Already counting to six - IRAQ WAR

!!!!-Already counting to six - IRAQ WAR

Asia Time Online - Daily News

Middle East

Mar 20, 2008

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Already counting to six
By Tom Engelhardt

Please don't write in with a correction. I know just as well as you do that we're approaching the fifth, not the sixth, anniversary of the moment when, on March 19, 2003, George W Bush told the American people:

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger ... My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.

At that moment, of course, the cruise missiles meant to "decapitate" Saddam Hussein's regime, but that killed only Iraqi civilians, were on their way to Baghdad. I'm perfectly aware that articles galore will be looking back on the five years since that day. This is not one of them.

Think of this piece as in the spirit of Senator John McCain's recent request that Americans not obsess about the origins of the Iraq War, but look forward. "On the issue of my differences with Senator [Barack] Obama on Iraq," he typically said, "I want to make it very clear: This is not about decisions that were made in the past. This is about decisions that a president will have to make about the future in Iraq. And a decision to unilaterally withdraw from Iraq will lead to chaos."

The future, not the past, is the mantra, which is why I'm skipping the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War entirely. Now, let me ask you a future-oriented question: What's wrong with these sentences?

On March 19, 2009, the date of the sixth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq, as surely as the sun rises in the East, I'll be sitting here and we will still have many tens of thousands of troops, a string of major bases, and massive air power in that country. In the intervening year, more Americans will have been wounded or killed; many more Iraqis will have been wounded or killed; more chaos and conflict will have ensued; many more bombs will have been dropped and missiles launched; many more suicide bombs will have gone off. Iraq will still be a hell on Earth.

Prediction is, of course, a risky business. Otherwise I'd now be commuting via jet pack through spire cities (as the futuristic articles of my youth so regularly predicted). If you were to punch holes in the above sentences, you would certainly have to note that it's risky for a man of 63 years, or of any age, to suggest that he'll be sitting anywhere in a year; riskier yet if you happen to live in those lands extending from North Africa to Central Asia that Bush administration officials used to call the "arc of instability" - essentially the oil heartlands of the planet - before they turned them into one.

It's always possible that I won't be sitting here (or anywhere else, for that matter) on March 19, 2009. Unfortunately, when it comes to the American position in Iraq, short of an act of God, the sixth anniversary of Bush's war of choice is going to dawn much like the fifth one.

As a start, you can write off the next 10 months of our lives, right up to January 20, 2009, inauguration day for the next president. We know that, last autumn, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was considering bringing American troop strength in Iraq down to 100,000 by the end of Bush's second term. However, that was, as they evidently love to say in Washington, just a "best-case scenario". Since then, the administration has signaled an end-of-July drawdown "pause" of unknown duration after American troop strength in Iraq, now at 157,000, hits about 142,000.

The president is clearly dragging his feet on removing even modest numbers of American troops. As he leaves office, it seems likely that there will be at least 130,000 US troops in the country, about the same number as there were before, in February 2007, the president's "surge" strategy kicked in. In addition, in the past year, US air power has "surged" in Iraq - and continues to do so - while US mega-bases in that country continue to be built up. As far as we know, there are no plans to reverse either of these developments by January 20, 2009. No presidential candidate is even discussing them.

Any official "best-case" scenario for drawdowns or withdrawals assumes, by the way, that the version of Iraq created during the "surge" months - at best, an unstable combination of Sunni, Shi'ite, Kurdish and American plans and desires - remains in place and that Iraqi carnage stays off the front pages of American papers. This is anything but a given, as British journalist Patrick Cockburn reported recently in a piece headlined, "Why Iraq Could Blow Up in John McCain's Face." Indeed it could.

Best-case scenarios
If McCain were elected president, the American position in Iraq on March 19, 2009, will certainly be as described above - and, if he has anything to say about it, for many anniversaries thereafter. But, when it comes to the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War, the truth is that it probably doesn't matter much who is elected president in November.

Take Hillary Clinton, she's said that she'll task the joint chiefs, the new secretary of defense and her National Security Council with having a plan for (partial) withdrawal in place within 60 days of coming into office. Since inauguration day is January 20, that means ... March 21, or two days after the sixth anniversary; by which time, of course, nothing would have changed substantially.

Obama has promised to remove US "combat" troops at a one-to-two-brigades-a-month pace over a 16-month period. So it's possible that troop levels could drop marginally before March 19, 2009, in an Obama presidency, but again there is no reason to believe that anything essential would have happened to change that "anniversary".

In addition, the stated plans of both Democratic candidates, vague and limited as they may be, might not turn out to be their actual plans. Note the recent comments of Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Powers, who resigned after calling Clinton a "monster" in an interview with the Scotsman during a book tour. Since name-calling will always trump substantive policy matters in American politics, less noted were her comments in an interview with the BBC on her candidate's Iraq withdrawal policy. "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a US senator," Powers said and then she referred to Obama's plan as nothing more than a - you guessed it - "best-case scenario".

Similarly, a Clinton sometime-advisor on military matters, retired General Jack Keane, also one of the authors of Bush's "surge" strategy, told the New York Sun that, in the Oval Office, "he is convinced [Hillary Clinton] would hold off on authorizing a large-scale immediate withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq". And Clinton herself, though less directly, has certainly hinted at a similar willingness to reconsider her policy promises in the light of an Oval Office morning.

So let's face it, barring an Iraqi surprise, the next year in that country may be nothing but a wash (and the lubricant, as in past years, is likely to be blood). It will be - best-case scenario - a holding action on the road to nowhere, another woefully lost year in what has now become something like a ghost country.

The children of war
To put this in more human terms: imagine that a child born on March 19, 2003, just as Baghdad was being shock-and-awed, will be of an age to enter first grade when the sixth anniversary of Bush's war hits. He or she will have gone from babbling to talking, crawling to walking, and will by then possibly be beginning to read and write.

Of course, an Iraqi child born on that day, who managed to live to see his or her sixth birthday, might be among the 2 million-plus Iraqis in exile in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East, or among the millions of internal refugees driven from their homes in recent years and not in school at all. (Similarly, a child born on October 7, 2001, when the president first dispatched American bombers to strike Afghanistan, will be in second grade in March 2009; of course, seven-and-a-half years after being "liberated", an Afghan child, especially one now living in the southern part of that failed narco-state, is unlikely to be in school at all. As with Iraq, we could take some educated guesses about the situation in Afghanistan a year from now and they would be grim beyond words.)

For those children, the real inheritors of the Bush war era that is not yet faintly over, the Iraq War has essentially been the equivalent of an open-ended prison sentence with little hope of parole; for some Americans and many Iraqis, including children, it is a death sentence without hope of pardon. All this for a country which, even by the standards of the Bush administration, never presented the slightest national security threat to the United States of America.

Only last week, an "exhaustive" Pentagon-sponsored study of 600,000 captured Iraqi documents confirmed, yet again, that there were no operational links whatsoever between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda.

With those children in mind, here's what's so depressing: in mainstream Washington, hardly anyone has taken a step outside the box of conventional, inside-the-Beltway thinking about Iraq, which is why it's possible to imagine March 19, 2009, with some confidence. For them, the Washington consensus, such as it is, is the only acceptable one and the disagreements within it, the only ones worth having. And here are its eight fundamentals:

· A belief that effective US power must invariably be based on the threat of, or use of, dominant force, and so must centrally involve the US military.

· A belief that all answers of any value are to be found in Washington among the serried ranks of officials, advisors, former officials, pundits, think-tank operators and other inside-the-Beltway movers and shakers, who have been tested over the years and found never to have a surprise in them. Most of them are notable mainly for having been wrong so often. This is called "experience".

· A belief that the critics of Washington policy outside Washington and its consensus are, at best, gadflies, never worth seriously consulting on anything.

· A belief that the American people, though endlessly praised in political campaigns, are know-nothings who couldn't think their way out of a proverbial paper bag when it comes to the supposedly arcane science of foreign policy, and so would certainly not be worth consulting on "national security" matters or issues involving the sacred "national interest", which is, in any case, the property of Washington. Like Iraqis and Afghans, the American people need good (or even not so good) shepherds in the national capital to answer that middle-of-the-night ringing phone and rescue them from impending harm. (The very foolishness of Americans can be measured by opinion polls which indicated that a majority of them had decided by 2005 that all American troops should be brought home from Iraq at a reasonable speed and that the US should not have permanent military bases in that country.)

· A belief that no other countries (or individuals elsewhere) have anything significant or original to offer when it comes to solving problems like the situation in Iraq (unless, of course, they agree with us). They are to be ignored, insists the Bush administration, or, say leading Democrats, "talked to" and essentially corralled into signing onto, and carrying out, the solutions the US considers reasonable.

· A belief that local peoples are incapable of solving their own problems without the intercession of, or the guiding hand (or Hellfire missile) of, Washington, which means, of course, of the US military.

· A belief that the US - whatever the problem - must be an essential part of the solution, not part of the problem itself.

· And finally, a belief (though no one would ever say this) that the lives of those children of Bush's wars of choice, already of an age to be given their first lessons in global "realism", don't truly matter, not when the great game of geopolitics and energy is at stake.

Of course, the most recent Washington solution, involving the endless military occupation (by whatever name) of alien lands, can "solve" nothing. The possibilities of genuine improvement in Iraq or Afghanistan under the ministrations of the US military are probably nil. And yet, because the only solutions entertained are variations of the above, little better lurks in our future at this moment.

Who would want to speculate on just how old those children of March 19, 2003, will actually be before the Iraq War is ended? So here's my next question: What's wrong with this sentence?

On March 19, 2010, the date of the seventh anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq, as surely as the sun rises in the East I'll be sitting here and we will still have ...

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)









Asia Time Online - Daily News

Middle East

Mar 20, 2008









THE ROVING EYE: IRAQ FIVE YEARS ON
Shocked, awed and left to rot
By Pepe Escobar

Future non-biased historians may well regard March 19, 2003, as a crucial mark in the annals of Western imperial arrogance. Five years later, the pre-emptive war celebratory fireworks have turned to dust. For months now Iraq has been an invisible American war. It's seldom on TV. It does not "sell". Thus, it does not exist. US Vice President Dick Cheney, one of its key architects, has just been to a whirlwind Baghdad tour. He said he sensed "phenomenal changes" since his last whirlwind tour 10 months ago. He praised security progress as "dramatic".

The "dramatic" progress was celebrated in style by a Sunni Arab female suicide bomber who managed to detonate her payload under her black abaya near the ultra-protected Imam Hussein shrine in holy Karbala, killing at least 42 Shi'ites and wounding 73.

Cheney did not see the real Baghdad, drowning in sewage, desperate for water and plunged in the dark - lacking 3,000 megawatts of electricity (it may take as many as 10 years before the city gets power 24 hours a day; so much for "reconstruction"). As no US official was suicidal enough to take Cheney, for instance, to a real life suicide bomber-targeted vegetable market in Sadr City - or to Imam Hussein's shrine in Karbala for that matter - these "phenomenal changes" warrant examination.

Cheney seems not to be very fond of the humongous Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 Iraqi documents which proved that there was no link whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In a curiously sedate propaganda effort, the report will not be posted online and will not be e-mailed by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia; any reporter who wants it will have to ask it to be sent via CD in the mail. That's quite a "phenomenal change" with regard to the George W Bush administration's hyped 2002 build up towards war.

British agency Oxford Research Business has recently updated its estimate of "additional deaths" caused by the war to 1.3 million Iraqis - not including the top killing fields, the provinces of al-Anbar (Sunni) and Karbala (Shi'ite). At least 4 million Iraqis have been internally displaced or become refugees, mostly in overburdened Syria and Jordan, now desperately running out of money and resources. As for any Sunni or Shi'ite proud of his historical memory, the US occupation has been regarded as more devastating than the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Talk about a historical "phenomenal change".

Baghdad - following the strategy of counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus - has been reduced to a rotten, amorphous, bloody and dangerous stockpile of blast-wall ghettos controlled by local warlords and militias. This "strategy" is being financed by US taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes, in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, estimate that by 2017, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion. Republican presidential contender John McCain wants this to last indefinitely as millions of Americans finally realize this avalanche of funds could instead provide them with better public schools, better health insurance and better projects to repair crumbling US infrastructure.

Petraeus' "surge" is gone - replaced by a "pause", defined by the general to the Army Times as "sensible" and "prudent". Recently resigned Admiral William Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, was dead set against Petraeus' "pause". He wanted to start drawing down troops - immediately. The Bush administration evicted him.

Up to the US presidential election, for political reasons, many would be led to believe nothing moves on the US front. At least nothing visible. Because in Kuwait, the Pentagon is busy building, in virtual secret, a mammoth permanent command structure to project "full spectrum dominance" not only in Iraq but all over the arc from the Middle East to Southwest Asia. Lieutenant General James J Lovelace minced no words to the Middle East edition of Stars and Stripes. It will be a "permanent presence" - of course compounded with all those extra permanent bases in Qatar, Bahrain the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Be it under pro-withdrawal Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or pro-"surge" McCain, the "war" in and on Iraq will go on - supported from Kuwait and the Gulf petro-monarchies.

It's alright Ma, I'm only dyin'
Baghdad is not only the 21st century heart of darkness. It is Fear Central - a desert sand nightmare frozen in fear, a direct consequence of the soggy mix of Petraeus' "surge" profiting from the uneasy Shi'ite Mahdi Army truce and the proliferation of the 80,000-strong anti-al-Qaeda movement dominated by Sunnis, Sahwa (Awakening).

As middle class Shi'ite professionals tell Asia Times Online, rape and pillage and widespread killing is down (65 Iraqis killed daily in August 2007, 26 killed daily in February 2008) because most neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is only "safer" - as the current official mantra in Washington goes - if compared to horrific post-February 2006 after the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, during the battle of Baghdad, when as many as 3,000 people were being killed every single month.

The inept Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad knows little of what's really going on - as it drags on in imperial seclusion behind the Green Zone, defended by valiant mercenaries from Georgia, Peru and Uganda. If Maliki and his entourage decide to go for an armored convoy stroll in formerly bustling al-Mansur neighborhood, for instance, the area has to be extensively searched as if this was a US presidential visit.

No matter what Washington decides or spins, it won't alter two major facts on the ground. Of all the major overlapping wars in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance has for all practical purposes stalemated the US occupation to the edge of defeat. And on a sectarian level, the Shi'ites have defeated the Sunnis as a whole - as they now control, allied with the Kurds, the government, Parliament, the army (13 divisions, half of them militias aligned with Iran) and the police.

The anti-al-Qaeda Sahwa, which the Americans dubbed "Concerned Local Citizens" and then "Sons of Iraq", are the same old Sunni Arab guerrillas, many of them former Saddam army officers who former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as "remnants of the old regime" who were killing Americans before they decided to rake some cash ($300 a month, an excellent salary in 70% unemployment Iraq) and do their own version of a "pause".

After all, they could not fight the US Army, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government at the same time and believe they would win it. They are, of course, anti-majority Shi'ite Iraqi government (although the American public relations machine would never let this cat out of the bag). They're still one more militia in a cornucopia of militias - the US Army itself being nothing more than a heavily armed militia.

In a sense, the old imperial divide and rule tactic has worked - as Sunnis and Shi'ites are more deadly polarized against each other than against the occupiers. But at the same time they all unite on the key issue: occupation out. The answer as to why no Iraqi militia organizes a Tet-style anti-American onslaught is political positioning.

Everyone's got militias - the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Mahdi Army, the Badr Organization, the Sahwa. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army's objective is to conquer political power in the next legislative elections. The Kurdish Peshmerga worry about defending Kirkuk after a referendum that could see it incorporated into the Kurdish north. Badr does not want to lose the government power it already enjoys; Hadi al-Amri, the dreaded leader of Badr, says he will respect the truce with the Mahdi Army. And Sahwa is just waiting to pounce against the Shi'ites. In this lethal cobweb, the Americans are just marginal, puzzled onlookers.

Stuck inside of Baghdad
This country is no more. This is an ex-country. It has gone to meet its maker (the Sumerians, presumably). The "surge" is a public relations-created illusion - as ghostly as those abandoned, burned out Iraqi tanks littering Baghdad's empty, dirty boulevards in April 2003; after all there was no war to speak of, the Iraqi army having preferred to flee.

The Turkish army, for its part, has just proved its point; Ankara can invade Iraqi Kurdistan any time it sees fit - as if it was Gaza. And this is nothing compared to what may happen after the endlessly postponed Kirkuk referendum, when Iraqi Kurds will finally have full control over their oil wealth and rekindle their independentist dreams. If East Timor and Kosovo can do it, why not us?

Muqtada has - literally - vanished, after lamenting an Iraq "characterized by social turmoil". He disappeared just like the 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi - and that's a really huge thing for pious Iraqi Shi'ites, not to mention a masterful political ploy. Muqtada has transferred to the US Marines the task of carrying a pogrom of the Mahdi Army. He's aiming at the polls - he wants the Sadrists to take over the Shi'ite provincial governments in the south in the next election. Sooner or later "anti-American" occult Muqtada will be the lord of what remains of Iraq - and there's nothing Washington can do about it.

As an internal US issue, neither Clinton nor Obama has provided any concrete evidence they want to totally scrap the US "mission" in Iraq - or at least roll back the worldwide empire of military bases still heavily supported by Cheney and an array of corporate/industrial-military interests.

As a global issue, millions of Iraqis lost their homes, their jobs, their families, their dreams and in countless cases their own lives because of a pre-emptive war (or "successful endeavor") built on lies. Shocked, awed and utterly destroyed, their ancestral land beheaded like a stray dog, Iraqis deserve at least the world's respect in their hour of darkness.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)