On the April day in 2003 when American
troops first entered Baghdad, historian Marilyn
Young suggested that Operation Iraqi Freedom was
"Vietnam on crack cocaine". She wrote presciently
at the time:
In less then
two weeks a 30-year-old vocabulary is back:
credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell
friend from foe, civilian interference in
military affairs, the dominance of domestic
politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts
and minds.
That language - and the
Vietnam template that goes with it - has never
left us. Only this week, Republican Senator and
presidential hopeful Chuck Hagel, who served in
Vietnam, publicly attacked the administration's
Iraq policy for "destabilizing" the Middle East
and suggested that President George W Bush's
constant "stay-the-course" refrain was "not a
policy". He added, "We are locked into a
bogged-down problem not ... dissimilar to where we
were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more
problems we're going to have."
Put another
way, Young's statement might now be amended to
read: "Iraq is what history looks like once the
Bush administration took the equivalent of crack
cocaine"; "the United States is now Vietnam on a
bad LSD trip."
After all, in Iraq, to put
events in a bizarre nutshell, the squabbling
government leadership just presented (kind of) on
deadline a new "constitution" that has blank
passages in it and then insisted on taking an
extra three days, not allowed for in the present
interim constitution, for further "debate". All
this despite the intense pressure US
"super-ambassador" Zalmay Khalilzad put on the
negotiators to make it on time to the deadline,
another of the Bush administration's much-needed
"turning points". (Imagine a representative of the
French king half-running our constitutional
convention.)
At his Informed Comment blog,
Juan Cole has already referred to this as a coup
d'etat, though the New York Times more politely
terms it a "legal sleight of hand". ("The rule of
law," writes Cole, "is no longer operating in
Iraq, and no pretence of constitutional procedure
is being striven for. In essence, the prime
minister and president have made a sort of coup,
simply disregarding the interim constitution.
Given the acquiescence of parliament and the
absence of a supreme court [which should have been
appointed by now but has not been, also
unconstitutionally], there is no check or balance
that could question the writ of the executive.")
More important yet, the politicians
involved - many of them exiles, some of them with
few roots in Iraq, the Sunnis among them with
limited roots in the insurgent Sunni community
(and in any case largely cut out of the bargaining
process between Kurdish and Shi'ite politicians) -
are fighting for a retrograde-sounding
constitution (religiously based and without a
significant emphasis on women's rights) inside
Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. It is a
constitution aimed at creating an almost
impossibly starved central government guaranteed
to control little.
Meanwhile, outside the
Green Zone, amid a brewing stewpot of internecine
killing and incipient civil war, vast parts of the
country have simply passed beyond Baghdad's rule,
and significant parts of central Iraq seemingly
beyond any rule at all. The Kurdish areas in the
north have long been autonomous, with their own
armed militia. In the largely Sunni areas of
central Iraq, chaos is the rule, but whole towns
like Haditha are now "insurgent citadels" run, as
Fallujah was less than a year ago, as little
retro-Islamic statelets. (Grim as this may be,
such statelets can offer - as Taliban-ruled
Afghanistan did after two decades of civil war and
chaos - order of a harsh kind that ensures
personal safety for most inhabitants. This is no
small thing when conditions are desperate enough.)
The Shi'ite south, on the other hand, has largely
fallen under the control of Islamic parties and
their armed militias, all allied to one degree or
another with the neighboring Iranian
fundamentalist regime. In the north and the south,
security is increasingly in the hands of local
parties, not the central government, or even the
occupying forces.
Throw in a full-scale
insurgency, constant interruptions in oil and
electricity production (as well as production
levels at or even below those of Saddam Hussein's
weakest post-Gulf War days in early 1990), and
high unemployment, and most Iraqis may not greatly
care about, or even be affected by, whatever
"constitution" is produced inside the relative
safety of the Green Zone.
With that in
mind, imagine some of the hawks and
neo-conservatives who first started us (and the
Iraqis) off on this glorious Middle Eastern
adventure of ours as being capable of seeing the
situation in a clear-eyed way. If so, they might
easily conclude that they were on a bad LSD trip
out of the Vietnam era. After all, they have
essentially created their own worst nightmare - no
small accomplishment when you think about it.
In the meantime, while Iraqi police,
soldiers, judges, officials and normal citizens
continue to die in horrible ways, so do American
soldiers in Iraq, in smaller but growing numbers
(as in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban has
clearly imported Iraqi tactical and improvised
explosive device expertise). Ominously, insurgent
and terrorist tactics, including the recent
missiling of two American warships docked at the
port of Aqaba in Jordan, continue to spread.
Today, on the inside page of my hometown
paper, under "names of the dead" are listed:
"BOUCHARD, Nathan K, 24, Sgt, Army; Wildomar,
Calif; Third Infantry Division; DOYLE, Jeremy W,
24, Staff Sgt, Army; Chesterton, Md; Third
Infantry Division; FUHRMANN, Ray M II, 28,
Specialist, Army; Novato, Calif; Third Infantry
Division; SEAMANS, Timothy J, 20, Pfc, Army;
Jacksonville, Fla; Third Infantry Division."
Three or four American dead a day seems
now close to the norm - seldom enough to make the
front pages of any but the most local newspapers,
yet enough evidently to penetrate the
consciousness of growing numbers of Americans. The
fact is - and this can be put down, if not simply
to Cindy Sheehan, then to the Sheehan moment we're
living through - a genuine conversation/debate has
begun about being in Iraq, about the Bush
administration lies that got us there and about
how in the world to get out. Most important, this
surprisingly noisy and discordant discussion is
taking place not, as in the past couple of years,
in the shadows, or on the Internet, but right in
plain sight: in our newspapers, on television, in
the streets, in homes, even in the corridors of
Congress.
One symbol of this change could
be seen in the decision of Democratic Senator
Russell Feingold to break "with his party
leadership last week", as Peter Baker and Shailagh
Murray of the Washington Post wrote, "to become
the first senator to call for all troops to be
withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline". On
the other end of the political spectrum,
Republicans like Senator Hagel and conservatives
of many stripes are raising danger flags ever more
often - and in some cases calling directly for us
to depart from Iraq. For instance, Andrew
Bacevich, who served in Vietnam and is the author
of the superb book The New American
Militarism, wrote recently in the Washington
Post:
Rather than producing security, our
continued massive military presence [in Iraq]
has helped fuel continuing violence. Rather than
producing liberal democracy, our meddling in
Iraqi politics has exacerbated political
dysfunction ... Wisdom requires that the Bush
administration call an end to its misbegotten
crusade. While avoiding the appearance of an
ignominious dash for the exits, but with all due
speed, the United States needs to liquidate its
presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to
decide their fate and creating the space for
other regional powers to assist in brokering a
political settlement.
Similarly,
Donald Devine of the American Conservative Union
Foundation, wrote, "The only solution is for the
US to exit before the whole thing comes apart."
On Monday, the president, roused from his
rounds of vacation bicycling by a ton of bad news
and ever-worse polling figures, was flown into
Salt Lake City to give a speech to the national
convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).
Inside the convention hall, he was received by a
friendly audience; while outside, in the streets
of a red-state capital, demonstrators including
Rocky Anderson, the Democratic mayor of Salt Lake
City, gathered to hold the president's feet to the
Iraqi fire. The last time a president was so
dogged by demonstrators in otherwise friendly
settings was certainly in the Vietnam era. ("We
are here today," announced Anderson, "to let the
world know that even in the reddest of red states,
there is enormous concern about the dangerous,
irresponsible and deceitful public policies being
pursued by President Bush and his
administration.")
Note, by the way,
another sign of the "chickenhawk" nature of this
administration: The president not only won't
attend funerals or meet with Cindy Sheehan; he
clearly doesn't dare venture into any area where
he's likely to meet a challenging reception of any
sort. It may, however, already be too late for him
to find unchallenging safety anywhere in the US.
In his stay-the-course VFW speech, you
could feel that the president now found himself in
a new and confusing situation. Step by step, he's
slowly been backing up. This time - contradicting
the anti-Vietnam, no-attention-to-casualties
playbook he has long been working off - he
specifically spoke of the numbers of dead American
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, something of a
first for him. Though he never mentioned Cindy
Sheehan's name, he might as well have. Its absence
acted like a presence, all but ringing from the
speech. Read it yourself and you can sense the
degree to which he is now uncharacteristically on
the defensive. Even to friendly crowds, he finds
himself answering questions that, not so long ago,
never would have come up. Wherever he is, he is
now essentially responding to what is, in effect,
an ongoing news conference with the nation in
which challenging questions never stop being
tossed his way.
All and all, in the past
weeks, it's been like watching a nation blinking
and slowly emerging from an all-enveloping state
of denial. Such a state of mind, once pierced,
will be hard indeed for this administration to
recreate. In the meantime, the Vietnam template
remains stuck in our collective heads. Even the
images on the television news - for instance, the
showing of American GIs dragging off the bodies of
American casualties under fire as the president
calls on the public to stay the course - have
suddenly grown more Vietnam-like.
This is,
of course, Vietnam as seen in an
Alice-in-Wonderland, crazy-mirror version of
itself. For instance, despite what many think,
post-invasion opposition to the Iraq war has grown
far more quickly than in the Vietnam era; and a
mass antiwar movement is now being jump-started
into visible existence by the families of soldiers
in Iraq (and by small numbers of resisting
soldiers too) rather than, as in the Vietnam era,
ending on such a movement. Expect the antiwar
demonstrations scheduled for Washington on
September 24 to be enormous, to feature Cindy
Sheehan, and to be led by military families.
It may be that, despite certain visible
similarities between the two, Iraq is not Vietnam,
as Time magazine editor Tony Karon argued
especially eloquently at his blog recently: But in
the US at least, there are certain striking
similarities, especially in the unequal burden of
pain, suffering and death laid by enthusiasts of
each war on working-class, heartland America.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
