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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Seven years in
hell By Tom Engelhardt
failed practices in each of the
many smaller interventions, invasions and wars
launched from the invasion of Grenada through the
first Gulf War in 1991, Somalia and the Kosovo air
war.
The Bush administration began
similarly, if more confidently, in opposites mode;
for they expected that, as the sole superpower on
a modest-sized planet with the mightiest military
in sight, victory would be theirs in a "cakewalk",
to use a winning word of
that
moment. It would also happen in the most obvious
of ways - the taking of the enemy capital, the
destruction (or as they liked to say,
"decapitation") of the enemy regime, and the
long-term garrisoning of American forces on
gigantic bases in the Iraqi countryside (not to
speak of the bouquets that were to be thrown by
thrilled Shi'ites at the feet of the invading
"liberators").
Vietnam? They'd skip it
entirely - and all its notorious ways. As General
Tommy Franks, who ran the Afghan war, so famously
said: "We don't do body counts."
Jump
almost five years to October 2006 and a president
thoroughly frustrated by an inability to show
"progress" in his war of choice, despite
proclaiming that "major combat operations in Iraq"
had "ended" in May 2003 and presenting a national
strategy for victory in Iraq in November 2005. In
an outburst to a group of sympathetic conservative
journalists, he revealed just how much he yearned
for the return of the body count: "We don't get to
say that - a thousand of the enemy killed, or
whatever the number was. It's happening. You just
don't know it," he exclaimed in frustration.
And why exactly couldn't the president
reveal that figure - of which he was inordinately
proud - to the American people? "We have made a
conscious effort not to be a body-count team," was
what Bush told the assembled journalists and
pundits, indicating in the process how much
conscious planning for Iraq as the not-Vietnam had
actually taken place in the White House as well as
the Pentagon. (Of course, as the Washington Post's
Bob Woodward pointed out, the president privately
kept a body count, "his own personal scorecard for
the war in the form of photographs with brief
biographies and personality sketches of those
judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists
- each ready to be crossed out by the president as
his forces took them down".)
Not so long
after Bush made his body-count comments, the body
count itself returned as military spokespeople in
Iraq and Afghanistan began releasing numbers of
enemy killed in "coalition" military operations.
Six months or so later, the body count has already
become a commonplace as typical recent headlines
indicate: "US, Iraqis kill 33 insurgents"; "Over
100 Taliban killed in Afghan battle."
In
his "Vietnam" speech, the president finally got to
salve his own frustration. "In Iraq," he told his
audience, "our troops are taking the fight to the
extremists and radicals and murderers all
throughout the country. Our troops have killed or
captured an average of more than 1,500 al-Qaeda
terrorists and other extremists every month since
January of this year."
Forgetting the
absurdity of the figure (which, if accurate, would
essentially mean al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia has been
wiped out), let's just note that, as with the
Vietnam analogy itself, the body count in
administration hands arrives not as a substitute
for victory, but as a way of staving off thoughts
of defeat. The president, that is, picked up not
where the body count started in Vietnam, but where
those five o'clock follies left off.
In
its own strange way, Bush's speech was an
admission of defeat. Somehow, Vietnam, the
American nightmare, had finally bested the man who
spent his youth avoiding it and his presidency
evading it. The president had finally mounted the
tiger you are always advised not to ride and had
officially entered the dead zone, where the bodies
pile high and victory never appears, taking the
rest of the country with him. It's clear that,
barring some stunning development in Iraq (or
perhaps an assault on Iran), whatever the
"progress reports", whatever the debates, that's
where we'll be until January 2009, when it will
automatically become Hillary Clinton's or Barack
Obama's or Mitt Romney's or Rudy Giuliani's war.
(From the Vietnam years, we also know what happens
when a president, who inherits a war, fears being
labeled the person who "lost" it; we know just how
hard it is to get out then.)
'Greatest
force for liberation the world has ever seen'
Arriving 40 years after the Vietnam War
ended, the war in Iraq has turned out to be its
spiritual twin in the American pantheon of
disaster and defeat. But what a 40 years they
were! In fact, if in all sorts of ways Iraq wasn't
actually Vietnam, then the United States of 2003
wasn't the US of the Vietnam era either. Not by a
long shot.
The president's Vietnam speech
was a clever historical montage, if you assume
that no one remembers anything about the past. As
it happens, almost every line of the speech has
since been analyzed, attacked and dismembered by
critics, pundits and historians who do remember.
But in all the commentary, one line - perhaps the
most striking - slipped by uncommented on. And yet
it was the line that offered an entry ramp onto
the royal road to understanding what exactly has
changed in the US over the post-Vietnam decades,
not to speak of the seven-plus years from hell of
the Bush administration.
Here's what the
president said to applause from the assembled
vets:
I'm confident that we will prevail.
I'm confident we'll prevail because we have the
greatest force for human liberation the world
has ever known - the men and women of the United
States Armed Forces.
Let's stop on
that breathtaking, near messianic claim for a
moment. Try, as a start, putting it in the mouths
of presidents John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or
even Richard Nixon, no less Gerald Ford. Or try
imagining Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great
civil war that would indeed lead to the
emancipation of the slaves, saying something of
the sort; or Dwight D Eisenhower, a former general
who had led a great "crusade" - it was his word of
choice for the title of his memoir - to free
Europe in World War II but would be the first to
warn of a "military-industrial complex" as his
presidency ended.
Past American presidents
might perhaps have spoken of the "greatest force
for human liberation" as being "the American way
of life" or "the American dream", or American
democracy, or the thinking of the Founding
Fathers. But it took a genuine transformation in,
and the full-scale militarization of, that way of
life, for such a formulation to become
presidentially conceivable, no less to pass
unnoticed, even by fierce critics, in a speech
practically every word of which was combed for
meaning.
Now, read the speech again and
you'll see that the line in question wasn't simply
passing blather for an audience of vets, but a
thematic summary of the thrust of the whole
address, of, in fact, the very vision the Bush
administration and supporting neo-conservatives
carried into office. Much has been said about the
Christian fundamentalist nature of the
administration, but if that had truly been the
essence of these last years, the president would
have identified Jesus Christ as that "greatest
force".
Not that a distinction need be
made, but this administration's primary
fundamentalism has been that of born-again
militarists, of believers in the efficacy of force
as embodied in the most awe-inspiring, high-tech
military on the planet. This was the idol at which
its top officials worshipped when it came to
foreign policy. They were in awe of the idea that
they had at their command the best equipped, most
powerful military the world had ever seen, armed
to the teeth with techno-toys; already garrisoning
much of the globe (and about to garrison more of
it); already on the receiving end of vast inflows
of taxpayer dollars (and about to receive
staggeringly more of the same); already embedded
in a sprawling network of corporate interests (and
about to be significantly privatized into the
hands of even more such corporations); already
having divided most of the globe into military
"commands" that were essentially viceroy-ships
(and about to finish the job by creating a command
for the "homeland," NORTHCOM, and for the
previously forgotten, suddenly energy-hot
continent of Africa, AFRICOM.
In the wake
of September 11, 2001, these fundamentalist
believers in the power of One to twist all other
arms on the planet
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