Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The corpse on the gurney
By Tom Engelhardt
The other day, as we reached the first anniversary of President George W Bush's
announcement of his "surge" strategy, his "new way forward" in Iraq, I found
myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever did. An editor
at a San Francisco textbook publisher hired me to "doctor" god-awful texts
designed for audiences of captive kids. Each of these "books" was not only in a
woeful state of disrepair, but essentially dead on arrival. I was nonetheless
supposed to do a lively rewrite of the mess and add seductive "sidebars";
another technician then simplified the language to "grade level" and a designer
provided a flashy layout and look. Zap! Pow! Kebang!
During the years that I freelanced for that company in the early 1970s, an
image of what I was doing formed in my mind - and it
suddenly came back to me this week. I used to describe it this way:
The little group of us - rewriter, grade-level reducer, designer - would be
summoned to the publisher's office. There, our brave band of technicians would
be ushered into a room in which there would be nothing but a gurney with a
corpse on it in a state of advanced decomposition. The publisher's
representative would then issue a simple request: make it look like it can get
up and walk away.
And the truth was: that corpse of a book would be almost lifelike when we were
done with it, but one thing was guaranteed - it would never actually get up and
walk away.
That was in another century and a minor matter of bad books that no one wanted
to call by their rightful name. But that image came to mind again more than
three decades later because it's hard not to think of America's Iraq in similar
terms. Only this week, Abdul Qadir, the Iraqi defense minister, announced that
"his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal
security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from
external threat until at least 2018". Pentagon officials, reported Thom Shanker
of the New York Times, expressed no surprise at these dismal post-"surge"
projections, although they were "even less optimistic than those [Qadir] made
last year".
According to this guesstimate then, the US military occupation of Iraq won't
end for, minimally, another 10 years. Bush confirmed this on his recent Mideast
jaunt when, in response to a journalist's question, he said that the US's stay
in Iraq "could easily be" another decade or more.
Folks, our media may be filled with discussions about just how "successful" the
president's "surge" plan has been, but really, Iraq is the corpse in the room.
'Success' as a mantra
Last January, after announcing his "surge" strategy, the president called in
his technicians. As it turned out, General David Petraeus, "surge" commander in
Iraq, has been quite impressive, as has new US ambassador to that country, Ryan
Crocker. Think of them as "the undertakers", since they've been the ones who,
applying their skills, have managed to give that Iraqi corpse the faint glow of
life.
The president asked them to make Iraq look like it could get up and walk away -
and the last year of "success", widely trumpeted in the media, has been the
result. But just think about what the defense minister and Bush are promising:
By 2018, the country will - supposedly - be able to control its own borders,
one of the more basic acts of a sovereign state. That, by itself, tells you
much of what you need to be know.
To achieve an image of lifelike quiescence in Iraq, involving a radical
lowering of "violence" in that country, the general and ambassador did have to
give up the ghost on a number of previous Bush administration passions.
Rebellious al-Anbar province was, for instance, essentially turned over to
members of the community (many of whom had, even according to the Department of
Defense, been fighting Americans until recently). They were then armed and paid
by the US not to make too much trouble.
In the Iraqi capital, on the other hand, the surging American military looked
the other way as, in the first half of 2007, the Shi'ite "cleansing" of mixed
Baghdad neighborhoods reached new heights, transforming it into a largely
Shi'ite city. This may have been the real "surge" in Iraq and, if you look at
new maps of the ethnic make-up of the capital, you can see the startling
results - from which a certain quiescence followed.
Powerful Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a longtime opponent of the Bush
administration, called a "truce" during the surge months and went about purging
and reorganizing his powerful militia, the Mahdi Army. In exchange, the US has
given up, at least temporarily, its goal of wresting control of some of those
neighborhoods from the Sadrists.
Despite hailing the recent passage of what might be called a modest
re-Ba'athification law in the Iraqi Parliament (that may have little effect on
actual government employment), the administration has also reportedly given up
in large part on pushing its highly touted "benchmarks" for the Iraqis to
accomplish. This was to be a crucial part of Iraqi political "reconciliation"
(once described as the key to the success of the whole surge strategy). It has
now been dumped for so-called Iraqi solutions.
All of this, including the lack of US patrolling in Anbar province, the
heartland of the Sunni insurgency, plus the addition of almost 30,000 troops in
Baghdad and environs, has indeed given Iraq a quieter look - especially in the
United States, where Iraqi news has largely disappeared from front pages and
slipped deep into prime-time TV news coverage just as the presidential campaign
of 2008 heats up.
The "surge" was always, in a sense, a gamble for time, a pacification program
directed at the "home front" in the president's "war on terror" as well as at
Iraq itself. And if this is what you mean by "success" in Iraq, Bush has indeed
succeeded admirably. As in the Vietnam era, when president Richard Nixon began
"Vietnamizing" that war, a reduction of American casualties has had the effect
of turning media attention elsewhere.
So another year has now passed in a country that we plunged into an
unimaginable charnel-house state. Whether civilian dead between the invasion of
2003 and mid-2006 (before the worst year of civil-war level violence even hit)
was in the range of 600,000 as a study in the British medical journal, The
Lancet reported or 150,000 as a recent World Health Organization study
suggests, whether two million or 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country,
whether 1.1 million or more than two million have been displaced internally,
whether electricity blackouts and water shortages have marginally increased or
decreased, whether the country's health-care system is beyond resuscitation or
could still be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept back to
the low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields of opium poppies
are, for the first time, spreading across the country's agricultural lands or
still relatively localized, Iraq is a continuing disaster zone on a
catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.
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