DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA
Please turn on the lights
By Tom Engelhardt
Recently, our top commander in Iraq, General George W Casey Jr, was brought
back to the United States, officially to consult with President George W Bush
on what the president still calls "our strategy for victory".
Along with retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers, Centcom
Commander General John Abizaid and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Casey
then testified before Congress on military "progress" in Iraq. As Rumsfeld
confidently told the Armed Services Committee, "Every single week that goes by,
the number of [Iraqi] security forces goes up, the total."
In a statement from the White House Rose Garden after meeting with his
generals, the president made the same point: "The
growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping
our coalition address a challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war.
And General Casey discussed this with us in the Oval Office ... Now, the
increasing number of more capable Iraqi troops has allowed us to better hold on
to the cities we have taken from the terrorists ... We're on the offense. We
have a plan to win."
Before Congress, however, Casey painted a rather different picture of the Iraqi
national-army-that-isn't. In fact, on a crucial point, his testimony bore
little relation to the assessments that either Bush or Rumsfeld claimed they
had heard. Last June, the Pentagon informed Congress that three Iraqi
battalions were finally at "Level 1" of preparedness - that is, "fully trained,
equipped and capable of operating independently" of US forces.
On Thursday, Casey lowered this estimate to one battalion (evidently not even
one of the previous three), calling it a "step backward". In other words, of
the 100-plus battalions in the American-created Iraqi army, only one - perhaps
1,000 soldiers - is capable of heading off on its own to fight, out of sight of
its American protectors. Rumsfeld has often talked about the "metrics" of
success. Well, here's perhaps the most significant metric we have on the Iraqi
military - the essence of what passes for a Bush administration plan for the
pacification of Iraq - and it speaks the world.
When queried on this dismal statistic, after at least a year of an intensive
American focus on "standing up" the Iraqi army, the general said defensively,
"It's not going to be like throwing a switch, where all of a sudden, one day,
the Iraqis are in charge." This was perhaps an ill-chosen image in a country in
which the Bush administration and its crony corporations have been unable to
deliver electricity with any regularity to the inhabitants of that country.
(During a blistering summer, parts of the capital got less than eight hours of
electricity a day.)
To put all this in perspective, remember that Saddam Hussein's military was
disbanded in May 2003 by L Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, and a
new Iraqi military officially reconstituted in August of that same year. The
first units of the new army didn't even finish basic training (and it was
evidently basic indeed) until early 2004. Ever since, they have been woefully
equipped and poorly led. The earliest units (with the exception of borrowed
Kurdish militiamen) broke and fled in battle. The record since hasn't been much
better. (And who knows, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment
website, what happened to those three battalions that are no longer at Level 1
status. "Did some melt away at Tal Afar?" he asks of a recent US campaign near
the Syrian border. There, Iraqi troops, fighting with Americans, were asked to
take the lead. The newest round of that campaign, launched in the area just
days ago, seems to lack Iraqi troops altogether.)
As the Bush administration became more desperate about developments in Iraq,
the Pentagon began placing ever greater emphasis on training the Iraqi military
to replace American troops. Thousands of American military advisors under the
command of Lieutenant General David H Petraeus, who was put in charge of the
Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, were assigned to Iraqi units
in "military transition teams". For a while, Petraeus got much good press here
from pundits like David Ignatius of the Washington Post as our possible
military savior in Iraq, and many relatively hopeful stories were written about
the always "slow" development of the Iraqi forces. Money for the new army and
its equipment poured in (striking amounts of which, $1-2 billion or more, have
evidently simply been stolen at the Defense Ministry in Baghdad). In addition,
the new Iraqi troops are lightly armed, partially out of American fears of what
they might do with more powerful weaponry.
By this summer, about the time Cindy Sheehan first landed on the presidential
vacation doorstep, the "Iraqification" effort had been turned into a
jingle-style slogan for Bush. It was the president's only real response to
calls, not only from war critics, newspaper editorial pages and a growing few
in Congress, but from within the top ranks of the military, for a withdrawal
plan and a timetable of some sort for getting American forces out of the
country. He intoned it again and again: "Our strategy is straightforward: As
Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down. And when Iraqi forces can defend
their freedom by taking more and more of the fight to the enemy, our troops
will come home with the honor they have earned."
The truth of the matter, however, is plain enough for all to see. There is no
Iraqi national army. "The only really effective units of the new security
forces," as Time magazine's Tony Karon pointed out at his blog recently, "are
essentially militias of the Kurdish and Shiite parties loyal to their party
leaders rather than to a new state." (Little wonder, by the way, that they are
so hated and feared in largely Sunni areas of Iraq.)
When it comes to the rest of the Iraqi military: The Iraqi Air Force
essentially doesn't exist - or rather, the assumption clearly is that, for the
foreseeable future, the Iraqi "Air Force" will be the US Air Force. As for the
Iraqi Navy, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently visited the port
of Umm Qasr in "safe" southern Iraq. He had to be "outfitted in body armor" for
the crossing of the Kuwaiti border, because IEDs (improvised explosive devices
or booby traps) have begun to be planted along the road to the port. With a
kind of perverse admiration, he adds: "The enemy just keeps getting smarter.
After the coalition forces introduced jamming devices to block roadside bombs
detonated with cell phones, the insurgents started using infrared devices from
garage door openers. So much ingenuity for so much malevolence."
His visit to the exceedingly modest 1,000-man Iraqi Navy, being trained at the
port by the Brits, led to the observation (regularly made by Americans about
every aspect of the Iraqi military) that "progress is slow. One day last week a
boatload of Iraqi sailors decided to take a long lunch break and blew off the
afternoon training. Too hot." The problem is that "middle-management Iraqis"
won't "take the initiative". To correct this, it seems, would require "a huge
cultural shift. Saddam's tyrannical rule over nearly three decades conditioned
people here never to assume responsibility."
That certainly explains it; and it's pretty typical of American explanations,
all of which might make sense, if those fiendishly clever insurgents weren't
just down that road, exercising their ingenuity, taking the initiative like
mad, upgrading their skills constantly and fighting fiercely without the help
of American trainers. I guess they just underwent a huge cultural shift that
our reporters and pundits have somehow missed.
This stuff would, of course, be priceless and completely comic, if it weren't
quite so tragic; if it weren't leading down desperate roads; if so many weren't
dying in Iraq; if the possibility of civil war, driven by a very minority
"Sunni death cult", weren't growing; and if that country hadn't turned into a
terrorist training ground. Or, as Casey put it in his testimony, in perfect
militarese, "I'll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of
success."
The question, of course, is: How come we can't find that switch the general
spoke of, and "they" can? Or to propose a novel theory, what if the "huge
cultural shift" Friedman mentions was us? What if we turned out the lights and
smashed the switch? What if we invaded a country under false pretenses;
occupied it; began building huge, permanent military bases on its territory;
let its capital and provincial cities be looted; disbanded its military;
provided no services essential to modern life; couldn't even produce oil for
gas tanks in an oil-rich land; bombed some of its cities, destroyed parts or
all of others; put tens of thousands of its inhabitants in US
military-controlled jails (where prisoners would be subjected to barbaric
tortures and humiliations); provided next to no jobs; opened the economy to
every kind of depredation; set foreign corporations to loot the country;
invited in tens of thousands of private "security contractors", heavily armed
and under no legal constraints; and then asked large numbers of Iraqis,
desperate for jobs that could be found nowhere else, to join a new "Iraqi"
military force meant to defend a "government" that could hardly leave an
American fortified enclave in its own capital?
After that, our military trainers, our generals, our politicians, our reporters
and our pundits all began fretting about this force for not fighting fiercely,
being independent, taking the initiative, or "standing up". The question should
be, but isn't: Standing up for what? (Not dissimilarly, as corporate looters
move in to get their "relief riches", what will those evacuees driven off by
hurricanes Katrina and Rita, now homeless, car-less and job-less, be standing
up for when they sign on the dotted line for military recruiters who seem to
have had less trouble getting to them with offers of help than most of the rest
of our government?)
This phenomenon - two sides that seem to come from different planets: our
natives who just don't or can't or won't fight, who need years and vast sums of
money and equipment, and then hardly stand up without an American "backbone"
nearby; and theirs, who fight willingly, eagerly, fiercely, bravely and with
initiative - was also a phenomenon of the Vietnam War era. Then, American
officers regularly spoke admiringly of the other side, the Vietcong, the NVA,
"Charlie", as brave, resourceful fighters and had scorn for "our" Vietnamese.
But generally, even when, as in Friedman's piece, the descriptions of Iraqis
who fight and those who don't can be found side by side, no comparisons are
made, and the farce of attempting to "stand up" an Iraqi Army simply goes on.
If you set aside, for a moment, what is believed in, it obviously helps to
believe in something if you plan to "stand up" and fight. At the most basic
level in our age, it helps if you feel your country has been violated and
occupied by foreigners. In the last two centuries, no emotion has mobilized
more people in arms than the one we call "nationalism" when other people take
up arms and "patriotism" when we do so. Call it love of country. Add religion
to that - or the belief that your country or region has been taken over by
unbelievers - and you have a powerful combination. The issue here is not years
of training, it's motivation. And our Iraqis have next to none - with the
exception of Kurdish and Shi'ite militiamen who want to take out those Sunnis
they think of as their enemies and a potential peril to their existence.
Experiencing withdrawal symptoms
So let's return for a moment to the president's "plan". "As Iraqis stand up, we
will stand down." But what about some contingency planning? This administration
has been notoriously weak on planning for lesser alternative futures. Despite
having Colin Powell for secretary of state, for instance, Bush officials never
had an exit strategy for Iraq, not just because they had no urge to leave, but
because they didn't believe they would ever have to. So if you reverse the
president's little jingle, there's no there there. "As Iraqis stand down, we
will ... " Well, what?
The options are increasingly limited, and yet, even for this administration,
the need is increasingly obvious and pressing. The president could not be more
isolated internationally when it comes to his war. Most of the Europeans are
now simply doing their best to look the other way. The Chinese leadership
undoubtedly dances in the streets of the Forbidden City every morning, because
the Iraqi quagmire ensures that, for another day, China will not be the next
enemy of enemies. The newly elected Norwegian government has announced that it
will withdraw its few trainers from Iraq. The Poles and Italians are on their
way out along with the Ukrainians.
A Dane was just killed by a roadside bomb in the Basra area and the keeping of
a Danish contingent in the country, never popular, has grown less so. The
Japanese troops are locked into their "base" in the south, doing nothing; and,
while Tony Blair swears fealty to Bush Iraq policy for another 1,000 Arabian
nights, the British have, in fact, been humming and hawing about withdrawal as
their situation grows ever hotter in the Basra area (where Shi'ite militias
have taken over and, as Robert Dreyfuss of Tompaine.com points out, former
Ba'athists are being assassinated in startling numbers). Meanwhile, the Bush
administration was just rebuffed by NATO on a Rumsfeld proposal that NATO
troops take over parts of the American counter-guerrilla war in southern
Afghanistan, freeing up our hard-pressed troops for duty elsewhere.
So what's left in Iraq - other than the stood-down Iraqi Army and the embattled
Iraqi police (both forces evidently well-infiltrated by insurgents)? Well,
there are always those 25,000 or so private mercenaries with the run of the
country; there's a nearly non-functional Iraqi government in disarray over the
constitution the Bush administration has been shoving down its throat on an
unpalatable schedule; and, of course, there's the US military, which is losing
not quite two soldiers a day in the country (and many more wounded).
Fifty-one American troops died in September along with several American
"contractors" and a diplomatic official. As has been true for the last two
years, the insurgents remain capable mainly of picking off Americans as they
travel from one place to another on Iraq's embattled roads and highways. But a
suicide car bomber was caught recently inside the well-guarded Green Zone in
Baghdad before his vehicle could explode. That is, perhaps, an omen of what's
likely to come. Sooner or later, catastrophic events are a near certainly if
the war goes on.
In the meantime, our military in Iraq is fraying in all sorts of ways; while
back home the publicity attendant on the war has been terrible and recruitment
continues to prove a problem, despite heightened resources going into the
effort. Publicity. Ah, there's an issue. Karen Hughes, presidential confident
and America's newest public diplomat, was hoofing it around the Middle East
last week on a disastrous public diplomacy tour for the administration,
highlighting her ya-gotta-love-me qualifications as a "mom" and Americans'
qualifications as a people "of faith". (As Fred Kaplan of Slate writes: "Put
the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve
Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a
woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States,
possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no
English beyond a heavily accented 'Good morning'.")
In the meantime, the real "public diplomacy" work is being done elsewhere by an
administration that, from the first moments of its global "war on terror", was
intent on mayhem, destruction and torture; that wanted, in Rumsfeld's words, to
"take the gloves off". All evidence continues to indicate that, in behavioral
terms, this spirit spread like a pandemic throughout the imperium and into the
deepest reaches of the US military, the CIA and even American embassies abroad.
Just in the last couple of weeks, such "public diplomacy" has consisted of an
actual porn website that has been posting military "war porn" for all to see -
photos of American troops exulting in blistered and mutilated Iraqi and Afghani
corpses; and the news that an army captain who reported ongoing military abuses
against Iraqi prisoners, both before and after Abu Ghraib (including the use of
those tell-tale human pyramids), found himself and two sergeants from his unit,
who supported his testimony, the only ones under investigation by our military.
("Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration, you show up
at the PUC [prisoner] tent. In a way it was sport.")
Or try this one on for publicity size: the global managing editor of Reuters
sent a letter off to Senator John Warner claiming that "American forces'
conduct towards journalists in Iraq is 'spiraling out of control' and
preventing full coverage of the war reaching the public ... The Reuters news
service chief referred to 'a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby
professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or
illegally abused by US forces in Iraq'." (I can't think of another example of
such a letter being written from a mainstream news outlet to the US
government.)
Believe me, you can't buy negative publicity like this on the street. And then,
just for good measure, consider the anti-publicity value of the latest ad from
the joint team of Boeing and Bell Helicopter for their vertical-lift Osprey
aircraft - a shot of US Special Forces rappelling onto a smoking mosque with
the tag line: "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell ...
Consider it a gift from above." The ad caused another little storm, and there's
an awesome shock!
Put it all together and it adds up to a tsunami of unsustainable reality. So
somebody answer me this question: Based on the evidence, what favor exactly
have we been doing the Iraqis these last two disastrous years by occupying
their country? I suspect a lot of military people have been asking similar
questions as they worry (as their predecessors did in the later Vietnam years)
about the future viability of the army.
Withdrawal from Iraq, one way or another, is now probably unstoppable, no
matter how many times generals, administration officials and politicians may
step back or create "withdrawal plans" that are intent on keeping us in Iraq.
Bush continues to speak of how the terrorists will not "break the will" of the
American people. But all evidence indicates that support for his war has all
but collapsed here in the United States, even increasingly among his own base
of support. And it's almost as clear that the military leadership knows the
score. The army high command, after all, never wanted to be in Iraq in the
first place and can see not only that the "war" is unwinnable, or even
salvageable, but that it threatens the cohesion and future of the army itself.
General Casey, for instance, has been floating supposedly unauthorized
withdrawal balloons for a couple of months now, despite being officially
chastised for doing so by Washington (or so the story goes, anyway). Recently,
in Washington, he began more publicly counseling for, if not a full-scale
withdrawal, at least a "gradual" draw-down of US forces in Iraq. As Mark
Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times wrote, he based his thinking on the novel
thesis (for this administration) that "the presence of US forces was fueling
the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among
the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle
East." Sound familiar, any of you war critics out there?
Unfortunately, this is likely to prove too little too late, Iraqi dependence
having long been fostered because it was exactly what was wanted. It's now late
in the game to - as administration officials used to love to say - put "an
Iraqi face" on "our" Iraq.
Oh, by the way, when someone actually starts developing those withdrawal plans
for real, the mercenaries shouldn't be forgotten. The Iraqis don't deserve
them, although evidence seems to indicate that some of them are already coming
home. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out recently, "In the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is awash in soldiers and police.
Nonetheless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Blackwater USA,
a private security firm with strong political connections, to provide armed
guards."
The North Carolina-based Blackwater Consulting, with its strong private
security presence in Iraq, has just hired former director of the CIA's
counterterrorism center and former ambassador Cofer Black as its vice chairman
and Joseph E Schmitz, former inspector general of the Department of Defense, as
its chief operating officer and general counsel; while, its website listings
for "overseas opportunities", assumedly in Iraq, still includes open positions
for explosive-detection dog handlers, designated defensive marksmen and
protective-security specialists. So batten down the hatches, there's surely
more killing and chaos to come. Lots more.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory
Culture. (Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)
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