How many times in recent weeks have we read a statement like this one in U.S. Drops Its Bid to Base Troops in Turkey in today’s Los Angeles Times:
“‘Given the record of the past few weeks, we are not counting on Turkey’s help anymore,’ the official said late Friday, briefing reporters on the envoy’s three hours of talks with top Turkish diplomats and military commanders in Ankara, the capital.”
And here’s the sort of statement we may hear a lot more of — as politicians around the world take up America as a “model” to emulate, just not perhaps the model we had in mind. In this case, it’s from a Turkish politician discussing Turkish plans to send the army into Northern Iraq, something the Bush administration is suddenly actively trying to discourage:
“‘If the safety of America’s citizens is so important that its army will come 10,000 miles from home to fight in Iraq, then what about us?’ said Egeman Bagis, a lawmaker from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party. ‘Don’t we have a right to defend our own interests in the country next door?'”
And here, by the way, are some comments in today’s British paper The Independent from Colonel Mike Turner, a retired military aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf (see yesterday’s comments by a retired Australian military man), which undoubtedly reflect deep fears within our military. Turner warns that war in Iraq
“could turn into a disaster that echoes the bloody debacle of Somalia rather than the relatively painless 1991 Gulf war.’There’s a saying in military circles: We always fight the last war So I asked myself today which war will this be: Desert Storm or Somalia? In 1991, we had four iron-clad prerequisites for war with Iraq: a clear political end state, overwhelming force to achieve a quick and decisive victory, a viable Arab coalition to avoid empowering Arab extremists, and absolutely no Israeli involvement to avoid a global holy war.
“‘In Somalia, we ignored the most critical of these lessons. Mission creep turned our original objective of humanitarian aid into simply ‘Get Aidid,’ the Somali factional leader we were battling.’ Colonel Turner said the US had made the mistake of fixing its sights early on ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. This plan had met stiff opposition from the uniformed staff within the Pentagon”
And here’s the sort of statement we may hear a lot more of — as politicians around the world take up America as a “model” to emulate, just not perhaps the model we had in mind. In this case, it’s from a Turkish politician discussing Turkish plans to send the army into Northern Iraq, something the Bush administration is suddenly actively trying to discourage:
“‘If the safety of America’s citizens is so important that its army will come 10,000 miles from home to fight in Iraq, then what about us?’ said Egeman Bagis, a lawmaker from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party. ‘Don’t we have a right to defend our own interests in the country next door?'”
And here, by the way, are some comments in today’s British paper The Independent from Colonel Mike Turner, a retired military aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf (see yesterday’s comments by a retired Australian military man), which undoubtedly reflect deep fears within our military. Turner warns that war in Iraq
“could turn into a disaster that echoes the bloody debacle of Somalia rather than the relatively painless 1991 Gulf war.’There’s a saying in military circles: We always fight the last war So I asked myself today which war will this be: Desert Storm or Somalia? In 1991, we had four iron-clad prerequisites for war with Iraq: a clear political end state, overwhelming force to achieve a quick and decisive victory, a viable Arab coalition to avoid empowering Arab extremists, and absolutely no Israeli involvement to avoid a global holy war.
“‘In Somalia, we ignored the most critical of these lessons. Mission creep turned our original objective of humanitarian aid into simply ‘Get Aidid,’ the Somali factional leader we were battling.’ Colonel Turner said the US had made the mistake of fixing its sights early on ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. This plan had met stiff opposition from the uniformed staff within the Pentagon”
Below, from Paul Rogers, the geopolitical analyst at www.openDemocracy.net, comes perhaps the most sobering consideration I’ve seen of the probable nature of the war the United States is about to launch in Iraq. He focuses in particular on our proud claim to use ever more technologically advanced “precision” weaponry and so to be capable of taking particular and humane “care” in war. Now, when you think about it, the development of weaponry historically has generally moved in the direction of greater “precision.” There are exceptions — the move, say, from the crossbow to the blunderbuss or the early musket — but the question is, precision in what? Precision obviously in delivering some deadly projectile or explosive to a designated human target or target area, but — and here’s the catch — delivery with ever more deadly power. So “precision” in warfare has, in fact, developed in tandem with slaughter, not in opposition to it.
The wars of the European colonial powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries became ever more precise in their ability to deliver death as weaponry improved and, as a result, in wars all across the colonial world, cannons on warships, the repeating rifle, the Gatling gun, its successor the machine gun, and finally the airplane, delivered ever greater numbers of deaths ever more “precisely.” So that at Omdurman in the Sudan, a British expeditionary force backed by warships and armed with Maxim machine guns was able to slaughter the Mahdi’s forces in distinctly modern and precise ways. Approximately 11,000 of his troops died without coming within hundreds of yards of British lines. (“It was not a battle but an execution The bodies were spread evenly over acres and acres,” wrote an observer.); in Afghanistan in 1880, 3,000 Afghan warriors advanced over a mile of open ground into British guns to the loss of 132 British troops; while in East Africa, a single German officer commanding native troops armed with two machines guns slaughtered 1,000 Hehe tribesmen. And so it went across the globe. And so, largely, it still goes.
Even rare European defeats, as of the Italians at Adowa, were not fully reflected in the casualty figures. Approximately six thousand Italians were killed, and another four thousand wounded or captured by the victorious Ethiopian troops whose losses nonetheless ran to perhaps seventeen thousand. And then, of course, in 1914, the Europeans finally brought “precision” war home from the colonies and turned Europe into a great charnel house in the First World War, learning first-hand how clean “precision” war can be.
Many of us grew up with this fact of global life and war-making before our eyes — though we didn’t quite recognize it for what it was. Our movies from the 1930s on were filled with what I’ve called elsewhere a riveting “spectacle of slaughter” — as Indians, Japanese, Chinese, “natives” of every sort fell thrillingly before our massed guns with a “precision” that reality had no way of offering and at the cost of the deaths of only a few white cavalrymen/settlers/marines (as well as their nonwhite sidekicks). More recently, however, as in the Gulf War, the Pentagon has preferred to leave this spectacle of slaughter distinctly off-stage (that old Vietnam syndrome again) which has taken a little of the visual thrill out of on-screen war in our world.
It’s within this historical context that Paul Rogers proceeds to demolish the idea that “precision” weapons lead to “clean” wars and gives a sense of what kinds of precise weapons and what kind of unimagined power to slaughter we will bring to the scene. In fact, America’s recent wars haven’t been faintly clean. The Gulf war was an out-and-out slaughter, whose disproportional death rates (most American “casualties” had little to do with combat or came from friendly fire) match those of any from the colonial wars of the 19th century; and this was no less true of the war against the Taliban and Al Quaeda in Afghanistan, where “collateral damage” to civilians is sometimes discussed but the thousands upon thousands of dead enemy soldiers go unmentioned. Even the American “defeat” in Somalia resulted in the usual lopsided loss of Somalian lives — up to 1,000 (Rogers says 500) for the few Americans who died.
I also include a new piece from the American Prospect magazine written by Robert Dreyfus, whose remarkable analysis of American planning in the oil lands of the globe in Mother Jones magazine, “The Thirty Year Itch,” I sent out recently. Here he reminds us that, in terms of the region, a “tidy” war is as unlikely as a clean one. Perhaps this piece should have been entitled something like “The Thirty Years War” for what our leaders seem intent on leading us into. Tom
The Myth of a clean war — and its real motive
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy
March 13, 2003As the United States and Britain move closer to a pre-emptive war to terminate the Saddam Hussein regime, a central claim of both governments will be that this will be a ‘clean’ war, using precision-guided missiles and bombs to destroy command headquarters and other military facilities while rigorously avoiding people, especially civilians.
The precedent
It is worth remembering that exactly the same was said at the time of the 1991 Gulf war, and only in its aftermath were the full effects of the war on ordinary people appreciated. The notion of a ‘war against real estate’ – with TV pictures showing the pinpoint destruction of deserted bridges — was carefully cultivated, with other film of people being killed assiduously kept from view.
To read more Rogers click here
Just the Beginning
Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?
By Robert Dreyfus
The American Prospect
March 1, 2003For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration’s hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq’s borders, are likely to be mistaken.