Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA A slo-mo withdrawal from Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
anti-war types who actually took to the streets of American cities by the
hundreds of thousands before the invasion to raise homemade placards to its
un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their very stance indicated a bias that
evidently disqualified them on the spot.
Someone - I can't claim to remember who - once made the point that within any
administration you could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a dove and
right. When it comes to TV war commentators, that seems to hold true as well.
It would, of course, be possible to imagine the anti-war equivalent of those
generals-as-analysts. From the ranks of the last anti-war
movement (all still active anti-warriors), you could, for example, choose Tom
Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg, and Howard Zinn to offer commentary on our ongoing
wars. Only you know as well as I do that that fantasy will never turn into
media reality. In our world of expertise, it's unthinkable.
A history of the Iraqi Air Force
Recently, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was visiting Iraq, the top
American commander in that country, General Ray Odierno, indicated that the
Iraqis would not be able to defend their own airspace for the foreseeable
future. Essentially, they have no air force - or rather, at this point they
have helicopters, C-130 transports, and some smaller Cessna trainers and the
like, but no jet fighters. Despite the fact that a US Air Force "assessment
team" is being rushed to Baghdad to look for "some creative solutions" to the
problem, it's clear that the Iraqi air force will remain the US Air Force for
some time to come (which undoubtedly means manning the giant US airbase built
at Balad as well).
The Iraqis now want American F-16s. Unfortunately, according to New York Times
reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, Odierno pointed out a sad truth: "It would be
impossible to build and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the Iraqis
were able to afford them." And don't forget this: Iraq has no trained pilots to
fly them either! Sigh ... much work remains on the horizon for the US Air
Force.
Fortunately, Aviation Week reported in April that the Iraqis have a plan to
overcome their problem. It's a "three-phase, 11-year improvement plan" that
will move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few dozen F-16s by "the middle
of the next decade" (in case you were wondering just how long the USAF is
likely to be filling in).
Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We want to leave Iraq. Maybe not
as quickly as Reese would like, but really we do. Obama has made that clear.
Unfortunately, the Iraqis just won't let us. Imagine! They weren't even
thinking about an air force until recently - and what would a country in the
Middle East be if, as Bumiller points out, it had "no way to intercept another
jet that invades the country's airspace".
Just who might invade Iraqi airspace remains a subject for speculation: The
Israelis on their way to bomb Iran? (Not likely the USAF would start shooting
those planes down.) The Iranians on their way to bomb...? Well, who? After all,
the present government in Iraq is essentially an ally of Iran. The Turks? Not
really an issue when you think about it. Their planes have been invading Iraqi
airspace for a while to attack Kurdish rebels and the USAF hasn't exactly been
shooting them down either.
Since it's so easy to obliterate the past, just for a moment let's recall the
history of the Iraqi air force. Now that Iraq essentially has no air force, who
remembers that Saddam Hussein's Iraq once had a very large and active one - up
to 950 planes in the 1980s. In 1990, according to the website
GlobalSecurity.org, it still had the sixth-largest air force in the world, and
plenty of trained pilots to go with it. During the First Gulf War, nearly half
of that air force fled to neighboring Iran (on which Iraqi planes had dropped
more than their share of bombs and even poison gas in the 1980s). Those planes
were never returned. Of the relatively small force that remained, many were
destroyed in the First Gulf War and some of the rest, at Saddam's orders, were
buried in the desert as the invasion of 2003 began.
The history that's really been forgotten, though, is even more recent. Put in a
nutshell, the Iraqis don't have an air force because Washington didn't want
them to. Much attention has been paid to the Bush administration's lack of
planning for the occupation of Iraq, but relatively little to what it did plan.
Let's start with the fact that, in May 2003, L Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority in a burst of blind pride disbanded the Iraqi army.
Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future, border-patrolling Iraqi
military (lite) of perhaps 40,000 men with minimal armaments and no air force
to speak of.
In the Middle East, this had only one meaning: from a series of newly built
mega-bases already on Pentagon drawing boards as American troops crossed the
Kuwaiti border in 2003, the US Army and Air Force would fill in as the real
Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of a fierce Sunni
insurgency, the army part of that plan was soon jettisoned. But "standing up"
the Iraqi military - "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," was long Bush's
mantra - has meant just that: two feet on the ground.
Until relatively recently, the Iraqis were functionally not permitted to take
to the skies. Now, the lack of that air force will surely come to the fore as
an excuse for why any American "withdrawal" will have to have caveats and
qualifications - and why, if ours proves to be a non-withdrawal withdrawal, it
will be their fault.
A history of devastation in Iraq Until the US arrived in Baghdad, things seemed bad enough. There was Saddam
Hussein, the megalomanic dictator - he of the endless Disney-esque palaces and
giant sculpted hands - with his secret prisons, torture chambers, and
helicopter gunships. There were the international sanctions strangling the
country. There were the mass graves in the north and the south. There was an
oil industry held together by scotch tape and ingenuity. It was a gruesome
enough mess.
That was before the invasion to "liberate" the country. Since then hundreds of
thousands, possibly a million or more Iraqis have died (depending on whose
figures and studies you believe). Saddam's killing fields have been dwarfed by
a fierce set of destructive American military operations as well as
insurgencies-cum-civil-wars-cum-terrorist-acts; major cities have been largely
or partially destroyed, or ethnically cleansed; millions of Iraqis have been
forced from their homes, becoming internal refugees or going into exile; untold
numbers of Iraqis have been imprisoned, assassinated, tortured or abused; and
the country's cultural heritage has been ransacked.
Basic services - electricity, water, food - were terribly impaired and the
economy, in the process of being privatized by the neo-conservative overseers
of the occupation, was simply wrecked. Health services were crippled. Oil
production, upon which Iraq now depends for up to 90% of its government funds,
has only relatively recently surpassed the worst levels of the Saddam Hussein
era.
Iraq, in other words, has been devastated. The American invasion and the
occupation that followed acted like whirlwinds of destruction, unraveling a
land already bursting with problems and potential animosities.
What men begin, the gods end. If such a saying doesn't exist, it should, since
the American catastrophe now seems to be morphing into an unparalleled natural
disaster as well. In what once was the breadbasket of civilization, Iraqi
agriculture, ignored by the occupiers, is withering and the country is
desertifying at a frightening pace under the pressure of a several-year-old
drought.
So fierce is the process that, according to Liz Sly of the Los Angeles Times,
who has written an apocalyptic account of all this, the country received only
20% of its normal rainfall in 2008, and so far in 2009 but half the usual
amount. Rivers are drying up, wells are disappearing, and desperate Iraqi
farmers are deserting the land for the city (where unemployment rates remain
high). Everywhere dust gathers, awaiting the winds which create the monstrous
dust storms that carry the precious land of Iraq into the fragile lungs of
urban Iraqis. "Now," writes Sly, "the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90%
of [Iraq's] land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and
that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5% a year."
Expecting the worst harvest in a decade and with the wheat crop at 40% of
normal, the government has been forced to buy enormous amounts of grain abroad
at a time when oil prices, dropping precipitously from 2008 highs, left it with
far less money available. However overused the image may be, the Bush
administration created the perfect storm in Iraq, a "mission accomplished"
version of hell on Earth. And it's because Iraq is in such desperate shape
that, of course, we, as the protectors of its fragile "stability," can't leave.
A history of justifications
When we invaded Iraq, serial justifications were offered. There was the grim
dictator to rid the world of. There were his killing fields. (Never again!)
There was 9/11 and his "support for terrorism." (Top Bush administration
officials long claimed a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, despite convincing
evidence to the contrary.) There was liberation for the Shi'ites and the ending
of what Wolfowitz called "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people".
There was the re-establishment of an American version of order in the region.
There were those heavily emphasized, if nonexistent, weapons of mass
destruction the dictator supposedly had squirreled away, as well as his (also
nonexistent) program to get his hands on a nuclear weapon. (As Wolfowitz put it
in May 2003: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on
which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason ... ".)
Later, when things began to take a turn for the worse and another reason was
needed, there was the propagation of democracy (a great guiding principle to
which the Bush administration arrived rather late in Iraq and only under
pressure from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani). Even later, when things were going
far worse, there was the idea that it was far better to fight the terrorists
over there than here. And, of course, as the president liked to confide to
foreign leaders, there was God Himself commanding him to strike Saddam and so
thwart Gog and Magog.
Among the cognoscenti, of course, there were other expectations and
justifications, caught best perhaps in the neo-conservative quip of 2003,
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." After all,
the neo-cons in and around the Bush administration truly did believe that a Pax
Americana in what they liked to call "the Greater Middle East" was within their
shock-and-awe grasp, and possibly even a global version of the same. As for oil
- or what Bush referred to, on the rare occasion when he mentioned it, as
Iraq's "patrimony" - mum was the word, even though that country had the world's
third-largest proven petroleum reserves and sat strategically at the heart of
the energy heartlands of the planet.
Now, with those 130,000 troops still there, not to speak of the scads of
rent-a-guns and private contractors, with that overstuffed, overstaffed embassy
the size of the Vatican built for 1,000 "diplomats", with that series of major
bases (which the Pentagon used to call, charmingly enough, "enduring camps")
still well occupied, with significant numbers of Iraqis and small numbers of
Americans dying each month, with millions of Iraqis still internal or external
refugees, with the land devastated, and basic services hardly restored, with
ethnic tensions still running high, and a government quietly allied to Iran in
place in Baghdad backed by a 250,000-man military, with an American withdrawal
still officially years off, and "withdrawal" itself a matter of definition, no
one even bothers to offer the slightest justification for being in Iraq. After
all, why would explanations be necessary when we're getting ready to leave?
If you don't believe me, go hunting for an official explanation today. Why are
we in Iraq? Because we're there. Because the Iraqis need us. Because something
terrible would happen if we left precipitously. So we still occupy Iraq and no
one even asks why.
A history of withdrawal from Iraq
There is no history of withdrawal from Iraq.
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