Vice-presidential rule:
A friend and editor, Hugh van Dusen, wrote me recently:
“I am puzzled that none of the commentators ever ask, ‘Who is running the country?’ Or is it just assumed everyone in Washington knows it’s Rove-Cheney-Rummy who are running the country, while the President spends all his waking hours tooling around in Air Force One, at taxpayers expense, raising money for his re-election? For someone who runs a couple of hours a day and goes to bed at nine, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for conferring with his staff-cabinet-Congress-whomever. Seems a reasonable question but no one ever raises it.”
It’s true that the President is seldom sighted more than a mile from a fundraiser, while ever more evidence comes into view that, on crucial matters, Cheney rules. A recent front-page New York Times piece by Christopher Draw and Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported, for instance, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was planning to drop investigations of 50 power plants for Clean Air Act violations, instead applying a new, far more lenient standard issued by the EPA only last month (Lawyers at EPA Say It Will Drop Pollution Cases). This means, in essence, that the power-plant owners, key players not only in the pollution of America’s air but in the political fundraising game, will have a painless way never to make anti-pollution upgrades at no penalty to themselves. Another case of sacrifice in a time of “war.”
“One career E.P.A. enforcement lawyer said the decision, coupled with the changes in the underlying rules, could mean that the utility industry could avoid making as much as $10 billion to $20 billion in pollution-control upgrades In referring to the scope of the changes,” report Drew and Oppel, “the career E.P.A. enforcement lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: ‘I don’t know of anything like this in 30 years.'”
The key passage in the Times piece, however, was a single sentence in paragraph four which led to no ringing editorial denunciations of vice-presidential rule (anywhere that I looked anyway): “The lawyers said the change grew out of a recommendation by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, which urged the government two years ago to study industry complaints about its enforcement actions.” I’m sure you all remember that “task force,” the one put together from energy company representatives and lobbyists in the formative days of the new Bush administration under the eye of the vice president. The records of its suggestions have yet to see the light of day, but no matter, as its policy suggestions now seem to be turning the light of day dim indeed.
We’re talking here about Dick Cheney, the man who has scattered his allies throughout the government, especially in the Pentagon; who has the largest National Security staff in vice presidential history (no surprise since he is the player of players in the realm of foreign policy); who seems to have appeared in person or via his aides at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the run-up to war to twist arms for “useful” intelligence information; whose close aides are among the suspected callers in the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, and so on. Does anyone remember the days when a vice president’s complaint was invariably that he had no power and no duties other than purely ceremonial ones? It feels as if that was the colonial era, though all you have to do is think back to poor, semi-exiled George Bush, the elder, in the Reagan White House. This is a topic for presidential historians – or perhaps vice-presidential ones — but in the meantime, as Hugh van Dusen comments, it’s striking that, as a topic, government-by-vice-president is almost as secret as Cheney himself.
It’s true that the President is seldom sighted more than a mile from a fundraiser, while ever more evidence comes into view that, on crucial matters, Cheney rules. A recent front-page New York Times piece by Christopher Draw and Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported, for instance, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was planning to drop investigations of 50 power plants for Clean Air Act violations, instead applying a new, far more lenient standard issued by the EPA only last month (Lawyers at EPA Say It Will Drop Pollution Cases). This means, in essence, that the power-plant owners, key players not only in the pollution of America’s air but in the political fundraising game, will have a painless way never to make anti-pollution upgrades at no penalty to themselves. Another case of sacrifice in a time of “war.”
“One career E.P.A. enforcement lawyer said the decision, coupled with the changes in the underlying rules, could mean that the utility industry could avoid making as much as $10 billion to $20 billion in pollution-control upgrades In referring to the scope of the changes,” report Drew and Oppel, “the career E.P.A. enforcement lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: ‘I don’t know of anything like this in 30 years.'”
The key passage in the Times piece, however, was a single sentence in paragraph four which led to no ringing editorial denunciations of vice-presidential rule (anywhere that I looked anyway): “The lawyers said the change grew out of a recommendation by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, which urged the government two years ago to study industry complaints about its enforcement actions.” I’m sure you all remember that “task force,” the one put together from energy company representatives and lobbyists in the formative days of the new Bush administration under the eye of the vice president. The records of its suggestions have yet to see the light of day, but no matter, as its policy suggestions now seem to be turning the light of day dim indeed.
We’re talking here about Dick Cheney, the man who has scattered his allies throughout the government, especially in the Pentagon; who has the largest National Security staff in vice presidential history (no surprise since he is the player of players in the realm of foreign policy); who seems to have appeared in person or via his aides at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the run-up to war to twist arms for “useful” intelligence information; whose close aides are among the suspected callers in the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, and so on. Does anyone remember the days when a vice president’s complaint was invariably that he had no power and no duties other than purely ceremonial ones? It feels as if that was the colonial era, though all you have to do is think back to poor, semi-exiled George Bush, the elder, in the Reagan White House. This is a topic for presidential historians – or perhaps vice-presidential ones — but in the meantime, as Hugh van Dusen comments, it’s striking that, as a topic, government-by-vice-president is almost as secret as Cheney himself.
The EPA now seems to be bowing out of the air pollution business; has already bowed out of the global-warming business by declaring itself authority-less to regulate greenhouse emissions, and has rendered the Pentagon “virtually impervious to environmental fault,” as a report on the agency at Mother Jones‘s online Daily Mojo points out (Sins of Omission). The Christian Science Monitor wrote on the EPA’s Pentagon rulings: “Bush appointees at the EPA have sided with the Pentagon in seeking exemption for military facilities from federal laws governing hazardous waste, air quality, and endangered species.” Under the distant but not disinterested eye of the vice president, the EPA might now consider renaming itself the Environmental Pollution Agency (a Daily Mojo suggestion) without even changing its well-known acronym, or perhaps it should enlarge its vision by adding an extra “P” — the Environmental Pentagon Protection Agency.
Whose analogy is this anyway?
Here are parts of a rather ordinary summary report on 24 hours in Iraq from Slobodan Lekic of the Associated Press. They nonetheless manage to highlight several aspects of the present crisis. His piece begins (Official Says U.S. Has Advantage in Iraq):
“A senior U.S. official insisted on Saturday that the U.S. military has the upper hand in the escalating war in Iraq, on a day when two paratroopers died in a roadside ambush and the international Red Cross said it was closing two main offices due to deteriorating security. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage described Iraq as a ‘war zone,’ but noted that ‘we have the momentum in this process.’“
Here we have the sort of mad spin that anyone who lived through the Vietnam era can’t help but remember — the insistence on “progress” of one sort or another against all evidence on the ground, an anti-truth telling meant to “buy time” during which, it is hoped, evidence of the very momentum, the very progress being described will appear on the radar screen. Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense, was an expert at this sort of thing and, as with McNamara, we’ll undoubtedly discover when the tell-alls and memoirs come out that Armitage and most of the others knew things were much, much grimmer, but just went right on anyway. (Responsibility being something reserved for less eminent types.)
Lekic also describes an attack on an American military vehicle in the streets of Mosul, resulting in several wounded American who abandon the vehicle which is then burned not by the insurgents but by “local people” — this in a city 250 miles north of Baghdad and so beyond the “Sunni Triangle,” further evidence that the insurgency may be spreading northwards. (I use “insurgents,” by the way, simply to keep up with the latest usage. The Los Angeles Times, according to Dan Whitcomb at the Commondreams website, ” has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as ‘resistance fighters,’ saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism. The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas.'” In any case Lekic reports the following individual response in Mosul:
“‘They (Americans) are occupying the world,’ said Shazad Ahmed, a resident who saw the attack. ‘What do you want the people to do? Kiss them?’“
This seems to catch a response one might have heard in any colonial or neo-colonial occupation by any superpower of the moment any time in the last century. And talking of responses, Lekic reports the following American response to the crash (assumedly due to enemy fire) of a Blackhawk helicopter near Tikrit in which six Americans died and for which no one has claimed credit and no insurgents were found — an event that has yet to be definitively declared the result of an act of “insurgency”:
“Late Friday, U.S. troops fired mortars around the crash site and Air Force jets dropped at least three 500-pound bombs on the same area. U.S. commanders said they were trying to warn the locals against supporting insurgents.“
On television, this was reported as an assault involving tanks and howitzers as well, a whole air-land assortment of weaponry, all firing into nearby areas and at houses which insurgents (however unknown) “might” have used to aid in the attack. Consider that and you know that you have signs of collective punishment, though (as in Vietnam) it’s seldom reported that way in our media; a collective punishment assumedly ordered from on high in a spirit of revenge for the dead, and possibly for the humiliations of the week, with a distinct edge of frustration undoubtedly thrown in for good measure. This is being referred to as a “show of force” in the Sunni Triangle and it takes us a small way toward the mindset that turned much of South Vietnam into a “free fire zone” in which anything that moved was fair game and, inevitably, it takes us into the world of war crimes. There is simply no way to have an occupation of this sort and resistance to it of any sort that grows rather than fades, and not head down this path. And, if this isn’t ended soon, there can only be worse to come.
For instance, our forces are globally stretched so thin that the decision has been made to ship up to 20,000 Marines to Iraq, perhaps early next year. To the phrase “send in the Marines” is seldom appended “for guard duty” or “convoy guard duty” or some such. They are a fighting force, not a long-term occupying force. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize the kinds of acts that are likely to result when adolescent Marines, trained for invasion and war, are sent in as “peace-keepers” and begin to experience the frustrations and casualties involved in a low-level guerrilla war with unknown enemies. We’ve been here before, that’s for sure, so prepare for either court marshals or cover ups in the months to come.
And keep in mind what the results of that “show of force” in Tikrit are likely to be. That’s easy enough to guess with only Vietnam in mind. But Patrick Graham of the British Observer has just filed a report from Falluja in the heart of the heart of the Sunni Triangle on the subject. It begins (Americans sow seeds of hatred):
“Sarab rolls up her sleeve and looks at the thick scar across her upper arm. The eight-year-old says she was playing in the bathroom of her house when the shots were fired but cannot remember anything else. ‘It is their routine,’ said her grandfather, Turk Jassim. ‘After the Americans are attacked, they shoot everywhere. This is inhuman – a stupid act by a country always talking about human rights.’While the US authorities maintain that resistance attacks are carried out by former Baathists and supporters of Saddam, they continue to ignore the tribal nature of the insurgency which has grown steadily over recent months. Deeply conservative clans like the 50,000-strong Albueisi have codes of honour which they complain the American army ignores at checkpoints and during raids on houses.
“In the area around Falluja, the US army appears to be winning hearts and minds – for their enemy. ‘The American army is our best friend,’ a resistance fighter told us. ‘We should be giving them medals.’ “
According to Graham, the angry tribesmen claim to have shot down that Chinook helicopter last week and also to have shot up a train carrying military supplies. Anthony Shadid, the incomparable Washington Post reporter in Iraq (who actually speaks Arabic and so has an immense advantage over just about any other American, military or civilian, except the commander of our forces Gen. Abizaid) spotlighted similar problems in a recent article. Pointing out that “with a limited number of interpreters and interrogators, the military is often forced to take people to bases for questioning,” he then wrote about one such case (U.S. Detains Relatives of Suspects in Iraq Attacks):
“[The mother of a fugitive son the Americans couldn’t find] said brown burlap bags were placed over their heads. Terrified and crying, they were driven in Humvees to the nearby U.S. base at Habbaniya ‘God does not accept this,’ she said simply As the U.S. military searches for tactics to break an escalating guerrilla war in a region where grievances tend to accumulate but rarely fade, few occurrences have unleashed more anger and etched deeper the cultural divide than several recent arrests of wanted men’s relatives — particularly women — in Khaldiya and nearby hamlets in the Euphrates River valley. Some villagers insist the relatives have been taken as hostages to force fugitives to turn themselves in, a charge the military has denied.”
Cultural ignorance deep enough to be staggering, superpower arrogance — that is, a sense of our own superiority powerful enough to replace old-fashioned racism as a powering force in new-style colonial relations — and a confusing mix of counterinsurgency tactics that might have been designed for, in Shadid’s words, “creating enemies” makes up a powerful trio that, again, had its parallels in our Vietnam moment.
Not surprisingly, much of this has a deeply familiar ring to it to many Americans. Senator Fritz Hollings gave a speech in the Senate last week on his feeling that this was just déjà vu all over again:
“I voted for the [war] resolution. I was misled. Now we hear that this is not Vietnam The heck it is not. This crowd has got historical amnesia. There is no education in the second kick of a mule. This was a bad mistake. We were misled. We are in there now, and I am hearing the same things that the Senator heard in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 right on through 1973 There are the misleading statements, the litany by the President telling us all there was reconstituted nuclear. Here again we are in a guerilla war. It is an urban guerilla war, not in the bushes of Vietnam but we still again are trying to win the hearts and minds.
“Mr. President, I do not know how many more similarities we are going to get. Iraq is Vietnam all over for the Senator from South Carolina We either have to get in or get out. We can’t stand for operation meat grinder to continue day in and day out. [In Vietnam era documents, by the way, American generals referred to that war, too, as a “meat grinder.”]
“…Was it for nuclear? No. Was it for terrorists? No, they didn’t have terrorists there. Your son gave his life for what? As their Senator, I am embarrassed. It wasn’t for any of those things. Why we went in, the administration has yet to tell us. They keep changing the rules and the goalposts every time”
And here is a response to the Hollings speech from a mother whose son died in Iraq, the kind of statement that, later in the Vietnam Era became ever more common, if never less gut wrenching (Lauren Markoe, Senator says situation in Iraq ‘is, chapter and verse, Vietnam’ again):
“‘He is so right; there is no reason for the war,’ said Carolyn Hutchings of Boiling Springs. Her son, Marine Private Nolen Ryan Hutchings, 20, died on the outskirts of Nasiriyah in a friendly fire incident. ‘First of all, we’re after al Qaeda, and then all of a sudden it turns to Iraq. Iraq wasn’t connected to 9/11 … My son died for no good reason. My son was always proud to be a Marine. He always wore the uniform proudly, but he shouldn’t have had to wear it over there.'”
The final sentence of Slobodan Lekic’s piece is perhaps the most telling – and it reminds us that whatever reality we Americans are inhabiting right now, we are not, in fact, in Vietnam:
“[Secretary of State Colin] Powell said in an interview that it remained unclear who was behind the spate of attacks.“
Such a statement could never have been made in Vietnam. As our leaders then weren’t willing to take Vietnamese nationalism seriously, there was certainly confusion about the ultimate enemy — Russian Communism, Chinese Communism World Communism? — but there was no doubt that North Vietnam existed, that it had a charismatic leader, that there was an organized guerrilla movement in the south of the country, and so on. It was true that American soldiers often couldn’t sort the “enemy” from the civilian population and so confronted a “faceless” foe, but that did not extend to the top.
Now, in some sense, we are literally unsure who it is we’re fighting. This sort of passage, from a Howard LaFranchi piece in the Christian Science Monitor, would have been inconceivable then (Why anti-US fighting grows in Iraq):
“Who makes up the resistance and why it is strengthening — with attacks two nights in a row this week on the American civilian authority’s fortress compound in central Baghdad — are queries with answers that remain to a large extent murky and conjectural. American authorities, admitting they have poor intelligence on what appears to be a diffuse but increasingly organized insurgency, plan to step up development of Iraqi intelligence sources they hope can get a better handle on this new opposition.”
” even though the US has a large intelligence operation here, experts say it is hampered by a lack of contacts on the ground, or ‘human intelligence.’ The FBI has a large number of agents here, for example, investigating recent car bombings and the increasing rocket attacks. But the American prowess with high-tech surveillance and investigative wizardry is often useless in a country where records and phone service are in a shambles, and where low-tech person-to-person contact reigns.”
There’s a certain pathos in the fact that we entered Iraq gulled by a few Iraqi exiles and, it seems, without real intelligence about anything. As Maureen Dowd wrote today in the New York Times (The Chicago Way), “The Bush crowd hurtled into Baghdad on the law of Disney: Wishing can make it so.” Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern comments on this fall from a beautiful dream of domination into the darkness of complete ignorance in “Helicopter down” from the Tompaine.com website (included below) which conjures up Vietnam-in-Iraq about as effectively as anything I’ve seen:
“After many weeks of refusing to admit the word ‘guerrilla’ into evidence, Rumsfeld seems to have made his peace with it. Yet, when asked this past weekend on television who the guerrillas are, he foundered, admitting in so many words that he hasn’t a clue. I was actually embarrassed for him. A terrific debater and otherwise reasonably smart man, Rumsfeld was reduced to telling us once again that Iraq is the size of California and bemoaning the deficiencies in ‘situational awareness’ and lack of ‘perfect visibility’ into who it is that are killing our troops.”
In our world, then, Vietnam has arrived — like the return of the repressed — with a bang. Its language is now with us big time; no surprise, since it’s lived like an unexorcised demon in our collective brains for decades. “Quagmire” or the Q-word came first, but so many others have followed and most of them from the mouths of those otherwise fighting hardest against the analogy. It’s as if they were possessed.
There is “cut and run,” a Lyndon Johnsonism that somehow won’t die even with several stakes in its syntactic heart; “progress,” McNamara’s creature; “nightmare” into which in Vietnam we were always descending; Vietnamization (in the form of “Iraqification”), a state towards which we’re suddenly running as if into the arms of a lover, though most of our leaders seem to have forgotten what “Vietnamization” really entailed — a South Vietnamese army that was a funnel for arms going to the guerrillas and that proved anything but a trustworthy ally in the war; and recently, “credibility”(whatever we do, we can’t leave, because we can’t afford to lose it, whatever it is). It was the Vietnam-era word par excellence and it’s now flooding into Washington.
This week Senator John McCain, still perhaps quietly positioning himself for a New Hampshire dash, just in case the presidential polls suddenly collapse, gave a “this is not Vietnam” speech, filled with all sorts of curious, obsessive denials (US Situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yale Global on-line):
“Iraq is not Vietnam because our ally is not a corrupt government unwilling to defend itself, but a newly-freed people that desperately want to build a new future. Most fundamentally, Iraq is not Vietnam because the United States and the Iraqi people share the same goal of building a free, prosperous, and secure Iraq.”
He’s not completely wrong, of course. If the Iraqi “enemy,” top to bottom, remains faceless and largely speechless, so do the Iraqis on our side. Note that McCain talks about the Iraqi people, not the isolated, powerless Governing Council. It, too, is largely “faceless.” At least in South Vietnam we had a semi-functioning government to support and be supported by us. In the end, McCain, our most famous Vietnam-era POW, cannot stay away from Vietnam:
“Our defeat in Vietnam nonetheless holds cautionary lessons. We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal [and so on]… Failure to make the necessary political commitment to secure and build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, put American security at risk, empower our enemies, and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny. It would be the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam.”
In the meantime, let’s note that as Vietnam words arrive, some key post-9/11 words seem to be disappearing: “Mullah Omar” (who remembers him, even though he’s leading a reorganized Taliban in the land that time forgot, Afghanistan); “Anthrax killer” (He/she/they have long been in absentia, except when the odd pond is drained in Virginia, despite the fact that his/her/their attack — the first to employ a weapon of mass destruction in the United States — was a significant factor in driving us toward a “war” on terror, when it was still thought that the anthrax came from al-Qaeda, not from our own weapons labs); “Osama bin Laden” (except on the days when he releases a new tape); and what about that hangman’s “noose” (first around Osama and then around Saddam Hussein, in both cases “tightening” rapidly); even “Saddam” seems MIA most of the time — and that may be the strangest thing of all since to topple him we first enforced a decade of fierce sanctions, helping destroy the Iraqi infrastructure and inflicting vast suffering on the Iraqi people and then, despite (as reported this week) his last minute attempts to settle up, launched a war essentially against a single man, causing yet more suffering among Iraqis. The three personalized targets of our “war” against terror as it bled into our war against Saddam as it bled back into a war against terror are all evidently still free and plotting against us. If a police force had such results in a high profile series of cases for which the national treasury had been opened heads would obviously roll.
Withdrawal maneuvers:
Throw into this mix the first rumors of the return of the draft, add in the controversy over the President’s avoidance of those coffins and funerals (an issue whose origins lie in the Vietnam era) and you have the makings of quite a potent brew — Vietnam’s revenge, you might call it. In addition, I see some other familiar Vietnam words just beginning to rear their heads on the political landscape — “withdrawal” obviously (McCain: “I was heartened to hear the President say that we cannot cut and run in Iraq”), but also expect “bloodbath” to appear soon along with a snarling demand to those of us who never wanted to get into this war from those who still don’t want us out for a detailed “plan” to extricate us.
In the Vietnam years, the “bloodbath” to come – the Vietnamese on taking over were expected to engage in wholesale slaughter – was a specter that kept the actual bloodbath then going on in place year after year. When the war ended, there was indeed a bloodbath, but not in Vietnam. It unexpectedly took place in Cambodia, a land whose neutralist prince we had helped overthrow and which we had thoroughly destabilized, and it was nearly genocidal.
We don’t know what will follow the present destabilization or what exactly would happen after an American withdrawal (or even the circumstances under which that withdrawal would take place). We can’t know the future, but we can know the present, and it’s important not to let bloodcurdling predictions of the future keep us from dealing with the dangers and disasters of this moment.
There are already all sorts of odd withdrawals underway in Iraq. Unfortunately, right now only a few of the right people and all of the wrong people are getting out. The Bulgarians, the Dutch, and the Spaniards, all with troops in the country, this week withdrew most of their diplomats to Amman, Jordan. The UN and various NGOs have been pulling out or scaling way back. The Red Cross has just announced — and this is a tragedy for many Iraqis — that they are, for the time being, closing their offices not just in Baghdad but in “peaceful” Basra in the south of the country. This week the Turks withdrew not their troops but their offer of troops and, after an election that proved far closer than the ruling party expected, the Japanese government is evidently about to withdraw its offer to send troops as well.
Then there are other kinds of withdrawals underway: Despite the show of force around Tikrit, the Washington Post reports (Daniel Williams, U.S. Grip Loosens in the Sunni Triangle):
“American troops patrol less frequently, townspeople openly threaten Iraqi security personnel who cooperate with U.S. forces, and the night belongs to the guerrillas. That is the reality in this little town 60 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials say, and it reflects a shifting balance of power in U.S.-occupied central Iraq. Resistance forces move with impunity in Thuluiya and throughout the so-called Sunni Triangle, despite repeated raids on suspected hide-outs and arms caches.”
On the other hand, while announcing a further call up of reserves and the National Guard, and the sending of the Marines, the administration in a Nixonian moment claimed that this represented a “drawdown” of American forces because, by their calculations, in the late spring when the troops now in Iraq have largely been replaced, we will have perhaps 25,000 less troops there. What’s not mentioned is that when these troops flood in early in 2004, we will have additional troops in country. Another Vietnam word that hasn’t quite made it back into the national discussion covers this: “escalation.”
This week democratic candidate General Wesley Clark suggested that “the United States should resist pressure for an early exit in Iraq, laying out steps to build international involvement there and mend relations with Europe.” Here’s my word of advice to the Democrats. While most of them undoubtedly remember antiwar candidate George McGovern’s loss to Nixon in 1972, they seem to forget that three American presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — got elected in part on promises to end, or in Johnson’s case at least not escalate wars then ongoing. All three were exceedingly vague in their promises. (Nixon had a “secret plan” -or so he said.) Johnson and Nixon were lying. Still, they won. Democrats — other than Dean and Kucinich — afraid of expressing a will to end this war and fast are, I suspect, making an electoral mistake.
In the meantime, while the Iraq war seems to have become an all-Vietnam-all-the time event here, it’s Vietnam only as reconceived in history’s funhouse, a kind of mad jigsaw puzzle into which familiar pieces — and only some of them — are being jammed in whatever order. Vietnamization (now, Iraqification), for instance, was a Nixon withdrawal maneuver late in the war, when antiwar pressures were rising to remarkable heights. It was meant to keep the war going by transferring most of the ground war responsibilities to South Vietnamese allies, while ratcheting up the American air war. We’ve now arrived at its supposed equivalent in a panic after only six months.
A recent message from a friend — meant comically, of course — nonetheless indicates something of the mad “Vietnam” path we’ve chosen. He suggests that we’re about to engage in a three-step program:
“First, recall units of the old Iraqi army. Second, recall Saddam Hussein. Third, ‘take 3,’ or as the administration might say, ‘Re-shoot.'”
Vietnam is undoubtedly our “default switch,” as I heard someone suggest on the radio the other day. And yet, the story of this ongoing war is being commandeered to a surprising extent by the side which has remained obdurately silent.
BYO analogies:
The other side, whomever they may be, are not about to leave our leaders to tell our story unopposed. There is, in fact, a struggle going on over who will define the narrative of this occupation/war. Michael Vlahos in a most interesting essay (recommended by the War in Context website) suggests that the Bush administration has already lost the ability to offer a coherent story about the war and occupation, that “through its occupation of Iraq the US is actually making the radical Islamist case — that we are invading Islam — encouraging the Muslim World to unite against us.” (The Story of This War)
Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, O. Faruk Logoglu, recently rejected the somewhat incoherent Vietnam analogy. He was quoted in a New York Times piece thusly (Allies: Turkish Aide Says Troop Offer Is Still Available):
“The ambassador said he remains optimistic about efforts to build a stable Iraq. Looking to history, he rejected comparisons to America’s experience in Vietnam. Instead, he said, the risk is greater that Iraq could become a new Lebanon, a nation that was splintered by civil war among rival groups aided by neighboring states exerting influence through proxy armies.”
The fact is the Iraqis are obviously not living in Vietnam, nor are they living with the Vietnam analogy. Their minds are undoubtedly elsewhere. Lebanon and its sad fate is certainly one analogy known to many there. Others come to mind and have infrequently been mentioned here. Ed Weathers, columnist for the Memphis Flyer, for instance, suggests:
“The more appropriate historical analogy for what the U.S. faces in Iraq is a different war: the one the Soviet Union tried to fight in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. …
“A superpower, in defiance of most world opinion, invades an Islamic Middle Eastern nation. The superpower is hoping to effect regime change and, citing an ‘imminent threat,’ declares the invasion ‘an international duty.’ Initially, the invasion goes well. Within weeks, all organized military opposition in the invaded nation appears to evaporate, and the invading superpower basks in its success, praised by its domestic media for its military prowess. The superpower imposes its own government on the invaded nation and settles in to oversee a comfortable, presumably temporary occupation.
“But almost immediately, resistance forces begin to coalesce, and the guerrilla war begins. The superpower’s convoys are attacked. It’s soldiers are killed one, two, ten at a time. Galvanized by religious zeal and nationalist pride, the guerrillas begin to attract other fighters sympathetic to their cause, from other lands. (One of these is named Osama bin Laden)”
Weathers points out that American military analysts have carefully examined and copiously written about what went wrong for the Soviets in Afghanistan, including the vulnerability of their helicopters.
William S. Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, suggests in a recent piece that the guerrillas in Iraq have embedded their analogies in their acts (Indicators – Iraqi guerrillas are attacking tanks):
“Three events last week may actually provide more in the way of indicators as to where the Iraq war is headed. The first two were successful attacks on American M-1 Abrams tanks by Iraqi resistance forces The technique is the same as that used by the Palestinians to destroy several Israeli Merkava tanks, so it should not have come as a surprise to us. More significant than the destruction of two American tanks is the fact that Iraqi guerrillas are attacking tanks. This is an indicator that the guerilla war is developing significantly more rapidly than reports in Washington suggest.
“One other indicator: a friend recently noted to me that the rapidly improving techniques we see from the Iraqi guerrillas bear a striking resemblance to those used by the Chechen guerrillas against the Russians. Might it be that we are not the only ones to have a coalition in Iraq?”
So we are either fighting, or struggling not to fight in Vietnam, while the guerrillas may be in some combination of Afghanistan/the occupied territories/Lebanon/Chechnya — not only two different styles, but two different analog worlds.
In the Guardian recently, Tariq Ali suggested that we should not drop the colonial experience as a model for understanding what’s going on in Iraq (Resistance is the first step toward Iraqi independence):
“Some weeks ago, Pentagon inmates were invited to a special in-house showing of an old movie. It was the Battle of Algiers At least the Pentagon understands that the resistance in Iraq is following a familiar anti-colonial pattern The US doesn’t even trust the Iraqis to clean their barracks, and so south Asian and Filipino migrants are being used. This is colonialism in the epoch of neo-liberal capitalism, and so US and ‘friendly’ companies are given precedence. Even under the best circumstances, an occupied Iraq would become an oligarchy of crony capitalism, the new cosmopolitanism of Bechtel and Halliburton Where there is resistance, as in Iraq, the only model on offer is a mixture of Gaza and Guantanamo.
“[The] old colonial notion that the Arabs are lost without a headman is being contested in Gaza and Baghdad. And were Saddam to drop dead tomorrow, the resistance would increase rather than die down. Sooner or later, all foreign troops will have to leave Iraq. If they do not do so voluntarily, they will be driven out.”
Or put it another way, in his most recent speech explaining his vote against the $87 billion Iraq and Afghanistan appropriation bill (filled with White House and Pentagon slush funds), Senator Robert Byrd concluded (A High Price for a Hollow Victory), “It is the American people who will ultimately decide how long we will stay in Iraq.”
This is a fact, though most pundits and politicians – see John McCain above — treat it as something horrific, a kind of looming defilement. What if, as it’s said, the American people don’t have “the stomach” to stay the course — as if we were watching some gory horror flick and part way through had to leave the theater? But the real horror in this film is that “we the people” and our elected representatives now play such a modest role in determining the nature of our world and the shape of our lives. Let’s only hope that we turn out to have the sort of “stomach” that will lead us one day to return our country to the path that might have been taken in the post-9/11 world, one that would remove global domination from the map, replacing it with understanding and the kind of international police work that might actually put the Osama bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of the world in jail where they belong.
You’re in the temp agency now:
Two pieces on our new, embattled military are well worth some of your time. In the Asia Times, Conn Hallinan makes some sense of Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to “transform” the American military and the Pentagon into a lean, mean, high-tech force (Rumsfeld’s new model army):
“The latest ‘revolution’ in warfare, the brainchild of the late Air Force Colonel, John Boyd, goes by the name ‘transformation’ and combines hi-tech and maneuverability. Its model was the German Blitzkrieg. But Rumsfeld’s new model army is discovering that the very instruments that make it so invincible on a conventional battlefield are of little use in the non-conventional war in which the Bush administration finds itself embroiled. As long as the enemy was the Iraqi army, the ‘revolution’ works just fine. It has done less well against roadside explosives, ambushes and suicide bombs.
“Part of the problem is the ‘transformation’ army itself. The US military looks increasingly like a temp agency on steroids: a massive organization of part-time workers armed with the latest in firepower The thinking behind all this is simple math: Reserve and Guard troops are much cheaper than regular troops. As Christopher Caldwell at the Weekly Standard notes, ‘It is hard not see a similarity between the army’s shift to part-time soldiering and businesses preferences for part-time vs full-time labor.'”
With the reserves, those “weekend warriors,” now on endless recall, we see what exactly this means. Our privatizers are, in fact, engaging in a vast experiment in transformation globally, in Iraq, at the Pentagon, and at home; though in Latin America, from Bolivia to Brazil, the urge to privatize is beginning to be contested. In the Guardian, Naomi Klein recently suggested that the antiwar movement as it reconstitutes itself must call not just for troop withdrawal from Iraq but for corporate withdrawal as well (see below): “It’s too late to stop the war, but it’s not too late to deny Iraq’s invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place.”
As for that privatized, embattled military, from officers to reserves, the Carolinas to Baghdad, it’s not happy. I suggested in a dispatch a couple of months back that Bush might not be as assured of the military vote as everyone imagines. While the Bush administration has focused much energy on the relatively tiny Jewish vote, a core constituency has begun to wander. Now, in “Corps Voters,” a fascinating piece in the Washington Monthly, Benjamin Wallace-Wells (see below) suggests exactly why that might be so. It bears careful reading. He concludes, “While the GOP hasn’t lost the military vote, if present trends continue, it could see substantial defections in one of its core constituencies… Some of the most closely contested states in the last election have the most dense populations of military voters: Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Nevada.” Tom
Helicopter Down
By Ray McGovern
Tompaine.comThe killing of 18 U.S. troops and the wounding of 21 others in Iraq on Nov. 2 brings to mind the successful attack by Viet Cong guerrillas on U.S. forces in Pleiku, Vietnam on February 7, 1965.
The Johnson administration immediately seized on that attack, in which nine U.S. troops were killed and 128 wounded, to start bombing North Vietnam and to send 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Unlike the U.S. advisory forces already in country, the Marines had orders to engage in combat, marking the beginning of the Americanization of the war. By 1968 U.S. forces had grown to over 536,000.
From the outset, my colleagues in CIA were highly skeptical that even with a half-million troops the United States could prevail in Vietnam
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, regularly briefed George H. W. Bush as vice president and, earlier, worked with him closely when he was director of CIA. Mr. McGovern is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is now co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington.
To read more McGovern click here
Iraq is not America’s to sell
By Naomi Klein
The Guardian
November 7, 2003Bring Halliburton home. Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the rules. Those are just a few of the suggestions for slogans that could help unify the growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far, activist debates have focused on whether the demand should be for a complete withdrawal of troops, or for the United States to cede power to the United Nations.
But the “troops out” debate overlooks an important fact. If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.
The Corps Voters
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
The Washington Monthly
November, 2003The Jacksonville unit of the North Carolina National Guard held its mobilization ceremony on the lawn of the local armory during an unseasonably chilly day last month, and even the town cut-up came, a shambolic, gray bearded, big bellied man. He was wearing a neck brace so loosely fashioned that it looked less like a helpful medical device than a prop from a high-school play, and at 10 o’clock on this soberingly cold morning, he seemed drunk. Five minutes before the ceremony began, he lurched past the microphone: “Don’t worry,” he called out to the crowd, “I’m not the guy who’s speaking.”