DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The devil's dictionary of war in
Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
My aunt Hilda, whose very name came from
some other century, once told me her earliest
memory: she was a little girl standing under a
large tree in the backyard of her house in
Brooklyn, New York, and she cried out for help.
Her mother (my grandmother) Celia came out to ask
what the matter was. An enormous spider was
descending on her, she said, and she was scared.
No, my grandmother told her gently, that's not a
spider; that's just the
tree's shadow. There's
nothing to be scared of.
This memory came
back to me the other day as I was thinking about
the latest round of Bush administration and
military commentary on Iraq. With a bow to my
long-dead aunt, all you have to do is reverse her
image to make sense of America's Iraq today: a
giant spider is indeed descending, while top
American officials do their best to insist that
it's simply 120 degrees in the shade.
Like
all wars, the "war in Iraq" or "Iraq war" - it's
never gained the double caps of the Korean or
Vietnam Wars - has also been a war of words. From
"homeland" and "unlawful combatant" to
"extraordinary rendition" and "Global War on
Terror" (aka: World War IV or the Long War), never
has an administration reached more often for its
dictionaries to create pretzled words and phrases.
Its war in Iraq has been no exception. But
recently there's been a change, hardly noticed by
anyone. The administration's familiar war
vocabulary and imagery, which hung in there so
remarkably long, has finally disappeared down the
memory hole. So many images, tailored for
home-front consumption, each meant to help give
just a little more time to an increasingly
embattled administration, have in recent months
disappeared.
When was the last time you
heard that the US had "turned the corner" in Iraq?
(Okay, Marine commandant General James Conway did
return from an early April visit to al-Anbar
province, saying: "I think, in that area, we have
turned the corner," but old habits do die hard.)
Remember those "tipping points" and "turning
points" we were always reaching (or reaching for)
on our way to mission accomplished? All gone. Or
what about those regularly spaced "landmarks" or
"milestones" - the capture of Saddam, the "handing
over of sovereignty" to the Iraqis, the "purple
finger" election, the killing of Zarqawi - on our
path to success in Iraq? All missing in action.
In fact, how many times have you heard
someone in this administration talk about
"victory" in 2007? Our "victory" president, who in
2005 used the word 15 times (and "progress" 28) in
a single speech introducing his long-forgotten
National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, now speaks
modestly of indeterminate hints of "success" or of
"encouraging signs". Victory, when in
administration speeches these days, often seems to
have switched teams. Americans - Republican or
administration ones anyway - may be "surging" in
Baghdad, but not, according to most spokespeople,
toward "victory". Our efforts of the moment are
aimed at trying to staunch the flow of victory to
our now omnipresent al-Qaedan opponents, who are
being aided and abetted, of course, by the
retreat-eager "Democrat" (or "cratic") Party.
President George W Bush, perhaps because
the movie-style fantasy of being a victorious
"commander-in-chief" was so much on his mind these
last years, often admits to a familiarity with the
psychology of victory, even when it has migrated
elsewhere. As he told American Legion Post 177 the
other week, "I also understand the mentality of an
enemy that is trying to achieve a victory over us
by causing us to lose our will." In last
Saturday's radio address to the nation, he
insisted that congressional Democrats had "passed
bills that would impose restrictions on our
military commanders and set an arbitrary date for
withdrawal from Iraq, giving our enemies the
victory they desperately want... Congress must now
work quickly and pass a clean bill that funds our
troops, without artificial time lines for
withdrawal, without handcuffing our generals on
the ground..."
(That "handcuffing" image,
by the way, has a fine presidential pedigree, even
if given a new twist of the wrist by our
we-don't-torture president. From Richard Nixon in
the Vietnam era to George H W Bush at the time of
the first Gulf War, American presidents regularly
complained that the country was being forced to
fight - or swore that it would not fight - "with
one hand tied behind our back". As the first
President Bush put it at the time of our first
Gulf War, "No hands are going to be tied behind
backs. This is not a Vietnam." Now, a "Democrat
Congress", evidently even more infernal than the
one Dick Cheney experienced in the early 1970s, is
actually planning a double-wristed "handcuff"
maneuver. If you're not a kickboxing champion,
what a way to fight a war!)
Our
geopolitically fundamentalist vice president, who
remains the president's pit bull when it comes to
the shrinking Republican base, is perhaps the last
priestly guardian of the old language of the Iraq
war. As in a recent appearance on the Rush
Limbaugh show, Dick ("last throes") Cheney now
regularly fulminates against Democratic advocates
of "withdrawal from Iraq" whose defeatist policies
simply play "right into the hands of al Qaeda…
[T]hey're betting… that they can break our will,
that they can, in fact, force the American people
to retreat, that we'll finally get tired of the
battle and go home, and then they win."
Despite the specter of the terrorists
taking full possession of victory, Cheney alone
seems not to have let winning loose from his
grasp. "We will," he typically told the gathered
grandees of the Heritage Foundation, "press on in
this mission, and we will turn events towards
victory."
Along with the brighter side of
the administration's war in words, a darker, more
fearful side, too, has fled the scene. In
2005-2006, as administration officials were coming
up with one explanation after another for why a
civil war visibly underway in Iraq actually
wasn't, another set of images crept into
officialese. Americans and Iraqis were, it was
increasingly said, approaching (or prudently
stepping back from) "the precipice"; they were at
"the brink"; they were looking down into "the
abyss"; they were dealing with a situation in
which "Pandora's box" itself had been opened.
A year later, civil war is a given - even
the Pentagon has acknowledged it. And yet, on the
landscape of official imagery, there's hardly a
lurid or crisis image in sight. That was, after
all, so last year.
In fact, with rare
exceptions, the language of Bush's Washington (and
Baghdad) has been swept remarkably clean of the
past - and, on the tabula rasa of no-image,
in place of everything that once was there, a new
set of words and images has been implanted.
Consciously or not, these mine a deep strain in
our national mythology: the belief in an
all-American right to a second chance, to light
out for the territories and start anew.
As
a description of reality on the ground in a
country wracked by mass killing, flight,
destruction, civil war, religious strife, ethnic
cleansing, vast flows of refugees, private
militias, insurgents, terrorists, foreign jihadis,
criminals, and kidnappers, this new language may
be out to lunch, but in terms of its appeal on the
"home front," it has in its crosshairs the deepest
realms of the American character.
A new
dawn in Baghdad? As this year began, the
president was already touting the 2007 strategy
model for Iraq, a "new plan to secure Baghdad". In
his most recent radio address, he said: "The
American people voted for change in Iraq [in
November 2006], and that is exactly what our new
commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is
working to achieve."
Over four years after
the president officially launched the invasion of
Iraq with a Disneyesque shock-and-awe spectacular
over Baghdad, almost four years after he declared
"major combat operations in Iraq have ended"
against the backdrop of a banner that read
"mission accomplished," all is again "new" in that
country. If the pronouncements of his top military
and civilian officials were to be believed, we are
now at the dawn of a new military/political moment
in Iraq, the kind of moment in which you just
can't help using words like "first" and "early"
and "beginning". It's so early, in fact, that no
one can possibly gauge whether the president's
"new plan", now two months old on-the-ground, is
working - and it will be many months more (for the
fair-minded, anyway) before the rudiments of such
an assessment can be hazarded.
After all,
the full contingent of new "surge" combat troops
won't even be in place until June. As Lieutenant
General Ray Odierno, commander of Multinational
Corps-Iraq, has pointed out, even thinking about
thinking about the new plan is going to be
inappropriate for some time to come. "I plan," he
said recently, "on making a first assessment
probably sometime in the summer, July or August
time frame, where I'll give my recommendation to
General Petraeus, and then he'll take a look at
that and make his recommendation up the chain of
command."
President Bush has made the same
point this way: "[T]his operation is just getting
started"; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
similarly pointed out that the surge was still
only "at the beginning"; Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates declared this "early in the process",
way too early, in fact, for any judgments.
"Premature" was the word he used. "It's sort of
like we keep pulling this tree up by the roots to
see if it's growing... And, you know, I think
General Petraeus has said the end of the summer";
General Petraeus, the much-lauded strategist
running the counterinsurgency operation in
Baghdad, helpfully pointed out that the operation
is "still early days".
Senator John
McCain, on returning from his stroll around that
Baghdad market, pleaded for time for the - to pick
up on Gates' image - sapling of strategy to grow.
"It is my obligation," he told the assembled
cadets of the Virginia Military Academy, "to
encourage Americans to give it a chance to
succeed."
This is a babe of a plan about
which our top officials are being suitably
cautious, as you would be with any creature that
was just wobbling to its feet for the first time.
However, they can't help but be optimistic. And so
they are - from the president ("there are some
encouraging signs… we're beginning to see some
progress toward the mission") to the
vice-president ("We've got a new commander in the
field… I think we are making progress") to that
commander ("encouraging indicators") to his
lieutenant Odierno ("steady progress is being
made") to presidential hopeful McCain ("the first
glimmers of progress under General Petraeus'
political-military strategy… [are] cause for very
cautious optimism"), and on down through the
serried ranks.
Administration-backing
pundits, themselves cautiously dipping toes in
water, nonetheless agree on every count, touting
cautious optimism and, like Senator McCain,
pleading for Americans - and especially Democrats
- to give war a chance. As David Brooks of the New
York Times put the matter on the Lehrer News Hour:
"[T]here's a lot more good news than a lot of us
would have expected. And the fact is, this
deserves a shot to play out over a few months,
until August, and then we can, I think, make other
decisions." Charles Krauthammer of the Washington
Post, in a piece entitled "The Surge: First
Fruits" offered this bit of upbeat but cautious
optimism: "The news from Anbar [province] is the
most promising." Like Brooks, he worries, however,
that the child may be smothered in the crib by
you-know-who: "How at this point - with only about
half of the additional surge troops yet deployed -
can Democrats be trying to force the United States
to give up?"
And, talking about a
tabula rasa world of war words, let's not
forget "Plan B". The question arose early in 2007
of what - if the surge should somehow fail
somewhere down the road - "Plan B" might be for
the Bush administration. Of course, it's a passing
advantage of the image itself that the president's
surge strategy then becomes, by definition, Plan
A. Those who bother to mention Plan A confirm
this. In March, for instance, in a White House
meeting with some state governors, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace spoke to the
question of Plan B. "Pace had a simple way of
summarizing the administration's position,
Governor Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. ‘Plan B
was to make Plan A work.'" Ah! Brilliant. No
wonder Secretary of State Rice concurred. In
response to a challenge from Senator John Kerry
about what might happen if Prime Minister Maliki's
government didn't live up to "the assurances they
gave us", Rice replied: "I don't think you go to
Plan B. You work with Plan A."
Republican
Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, testing the
presidential waters, added this gem: "When people
start asking what's plan B, let's go to plan A.
Plan A, let's win. Plan B, let's win. If we have
to come up with another plan, let's win." While
Senator McCain, in a front-page New York Times
interview, simply threw his proverbial hands up
and admitted: "I have no Plan B. If I saw that
doomsday scenario evolving, then I would try to
come up with one."
No one seemed to wonder
if the American playbook, now over four years old,
really only consisted of the first two letters in
our alphabet; nor did anyone ask what, in fact,
all those other confused plans the Bush
administration put in place in Iraqi occupation
years one through four were. Instead Plan B, like
all those firsts and earlys, those uprooted
saplings and encouraging initial steps offered an
all-American composite image of starting over from
scratch.
All of this, of course, is an
extraordinary language in which to frame events in
Iraq so many disastrous years after the invasion,
with history's judgment already weighing so
heavily on our president's plan to take down
Saddam and recreate "the Greater Middle East" in
an American image. All of this is no less
extraordinary - verging on obscenity - as a
collective description of a world of death,
destruction, and mayhem in which, in a completely
unremarkable Iraqi day - this Monday - the "early"
tallies showed six GIs and 69 Iraqis killed and 39
wounded (and we're only talking about immediately
reported bodies here); while on the previous day,
five GIs, two Britons, and 109 Iraqis died (with
173 were wounded), and on the day before that, 164
Iraqis were killed, 345 injured, and 26 kidnapped.
In terms only of the recorded dead of those three
"normal" days of "stability and security" under
the president's "surge" plan, we're talking, in
terms of the dead, about the equivalent of more
than 12 Virginia-Tech-style massacres.
Americans, who notoriously don't put much
faith in history, put a great deal of faith in
newness. So the president's "surge" plan has been
polished new as a gleaming apple. Forget that this
isn't the first time American troops have "surged"
into Baghdad and that just about every element of
the plan is old as Methuselah - and has already
failed in Iraq or somewhere else. Take, for
instance, the decision to turn numerous
neighborhoods in Baghdad into what are now being
called (in another triumph of ludicrously upbeat
naming), "gated communities". These will be
patterned on "gated communities" previously tested
out in the cities of Tal Afar and Falluja (with
grim results). Those gatings had more of the
Orwellian than Californian about them and were
more like incarceration centers than Century
Villages. Over-elaborate as they sound, these
"gated communities" are undoubtedly doomed to
fail. Not only did the French try something
similar in Algeria, but we lived through the rural
equivalent - "strategic hamlets" - in Vietnam and
they were a disaster.
In the end, all of
this is likely to prove but another linguistic
strategy for buying time and the military men
tasked with carrying the plan out surely know
that. Lieutenant General Odierno, for example,
commented recently: "If we're able to create the
security and stability within Iraq, that then buys
the time"; while General Petraeus put the matter
vividly indeed:
... The Washington clock
is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, so
we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad
clock a bit and to produce some progress on the
ground that can perhaps give hope to those in the
coalition countries, in Washington, and perhaps
put a little more time on the Washington clock.
So think of the new Bush
administration language of war as a kind of
installment plan, a time-buying operation, a
desperate attempt to wipe out a disastrous four
years (as well as the results of the recent
midterm elections and every opinion poll in
sight). Don't think of it as a plan for victory,
or even a plan for the security of the city-state
of Baghdad. It is, in the end, an administration
attempt, while the "clock" ticks less than
encouragingly, to creep through at least to
November 2008, or to Plan B or C or Z, anything
that will keep defeat away from the door for a few
months more.
Calling names by their
things in Iraq Among the stranger aspects
of the war is this: at least three foundational
pieces of the American occupation of Iraq have
essentially gone nameless. Yet, without them, the
last years can make little sense. Amid the endless
interviews, news conferences, press briefings,
radio addresses, speeches, and talk radio and
television interviews that come out of this
administration in weekly, if not daily, surges -
the tens upon tens of thousands of words that pour
from Washington and the Green Zone of Baghdad -
these three subjects remain largely unmentioned,
largely uncovered in a media that has relied so
heavily on the administration's framing of the
issues. Where there is no language, of course,
things exist in consciousness in, at best, the
most shadowy of forms, leaving Americans
tongue-tied on matters of genuine import.
Here they are in brief order:
Air Power: Consider a recent
exchange between a reporter and Secretary of
Defense Gates
Q: Can you
talk a little bit about the bombing today in Iraq?
Gates: I don't know much
more about it than you all do.
Even if you
know nothing about the actual subject of this
question, you should automatically know one thing:
It wasn't about American air power. In fact, the
reporter was bringing up the recent suicide
bombing inside a cafeteria in the Iraqi parliament
building. But in both Iraq and Afghanistan,
there's a simple rule of these last years: They
bomb, we don't. If you Google the words "bombing"
and "Iraq," you'll see what I mean.
Air
power has long been the American way of war. In
fact, the use of air power with all its
indiscriminate terror has, in the last year,
ratcheted up strikingly in Afghanistan and may now
be in the process of doing the same in Iraq. (It's
hard to tell without the necessary reporting.)
Journalists in Baghdad evidently do not look up -
and military press briefers don't point to the
skies. We have, in fact, been bombing and
missiling in heavily populated urban areas of Iraq
throughout the occupation years. But no
descriptive language has been developed that would
capture in any significant way the loosing of the
US Air Force on either country; and so, in a
sense, the regular (if, in Iraq, still limited)
use of air power has next to no reality for
Americans, even though Iraq's skies are filled
with attack helicopters, jets, and drones.
Permanent bases: Every now
and then some political figure mentions the
possibility of, at some future moment, withdrawing
American troops into the vast,
multi-billion-dollar permanent bases that have
been (and are still being) constructed in Iraq.
Some of these are large enough to be small
American towns (with their own multiple bus
routes). Balad Air Base, for example, along with
its 20,000 troops and its contractors, has air
traffic that rivals Chicago's O'Hare Airport. At
least four such mega-bases were planned before the
invasion began. Early on, they were called
"enduring camps" by the Pentagon, which had charm
as well as a certain rudimentary accuracy. But
over these years, the bases have rarely been
mentioned by the administration and seldom
attended to by the media. They remain a major
fact-on-the-ground in Iraq - and in Bush
administration plans for that country - but we
have next to no real language for taking in their
massive reality, so they remain a non-issue,
nearly nonexistent in American debate about Iraq.
Most "withdrawal" plans now being offered
by our Congressional representatives, for
instance, only account for the withdrawal of
"combat brigades," not troops guarding the bases,
which means, of course, that after most imagined
"withdrawals," these vast bases are to remain well
staffed. Little wonder Iraqis of just about every
stripe are suspicious of us and our intentions in
their country. And what descriptive language is
there for what Washington Post online columnist
William Arkin calls "a Pentagon-like military
headquarters in the Green Zone" or the "largest
embassy in the universe", also being built in that
massively fortified citadel in the heart of the
Iraqi capital. When an embassy is to have a
"staff" of many thousands, along with its own
water and electricity systems, and its own
anti-missile defenses, the very word "embassy" no
longer has much meaning. We have no word for such
a symbol of (attempted) permanent domination of a
country and so, most of the time, nothing much is
said.
Mercenaries: When the
mainstream media speaks of the approximately
170,000 troops that will be in Iraq after the
surge or "plus-up" is theoretically complete, they
are perpetrating a fiction. As a start, just about
no one counts the support troops in Kuwait, on
ships off the coast, or in the region generally,
which would certainly bring the figure up closer
to 250,000. And it's rare to see anyone discussing
the hordes of mercenaries, known politely as
"private contractors", on the ground in Iraq
working for rent-a-cop corporations. These range
in number from the Pentagon's division-sized
estimate of 20,000 up to 100,000, depending on how
(and who) you decide to count. As part of the
privatizing of the American military, they are
undertaking various military and semi-military
duties and have, as a group, recently been
classified, according to Jeremy Scahill, as "an
official part of the US war machine".
They
are a force (or a rabble) beyond control, beyond
the law. (Not a single hired gun has yet been
brought up on charges for any of their lawless
acts in Iraq.) Their numbers, like their
casualties, are essentially unknown; their tasks,
largely unexplored; and, as "private contractor"
indicates, there is no suitable descriptive
language for them either. As a result, there is
little way for Americans to grasp the essential
lawlessness of the American occupation of Iraq,
the real numbers involved in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or just how far our former citizen
military has gone down the path to becoming a
mercenary military.
With these key aspects
of the invasion, occupation, and destruction of
Iraq - for which language has failed us so badly -
missing in action, much in the situation remains
hidden, mysterious, even incomprehensible to us,
though not necessarily to the Iraqis or, in many
cases, to readers and viewers elsewhere on the
planet.
The developing administration
language for the president's surge plan in Baghdad
(and al-Anbar province) does several things. It
manufactures "newness" from some of the older and
less promising materials around; it creates a
"new" plan out of ancient, failed strategies, not
to say, the thinnest of air. It also strips Iraq
of some of its recent horrendous past, and us of
our responsibility for it. In this case at least,
that is what "starting over" really means.
This new, hopeful language offers one
group - and only one - a "second" chance: the top
officials of an administration that otherwise
looked to be in its last throes. It has bought a
little time for George W Bush, while adding some
new twisted definitions to an American Devil's
Dictionary of War in Iraq, all the while carefully
leaving blank pages where significant definitional
chunks of reality should be.
But make no
mistake, whatever words may be wielded, that
"clock" of General Petraeus's is indeed ticking -
loudly enough to be a bomb. Sooner or later, it
will go off and whether it proves to be an alarm,
waking Congress and the American people, or an
explosion demolishing some aspect of our world
remains unknown. In June or August or October,
when horrific reality in Iraq outpaces whatever
the Bush administration tries to call it, we may
have our answer and perhaps then reality will name
us.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the
Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and,
most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with
American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation
Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
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