Quote of the day (from Alain Touraine, El Pais): “The US … is building a world order, prepared by itself and justified only by being at the service of God, so that the US more and more resembles the regimes it threatens … The Europeans [are] so indecisive, so apathetic – will they ever understand that they must oppose the American crusade, create a distinct relationship with the Islamic countries, and impose a return to multilateralism, after this warrior episode of US policy, which may end like Napoleon’s expedition to Russia?”
Among the many historical analogies being bandied about, that’s one I hadn’t seen before – our troops in broiling Iraq as the frozen soldiers of Napoleon’s retreating army (remember that the Russians had burned down Moscow to deny the French Emperor winter succor), harried by guerrillas across the icy steppes of Russia. And yet let’s not deny that this will end badly. Not least because the men (and lone woman) in the Bush administration are inching back from Iraq at a glacial pace. Only the other day the Pentagon’s leading neocon, Wolfowitz of Arabia, took to the op-ed podium of the Wall Street Journal to remind everyone that the civilians in the Pentagon aren’t backing away from their global dreams at all. He wrote what in the old Soviet Union would have been a party-line piece insisting that (Paul Wolfowitz, Support Our Troops):
“Just as in the Cold War, holding the line in Berlin and Korea was not just about those places alone. It was about the resolve of the free world. Once that resolve was made clear to the Soviets, communism eventually collapsed. The same thing will happen to terrorism — and to all those who have attempted to hijack Islam and threaten America and the rest of the free world, which now includes Iraq. They will see our resolve and the resolve of the free world. Then they, too, will take their place on the ash heap of history.”
I think it still remains a more than open question exactly who will join whom on that “ash heap of history.” The new line in our press this week is that some of the Busheviks, the President included, are “swallowing their pride” and “returning” to the UN. We are finally on a “UN track,” as the papers like to say, with the media equivalent of a straight, even a sober, face. As the New York Times hustled to suggest in its lead editorial today (A Bigger U.N. Role in Iraq):
“It is unclear how much authority Washington is willing to give the U.N., but the new resolution offers an approach all Council members should support Fuller U.N. involvement would not only reduce the costs in American lives and dollars -it would also improve the chances for success.”
This is, in fact, little short of a joke. Here, for instance, is what that softie, our Secretary of State Colin Powell, had to say about “sharing” the burden (of empire) in Iraq (Robin Wright, US Pushes for UN Resolution, Los Angeles Times):
“At a news conference today, Powell said the U.S. will ‘play a dominant role in Iraq. But there is room for other nations in providing troops for security across Iraq. There are many roles to be played,’ he said. ‘We believe that every peace-loving nation in the world, every nation that would like to see a more stable Middle East, that would like to see democracy arise in that part of the world, would want to play a role.’ He added: ‘It’s important for us to come together as an international community, and this is a further step in that direction.'”
I think it still remains a more than open question exactly who will join whom on that “ash heap of history.” The new line in our press this week is that some of the Busheviks, the President included, are “swallowing their pride” and “returning” to the UN. We are finally on a “UN track,” as the papers like to say, with the media equivalent of a straight, even a sober, face. As the New York Times hustled to suggest in its lead editorial today (A Bigger U.N. Role in Iraq):
“It is unclear how much authority Washington is willing to give the U.N., but the new resolution offers an approach all Council members should support Fuller U.N. involvement would not only reduce the costs in American lives and dollars -it would also improve the chances for success.”
This is, in fact, little short of a joke. Here, for instance, is what that softie, our Secretary of State Colin Powell, had to say about “sharing” the burden (of empire) in Iraq (Robin Wright, US Pushes for UN Resolution, Los Angeles Times):
“At a news conference today, Powell said the U.S. will ‘play a dominant role in Iraq. But there is room for other nations in providing troops for security across Iraq. There are many roles to be played,’ he said. ‘We believe that every peace-loving nation in the world, every nation that would like to see a more stable Middle East, that would like to see democracy arise in that part of the world, would want to play a role.’ He added: ‘It’s important for us to come together as an international community, and this is a further step in that direction.'”
A “further” step? Maybe it’s just my fading brain, but I can’t seem to recall the previous ones. Last night’s ABC prime-time news reported that our staggering concessions to the international community would include letting the UN help the Governing Council we appointed in the writing of a new constitution, or help monitor a future vote. Gosh, even I feel empowered.
But what’s actually going on here? Well, start with casualties. There have been all those rumors, faithfully reported here, about the under-reporting of American casualties. Now, Vernon Loeb of the Washington Post offers a full-scale assessment of this, calling “the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war” and reporting that “almost 10 American troops a day [are] now being officially declared ‘wounded in action.'” His conclusion (Number of Wounded in Action on Rise): “Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.” There have also, reported ABC prime time news last night, been nine suicides.
If we have about 140,000 troops in Iraq at any time, then over 6,000 flown out of action for “injuries” of any sort, mental or physical, or killed in Iraq means that, by my crude calculations, well over 4% of the American force there has been put of out action one way or another – and those figures include months when casualties were relatively low.
If I were the military I would be panicking too. Troops are exhausted. There have been numerous reports on low morale and high stress in the press, from the troops themselves and from their families. Many of our soldiers are in what Senator Robert Byrd has called a “shooting gallery” situation And the military is overextended globally. What they need (from their point of view) isn’t international sharing, but troops, fresh troops – and if we can get Indians or Pakistanis to do our phone solicitations, why not our military junk work in Iraq too? In June, Byrd, our last Roman senator, asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to assess “how a protracted mission in Iraq could affect our military readiness.” And now we know. In a speech in the Senate, he reported in part:
“According to the advance copy of the CBO report that was delivered to my office today, if we are to rely primarily on the active duty Army to carry out the occupation of Iraq while maintaining our presence in Korea, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and elsewhere, we can only maintain 38,000 to 64,000 soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait over the long term.
“Even if the Pentagon takes extraordinary measures, such as depending on large deployments of the National Guard and the Reserves and using Marines as peacekeepers, the CBO report estimates that we could still only sustain 67,000 to 106,000 troops in Iraq for the long term. The annual incremental cost for a continuing deployment of this size, assuming that the security situation becomes stable, could be up to $19 billion per year The CBO also reports that our troop levels in Iraq will have to start declining by March 2004 if we hope to preserve readiness in our armed forces.”
On this one, you can do the math yourself, probably far better than I can. So can the President. It’s not very complicated. Then think to yourself about the growing team of “critics,” Republicans and Democrats alike, who want to send more troops to Iraq.
So the Bush administration is quite literally between a rock (their now increasingly ludicrous dreams of global domination from which they can’t bear to be parted) and a hard place (the military and financial needs of Iraq and the needs of the military in Iraq). A front-page piece in the New York Times this morning claims that “Administration officials have also said over the last few days that they expected to ask Congress for an additional spending request of between $60 billion and $80 billion in the next fiscal year to pay for the reconstruction and some of the military occupation of Iraq.” (I’d like to see exactly who is supposed to get how much of that money.) It’s in this context that they are now trying to involve the United Nations – not of course in any meaningful way, but as a cover for convincing other countries to provide reinforcements, military and financial. As Dana Milbank and Thomas Ricks put it today in a long Washington Post report on how Powell and the Joint Chiefs trumped the Pentagon civilian command on a return to the UN (Powell and Joint Chiefs Nudged Bush Toward U.N.),
“At the same time, it was becoming obvious that the administration could not recruit enough foreign troops without U.N. support. ‘The U.S. had gone around knocking on just about every possible door looking for money and troops, and they got the same answer everywhere: We need some kind of a new resolution,’ a diplomat at the United Nations said.
“‘All these strands came together and reached a critical mass,’ the diplomat said. ‘The coalition authority is broke. They need bodies. The administration finally understands that you can’t have reconstruction while destruction is still going on.'”
Let’s only hope that the world is not so dazzled by American assessments of American power that they in some fashion give in to this foolishness which will not help the Iraqis, nor, in the long run, our troops. Anybody who takes the assurances of this administration seriously on sharing even a shred of power in Iraq should just recall the “vital role” Bush and Blair promised the U.N. back when, and then consider what’s happened since. I note that already today the leaders of France and Germany have criticized the U.S. draft resolution.
By the way, the right-wing Washington Times has just revealed the existence of a “secret report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” on Iraq war planning that “lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that ‘limited the focus’ for preparing for post-Saddam Hussein operations The report is titled ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom Strategic Lessons Learned’ and is stamped ‘secret.’ A copy was obtained by The Washington Times.”
But “rush” might not be quite the right word for it. The Times goes on to say (Rowan Scarborough, U.S. rushed post-Saddam planning):
“The report also shows that President Bush approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August last year. That was eight months before the first bomb was dropped and six months before he asked the U.N. Security Council for a war mandate that he never received.”
What I’d love to know is who leaked this report and for what purpose. I assume it was someone in the military and embarrassment of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon had to be at the top of the list (although it’s also clearly an attempt to whitewash the postwar military failure to find weapons of mass destruction). But what’s fascinating here is the confirmation that the plan for (and undoubtedly decision for) war was made eight months early. Eight months – all that discussion and “debate” to follow — and yet no significant Pentagon planning for the postwar moment was undertaken until the postwar moment was upon them. What the report confirms is that Wolfowitz and the Don believed their dreams. They genuinely thought postwar Iraq, as Ahmed Chalabi had assured them, would be the Big Rock Candy Mountain of countries – no problems and lots of gum drops (or oil wells) for the picking.
So here we are. We know what they still want to do – hang on with the help of the “international community.” So what do we do? Fortunately, the Nation magazine (www.thenation.com whose homepage you can view by clicking here) and Jonathan Schell have agreed to let me to share in his latest, and one of his most eloquent, “Letters from Ground Zero.” “The Importance of Losing” is to appear in the September 22nd issue of the magazine. In it, he says not just that this war is a losing proposition, which indeed it is, but that the “losing” part of it is in itself important, is in fact the most important thing.
If you had read his recent book, The Unconquerable World, Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (which I once again recommend to you as an indispensable volume for our desperate world), you would understand just why the invasion and occupation of Iraq, no matter the nature of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, was always fated to be a disaster. A couple of centuries of opposition to imperial rule had ensured that. His description of our situation follows. Tom
The Importance of Losing
Letter From Ground Zero
By Jonathan SchellThe basic mistake of American policy in Iraq is not that the
Pentagon-believing the fairy tales told it by Iraqi exile groups and
overriding State Department advice-forgot, when planning “regime
change,” to bring along a spare government to replace the one it was
smashing; not that, once embarked on running the place, the
Administration did not send enough troops to do the job; not that a
civilian contingent to aid the soldiers was lacking; not that the
Baghdad museum, the Jordanian Embassy, the United Nations and Imam
Ali mosque, among other places, were left unguarded; not that no
adequate police force, whether American or Iraqi, was provided to
keep order generally; not that the United States, seeking to make
good that lack, then began to recruit men from the most hated and
brutal of Saddam’s agencies, the Mukhabarat; not that, in an
unaccountable and unparalleled lapse in America’s once sure-fire
technical know-how, Iraq’s electrical, water and fuel systems remain
dysfunctional; not that the Administration has erected a powerless
shadow government composed in large measure of the same clueless
exiles that misled the Administration in the first place; not that
the Administration has decided to privatize substantial portions of
the Iraqi economy before the will of the Iraqi people in this matter
is known; not that the occupation forces have launched
search-and-destroy operations that estrange and embitter a population
that increasingly despises the United States; not that, throughout, a
bullying diplomacy has driven away America’s traditional allies.
All these blunders and omissions are indeed mistakes of American
policy, and grievous ones, but they are secondary mistakes. The main
mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging the war at all. That is
not a conclusion that anyone should have to labor to arrive at.
Something like the whole world, including most of its governments and
tens of millions of demonstrators, plus the UN Security Council,
Representative Dennis Kucinich, Governor Howard Dean and this
magazine, made the point most vocally before the fact. They variously
pointed out that the Iraqi regime gave no support to Al Qaeda,
predicted that the United States would be unable to establish
democracy in Iraq by force-and that therefore no such democracy could
serve as a splendid model for the rest of the Middle East-warned that
“regime change” for purposes of disarmament was likely to encourage
other countries to build weapons of mass destruction, and argued that
the allegations that Iraq already had weapons of mass destruction and
was ready to use them at any moment (within forty-five minutes after
the order was delivered, it was said) were unproven. All these
justifications for the war are now on history’s ash heap, never to be
retrieved-adding a few largish piles to the mountains of ideological
claptrap (of the left, the right and what have you) that were the
habitual accompaniment of the assorted horrors of the twentieth
century.Recognition of this mistake-one that may prove as great as the
decision to embark on the Vietnam War-is essential if the best (or at
any rate the least disastrous) path out of the mess is to be charted.
Otherwise, the mistake may be compounded, and such indeed is the
direction in which a substantial new body of opinion now pushes the
United States. In this company are Democrats in Congress who
credulously accepted the Bush Administration’s arguments for the war
or simply caved in to Administration pressure, hawkish liberal
commentators in the same position and a growing minority of
right-wing critics.They now recommend increasing American troop strength in Iraq. Some
supported the war and still do. “We must win,” says Democratic
Senator Joseph Biden, who went on Good Morning America to recommend
dispatching more troops. His colleague Republican John McCain agrees.
The right-wing Weekly Standard is of like mind. Others were doubtful
about the war at the beginning but think the United States must “win”
now that the war has been launched. The New York Times, which opposed
an invasion without UN Security Council support, has declared in an
editorial that “establishing a free and peaceful Iraq as a linchpin
for progress throughout the Middle East is a goal worth struggling
for, even at great costs.” And, voicing a view often now heard, it
adds, “We are there now, and it is essential to stay the course.” Joe
Klein, of Time, states, “Retreat is not an option.”“Winning,” evidently, now consists not in finding the weapons of mass
destruction that once were the designated reason for fighting the war
but in creating a democratic government in Iraq-the one that will
serve as a model for the entire Middle East. Condoleezza Rice has
called that task the “moral mission of our time.” Stanford professor
Michael McFaul has even proposed a new Cabinet department whose job
would be “the creation of new states.” The Pentagon’s job will be
restricted to “regime destruction”; the job of the new outfit,
pursuing a “grand strategy on democratic regime change,” will be,
Houdini-like, to pull new regimes out of its hat. On the other hand,
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which recently
produced a report on the situation in Iraq, thinks a big part of the
problem is bad public relations and counsels “an intense
communications and marketing campaign to help facilitate a profound
change in the Iraqi national frame of mind.”These plans to mass-produce democracies and transform the mentalities
of whole peoples have the look of desperate attempts-as grandiose as
they are unhinged from reality-to overlook the obvious: First, that
people, not excluding Iraqis, do not like to be conquered and
occupied by foreign powers and are ready and able to resist; and,
second, that disarmament, which is indeed an essential goal for the
new century, can only, except in the rarest of circumstances, be
achieved not through war but through the common voluntary will of
nations. It is not the character of the occupation, it is occupation
itself that the Iraqis are, in a multitude of ways, rejecting.The practical problem of Iraq’s future remains. The Iraqi state has
been forcibly removed. That state was a horrible one; yet a nation
needs a state. The children must go to school; the trains must run;
the museums must open; murderers must be put in jail. But the United
States, precisely because it is a single foreign state, which like
all states has a highly self-interested agenda of its own, is
incapable of providing Iraq with a government that serves its own
people. The United States therefore must, to begin with, surrender
control of the operation to an international force. It will not
suffice to provide “UN cover” for an American operation, as the
Administration now seems to propose. The United States should
announce a staged withdrawal of its forces in favor of and in
conjunction with whatever international forces can be cobbled
together. It should also (but surely will not) provide that force
with about a hundred billion or so dollars to do its work-a low
estimate of what is needed to rebuild Iraq.Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United
States must learn to lose this war-a harder task, in many ways, than
winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing
attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time
(well, of the next few years, anyway). The cost of leaving will
certainly be high, just not anywhere near as high as trying to “stay
the course,” which can only magnify and postpone the disaster.
And yet-regrettable to say-even if this difficult step is taken, no
one should imagine that democracy will be achieved by this means. The
great likelihood is something else-something worse: perhaps a
recrudescence of dictatorship or civil war, or both. An interim
period-probably very brief-of international trusteeship is the best
solution, yet it is unlikely to be a good solution. It is merely
better than any other recourse. The good options have probably passed
us by. They may never have existed. If the people of Iraq are given
back their country, there isn’t the slightest guarantee that they
will use the privilege to create a liberal democracy. The creation of
democracy is an organic process that must proceed from the will of
the local people. Sometimes that will is present, more often it is
not. Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the
self-determination it battled to achieve for so long; but it has not
become a democracy.On the other hand, just because Iraq’s future remains to be decided
by its talented people, it would also be wrong to categorically rule
out the possibility that they will escape tyranny and create
democratic government for themselves. The United States and other
countries might even find ways of offering modest assistance in the
project. It’s just that it is beyond the power of the United States
to create democracy for them.The matter is not in our hands. It never was.
Jonathan Schell, the Harold Willens Peace Fellow of the Nation
Institute, is the author of the recently published The Unconquerable
World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (Metropolitan).Reprinted with permission from the September 22, 2003 issue of The Nation