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2 A 'surge' in the wrong
direction By Julian
Delasantellis
For the more than 35 million
Americans who tune in every week, the Fox Network
program American Idol presents a television
experience like none other. They wait breathlessly
for their favorite contestant, and when his or her
time arrives, they, like the studio audience, are
frequently overcome with orgiastic adoration and
adulation, many even spending substantial sums to
text-message votes for their favorites from their
mobile phones.
If the voting for
American Idol were limited to the 250
Republican members of the US Congress, legislators
who, by their votes, still
overwhelmingly support
President George W Bush's Iraq policies, there
would be none of the show's signature drama or
tension over who their choice would be. Judging
from the gushing praise and adoration they
currently publicly bestow on him, their choice
would be no one other than General David Petraeus,
since January the US military commander in Iraq
tasked to implement Bush's troop "surge".
In an earlier article [1] I introduced
readers to the "new" (the first since Vietnam) US
military counterinsurgency doctrine, FM 3-24,
authored last year by Petraeus (at that time
commander of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a position
that put him in charge of the army's Command and
General Staff College) along with US Marine Corps
General James F Amos.
As the new doctrine
was being developed last year, it attracted
significant public and media attention, since its
policy prescriptions seemed to represent a fairly
explicit rejection of the manner in which the Iraq
war had been fought up to that time, especially as
regards the US military's seeming penchant for
employing disproportionate levels of force in
civilian areas.
Petraeus and Amos warned,
"Counterinsurgents should carefully calculate the
type and amount of force and who wields it for any
operation. An operation that kills five insurgents
is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to
the recruitment of 50 more insurgents."
The seemingly fresh perspective and
approach offered by Petraeus made him a bipartisan
favorite on Capitol Hill, and on January 27 the
Senate unanimously confirmed him as the new US
military commander in Iraq. He replaced General
George Casey, who, along with all six members of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was less than
enthusiastic (to put it mildly) about the wisdom
of Bush's policy of adding five new combat
brigades, along with support forces, to the US
military presence in Iraq; this policy initiative
is commonly known as the "surge".
The
effectiveness of the surge is certainly an open
question in Iraq, but it has had a dramatic effect
in the United States. Among the Republican
supporters of the president's policies in Iraq, a
cult of personality has developed around Petraeus
and his officers that would put North Korea's Kim
Jong-il to shame. As California Congressman David
Dreir said, "This [the 'surge'] isn't the
president's plan. This is General Petraeus' plan.
This is his plan we're talking about."
This, of course, is demonstrably untrue -
the "surge", like the war itself, is another
product of the "field marshals" of US
neo-conservatism, in this case American Enterprise
Institute civilian strategists Frederick Kagan and
Danielle Pletka, along with retired US Army
General Jack Keene. Still, if there is one thing
that recent revelations about the Iraq war,
including those by former Central Intelligence
Agency director George Tenet, have proved, it is
that truth is very rarely a critical component of
either policy creation or advocacy.
On May
8, on the MSNBC television show Hardball with
Chris Matthews, Republican Congresswoman
Marcia Blackburn stated, "General David Petraeus
came to the Senate. He laid out his plan ... We
need to get the troops on the field. My goodness,
all the troops are not even there that should be
there to return to the levels that are needed to
carry out his plan. He is a good man that
understands how to fight terrorists. He is over
there to win."
Whatever warm place the
late Augusto Pinochet resides in now, the former
Chilean junta leader must take no small measure of
solace that so many important Americans have come
around to his governing philosophy - that only the
military is qualified to make policy prescriptions
on national-security issues.
The
supporters of the "surge" may have little idea how
to deal with the ongoing Iraqi insurgency, but
what the Petraeus idolatry has done is to deal
effectively with the real threat to the current
administration's way of life, the US Democratic
Party's ongoing insurgency against the president's
Iraq policies.
Congressional Democrats
supported Petraeus when it seemed that he was
offering an informed critique of the
administration's policies; when he was appointed
in essence to continue those policies, the
Democrats found themselves outflanked, unable to
make a coherent argument in opposition in the
battle for public opinion. The Republicans know
very well that the Democrats, many of whom cut
their teeth in political activism as anti-Vietnam
War activists, are massively hesitant to go
anywhere near advocacy of a policy position that
might open them up to a repeat of the false but
devastating charge that the Vietnam-era anti-war
left, by not "supporting the troops", lost that
war.
Also, the supporters of the "surge"
know they must shift ownership of the policy away
from a wildly unpopular president. Newsweek
reports that Bush's approval rating, at 28%, has
fallen to the low point of his presidency, and the
lowest reading of any US president since Jimmy
Carter in 1979. More important, the Rasmussen
polling agency reports that, on any given day, at
least three times as many Americans, close to 50%
of the population, report that they "strongly
disapprove" of the president as those who say they
"strongly approve".
After the failed 1961
invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba that is now known
as the Bay of Pigs, president John F Kennedy
accepted responsibility for the fiasco by saying
that "success has many fathers, but failure is an
orphan". In trying to divert attention and
responsibility for the policy disaster that is
Iraq away from Bush, the supporters of the "surge"
are like a wealthy family that go into panic mode
when the poor village servant girl shows up at the
front door of the mansion with a newborn baby in
her arms. If it were as easy to do DNA tests on
policies as it is on infants, it would be readily
seen that what is now being called the "Petraeus
Plan" (ie, "the surge") bears the unmistakable
parentage of George W Bush.
The core
policy prescription of the Petraeus/Amos way of
counterinsurgency was the warning against use of
excessive force. Petraeus has said that use of
excessive and disproportionate force, in which he
included torture and maltreatment of civilians,
contributes to what he called the "recuperative
power" of an insurgency, in which combat losses
among the ranks of the insurgents are easily
replaced with friends and relatives of the dead
outraged by the brutal tactics employed by the
counterinsurgents.
In the case of the
current US military effort in Iraq, this would
mean avoidance of the employment of high-explosive
artillery or air strikes in civilian areas. This
firepower, he argued, frequently brought more new
enemies to the battlefield than they killed.
As I predicted in my January 12 article,
there is absolutely no indication that the new
Petraeus counterinsurgency paradigm is having much
influence with the mid-level officers who are
actually conducting the day-to-day tactical
operations in Iraq. Indiscriminate applications of
excessive force may have alienated much the Iraqi
population into at least tacit support of the
insurgency, but they also prevent the need for US
ground commanders to send lightly protected
infantry troops into dangerous situations on the
ground, and this factor continues to be paramount
in the calculations of current ground force
commanders.
On May 8, the McClatchy News
Service (and no other major US news outlet)
reported:
Around 10:30am, an American
helicopter opened fire on a primary school at
al-Nida [9 kilometers northwest of Mendli],
killing seven pupils and injuring three other
pupils, with huge damage to the school building.
Eyewitnesses confirmed this report while the
American side said that they opened fire on the
building after being fired from it.
Think of every parent, sibling or
extended relative of the seven dead schoolchildren
now willing to die to avenge their deaths
and
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