DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Already counting to
six By Tom Engelhardt
Please don't write in with a correction. I
know just as well as you do that we're approaching
the fifth, not the sixth, anniversary of the
moment when, on March 19, 2003, George W Bush told
the American people:
My fellow citizens, at this hour,
American and coalition forces are in the early
stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to
free its people and to defend the world from
grave danger ... My fellow citizens, the dangers
to our country and the world will be overcome.
We will pass through this time of peril and
carry on the work of peace. We will defend our
freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we
will prevail.
At that moment, of
course, the cruise missiles meant to
"decapitate" Saddam Hussein's
regime, but that killed only Iraqi civilians, were
on their way to Baghdad. I'm perfectly aware that
articles galore will be looking back on the five
years since that day. This is not one of them.
Think of this piece as in the spirit of
Senator John McCain's recent request that
Americans not obsess about the origins of the Iraq
War, but look forward. "On the issue of my
differences with Senator [Barack] Obama on Iraq,"
he typically said, "I want to make it very clear:
This is not about decisions that were made in the
past. This is about decisions that a president
will have to make about the future in Iraq. And a
decision to unilaterally withdraw from Iraq will
lead to chaos."
The future, not the past,
is the mantra, which is why I'm skipping the fifth
anniversary of the Iraq War entirely. Now, let me
ask you a future-oriented question: What's wrong
with these sentences?
On March 19, 2009,
the date of the sixth anniversary of Bush's
invasion of Iraq, as surely as the sun rises in
the East, I'll be sitting here and we will still
have many tens of thousands of troops, a string of
major bases, and massive air power in that
country. In the intervening year, more Americans
will have been wounded or killed; many more Iraqis
will have been wounded or killed; more chaos and
conflict will have ensued; many more bombs will
have been dropped and missiles launched; many more
suicide bombs will have gone off. Iraq will still
be a hell on Earth.
Prediction is, of
course, a risky business. Otherwise I'd now be
commuting via jet pack through spire cities (as
the futuristic articles of my youth so regularly
predicted). If you were to punch holes in the
above sentences, you would certainly have to note
that it's risky for a man of 63 years, or of any
age, to suggest that he'll be sitting anywhere in
a year; riskier yet if you happen to live in those
lands extending from North Africa to Central Asia
that Bush administration officials used to call
the "arc of instability" - essentially the oil
heartlands of the planet - before they turned them
into one.
It's always possible that I
won't be sitting here (or anywhere else, for that
matter) on March 19, 2009. Unfortunately, when it
comes to the American position in Iraq, short of
an act of God, the sixth anniversary of Bush's war
of choice is going to dawn much like the fifth
one.
As a start, you can write off the
next 10 months of our lives, right up to January
20, 2009, inauguration day for the next president.
We know that, last autumn, Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates was considering bringing American
troop strength in Iraq down to 100,000 by the end
of Bush's second term. However, that was, as they
evidently love to say in Washington, just a
"best-case scenario". Since then, the
administration has signaled an end-of-July
drawdown "pause" of unknown duration after
American troop strength in Iraq, now at 157,000,
hits about 142,000.
The president is
clearly dragging his feet on removing even modest
numbers of American troops. As he leaves office,
it seems likely that there will be at least
130,000 US troops in the country, about the same
number as there were before, in February 2007, the
president's "surge" strategy kicked in. In
addition, in the past year, US air power has
"surged" in Iraq - and continues to do so - while
US mega-bases in that country continue to be built
up. As far as we know, there are no plans to
reverse either of these developments by January
20, 2009. No presidential candidate is even
discussing them.
Any official "best-case"
scenario for drawdowns or withdrawals assumes, by
the way, that the version of Iraq created during
the "surge" months - at best, an unstable
combination of Sunni, Shi'ite, Kurdish and
American plans and desires - remains in place and
that Iraqi carnage stays off the front pages of
American papers. This is anything but a given, as
British journalist Patrick Cockburn reported
recently in a piece headlined, "Why Iraq Could
Blow Up in John McCain's Face." Indeed it could.
Best-case scenarios If McCain
were elected president, the American position in
Iraq on March 19, 2009, will certainly be as
described above - and, if he has anything to say
about it, for many anniversaries thereafter. But,
when it comes to the sixth anniversary of the Iraq
War, the truth is that it probably doesn't matter
much who is elected president in November.
Take Hillary Clinton, she's said that
she'll task the joint chiefs, the new secretary of
defense and her National Security Council with
having a plan for (partial) withdrawal in place
within 60 days of coming into office. Since
inauguration day is January 20, that means ...
March 21, or two days after the sixth anniversary;
by which time, of course, nothing would have
changed substantially.
Obama has promised
to remove US "combat" troops at a
one-to-two-brigades-a-month pace over a 16-month
period. So it's possible that troop levels could
drop marginally before March 19, 2009, in an Obama
presidency, but again there is no reason to
believe that anything essential would have
happened to change that "anniversary".
In
addition, the stated plans of both Democratic
candidates, vague and limited as they may be,
might not turn out to be their actual plans. Note
the recent comments of Obama foreign policy
advisor Samantha Powers, who resigned after
calling Clinton a "monster" in an interview with
the Scotsman during a book tour. Since
name-calling will always trump substantive policy
matters in American politics, less noted were her
comments in an interview with the BBC on her
candidate's Iraq withdrawal policy. "He will, of
course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as
a presidential candidate or a US senator," Powers
said and then she referred to Obama's plan as
nothing more than a - you guessed it - "best-case
scenario".
Similarly, a Clinton
sometime-advisor on military matters, retired
General Jack Keane, also one of the authors of
Bush's "surge" strategy, told the New York Sun
that, in the Oval Office, "he is convinced
[Hillary Clinton] would hold off on authorizing a
large-scale immediate withdrawal of American
soldiers from Iraq". And Clinton herself, though
less directly, has certainly hinted at a similar
willingness to reconsider her policy promises in
the light of an Oval Office morning.
So
let's face it, barring an Iraqi surprise, the next
year in that country may be nothing but a wash
(and the lubricant, as in past years, is likely to
be blood). It will be - best-case scenario - a
holding action on the road to nowhere, another
woefully lost year in what has now become
something like a ghost country.
The
children of war To put this in more human
terms: imagine that a child born on March 19,
2003, just as Baghdad was being shock-and-awed,
will be of an age to enter first grade when the
sixth anniversary of Bush's war hits. He or she
will have gone from babbling to talking, crawling
to walking, and will by then possibly be beginning
to read and write.
Of course, an Iraqi
child born on that day, who managed to live to see
his or her sixth birthday, might be among the 2
million-plus Iraqis in exile in Syria or elsewhere
in the Middle East, or among the millions of
internal refugees driven from their homes in
recent years and not in school at all. (Similarly,
a child born on October 7, 2001, when the
president first dispatched American bombers to
strike Afghanistan, will be in second grade in
March 2009; of course, seven-and-a-half years
after being "liberated", an Afghan child,
especially one now living in the southern part of
that failed narco-state, is unlikely to be in
school at all. As with Iraq, we could take some
educated guesses about the situation in
Afghanistan a year from now and they would be grim
beyond words.)
For those children, the
real inheritors of the Bush war era that is not
yet faintly over, the Iraq War has essentially
been the equivalent of an open-ended prison
sentence with little hope of parole; for some
Americans and many Iraqis, including children, it
is a death sentence without hope of pardon. All
this for a country which, even by the standards of
the Bush administration, never presented the
slightest national security threat to the United
States of America.
Only last week, an
"exhaustive" Pentagon-sponsored study of 600,000
captured Iraqi documents confirmed, yet again,
that there were no operational links whatsoever
between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda.
With those children in mind, here's what's
so depressing: in mainstream Washington, hardly
anyone has taken a step outside the box of
conventional, inside-the-Beltway thinking about
Iraq, which is why it's possible to imagine March
19, 2009, with some confidence. For them, the
Washington consensus, such as it is, is the only
acceptable one and the disagreements within it,
the only ones worth having. And here are its eight
fundamentals:
A belief that effective US power must
invariably be based on the threat of, or use of,
dominant force, and so must centrally involve the
US military.
A belief that all answers of any value are to
be found in Washington among the serried ranks of
officials, advisors, former officials, pundits,
think-tank operators and other inside-the-Beltway
movers and shakers, who have been tested over the
years and found never to have a surprise in them.
Most of them are notable mainly for having been
wrong so often. This is called "experience".
A belief that the critics of Washington policy
outside Washington and its consensus are, at best,
gadflies, never worth seriously consulting on
anything.
A belief that the American people, though
endlessly praised in political campaigns, are
know-nothings who couldn't think their way out of
a proverbial paper bag when it comes to the
supposedly arcane science of foreign policy, and
so would certainly not be worth consulting on
"national security" matters or issues involving
the sacred "national interest", which is, in any
case, the property of Washington. Like Iraqis and
Afghans, the American people need good (or even
not so good) shepherds in the national capital to
answer that middle-of-the-night ringing phone and
rescue them from impending harm. (The very
foolishness of Americans can be measured by
opinion polls which indicated that a majority of
them had decided by 2005 that all American troops
should be brought home from Iraq at a reasonable
speed and that the US should not have permanent
military bases in that country.)
A belief that no other countries (or
individuals elsewhere) have anything significant
or original to offer when it comes to solving
problems like the situation in Iraq (unless, of
course, they agree with us). They are to be
ignored, insists the Bush administration, or, say
leading Democrats, "talked to" and essentially
corralled into signing onto, and carrying out, the
solutions the US considers reasonable.
A belief that local peoples are incapable of
solving their own problems without the
intercession of, or the guiding hand (or Hellfire
missile) of, Washington, which means, of course,
of the US military.
A belief that the US - whatever the problem -
must be an essential part of the solution, not
part of the problem itself.
And finally, a belief (though no one would
ever say this) that the lives of those children of
Bush's wars of choice, already of an age to be
given their first lessons in global "realism",
don't truly matter, not when the great game of
geopolitics and energy is at stake.
Of
course, the most recent Washington solution,
involving the endless military occupation (by
whatever name) of alien lands, can "solve"
nothing. The possibilities of genuine improvement
in Iraq or Afghanistan under the ministrations of
the US military are probably nil. And yet, because
the only solutions entertained are variations of
the above, little better lurks in our future at
this moment.
Who would want to speculate
on just how old those children of March 19, 2003,
will actually be before the Iraq War is ended? So
here's my next question: What's wrong with this
sentence?
On March 19, 2010, the date of
the seventh anniversary of Bush's invasion of
Iraq, as surely as the sun rises in the East I'll
be sitting here and we will still have ...
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the
Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project. His
book, The End of Victory Culture
(University of Massachusetts Press), has been
thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that
deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel
in Iraq.
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