% of his
presidency to date". (And that's without even
counting those weekends at Camp David or the
summer visits with his folks in Kennebunkport,
Maine.) This is a particularly record-setting
moment because, by the time he returns, five years
into his presidency, he will have bested his idol,
Ronald Reagan, who in his eight years as president
spent 335 days on vacation.
While the
president is at Crawford, perhaps he'll be
thinking about the book he might sell in his
post-presidential sunset for multi-millions; you
know, the one he will "write", but not of course,
in Newsweek's phrase, "physically write". Advisor
Karen Hughes, Newsweek adds, "is expected to play
a role in the president's new book, along with
Mike Gerson, his former chief speech writer, who
crafted Bush's public voice in his first term." I
wonder if that's his "physical voice"?
He
may need that extra vacation time at the ranch
because there's a knotty problem to be finessed,
one typical of our tough, new G-SAVEGWOT world,
one his predecessors didn't have to face. Exactly
what "raw material" is "he" to base the book on?
Unlike his father who kept a diary and wrote
letters, or Bill Clinton who taped "conversations
about his life with former speech writer Ted
Widmer", or brother Jeb who, if Newsweek is to be
believed, specializes in e-mails, the president
can mainly fall back on a record of "thank-you
notes and greeting cards" he scribbles "with a
black Sharpie marker".
Okay, it's August.
It's record-setting hot across the country - and
even more so across Iraq where electricity is
generally less available than it was under Saddam
Hussein, and air-conditioning undoubtedly the sort
of thing you dream about in a fever haze of
insomnia. Still, for the president in Crawford
there's something in Iraq to feel positive about.
Without even a helping hand from General
Webster or General Alston, it turns out that there
is some good news when it comes to Iraq.
Right-wingers always claim that the media and the
war's critics never notice the "good news" in that
benighted land; but, believe me, that's hardly the
case, as I'm about to prove. Yes, Iraq may have
devolved into a classically failed state and, at
every turn, the Pentagon may have pioneered new
paths, set future records, and won awards in the
category of lack of foresight - so, for $200, what
secretary of defense shrugged off an initial wave
of looting and burning in Baghdad by saying,
"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to
make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things
... Stuff happens"? For $300, what Coalition
Provisional Authority head disbanded the Iraqi
army? But on one specific issue, the Pentagon
simply cannot be faulted when it comes to
exercising foresight in Iraq.
At the end
of June, Ashraf Khalil and Patrick J McDonnell of
the Los Angeles Times reported that, with just
over 10,000 prisoners held in American-run jails
across Iraq (only a few hundred of them
foreigners) and another "1,630 detainees awaiting
processing in different army divisional and
brigade headquarters", the Pentagon had spotted a
growth industry and was acting accordingly.
"Business is booming," commented Major General
William Brandenburg, who oversees US-run prisons
in that country. So the military began expanding
the two army-run prisons, Camp Bucca and Abu
Ghraib; as army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Guy
Rudisill put it, "Pushing our surge capacity" -
and not to be caught short of facilities, they
were actually adding a new prison, Fort Suse (a
former Russian-built barracks near Sulaymaniya.)
"Part of it used to be a prison, so it should be
easy to renovate," Brandenburg added. So
convenient, just like that old Saddam Hussein war
horse Abu Ghraib. Better yet, all of this was
being done at a bargain-basement cost of $50
million. A mere dribble in the Iraqi bucket and a
sharp riposte to critics who claim that the Bush
administration isn't engaged in serious
reconstruction efforts in that country.
I
think that we can all revel in the knowledge that
this was money at least as well spent as the
$150,000 our Central Intelligence Agency agents
plugged into five-star hotels back in 2003 while
engaged in a "rendition operation" in Italy; or
the million bucks in taxpayers' money that the
Halliburton-owned KBR's Tiger Team of in-house
auditors put into decent digs at the five-star
Kuwait Kempinski Hotel while researching KBR
overcharges to the military. (By comparison,
according to Ed Harriman in the London Review of
Books, American troops in the region were sleeping
in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day, tents the KBR
people refused to move into when asked by the
army.) Or what about those American dollars
ploughed into a "Truth Tour" of Iraq for a group
of conservative radio-talk show hosts aimed at
finding the hidden "good news" in that country, an
expenses-paid voyage that, columnist Bill
Berkowitz tells us, was partially sponsored (for
who knows how much) by the Office of Media
Outreach, a taxpayer-funded publicity arm of the
Department of Defense; or how about that nifty
$100,000 the Air Force ploughed into an
experimental program in Hollywood meant to turn
scientists into screenwriters (including that
national-security essential three-hour session on
"agents and managers")?
Unfortunately, our
enemies seem to have gotten word about the kind of
life Americans engaged in G-SAVEGWOT feel they
have every right to live. According to the New
York Times, the Jordanian government has just
"arrested 17 men it said were linked to al-Qaeda
in Iraq and were plotting to attack American
military personnel who frequent Jordan's five-star
hotels while on leave in Iraq".
Oh, sorry,
I think I got distracted. It must be August. What
was I talking about? Right ... Pentagon long-range
planning and foresight in Iraq. When the military
put out its latest vacancy sign at Abu Ghraib and
other US-run prisons there, they were aiming for
cells (or at least space of some sort) for 16,000
prisoners. Unfortunately, Iraq's prisons under
American control are evidently like LA's highways.
If you build them, "they" will come. Just the
other week, Rumsfeld announced that we were now
holding 15,000 assumedly enraged prisoners (more
than enough to form an insurgency by themselves).
Not quite the ceiling but ... .
Withdrawal and other half-baked schemes
As far as Tomdispatch informants can tell,
the Pentagon's plan evidently is to get all Iraqi
males of "military age" into some prison or
another, or into some unit of the new Iraqi army
or police, and then safely "drawdown" our forces
in that country. And speaking about withdrawals
(in the context of the Bush not-so-silly season),
as the president's poll figures continue to drop
like Iraq's oil output and the thought of 2006
mid-term elections with a hopeless war raging on
rises in the Republican political brain, and the
military worries ever more about its vaunted
forces going down the no-volunteer drain, our
media have suddenly, even miraculously, filled
with endless rumors about and curiously qualified
official statements on "withdrawal" from Iraq.
All of this started with another of those
leaked British documents claiming that US
officials favored "a relatively bold reduction in
force numbers" in Iraq within the next year. Not
so long after that, both Rumsfeld and the top
American military man in Iraq, General George W
Casey, suggested that significant withdrawals of
American forces might be possible in the
relatively near future. Casey's exact comment was,
"If the political process continues to go
positively, and if the development of the security
forces continues to go as it is going, I do
believe we'll still be able to take some fairly
substantial reductions after these elections in
the spring and summer." (Note that looming set of
"ifs"). This, in turn, opened the media
"withdrawal" floodgates.
In this, the Bush
administration seems to be taking yet another leaf
out of an ancient but tried-and-true Vietnam
playbook. In those long-lost years, "withdrawal"
plans never involved actual withdrawal, but all
sorts of departure-like maneuvers including
negotiation offers never meant to be taken up by
the enemy and a "Vietnamization" plan rather like
the present "Iraqification" one meant to "stand
up" the Iraqi military in place of significant
numbers of American troops. Each gesture of
withdrawal, back then, only allowed the war
planners to fight on a little longer. The same
seems to hold true today.
Looked at baldly
(and I say that as a bald guy), the Pentagon
"withdrawal" plan (which may involve little more
than withdrawing troops to Kuwait and bases
outside of Iraq's cities), as Michael Hirsh and
John Barry of Newsweek cannily point out, simply
brings us back to the original Rumsfeld plan,
which was to draw down our troops to the
30,000-40,000 level by the end of 2003 and have
them well situated in a small number of heavily
fortified permanent bases (then charmingly
referred to as "enduring camps"). Now, Rumsfeld
more modestly hopes to halve the American forces
in Iraq to 60,000 by the end of 2006 and assumedly
house them in those bases. His main commanders
speak even more modestly of a drop of perhaps
20,000-30,000 troops from the present troop level
of 138,000 by next spring, but only after a rise
of 20,000 troops in times for Iraq's prospective
elections in December. All of this, in turn, is
couched in "ifs" of every sort. As Centcom
commander John Abizaid put it recently, we may
"have to keep the current levels of about 138,000
American soldiers in Iraq throughout 2006 if
security and political trends are unfavorable for
a withdrawal". (See Basic questions about
bases, Asia Times Online, August 6.)
One of the problems involved in all
American "withdrawal" discussions, unfortunately,
is that those long-planned "enduring camps" in
Iraq seldom come up. They're just not on many
minds (other than the Bush administration's
collective one). For that, you have to look to
coverage abroad. And yet there are now reputedly
over 100 American bases of every size in that
country (and a new one has only recently been
established in Iraq's western desert). Some like
Camp Victory at Baghdad Airport are massive beyond
imagining, Vietnam-era-sized installations with
the look of eternal permanency (and evidently with
significant permanent housing for American troops
being built into them as well).
Right now,
the "withdrawal" trial balloons are, at best, in
the lingo of the Pentagon, about reducing the
American military "footprint" in Iraq. But like
most of the half-baked schemes of Rumsfeld's
Pentagon, the Bush administration's withdrawal
strategy is likely to prove as much fantasy as the
original Rumsfeld 2003 drawdown plans were. The
"standing up" of an Iraqi military on which every
administration plan is predicated already seems an
exercise in futility, not to say predictable
disaster. In the meantime, at home, calls for the
setting of timetables for total withdrawal are
beginning to mount and pressure is building, even
without a significant antiwar movement - enough so
that the president now has to continually deny
that he will ever set such a timetable. In the
meantime, the "coalition of the ever less willing"
is drawing down and at a pretty respectable pace.
Even the Brits - we swear, no connection to those
bombings in London - may really be mostly out of
Iraq by the end of next year. And for good reason.
The truth is that Iraq, which was to be
only the first stop on a Bush administration (and
neo-con) military tour of the Middle East, and
then assumedly the world, has so far proven the
last stop on the global domination line. It has
revealed to a startled world the remarkable
weakness of the Earth's last superpower, the land
which was, Roman-style, supposed to imprint a Pax
Americana on the planet. It has ripped up the
all-volunteer military and confounded the dreams
of the ever angrier neo-cons.
In the
period before September 11, neo-con writers often
focused on the spread of a failed-state world, a
supposed jungle of non-governable instability out
there on the peripheries, one on which only the
sole global hyperpower would assumedly have the
capability to impose some level of order. Some of
those neo-cons, in their eagerness to whack
various regimes in the Middle East - Iraq, Iran,
Syria, Lebanon - probably didn't care greatly if,
as a result, they created failed states throughout
the region. Chaos didn't perhaps seem the worst
fate for many of those lands (as long as Ariel
Sharon's Israel was strengthened in the process).
Little did they know. Now, they have
indeed succeeded in creating a failed-state right
in the oil-rich heart of the Middle East and the
chaos of Iraq has proceeded to suck the American
military as well as Bush administration policies
and dreams of every sort down with it, creating
maneuvering space for countries as disparate as
Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
In fact, it's unlikely that the Bush
administration - possibly any American government
- will be able to live comfortably with Iraq as a
failed state, its ripples of chaos spreading
regionally, even globally. And yet the
administration has already demonstrated with
definitive thoroughness that it is capable of
doing little about the situation - except
continually making it worse.
Someday,
withdrawal will come, "permanent" bases or no.
Staying is not conceivable and the longer we
remain, the worse the situation is likely to be
when we depart. But on such subjects and on the
matter of taking any responsibility for its
actions, this administration is not only
shameless, but quite hopeless. It can only create
more chaos, foster yet more mad plans for future
operations like - if the latest rumors leaked to
former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip
Giraldi of American Conservative magazine are to
be believed - taking out the Iranian nuclear
program using ... duh! ... nuclear weapons. Even
Homer Simpson, six beers to the wind, couldn't
have come up with that one, but evidently our vice
president has.
If you really want to
sample the madness of our times, consider Juan
Cole's little history of how "the American Right,
having created the (anti-Soviet) mujahideen (in
Afghanistan) and having mightily contributed to
the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that
there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that
it kept producing terrorists", or just wrap your
mind around the fate of the poor birdwatcher in
Bush's America. Cynthia H Cho of the Los Angeles
Times recently reported that, from Cape Charles,
Virginia, to Sierra Vista, Arizona, your typical
birder, walking quietly in nature with a pair of
binoculars (and possibly a telescope and camera),
the very picture of the harmless human being, is
now feeling the pinch of the homeland security
state. "At popular birding sites across the
country, they are facing stricter regulations - in
some cases being required to hire a police escort
- as authorities beef up national security."
Birds, it turns out, don't hesitate to congregate
around key bridges, tunnels, roads, and military
facilities like so many terrorist rock doves and
who knows what stranger may be lurking in their
vicinity cleverly dressed in the guise of a
birder.
Take a proud step forward ...
Mr Anonymous
So to sum up:
More prisons in Iraq =
withdrawal from Iraq. So spend,
spend, spend on constructing or reconstructing
those jails.
More five-star hotels = an
intensified war on terror. So fill those scenic
rooms at taxpayers' expense - and don't forget to
knock off the macadamia nuts in the mini-fridge!
(On the other hand, America's Spartan warriors -
and Spartan auditors - might consider crossing up
the terrorists by varying their lodgings in order
to G-SAVE themselves; they might, that is, make
the ultimate sacrifice and, from time to time,
stay in four or even ... gasp! ... three-star
hotels.)
Travel = Death. So if you're a US
citizen, thinking about those late summer days
abroad, you should probably cancel those plans and
catch another showing of War of the Worlds
instead.
Birdwatching = security risk. So if
you're heading out for a quiet, woodsy morning
with that nesting pair of Blackburnian warblers
near the local nuclear plant, bring your own
guards and the necessary papers.
Oh, and
to catch the full spirit of our Bushificated
summer of fun, just consider the State
Department's recently announced winner of its
annual Foreign Service National Employee of the
Year award. According to the eagle-eyed Al Kamen
in his Washington Post online column, "In the
Loop", the winner gets "a certificate signed by
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and $10,000".
And, as it happens, that man, an official in the
US Embassy in Baghdad, has a remarkable tale to
tell. As Kamen relates it, his "life was at risk
night and day" and he had "many close calls
personally and several friends were slain".
If that's not enough, "after a
suicide bomber detonated (a) device within five
yards of the dining table", the announcement
says, (he) "limped in to the embassy and
continued working despite suffering from shock
and severe hearing loss". When a colleague was
assassinated and his US supervisor sent home the
following day, (he) vowed to work "even if no
one was left".
And when the delegates to
the Iraqi National Assembly met at a Baghdad
hotel, he was "trapped in the elevator when a
rocket slammed into the hotel", we're told.
"Later that day, a Gurkha security guard
standing a few feet away was struck in the head
by shrapnel from an exploding mortar round," and
(he) provided first aid. So, to honor
this American hero, we give you our proud winner
... step forward, Mr Anonymous. (His name was
omitted from the State Department announcement
"for security reasons").
And if that
doesn't tell you everything you need to know about
the state of our American world today, then, boy
do I have a five-star hotel in sunny Baghdad to
sell you.
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch.com and the author of
The End of Victory Culture.
( Used by
permission Tomdispatch
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt)
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