The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jun 30 2008 - 10:05am
- from TomDispatch [1]
On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being
launched, George W. Bush addressed [2] the nation. "My fellow citizens,"
he
began, "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." We were entering Iraq, he insisted, "with
respect
for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious
faiths
they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and
restore control of that country to its own people."
Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted [3],
pillaged, and ****pped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictator****p was
no
more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially
disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition
Provisional
Authority and the President's viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry
buildings -- except for the oil [4] and interior ministries -- were just
looted shells. Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about
everything
that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in
their
new offices in Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative
occupiers
were already bringing in the administration's crony cor****ations --
Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish off
the
job of looting the country under the rubric of "reconstruction." Somehow,
these "administrators" managed to "spend" $20 billion of Iraq's oil money,
already in the "Development Fund for Iraq," even before the first year of
occupation was over -- and to no effect whatsoever. They also managed to
create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books [5] labeled "the
least
accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small
trick given the competition.)
Before the Sunni insurgency even had a chance to ramp up in 2003, they
were
already pouring [6] billions of U.S. tax dollars into what would become
their massive military mega-bases meant to last a millennium, and, of
course, they were dreaming about opening [7] Iraq's oil industry to the
major oil multinationals and to a privatized future as an oil spigot for
the
West.
On May 1, 2003, six weeks after he had announced his war to the nation and
the world, the President landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, an
aircraft carrier returning from the Persian Gulf where its planes had just
launched [8] 16,500 missions and dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on
Iraq. From its flight deck, he spoke triumphantly [9], against the
backdrop
of a "Mission Accomplished" banner, assuring Americans that we had
"prevailed." "Today," he said, "we have the greater power to free a nation
by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and
precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing
violence against civilians." In fact, according to Human Rights Watch
[10],
the initial shock-and-awe strikes he had ordered killed only civilians,
possibly hundreds of them, without touching a single official [11] of
Saddam
Hussein's "regime."
Who's Counting Now?
Since that first day of "liberation," Iraqis have never stopped dying in
prodigious numbers. Now, more than five years after the U.S. "prevailed"
with such "precision," a more modest version of the same success story has
once again taken the beaches of the mainstream media, if not by storm,
then
by siege. When it comes to Iraq, the good news is unavoidable. It's in the
air. Not victory exactly, but a slow-motion movement toward a "stable"
Iraq,
a country with which we might be moderately content.
The President's surge -- those extra 30,000 ground troops sent into Iraq
in
the first half of 2007 -- has, it is claimed, proven the negativity of all
the doubters and critics unwarranted. Indeed, it is now agreed, security
conditions have improved significantly and in ways "that few thought
likely
a year ago."
You already know the story well enough. It turns out that, as in Vietnam
many decades ago, the U.S. military is counting like mad. So, for
instance,
according to the Pentagon, attacks on American and Iraqi troops are down
70%
compared to June 2007; IED (roadside bomb) attacks have dropped almost 90%
[12] over the same period; in May, for the first time, fewer Americans
died
[13] in Iraq than in Afghanistan (where the President's other war, some
seven-plus years later, is going poorly indeed); and, above all else,
"violence" is down [14]. ("All major indicators of violence in Iraq have
dropped by between 40 and 80 percent since February 2007, when President
Bush committed an additional 30,000 troops to the war there, the Pentagon
re****ted.")
Think of this as the equivalent of Vietnam's infamous "body count," but in
reverse. In a country where the U.S. generally occupies only the land its
troops are on, the normal measures of military victory long ago went out
the
window, so bodies have to stand in. In Vietnam, the question was: How many
enemy dead could you tote up? The greater the slaughter, the closer you
assumedly were to obliterating the other side (or, at least, its will). As
it turned out, by what the grunts dubbed "the Mere Gook Rule" -- "If it's
dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC [Vietcong]. " -- any body would do in a
pinch when it came to the metrics of victory.
[15]In Iraq today, the counting being most widely publicized runs in the
opposite direction. Success now can be measured in less deaths; and, by
all
usual counts, Iraqi deaths have indeed been falling since the height of
sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in the early months of 2007. In
part, this has occurred because millions of people have already been
driven
out of their homes and many neighborhoods, especially in the capital,
"cleansed." At the same time, in Sunni areas, significant numbers of
insurgents have joined the Awakening Movement. They have been paid off by
the U.S. military to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, while, assumedly, biding
their
time until the American presence ebbs to take on "the Persians" -- that
is,
the ****ite (and Kurdish) government embedded in Baghdad's fortified,
American-controlled Green Zone.
As a result, cratered Iraq -- a land with at least 50% unemployment, still
lacking decent electricity, potable water, hospitals with drugs (or even
doctors, so many having fled), or courts with judges (40 [16] of them
having
been assassinated and many more injured since 2003) or lawyers, many of
whom
joined the more than two million Iraqis who have gone into exile -- is,
today, modestly quieter. But don't be fooled. So many years later, Iraqis
are still dying in prodigious numbers, and significant numbers of those
dying are doing so at the hands of Americans.
It's not just the family, including possibly four children [17] under the
age of 12, who died last week when a U.S. jet blasted their house in
Tikrit
(after their father, evidently believing thieves were about, fired [18]
shots in the air with a U.S. patrol nearby); or the manager and two female
employees of a bank at Baghdad International Air****t ("three criminals,"
according to a U.S. military statement) killed [19] when their car was
shot
up by soldiers from a U.S. convoy; or the unarmed civilian, a relative of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who died in an early morning American raid
[20] in the southern town of Janaja; or the men, woman, and child in a car
"which failed to stop [21] at a [U.S.] checkpoint on the outskirts of
Mosul
because, according to a U.S. military statement, the two men were armed
and
one man inside the car made 'threatening movements'"; or, according to the
U.N., the estimated 1,000 dead in Baghdad's vast, heavily populated ****ite
slum of Sadr City, mostly civilians, 60% women and children, in fighting
in
April and May in which U.S. troops and air power played a significant
role.
In fact, one great difference between the "liberation" moment of 2003 and
the "stabilization" moment of 2008 is simply that what began as "regime
change" -- missiles and bombs theoretically meant for that Saddamist deck
of
55 leader****p cards [22] -- then developed into a war against a Sunni
insurgency, and is now functionally a war against ****ites as well.
Particularly targeted of late has been the movement headed by cleric
Muqtada
al-Sadr [23], a fierce opponent of the American occupation, who is
especially popular among the impoverished ****ite m***** in Baghdad and
southern Iraq. In ****ite areas, his party, according to a U.S.
intelligence
estimate, would probably win upwards of 60% [24] of the votes in the
upcoming provincial elections, if they were fairly conducted. In recent
months, the U.S. military in "sup****t" of its Iraqi allies in the Maliki
government has fought fierce battles in both the southern oil city of
Basra
and Sadr City against Sadr's militia, with the usual sizeable numbers of
civilian casualties.
In other words, despite all the talk about onru****ng "stability," looked
at
another way, the U.S. faces an ever more complicated and spreading, if
intermittent, war. With it has gone another, somewhat less publicized kind
of body count. Consider, for instance, a small passage from a recent piece
[25] by New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker on inter-service
rivalries
in Iraq. The U.S. Army, he re****ts, is now ramping up its own air arm
(just
as it did in the Vietnam era). In the last year, it has launched Task
Force
ODIN, the name being an acronym for "observe, detect, identify and
neutralize," but also the über-god of Norse mythology (and perhaps a
reminder of the godlike attitudes those in the air can develop towards
those
being "neutralized" on the ground).
With its headquarters at a base near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old
hometown,
the unit consists of only "about 300 people and 25 aircraft." Shanker
calls
it "a Rube Goldberg collection of surveillance and communications and
attack
systems, a mash-up of manned and remotely piloted vehicles, commercial
aircraft with high-tech infrared sensors strapped to the fuselage, along
with attack helicopters and infantry."
Here's the money paragraph of his piece with its triumphalist body count:
"The work of the new aviation battalion was initially kept secret, but
Army officials involved in its planning say it has been exceptionally
active, using remotely piloted surveillance aircraft to call in Apache
helicopter strikes with missiles and heavy machine gun fire that have
killed
more than 3,000 adversaries in the last year and led to the capture of
almost 150 insurgent leaders."
We have no idea how that figure of more than 3,000 dead Iraqis was
gathered
(given that we're talking about an air unit), or what percentage of those
dead were actually civilians, but certainly some among them died in the
recent fighting in heavily populated Sadr City. In any case, consider that
number for a moment: One modest-sized Army air unit/one year = 3,000+ dead
Iraqis.
Now, consider that the Air Force in Iraq in that same year, according to
Shanker, "quadrupled its number of sorties and increased its bombing
tenfold." Consider that significant numbers of those sorties have been
over
heavily populated cities, or that, according to the Wa****ngton Post,
between
late March and late May, more than 200 [26] powerful Hellfire missiles
were
fired into Baghdad (mainly, undoubtedly, into the Sadr City area); or that
the unmanned aerial vehicles, the Predator (armed with two Hellfire
missiles) and the larger, far more deadly Reaper (armed with up to 14 of
those missiles), carried out, according to Shanker, 64 [27] and 32
attacks,
respectively, in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of March and
June.
And we're not even considering here U.S. military operations on the ground
in Basra earlier in the year (special forces units were sent [28] into the
city when the Iraqi military and police seemed to be buckling), or in
campaigns in Sunni or mixed areas to the north of Baghdad, or simply in
ongoing everyday operations. Although individual body counts are now
regularly announced for specific operations (not the case in the early
years
in Iraq), who knows what the overall carnage amounts to. One thing can be
said however: The pacification campaign in Iraq really hasn't flagged
since
the Sunni insurgency gained strength in late 2003. Reformulated by General
David Petraeus in 2007, it's just the sort of effort that occupying Great
Powers have long been known to apply to rebellious possessions.
Iraq as a Surge-athon
To fully *****s just what lurks beneath the "good news" from Iraq,
including
those 3,000 "adversaries" that Task Force ODIN "neutralized," we would
have
to do a different kind of counting of which we're incapable, not because
no
one's doing it, but because we have minimal access to the numbers. Let me
try, however, to outline briefly some of what can be known -- and then you
can judge the good news for yourself.
American troop strength in Iraq now stands at about 146,000. That's
perhaps
16,000 more than in January 2007 just before the surge began. It's also
about 16,000 more than in April 2003 when Baghdad was taken. According to
Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, the latest Pentagon plans [29] are
to
order about 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in 2009, which would keep troop
levels at or above that 140,000 mark.
In addition, a vast force of private contractors, armed and unarmed, is in
the country. There is no way to know how many of these hired hands and
hired
guns are actually there, but it's a reasonable guess that they add up to
more -- possibly substantially more -- than the troops on hand.
Since February 2007 in the U.S., only one "surge" has been discussed,
almost
nonstop -- those 30,000 ground troops the President ordered largely into
the
Baghdad area. A surprising number of other surges have, however, been
underway, even if barely noted in the U.S. These add up to a remarkable
Bush
administration urge to surge that puts American policy in Iraq in quite a
different light.
Among these surges, for instance, has been a political surge of U.S.
"advisors" and "mentors" to the Iraqi government, police, and military. In
another of his superb re****ts for the New York Review of Books, "Embedded
in
Iraq," [30] Michael Massing says that the main elements of this "little
known political surge. were spelled out in a classified 'Joint Campaign
Plan' completed in May 2007." It represented, he writes, a "sharp
expansion."
"Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were
assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out
sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the Army
Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and reinforce dams.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in Baghdad and elsewhere to
help repair infrastructure, improve water and electrical systems, and
stimulate the economy."
We know as well that American advisers are now deeply involved [31] with
local government bodies in contested areas; that American advisers,
evidently hired from private contractors, are embedded in the key interior
[32], defense, and oil [33] ministries; that advisers, also hired from
private contractors, are helping the Iraqi police and that a new multiyear
contract [34] with DynCorp International, which already has 700 civilian
police advisers in the country, will raise that number above 800. Their
mission: "to advise, train and mentor the Iraqi Police Service, Ministry
of
Interior, and Department of Border Enforcement."
In this period, even academics have surged into Iraq as the military has
embedded anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists from the
"Human Terrain System" in military units to advise on local customs and
"cultural understanding." One of them, a political scientist completing
her
Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, was recently killed [35] in a bombing
in
Sadr City.
We know that more than 20,000 [36] Iraqis are now in two U.S. prisons,
Camp
Bucca in the south of the country and state-of-the-art Camp Cropper on the
outskirts of Baghdad. Both of these have been continually upgraded. In
this
period, though, it seems that a surge in prison building (and assumedly
prisoners) has also been underway. The Wa****ngton Post's Walter Pincus
re****ts [37] that a new "Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation
Center" -- i.e. prison -- is being built near Camp Taji, 12 miles north of
Baghdad. A "new contract calls for providing food for 'up to 5,000
detainees' [there] and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently
will work at the facility." Another "reconciliation center" is to be
opened
at Ramadi in al-Anbar Province.
All of this is, again, being done through private contractors, including a
contract [38] for some company to "guard" the "property" of up to 60,000
Iraqi detainees. ("The contracted personnel will be responsible for the
accountability, inventory, and storage of all property.") This, re****ts
Sharon Weinberger of Wired's Danger Room blog, is evidently in
anticipation
of a "surge of approximately 15,000 detainees in the upcoming six months."
In addition, the Iraqi military, with its embedded American advisors,
remains almost totally dependent on the U.S. military. According to a
recent
Government Accountability Office re****t, based [39] on "a classified study
of Iraqi Army battalions," just 10% of them "are capable of operating
independently in counterinsurgency operations and... even then they rely
on
American sup****t." For logistics, planning, supplies -- almost everything
that makes a military function -- the Iraqi military relies on the U.S.
military and would be helpless without it.
More than five years after Baghdad fell, there still is no real Iraqi air
force. The Iraqi military now depends ever more on the quick and constant
application of American air power -- and U.S. air power in the region has
surged in the last year and a half. The use of drones like the Predator
and
Reaper, whose pilots are stationed at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las
Vegas and other distant spots, has also surged, doubling [40] since the
beginning of 2007. Meanwhile, new machines, including a "platoon" of 30 of
the Army's experimental Micro Air Vehicles [41], which can hover "in one
place [and]. stare down with 'electro-optical and infrared cameras,'" are
being rushed into action in Iraq, which is increasingly a laboratory for
the
testing of the latest U.S. weaponry.
In addition, for unknown billions of dollars, the upgrading of American
bases in that country, especially the mega-bases, continues [42], while
possibly the largest embassy on the planet, a vast citadel inside
Baghdad's
fortified Green Zone meant to house 1,000 "diplomats" (and large numbers
of
guards and sup****t staff of every sort), is nearly finished.
Finally, among the various surges of these last 18 months, there has been
a
surge [43] in Bush administration demands for an American future in Iraq.
In
ongoing negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, U.S. negotiators
have
demanded access to nearly 60 bases, control of Iraqi air space to 29,000
feet, the right to arrest Iraqis without explanation or permission, the
right to bring troops into and out of the country without permission or
notification, the right to launch military operations on the same basis,
and
immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for troops and private
contractors.
In other words, wherever you might have looked over the last year or more,
a
surge-athon was under way. It was meant to solidify the American position
in
Iraq for the long term as an occupying power [44]. Not withdrawing or
drawing down, but ramping up has been the order of the day, no matter what
was being debated, discussed, or written about in the United States.
That ramping up makes some sense of the "good news" and "stability" of
this
moment. Among other things, it's hardly surprising that weakly armed
guerrilla forces (whether ****ite or Sunni), when faced with such a display
of power have no desire to take it on frontally.
Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion, to
speak of this urge to surge and its results as "success" or as "good news"
is essentially obscene. Think of Iraq instead as a cocked gun. It's
loaded,
it's held to your head, and things are improving only to the extent that,
recently, it hasn't gone off.
Iraq itself is wreckage beyond anything that could have been imagined back
in March 2003; liberation is, by now, a black joke; the Bush
administration's "benchmarks" [45] for Iraqi success remain largely unmet,
and still we keep "liberating" that land, still we keep killing Iraqis in
prodigious numbers. A Vietnam-style body count, once banished [46] by an
administration that wanted no reminders of the last disastrous American
counterinsurgency war, is now back with a vengeance, even if violence is
down. These days, in its statements, the U.S. military is counting scalps
almost everywhere there's fighting in Iraq.
A Great Lie of History
"We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore
control
of that country to its own people." This was one of the great lies of
history. And all the while, the price of oil -- the one product Iraq has
and, in present conditions, can't get at adequately -- continues to soar.
There is no "good news" in any of this, unless you happen to be an
undertaker, nor is there any end to it in sight.
Of the political surge in Iraq -- all those advisers and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams pouring into the country -- Michael Massing has
written
bluntly: "[I]t has been an utter failure. 'Dysfunctional' is how one
visiting adviser described it, citing bitter inter-agency battles,
micromanagement from Wa****ngton, and an acute mismatch between the skills
of
the advisers and the needs of the Iraqi government."
The same could be said -- and someday undoubtedly will be -- of the rest
of
the U.S. effort, including the much lauded recent counterinsurgency part
of
it.
So let me offer this bit of advice. When you read the news, skip the
"good"
part. The figures demonstrating "improvement" may (or may not) be
perfectly
real, but they also represent an effort to dominate (as well as divide and
conquer) in an essentially colonial fa****on; worse yet, it's an effort
barely held together by baling wire and reliant on the destruction of ever
more Iraqi neighborhoods.
If you want a prediction, here it is and it couldn't be simpler: This
cannot
end well. Not for Wa****ngton. Not for the U.S. military. Not for
Americans.
And, above all, not for Iraqis.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project [47], runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch:
America in the New Age of Empire [48] (Verso, 2008), a collection of some
of
the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what
the
mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad
Bush years. A brief video in which Engelhardt discusses American
mega-bases
in Iraq can be viewed by clicking here [49].
[Note for readers: This piece could profitably be read in conjunction with
Juan Cole's recent post, "The Real State of Iraq," [50] for a full and
thoroughly devastating picture of what American policy has meant in that
country.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
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political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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