DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Iraq: Name that war By Tom Engelhardt
In September 2001,
the president announced that we were at war with
terrorism. It was to be a conflict far longer than
World War II, a titanic generational struggle more
in line with the Cold War in its prospective
length. It was a war that naturally deserved a
name. Administration officials promptly gave it
the somewhat less than sonorous, slightly
tongue-twisting label of the "Global War on
Terrorism", which translated quickly into the
inelegant acronym GWOT. That name would be used
endlessly in official pronouncements, news
conferences and interviews, but never quite
managed to catch on with the public. So somewhere
along the line, administration officials and
various neo-con allies began testing out other
monikers - among them World War IV, the
Long
War and the
Millennium War - none of which ever got the
slightest bit of traction.
In the
meantime, the president launched his war of choice
in Iraq, an invasion given the soaring name
Operation Iraqi Freedom. What followed - from the
days of unrestrained looting after Baghdad fell to
the present violent and chaotic moment - has gone
strangely nameless. Perhaps this was because the
administration had been so certain that the
invasion would "shock-and-awe" sufficiently to be
the end of it, or perhaps because Operation Iraqi
Occupation (to pick a name) ran so against the
idea that we were liberating the Iraqi people.
Instead, well into our third year of combat in
Iraq, we find ourselves in an unnamed war - rarely
even called the Iraq War - spiraling into nowhere.
Just last week, 23 American soldiers were killed
in Iraq (almost 2,000 killed and more than 15,000
wounded since 2003); the American Air Force was
let loose to bomb parts of the city of Ramadi and
environs, bombings in which children died; mortars
fell in Baghdad's Green Zone; and numerous Iraqis,
including six Shi'ite factory workers, three
election commission officials and two bodyguards
of the governor of Anbar Province, died in
drive-by shootings or attacks of various sorts.
And yet none of this has a name. Perhaps
the namelessness acted as a distancing mechanism,
one of a number that, for long periods, have
allowed the war to fall out of the headlines as
well as American consciousness, while the dead and
wounded (unless killed in staggering numbers on
any given day) head for the deep middle of the
newspaper. As the British in imperial days once
dealt at arm's length with endless border wars in
distant lands while life continued at home, so
perhaps Americans responded to this nameless war
once it turned sour. What makes this so strange,
however, is that the particular "borderland", the
global periphery the Bush administration picked
for its war lay, of course, right smack in the
middle of the oil heartlands of an increasingly
energy-thirsty planet. Under the circumstances, it
may be worth taking a moment to consider what
names might be applied to our war in Iraq and what
they might reveal about our situation.
The Precipice War? "Publicly,
administration officials hailed the result but
privately some officials acknowledged that the
road ahead is still very difficult, especially
because Sunni Arab voters appeared to have
rejected the constitution by wide margins. As one
official put it, every time the administration
appears on the edge of a precipice, it manages to
cobble together a result that allows it to move on
to the next precipice."
The edge of a
precipice - an image offered to the Washington
Post's Glenn Kessler by one of those anonymous
officials who always seem so omnipresent in
Washington and included in a post-Iraqi-election
piece headlined, "For US, a Hard Road Is Still
Ahead in Iraq". (Is that the hard road to or from
the precipice?)
There have been a number
of moments in the history of the American
occupation of Iraq that might, in retrospect, be
labeled "precipice" moments but, at the time, were
hailed as "turning points" or "tipping points".
These would include the killing of Saddam's sons
in July 2003; the capture of Saddam in December
2003; the "turning over of sovereignty" to Iraqis
in June 2004; and, of course, the "purple finger"
election of January 30. The last two - part of a
larger pattern of official prediction - were
preceded by carefully choreographed administration
warnings that the weeks leading up to the event
would see heightened violence as the "terrorists"
or insurgents tried to stop the Iraqi people from
reaching the promised land of sovereignty and/or
democracy. As each "landmark" arrived, it would be
hailed as a tipping point in our Iraqi adventure
by Bush officials in Washington as well as
American commanders in Iraq - but only, of course,
until the next wave of violence arrived.
This was the Bush administration's version
of Vietnam's famed
"light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel". (That era also
had its "tipping points" as well as its military
"crossover point", the mythical moment when our
forces would kill more of the enemy than they
could replace.) To the tunnel-and-light metaphor,
the grimly joking response at that time was, "But
isn't that light the headlight of a train bearing
down on us?"
What's curious and notable
about Iraq's constitutional election just past is
that there were the usual warnings about increased
violence (even this time from a somewhat chastened
president), but the normal chorus of "turning
points" was missing in action. When it came to
imagery, there was only a kind of embarrassed
silence and that anonymous, scary view from the
"precipice".
Admittedly, in a piece on the
op-ed page of the right-wing Washington Times
("New Iraq unfolding"), you could still find the
last of the faithful, one Helle Dale, announcing,
"This weekend may have been the tipping point in
Iraq." But hers was a lonely tipping-point vigil.
Elsewhere, when such images cropped up - as in a
Steven Komarow USA Today piece headlined "Vote is
critical turning point for Iraq", the image had
morphed into something quite different. As Komarow
put it, "But at stake are issues that could
determine whether Iraq's violence and political
instability will worsen or whether the country
moves closer to a stable democracy." We weren't,
it seems, at a tipping point, but at a previously
unmentioned fork in the road. Unfortunately,
Fork-in-the-Road War doesn't have much of a ring
to it.
So, to tipping points, turning
points, or even - another image often wielded by
administration officials - that "corner" we were
just about to turn, it's evidently time to bid
adieu, sayonara, so long, bud. Perhaps we've ...
gulp ... come to an actual American turning point
in how we think about our war in Iraq? Just as all
the explanations for the war - weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs), Saddam's 9/11 links,
liberating the Iraqis from tyranny - have peeled
away, so, it seems, has a whole arsenal of hopeful
images and metaphors. They've gone onto the trash
heap of historic imagery along with, for instance,
the Iraqi "face" that American officials always
were talking about putting on occupied Iraq, or
that bicycle we were regularly going to mount the
Iraqi kid on, after which we would, sooner or
later, kick off those training wheels and let him
take a toodle around the ... dare I say it ...
corner?
For the last couple of years,
sprayed by machine-gun bursts of hopeful
administration propaganda as well as
fear-inducing, color-coded warnings of terror
attacks to come (all faithfully reproduced in our
press and on TV), it was as if we were living
inside the Bush equivalent of one of those Cold
War magazines such as Soviet Life produced by the
other side. Now that the sheen is off and the
conflict in Iraq seems unending, however, all
we're left with (other than a hangover) is a
nameless war and, perhaps, a creeping sense of
shame.
But before we put "tipping point"
to metaphorical sleep, it turns out there still is
one party ready to use it in the way it should be
used. Check out this headline hailing the recent
election - "Referendum marks turning point in
Iraqi history". As it happens, that comes hot off
the presses of the Tehran Times.
Actually,
in a piece ("Administration's Tone Signals a
Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict") in the New York
Times this week, David Sanger suggested part of
the underlying problem. The Bush administration
has just begun to admit to itself that creating
its version of democracy in Iraq - think Florida,
2000 - has had no positive effect on the
insurgency, which only grew as those turning
points of democracy came and went. Now, but one
"landmark" remains on the administration's
calendar, the elections in December for a new
parliament. This, it seems, gave another of those
unnamed Washington officials the willies. He or
she then whispered in Sanger's ear. "The real test
may come after parliamentary elections, which, if
the constitution is found to have passed this
weekend, are scheduled for mid-December. After
that time, a senior administration official noted
with some dread in his voice, 'there are no more
democratic landmarks for us to point to - that's
when we learn whether the Iraqi state can stay
together'."
So imagine, then, all those
anonymous officials standing at that precipice and
staring into what could certainly be labeled the
Abyss War.
The Is-To War? "Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the
Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a
sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow
over the border and, ultimately, a place for a
shadow struggle."
So wrote the New York
Times' James Risen and David Sanger, quoting more
of those faceless officials, in an ominous,
front-page piece ("GIs and Syrians in Tense
Clashes on Iraqi Border") last weekend about US
military border-crossings into Syria.
If
this isn't the Is-To War, as inelegant as that may
sound, I don't know what is. After all, in his
most recent Saturday radio address, the president
quoted a letter the American military claims to
have intercepted on its way from al-Qaeda
number-two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Iraq's
terrorist of the year, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It
seems the al-Qaeda leader and the president agree
that we're all working off a version of the same
Vietnam-style script in Iraq. "The terrorists",
said the president, "know their only chance for
success is to break our will and force us to
retreat. The al-Qaeda letter points to Vietnam as
a model. Zawahiri says: 'The aftermath of the
collapse of American power in Vietnam, and how
they ran and left their agents, is noteworthy.'
Al-Qaeda believes that America can be made to run
again. They are gravely mistaken. America will not
run, and we will not forget our responsibilities."
There's a long history behind such Vietnam
analogies. When the president's father was
exulting in the glow of victory in Gulf War I, he
claimed that defeat in Vietnam was finally in the
past, exclaiming, "By God, we've kicked the
Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!" How wrong he
was. (By then, the Vietnam Syndrome was the way
the whole Vietnam experience was summed up - as if
it had been nothing more than a prolonged state of
mental aberration. It's worth noting that an Iraq
Syndrome has already made its first appearance.)
Above all, the Vietnam War was never
banished from the minds of our war planners and
policymakers. Even when they were playing an
opposites game with Vietnam (as in, for instance,
their no-body-bags,
no-photos-of-the-American-dead-coming-home
policy), Bush administration officials had a clear
case of Vietnam-on-the-brain, as did the society
they represented. In 2003, while the invasion of
Iraq was still ongoing, the historian, Marilyn
Young, commented, "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."
It came
back, of course, because it had never strayed far;
nor was this just a matter of the return of images
or words in print. When we look back on these
years, it will, I suspect, be clearer that Vietnam
- upside-down, inside-out, in reverse - has driven
the American war in Iraq. Thus, when US commanders
now send their troops "spilling" across the Syrian
border, they do so in "hot pursuit" of insurgents
- another term (from the Risen/Sanger piece) that
comes straight out of the Vietnam-era,
crossing-the-Cambodian-border playbook.
And it's not just the war makers or the
war fighters who have Vietnam on the brain. Even
many war opponents seem to be playing by an only
half-buried Vietnam script. Take the
bloodbath-to-come - the future Iraqi civil war of
catastrophic proportions now featured in endless
speculations and in the fears of many antiwar
thinkers and activists, a fantasy (which could, of
course, become reality) that acts as a constraint
on thoughts about any kind of speedy military
withdrawal from that country. A similar bloodbath
was on the minds of, and a powerful constraint on,
opponents of the Vietnam War, who long accepted
that an American departure from Vietnam would lead
to a terrible bloodbath there. This was a
paralyzing fantasy, one which somehow mitigated
the actual bloodbath then underway.
Of
course, in the bright light of day, if Iraq is
Vietnam and Syria is Cambodia, the analogy is a
bizarrely unbalanced one. To make the comparison
seriously, after all, you would have to start by
saying that in Iraq the American foe is far less
imposing, but what's immediately at stake is so
much more consequential. The force that fought the
United States to bloody stalemate (and finally
defeat off the battlefield) in Vietnam was
formidable indeed - a regular army as well as a
powerful guerrilla movement aided by two world
powers, the USSR and China. It was politically
unified, well-armed, well funded and well
supported; whereas the force that has so far
fought the American military into a state of
frustration in Iraq remains comparatively
under-armed, fractured and politically at odds,
and haphazardly funded; in short, relatively
rag-tag. (In a chilling Time magazine piece on a
former Ba'athist who prepares suicide bombers for
both jihadist and nationalist organizations,
journalist Aparism Ghosh offers this telling
passage: "He fears [the jihadists] want to turn
Iraq into another Afghanistan, with a
Taliban-style government. Even for a born-again
Muslim, that's a distressing scenario. So, he
says, 'one day, when the Americans have gone, we
will need to fight another war, against these
jihadis. They won't leave quietly'.") On the other
hand, Vietnam was, from the American point of
view, a nowhere, a happenstance at the periphery
of a great global struggle, while Iraq is a vast
oil reservoir, an essential part of the powering
of any future the Bush administration might care
to imagine.
Nonetheless, just for the heck
of it, let's take seriously the analogy laid out
by those anonymous officials quoted in the
Risen/Sanger piece. The Bush administration is, as
they point out, already engaged in military as
well as political actions aimed at "rattling the
cage" of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, much as
the Nixon administration "rattled the cage" of
neutralist Cambodian leader King Norodom Sihanouk
(who believed his survival and that of his
government lay in looking the other way as North
Vietnamese troops manned those "sanctuaries" in
his borderlands). In the case of Cambodia, first
there were the US covert, cross-border missions
and black ops; then unofficial "hot pursuit"
across that border followed by Richard Nixon's
massive, secret, and illegal B-52 carpet-bombing
campaign against those borderlands (and beyond);
and finally, in 1970, an actual invasion of the
already-wrecked country (though it was politely
referred to as an "incursion").
When it
comes to Syria we're obviously not there yet. The
clashes remain minor; the air raids haven't
started; an American occupation of the Syrian
borderlands seems not in the immediate offing. (Of
course, it's worth remembering that, on the other
side of the border, is something a lot less
impressive than the North Vietnamese Army.) Just
yesterday, however, in testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice all but threatened Assad's regime
with some mix of the above, not just refusing to
take any of the president's "options" off the
table, but claiming that he would need no
authorization from Congress to launch a full-scale
attack on Syria. ("[She] said that President Bush
would not need to ask Congress for authorization
to use military force against Iraq's neighbors. 'I
don't want to try and circumscribe presidential
war powers,' Rice said in response to a question
on whether the administration would have to return
to Congress to seek authorization to use military
force outside Iraq's borders. 'I think you'll
understand fully that the president retains those
powers in the war on terrorism and in the war in
Iraq'.")
It's clear that (in conjunction
with the Sharon government in Israel), the Bush
administration has long been thinking about
destabilizing Assad's regime much as we
destabilized Sihanouk's government. So it's worth
recalling the outcome in Cambodia. While the
long-awaited bloodbath never happened in Vietnam,
an unexpected post-war bloodbath did occur in
destabilized neighboring Cambodia where the Khmer
Rouge rebel movement rose to power in the vacuum
left when Sihanouk's government fell - and then
committed acts of mass slaughter for which there
is no name ("genocide" being the wrong word when
you murder vast numbers of your own people).
The Bush administration already blithely
opened a Pandora's Box in Iraq. Does it really
care to go two for two by ratcheting up the
pressure on Assad and then attempting a
military-induced regime "decapitation" in Syria?
In that void, don't even think about what might
emerge - not to speak of the fact that, under a
banner that seems to read, "the Middle East for
the Iranians", the Bush administration is clearing
away all of Iran's enemies (except, of course,
Israel). So this could certainly be labeled the
Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For War.
The
For-What War? "Now, more than ever, the
grieving father [Swadi Ghilan] says he wants to
hunt down and kill not only Sunni guerrilla
fighters but also Sunnis who give those fighters
shelter and support. By that, he means killing
most Sunnis in Iraq. 'There are two Iraqs; it's
something that we can no longer deny,' Ghilan
said. 'The army should execute the Sunnis in their
neighborhoods so that all of them can see what
happens, so that all of them learn their lesson'."
Shi'ite Swadi Ghilan's two sons were
murdered this year by Sunni insurgents. He is now
a soldier in the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the
6th Iraqi Division, a largely "stood up" unit of
the new American-trained Iraqi Army. As Knight
Ridder's Tom Lasseter tells us in one of the most
important, if bloodcurdling, reports to emerge
from Iraq recently, "American commanders often
refer to the 1st Brigade as a template for the
future of Iraq's military."
It is one of
the canons of faith in the American mainstream
that our military can't leave Iraq until the Iraqi
Army is capable of standing on its own. Only this,
and the now more than 150,000 troops we have in
Iraq, are said to lie between the hideous,
devolving present and the country's collapse into
full-scale civil war. That sounds reasonable
enough unless, as Lasseter did, you were to hang
out with the 1st Brigade for a while. Here's what
Lasseter discovered:
The Brigade is
essentially a Shi'ite outfit, whose ranks are
filled with Swadi Ghilan's burning for revenge
against Iraq's Sunni population, and a commander
who "regularly reviews important decisions,
including troop distribution, with a prominent
local Shi'ite cleric".
As Lasseter
comments: "The Bush administration's exit strategy
for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive,
democratic political process that includes all
major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi
national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping
and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi
Army suggests that the strategy is in serious
trouble ... Instead of rising above the ethnic
tension that's tearing their nation apart, the
mostly Shi'ite troops are preparing for, if not
already fighting, a civil war against the minority
Sunni population ... Increasingly ... they look
and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit
and more like a Shi'ite militia."
Given
Lasseter's piece and similar reports elsewhere -
Rory Carroll of the Guardian, recently kidnapped
and released, wrote: "Government officials admit
that Shia militias with links to Iran have
infiltrated the police and army. Human rights
groups accuse them of operating death squads
against Sunnis."
Another question might be
asked: What is the Iraqi Army actually being stood
up for? The Iraqi government in Baghdad's Green
Zone is an awkward Shi'ite-Kurdish alliance.
Little surprise that the new army should also be
mainly a mix of Shi'ite and Kurdish units, or that
its goals should be less than "national". Those
who want the United States to remain ever longer
in Iraq to prevent a possibly genocidal civil war
might consider whether the act of remaining -
especially with the Bush administration running
the show - isn't also the act of creating a civil
war, whether by happenstance or by design.
Start with the fact that the number of
American troops in the country has actually been
on the rise recently; that this administration
continues to invest in gigantic, increasingly
permanent bases in the country; and that it is as
unwilling to write off such bases or future
control over Iraqi oil as it is to agree to a
congressional anti-torture resolution. Then put
the sort of Iraqi Army described by Lasseter in
the context of an ongoing American punitive
campaign of growing brutality against the Sunni
insurgency. In that war, among other things,
uncontested air power is regularly unleashed
against, and has already dismantled, huge swathes
of a number of largely Sunni cities and towns such
as Fallujah and Tal Afar. This is a formula not
for preventing civil war but for fomenting it.
Then put the new constitution, which
clearly is meant to transfer power almost
completely out of Sunni hands and into those of
the Shi'ite religious and Kurdish political
parties, and you have the makings of a grim
formula indeed. As Time magazine's Tony Karon
suggested in a recent, not-to-be-missed essay at
his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, "If anything, a
successful referendum is more likely to bolster
Sunni support for the insurgency." Again the
unasked question may be: Constitution for what?
And this may turn out to be the For-What War.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
