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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Lessons from lost
wars By Tom Engelhardt
It was to be the war that would establish
empire as an American fact. It would result in a
thousand-year Pax Americana. It was to be "mission
accomplished" all the way. And then it wasn't. And
then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over
(sorta).
It was the Iraq war, and we were
the uninvited guests who didn't want to go home.
To the last second, despite President Barack
Obama's repeated promise that all American troops
were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi
government had signed with George W Bush's
administration in 2008, America's military
commanders continued to lobby and Washington
continued to
negotiate for 10,000 to
20,000 US troops to remain in-country as advisors
and trainers.
Only when the Iraqis simply
refused to guarantee those troops immunity from
local law did the last Americans begin to cross
the border into Kuwait. It was only then that our
top officials began to hail the thing they had
never wanted, the end of the American military
presence in Iraq, as marking an era of
"accomplishment". They also began praising their
own "decision" to leave as a triumph, and
proclaimed that the troops were departing with as
the president put it - "their heads held high".
In a final flag-lowering ceremony in
Baghdad, clearly meant for US domestic consumption
and well attended by the American press corps but
not by Iraqi officials or the local media,
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke glowingly
of having achieved "ultimate success".
He
assured the departing troops that they had been a
"driving force for remarkable progress" and that
they could proudly leave the country "secure in
knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi
people begin a new chapter in history, free from
tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and
peace". Later on his trip to the Middle East,
speaking of the human cost of the war, he added,
"I think the price has been worth it."
And
then the last of those troops really did "come
home" - if you define "home" broadly enough to
include not just bases in the US but also
garrisons in Kuwait, elsewhere in the Persian
Gulf, and sooner or later in Afghanistan.
On December 14 at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, the president and his wife gave
returning war veterans from the 82nd Airborne
Division and other units a rousing welcome. With
some in picturesque maroon berets, they
picturesquely hooahed the man who had once called
their war "dumb".
Undoubtedly looking
toward his 2012 campaign, Obama, too, now spoke
stirringly of "success" in Iraq, of "gains" of his
pride in the troops, of the country's "gratitude"
to them, of the spectacular accomplishments
achieved as well as the hard times endured by "the
finest fighting force in the history of the
world", and of the sacrifices made by our "wounded
warriors" and "fallen heroes".
He praised
"an extraordinary achievement nine years in the
making", framing their departure this way:
"Indeed, everything that American troops have done
in Iraq - all the fighting and all the dying, the
bleeding and the building, and the training and
the partnering - all of it has led to this moment
of success ... [W]e're leaving behind a sovereign,
stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a
representative government that was elected by its
people."
And these themes - including the
"gains" and the "successes", as well as the pride
and gratitude, which Americans were assumed to
feel for the troops - were picked up by the media
and various pundits. At the same time, other news
reports were highlighting the possibility that
Iraq was descending into a new sectarian hell,
fueled by an American-built but largely Shi'ite
military, in a land in which oil revenues barely
exceeded the levels of the Saddam Hussein era, in
a capital city which still had only a few hours of
electricity a day, and that was promptly hit by a
string of bombings and suicide attacks from an
al-Qaeda affiliated group (non-existent before the
invasion of 2003), even as the influence of Iran
grew and Washington quietly fretted.
A
consumer society at war It's true that, if
you were looking for low-rent victories in a near
trillion-dollar war, this time, as various
reporters and pundits pointed out, US diplomats
weren't rushing for the last helicopter off an
embassy roof amid chaos and burning barrels of
dollars. In other words, it wasn't Vietnam and, as
everyone knew, that was a defeat. In fact, as
other articles pointed out, our - as no fitting
word has been found for it, let's go with -
withdrawal was a magnificent feat of reverse
engineering, worthy of a force that was a
nonpareil on the planet.
Even the
president mentioned it. After all, having
seemingly moved much of the US to Iraq, leaving
was no small thing. When the US military began
stripping the 505 bases it had built there at the
cost of unknown multibillions of taxpayer dollars,
it sloughed off $580 million worth of
no-longer-wanted equipment on the Iraqis. And yet
it still managed to ship to Kuwait, other Persian
Gulf garrisons, Afghanistan, and even small towns
in the US more than two million items ranging from
Kevlar armored vests to port-a-potties. We're
talking about the equivalent of 20,000 truckloads
of materiel.
Not surprisingly, given the
society it comes from, the US military fights a
consumer-intensive style of war and so, in purely
commercial terms, the leaving of Iraq was a
withdrawal for the ages. Nor should we overlook
the trophies the military took home with it,
including a vast Pentagon database of thumbprints
and retinal scans from approximately 10% of the
Iraqi population. (A similar program is still
underway in Afghanistan.)
When it came to
"success", Washington had a good deal more than
that going for it. After all, it plans to maintain
a Baghdad embassy so gigantic it puts the Saigon
Embassy of 1973 to shame. With a contingent of
16,000 to 18,000 people, including a force of
perhaps 5,000 armed mercenaries (provided by
private security contractors like Triple Canopy
with its $1.5 billion State Department contract),
the "mission" leaves any normal definition of
"embassy" or "diplomacy" in the dust.
In
2012 alone, it is slated to spend $3.8 billion, a
billion of that on a much criticized
police-training program, only 12% of whose funds
actually go to the Iraqi police. To be left behind
in the "postwar era", in other words, will be
something new under the sun.
Still, set
aside the euphemisms and the soaring rhetoric, and
if you want a simple gauge of the depths of
America's debacle in the oil heartlands of the
planet, consider just how the final unit of
American troops left Iraq. According to Tim Arango
and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, they
pulled out at 2:30 am in the dead of night.
No helicopters off rooftops, but 110
vehicles setting out in the dark from Contingency
Operating Base Adder. The day before they left,
according to the Times reporters, the unit's
interpreters were ordered to call local Iraqi
officials and sheiks with whom the Americans had
close relations and make future plans, as if
everything would continue in the usual way in the
week to come.
In other words, the Iraqis
were meant to wake up the morning after to find
their foreign comrades gone, without so much as a
goodbye. This is how much the last American unit
trusted its closest local allies. After "shock and
awe", the taking of Baghdad, the
mission-accomplished moment, and the capture,
trial and execution of Saddam, after Abu Ghraib
and the bloodletting of the civil war, after the
"surge" and the Sunni Awakening movement, after
the purple fingers and the reconstruction funds
gone awry, after all the killing and the dying,
the US military slipped into the night without a
word.
If, however, you did happen to be
looking for a word or two to capture the whole
affair, something less polite than those presently
circulating, "debacle" and "defeat" might fit the
bill. The military of the self-proclaimed single
greatest power of planet Earth, whose leaders once
considered the occupation of the Middle East the
key to future global policy and planned for a
multi-generational garrisoning of Iraq, had been
sent packing. That should have been considered
little short of stunning.
Face what
happened in Iraq directly and you know that you're
on a new planet.
Doubling down on
debacle Iraq was just one of our
invasions-turned-counter-insurgencies-turned-disasters.
The other, which started first and is still
ongoing, may prove the greater debacle. Though
less costly so far in both American lives and
national treasure, it threatens to become the more
decisive of the two defeats, even though the
forces opposing the US military in Afghanistan
remain an ill-armed, relatively weak set of
minority insurgencies.
As great as was the
feat of building the infrastructure for a military
occupation and war in Iraq, and then equipping and
supplying a massive military force there year
after year, it was nothing compared to what the US
had to do in Afghanistan. Someday, the decision to
invade that country, occupy it, build more than
400 bases there, surge in an extra 60,000 or more
troops, masses of contractors, Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents, diplomats, and
other civilian officials, and then push a weak
local government to grant Washington the right to
remain more or less in perpetuity will be seen as
the delusional actions of a Washington incapable
of gauging the limits of its power in the world.
Talk about learning curves: having watched
their country fail disastrously in a major war on
the Asian mainland three decades earlier,
America's leaders somehow convinced themselves
that nothing was beyond the military prowess of
the "sole superpower". So they sent more than
250,000 American troops (along with all those
Burger Kings, Subways and Cinnabons) into two land
wars in Eurasia. The result has been another
chapter in a history of American defeat - this
time of a power that, despite its pretensions, was
not only weaker than in the Vietnam era, but also
far weaker than its leaders were capable of
imagining.
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