Unraveling Iraq: 12 Answers to Questions No One Is Bothering to Ask about Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt
Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here's the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the "success" of the President's surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well.
In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans "say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties" and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq -- and of thinking in Washington.
Tomgram: 12 Reasons to Get Out of Iraq
So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in
ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be
asked far more often in this country:
1. Yes, the war has
morphed into the U.S. military's worst Iraq nightmare: Few now
remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in
March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a single
overriding nightmare -- not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam
Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into "Fortress
Baghdad," as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There,
they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the
warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital's poorest districts.
When
American forces actually entered Baghdad in early April 2003, however,
even Saddam's vaunted Republican Guard units had put away their weapons
and gone home. It took five years but, as of now, American troops are
indeed fighting in the warren of streets in Sadr City, the Shiite slum
of two and a half million in eastern Baghdad largely controlled by
Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. military, in fact,
recently experienced its worst week of 2008 in terms of casualties,
mainly in and around Baghdad. So, mission accomplished -- the worst
fear of 2003 has now been realized.
2. No, there was never an
exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended
to leave -- and still doesn't: Critics of the war have regularly gone
after the Bush administration for its lack of planning, including its
lack of an "exit strategy." In this, they miss the point. The Bush
administration arrived in Iraq with four mega-bases on the drawing
boards. These were meant to undergird a future American garrisoning of
that country and were to house at least 30,000 American troops, as well
as U.S. air power, for the indefinite future. The term used for such
places wasn't "permanent base," but the more charming and euphemistic
"enduring camp." (In fact, as we learned recently, the Bush
administration refuses to define any American base on foreign soil
anywhere on the planet, including ones in Japan for over 60 years, as
permanent.) Those four monster bases in Iraq (and many others) were
soon being built at the cost of multibillions and are, even today,
being significantly upgraded. In October 2007, for instance, National
Public Radio's defense correspondent Guy Raz visited Balad Air Base,
north of Baghdad, which houses about 40,000 American troops,
contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees, and described
it as "one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and
structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center
of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades."
These
mega-bases, like "Camp Cupcake" (al-Asad Air Base), nicknamed for its
amenities, are small town-sized with massive facilities, including PXs,
fast-food outlets, and the latest in communications. They have largely
been ignored by the American media and so have played no part in the
debate about Iraq in this country, but they are the most striking
on-the-ground evidence of the plans of an administration that simply
never expected to leave. To this day, despite the endless talk about
drawdowns and withdrawals, that hasn't changed. In fact, the latest
news about secret negotiations for a future Status of Forces Agreement
on the American presence in that country indicates that U.S. officials
are calling for "an open-ended military presence" and "no limits on
numbers of U.S. forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their
legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term
U.S. security agreements with other countries."
3. Yes, the
United States is still occupying Iraq (just not particularly
effectively): In June 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),
then ruling the country, officially turned over "sovereignty" to an
Iraqi government largely housed in the American-controlled Green Zone
in Baghdad and the occupation officially ended. However, the day before
the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer III, slipped out of the country
without fanfare, he signed, among other degrees, Order 17, which became
(and, remarkably enough, remains) the law of the land. It is still a
document worth reading as it essentially granted to all occupying
forces and allied private companies what, in the era of colonialism,
used to be called "extraterritoriality" -- the freedom not to be in any
way subject to Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever. And so the occupation
ended without ever actually ending. With 160,000 troops still in Iraq,
not to speak of an unknown number of hired guns and private security
contractors, the U.S. continues to occupy the country, whatever the
legalities might be (including a UN mandate and the claim that we are
part of a "coalition"). The only catch is this: As of now, the U.S. is
simply the most technologically sophisticated and potentially
destructive of Iraq's proliferating militias -- and outside the
fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, it is capable of controlling only the
ground that its troops actually occupy at any moment.
4. Yes,
the war was about oil: Oil was hardly mentioned in the mainstream media
or by the administration before the invasion was launched. The
President, when he spoke of Iraq's vast petroleum reserves at all,
piously referred to them as the sacred "patrimony of the people of
Iraq." But an administration of former energy execs -- with a National
Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron and had a
double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until
she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware of the
globe's potentially limited energy supplies -- certainly had oil
reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on "a sea
of oil" and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil
heartlands of the planet.
It wasn't a mistake that, in 2001,
Vice President Dick Cheney's semi-secret Energy Task Force set itself
the "task" of opening up the energy sectors of various Middle Eastern
countries to "foreign investment"; or that it scrutinized "a detailed
map of Iraq's oil fields, together with the (non-American) oil
companies scheduled to develop them"; or that, according to the New
Yorker's Jane Mayer, the National Security Council directed its staff
"to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the
'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of
operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions
regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields'"; or that
the only American troops ordered to guard buildings in Iraq, after
Baghdad fell, were sent to the Oil Ministry (and the Interior Ministry,
which housed Saddam Hussein's dreaded secret police); or that the first
"reconstruction" contract was issued to Cheney's former firm,
Halliburton, for "emergency repairs" to those patrimonial oil fields.
Once in charge in Baghdad, as sociologist Michael Schwartz has made
clear, the administration immediately began guiding recalcitrant Iraqis
toward denationalizing and opening up their oil industry, as well as
bringing in the big boys.
Though rampant insecurity has kept
the Western oil giants on the sidelines, the American-shaped "Iraqi"
oil law quickly became a "benchmark" of "progress" in Washington and
remains a constant source of prodding and advice from American
officials in Baghdad. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan put
the oil matter simply and straightforwardly in his memoir in 2007: "I
am saddened," he wrote, "that it is politically inconvenient to
acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." In
other words, in a variation on the old Bill Clinton campaign mantra:
It's the oil, stupid. Greenspan was, unsurprisingly, roundly assaulted
for the obvious naiveté of his statement, from which, when it proved
inconvenient, he quickly retreated. But if this administration hadn't
had oil on the brain in 2002-2003, given the importance of Iraq's
reserves, Congress should have impeached the President and Vice
President for that.
5. No, our new embassy in Baghdad is not
an "embassy": When, for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars,
you construct a complex -- regularly described as "Vatican-sized" -- of
at least 20 "blast-resistant" buildings on 104 acres of prime Baghdadi
real estate, with "fortified working space" and a staff of at least
1,000 (plus several thousand guards, cooks, and general factotums),
when you deeply embunker it, equip it with its own electricity and
water systems, its own anti-missile defense system, its own PX, and its
own indoor and outdoor basketball courts, volleyball court, and indoor
Olympic-size swimming pool, among other things, you haven't built an
"embassy" at all. What you've constructed in the heart of the heart of
another country is more than a citadel, even if it falls short of a
city-state. It is, at a minimum, a monument to Bush administration
dreams of domination in Iraq and in what its adherents once liked to
call "the Greater Middle East."
Just about ready to open,
after the normal construction mishaps in Iraq, it will constitute the
living definition of diplomatic overkill. It will, according to a
Senate estimate, now cost Americans $1.2 billion a year just to be
"represented" in Iraq. The "embassy" is, in fact, the largest
headquarters on the planet for the running of an occupation.
Functionally, it is also another well-fortified enduring camp with the
amenities of home. Tell that to the Shiite militiamen now mortaring the
Green Zone as if it were… enemy-occupied territory.
6. No, the
Iraqi government is not a government: The government of Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki has next to no presence in Iraq beyond the Green Zone;
it delivers next to no services; it has next to no ability to spend its
own oil money, reconstruct the country, or do much of anything else,
and it most certainly does not hold a monopoly on the instruments of
violence. It has no control over the provinces of northern Iraq which
operate as a near-independent Kurdish state. Non-Kurdish Iraqi troops
are not even allowed on its territory. Maliki's government cannot
control the largely Sunni provinces of the country, where its officials
are regularly termed "the Iranians" (a reference to the heavily Shiite
government's closeness to neighboring Iran) and are considered the
equivalent of representatives of a foreign occupying power; and it does
not control the Shiite south, where power is fragmented among the
militias of ISCI (the Badr Organization), Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army,
and the armed adherents of the Fadila Party, a Sadrist offshoot, among
others.
In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been
derisively nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul" for his government's lack of
control over much territory outside the national capital. It would be a
step forward for Maliki if he were nicknamed "the mayor of Baghdad."
Right now, his troops, heavily backed by American forces, are fighting
for some modest control over Shiite cities (or parts of cities) from
Basra to Baghdad.
7. No, the surge is not over: Two weeks ago,
amid much hoopla, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker
spent two days before Congress discussing the President's surge
strategy in Iraq and whether it has been a "success." But that surge --
the ground one in which an extra 30,000-plus American troops were
siphoned into Baghdad and, to a lesser extent, adjoining provinces --
was by then already so over. In fact, all but about 10,000 of those
troops will be home by the end of July, not because the President has
had any urge for a drawdown, but, as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote
recently, "because of simple math. The five extra combat brigades,
which were deployed to Iraq with the surge, each have 15-month tours of
duty; the 15 months will be up in July… and the U.S. Army and Marines
have no combat brigades ready to replace them."
On the other
hand, in all those days of yak, neither the general with so much more
"martial bling" on his chest than any victorious World War II
commander, nor the white-haired ambassador uttered a word about the
surge that is ongoing -- the air surge that began in mid-2007 and has
yet to end. Explain it as you will, but, with rare exceptions, American
reporters in Iraq generally don't look up or more of them would have
noticed that the extra air units surged into that country and the
region in the last year are now being brought to bear over Iraq's
cities. Today, as fighting goes on in Sadr City, American helicopters
and Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones reportedly circle overhead
almost constantly and air strikes of various kinds on city
neighborhoods are on the rise. Yet the air surge in Iraq remains
unacknowledged here and so is not a subject for discussion, debate, or
consideration when it comes to our future in Iraq.
8. No, the
Iraqi army will never "stand up": It can't. It's not a national army.
It's not that Iraqis can't fight -- or fight bravely. Ask the Sunni
insurgents. Ask the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. It's not
that Iraqis are incapable of functioning in a national army. In the
bitter Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Iraqi Shiite as well as Sunni
conscripts, led by a largely Sunni officer corps, fought Iranian troops
fiercely in battle after pitched battle. But from Fallujah in 2004 to
today, Iraqi army (and police) units, wheeled into battle (often at the
behest of the Americans), have regularly broken and run, or abandoned
their posts, or gone over to the other side, or, at the very least,
fought poorly. In the recent offensive launched by the Maliki
government in Basra, military and police units up against a single
resistant militia, the Mahdi Army, deserted in sizeable numbers, while
other units, when not backed by the Americans, gave poor showings. At
least 1,300 troops and police (including 37 senior police officers)
were recently "fired" by Maliki for dereliction of duty, while two top
commanders were removed as well.
Though American training
began in 2004 and, by 2005, the President was regularly talking about
us "standing down" as soon as the Iraqi Army "stood up," as Charles
Hanley of the Associated Press points out, "Year by year, the goal of
deploying a capable, free-standing Iraqi army has seemed to always slip
further into the future." He adds, "In the latest shift, the Pentagon's
new quarterly status report quietly drops any prediction of when local
units will take over security responsibility for Iraq. Last year's
reports had forecast a transition in 2008." According to Hanley, the
chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now
estimates that the military will not be able to guard the country's
borders effectively until 2018.
No wonder. The "Iraqi
military" is not in any real sense a national military at all. Its
troops generally lack heavy weaponry, and it has neither a real air
force nor a real navy. Its command structures are integrated into the
command structure of the U.S. military, while the U.S. Air Force and
the U.S. Navy are the real Iraqi air force and navy. It is reliant on
the U.S. military for much of its logistics and resupply, even after an
investment of $22 billion by the American taxpayer. It represents a
non-government, is riddled with recruits from Shiite militias
(especially the Badr brigades), and is riven about who its enemy is (or
enemies are) and why. It cannot be a "national" army because it has, in
essence, nothing to stand up for.
You can count on one thing,
as long as we are "training" and "advising" the Iraqi military, however
many years down the line, you will read comments like this one from an
American platoon sergeant, after an Iraqi front-line unit abandoned its
positions in the ongoing battle for control of parts of Sadr City: "It
bugs the hell out of me. We don't see any progress being made at all.
We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up there
helping these guys out we are making very little progress."
9.
No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and fragmentation:
The U.S. invasion and the Bush administration's initial occupation
policies decisively smashed Iraq's fragile "national" sense of self.
Since then, the Bush administration, a motor for chaos and
fragmentation, has destroyed the national (if dictatorial) government,
allowed the capital and much of the country (as well as its true
patrimony of ancient historical objects and sites) to be looted,
disbanded the Iraqi military, and deconstructed the national economy.
Ever since, whatever the administration rhetoric, the U.S. has only
presided over the further fragmentation of the country. Its military,
in fact, employs a specific policy of urban fragmentation in which it
regularly builds enormous concrete walls around neighborhoods,
supposedly for "security" and "reconstruction," that actually cut them
off from their social and economic surroundings. And, of course, Iraq
has in these years been fragmented in other staggering ways with an
estimated four-plus million Iraqis driven into exile abroad or turned
into internal refugees.
According to Pepe Escobar of the Asia
Times, there are now at least 28 different militias in the country. The
longer the U.S. remains even somewhat in control, the greater the
possibility of further fragmentation. Initially, the fragmentation was
sectarian -- into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia regions, but each of those
regions has its own potentially hostile parts and so its points of
future conflict and further fragmentation. If the U.S. military spent
the early years of its occupation fighting a Sunni insurgency in the
name of a largely Shiite (and Kurdish) government, it is now fighting a
Shiite militia, while paying and arming former Sunni insurgents,
relabeled "Sons of Iraq." Iran is also clearly sending arms into a
country that is, in any case, awash in weaponry. Without a real
national government, Iraq has descended into a welter of
militia-controlled neighborhoods, city states, and provincial or
regional semi-governments. Despite all the talk of American-supported
"reconciliation," Juan Cole described the present situation well at his
Informed Comment blog: "Maybe the US in Iraq is not the little boy with
his finger in the dike. Maybe we are workers with jackhammers
instructed to make the hole in the dike much more huge."
10.
No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and civil war: As
with fragmentation, the U.S. military's presence has, in fact, been a
motor for civil war in that country. The invasion and subsequent chaos,
as well as punitive acts against the Sunni minority, allowed Sunni
extremists, some of whom took the name "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," to
establish themselves as a force in the country for the first time.
Later, U.S. military operations in both Sunni and Shiite areas
regularly repressed local militias -- almost the only forces capable of
bringing some semblance of security to urban neighborhoods -- opening
the way for the most extreme members of the other community (Sunni
suicide or car bombers and Shiite death squads) to attack. It's worth
remembering that it was in the surge months of 2007, when all those
extra American troops hit Baghdad neighborhoods, that many of the
city's mixed or Sunni neighborhoods were most definitively "cleansed"
by death squads, producing a 75-80% Shiite capital. Iraq is now
embroiled in what Juan Cole has termed "three civil wars," two of which
(in the south and the north) are largely beyond the reach of limited
American ground forces and all of which could become far worse. The
still low-level struggle between Kurds and Arabs (with the Turks
hovering nearby) for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the north may be
the true explosion point to come. The U.S. military sits precariously
atop this mess, at best putting off to the future aspects of the
present civil-war landscape, but more likely intensifying it.
11.
No, al-Qaeda will not control Iraq if we leave (and neither will Iran):
The latest figures tell the story. Of 658 suicide bombings globally in
2007 (more than double those of any year in the last quarter century),
542, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright, took place in
occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly Iraq. In other words, the American
occupation of that land has been a motor for acts of terrorism (as
occupations will be). There was no al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia before the
invasion and Iraq was no Afghanistan. The occupation under whatever
name will continue to create "terrorists," no matter how many times the
administration claims that "al-Qaeda" is on the run. With the departure
of U.S. troops, it's clear that homegrown Sunni extremists (and the
small number of foreign jihadis who work with them), already a minority
of a minority, will more than meet their match in facing the Sunni
mainstream. The Sunni Awakening Movement came into existence, in part,
to deal with such self-destructive extremism (and its fantasies of a
Taliban-style society) before the Americans even noticed that it was
happening. When the Americans leave, "al-Qaeda" (and whatever other
groups the Bush administration subsumes under that catch-all title)
will undoubtedly lose much of their raison d'être or simply be crushed.
As for Iran, the moment the Bush administration finally agreed
to a popular democratic vote in occupied Iraq, it ensured one thing --
that the Shiite majority would take control, which in practice meant
religio-political parties that, throughout the Saddam Hussein years,
had generally been close to, or in exile in, Iran. Everything the Bush
administration has done since has only ensured the growth of Iranian
influence among Shiite groups. This is surely meant by the Iranians as,
in part, a threat/trump card, should the Bush administration launch an
attack on that country. After all, crucial U.S. resupply lines from
Kuwait run through areas near Iran and would assumedly be relatively
easy to disrupt.
Without the U.S. military in Iraq, there can
be no question that the Iranians would have real influence over the
Shiite (and probably Kurdish) parts of the country. But that influence
would have its distinct limits. If Iran overplayed its hand even in a
rump Shiite Iraq, it would soon enough find itself facing some version
of the situation that now confronts the Americans. As Robert Dreyfuss
wrote in the Nation recently, "[D]espite Iran's enormous influence in
Iraq, most Iraqis -- even most Iraqi Shiites -- are not pro-Iran. On
the contrary, underneath the ruling alliance in Baghdad, there is a
fierce undercurrent of Arab nationalism in Iraq that opposes both the
U.S. occupation and Iran's support for religious parties in Iraq." The
al-Qaedan and Iranian "threats" are, at one and the same time, bogeymen
used by the Bush administration to scare Americans who might favor
withdrawal and, paradoxically, realities that a continued military
presence only encourages.
12. Yes, some Americans were right
about Iraq from the beginning (and not the pundits either): One of the
strangest aspects of the recent fifth anniversary (as of every other
anniversary) of the invasion of Iraq was the newspaper print space
reserved for those Bush administration officials and other war
supporters who were dead wrong in 2002-2003 on an endless host of
Iraq-related topics. Many of them were given ample opportunity to offer
their views on past failures, the "success" of the surge, future
withdrawals or drawdowns, and the responsibilities of a future U.S.
president in Iraq.
Noticeably missing were representatives of
the group of Americans who happened to have been right from the get-go.
In our country, of course, it often doesn't pay to be right. (It's seen
as a sign of weakness or plain dumb luck.) I'm speaking, in this case,
of the millions of people who poured into the streets to demonstrate
against the coming invasion with an efflorescence of placards that said
things too simpleminded (as endless pundits assured American news
readers at the time) to take seriously -- like "No Blood for Oil,"
"Don't Trade Lives for Oil," or ""How did USA's oil get under Iraq's
sand?" At the time, it seemed clear to most reporters, commentators,
and op-ed writers that these sign-carriers represented a crew of
well-meaning know-nothings and the fact that their collective fears
proved all too prescient still can't save them from that conclusion.
So, in their very rightness, they were largely forgotten.
Now,
as has been true for some time, a majority of Americans, another
obvious bunch of know-nothings, are deluded enough to favor bringing
all U.S. troops out of Iraq at a reasonable pace and relatively soon.
(More than 60% of them also believe "that the conflict is not integral
to the success of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.") If, on the other hand,
a poll were taken of pundits and the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia
(not to speak of the officials of the Bush administration), the number
of them who would want a total withdrawal from Iraq (or even see that
as a reasonable goal) would undoubtedly descend near the vanishing
point. When it comes to American imperial interests, most of them know
better, just as so many of them did before the war began. Even advisors
to candidates who theoretically want out of Iraq are hinting that a
full-scale withdrawal is hardly the proper way to go.
So let me ask you a question (and you answer it): Given all of the above, given the record thus far, who is likely to be right?
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 updated in a
newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn
sequel in Iraq.
[Tomdispatch recommendations: For another
numbered piece on Iraq, check out Gary Kamiya's eminently sane reprise
of the Ten Commandments as applied to the launching of the 2003
invasion -- to be found at Salon.com. ("Commandment I, "Thou shalt not
launch preventive wars…"; Commandment VI: "Do not allow
neoconservatives anywhere near Middle East policy… Special Bill Kristol
Sub-commandment VI a: Stop giving these buffoons prestigious jobs on
newspaper-of-record Op-Ed pages, top magazines and television shows.
They have been completely and consistently wrong about everything. Must
we continue to be subjected to their pontifications?"). Also let me
offer a Tomdispatch bow of thanks to Cursor.org's daily "Media Patrol"
column. Someone at that site with a keen eye for the less noticed but
newsworthy pieces of any day (and an always splendid set of links)
makes my life so much easier, when gathering material for essays like
this one.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
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If we know where al-Sadr is, why is he still vertical?