Tom Engelhardt: American Hubris in Iraq

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 11, 2004):

Does anyone recall the arguments of worried critics of the impending invasion of Iraq early last spring? There was a fear – not realized (until this week) of block by block urban warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Iraq's capital was to be an enormous trap Saddam Hussein had readied to spring on American troops. Casualties would be high; fighting would be bitter. It would be an urban "quagmire."

Of course, no such thing happened. As the Americans approached, much of Saddam's army, including elite units of the Republican Guard, possibly responding to promises that soldiers and officers alike would be respected and used in a new Iraq, simply evaporated. After a bloody firefight, the capital was "liberated"; the dictator disappeared; and Donald Rumsfeld back in the Pentagon was left chortling about the stupidity and timidity of his critics.

Now, on the year anniversary of that moment, the Marines find themselves fighting block by block through the streets of Fallujah; parts of Baghdad are up in arms; and cities in the south of the country are in the chaotic hands of the Mahdi Army and its supporters. One year later, that is, our troops in Iraq are living out the nightmares of the war critics -- and Saddam Hussein can't even be blamed, nor can the usual outside agitators (whether al-Qaedan or Iranian). In this case, the Bush administration can largely blame itself.

The Greeks would have known what to call this result of overweening pride and arrogance -- hubris -- though our War President doesn't quite qualify as a tragic figure. Certainly, our neocon viceroy in Baghdad L. Paul Bremer had barely landed before, with the certainty that's a Bush administration trait, he disbanded the Iraqi military, putting maybe 400,000 men, mostly still armed, on the street with no jobs, nothing to do, and families or themselves to feed. But Father knew best. It was our military in its permanent bases which was to ensure Iraq's "safety" for an indefinitely prolonged future.

As the Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis comments in his latest column, Bush's Boy Blunder:

"Any junior imperialist knows the first thing you do when you conquer someone's country is to buy the loyalty of its existing armed forces, government and police. Otherwise you will have armies of angry, unemployed potential rebels roaming the streets -- Iraq today being Exhibit A."

Indeed, but the neocons of this administration didn't think of themselves as junior anythings. They thought of themselves as global dominators. They were confirmed in the belief that they could do anything by the speed with which their dreams seemed to come to life last April and the evident impotence of the rest of the world to stop them.

From the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, they had taken only one lesson: That, as the last Great Power standing at what seemed like the end of hundreds of years of multi-power struggles, of history itself, and with a lead in the technology of applied deadly force that left the military budgets of any conceivable alliance of powers in the dust, they were free to do their damnedest. This was what they meant by freedom -- ours to impose our will on them (name and location to be supplied later). They also came to believe that, for the globe's only hyperpower, military power or the threat of it was the same as power itself; that only a kind of weakness, an imperial wimpiness in the years of Bush I and Clinton I and II, had prevented our ultimate success. Just to be sure, they picked out the weakest looking of their conceivable enemies – Iraq (not Iran or North Korea) -- and whacked it good. And won in no time at all. Mission accomplished.

Only this sort of thinking could explain the blunt openness with which they acted to secure an Iraq to their liking -- a country disarmed, helpless, run by men chosen by them (this was called "democracy"), economically privatized, and opened utterly to a set of corporate entities known to support them back in Washington. (Has anybody noticed, by the way, that no significant "reconstruction" contracts have been doled out even to our closest allies, only subcontracting crumbs; that the greatest "export" of the British – who turn out to be our Gurkhas – to Iraq seems to be mercenaries for hire?)

A year later, all this has, of course, turned nightmarish for them. A year later, whether they like it or not, care to acknowledge it or not, are in denial about it or not, they will have to come to grips somehow with what Martin Wollacott of the Guardian calls "the essential meagerness of the military instrument." (Now it is America that desperately needs rescuing) And it seems they will have to do so in the streets of Iraq.

If you want to check out the train of ham-handed mistakes that led to this moment, read the latest from Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, U.S. Targeted Fiery Cleric In Risky Move. And here's how Robert Fisk of the Independent sizes up the present "military" situation (The War's One Simple Truth):

"So the marines smashed their way into Fallujah, killing more than 200 Iraqis, including women and children, while using tanks fire and helicopter gunships against gunmen in the Baghdad slums of Sadr City. It took a day or two to understand what new self-delusion had taken over the US military command. They were not facing a country-wide insurgency. They were liberating the Iraqis all over again! So, of course, this will mean a few more ‘major military operations'. Sadr goes on the wanted list for a murder after an arrest warrant that no one told us about when it was mysteriously issued months ago--supposedly by an Iraqi judge--and General Mark Kimmitt, General Sanchez's number two, told us confidently that Sadr's militia will be ‘destroyed'…

"And with each new collapse, we are told of new hope. Yesterday, General Sanchez was still talking about his ‘total confidence' in his troops who were ‘clear in their purpose,' how they were making ‘progress' in Fallujah and how--these are his actual words, ‘a new dawn is approaching.'

"Which is exactly what US commanders were saying exactly a year ago today--when US troops drove into the Iraqi capital and when Washington boasted of victory against the Beast of Baghdad."

And here's what Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment website is simply a must at the moment, sums up our stated decision to take in or take out the young radical Islamist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces ):

"Al-Hayat reports that US Viceroy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, rejects such negotiations [between Muqtada and members of the Governing Council], saying that Muqtada faces three possibilities: He can surrender, he can be arrested by US troops, or he can be killed resisting that arrest. I'd just suggest to Jerry that he be careful what he wishes for. Muqtada's family has been standing up to that kind of bullying talk for decades, when it issued from the Baath, and they are not the surrendering kind. If the US arrests Muqtada, it can only do so by desecrating among the most sacred shrines in Islam. If you want to see waves of attacks on American interests from Beirut to Tehran and from Kabul to Manama, just go ahead. And once the US has Muqtada, that will simply provoke daily demonstrations in all the southern cities demanding his release. If the US kills Muqtada, his followers will likely go underground and wage a long-term guerrilla war against the US, of the sort Mr. Bremer has failed to put down in the Sunni Arab areas after a year of trying. My advice to him (not that he is good at taking advice) is, if [Council member Nadeer] Chaderji can get him a deal, to take it. Bremer will be back in Washington on July 1, but the Iraqis and the US troops and all the rest of us will have to live with the results of his failed policies and his arrogant obstinacy for the next decade."

And here's a question nobody's bothering to ask: What exactly happens once we take Fallujah, or Kut, or Najaf, or Karbala? Excuse my Vietnam analogies, but won't these just be another set of Hamburger Hills? We don't really have enough troops to garrison the country, so if we stay in Fallujah, there will simply be another place we can't be. If we leave, on the other hand, what we leave behind is not a city, but a thoroughly inflamed, resistant, and ever more embittered and oppositional populace. Like the Hamburger Hills of Vietnam, we don't actually want Fallujah, or Kut, or Kufa, or for that matter the holy city of Najaf. There's nothing there of value to us. What we want is to stop a mindset for which tanks, gunships, and Apache helicopters are blunt instruments indeed. This is the nature of -– dare I name the obvious -- national liberation struggles once they begin against occupiers in our resistant world.

Under the pressure of recent events, as has been true over and over since 9/11, journalists, analysts and pundits are reaching for historical analogies that might help us grasp or even domesticate the rush of events. Certainly, the dominant one here in the last week has been the Vietnam War (pro or con). It's an experience lodged deep in the American brain and so it's not hard to think of those urban areas of Iraq as the "jungles" of Indochina or even of the desert as a "quagmire." Our Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance, appeared this week to state definitively that Iraq ''is not a swamp that is going to devour us.'' Okay, so he couldn't bring himself to say "quagmire." The point was made. Perhaps the most on-the-mark Vietnam analogy was made by Marilyn Young, historian of our Vietnam wars, who, even before Baghdad was taken, spoke of the developing Iraq experience as "Vietnam on crack cocaine".

Among the more intriguing comparisons this week, though, were several to France's Algerian experience and Israel's Lebanese experience. James Bennet, possibly the best of the New York Times Middle Eastern reporters (and a vivid writer), had a piece on the Lebanon analogy, The Parallels of Wars Past, in which he wrote in part:

"At a grander level, a level of global strategy and even myth-making, Iraq has echoes of Vietnam, which was presented by the White House as a test of American resolve against a rising international menace, Communism. But in terms of specific, stated objectives for the application of military force, Iraq looks more like [Israel's] Lebanon.

"In Vietnam the Americans had a clear if shaky client, the South Vietnamese government, and an enemy, North Vietnam, with a strong political structure. In Lebanon the Israelis, like the Americans in Iraq, plunged into a vacuum -- or more precisely into a maelstrom of political and religious rivalries."

And, of course, Israel's man in Lebanon in the early 1980s was none other than Ariel Sharon, whose recent actions in the occupied territories have been carefully studied and imitated by the Bush administration. The most striking formulation of this I've seen was in a column by Gideon Samet in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. (The Sharonizing of America):

"If anyone took the time to interest himself in the troubles of others, he encountered an ironic spectacle: the Americans have supplanted us in the headlines. Their air force carried out targeted assassinations, letting the chips of civilian casualties fly where they may as they lop off the arm of terror. In a confusion of historic images, the Iraqi quagmire was dipped into the Lebanese quicksand with a touch of Vietnam jungle… [T]he peak of the coordination between [Israel and the United States] is the current situation, in which for the last few years we have been witnessing a kind of Israelization -- or Sharonization -- of America: in its attitude toward the threats of terrorism, America is talking and behaving in Iraq like the last of the hawks on the Israeli General Staff. Instead of giving Jerusalem an example of political daring, Washington has become a huge version of the Israeli army's ‘we'll show them' approach. Sharon's visit there next week will look almost like the hosting of the aged mentor by his slightly maladroit disciple."

And in the coming weeks as we launch our "offensive" to retake urban Iraq, we're bound to see more of the same.

Let me now offer my own homely analogy, quite divorced from history. Imagine the present situation as a kind of home-gardening experiment on a colossal scale. The Bush administration planted the seeds and in Iraq the crop has just come up. Yes, we went in talking about "liberation" and "democracy," but our acts were those of dominators, and the men who undertook them from Bush and Cheney to Rumsfeld and Bremer were extremists determined to bend Iraqis and then the larger world to their will. Not surprisingly, they planted mutant seeds and got, I'm sorry to say, the crops they deserved. Iraq is now Bush's garden, filled with terror and insurrection, kidnapping, insecurity, and extreme acts and oppressive thoughts of every sort. Our gardeners are about to reenter those lands and harvest the weed-infested soil using instruments of deadly destruction. We already know the long-term results. It might have been different....