Two days in a row starting with the lead piece in the New York Times (Thom Shanker, Cost of U.S. Troops in Iraq Put at $3.9 Billion a Month)… I don’t know what’s getting into me. Still, the first paragraph of the piece paraphrases yesterday’s testimony of Gen. Tommy Franks before the Senate Armed Services Committee in this way: “General Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced ‘for the foreseeable future.'”
Forget for a minute that the $3.9 billion a month bill suggested by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in the same hearings and cited in the headline is almost twice the cut-rate price quoted prewar and doesn’t include the moneys for operations in Afghanistan ($900-950 million a month) or any costs whatsoever for what is laughably called the reconstruction of Iraq (see below). The phrase that interests me is that “for the foreseeable future” direct from the retiring General’s mouth (and his retirement schedule does look remarkably well-timed). Now that’s a frightening phrase in itself. How much more frightening it would be if it were put more accurately — “for the unforeseeable future.” After all, the present we’re now in was once that “unforeseeable future,” and who woulda guessed?
By the way, I liked this little paragraph in the Washington Post account of the same hearings (Thomas E. Ricks and Helen Dewar, Senators Grill Rumsfeld About U.S. Future in Iraq):
“Rumsfeld, who usually appears confident in his testimony, repeatedly said he did not know the answers to major questions from committee members, such as whether France and Germany specifically had been asked to contribute troops to postwar operations in Iraq, or the total monthly costs of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
You can already sense, as with the President staggering through a news conference in South Africa how the defensiveness is creeping up on these guys. In the same Post piece, here’s a little hint perhaps of why our leaders seem to have entered if not the Twilight Zone, at least the Discomfort Zone:
“A poll released this week by the Pew Research Center found that 23 percent of Americans believe the military effort in Iraq is going very well. That’s sharply down from 61 percent in April. But there is still strong support — 66 percent — for a major U.S. commitment to rebuild Iraq and establish a stable government.”
Rumsfeld himself had a great little quote about the “V” word, already so well re-attached to the Q-word, at a press conference some days back: “There are so many cartoons where people, press people, are saying, ‘Is it Vietnam yet?’ hoping it is and wondering if it is. And it isn’t. It’s a different time. It’s a different era. It’s a different place.”
You can already sense, as with the President staggering through a news conference in South Africa how the defensiveness is creeping up on these guys. In the same Post piece, here’s a little hint perhaps of why our leaders seem to have entered if not the Twilight Zone, at least the Discomfort Zone:
“A poll released this week by the Pew Research Center found that 23 percent of Americans believe the military effort in Iraq is going very well. That’s sharply down from 61 percent in April. But there is still strong support — 66 percent — for a major U.S. commitment to rebuild Iraq and establish a stable government.”
Rumsfeld himself had a great little quote about the “V” word, already so well re-attached to the Q-word, at a press conference some days back: “There are so many cartoons where people, press people, are saying, ‘Is it Vietnam yet?’ hoping it is and wondering if it is. And it isn’t. It’s a different time. It’s a different era. It’s a different place.”
Yes, Don, you’re right Iraq is not Vietnam, but it’s already Vietnam-time inside his brain. Our leaders, all of them, have been running from that defeat in Vietnam for thirty years and just when they thought, like so many hares, they’d outrun it, lo and behold, the tortoise caught up; a whole army of tortoises it seems. Hordes of them. I guess you just can’t keep a good defeat down. Now, they’re twisting and ducking the Vietnam label for all their worth — after all, whether or not Iraq is a quagmire, the image is a political quagmire right here at home and they all fear getting sucked down.
Now, the game is to somehow get someone else’s troops into Iraq on the double. Two Baltimore Sun journalists, Mark Matthews and Tom Bowman report (U.S. might ask NATO to take over control of Iraq occupation) that administration officials are actually considering swallowing crow one of these days, if things don’t improve fast, and trying to dump the problem on NATO. (If France and Germany buy that “deal,” I’d personally like to sell them a genuine ziggurat which a reputable real estate agent assures me is located somewhere near the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.) Matthews and Bowman note:
“The Pentagon and the State Department have reached out to some 70 countries to contribute forces outside the NATO umbrella to the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. But they have enlisted only the 8,000-member force that will be led by Poland.”
And then they indicate that NATO is now on the White House brain, but, they suggest, there’s another dreamy fall-back vision floating around somewhere inside the Beltway: “As the single most powerful nation in NATO, the United States would retain military command while spreading the burden and costs among a number of nations, thereby easing demands on overstretched American forces, diplomats said.”
And then — it just can’t be avoided — one of those unnamed “senior defense officials” who populate our press is quoted as recently telling reporters “he has not seen the Army this stretched since the Vietnam era. One option is to extend the deployment periods of active Army units from six months to nine months. Another is to mobilize National Guard forces to help relieve the pressure, said one officer familiar with the effort.” But, of course, this is going to leave the military even more overstretched in the future when unhappily “mobilized” National Guardsmen and overused troops don’t re-up.
Here, In the meantime, on the WMD front, are two splendid, state-of-the-moment phrases, suitable for framing, from the “retired” intelligence community (Barry Schweid, AP, Experts Accuse U.S. of Misrepresentation):
“When the war began in March, Iraq posed no threat to the United States or to its neighbors, a former senior State Department intelligence official said Wednesday. Its missiles could not reach Israel, Saudi Arabia or Iran, said Greg Thielmann, who held a high post in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. But Thielmann, one of four critics at a session held by the private Arms Control Association, said the Bush administration had formed a ‘faith-based’ policy on Iraq and took the approach that “we know the answers; give us the intelligence to support those answers.
“Gregory V. Treverton, a senior analyst at Rand, a government-financed research group, challenged what he said was the administration’s persistent description of intelligence as evidence when it often is a qualified judgment. But the administration extracted from the data the ‘best bumper stickers’ it could fashion, said the former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council.”
Ruth Rosen in today’s San Francisco Chronicle asks the Colin Powell question — the first time I’ve seen it in the mainstream media, but I give you the Tomdispatch guarantee of satisfaction (not often proffered) that it won’t be the last — “Where’s the exit strategy?” I’ve included the Rosen below and a response to her of a sort. It’s a new Foreign Policy in Focus piece by Michael Renner on the “other looting” of Iraq which offers the best rundown I’ve seen of American privatization plans for the country and indicates that the only “exit strategy” this administration had thought out was for Iraq’s oil and that has yet to work.
Remarkably, at the end of this long imperial stretch in the oil lands of our world, led as we are by a coterie of oil men, oil itself is still more or less a verboten topic in most of our media. If you say we went into Iraq for the oil, you’re dismissed as a Marxist simpleton and an idiot. It was all much more complex (as it was). But oil is a pretty complex thing in itself if you stop to think about it.
Let me return then briefly to a couple of prewar themes of mine: We are ruled by vulgar Marxists. They think natural resources and raw materials (and how to use them up profligately). They dream oil, which isn’t so dopey. The stuff fuels the world, after all, and so, like gold in the 16th century, fuels the dreams of men. (It isn’t called “black gold” for nothing.) Controlling the world’s flow of oil is, believe me, deeply on the minds of these men, whether in Iraq or in Africa, where by remarkable happenstance the President now is dodging and weaving the slings and arrows of Vietnam just like his secretary of defense at home.
If you leave the mainstream media and check out that Marxist rag Oil & Gas Journal, here’s how you find their editors starting their Africa visit piece: (CERA: Bush’s Africa visit to focus on oil supply, new natural gas sources):
“While mainly centered around a macroeconomic and humanitarian-based agenda, US President George W. Bush’s tour this week of certain key sub-Saharan African countries had “underlying US economic concerns” relating directly to the strategic importance of the US’s energy security, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. In a recently released study, CERA said, “Increasing economic and political stability in Africa supports a linchpin of US energy policy: diversifying oil and gas import sources.
“During 2002, Africa produced 7.05 million b/d of oil, or about 10.7% of total world oil output. The continent’s reserves, meanwhile, stood at 77.4 billion bbl of oil, or 6.4% of world reserves, CERA noted. CERA said that West Africa’s oil and gas industry in particular is currently “at a threshold.” The region now supplies roughly 14% of all US oil imports”
And so on, but go and read it yourself. And here’s James Ridgeway of the Village Voice discussing present events in Liberia in an energy context (Liberia: Ripe for Colonizing?)
“At press time, Taylor had agreed, under pressure from the U.S. and others, to leave Liberia, but the U.S.’s policy objectives require a more stable government in Liberia anyway. In the first place, with the war on terror replacing the Cold War, Liberia could serve as a listening post and operations center for combating Al Qaeda and other militant groups in Africa.
“This is important because West Africa might well emerge as a major supplier to the U.S. of oil–and especially natural gas. An increased supply of natural gas is a cardinal part of Bush’s energy program. That in turn would mean carrying frozen natural gas across the ocean on special liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers and building ports and processing stations. This is a highly controversial venture because an LNG explosion, either accidental or deliberate, would be devastating.”
Finally, British Historian Eric Hobsbawm has written a long, fond, thoughtful essay on our country in the Chronicle of Higher Education adapted from an autobiographical book, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, to be published next month. It’s about living on and off in the United States, especially New York City, these last forty years (Only in America). On the American model which our rulers are so desperate to make the world’s model, he says, “It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it.” He goes on to write in part:
“[S]ince the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world’s only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics, self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.”
And he ends touchingly, ” Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. That is the problem of living at the apex of the ‘American Century.’ As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its solution.” Tom
The Other Looting
By Michael Renner
Foreign Policy In Focus
July 2003Chaos and lawlessness have gripped large parts of Iraq following the U.S.-British invasion. The country’s civilian population finds itself bereft of jobs and even basic services. Museums, hospitals, universities, power stations, water plants, and telecomm facilities have been stripped bare by looters, leaving the country in dire straits. Several weeks after the end of major fighting, ordinary Iraqis have seen little in the way of benefits from whatever reconstruction is going on. Indeed, the focus of the occupation regime is more on emergency repairs than on a major rehabilitation of Iraq’s dilapidated and war-destroyed public infrastructure.1
Less visible than the pedestrian plundering afflicting Iraq’s cities and archeological treasures, another looting operation from on high is in the works: the Bush administration has been moving with great alacrity to take control of the major prize to be won in Iraq–strategic control over the country’s considerable oil wealth.
To read more Renner click here
What’s the exit strategy?
By Ruth Rosen
The San Francisco Chronicle
July 10, 2003I keep wondering what Secretary of State Colin Powell really thinks about the war in Iraq and the fact that we appear to have no exit strategy.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell was determined to prevent another military quagmire. In the early 1990s, he developed the Powell Doctrine, a set of criteria for using military force. War, he said, should be a last resort, the purpose should reflect a well-defined national interest and enjoy strong public support, and once decided, should be executed with overwhelming force and have a clear exit strategy.
With astonishing hubris, the Bush administration dumped the Powell Doctrine,
with its many restraints, for a pre-emptive war strategy that had none.