Page 2 of
2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
Petraeus moment blots out the
world By Tom Engelhardt
situation in
Iraq will be predictably worse, predictably more
precarious, and predictably surprising to the
general and the ambassador.
As aids for
his testimony, Petraeus had brought along a
profusion of enormous multicolored charts to
illustrate his points. Many of them - amazingly
enough - seemed to have more or less the same
blue, red, or yellow lines, each of which crested
about mid-
chart and then in essence
nosedived toward the present moment. The message
was clear: good news on the numbers! Everything's
falling! You didn't need an expert - in essence,
you didn't need to know a thing - to find the
confluence of those descending lines with the
general's appearance in Washington a tad tidy.
As for me, I found it hard to believe that
those charts hadn't been recycled from the Vietnam
era, when Petraeus' equivalent, the late General
William Westmoreland, used similar brightly
colored, bar-coded, son-et-lumiere aids to
wow visiting congressional delegations with the
metrics of "progress" in his war. Now, once again,
we're knee-deep in the Big Metric, flooded with so
many different kinds of stats that you can hardly
tell one from another (though most involve dead
bodies). If you remember the Vietnam era, there's
a simple rule here: when the top brass hauls out
the pretty charts, duck ...
In the
meantime, mind you, this is Iraq, where nothing
has been orderly. Everything was, we were assured,
to proceed in an orderly fashion, summed up in the
general's wonderfully tidy if somewhat
Orwellian-sounding formula, "from leading to
partnering to overwatch".
Hmmm ...
"overwatch". I wonder who first woke up in a sweat
in the middle of the night with that lovely term
on the brain? I wonder what it even means? I
wonder where we'll be "overwatching" from? Perhaps
from that monstrous embassy that we've almost
completed in Baghdad, the largest on this or any
other planet, or from our vast permanent-seeming
base towns like the one with the 27-kilometer
security perimeter that Bush visited in Iraq's
western desert, but which no reporter accompanying
him even thought to describe for us.
(Oh,
back in November, that base, as a British reporter
described it, already had the requisite pizza and
Subway sandwich outlets, a football field, a Hertz
Rent-a-Car office, a swimming pool, a movie
theater showing the latest flicks, and two bus
routes.)
Like Eliza, I'm for skipping the
words at this point. After all, what does all the
talk mean if, in September 2007, the US is
building yet another base in Iraq, this time near
the Iranian border, as the Wall Street Journal
reported on Monday? The military describes it as a
"life-support area" - don't ask me what that means
- with this added definition: it's "not really
permanent, although it will be manned 24/7 and
will be used for as long as necessary".
What does all the talk mean if, as the
Washington Post's indefatigable Walter Pincus
noted, also on Monday, the US Commerce Department
is looking for a new legal adviser for Iraq with a
contract running through July 31, 2008, plus two
possible 12-month extensions? (There we are in
2010 again!) This adviser is to help the poor,
ignorant Iraqis as "they draft the laws and
regulations that will govern Iraq's oil-and-gas
sector".
After all, as the proposal makes
clear, the Commerce Department (US, not Iraqi)
"will be providing technical assistance to Iraq to
create a legal and tax environment conducive to
domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key
economic sectors, starting with the
mineral-resources sector". And "conducive" is just
such a nice word! Even nicer than "sovereignty".
What do the words mean, if the far edge of
Armageddon, as defined in Washington or in
military-insider politics, leaves enough US troops
in Iraq to fill a couple of baseball stadiums - or
several gigantic bases - in 2010?
At some
level, the situation seems remarkably
uncomplicated, if you skip the words (and the
words about the words). As has always been true,
the top figures of the Bush administration remain
completely unmoved by, and unmovable by, words
that, as is well known, are only meant to move
other people: the Republicans in Congress - after
all this time, despite all the dismal polling
figures - are still on bended knee to the Bush
administration, so powerless that they feel
incapable of striking off on their own.
(Senator John Warner, who isn't even
seeking re-election, recently begged the president
to please, please, pretty please, send home a few
thousand troops, any troops at all, and call it a
day. And, in his testimony, General Petraeus threw
the senator a carefully gnawed bone, agreeing to
do just that.)
The congressional Democrats
are too weak (and divided) to change policy - and
let's be honest, even if they did, this
administration would undoubtedly pay no attention
whatsoever to anything they mandated. The
Republican candidates for president (minus the
maverick Ron Paul, who isn't really a Republican
at all) have bowed down low before presidential
Iraq policy, as if before a pagan idol in the
desert, in search of the "base vote".
Democratic candidates for president (Bill
Richardson and Denis Kucinich excepted) are
running "tough" (which means running scared and
cautious) on Iraq. If, in 2008, the war actually
proves good for business at the polls for
Democrats, then, to their consternation, they'll
find they've just inherited a disastrous war, that
they're likely to be blamed for losing, and that
they're in charge of hell, not the Oval Office or
Congress. (And note that, out of kindness to all
of you, I'm not even mentioning Iran ... though
there was that nice, giant block of type over
Iranian territory on a Petraeus-displayed map
labeled "Major Threats to Iraq" that said: "Lethal
Aid, Training, Funding".)
Given this
lineup of forces, how could it have been anything
but "words, words, words" in Washington, even
while it was death, death, death in Iraq?
What those words do, however, is fill all
available space, reinforcing a powerful sense that
Washington's importance in the scheme of things is
the one unquestionable reality on our planet. The
rest of the world hardly registers, except in the
mode of frustration.
Is there a single
ounce of humility anywhere in Washington? Can we
even imagine that, somewhere on Earth, someone
doesn't think about us?
Petraeus, always
identified as having "earned a PhD in
international relations from Princeton University
as a young officer", is said to be a man with a
high regard for his own reputation. Hasn't he
noticed, then, that for one extra star and his 15
minutes of fame, he has made himself the fourth
commander of US forces in Iraq in less than five
years?
Each of those commanders had a
plan. Each was confident. Each claimed "progress".
And, once upon a time, each was embraced by Bush
as the man to give him "advice". Ambassador
Crocker is similarly the fourth American civilian
viceroy to head up our caliphate of Baghdad. He
now has "carte blanche" there. But carte
blanche to do what?
Could these men
really believe that, with them, the occupation of
a crucial country in the embattled oil heartlands
of the planet would finally head down the
roadside-bomb-pocked path of success? Is the
vanity of US officials as great as that? Was it
really worth turning so many Iraqis into red and
blue lines, into military metrics?
To
grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to
re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks
behind the wheels of so many sport-utility
vehicles tearing down a well-populated city avenue
- and all of them are on their cell phones.
They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off
the fenders. For them, the world is
Washington-centered; all interests that matter are
American ones. Nothing else exists, not really.
Think of this as a form of imperial autism, and
the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White
House and official Washington have, for a brief
time, blotted out the world.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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