Petraeus's testimony: Misinformation wrapped in delusion

American Grand Delusions

Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional

By Tom Engelhardt

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, tribal areas in Pakistan,

rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods 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 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 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, editor of the

newspaper Dawn, put it.)

At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates 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." Agents from their

intelligence services have, these last years, roamed the planet,

kidnapping terrorist suspects directly off the streets 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, 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 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 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 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 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." 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," or even, more gloriously, "Sons of Iraq."

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 in the Bavarian Alps

or the Dragon Hill Lodge 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 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 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 for the occupation

of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting 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 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 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 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 (along with others and the largest embassy 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, "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. When they got desperate, they had

to call on U.S. and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces

units. And, of course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where

American units quickly 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 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 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 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 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 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, "in the lead" and its military

shaping up well. As Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported,

"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 of Sadr's forces

from Basra to Baghdad -- and ongoing American attempts to disavow 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 simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases,

surrendered 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" (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.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174914/the_natives_of_planet_earth

Sorry to have cut big chunks of this great article. The link at the bottom

will bring you to the source article.

"Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:428f3d28-56be-45d7-8b6e-3ca9b840ef9e@8g2000hsu.googlegroups.com...

> American Grand Delusions

> Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional

> By Tom Engelhardt

>

>

> 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 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.)

>

>

> 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." 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," or even, more gloriously, "Sons of Iraq."

>

> 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 in the Bavarian Alps

> or the Dragon Hill Lodge 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 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 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.

>

It is just crazy to have the military justify bad political decisions made

on lies which have led our troops into Iraq. The decision to invade and to

loot Iraq was political, was bad, was criminal. There is no military

solution to it. If you let it up to professional military to decide we will

ALWAYS find enemies in the world, we will always fight wars - otherwise many

of those military jobs will be eliminated as unnecessary.

Not a single new drop of blood for this criminal invasion - be it American

or Iraqi blood.

Not a single new dollar to pay for continuation of our crimes in Iraq. This

President has already diluted our currency enough by printing and throwing

into the world markets tons of less and less valuable US dollars daily to

pay for his little wars. This is the major reason for the current financial

crisis - not the poor home owners unable to pay their mortgages! Enough of

borrowing from the other nations in order to continue our crimes against

singled out portions of the world. The Republicans don't even want our

people to know that we still pay for their criminal wars even though the

government is not collecting enough taxes to pay for the wars. These wars

are being paid with hidden "delayed" taxes - that is what our worldwide

borrowing is. Our children's and great children's Administrations will have

to put aside trillions of dollars to pay the interest and the principal on

the money the Bushes have been borrowing to wage their criminal wars. Stop

this madness now - we cannot afford it anymore. The world cannot afford it

anymore. Don't seek military opinion for the proof - just look at the state

of the financial markets - that is the proof!

> 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.

>

> 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.

>

>

> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174914/the_natives_of_planet_earth

>