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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The last war and the next
one By Tom Engelhardt
The last war won't end, but in the
Pentagon they're already arguing about the next
one.
Let's start with that "last war" and
see if we can get things straight. Just over five
years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in
battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated
government of dictator Saddam Hussein and
declaring Iraq "liberated". In the wake of the
city's fall, after widespread looting, the new
American administrators dismantled the remains of
Saddam's government in its hollowed out, trashed
ministries; disassembled the Sunni-dominated
Ba'athist party which had ruled Iraq since the
1960s, sending its members home with news that
there was no coming
back; dismantled Saddam's
400,000 man army; and began to denationalize the
economy. Soon, an insurgency of outraged Sunnis
was raging against the American occupation.
After initially resisting democratic
elections, American occupation administrators
finally gave in to the will of the leading Shi'ite
clergyman, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and agreed
to sponsor them. In January 2005, these brought
religious parties representing a long-oppressed
Shi'ite majority to power, parties which had
largely been in exile in neighboring Shi'ite Iran
for years.
Now, skip a few years, and US
troops have once again entered Baghdad in battle
mode. This time, they've been moving into the vast
Sadr City Shi'ite slum "suburb" of eastern
Baghdad, which houses perhaps two-and-a-half
million closely packed inhabitants. If
free-standing, Sadr City would be the
second-largest city in Iraq after the capital.
This time, the forces facing American troops
haven't put down their weapons, packed up, and
gone home. This time, no one is talking about
"liberation" or "freedom" or "democracy". In fact,
no one is talking about much of anything.
And no longer is the US attacking Sunnis.
In the wake of President George W Bush's 2007
"surge", the US military is now officially allied
with 90,000 Sunnis of the so-called Awakening
Movement, mainly former insurgents, many of them
undoubtedly once linked to the Ba'athist
government US forces overthrew in 2003. Meanwhile,
American troops are fighting the Shi'ite militia
of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose spokesman in Najaf
recently bitterly denounced Iran for "seeking to
share with the US in influence over Iraq". And
they are fighting the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia
in the name of an Iraqi government dominated by
another Shi'ite militia, the Badr Corps of Supreme
Iraqi Islamic Council, whose ties to Iran are even
closer.
Ten thousand Badr Corps militia
members were being inducted into the Iraqi army
(just as the government of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki was demanding that the Mahdi Army
militia disarm). Last week, an official delegation
from that government, which only recently received
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with high
honors in Baghdad, took off for Tehran at American
bidding to present "evidence" that the Iranians
are arming their Sadrist enemies.
At the
heart of this intra-sectarian struggle may be the
fear that, in upcoming provincial elections, the
Sadrists, increasingly popular for their
resistance to the American occupation, might
actually win. For the past few weeks, American
troops have been moving deeper into Sadr City,
implanting the reluctant security forces of the
Maliki government 500-600 meters ahead of them.
This is called "standing them up", "part of a
strategy to build up the capability of the Iraqi
security forces by letting them operate
semi-autonomously of the American troops". It's
clear, however, that, if Maliki's military were
behind them, many might well disappear. (A number
have already either put down their weapons, fled,
or gone over to the Sadrists.)
How the
reverse body count came - and went The
fighting in the heavily populated urban slums of
Sadr City has been fierce, murderous and
destructive. It has quieted most of the talk about
the "lowering of casualties" and of "violence"
that was the singular hallmark of the "surge" year
in Iraq. Though never commented on, that
remarkable year-long emphasis on the
ever-lessening number of corpses actually
represented the return, in perversely reverse
form, of the Vietnam era "body count".
In
a guerrilla war situation in which there was no
obvious territory to be taken and no clear way to
establish what our previous secretary of defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, once called the "metrics" of
victory or success, it was natural, as happened in
Vietnam, to begin to count. If you couldn't
conquer a city or a country, then there was a
certain logic to the thought that victory would
come if, one by one, you could "obliterate" - to
use a word suddenly back in the news - the enemy.
As the Vietnam conflict dragged on,
however, as the counting of bodies continued and
victory never materialized, that war gained the
look of slaughter, and the body count (announced
every day at a military press conference in Saigon
(now Ho Chi Minh City) that reporters labeled "the
five o'clock follies") came to be seen by
increasing numbers of Americans as evidence of
atrocity. It became the symbol of the descent into
madness in Indochina. No wonder the Bush
administration, imagining itself once again
capturing territory, carefully organized its Iraq
war so that it would lack such official counting.
(The president later described the process this
way: "We have made a conscious effort not to be a
body-count team.")
With the coming of the
"surge" strategy in 2007, frustration over the
president's unaccomplished mission and his
constant talk of victory meant that some other
"metric", some other "benchmark" for success had
to be established, and it proved to be the reverse
body count. Over the past year, in fact, just
about the only measure of success regularly
trumpeted in the mainstream media has been that
lowering of the death count. In reverse form,
however, it still held some of the same dangers
for the administration as its Vietnamese cousin.
As of April, bodies, in ever rising
numbers, American and Iraqi, have been forcing
their way back into the news as symbols not of
success, but of failure. More than 1,000 Iraqis
have, by semi-official estimate, died just in the
past month (and experts know that these monstrous
monthly totals of Iraqi dead are usually dramatic
undercounts). Four hundred Iraqis, reportedly only
10% militia fighters, are estimated to have died
in the onslaught on Sadr City alone.
American soldiers are also dying in and
around Baghdad in elevated numbers. US military
spokesmen claim that none of this represents a
weakening of the post-"surge" security situation.
As Lieutenant General Carter Ham, Joint Staff
director for operations at the Pentagon, put the
matter, "While it is sad to see an increase in
casualties, I don't think it is necessarily
indicative of a major change in the operating
environment. When the level of fighting increases,
then sadly the number of casualties does tend to
rise." This is, of course, unmitigated nonsense.
In April, of the 51 American deaths in
Iraq, more than 20 evidently took place in the
ongoing battle for Sadr City or greater Baghdad.
Among them were young men from Portland, Mesquite,
Buchanan Dam, and Fresno (Texas), Billings
(Montana), Fountain (Colorado), Bakersfield
(California), Mount Airy (North Carolina) and
Zephyrhills (Florida) - all thousands of miles
from home. And many of them have died under the
circumstances most feared by American commanders
(and thought for a time to have been avoided)
before the invasion of Iraq - in block to block,
house to house fighting in the warren of streets
in one of this planet's many slum cities.
For the Iraqis of Sadr City, of course,
this is a living hell. ("Sadr City right now is
like a city of ghosts," Abu Haider al-Bahadili, a
Mahdi Army fighter told Amit R Paley of the
Washington Post. "It has turned from a city into a
field of battle.") As in all colonial wars, all
wars on the peripheries, the "natives" always die
in staggeringly higher numbers than the far better
armed occupation or expeditionary forces.
This is no less true now, especially since
the US military has wheeled in its Abrams tanks,
brought out its 200-pound guided rockets, and
called in air power in a major way. Planes,
helicopters and Hellfire-missile-armed drones are
now all regularly firing into the heavily
populated urban neighborhoods of the east Baghdad
slum. As Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times
wrote recently, "With many of Sadr City's main
roads peppered with roadside bombs and its side
streets too narrow for US tanks or other heavy
vehicles to navigate, US forces often call in
airstrikes or use guided rockets to hit their
targets."
Buried in a number of news
stories from Sadr City are reports in which
attacks on "insurgents", "criminals" or "known
criminal elements" (now Shi'ite, not Sunni)
destroy whole buildings, even rows of buildings,
even in one case recently damaging a hospital and
destroying ambulances. Every day now, civilians
die and children are pulled from the rubble. This
is brutal indeed.
And it no longer makes
any particular sense, even by the standards of the
Bush administration; nor, in the post-"surge"
atmosphere, is anybody trying to make much sense
of it. That rising body count has, after all,
taken away the last metric by which to measure
"success" in Iraq. Even the small explanations
(and, these days, those are just about the only
ones left) seem increasingly bizarre. Take, for
instance, the convoluted explanation of who
exactly is responsible for the devastation in Sadr
City. Here's how military spokesman Lieutenant
Colonel Steve Stover put it recently:
"The sole burden of responsibility
lies on the shoulders of the militants who care
nothing for the Iraqi people ..." He said the
militiamen purposely attack from buildings and
alleyways in densely populated areas, hoping to
protect themselves by hiding among civilians.
"What does that say about the enemy? ... He is
heartless and evil."
Mind you, this
comes from the representative of a military that
now claims to grasp the true nature of
counterinsurgency warfare (and so of a guerrilla
war); and you're talking about a militia largely
from Sadr City, fighting "a war of survival" for
its own families, its own people, against foreign
soldiers who have hopped continents to attack
them. The Sadrist militiamen are defending their
homes and, of course, with Predator drones and
American helicopters constantly over their
neighborhoods, it's quite obvious what would
happen to them if they "came out and fought" like
typical good-hearted types. They would simply be
blown away. (Out of curiosity, what descriptive
adjectives would Stover use to capture the style
of fighting of the Predator pilots who "fly" their
drones from an air base outside of Las Vegas?)
By the way, the last time such street
fighting was seen, in the first six months of
2007, the US military was clearing insurgents
("al-Qaeda") out of Sunni neighborhoods of the
capital, which were then being further cleansed by
Shi'ite militias (including the Sadrists).
So, to sum up, let me see if I have this
straight: The Bush administration liberated Iraq
to send US troops against a ragtag militia that
had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam's former
government (and many of whose members were, in
fact,
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