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Blunderov
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Iraq: The Endgame
« on: 2007-09-09 09:12:49 » |
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[Blunderov] I'm not sure that I agree with the assessment that Operation Iraqi Oil "was militarily excellent but politically vacuous". Certainly the leadership, if one can dignify that gang of moral degenerates who have infested the American body politic with such a description, has been totally vacant. It should not be forgotten that the beginning of the fiasco was the Rumsfeld category error in which he mistook a military problem for a cost effectiveness exercise. Nothing could possibly have worked out well after such a misguided beginning. Not that there was ever a prospect of that anyway considering the current incumbent of the Whitehouse.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article2414611.ece
Bush must accept bloody reality and follow our fumbling retreat
Simon Jenkins
The American and British armies do not have to withdraw from Iraq. They are powerful and can stay as long as they wish, even if entombed like French legionnaires in desert forts and sustained at great cost in lives and money.
Their governments are a different matter. They need reasons for occupying foreign countries and now face humiliation in the greatest war of ideological intervention since Vietnam. They are praying for their armies to save them from this humiliation.
This week David Petraeus, the talented American general in Baghdad, reports on the progress of his “surge” strategy to an impatient Congress. Two thirds of Americans have joined two thirds of world opinion in wanting a swift American withdrawal, defined as inside a year. Petraeus’s predicament is therefore agonising. He cannot possibly offer victory. He can offer only defeat or a desperate clinging on, as now. For George Bush, his commander-in-chief, only the last is imaginable. Petraeus must therefore forget about a better yesterday or a better tomorrow, and concentrate on today.
Here he is trapped. The more optimistic his progress report, the more it will support clinging on as now. Bush and Gordon Brown will grasp at any straw that allows them to postpone withdrawal. They grasp at the success of supporting the Sunni Islamic Army against Al-Qaeda cells in Anbar province, despite Bush having to describe as “our friends” Saddamist thugs whom he spent four years trying to eliminate, notably in Falluja.
Bush and Brown grasp at the lower kill rate that has followed the fortifying and garrisoning of “forward operating bases”, mostly in the Sunni suburbs of Baghdad. This has turned American troops into mercenaries defending the Sunnis against Shi’ite militias and police. But it has brought respite to parts of Baghdad and enabled the Americans to talk of the “political mosaic” of Iraq, of sheikhs and tribes and local nation building from the ground up. There is even a murmur of that formerly unmentionable word, partition.
Petraeus is, by all accounts, too intelligent a general to let these straws become an easy reason for hanging on indefinitely. He knows that any soldier can flood a theatre with armour and claim to have it under control, that success can be assessed only when that control ends. He knows there is no endgame to the surge. He has all but given up on a “retrained” Iraqi army as future guardian of order in Iraq. Like the police it has mostly been hijacked by the Shi’ites.
Petraeus knows he must also guard against the most desperate reason for staying: “After me, the deluge.” With no political progress in Iraq, the longer the stay the greater the deluge. The broken-backed Iraqi government is useless, reduced to pleading for the coalition to stay largely for its own protection. This is the trap into which the surge strategy walked from the start. It was militarily excellent but politically vacuous.
The resolution in Iraq can start only when the state of denial in the White House and Downing Street ends. This hurdle was well illustrated by the false parallel drawn by Bush last month with Vietnam, from which he believed America withdrew too soon.
In Vietnam America was aiding an ally against an external foe who sought to conquer and enslave it. The American occupation of Iraq has been utterly different. It was doomed not just by its cruelty and ineptitude but because its neoconservative objective - a pro-western, pro-Israeli, capitalist democracy - was ludicrously utopian. Occupation spurred insurgency and destroyed order. The only real parallel was that in both Vietnam and Iraq intervention led to the outcome America least wanted. In the former it expanded communist influence in southeast Asia. In Iraq it is likely to replace a secular, antiIranian regime with a clerical, pro-Iranian one.
Meanwhile, the degradation of Iraq has made it the most desperate and dangerous country in the world. A once-rich nation is as poor, chaotic and devoid of hope as the worst in sub-Saharan Africa. Two million people have fled their homes. More than half the professional class has disappeared. Those who have been turned back at the borders face famine, disease and murder in camps disowned by the Americans and the British. Utilities are not repaired and operate at or below their level under Saddam Hussein. Cholera has appeared and child mortality is worse than during sanctions in the 1990s. Iraq’s heritage and its ancient Mesopotamian sites are looted.
None of this is getting any better. If Petraeus could offer a new political dispensation to run alongside a gradual reduction of his surge, he might be justified in proclaiming optimism. He cannot do this, as a rush of congressional reports has indicated – notably two indictments of current policy from the Government Accountability Office and the National Intelligence Estimate. None of the political items in Congress’s 18 “benchmarks” required of the surge has been met. The constitution brokered last year by Zalmay Khalilzad, the then US ambassador, proposed ways of sharing oil revenue and devolving security. Even that is in ruins.
The one thing Petraeus can offer Washington is a smokescreen of partial success behind which to begin a rolling disengagement: a steady withdrawal of units to bases, transferring control in each enclave to whichever militia group enjoys local loyalty. He would make the success of the surge a reason for withdrawing rather than for staying.
For all the abuse thrown by Americans at the British retreat in Basra, it offers a test of such withdrawal. Blood has undoubtedly flowed. Two newly autonomous provincial governors have been murdered. The Iran-backed Badr brigade has fought the Mahdists over the spoils of victory. Deals have been cut with the Iraqi army and the militia-dominated police.
The result is hardly democracy but full-scale civil war has not broken out and living conditions appear no worse than when Britain was supposedly in charge. Now that the chief targets of insurgency machismo, British soldiers, have departed there is a chance of a political equilibrium that might enable the people of Basra to rebuild their lives and accept aid for their battered infrastructure. Such a policy should have been put to the test three years ago.
Rather than criticise the British for cutting and running, the Americans might study how Iraqi factions have filled the power vacuum. If relative peace is sustained with British troops confined to base, the same might apply even among the more divided communities of the north.
Sooner or later Petraeus will have to try some version of the British way. Wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan are not simple fights over territory. They are messy interventions in other peoples’ affairs that almost always yield a bloody nose. The American public has judged that whatever Bush was trying to do in Iraq he has failed and should cut his losses - and theirs.
If the price is high, if parts of Iraq see yet more factional bloodshed after a withdrawal, Americans might argue that this was the inevitable fault of past errors. America had done its bit. It toppled Saddam and tried to postpone the subsequent settling of old scores. It failed to install a political framework to achieve this, but so be it. The sting of occupation must be drawn from the wound of Iraq.
Of course the best face must be put on withdrawal. Those whose arrival led to more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths owe it to their victims to minimise any more. That especially applies to the hapless agents of occupation, such as Iraqi interpreters and officials, whose lives are at risk. Told that the invasion was to restore order and justice, they are entitled to feel more than cheated. They are entitled to asylum.
Iraq has been a disaster, an illegal act crassly perpetrated by supposedly honourable powers. It shows what happens when crackpot idealism breaks from the realm of think tanks and journalism and penetrates the body politic. It validates the remark of the philosopher John Gray that “modern politics is really a chapter in the history of religion”.
Last month the British began fumbling their way towards an escape from this disaster. The danger for Petraeus is that he digs a deeper hole.
The paperback edition of Simon Jenkins's Thatcher and Sons, updated to include Gordon Brown's accession, has just been published by Penguin.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
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Blunderov
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Re:Iraq: The Endgame
« Reply #1 on: 2007-09-11 02:41:55 » |
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[Blunderov] Zugzwang.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/kolko.php?articleid=11593
September 11, 2007
'The US Will Lose War Regardless What it Does'
by Gabriel Kolko
In an interview with Der Spiegel online, American military historian Gabriel Kolko argues that the situation in Iraq is worse than ever and that the artificial nation, created after World War I, is breaking up. The "surge," he says, is also failing.
SPIEGEL: The long-awaited results of the "surge" are now in. Has the surge succeeded? Is there reason for optimism in Iraq?
KOLKO: Both United States Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will deliver "progress" reports to Congress on Monday, but the skeptics far outnumber those who believe Bush's strategy in Iraq is succeeding. They will say that Shi'ite attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad have fallen, but they will not add that Baghdad has been largely purged in many areas of Sunni inhabitants and their flight much earlier, and not the increase in Americans, is the reason "success" can be reported to Congress. Indeed, most of the administration's statistics have been met with a wave a skepticism.
The Iraq military, but especially the political "benchmarks" that this administration thought so crucial – and used to justify its "surge" of 28,500 additional troops – have, in the opinion of Congress' Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued at the end of August, not been attained (there are now 168,000 American troops in Iraq, plus roughly half as many civilians). In its unexpurgated, original form, the GAO claimed that only three of the 18 congressionally mandated "benchmarks" had been reached: violence was as high as ever, reconstruction was plagued by corruption on both the Iraqi and American sides, the Shi'ites and Sunnis were as disunited as ever, murdering each other, crucial laws, especially on oil, have not been enacted yet and probably many political changes will never occur, and the like. Of its nine security goals, only two had been met. White House and Pentagon efforts to soften GAO criticisms failed.
SPIEGEL: Who has benefited from the mess?
KOLKO: The situation is worse than ever, and the artificial nation – created after World War I in a capricious manner – is breaking up. The surge, as one Iraqi is quoted, "is isolating areas from each other … and putting up permanent checkpoints. That is what I call a failure." The civilian death toll last August was higher than in February. Geopolitically, as Bush senior feared after the first Gulf war in 1990-91, Iran is emerging more powerful than ever, increasingly dominant in the region. The many official Israeli warnings before the war that this would be the outcome of war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power have come true.
SPIEGEL: How would you describe the situation of the Bush White House today? What options does it have?
KOLKO: The Bush administration suffers from a fatal dilemma. Its Iraq adventure is getting steadily worse, the American people very likely will vote the Republicans out of office because of it, and the war is extremely expensive at a time that the economy is beginning to present it with a major problem. The president's poll ratings are now the worst since 2001. Only 33 percent of the American public approve his leadership, and 58 percent want to decrease the number of American troops immediately or quickly. Fifty-five percent want legislation to set a withdraw deadline. In Afghanistan, as well, the war against the Taliban is going badly, and the Bush administration's dismal effort to use massive American military power to remake the world in a vague, inconsistent way is failing. The U.S. has managed to increasingly alienate its former friends, who now fear its confusion and unpredictability. Above all, the American public is less ready than ever to tolerate Bush's idiosyncrasies.
SPIEGEL: What went wrong? Was the war doomed from the very beginning? How can the U.S. military and the U.S. government which is spending $3 billion per week in Iraq be losing the war?
KOLKO: The U.S. is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage, as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium- and long-run. They were irrelevant in many contexts in which the U.S. was not involved, and they explain the outcome of many armed struggles over the past century regardless of who was in them, for they are usually decided by the socio-economic and political strength of the various sides – China after 1947 and Vietnam after 1972 are two examples, but scarcely the only ones. Wars are more determined by socioeconomic and political factors than any other, and this was true long before the U.S. attempted to regulate the world's affairs. Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology. Washington refuses to heed this lesson of modern history.
SPIEGEL: What is the position of the U.S. military? Are its forces united behind the war?
KOLKO: Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the American military, especially after the Vietnam experience traumatized it. My history of the Vietnam War was purchased by many base libraries, and the military journals treated it in detail and very respectfully. The statement at the end of July by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael G. Mullen, that "no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" if Iraqi politics fails to change drastically reflects a current of realism that has existed among military thinkers for some decades (whether he acts on this assumption is another matter and depends greatly on considerations outside of his control). But the senior military remains extremely disunited on this war, and many officers regard Gen. Petraeus – the top military commander in Iraq – as a political opportunist who ultimately will do as Bush commands.
Admiral William J. Fallon, who commands American forces in the region and is Petraeus' superior, is publicly skeptical of his endorsement of the president's policies in Iraq. The Army, especially, does not have the manpower for a protracted war and if the U.S. maintains its troop levels after spring 2008, it will face a crisis. It will have to break its pledge not to leave soldiers in Iraq longer than 15 months, accelerate the use of National Guard units, and the like – and it will lose the war regardless of what it does.
SPIEGEL: But if there are critical voices in the military, why are they ignored?
KOLKO: Like the CIA, the military has some acute strategic thinkers who have learned from bitter experiences. The analyses of the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute – to name one of many – are often very insightful and critical.
The problem, of course, is that few (if any) at the decisive levels pay any attention to the critical ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There is no shortage of insight among U.S. official analysts – the problem that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity, say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict them. Former CIA head George Tenet is the supreme example of that, and what the CIA emphasized for the president or Donald Rumsfeld was essentially what they wanted to hear. While he admits the CIA knew far less regarding Iraq than it should have, Tenet's recent memoir is a good example of desire leading reporting objectively. The men and women who rise to the top are finely tuned to the relationship between ambition and readiness to contradict their superiors with facts. The entire mess is Iraq, to cite just one example, was predicted. If reason and clarity prevailed, America's role in the world would be utterly different.
SPIEGEL: But what about the Iraqi security forces? Are they able to take over from the Americans?
KOLKO: The Iraqi army and police that are to replace the Americans is heavily infiltrated by Shi'ites loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr and others – estimates vary, but at least a quarter is wholly unreliable. When Paul Bremer was sent as proconsul to Iraq in May 2003, he decided unilaterally to purge the military completely of Saddam's officers and loyalists – Bush still wanted, vaguely, to keep the existing army intact – but the task of reconstructing it proved far too difficult for his successors. The American administration in now using the very Sunni tribes that Saddam had worked with, mainly by purchasing their loyalty. It is very significant that Bush during his visit to Iraq a few days ago went to Anbar province rather than Baghdad, reflecting the realization that Nouri al-Maliki's government is no longer the chosen vehicle for attaining America's goals.
SPIEGEL: How does Washington plan to go about the business of ending the war?
KOLKO: There is utter confusion in Washington about how to end this morass. Goals are similar but the means to attain them are increasingly changing, confused, and as victory becomes more elusive so too does this administration look pathetic. The "surge," in the opinion of a majority of quite conservative establishment foreign policy experts (80 percent of whom had once served in government) was failing; the administration's handling of the war, in their view, was dismal. In fact, it is disastrous.
Interview conducted by John Goetz.
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