G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
American Grand Delusions: Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be
Delusional
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Apr 4 2008 - 11:48am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As
ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They
struck a village in Somalia [2], tribal areas in Pakistan [3], rural areas
in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods [4] in Iraq. Their troops are
training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan
army, while their Special Operations forces are planning [5] to train
Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country's wild, mountainous
borderlands.
Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive
against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city
of Basra. To "discuss" their needs in their President's eternal War on
Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an
assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived [6] in
Pakistan -- to the helpless outrage of the local press -- on the very day
newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of
office. ("I don't think it is a good idea for them to be here on this
particular day. right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in
the new government, trying to dictate terms..." was the way Zaffar Abbas
[7], editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)
At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates [8] in which
they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults
against Pakistan's tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani
government but based on "actionable intelligence" on terrorists. Their
drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to -- in
the phrase of the hour -- "take out." [9] Agents from their intelligence
services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist
suspects directly off the streets [10] of major cities and transporting them
to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ
torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on
conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the
whole planet into "commands," the last of which, Africom [11], was just
formed.
As far as they are concerned, nowhere do their interests not come into play;
nowhere, in fact, are they not paramount. As their President put it [12]
recently, "If [our] strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence
point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin
Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country
at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?"
(And you could easily substitute the names of other countries for Iraq.)
Their President makes a habit of regularly telling [13] other countries what
they "must" do. "At the same time," he said recently, "the regimes in Iran
and Syria must stop supporting violence and terror in Iraq." It's especially
important to him and his officials that other nations not "interfere" in
situations where, as in Iraq, they are so obviously "foreigners" and have no
business; no fingers, that is, are to be caught in other people's cookie
jars. Their Vice President made this point strikingly in an exchange [14]
with a TV interviewer:
"Q: So what message are you sending to Iran, and how tough are you
prepared to get?
"Vice President: I think the message that the president sent clearly is
that we do not want them doing what they can to try to destabilize the
situation inside Iraq. We think it's very important that they keep their
folks at home."
A range of other countries, all with a natural bent for "interference" or
"meddling," must regularly be warned or threatened. After all, what needs to
be prevented, according to a typical formulation [15] of their President, is
"foreign interference in the internal affairs of Iraq."
None of this advice do they apply to themselves for reasons far too obvious
to explain. Wherever they go -- sometimes in huge numbers, usually
well-armed, and, after a while, deeply entrenched in bases the size of small
towns that they love to build -- they feel comfortable. They are, after all,
defending their liberties by defending those of others elsewhere. Though
there are natives of one brand or another everywhere, they consider
themselves the planet's only true natives. Their motto might be: Wherever we
hang our hats (or helmets) is home.
Others, who choose to fight them, automatically become aliens, intent as
they are on destroying the stability of that planetary "home." So, for
years, their military spokespeople referred to the Sunni insurgents they
were battling in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces." [16] It mattered little that
almost all of them were, in fact, Iraqis; for the enemy is, by nature, so
beyond the pale as to be a stranger to his or her own country or, just as
likely, a cat's-paw of foreign forces and powers. Only when the very same
"anti-Iraqi forces" suddenly decided to become allies were they suddenly
granted the title, "concerned citizens," [17] or even, more gloriously,
"Sons of Iraq." [18]
When off duty, their luckier soldiers have the option of taking "rest and
recreation" in "the homeland" at places like the Hale Koa ("House of the
Warrior") Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, or in the extended homeland at, say,
the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort [19] in the Bavarian Alps or the Dragon Hill
Lodge [20] near thrilling downtown Seoul, South Korea -- all part of their
global system of Armed Forces Recreation Centers.
This is their world -- and welcome to it.
It's not exactly a mystery what country I'm talking about. You knew from the
beginning. Since the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, only one nation has made
itself at home everywhere on Earth; only one nation has felt that the
planet's interests and its own interests were essentially one; only one
nation's military garrisons and patrols our world from Greenland to the
tropics, from the sea bed to the edge of space; only one nation's military
talks about its vast array [21] of bases as its "footprint" on the planet;
only one nation judges its essential and exceptional goodness, in motivation
if nothing else, as justification for any act it may take.
Putting an Iraqi Face on Iraq
Soon, U.S. surge commander General David Petraeus will return to Washington
to report [22] to Congress on our "progress" in Iraq -- and he'll do so with
the worst crisis in that country in almost a year still unresolved. He'll do
so, in fact, shrouded in yet another strategic disaster for the Bush
administration. With that in mind, let's take a moment to look back at just
how, militarily at least, the Bush administration first made itself at home
in Iraq.
In the U.S., the administration's lack of planning [23] for the occupation
of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting [24] of Baghdad after
American troops had taken the capital -- has been the subject of much debate
and discussion in Congress and the media. While it's usually noted in
passing that, amid the chaos, orders had in fact been issued to American
troops to guard [25] the Oil Ministry, little is made of that. In fact,
orders for U.S. troops to guard that ministry and the Interior Ministry, and
nothing else, were indeed given, which simply indicates that administration
planning was extremely focused -- on oil and the secret police (and perhaps
Saddam Hussein's secret archives).
In addition, we know that the administration ignored the 13-volume "Future
of Iraq" project [26] put together by the State Department to guide an
occupation -- largely because its neocon officials were so intent on
sidelining the State Department more generally. On the other hand, the
Pentagon did plan for what it thought would matter. Specifically, from a
front-page [27] April 19, 2003 New York Times article, we know that, by the
time the invasion began, the Pentagon already had on the drawing boards
plans for building four permanent mega-bases in Iraq. (They were meant to
replace our bases in Saudi Arabia.) And these were indeed built [28] (along
with others and the largest embassy [29] on the planet) in more or less the
locations originally described. From the beginning, whatever planning it
didn't do, the Bush administration was certainly planning to make itself at
home in Iraq in a big way for a long, long time.
Much has also been made of the disastrous, seat-of-the-pants decision by the
administration, in the person of L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) then ruling Baghdad, to disband the Iraqi army.
But few now recall what the administration, the CPA, and the Pentagon had in
mind (and leaked to the press soon after the invasion) for a future Iraqi
military of their dreams.
They had, in fact, reconceived the Iraqi army as a force of perhaps 40,000
lightly armed, largely border-guarding troops. Keep in mind that Saddam
Hussein had a military of 400,000 heavily armed troops and -- until the
First Gulf War in 1990 -- a powerful air force (as well as copious supplies
of chemical weapons). In the Middle East, for a country to have only a
40,000 man military without tanks, artillery, or an air force to call on
meant but one thing: that the U.S. military and the U.S. Air Force, from
bases in Iraq and in the region, were to be Iraq's real fighting force in
any crisis. This was the true planning message of the Bush administration
and it indicated just how "at home" its officials thought they would be in
occupied Iraq.
By the time it became obvious that such thinking was fantastical and George
Bush was starting to repeat the mantra [30], "As Iraqis stand up, Americans
will stand down," the idea of a 40,000-man force had been long forgotten. By
then, the U.S. military was at work creating a large Iraqi army and national
police force. But the effects of such planning remain debilitatingly
present, even today.
After all, the "crack" Iraqi units sent into Basra by Prime Minister Maliki
were still relatively lightly armed. (Hence, their complaints that the
Sadrist militia they came up against were often better armed than they
were.) They still had no significant Iraqi air force to call on, because as
yet it hardly exists [31]. When they got desperate, they had to call on U.S.
and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces units [32]. And, of
course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where American units quickly
[33] entered the fray, they showed no particular flair for "standing up." In
fact, according to the Associated Press's fine reporter Charles J. Hanley,
the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now
estimates [34] that Iraq's military will not be able to guard the country's
borders effectively until, at the earliest, 2018.
There was a period, back in 2004-05, when the Bush administration regularly
wielded a telling image. They talked often about the importance of putting
"an Iraqi face" on various aspects of the situation in that country. Here's
a typical passage [35] from the New York Times from that period: "By
insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad
were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to
put 'an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the
ones talking to reporters, not Americans." This caught something of the
strangeness of that moment, a strangeness that has yet to disappear. After
all, as an image, to put a "face" on anything actually means to put a mask
over an already present face, which was (and, even today, in military terms
largely remains) American power in Iraq.
The presentation of the recent Maliki government offensive, launched on the
eve of Petraeus's return, also represented, in part, an attempt to put an
Iraqi face on American at-homeness in that country. The fictional story put
out as the "Iraqi" offensive was launched -- printed up quite seriously [36]
in our media -- was that Maliki had only informed the American high command
(and the British in Basra) of his prospective move in the hours [37] just
before it was launched. This was, on the face of it, ludicrous. The "Iraqi"
army has been stood up -- trained, that is -- by U.S. advisors; some of its
units have U.S. advisors embedded in them; it is almost totally reliant on
the logistical support of the U.S. military. It could not move far
offensively without the significant prior knowledge of U.S. commanders (and
this was later admitted [38] by the President's National Security Council
Advisor Stephen J. Hadley).
While Maliki had his own reasons for launching his forces (and allied
militias) against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, the Americans
certainly imagined a triumphant moment for Petraeus in his upcoming
hearings, thanks to new evidence that the Iraqi government was finally, in
George Bush's words [39], "in the lead" and its military shaping up well. As
Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported [40], "Pentagon spokesman
Geoff Morrell said the Iraqi operation was a 'byproduct of the success' of
the year-old U.S. troop surge." This was a fantasy, of course. And the
result was the success [41] of Sadr's forces from Basra to Baghdad -- and
ongoing American attempts to disavow [42] any real involvement in the
planning of the offensive.
Grand Delusions
The United States is hardly the first empire whose representatives have felt
at home anywhere in its world (if not, in past times, in the world). When
you are at the peak of your imperial powers, you can ignore the problems and
contradictions that such a feeling, such an attitude, naturally calls up.
This is no longer the situation for the United States and so the
contradictions ripen, the problems only grow, and the plunge into delusional
thinking deepens.
Take just the seeming conundrum of the recent battle in Basra. On one side,
you have an Iraqi army, trained for years by the Americans, to the tune of
approximately $22 billion in U.S. funds. On the other side, you have an (at
best) partially trained "militia" -- an "army" in name only. It may be that
the Iranians have put some effort or money into equipping the Mahdi Army --
though the evidence for this is slim indeed -- but, if so, this would be
minor by comparison.
When the two forces clashed, what was the result? Some Iraqi soldiers and
policemen [43] simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases,
surrendered [44] or went over to the other side, or deserted, or fought
half-heartedly; while the Mahdis fought fiercely, cleverly, and, in the end,
successfully, until called off in triumph by their leader. They "stood up"
[45] (just as they had against the full might of the American military in
the southern holy city of Najaf back in 2004). Could there, then, be two
different races of Iraqis, one set willing to fight with or without training
or outside help, the other unwilling, no matter the support?
The American military faced a similar situation four decades ago in Vietnam,
where American advisors training the South Vietnamese military regularly
swore that they would turn in their brigades of Vietnamese troops for just a
few platoons of Vietcong, who would stand and fight as if their lives
depended on it.
Of course, the answer here is anything but mysterious. On the one hand, you
have a foreign-trained, foreign-advised, foreign-supplied force with
confused and divided loyalties that is only partially an "Iraqi" army; on
the other, you have a local force, fighting in a community, for the safety
and wellbeing of its own sons and wives, friends and relatives. The Mahdi
Army members know why they fight and who they fight for. They have "faith,"
and not just in the religious sense. They are, in a word, at home.
The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this
matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly "stand up"
for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power,
no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The
inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades --
represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability
of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world.
In such cases, you misperceive who is on your side, why they are there, and
what, exactly, they are capable of. You misunderstand what the actual
natives of a place think of you. You don't grasp that, whatever the brute
force and finances at your command, you, as a foreigner, may never
understand the situation you believe you should control. Even the Maliki
government itself, after all, is only "on our side" thanks to its abysmal
weakness. (Otherwise, it would be far more closely allied with that other
foreign power, Iran.) Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- you simply delude
yourself. You mistake your trained army for an "Iraqi" or a "Vietnamese" one
and so come to believe that, if only you adjust your counterinsurgency
tactics correctly, it will fight like one. Then you act accordingly, which
is, of course, disastrous.
Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and
pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's
worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional,
because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further
disaster for Americans and Iraqis.
Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies
of the globe "taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens
elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high
military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating,
however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere
"must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army
in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.
And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for "the natives," as long as we
are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we
must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the
world's -- will only multiply.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project [46]. His book, The End of Victory
Culture [47] (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 Recommendation: A recent Noam Chomsky piece, "We Own the
World," [48] took up an allied set of topics to those in this essay. It's a
fascinating read and I urge you to check it out.]
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
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
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 opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
Delusional
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Apr 4 2008 - 11:48am
- from TomDispatch [1]
Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As
ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They
struck a village in Somalia [2], tribal areas in Pakistan [3], rural areas
in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods [4] in Iraq. Their troops are
training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan
army, while their Special Operations forces are planning [5] to train
Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country's wild, mountainous
borderlands.
Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive
against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city
of Basra. To "discuss" their needs in their President's eternal War on
Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an
assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived [6] in
Pakistan -- to the helpless outrage of the local press -- on the very day
newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of
office. ("I don't think it is a good idea for them to be here on this
particular day. right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in
the new government, trying to dictate terms..." was the way Zaffar Abbas
[7], editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)
At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates [8] in which
they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults
against Pakistan's tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani
government but based on "actionable intelligence" on terrorists. Their
drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to -- in
the phrase of the hour -- "take out." [9] Agents from their intelligence
services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist
suspects directly off the streets [10] of major cities and transporting them
to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ
torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on
conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the
whole planet into "commands," the last of which, Africom [11], was just
formed.
As far as they are concerned, nowhere do their interests not come into play;
nowhere, in fact, are they not paramount. As their President put it [12]
recently, "If [our] strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence
point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin
Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country
at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?"
(And you could easily substitute the names of other countries for Iraq.)
Their President makes a habit of regularly telling [13] other countries what
they "must" do. "At the same time," he said recently, "the regimes in Iran
and Syria must stop supporting violence and terror in Iraq." It's especially
important to him and his officials that other nations not "interfere" in
situations where, as in Iraq, they are so obviously "foreigners" and have no
business; no fingers, that is, are to be caught in other people's cookie
jars. Their Vice President made this point strikingly in an exchange [14]
with a TV interviewer:
"Q: So what message are you sending to Iran, and how tough are you
prepared to get?
"Vice President: I think the message that the president sent clearly is
that we do not want them doing what they can to try to destabilize the
situation inside Iraq. We think it's very important that they keep their
folks at home."
A range of other countries, all with a natural bent for "interference" or
"meddling," must regularly be warned or threatened. After all, what needs to
be prevented, according to a typical formulation [15] of their President, is
"foreign interference in the internal affairs of Iraq."
None of this advice do they apply to themselves for reasons far too obvious
to explain. Wherever they go -- sometimes in huge numbers, usually
well-armed, and, after a while, deeply entrenched in bases the size of small
towns that they love to build -- they feel comfortable. They are, after all,
defending their liberties by defending those of others elsewhere. Though
there are natives of one brand or another everywhere, they consider
themselves the planet's only true natives. Their motto might be: Wherever we
hang our hats (or helmets) is home.
Others, who choose to fight them, automatically become aliens, intent as
they are on destroying the stability of that planetary "home." So, for
years, their military spokespeople referred to the Sunni insurgents they
were battling in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces." [16] It mattered little that
almost all of them were, in fact, Iraqis; for the enemy is, by nature, so
beyond the pale as to be a stranger to his or her own country or, just as
likely, a cat's-paw of foreign forces and powers. Only when the very same
"anti-Iraqi forces" suddenly decided to become allies were they suddenly
granted the title, "concerned citizens," [17] or even, more gloriously,
"Sons of Iraq." [18]
When off duty, their luckier soldiers have the option of taking "rest and
recreation" in "the homeland" at places like the Hale Koa ("House of the
Warrior") Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, or in the extended homeland at, say,
the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort [19] in the Bavarian Alps or the Dragon Hill
Lodge [20] near thrilling downtown Seoul, South Korea -- all part of their
global system of Armed Forces Recreation Centers.
This is their world -- and welcome to it.
It's not exactly a mystery what country I'm talking about. You knew from the
beginning. Since the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, only one nation has made
itself at home everywhere on Earth; only one nation has felt that the
planet's interests and its own interests were essentially one; only one
nation's military garrisons and patrols our world from Greenland to the
tropics, from the sea bed to the edge of space; only one nation's military
talks about its vast array [21] of bases as its "footprint" on the planet;
only one nation judges its essential and exceptional goodness, in motivation
if nothing else, as justification for any act it may take.
Putting an Iraqi Face on Iraq
Soon, U.S. surge commander General David Petraeus will return to Washington
to report [22] to Congress on our "progress" in Iraq -- and he'll do so with
the worst crisis in that country in almost a year still unresolved. He'll do
so, in fact, shrouded in yet another strategic disaster for the Bush
administration. With that in mind, let's take a moment to look back at just
how, militarily at least, the Bush administration first made itself at home
in Iraq.
In the U.S., the administration's lack of planning [23] for the occupation
of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting [24] of Baghdad after
American troops had taken the capital -- has been the subject of much debate
and discussion in Congress and the media. While it's usually noted in
passing that, amid the chaos, orders had in fact been issued to American
troops to guard [25] the Oil Ministry, little is made of that. In fact,
orders for U.S. troops to guard that ministry and the Interior Ministry, and
nothing else, were indeed given, which simply indicates that administration
planning was extremely focused -- on oil and the secret police (and perhaps
Saddam Hussein's secret archives).
In addition, we know that the administration ignored the 13-volume "Future
of Iraq" project [26] put together by the State Department to guide an
occupation -- largely because its neocon officials were so intent on
sidelining the State Department more generally. On the other hand, the
Pentagon did plan for what it thought would matter. Specifically, from a
front-page [27] April 19, 2003 New York Times article, we know that, by the
time the invasion began, the Pentagon already had on the drawing boards
plans for building four permanent mega-bases in Iraq. (They were meant to
replace our bases in Saudi Arabia.) And these were indeed built [28] (along
with others and the largest embassy [29] on the planet) in more or less the
locations originally described. From the beginning, whatever planning it
didn't do, the Bush administration was certainly planning to make itself at
home in Iraq in a big way for a long, long time.
Much has also been made of the disastrous, seat-of-the-pants decision by the
administration, in the person of L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) then ruling Baghdad, to disband the Iraqi army.
But few now recall what the administration, the CPA, and the Pentagon had in
mind (and leaked to the press soon after the invasion) for a future Iraqi
military of their dreams.
They had, in fact, reconceived the Iraqi army as a force of perhaps 40,000
lightly armed, largely border-guarding troops. Keep in mind that Saddam
Hussein had a military of 400,000 heavily armed troops and -- until the
First Gulf War in 1990 -- a powerful air force (as well as copious supplies
of chemical weapons). In the Middle East, for a country to have only a
40,000 man military without tanks, artillery, or an air force to call on
meant but one thing: that the U.S. military and the U.S. Air Force, from
bases in Iraq and in the region, were to be Iraq's real fighting force in
any crisis. This was the true planning message of the Bush administration
and it indicated just how "at home" its officials thought they would be in
occupied Iraq.
By the time it became obvious that such thinking was fantastical and George
Bush was starting to repeat the mantra [30], "As Iraqis stand up, Americans
will stand down," the idea of a 40,000-man force had been long forgotten. By
then, the U.S. military was at work creating a large Iraqi army and national
police force. But the effects of such planning remain debilitatingly
present, even today.
After all, the "crack" Iraqi units sent into Basra by Prime Minister Maliki
were still relatively lightly armed. (Hence, their complaints that the
Sadrist militia they came up against were often better armed than they
were.) They still had no significant Iraqi air force to call on, because as
yet it hardly exists [31]. When they got desperate, they had to call on U.S.
and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces units [32]. And, of
course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where American units quickly
[33] entered the fray, they showed no particular flair for "standing up." In
fact, according to the Associated Press's fine reporter Charles J. Hanley,
the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now
estimates [34] that Iraq's military will not be able to guard the country's
borders effectively until, at the earliest, 2018.
There was a period, back in 2004-05, when the Bush administration regularly
wielded a telling image. They talked often about the importance of putting
"an Iraqi face" on various aspects of the situation in that country. Here's
a typical passage [35] from the New York Times from that period: "By
insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad
were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to
put 'an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the
ones talking to reporters, not Americans." This caught something of the
strangeness of that moment, a strangeness that has yet to disappear. After
all, as an image, to put a "face" on anything actually means to put a mask
over an already present face, which was (and, even today, in military terms
largely remains) American power in Iraq.
The presentation of the recent Maliki government offensive, launched on the
eve of Petraeus's return, also represented, in part, an attempt to put an
Iraqi face on American at-homeness in that country. The fictional story put
out as the "Iraqi" offensive was launched -- printed up quite seriously [36]
in our media -- was that Maliki had only informed the American high command
(and the British in Basra) of his prospective move in the hours [37] just
before it was launched. This was, on the face of it, ludicrous. The "Iraqi"
army has been stood up -- trained, that is -- by U.S. advisors; some of its
units have U.S. advisors embedded in them; it is almost totally reliant on
the logistical support of the U.S. military. It could not move far
offensively without the significant prior knowledge of U.S. commanders (and
this was later admitted [38] by the President's National Security Council
Advisor Stephen J. Hadley).
While Maliki had his own reasons for launching his forces (and allied
militias) against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, the Americans
certainly imagined a triumphant moment for Petraeus in his upcoming
hearings, thanks to new evidence that the Iraqi government was finally, in
George Bush's words [39], "in the lead" and its military shaping up well. As
Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported [40], "Pentagon spokesman
Geoff Morrell said the Iraqi operation was a 'byproduct of the success' of
the year-old U.S. troop surge." This was a fantasy, of course. And the
result was the success [41] of Sadr's forces from Basra to Baghdad -- and
ongoing American attempts to disavow [42] any real involvement in the
planning of the offensive.
Grand Delusions
The United States is hardly the first empire whose representatives have felt
at home anywhere in its world (if not, in past times, in the world). When
you are at the peak of your imperial powers, you can ignore the problems and
contradictions that such a feeling, such an attitude, naturally calls up.
This is no longer the situation for the United States and so the
contradictions ripen, the problems only grow, and the plunge into delusional
thinking deepens.
Take just the seeming conundrum of the recent battle in Basra. On one side,
you have an Iraqi army, trained for years by the Americans, to the tune of
approximately $22 billion in U.S. funds. On the other side, you have an (at
best) partially trained "militia" -- an "army" in name only. It may be that
the Iranians have put some effort or money into equipping the Mahdi Army --
though the evidence for this is slim indeed -- but, if so, this would be
minor by comparison.
When the two forces clashed, what was the result? Some Iraqi soldiers and
policemen [43] simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases,
surrendered [44] or went over to the other side, or deserted, or fought
half-heartedly; while the Mahdis fought fiercely, cleverly, and, in the end,
successfully, until called off in triumph by their leader. They "stood up"
[45] (just as they had against the full might of the American military in
the southern holy city of Najaf back in 2004). Could there, then, be two
different races of Iraqis, one set willing to fight with or without training
or outside help, the other unwilling, no matter the support?
The American military faced a similar situation four decades ago in Vietnam,
where American advisors training the South Vietnamese military regularly
swore that they would turn in their brigades of Vietnamese troops for just a
few platoons of Vietcong, who would stand and fight as if their lives
depended on it.
Of course, the answer here is anything but mysterious. On the one hand, you
have a foreign-trained, foreign-advised, foreign-supplied force with
confused and divided loyalties that is only partially an "Iraqi" army; on
the other, you have a local force, fighting in a community, for the safety
and wellbeing of its own sons and wives, friends and relatives. The Mahdi
Army members know why they fight and who they fight for. They have "faith,"
and not just in the religious sense. They are, in a word, at home.
The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this
matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly "stand up"
for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power,
no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The
inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades --
represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability
of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world.
In such cases, you misperceive who is on your side, why they are there, and
what, exactly, they are capable of. You misunderstand what the actual
natives of a place think of you. You don't grasp that, whatever the brute
force and finances at your command, you, as a foreigner, may never
understand the situation you believe you should control. Even the Maliki
government itself, after all, is only "on our side" thanks to its abysmal
weakness. (Otherwise, it would be far more closely allied with that other
foreign power, Iran.) Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- you simply delude
yourself. You mistake your trained army for an "Iraqi" or a "Vietnamese" one
and so come to believe that, if only you adjust your counterinsurgency
tactics correctly, it will fight like one. Then you act accordingly, which
is, of course, disastrous.
Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and
pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's
worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional,
because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further
disaster for Americans and Iraqis.
Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies
of the globe "taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens
elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high
military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating,
however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere
"must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army
in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.
And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for "the natives," as long as we
are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we
must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the
world's -- will only multiply.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project [46]. His book, The End of Victory
Culture [47] (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 Recommendation: A recent Noam Chomsky piece, "We Own the
World," [48] took up an allied set of topics to those in this essay. It's a
fascinating read and I urge you to check it out.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
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"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 opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson