Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The corpse on the gurney
By Tom Engelhardt
What Bush has done with his "surge", however, is buy himself that year-plus of
free time, while he negotiates with Iraq's inside-the-Green-Zone government to
cement in place an endless American presence there. In the process, he may
create a sense of permanency that no future president will prove capable of
tampering with - not without being known as the man (or woman) who "lost" Iraq.
Forget the Republican presidential candidates - Senator John McCain, for
instance, has said that he doesn't care if the US is in Iraq for the next 100
years - and think about the leading Democratic candidates with their elongated
(and partial) "withdrawal" plans. Barack Obama, for instance, is for
guaranteeing a 16-month withdrawal schedule, and that's just for US "combat
troops" which are only perhaps half of all American forces in the country.
Hillary Clinton's plan is no more promising.
The president's gamble, so far "successful", has been that the look of
returning life in Iraq will last at least long enough for him to turn a
marginally "successful" war over to the next administration. If the Democrats
sweep to power, he hopes to stick them with that war. As Michael Hirsh of
Newsweek put the matter recently, while discussing the president's trip to the
Middle East: "Far away in the Persian Gulf, Bush is creating facts on the
ground that the next president may not be able to ignore." (Of course, this
assumes that the Iraqis will comply.)
In that case, here would be another piece of potential Bush "success": nine
months into any new presidential term and the Iraq War is yours. (Those of us
old enough to remember have already lived through this scenario once with
"Lyndon Johnson's war" in Vietnam, so how does "Barack Obama's war" sound?)
Then, former Bush administration officials, Republicans of all stripes,
neo-cons, and an array of pundits will turn on those uncelebratory Democrats
who, they will claim, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of "success," if
not victory. Wait for it.
Victory laps and other celebrations
But folks, let's face it, despite the cosmetic acts of the president and his
undertakers, America's Iraq is still a corpse. And yet, in this "post-surge"
moment, everybody is arguing over just how "successful" the "surge" has been.
All agree it has "lowered violence" in Iraq. The Democrats insist that the
plan's "success" is limited indeed, because its main goal, "political
reconciliation", has not been reached.
On the other hand, Republicans, assorted neo-cons, and some in the
administration are already doing modest victory dances. The newest New York
Times columnist, William Kristol, a man previously known for being endlessly
wrong on his Iraqi war of choice, just last week chided the Democrats in his
typical way: "It's apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to
acknowledge - let alone celebrate - progress in Iraq."
Let the celebrations begin! In the White House, anyway. After all, whatever
Iraq news breaks out of the inside pages of the paper is now often framed by
this ongoing dispute about the how much surge and post-surge success has
happened, about how much to celebrate, and that is another sign of success for
the President. No wonder, as Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post put it,
Bush's recent meeting in Kuwait with General Petraeus and ambassador Ryan
Crocker, as well as his comments to a rally of 3,000 hoo-ahing US troops, "had
the air of a victory lap for a president whose decision to raise the troop
levels in Iraq last year was questioned not only by Democrats but also by many
Republicans and even generals at the Pentagon".
But folks, Bush can lap the Middle East, the planet, the solar system and
America's Iraq is still never going to get up and walk away. Not even in 2018
or 2028. Don't forget, it's a corpse. (In fact, unlike the politicians and the
media, recent opinion polls show that the American people generally have not
forgotten this.)
In the meantime, the military in Iraq is preparing for something other than a
simple victory lap, just in case the president's "surge" luck doesn't quite
extend to 2009. Former brigadier general and Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Middle Eastern Affairs Mark Kimmitt, for instance, recently
suggested that there was "only a mild chance" that surge security gains would
prove permanent: "[I]f I had to put a number to it, maybe it's three in 10,
maybe it's 50-50, if we play our cards right."
In fact, Petraeus and the rest of the US military are faced with a relatively
simple calculus for their exhausted, overstretched, overused forces among whom
the rate of post-traumatic stress syndrome has tripled. Although the president
recently insisted that he would be happy to slow down or halt an expected
drawdown of 30,000 surge troops by July, the fact is that present military
manpower levels there are literally unsustainable - especially since 3,200
Marines are now being committed to the ever-less-successful Afghan War.
Drawdowns are a must and "successful" Iraq, already experiencing signs of
another uptick in violence and death (including of American troops) in the new
year, is likely to need a dose of something else soon, if that faint glow of
life is to be sustained.
One candidate for that, as American troop levels drop, is air power, a much
under-reported subject in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, according to a
recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the use of
air power took a striking leap forward in 2007. According to the study, the
number of Close Air Support/Precision Strikes - sorties that used a major
munition - in Iraq went up five-fold between 2006 and 2007 (not including
December of that year), from 229 to 1,119 or, on average, from 19 per month to
102 per month.
This year started with a literal bang, as 40,000 pounds of explosives were
dropped in ten minutes on 38 targets in a Sunni farming area on "the outskirts"
of Baghdad. After 10 preceding days of intermittent air attacks, this was
probably the largest display of air power since the 2003 invasion. It was also
undoubtedly a harbinger of things to come and, of course, guaranteed to drive
up the number of civilian dead.
Similarly, between January and October 2007, according to the Associated Press,
the US military more than doubled its use of armed and unarmed drone aircraft,
which clocked 500,000-plus hours in the air (mainly in Iraq). This is
undoubtedly a taste of what "success" means in the year to come.
Dancing on a corpse
So, here's a simple reality check: the whole discussion of, and argument about,
"success" in Iraq is, in fact, obscene. Given what has already happened to that
country - and will continue to happen as long as the US remains an occupying
power there - the very category of "success" is an obscenity. If violence
actually does stay down there, that may be a modest godsend for Iraqis, but it
can hardly be considered a sign of American "success".
Every now and then, history comes in handy. In a previous moment, when the
neo-cons and their allied pundits were feeling particularly triumphant, they
began touting Bush's America as the planet's new Rome (only more so). That talk
evaporated once Iraq went into full-scale insurgency mode (and Afghanistan
followed). But perhaps Rome does remain a touchstone of a sort for
administration Iraqi policies.
What comes to mind is the Roman historian Tacitus' description of the Roman way
of war. He put his version of it into the mouth of Calgacus, a British
chieftain who opposed the Romans, and it went, in part, like this:
They
have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger, they loot
even the ocean: they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition,
if poor; neither the wealth of the east nor the west can satisfy them: they are
the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal passion to dominate.
They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this
they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains
but a desert, they call that peace.
Folks, it's obscene. We're
doing victory laps around, and dancing on, a corpse.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory
Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a
newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in
Iraq.
(Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt. Used by permission
Tomdispatch).
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