by Tom Engelhardt
(Tom Dispatch)
Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has
been unraveling? And here’s the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent
information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe,
despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages
and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the
success of the President’s surge strategy, Americans sense this
perfectly well. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties and this has, as the Post
notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the
surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American
public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq — and of
thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the
situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which
should be asked far more often in this country:
1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military’s worst Iraq nightmare:
Few now remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of
Iraq in March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a
single overriding nightmare — not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam
Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into Fortress Baghdad, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There, they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital’s poorest districts.
When American forces actually entered Baghdad in early April 2003,
however, even Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard units had put away
their weapons and gone home. It took five years but, as of now,
American troops are indeed fighting in the warren of streets in Sadr
City, the Shiite slum of two and a half million in eastern Baghdad
largely controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The U.S.
military, in fact, recently experienced its worst week
of 2008 in terms of casualties, mainly in and around Baghdad. So,
mission accomplished — the worst fear of 2003 has now been realized.
2. No, there was never an exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended to leave — and still doesn’t:
Critics of the war have regularly gone after the Bush administration
for its lack of planning, including its lack of an exit strategy. In
this, they miss the point. The Bush administration arrived in Iraq with
four mega-bases on the drawing boards.
These were meant to undergird a future American garrisoning of that
country and were to house at least 30,000 American troops, as well as
U.S. air power, for the indefinite future. The term used for such
places wasn’t permanent base, but the more charming and euphemistic
enduring camp. (In fact, as we learned recently,
the Bush administration refuses to define any American base on foreign
soil anywhere on the planet, including ones in Japan for over 60 years,
as permanent.) Those four monster bases in Iraq (and many others) were soon being built at the cost of multibillions and are, even today, being significantly upgraded.
In October 2007, for instance, National Public Radio’s defense
correspondent Guy Raz visited Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which
houses about 40,000 American troops, contractors, and Defense
Department civilian employees, and described
it as one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and
structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center
of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades.
These mega-bases, like Camp Cupcake
(al-Asad Air Base), nicknamed for its amenities, are small town-sized
with massive facilities, including PXs, fast-food outlets, and the
latest in communications. They have largely been ignored by the
American media and so have played no part in the debate about Iraq in
this country, but they are the most striking on-the-ground evidence of
the plans of an administration that simply never expected to leave. To
this day, despite the endless talk about drawdowns and withdrawals,
that hasn’t changed. In fact, the latest news about secret negotiations
for a future Status of Forces Agreement on the American presence in
that country indicates that U.S. officials are calling for an
open-ended military presence and no limits on numbers of U.S. forces,
the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over
Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term U.S. security agreements
with other countries.
3. Yes, the United States is still occupying Iraq (just not particularly effectively): In June 2004,
the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), then ruling the country,
officially turned over sovereignty to an Iraqi government largely
housed in the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad and the
occupation officially ended. However, the day before the head of the
CPA, L. Paul Bremer III, slipped out of the country without fanfare, he signed, among other degrees, Order 17,
which became (and, remarkably enough, remains) the law of the land. It
is still a document worth reading as it essentially granted to all
occupying forces and allied private companies what, in the era of
colonialism, used to be called extraterritoriality — the freedom not
to be in any way subject to Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever. And so the
occupation ended without ever actually ending. With 160,000 troops
still in Iraq, not to speak of an unknown number of hired guns and
private security contractors, the U.S. continues to occupy the country,
whatever the legalities might be (including a UN mandate and the claim
that we are part of a coalition). The only catch is this: As of now,
the U.S. is simply the most technologically sophisticated and
potentially destructive of Iraq’s proliferating militias — and outside
the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, it is capable of controlling only
the ground that its troops actually occupy at any moment.
4. Yes, the war was about oil: Oil was hardly mentioned in the
mainstream media or by the administration before the invasion was
launched. The President, when he spoke of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves at all, piously referred to them as the sacred patrimony
of the people of Iraq. But an administration of former energy execs –
with a National Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron
and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware
of the globe’s potentially limited energy supplies — certainly had oil
reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on a sea of oil and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil heartlands of the planet.
It wasn’t a mistake that, in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s
semi-secret Energy Task Force set itself the task of opening up the
energy sectors of various Middle Eastern countries to foreign
investment; or that it scrutinized
a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, together with the (non-American)
oil companies scheduled to develop them; or that, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, the National Security Council directed
its staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it
considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:
‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as
Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and
gas fields’; or that the only American troops ordered to guard
buildings in Iraq, after Baghdad fell, were sent to the Oil Ministry
(and the Interior Ministry, which housed Saddam Hussein’s dreaded
secret police); or that the first reconstruction contract was issued
to Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, for emergency repairs to those
patrimonial oil fields. Once in charge in Baghdad, as sociologist
Michael Schwartz has made clear,
the administration immediately began guiding recalcitrant Iraqis toward
denationalizing and opening up their oil industry, as well as bringing
in the big boys.
Though rampant insecurity has kept the Western oil giants on the
sidelines, the American-shaped Iraqi oil law quickly became a
benchmark of progress in Washington and remains a constant source
of prodding and advice from American officials in Baghdad. Former
Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan put the oil matter simply and
straightforwardly in his memoir in 2007: I am saddened, he wrote,
that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone
knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil. In other words, in a
variation on the old Bill Clinton campaign mantra: It’s the oil,
stupid. Greenspan was, unsurprisingly, roundly assaulted
for the obvious naivet?of his statement, from which, when it proved
inconvenient, he quickly retreated. But if this administration hadn’t
had oil on the brain in 2002-2003, given the importance of Iraq’s
reserves, Congress should have impeached the President and Vice
President for that.
5. No, our new embassy in Baghdad is not an embassy: When,
for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, you construct a
complex — regularly described as Vatican-sized — of at least 20
blast-resistant buildings on 104 acres of prime Baghdadi real estate,
with fortified working space and a staff of at least 1,000 (plus
several thousand guards, cooks, and general factotums), when you deeply
embunker it, equip it with its own electricity and water systems, its
own anti-missile defense system, its own PX, and its own indoor and
outdoor basketball courts, volleyball court, and indoor Olympic-size
swimming pool, among other things, you haven’t built an embassy at
all. What you’ve constructed in the heart of the heart of another
country is more than a citadel,
even if it falls short of a city-state. It is, at a minimum, a monument
to Bush administration dreams of domination in Iraq and in what its
adherents once liked to call the Greater Middle East.
Just about ready to open, after the normal construction mishaps
in Iraq, it will constitute the living definition of diplomatic
overkill. It will, according to a Senate estimate, now cost Americans $1.2 billion
a year just to be represented in Iraq. The embassy is, in fact, the
largest headquarters on the planet for the running of an occupation.
Functionally, it is also another well-fortified enduring camp with the
amenities of home. Tell that to the Shiite militiamen now mortaring the Green Zone as if it were?enemy-occupied territory.
6. No, the Iraqi government is not a government: The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has next to no presence
in Iraq beyond the Green Zone; it delivers next to no services; it has
next to no ability to spend its own oil money, reconstruct the country,
or do much of anything else, and it most certainly does not hold a
monopoly on the instruments of violence. It has no control over the
provinces of northern Iraq which operate as a near-independent Kurdish
state. Non-Kurdish Iraqi troops are not even allowed on its territory.
Maliki’s government cannot control the largely Sunni provinces of the
country, where its officials are regularly termed the Iranians (a
reference to the heavily Shiite government’s closeness to neighboring
Iran) and are considered the equivalent of representatives of a foreign
occupying power; and it does not control the Shiite south, where power
is fragmented among the militias of ISCI (the Badr Organization),
Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the armed adherents of the Fadila
Party, a Sadrist offshoot, among others.
In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been derisively nicknamed
the mayor of Kabul for his government’s lack of control over much
territory outside the national capital. It would be a step forward for
Maliki if he were nicknamed the mayor of Baghdad. Right now, his
troops, heavily backed by American forces, are fighting for some modest
control over Shiite cities (or parts of cities) from Basra to Baghdad.
7. No, the surge is not over: Two weeks ago, amid much hoopla,
General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker spent two days
before Congress discussing the President’s surge strategy in Iraq and
whether it has been a success. But that surge — the ground one in
which an extra 30,000-plus American troops were siphoned into Baghdad
and, to a lesser extent, adjoining provinces — was by then already so
over. In fact, all but about 10,000 of those troops will be home by the
end of July, not because the President has had any urge for a drawdown,
but, as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote recently,
because of simple math. The five extra combat brigades, which were
deployed to Iraq with the surge, each have 15-month tours of duty; the
15 months will be up in July?and the U.S. Army and Marines have no combat brigades ready to replace them.
On the other hand, in all those days of yak, neither the general with so much more martial bling on his chest than any victorious World War II commander, nor the white-haired ambassador uttered a word about the surge that is ongoing — the air surge that began
in mid-2007 and has yet to end. Explain it as you will, but, with rare
exceptions, American reporters in Iraq generally don’t look up or more
of them would have noticed that the extra air units surged into that
country and the region in the last year are now being brought to bear over Iraq’s cities. Today, as fighting goes on in Sadr City, American helicopters and Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones
reportedly circle overhead almost constantly and air strikes of various
kinds on city neighborhoods are on the rise. Yet the air surge in Iraq
remains unacknowledged here and so is not a subject for discussion,
debate, or consideration when it comes to our future in Iraq.
8. No, the Iraqi army will never stand up: It can’t. It’s not
a national army. It’s not that Iraqis can’t fight — or fight bravely.
Ask the Sunni insurgents. Ask the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada
al-Sadr. It’s not that Iraqis are incapable of functioning in a
national army. In the bitter Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Iraqi Shiite as
well as Sunni conscripts, led by a largely Sunni officer corps, fought
Iranian troops fiercely in battle after pitched battle. But from Fallujah in 2004 to today,
Iraqi army (and police) units, wheeled into battle (often at the behest
of the Americans), have regularly broken and run, or abandoned their
posts, or gone over to the other side, or, at the very least, fought
poorly. In the recent offensive launched by the Maliki government in
Basra, military and police units up against a single resistant militia,
the Mahdi Army, deserted in sizeable numbers, while other units, when
not backed by the Americans, gave poor showings. At least 1,300 troops
and police (including 37 senior police officers) were recently fired
by Maliki for dereliction of duty, while two top commanders were removed as well.
Though American training began in 2004 and, by 2005, the President was
regularly talking about us standing down as soon as the Iraqi Army
stood up, as Charles Hanley of the Associated Press points out,
Year by year, the goal of deploying a capable, free-standing Iraqi
army has seemed to always slip further into the future. He adds, In
the latest shift, the Pentagon’s new quarterly status report quietly
drops any prediction of when local units will take over security
responsibility for Iraq. Last year’s reports had forecast a transition
in 2008. According to Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi
forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that the military will not
be able to guard the country’s borders effectively until 2018.
No wonder. The Iraqi military is not in any real sense a national
military at all. Its troops generally lack heavy weaponry, and it has
neither a real air force nor a real navy.
Its command structures are integrated into the command structure of the
U.S. military, while the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy are the real
Iraqi air force and navy. It is reliant on the U.S. military for much
of its logistics and resupply, even after an investment of $22 billion
by the American taxpayer. It represents a non-government, is riddled
with recruits from Shiite militias (especially the Badr brigades), and
is riven about who its enemy is (or enemies are) and why. It cannot be
a national army because it has, in essence, nothing to stand up for.
You can count on one thing, as long as we are training and advising
the Iraqi military, however many years down the line, you will read
comments like this one
from an American platoon sergeant, after an Iraqi front-line unit
abandoned its positions in the ongoing battle for control of parts of
Sadr City: It bugs the hell out of me. We don’t see any progress being
made at all. We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up
there helping these guys out we are making very little progress.
9. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and fragmentation:
The U.S. invasion and the Bush administration’s initial occupation
policies decisively smashed Iraq’s fragile national sense of self.
Since then, the Bush administration, a motor for chaos and
fragmentation, has destroyed the national (if dictatorial) government,
allowed the capital and much of the country (as well as its true patrimony of ancient historical objects and sites) to be looted, disbanded the Iraqi military, and deconstructed
the national economy. Ever since, whatever the administration rhetoric,
the U.S. has only presided over the further fragmentation of the
country. Its military, in fact, employs a specific policy of urban
fragmentation in which it regularly builds
enormous concrete walls around neighborhoods, supposedly for security
and reconstruction, that actually cut them off from their social and
economic surroundings. And, of course, Iraq has in these years been
fragmented in other staggering ways with an estimated four-plus million Iraqis driven into exile abroad or turned into internal refugees.
According to Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times,
there are now at least 28 different militias in the country. The longer
the U.S. remains even somewhat in control, the greater the possibility
of further fragmentation. Initially, the fragmentation was sectarian –
into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia regions, but each of those regions has
its own potentially hostile parts and so its points of future conflict
and further fragmentation. If the U.S. military spent the early years
of its occupation fighting a Sunni insurgency in the name of a largely
Shiite (and Kurdish) government, it is now fighting a Shiite militia,
while paying and arming former Sunni insurgents, relabeled Sons of
Iraq. Iran is also clearly sending arms into a country that is, in any
case, awash in weaponry. Without a real national government, Iraq has
descended into a welter of militia-controlled neighborhoods, city
states, and provincial or regional semi-governments. Despite all the
talk of American-supported reconciliation, Juan Cole described the present situation well at his Informed Comment
blog: Maybe the US in Iraq is not the little boy with his finger in
the dike. Maybe we are workers with jackhammers instructed to make the
hole in the dike much more huge.
10. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and civil war:
As with fragmentation, the U.S. military’s presence has, in fact, been
a motor for civil war in that country. The invasion and subsequent
chaos, as well as punitive acts against the Sunni minority, allowed
Sunni extremists, some of whom took the name al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,
to establish themselves as a force in the country for the first time.
Later, U.S. military operations in both Sunni and Shiite areas
regularly repressed local militias — almost the only forces capable of
bringing some semblance of security to urban neighborhoods — opening
the way for the most extreme members of the other community (Sunni
suicide or car bombers and Shiite death squads) to attack. It’s worth
remembering that it was in the surge months
of 2007, when all those extra American troops hit Baghdad
neighborhoods, that many of the city’s mixed or Sunni neighborhoods
were most definitively cleansed by death squads, producing a 75-80% Shiite capital. Iraq is now embroiled in what Juan Cole has termed three civil wars,
two of which (in the south and the north) are largely beyond the reach
of limited American ground forces and all of which could become far
worse. The still low-level struggle between Kurds and Arabs (with the
Turks hovering nearby) for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the north may
be the true explosion point to come. The U.S. military sits
precariously atop this mess, at best putting off to the future aspects
of the present civil-war landscape, but more likely intensifying it.
11. No, al-Qaeda will not control Iraq if we leave (and neither will Iran):
The latest figures tell the story. Of 658 suicide bombings globally in
2007 (more than double those of any year in the last quarter century),
542, according to the Washington Post’s
Robin Wright, took place in occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly Iraq.
In other words, the American occupation of that land has been a motor
for acts of terrorism (as occupations will be). There was no al-Qaeda
in Mesopotamia before the invasion and Iraq was no Afghanistan. The
occupation under whatever name will continue to create terrorists, no
matter how many times the administration claims that al-Qaeda is on
the run. With the departure of U.S. troops, it’s clear that homegrown
Sunni extremists (and the small number of foreign jihadis who
work with them), already a minority of a minority, will more than meet
their match in facing the Sunni mainstream. The Sunni Awakening
Movement came into existence, in part, to deal with such
self-destructive extremism (and its fantasies of a Taliban-style
society) before the Americans even noticed that it was happening. When
the Americans leave, al-Qaeda (and whatever other groups the Bush
administration subsumes under that catch-all title) will undoubtedly
lose much of their raison d’阾re or simply be crushed.
As for Iran, the moment the Bush administration finally agreed to a
popular democratic vote in occupied Iraq, it ensured one thing — that
the Shiite majority would take control, which in practice meant
religio-political parties that, throughout the Saddam Hussein years,
had generally been close to, or in exile in, Iran. Everything the Bush
administration has done since has only ensured the growth of Iranian
influence among Shiite groups. This is surely meant by the Iranians as,
in part, a threat/trump card, should the Bush administration launch an
attack on that country. After all, crucial U.S. resupply lines from
Kuwait run through areas near Iran and would assumedly be relatively
easy to disrupt.
Without the U.S. military in Iraq, there can be no question that the
Iranians would have real influence over the Shiite (and probably
Kurdish) parts of the country. But that influence would have its
distinct limits. If Iran overplayed its hand even in a rump Shiite
Iraq, it would soon enough find itself facing some version of the
situation that now confronts the Americans. As Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the Nation
recently, [D]espite Iran’s enormous influence in Iraq, most Iraqis –
even most Iraqi Shiites — are not pro-Iran. On the contrary,
underneath the ruling alliance in Baghdad, there is a fierce
undercurrent of Arab nationalism in Iraq that opposes both the U.S.
occupation and Iran’s support for religious parties in Iraq. The
al-Qaedan and Iranian threats are, at one and the same time, bogeymen
used by the Bush administration to scare Americans who might favor
withdrawal and, paradoxically, realities that a continued military
presence only encourages.
12. Yes, some Americans were right about Iraq from the beginning (and not the pundits either): One of the strangest aspects of the recent fifth anniversary (as of every other anniversary) of the invasion of Iraq was the newspaper print space
reserved for those Bush administration officials and other war
supporters who were dead wrong in 2002-2003 on an endless host of
Iraq-related topics. Many of them were given ample opportunity to offer
their views on past failures, the success of the surge, future
withdrawals or drawdowns, and the responsibilities of a future U.S.
president in Iraq.
Noticeably missing were representatives of the group of Americans who
happened to have been right from the get-go. In our country, of course,
it often doesn’t pay to be right. (It’s seen as a sign of weakness or
plain dumb luck.) I’m speaking, in this case, of the millions of people
who poured into the streets to demonstrate against the coming invasion
with an efflorescence
of placards that said things too simpleminded (as endless pundits
assured American news readers at the time) to take seriously — like
No Blood for Oil, Don’t Trade Lives for Oil, or How did USA’s oil
get under Iraq’s sand? At the time, it seemed clear to most reporters,
commentators, and op-ed writers that these sign-carriers represented a
crew of well-meaning know-nothings and the fact that their collective
fears proved all too prescient still can’t save them from that
conclusion. So, in their very rightness, they were largely forgotten.
Now, as has been true for some time, a majority of Americans, another obvious bunch of know-nothings, are deluded enough to favor bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq at a reasonable pace and relatively soon. (More than 60% of them also believe
that the conflict is not integral to the success of U.S.
anti-terrorism efforts.) If, on the other hand, a poll were taken of
pundits and the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia (not to speak of the
officials of the Bush administration), the number of them who would
want a total withdrawal from Iraq (or even see that as a reasonable
goal) would undoubtedly descend near the vanishing point. When it comes
to American imperial interests, most of them know better, just as so
many of them did before the war began. Even advisors to candidates who
theoretically want out of Iraq are hinting that a full-scale withdrawal is hardly the proper way to go.
So let me ask you a question (and you answer it): Given all of the
above, given the record thus far, who is likely to be right?
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.
[Tomdispatch recommendations: For another numbered piece on Iraq, check out Gary Kamiya's eminently sane reprise of the Ten Commandments as applied to the launching of the 2003 invasion -- to be found at Salon.com. (Commandment I, Thou shalt not launch preventive wars?quot;; Commandment VI: Do not allow neoconservatives anywhere near Middle East policy?Special Bill Kristol Sub-commandment VI a:
Stop giving these buffoons prestigious jobs on newspaper-of-record
Op-Ed pages, top magazines and television shows. They have been
completely and consistently wrong about everything. Must we continue to
be subjected to their pontifications?). Also let me offer a
Tomdispatch bow of thanks to Cursor.org's daily Media Patrol column.
Someone at that site with a keen eye for the less noticed but
newsworthy pieces of any day (and an always splendid set of links)
makes my life so much easier, when gathering material for essays like
this one.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
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