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The Last War and the Next One: Descending Into Madness in Iraq - and Beyond
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 04 May 2008
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 Baathist
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 Shiite
clergyman, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and agreed to sponsor them. In January
2005, these brought religious parties representing a long-oppressed Shiite majority
to power, parties which had largely been in exile in neighboring Shiite Iran
for years.
Now, skip a few years, and U.S. troops have once again entered
Baghdad in battle mode. This time, they've been moving into the vast Sadr City
Shiite 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 U.S. attacking Sunnis. In the wake of the President's
2007 surge, the U.S. 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 Baathist government U.S. forces
overthrew in 2003. Meanwhile, American troops are fighting the Shiite militia
of Muqtada al-Sadr, a cleric who seems now to be living in Iran, but whose spokesman
in Najaf recently bitterly denounced that country for "seeking
to share with the U.S. in influence over Iraq." And they are fighting the
Sadrist Mahdi Army militia in the name of an Iraqi government dominated by another
Shiite militia, the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, 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 Nouri al-Maliki was demanding that the Mahdi
Army militia disarm). This week, an official delegation from that government,
which only recently received Iranian President Mahmoud 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 last 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 upon, 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 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 last year,
in fact, just about the only measure of success regularly trumpeted in the mainstream
media has been that lowering 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 last
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.
U.S. 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 twenty 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 U.S. 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 U.S. tanks or other heavy vehicles to navigate, U.S. 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 Shiite, 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 Lt. Col. 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 Lt. Col. 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 U.S. military was clearing insurgents ("al-Qaeda")
out of Sunni neighborhoods of the capital, which were then being further cleansed
by Shiite militias (including the Sadrists).
So, to sum up, let me see if I have this straight: The Bush administration
liberated Iraq in order to send U.S. troops against a ragtag militia that has
nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's former government (and many of
whose members were, in fact, oppressed by it, as were its leaders) in the name
of another group of Iraqis, who have long been backed by Iran, and... uh...
Hmmm, let's try that again... or, like the Bush administration, let's not
and pretend we did.
In the meantime, the U.S. military has tried to partially "seal off" Sadr City and, in
the neighborhoods that they have partially occupied with their attendant Iraqi
troops, they are building the usual vast, concrete walls, cordoning off the area.
This is being done, so American spokespeople say, to keep the Sadrist militia
fighters out and to clear the way for government hearts-and-minds "reconstruction"
projects that everyone knows are unlikely to happen.
Soon enough, if the previous pattern in Sunni neighborhoods is applied, they
and/or their Iraqi cohorts will start going door to door doing weapons searches.
As a result, the American and Iraqi prisons now supposedly being substantially emptied - part of a program
of "national reconciliation" - of many of the tens of thousands of
Sunni prisoners swept up in raids in Sunni neighborhoods, are likely to be refilled
with Shiite prisoners swept up in a similar way. Call it grim irony - or call
it a meaningless nightmare from which no one can awaken. Just don't claim it
makes much sense.
As in Vietnam, so four decades later, we are observing a full-scale descent
into madness and, undoubtedly, into atrocity. At least in 2003, American troops
were heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal, a city to take. Now,
they are heading for nowhere, for the heart of a slum city which they cannot
hold in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighborhoods
is essentially beside the point. They are heading for oblivion, while trying
to win hearts and minds by shooting missiles into homes and enclosing people
in giant walls which break families and communities apart, while destroying
livelihoods.
Oh, and while we're at it, welcome to "the next war," the war in
the slum cities of the planet.
"There Are No Exit Strategies"
Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield
its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning
strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably
distant past of perhaps 2002-2003. Afghanistan had been "liberated"
in a matter of weeks; "regime change" in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk,"
and it would be followed by the reordering of what the neoconservatives liked
to refer to as "the Greater Middle East." No one who mattered was
talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said
about counterinsurgency (nor, as in the Powell Doctrine, about exits either).
The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in
short order, and then, of course, we would stay. We would, in fact, be welcomed
with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically
beg us to garrison their countries.
Every one of those assumptions about the new American way of war was absurd,
even then. At the very least, the problem should have been obvious once American
generals reached Baghdad and sat down at a marble table in one of Saddam Hussein's
overwrought palaces, grinning for a victory snapshot - without any evidence
of a defeated enemy on the other side of the table to sign a set of surrender
documents. If this were a normal campaign and an obvious imperial triumph, then
where was the other side? Where were those we had defeated? The next thing you
knew, the Americans were printing up packs of cards with the faces of most of
Saddam's missing cronies on them.
Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated
to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and, in Afghanistan,
are moving ever closer to the Afghan capital, Kabul. And even though the "last
war" in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be transferred to the even older
war in Afghanistan that is, now, spiraling out of control), inside the
Pentagon some are thinking not about how to get out, but about how to get in.
They are pondering "the next war."
With that in mind, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently gave two sharp-edged
speeches, one at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, the other
at West Point, each expressing his frustration
with the slowness of the armed services to adapt to a counterinsurgency planet
and to plan for the next war.
Now, there's obviously nothing illogical about a country's military preparing
for future wars. That's what it's there for and every country has the right
to defend itself. But it's a different matter when you're preparing for future
"wars of choice" (which used to be called wars of aggression) - for
the next war(s) on what our Secretary of Defense now calls the "the 21st
century's global commons." By that, he means not just planet Earth in its
entirety, but "space and cyberspace" as well. For the American military,
it turns out, planning for a future "defense" of the United States
means planning for planet-wide, over-the-horizon counterinsurgency. It will,
of course, be done better, with a military that, as Gates
put it, will no longer be "a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force."
(It was at the Fulda Gap, a German plain, that the U.S. military once expected
to meet Soviet forces invading Europe in full-scale battle.)
So the secretary of defense is calling for more foreign-language training,
a better "expeditionary culture," and more nation building - you
know, all that "hearts and minds" stuff. In essence, he accepts that
the future of American war will, indeed, be in the Sadr Cities and Afghan backlands
of the planet; or, as he says, that "the asymmetric battlefields of the
21st century" will be "the dominant combat environment in the decades
to come." And the American response will be high-tech indeed - all those
unmanned aerial vehicles that he can't
stop talking about.
Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called
the 'Long War' [i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq] is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around
the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign
cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."
"There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your
tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying that the U.S. military is likely
to be in one, two, many Sadr Cities for a long time to come. This is Gates's
ultimate insight as secretary of defense, and his response is to urge the military
to plan for more and better of the same. For this we give the Pentagon almost
a trillion dollars a year.
The irony is that, in both speeches, Gates praises outside-the-box thinking
in the military and calls upon the armed services to "think unconventionally."
Yet his own thoughts couldn't be more conventional, imperial, or potentially
disastrous. Put in a nutshell: If the mission is heading into madness, then
double the mission. Bring in yet more of those drones whose missiles are already
so popular in Sadr City. This is brilliantly prosaic thinking,
based on the assumption that the "global commons" should be ours and
that the "next war" will be ours, and the one after that, and so on.
But I wouldn't bet on it. John McCain got a lot of flak for saying that, as far as he was concerned,
American troops could stay in Iraq for "100 years... as long as Americans
are not being injured, harmed or killed." Our present secretary of defense,
a "realist" in an administration of bizarre dreamers and inept gamblers,
has just cast his vote for more and better Sadr Cities. In a Pentagon version
of an old Maoist slogan: Let a hundred slum guerrilla struggles bloom!
It's a recipe for being bogged down in such wars for 100 years - with the
piles of dead rising ever higher. No wonder some of the top military brass,
whom he criticizes for their bureaucratic inertia, have been unenthusiastic.
They don't want to spend the rest of their careers fighting hopeless wars in
Sadr City or its equivalent. Who would?
The rest of us should feel the same way. Every time you hear the phrase "the
next war" - and journalists already love it - you should wince. It means
endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.
Vietnam... Iraq... Afghanistan... Don't we already have enough
examples of American counterinsurgency operations under our belt? The American
people evidently think so. For some time now, significant majorities have wanted
out of Baghdad, out of Iraq. All the way out. In a major survey just released
by the influential journal Foreign Affairs, similar majorities
have, in essence, "voted" for demilitarizing
U.S. foreign policy. In their responses, they offer quite a different approach
to how the United States should operate in the world. According to journalist
Jim Lobe, 69% of respondents believe "the U.S. government should put more
emphasis on diplomatic and economic foreign policy tools in fighting terrorism,"
not "military efforts." (Sixty-five percent believe the U.S. should
withdraw all its troops from Iraq either "immediately" or "over
the next twelve months.") But, of course, no one who matters listens to
them.
And yet, the path to Sadr City is one that even an imperialist should want
to turn back from. It's the road to Hell and it's paved with the worst of intentions.
--------
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 updated in a newly issued edition that deals
with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[Note of thanks: Essays like this are only possible because
I can draw on the spadework work of other websites, especially, in this case
(as in so many others), of Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Antiwar.com, Paul Woodward's The War in Context, and Cursor.org.]
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