The war against memory
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
"Baghdad was a veritable city of palaces... and the scene on the river was animated by thousands of gondolas, decked with little flags, dancing like sunbeams on the water, and carrying the pleasure-seeking Baghdad citizens from one part of the city to the other. There were also in Baghdad numerous colleges of learning, hospitals, infirmaries for both sexes, and lunatic asylums."
-Yaqut ibn 'Abdallah ur-Rumi,
Geographical Encyclopedia, c.1224
Whether we choose to deny it or not, US policy in Iraq is on the rocks and the options are now both obvious and awful: years of protracted struggle in a nation that isn't prepared to accept the egalitarian presumptions of democracy; or the complete US abandonment of a failed invasion created by a flawed administration, let the chips of war fall as they may. Meanwhile the nation of Iraq appears to be disintegrating, pulled apart by the wider forces of cultural transition at work across the Islamic world.
The middle option is to stand ground in French Foreign Legion-like enclaves, guarding the oil industry and possibly Israel, while sundry Iraqi war lords, bandits, jihadists, Saddamites, Islamists, gangsters and profiteers fight their way through regional civil wars until a powerful figure - another Saddam Hussein - emerges to force unification, or new Islamic nations take shape in Iraq.
Anyway you slice it, the US has created a disaster with largely worsening near-term contingencies. A harsh reality, especially stinging to those of us who against our better nature and bitter experience supported the Iraq invasion as best case for bringing down a fascist regime and jump starting a second Islamic nation toward liberal democracy.
Afghanistan looked relatively easy, why not Iraq next?
If the goal was to launch a dynamic for change in the political and cultural landscape as a longer-term solution to Islamic suppression and international terror, what better place to begin than Saddam Hussein's Iraq?
Of course nothing about the invasion of Iraq was written in stone. There were options, decisions of leadership and command, political and military choices which could have shaped a volatile environment quite differently. How differently, is the question?
The US invasion might well have rolled out from a ground war overwhelming Saddam's weakened army into a well-managed counterinsurgency with a police-secure infrastructure buying time for the transition to social stability: integrating neighborhood organizations, rural tribal leaders, Baath bureaucrats, administrators, jihadists, moderate clerics, merchants and profiteers - the leadership flotsam of years of suppression, war, and chaos.
Given a secure infrastructure - as opposed to massive unemployment and social disintegration - these dissident fractions might have been brought together, cajoled, bullied, herded into a semblance of democratic reform. Reform premised on individual empowerment by way of private ballot and civil rights, as opposed to generations of suppression by terror and thuggery.
Something like this might have been accomplished, step by step, under skillful American and British counterinsurgency and civil affairs specialists.
The United Nations could have been administering Iraq under allied protection by now. International social service and professional organizations from every democracy on the planet could have been helping show the Iraqi people the potential they themselves have to reform this most ancient of civilizations into a postmodern state.
In-country polling early on found optimism for an American 'liberation', but vehement opposition to any American 'occupation' of Iraq. There was widespread public relief and support following the defeat of Saddam's weakened military; but as sectarian and clan killings across the country undermined positive civil actions taken, the US military soon became viewed as an occupying force, strong enough to muscle the weak, but too undermanned to protect the infrastructure and secure borders.
Baghdad residents, for example, have watched their neighborhoods erode from peaceful pre-invasion mixed Shia and Sunni communities, to tightly controlled sectarian strongholds, with roaming armed sectarian patrols, neighborhood militias, and local armed men compelled to defend their own homes against their neighbors today.
"Stuff happens!" Secretary Rumsfeld said of the rampant early street crime that followed Saddam's fall: "freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." He said.
It is too late to debate the difference between 'freedom' and 'anarchy', too late for second thoughts: Iraq is as broken as Colin Powell said it would be, and we - the United States and the United Kingdom own it. Mistakes, deceits, failed leadership, corporate greed, atrocities, war crimes - we own all of it now.
Those of us who favored the invasion and recognize its mismanagement now, own it as well, and Thomas E Ricks, Pulitzer Prize winning Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, fills in whatever blanks we missed (or ignored) along the way in a thoroughly damaging book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
Here's one of Mr. Ricks' succinctly argued conclusions:
"It now seems more likely that history's judgment will be that the US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign plan for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory. It incompleteness helped create the conditions for the difficult occupations that followed. The invasion is of interest now mainly for its role in creating those problems." [p115]
Ricks says the management of the war by the Bush Administration is one of the most "profligate" and "negligent" actions in the history of American foreign policy, "launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation."
Claims that the invasion of Iraq was a 'war against al-Qaida terror', or somehow prevented expansion of Saddam's weapon technology, were never defensible. In fact these were lies from the first as Ricks demonstrates through a history of deception: from early intelligence lies, silly 'neocon' assumptions, and bravado cheerleading that pandered to America's worst insecurities and suckered a great nation into another wasteful war.
He explicates poor military planning, the minimal invasion force, the firing of 500,000 Iraqi soldiers infrastructure managers, and police, the alienation of the Iraqi people by increasingly frustrated and brutal troops, steadily fueling an insurgency into open civil war.
Ricks clarifies some of the damage done in the US, Iraq, and the middle east by these early misconceptions and lies, as well as the individuals who he says must be held accountable for them:
"Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story... The Bush administration - and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and L Paul Bremer III - bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004." [p4]
Ricks is critical too of Congress for its failure of oversight, Democrats for failing to frame and debate the issues clearly for the public, the media for failing to find and report alternative sources of information; and finally, Ricks faults US military leadership - starting with Gen Franks - for failing to prepare the US Army for "the challenge it faced" and then wasting a year "using counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare." [p4]
Misconceptions and lies linger still in the netherworld of media 'disinformation' which panders to every talk radio consumer niche, providing the administration and politicians cover while confusing audiences with polluted arguments.
Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said that an opponent's Connecticut primary victory over an incumbent (friendly to the administration) might encourage, in Cheney's words, "the al-Qaida types" who want to "break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task." [1] A statement provided under the auspices of a White House telephone press background discussion.
Any reader of Fiasco might find the vice president's comments absurd, an obvious tactic intended to further misinform the public about both the war and a political opponent. But many in the press followed up on the comment, expanded it, debated it, and now "doubt" is raised about that candidate.
Cheney's role in pre-invasion propaganda - actually the start of the administration's public relations campaign to justify invading Iraq - begins, Ricks shows, at a convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, August 2002, seven months before the March 2003 invasion.
"The president and I never for a moment forget our number-one responsibility: to protect the American people against further attack and to win the war that began last September eleventh," Cheney said that night. "Despite creating a Department of Homeland Security... We realize that wars are never won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy." Ricks sees the speech like this:
"In retrospect, the speech is even more stunning than it appeared to be then, because it has become clear with the passage of time that it constructed a case that was largely false. Containment may have worked in the Cold War, Cheney said, but is "not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States... Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon... Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he said flatly. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."
"Not only that," [Ricks continues] "but the situation was getting worse. Cheney said, "Time is not on our side. The risks of inaction are far greater that the risks of action." [p49-50]
Cheney's trumpet call to war drew confused reactions from the military and intelligence communities at the time. One "stunned" general later told Ricks: "[the evidence] was never there, never there. These guys were going to war without evidence to back them up... and worse, they didn't understand what they were getting us into."
Ricks says the speech impacted inside the administration "like a preemptive strike."
"Bush himself had been at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when it was delivered. "My understanding was that the president himself was very surprised at that speech, because it was kind of constraining his options," said a former senior Bush administration official. "It had the effect of somewhat limiting the president's options, in my view." [p51]
Cheney defined and drove the war agenda for both the administration and the intelligence community, and an array of problems with intelligence and disinformation would eventually lead to Secretary of State Powell's infamous UN presentation, the outing of a CIA agent, and misdirected military planning and resulting troop actions on the ground.
This propaganda pollutes American opinion today. According to a Harris Poll conducted in July, 2006, this is how informed the American public is right now:
"Despite being widely reported in the media that the US and other countries have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, surprisingly; more US adults (50%) think that Iraq had such weapons when the US invaded Iraq. This is an increase from 36 per cent in February 2005. Overall, attitudes toward the war in Iraq are negative, and less than half of the US population believes that the threat of terrorism has been reduced. US adults are not confident that Iraq's government will eventually become stable, and many think the war in Iraq is continuing to hurt respect for the US around the world. Most people do not think that US troops will be out of Iraq in the next two years." [2]
The survey also found a majority of Americans think domestic security has been weakened by the vast expenditures in Iraq; more than 60 per cent believe that the invasion of Iraq has "motivated more Islamic terrorists to attack the US." Almost the same number do not think the invasion has helped reduce the threat of another terrorist attack against the US. At the same time, 64 per cent incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein had "strong ties" to al-Qaeda.
2.
Beyond a brief review of controversial New York Times reporting - the Judith Miller affair which spilled into the grand jury indictment of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff and assistant for National Security Affairs to Vice President Cheney and adviser to President Bush - Ricks has little to say about media coverage of the Iraq war.
He notes difficulties journalists face finding sources and the abnormally high casualty rate among media in Iraq - about 100 reporters killed to date in three years, compared to half that number killed in Viet Nam over 20 years of war.
He says nothing about embedding (Ricks was himself embedded with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad after the invasion), a press protocol designed by the Department of Defense to control coverage of the invasion, which quickly became the modus operandi for future US press coverage, a process dependent upon military units for safety and almost all source access for journalists.
As infrastructure fell apart and guerrilla warfare spread across Iraq, it has become increasingly dangerous for the military to operate in public and even more difficult for journalists to report information outside military controlled 'safe zones'. At the same time some in the military had grown distrustful of the press, accusing the media of negative coverage. Ricks quotes one officer:
"They are bald face liars," [Ricks quotes a major] "I could go on and on, but the media clearly, clearly as any soldier over there will tell you, have an anti-US agenda and are willing to propagandize falsehoods in furtherance of their own agenda." [p426]
The U.S. media has also been widely criticized for failing to find alternate sources, information and opposing viewpoints about US activities in Iraq - a failure that helps continually 'validate' the flow of disinformation to the American public.
Ricks, a five-time visitor to Iraq, sums up the tactical blunders - killing farm animals, wantonly destroying civilian property, running down civilians with Humvees, or taking hostages when US troops cannot find suspects they are pursuing - as resulting from strategic failures of military commanders to recognize the nature of the war they face: namely an unconventional counterinsurgency, as opposed to the conventional warfare they anticipated when planning and invading. He views this as a failure of a military establishment, largely distracted by administration politics, to implement the lessons learned in Viet Nam.
This presumes that some US counterinsurgency, properly timed and executed, would have been successful in Iraq. It's helpful to remember that regardless of strategy or tactics, the Viet Nam war could not have been won by Americans without the complete destruction of the north. Nationalism at any cost was the reality of the Vietnamese historic moment and Ho Chi Minh embodied it. Irag was arbitrarily shaped by the British and French and mandated by the League of Nations as a state in 1920. Iraq's nationalist movement was suppressed for decades by the British military until the Baath party came to power in the late 1950s. Baathists were able to unify the many factions, ultimately under fascist Saddam Hussein. Vietnam remains socialist, now building trade with the US and others, so the analogy between the two nations and wars has always been a stretch.
None the less, US Iraq invasion strategy should have been based on a 'fluid' situation within which conventional tactics defeated Saddam's weakened military, were then supplemented by strong policing to secure the populace, infrastructure, and borders; and then expanded again into a combined military-civilian counterinsurgency before organized resistance and factious religious fighting broke out.
At the very least, these three phases of warfare should have been anticipated by administration planners.
But a 'fluid' mission was apparently not even seriously anticipated. The situation facing the boots on the ground was certainly foreseeable, appropriate force levels could have been deployed, but there was no fluid plan in place to do so, and forces were always inadequate to the situation.
Inadequate troop levels narrowed the focus and wasted time and this resulted because, according to Ricks and others (Bob Woodward), Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly reduced the requested troop levels recommended by the military's most experienced planners.
"Speed kills," as General Tommy Franks, commander of the boots on the ground, said at the time. But post invasion "success" required speed in transitioning the kinds of special troops necessary to Phases 2 and 3, not killing Hussein forces.
Failure to recognize a fluid mission, itself a result of the failure to anticipate the dynamic tactical flow on the ground, is the result of incompetent strategic planning, not ignoring the doctrines learned in Viet Nam.
It's a failure to understand the situation on the ground and a failure to listen to the best thinking of military experts by some in the administration who continually appear to ignore history and forget the past.
(From Vietnam to Civil Rights to the Geneva Convention, from rejecting the World Court to reorganizing FEMA to attempting to undo Roe v Wade and propagating corporate outsourcing of Social Security - it's as if for some in the administration, the Great Depression never happened, or that racism, women's and minority rights, war and war crimes are not a constant throughout the American experience?)
Ricks does show that the planning failures of the Iraq war at the administration level are in fact the same failures of the war in Viet Nam - a profound disconnect between muddled civilian managers and the military. Even more fundamentally, the inappropriate use of war to serve vague political objectives, with no clear plan based on a realistic assessment of the situation.
Situational assessments are rooted in history and intelligence and as Ricks and others demonstrate, American intelligence has been systematically driven by the same murky administration policy, dogmatically executed primarily through Vice President Cheney's office.
Ricks says there is no post-Saddam strategy and the flawed rationale used to launch the war ultimately became the strategy for operations on the ground. The boots were mismanaged at home, misbriefed en route, and misled in country. They were misinformed from the start and launched on a mission doomed from its inception. This is the failure Ricks attributes directly to the president, vice president, secretary of defense and joint chiefs of staff and their top advisers.
It is clear the administration completely abandoned the strategic lessons learned in Viet Nam. They ignored history and memory, and summarily rejected the best thinking of experts. They ignored what become known as the "Powell doctrine", minimal guidelines for any administration ordering America's postmodern military machine into war. How simple and ironic these guidelines seem now:
*Is a vital national security interest threatened?
*Do we have a clear attainable objective?
*Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
*Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
*Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
*Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
*Is the action supported by the American people?
*Do we have genuine broad international support? [3]
"I will forever be known as the one who made the case." Secretary Powell said following his resignation after the 2004 election. [p497] The political clock is ticking, both in Iraq - where the elected government has apparently no control beyond the Green Zone and the Iraqi "Army" that cannot contain open civil war or even pacify Baghdad - and in the US, where the majority of the American public no longer supports the administration or the war and non-volunteer reservists are now being activated for duty in Iraq. The Gallup Panel poll, conducted in late July, found that the Iraq war will likely most determine who voters choose to support for Congress - more so than the economy, immigration, social issues, or bringing jobs or federal money to their local districts. About 85 per cent of US adults say the issue will be either extremely or very important to them when they vote in November. [4]
3.
Fiasco provides case scenarios for possible outcomes in Iraq, but it was published before the month-long Israeli-Hezbullah war in Lebanon this month, which appears to have only strengthened Hezbullah and the Jihadist movement across the entire region, resulting in declining support for the government of Israel, while expanding and channeling insurgent logistical, training, and staging networks from Iran and elsewhere, through Iraq.
US stature in the region is further eroded because we are viewed as either unable to manage 'Israeli aggression', or are held directly responsible for planning and advancing the invasion of Lebanon. The failure to eradicate Hezbullah, and the protracted engagement in Iraq, continue to undermine US credibility and effectiveness globally while giving rise to conservative, anti-democratic Islamicist forces.
Those of us with expectations for liberal democratic societies following the fall of the Taliban and the removal of Saddam Hussein, have learned again the hard folly of anticipating cultural change through war. Highly ethical ends, presumed to justify simplistic, tragic means; when in fact there is no indication at all that any US plan for the invasion and "liberalization" of Iraq could have succeeded. We too have ignored history and memory.
In Fiasco, Ricks very responsibly and thoroughly documents what he calls a "fair reckoning":
"Some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders were derelict in their duty... Too many American and Iraqi lives have been lost, and too much of American's might and influence has been squandered for these individuals to escape a fair reckoning."
For many, Fiasco is the beginning of that reckoning. If so, Americans need to probe deeper. What might the subtext for this disaster be?
Is it driven by personal hubris, and sheer incompetence as Ricks argues? Is it about controlling rich oil and natural gas reserves across the Arab world as many think? The people who have most profited from this war are the shareholders and executives who run oil, related energy and defense industries, and hasn't this always been the case in the middle east?
Voltaire said that "history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes." The failure of any administration to remember "crimes and misfortunes" so recent in memory as America's disaster in Viet Nam, surely invites only further misfortune.
Ricks has delivered the message. The American people and their elected representatives now have to fathom another strange, and darkly American malaise.
Notes
1 Vice President Cheney is interviewed by teleconference, as released by the White House [Back]
2 Belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction has increased substantially [Back]
3 US Forces: Challenges Ahead, Colin L Powell, From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1992/93
"The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defines a new national military strategy aimed at accomplishing a range of missions far broader than America's armed forces have known before. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations will loom larger. Called for is a flexible Base Force with capabilities to meet a host of far-flung threats to America's interests, rather than the single threat of communist power that guided military doctrine through the Cold War." [Back]
4 Gallup polls: The War in Iraq [Back]
Fiasco review from the Brookings Institution
