Endless War

Endless War

Tom Englehardt writes of the madness that is the U.S. occupation of Iraq with an overview and insights that put the mainstream media to shame. I'm going to quote extensively from his analysis of 04 May, 2008:

Concisely describing how some things have come full cycle to the point we're at today:

... 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.

Similar madness inspired Country Joe and the Fish's immortal lyrics:

well it's one, two, three
what are we all fightin' for?
don't ask me now I don't give a damn;

And a perverse reversal hearkening back to U.S. metrics of the war upon the Vietnamese:

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."

...

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 of the death count. In reverse form, however, it still held some of the same dangers for the administration as its Vietnamese cousin.

...

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. ... 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.

Unlike virtually all of the reporting from Iraq, Englehardt considers the situation from the viewpoint of the Iraqis.

For the Iraqis of Sadr City, of course, this is a living hell. ... 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.

...

That rising body count has, after all, taken away the last metric by which to measure "success" in Iraq. Even the small explanations ... seem increasingly bizarre. Take, for instance, the convoluted explanation of who exactly is responsible for the devastation in Sadr City. ...

"'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.'"

...

So, to sum up ... 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…

...

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.

...

Remember the days when the warmongers were so elated with their "victory":

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.

Here's another point, so obvious which Christopher Hedges has also made: Armies win wars and armies lose wars, but politicians begin wars and politicians end wars.


The current U.S. puppet government of Iraq has little legitimacy amongst the Iraqi people, all of whom want our foreign army to leave.

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?

...

[Secretary of Defense] 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."


... This is Gates' 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.

...

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.

...


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.

Posted by Mark Ganzer at 1:16 AM