Quote of the week: “A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we’d accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq.” (President Bush Welcomes Canadian Prime Minister Martin to White House, Friday, April 30, 2004)
It’s just a year and a couple of days since George Bush’s aircraft-carrier landing and Iraq is unraveling big time. I’ve quoted Vietnam War historian Marilyn Young before on this, but in the realm of analogies, we now do seem to be experiencing Iraq as, in her phrase, “Vietnam on crack cocaine.” It’s remarkable actually and, if human lives weren’t at stake and so much misery not being caused, it would certainly be comic. There has been much discussion of prewar and postwar Bush administration planning (or lack of it) for a future Iraq; but no one could have hoped to plan an occupation so precisely targeted when it came to alienating so many Iraqis, so fast, so deeply, and in so many ways — especially given the “act” we were following. Whatever the dark-side equivalent would be of having your ship come home, scoring a hole-in-one more than once, or winning the lottery repeatedly, that’s our occupation of Iraq. Saddam Hussein, brute that he was, should certainly have lent us at least a couple of years of imperial grace in our occupation; but no, not for the men (and woman) of the Bush administration whose arrogance, as the sole representatives of the Earth’s last great Empire, was — there’s no other word for it — o’erweening, and so, utterly blinding.
In the last week one of our tanks managed to blow a minaret off a mosque in Fallujah (snipers, it was claimed, were firing from it) and our Secretary of State defended the act (Guardian, 4/27/04), while photos of the utter degradation of naked Iraqi prisoners in the infamous jail of the former dictator were released to the world by the CBS TV’s 60 Minutes II. Only weeks ago, our Baghdad “administrator” (though that seems an odd term for him these days), L. Paul Bremer, compounded his many previous ill-timed acts by taking out after and shutting down the small if inflammatory newspaper of the radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and managed in the process to do the near impossible — single-handedly start a Shiite uprising against the occupation, while our airplanes (Vietnam anyone?) made “precision strikes” on the heavily inhabited Sunni city of Fallujah with 500 pound, laser-guided bombs, Hellfire missiles, and AC-130 gunships. In the meantime, our top military brass and their civilian counterparts (up to the President) swore we would never let the insurgents remain in Fallujah, that we would destroy them, that we would “kill or capture” the Shiite rebel cleric who had hunkered down in Najaf, and so on. Then, after hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi dead, the destabilization of the country, and soaring American casualties, the Marines withdrew from parts of Fallujah to allow a former Saddamist general (from his Republican Guard no less) to take care of things, while the various services and the Pentagon argued about what was happening — and then, while the insurgents were declaring victory, promptly threatened to remove the general… (Scotsman, 5/3/04) but need I go on?
Oh, and then, there was the flag fiasco. Let me see if I can even get this one straight. Our handpicked guys on the Iraqi Governing Council announced a “competition” to replace the Saddamist national flag, whose basic design turns out to have preceded Saddam, and the competition was miraculously “won” by Rifat Chadirij, an Iraqi artist living in London who just happened to be the brother of Nassir al-Chaderchi, “the chairman of the IGC committee charged with choosing a new flag for Iraq,” and whose design — “white with two parallel blue strips along the bottom representing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with a yellow strip in between symbolizing the Kurds,” as well as a blue crescent to represent Islam — reminds many Iraqis of the Israeli flag. Thus, the insurgents now have free rein to wrap themselves nationalistically in the old red, black, and green flag. This is the sort of design coup d’etat you might expect of some comic-opera banana republic. (Patrick Cockburn and David Usborne, “Burning with anger: Iraqis infuriated by new flag that was designed in London,” Independent, 4/28/04.)
Nothing these guys or their Iraqis touch turns to anything but dross.
Remember when American officials were claiming that American casualties and the insurgency by “Baathist deadenders” (later “foreign fighters,” later…) was restricted to the “Sunni Triangle” (not, by the way, especially triangular, just one of these Vietnam-era images that leaped so readily to the minds of our leaders, even as they were vehemently claiming that there was nothing whatsoever Vietnamish about what was going on and that it was nothing short of disloyal to think so). Though only bare months ago, already it seems like ancient history. Sunday, for instance, the American casualty count of eleven dead extended from Kirkuk in the north (one American soldier killed, a bomb and small arms fire) to Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad and “Sunni Triangle” territory (6 dead and 30 wounded, a mortar attack), to northwest of Baghdad where two more Americans died (no details given), as did two in the southern city of Amarrah, where a convoy was attacked by Shiite rebels with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms (“Through the night and into Sunday morning, Iraqis set fire to the long line of abandoned vehicles, jumping on the hoods and beating them with sticks,” reported the Associated Press, 5/2/04.)
Civil war among Iraqis has long been predicted if American troops withdraw. Civil war among various parts of the American military and the civilians running the Pentagon may be the result if we stay — charges are flying between reservists and the regular military over those hideous prison photos; between the Marines and the Army over the recent battles in Iraq; between the military men who seem to have negotiated the Fallujah withdrawal deal on the ground and the Pentagon civilians who were evidently caught quite off guard by it (Scotsman, 4/30/04); and I think it’s fair to assume that, within the military high command, feelings toward this administration and the Pentagon neocons aren’t exactly on the warm and fuzzy side right now, given the ridiculous — and unbearably dangerous — situation our troops have been maneuvered into.
There is no greater sign of the delamination underway — that crack-cocaine effect — than the sudden popping up of calls for withdrawal from all over the lot, after so many weeks of uniform stay-the-course-ism in official Washington and in the media. Senator Robert Byrd, until recently a lone voice in the wilderness, spoke of withdrawal indirectly but eloquently on the Senate floor (“How long will America continue to pay the price in blood and treasure of this President’s war? How long must the best of our nation’s military men and women be taken from their homes to fight this unnecessary war in Iraq?”); as did Howard Zinn, quite directly, in a moving essay, “What Do We Do Now?” in the May 2004 Progressive magazine (“There is a history of dire forecasts for what will happen if we desist from deadly force… Truth is, no one knows what will happen if the United States withdraws. We face a choice between the certainty of mayhem if we stay and the uncertainty of what will follow.”), as did Stephen R. Shalom in Where Do We Go From Here?, a thoughtful exploration of possibilities, difficulties, problems and positions on the issue of withdrawal at the ZNET website.
But it wasn’t only among the usual suspects that such calls were heard. On Sunday, in the lead article of the (admittedly liberal) San Francisco Chronicle were paragraphs I thought I might never live to see on the front page of a mainstream newspaper. The piece written by Robert Collier, who has delivered consistently fine Iraqi news coverage to the Chronicle, led with the following (5/2/04):
“As the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq stumbles from one problem to the next, suddenly everything seems to be up for grabs, and an administration that once seemed sure of its goals and its strategy now appears to be trying anything that might work.
“Having long resisted calls for United Nations involvement, the White House is now embracing it, expecting the world body to come up with a political solution that has evaded the United States. But with the chaotic surge in fighting and the growing discontent of ordinary Iraqis, even staunch supporters of the United Nations say it may not have the capacity to stop Iraq‘s meltdown. And as the U.S. occupation prepares to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, calls are increasing for what until now has been widely viewed as unthinkable — a full-scale American troop withdrawal.”
But note as well the hawkish Robert Kagan’s recent Washington Post column, ‘Lowering Our Sights’ (5/2/04). He’s not especially in favor of withdrawal, but he certainly catches the mood of the moment in his own world:
“I find even the administration’s strongest supporters, including fervent advocates of the war a year ago and even some who could be labeled ‘neoconservatives,’ now despairing and looking for an exit… So get ready for the coming national debate over withdrawal. The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. And it isn’t hard to understand why. All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now.”
Meanwhile, on NBC’s Today show, General William E. Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, said, “”We have already failed. Staying in longer makes us fail worse … I think we’ve passed the chances not to fail. And now we are in the situation where we have to limit the damage.” In the Wall Street Journal he called directly for withdrawal. “The only question is how long we’re going to wait to leave and what price we’re going to have to pay if we try to stay.”
Official Washington, the President possibly excepted, is finally panicking. Too late, of course. As Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service points out (and no one has done better day-in, day-out reporting on the neocons), the U.S. “appears to be teetering on the brink of strategic defeat in its Mesopotamian adventure,” and he speaks directly for the first time of “the defeat of the neocons”:
“Indeed, over the past two weeks, the administration appears to have almost entirely jettisoned the neo-conservative vision of an ardently pro-US Iraq led by Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief Ahmed Chalabi, opened wide to US and western capital, and eager to serve as a convenient base for destabilizing Syria, Iran and even Saudi Arabia if it gets out of line.”
Chaos not just in Iraq, but in Washington. Dilip Hiro has discussed what’s worked and (mostly) what hasn’t for the Bush administration and why. In the process, he put his finger on the main failure — which is to transform Iraq into a “client state.” In the last year, you can search our media for such a phrase or such an analysis — in vain; and that tells you the world about where we’ve been and where we are.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]
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