October 3, 2005
Last One to Leave, Please Turn On the Lights
Experiencing Withdrawal Symptoms in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Recently, our top commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., was
brought back to the United States, officially to consult with George
Bush on what the President still calls "our strategy for victory."
Along with retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Centcom
Commander Gen. John Abizaid, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
Casey then testified before Congress on military "progress" in Iraq. As
Rumsfeld confidently told the Armed Services Committee, ``Every single
week that goes by, the number of [Iraqi] security forces goes up, the
total.'' In a statement
from the White House Rose Garden after meeting with his generals, the
President made the same point: "The growing size and increasing
capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping our coalition
address a challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war. And
General Casey discussed this with us in the Oval Office… Now, the
increasing number of more capable Iraqi troops has allowed us to better
hold on to the cities we have taken from the terrorists… We're on the
offense. We have a plan to win."
Before Congress, however, Casey painted a rather different picture of
the Iraqi national-army-that-isn't. In fact, on a crucial point, his
testimony bore little relation to the assessments that either George
Bush or Donald Rumsfeld claimed they had heard. Last June, the Pentagon
informed Congress that three Iraqi battalions were finally at "Level 1"
of preparedness -- that is, "fully trained,
equipped, and capable of operating independently" of U.S. forces. On
Thursday, Casey lowered this estimate to one battalion (evidently not
even one of the previous three), calling it a "step backward." In other
words, of the 100-plus battalions in the American-created Iraqi army,
only one -- perhaps 1,000 soldiers
-- is capable of heading off on its own to fight, out of sight of its
American protectors. Donald Rumsfeld has often talked about the
"metrics" of success. Well, here's perhaps the most significant metric
we have on the Iraqi military -- the essence of what passes for a Bush
administration plan for the pacification of Iraq -- and it speaks the
world.
When queried on this dismal statistic, after at least a year of an
intensive American focus on "standing up" the Iraqi army, the general said defensively,
"It's not going to be like throwing a switch, where all of a sudden,
one day, the Iraqis are in charge." This was perhaps an ill-chosen
image in a country in which the Bush administration and its crony
corporations have been unable to deliver electricity with any
regularity to the inhabitants of that country. (During a blistering
summer, parts of the capital got less than eight hours of electricity a day.)
To put all this in perspective, remember that Saddam Hussein's military
was disbanded in May 2003 by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority and a new Iraqi military officially reconstituted in August
of that same year. The first units of the new army didn't even finish
basic training (and it was evidently basic indeed) until early 2004.
Ever since, they have been woefully equipped and poorly led. The
earliest units (with the exception of borrowed Kurdish militiamen)
broke and fled in battle. The record since hasn't been much better. (And who knows, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment
website, what happened to those three battalions that are no longer at
Level 1 status. "Did some melt away at Tal Afar?" he asks of a recent
U.S. campaign near the Syrian border. There, Iraqi troops, fighting
with Americans, were asked to take the lead. The newest round of that campaign, launched in the area just days ago, seems to lack Iraqi troops altogether.)
As the Bush administration became more desperate about developments in
Iraq, the Pentagon began placing ever greater emphasis on training the
Iraqi military to replace American troops. Thousands of American
military advisors under the command of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who
was put in charge of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, were assigned to Iraqi units in "military transition teams." For a while, Petraeus got much good press here from pundits like David Ignatius of the Washington Post
as our possible military savior in Iraq, and many relatively hopeful
stories were written about the always "slow" development of the Iraqi
forces. Money for the new army and its equipment poured in (striking
amounts of which, $1-2 billion
or more, have evidently simply been stolen at the Defense Ministry in
Baghdad). In addition, the new Iraqi troops are lightly armed,
partially out of American fears of what they might do with more
powerful weaponry.
By this summer, about the time Cindy Sheehan first landed on the
Presidential vacation doorstep, the "Iraqification" effort had been
turned into a jingle-style slogan for George Bush. It was the
President's only real response to calls, not only from war critics,
newspaper editorial pages, and a growing few in Congress, but from
within the top ranks of the military, for a withdrawal plan and a
timetable of some sort for getting American forces out of the country.
He intoned it again and again: "Our strategy is straightforward: As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.
And when Iraqi forces can defend their freedom by taking more and more
of the fight to the enemy, our troops will come home with the honor
they have earned."
The truth of the matter, however, is plain enough for all to see.
There is no Iraqi national army. "The only really effective units of
the new security forces," as Time magazine's Tony Karon
pointed out at his blog recently, "are essentially militias of the
Kurdish and Shiite parties loyal to their party leaders rather than to
a new state." (Little wonder, by the way, that they are so hated and
feared in largely Sunni areas of Iraq.)
When it comes to the rest of the Iraqi military: The Iraqi Air Force
essentially doesn't exist -- or rather, the assumption clearly is that,
for the foreseeable future, the Iraqi "Air Force" will be the U.S. Air
Force. As for the Iraqi Navy, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
recently visited the port of Umm Qasr in "safe" southern Iraq. He had
to be "outfitted in body armor" for the crossing of the Kuwaiti border,
because IEDs have begun to be planted along the road to the port. With
a kind of perverse admiration, he adds, "The enemy just keeps getting
smarter. After the coalition forces introduced jamming devices to block
roadside bombs detonated with cell phones, the insurgents started using
infrared devices from garage door openers. So much ingenuity for so
much malevolence."
His visit to the exceedingly modest 1,000-man Iraqi Navy, being trained
at the port by the Brits, led to the observation (regularly made by
Americans about every aspect of the Iraqi military) that "progress is
slow. One day last week a boatload of Iraqi sailors decided to take a
long lunch break and blew off the afternoon training. Too hot." The
problem is that "middle-management Iraqis" won't "take the initiative."
To correct this, it seems, would require "a huge cultural shift.
Saddam's tyrannical rule over nearly three decades conditioned people
here never to assume responsibility."
That certainly explains it; and it's pretty typical of American
explanations, all of which might make sense, if those fiendishly clever
insurgents weren't just down that road, exercising their ingenuity,
taking the initiative like mad, upgrading their skills constantly, and
fighting fiercely without the help of American trainers. I guess they
just underwent a huge cultural shift that our reporters and pundits
have somehow missed.
This stuff would, of course, be priceless and completely comic, if it
weren't quite so tragic; if it weren't leading down desperate roads; if
so many weren't dying in Iraq;, if the possibility of civil war,
driven by a very minority "Sunni death cult," weren't growing; and if
that country hadn't turned into a terrorist training ground. Or, as
Gen. Casey put it in his testimony, in perfect militarese: "I'll tell
you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success."
The question, of course, is: How come we can't find that switch the
general spoke of, and "they" can? Or to propose a novel theory, what if
the "huge cultural shift" Friedman mentions was us? What if we turned
out the lights and smashed the switch. What if we invaded a country
under false pretenses; occupied it;, began building huge, permanent
military bases on its territory; let its capital and provincial cities
be looted; disbanded its military; provided no services essential to
modern life; couldn't even produce oil for gas tanks in an oil-rich
land; bombed some of its cities, destroyed parts or all of others; put
tens of thousands of its inhabitants in U.S. military-controlled jails
(where prisoners would be subjected to barbaric tortures and
humiliations); provided next to no jobs; opened the economy to every
kind of depredation; set foreign corporations to loot the country;
invited in tens of thousands of private "security contractors," heavily
armed and under no legal constraints; and then asked large numbers of
Iraqis, desperate for jobs that could be found nowhere else, to join a
new "Iraqi" military force meant to defend a "government" that could
hardly leave an American fortified enclave in its own capital. After
that, our military trainers, our generals, our politicians, our
reporters, and our pundits all began fretting about this force for not
fighting fiercely, being independent, taking the initiative, or
"standing up." The question should be, but isn't: Standing up for what?
(Not dissimilarly, as corporate looters move in to get their "relief riches,"
what will those evacuees driven off by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, now
homeless, car-less, and job-less, be standing up for when they sign on
the dotted line for military recruiters who seem to have had less
trouble getting to them with offers of help than most of the rest of
our government?)
This phenomenon -- two sides that seem to come from different planets:
our natives who just don't or can't or won't fight, who need years and
vast sums of money and equipment, and then hardly stand up without an
American "backbone" nearby; and theirs, who fight willingly, eagerly,
fiercely, bravely, and with initiative -- was also a phenomenon of the
Vietnam War era. Then, American officers regularly spoke admiringly of
the other side, the Vietcong, the NVA, "Charlie," as brave, resourceful
fighters and had scorn for "our" Vietnamese. But generally, even when,
as in Friedman's piece, the descriptions of Iraqis who fight and those
who don't can be found side by side, no comparisons are made, and the
farce of attempting to "stand up" an Iraqi Army simply goes on.
If you set aside, for a moment, what is believed in, it obviously helps
to believe in something if you plan to "stand up" and fight. At the
most basic level in our age, it helps if you feel your country has been
violated and occupied by foreigners. In the last two centuries, no
emotion has mobilized more people in arms than the one we call
"nationalism" when other people take up arms and "patriotism" when we
do so. Call it love of country. Add religion to that -- or the belief
that your country or region has been taken over by unbelievers -- and
you have a powerful combination. The issue here is not years of
training, it's motivation. And our Iraqis have next to none -- with the
exception of Kurdish and Shiite militiamen who want to take out those
Sunnis they think of as their enemies and a potential peril to their
existence.
Experiencing Withdrawal Symptoms
So let's return for a moment to the President's "plan." "As Iraqis
stand up, we will stand down." But what about some contingency
planning? This administration has been notoriously weak on planning for
lesser alternative futures. Despite having Colin Powell for Secretary
of State, for instance, Bush officials never had an exit strategy for
Iraq, not just because they had no urge to leave, but because they
didn't believe they would ever have to. So if you reverse the
President's little jingle, there's no there there. "As Iraqis stand
down, we will…" Well, what?
The options are increasingly limited, and yet, even for this
administration, the need is increasingly obvious and pressing. The
President could not be more isolated internationally when it comes to
his war. Most of the Europeans are now simply doing their best to look
the other way. The Chinese leadership undoubtedly dances in the streets
of the Forbidden City every morning, because the Iraqi quagmire ensures
that, for another day, China will not be the next enemy of enemies. The
newly elected Norwegian government has announced that it will withdraw
its few trainers from Iraq. The Poles and Italians are on their way out
along with the Ukrainians. A Dane was just killed by a roadside bomb in
the Basra area and the keeping of a Danish contingent in the country,
never popular, has grown less so. The Japanese troops are locked into
their "base" in the south, doing nothing; and, while Tony Blair swears
fealty to Bush Iraq policy for another 1,000 Arabian nights, the
British have, in fact, been hemming and hawing about withdrawal as
their situation grows ever hotter in the Basra area (where Shiite
militias have taken over and, as Robert Dreyfuss of Tompaine.com points out, former Baathists are being assassinated in startling numbers). Meanwhile, the Bush administration was just rebuffed by NATO
on a Rumsfeld proposal that NATO troops take over parts of the American
counter-guerrilla war in southern Afghanistan, freeing up our
hard-pressed troops for duty elsewhere.
So what's left in Iraq -- other than the stood-down Iraqi Army and the
embattled Iraqi police (both forces evidently well-infiltrated by
insurgents)? Well, there are always those 25,000 or so private
mercenaries with the run of the country; there's a nearly
non-functional Iraqi government in disarray over the constitution the
Bush administration has been shoving down its throat on an unpalatable
schedule; and, of course, there's the U.S. military, which is losing
not quite two soldiers a day in the country (and many more wounded). Fifty-one American troops
died in September along with several American "contractors" and a
diplomatic official. As has been true for the last two years, the
insurgents remain capable mainly of picking off Americans as they
travel from one place to another on Iraq's embattled roads and
highways. But a suicide car bomber
was caught recently inside the well-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad
before his vehicle could explode. That is, perhaps, an omen of what's
likely to come. Sooner or later, catastrophic events are a near
certainly if the war goes on.
In the meantime, our military in Iraq is fraying in all sorts of ways;
while, back home, the publicity attendant on the war has been terrible
and recruitment
continues to prove a problem, despite heightened resources going into
the effort. Publicity. Ah, there's an issue. Karen Hughes, presidential
confident and America's newest public diplomat, was hoofing it around
the Middle East last week on a disastrous public diplomacy tour for the
administration, highlighting her ya-gotta-love-me qualifications as a
"mom" and Americans' qualifications as a people "of faith." (As Fred Kaplan of Slate
writes, "Put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader
wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he
would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no
time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or
movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented
'Good morning.'")
In the meantime, the real "public diplomacy" work is being done elsewhere by an administration that, from the first moments
of its global war on terror, was intent on mayhem, destruction, and
torture; that wanted, in Donald Rumsfeld's words, to "take the gloves
off." All evidence continues to indicate that, in behavioral terms,
this spirit spread like a pandemic throughout the imperium and into the
deepest reaches of the U.S. military, the CIA, and even American embassies abroad. Just in the last couple of weeks, such "public diplomacy" has consisted of an actual porn website
that has been posting military "war porn" for all to see -- photos of
American troops exulting in blistered and mutilated Iraqi and Afghani
corpses; and the news that an Army captain
who reported ongoing military abuses against Iraqi prisoners, both
before and after Abu Ghraib (including the use of those tell-tale human
pyramids), found himself and two sergeants from his unit, who supported
his testimony, the only ones under investigation by our military.
("Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration, you
show up at the PUC [prisoner] tent. In a way it was sport.") Or try
this one on for publicity size: This week, the global managing editor of Reuters
sent a letter off to Senator John Warner claiming that "American
forces' conduct towards journalists in Iraq is 'spiraling out of
control' and preventing full coverage of the war reaching the public…
The Reuters news service chief referred to 'a long parade of disturbing
incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully
detained, and/or illegally abused by US forces in Iraq.'" (I can't
think of another example of such a letter being written from a
mainstream news outlet to the U.S. government.)
Believe me, you can't buy negative publicity like this on the street.
And then, just for good measure, consider the anti-publicity value of the latest ad
from the joint team of Boeing and Bell Helicopter for their
vertical-lift Osprey aircraft -- a shot of U.S. Special Forces
rappelling onto a smoking mosque with the tag line: "It descends from
the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell... Consider it a gift from
above." The ad caused another little storm, and there's an awesome
shock!
Put it all together and it adds up to a tsunami of unsustainable
reality. So somebody answer me this question: Based on the evidence,
what favor exactly have we been doing the Iraqis these last two
disastrous years by occupying their country? I suspect a lot of
military people have been asking similar questions as they worry (as
their predecessors did in the later Vietnam years) about the future
viability of the Army.
Withdrawal from Iraq, one way or another, is now probably unstoppable,
no matter how many times generals, administration officials, and
politicians may step back or create "withdrawal plans" that are intent
on keeping us in
Iraq. President Bush continues to speak of how the terrorists will not
"break the will" of the American people. But all evidence indicates
that support for his war has all but collapsed here in the United
States, even increasingly among his own base of support. And it's
almost as clear that the military leadership knows the score. The Army
high command, after all, never wanted to be in Iraq in the first place
and can see not only that the "war" is unwinnable, or even salvageable,
but that it threatens the cohesion and future of the Army itself.
Gen. Casey, for instance, has been floating supposedly unauthorized
withdrawal balloons for a couple of months now, despite being
officially chastised for doing so by Washington (or so the story goes,
anyway). Recently, in Washington, he began more publicly counseling
for, if not a full-scale withdrawal, at least a "gradual" draw-down of
U.S. forces in Iraq. As Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times
wrote, he based his thinking on the novel thesis (for this
administration) that "the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the
insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops
among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across
the Middle East." Sound familiar, any of you war critics out there?
Unfortunately, this is likely to prove too little too late, Iraqi
dependence having long been fostered because it was exactly what was
wanted. It's now late in the game to -- as administration officials
used to love to say -- put "an Iraqi face" on "our" Iraq.
Oh, by the way, when someone actually starts developing those
withdrawal plans for real, the mercenaries shouldn't be forgotten. The
Iraqis don't deserve them, although evidence seems to indicate that
some of them are already coming home. As New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman pointed out recently, "In the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is awash in soldiers and police.
Nonetheless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired
Blackwater USA, a private security firm with strong political
connections, to provide armed guards." The North Carolina-based
Blackwater Consulting, with its strong private security presence in
Iraq, has just hired former Director of the CIA's Counterterrorism
Center and former ambassador Cofer Black as its vice-chairman and Joseph E. Schmitz,
former Inspector General of the Department of Defense, as its Chief
Operating Officer and General Counsel; while "overseas opportunities,"
assumedly in Iraq, offered by its website
include: explosive-detection dog handler, designated defensive
marksman, and protective-security specialist. So batten down the
hatches, there's surely more killing and chaos to come. Lots more.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
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