Lyle Andrew
2008-07-06 00:17:22 UTC
U.S. Continues to Brutalize Iraqis in the Cause of the 'Surge'
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 30, 2008.
Five years after the invasion, to speak of this urge to surge and its
results as "success" or as "good news" is essentially obscene.
On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was
being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation. "My fellow
citizens," he began, "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." We were entering
Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great
civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no
ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of
that country to its own people."
Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted,
pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship
was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been
officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying
Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in
Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and
interior ministries -- were just looted shells. Schools, hospitals,
museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or
meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in
Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were
already bringing in the administration's crony corporations --
Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish
off the job of looting the country under the rubric of
"reconstruction." Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend"
$20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for
Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no
effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the
London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least
transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the
competition.)
Before the Sunni insurgency even had a chance to ramp up in 2003, they
were already pouring billions of U.S. tax dollars into what would
become their massive military mega-bases meant to last a millennium,
and, of course, they were dreaming about opening Iraq's oil industry
to the major oil multinationals and to a privatized future as an oil
spigot for the West.
On May 1, 2003, six weeks after he had announced his war to the nation
and the world, the President landed on the deck of the USS Abraham
Lincoln, an aircraft carrier returning from the Persian Gulf where its
planes had just launched 16,500 missions and dropped 1.6 million
pounds of ordnance on Iraq. From its flight deck, he spoke
triumphantly, against the backdrop of a "Mission Accomplished" banner,
assuring Americans that we had "prevailed." "Today," he said, "we have
the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and
aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can
achieve military objectives without directing violence against
civilians." In fact, according to Human Rights Watch, the initial
shock-and-awe strikes he had ordered killed only civilians, possibly
hundreds of them, without touching a single official of Saddam
Hussein's "regime."
Who's Counting Now?
Since that first day of "liberation," Iraqis have never stopped dying
in prodigious numbers. Now, more than five years after the U.S.
"prevailed" with such "precision," a more modest version of the same
success story has once again taken the beaches of the mainstream
media, if not by storm, then by siege. When it comes to Iraq, the good
news is unavoidable. It's in the air. Not victory exactly, but a
slow-motion movement toward a "stable" Iraq, a country with which we
might be moderately content.
The President's surge -- those extra 30,000 ground troops sent into
Iraq in the first half of 2007 -- has, it is claimed, proven the
negativity of all the doubters and critics unwarranted. Indeed, it is
now agreed, security conditions have improved significantly and in
ways "that few thought likely a year ago."
You already know the story well enough. It turns out that, as in
Vietnam many decades ago, the U.S. military is counting like mad. So,
for instance, according to the Pentagon, attacks on American and Iraqi
troops are down 70% compared to June 2007; IED (roadside bomb) attacks
have dropped almost 90% over the same period; in May, for the first
time, fewer Americans died in Iraq than in Afghanistan (where the
President's other war, some seven-plus years later, is going poorly
indeed); and, above all else, "violence" is down. ("All major
indicators of violence in Iraq have dropped by between 40 and 80
percent since February 2007, when President Bush committed an
additional 30,000 troops to the war there, the Pentagon reported.")
Think of this as the equivalent of Vietnam's infamous "body count,"
but in reverse. In a country where the U.S. generally occupies only
the land its troops are on, the normal measures of military victory
long ago went out the window, so bodies have to stand in. In Vietnam,
the question was: How many enemy dead could you tote up? The greater
the slaughter, the closer you assumedly were to obliterating the other
side (or, at least, its will). As it turned out, by what the grunts
dubbed "the Mere Gook Rule" -- "If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's
VC [Vietcong] " -- any body would do in a pinch when it came to the
metrics of victory.
In Iraq today, the counting being most widely publicized runs in the
opposite direction. Success now can be measured in less deaths; and,
by all usual counts, Iraqi deaths have indeed been falling since the
height of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in the early months
of 2007. In part, this has occurred because millions of people have
already been driven out of their homes and many neighborhoods,
especially in the capital, "cleansed." At the same time, in Sunni
areas, significant numbers of insurgents have joined the Awakening
Movement. They have been paid off by the U.S. military to fight
al-Qaeda in Iraq, while, assumedly, biding their time until the
American presence ebbs to take on "the Persians" -- that is, the
Shiite (and Kurdish) government embedded in Baghdad's fortified,
American-controlled Green Zone.
As a result, cratered Iraq -- a land with at least 50% unemployment,
still lacking decent electricity, potable water, hospitals with drugs
(or even doctors, so many having fled), or courts with judges (40 of
them having been assassinated and many more injured since 2003) or
lawyers, many of whom joined the more than two million Iraqis who have
gone into exile -- is, today, modestly quieter. But don't be fooled.
So many years later, Iraqis are still dying in prodigious numbers, and
significant numbers of those dying are doing so at the hands of
Americans.
It's not just the family, including possibly four children under the
age of 12, who died last week when a U.S. jet blasted their house in
Tikrit (after their father, evidently believing thieves were about,
fired shots in the air with a U.S. patrol nearby); or the manager and
two female employees of a bank at Baghdad International Airport
("three criminals," according to a U.S. military statement) killed
when their car was shot up by soldiers from a U.S. convoy; or the
unarmed civilian, a relative of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who
died in an early morning American raid in the southern town of Janaja;
or the men, woman, and child in a car "which failed to stop at a
[U.S.] checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul because, according to a
U.S. military statement, the two men were armed and one man inside the
car made 'threatening movements'"; or, according to the U.N., the
estimated 1,000 dead in Baghdad's vast, heavily populated Shiite slum
of Sadr City, mostly civilians, 60% women and children, in fighting in
April and May in which U.S. troops and air power played a significant
role.
In fact, one great difference between the "liberation" moment of 2003
and the "stabilization" moment of 2008 is simply that what began as
"regime change" -- missiles and bombs theoretically meant for that
Saddamist deck of 55 leadership cards -- then developed into a war
against a Sunni insurgency, and is now functionally a war against
Shiites as well. Particularly targeted of late has been the movement
headed by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a fierce opponent of the American
occupation, who is especially popular among the impoverished Shiite
masses in Baghdad and southern Iraq. In Shiite areas, his party,
according to a U.S. intelligence estimate, would probably win upwards
of 60% of the votes in the upcoming provincial elections, if they were
fairly conducted. In recent months, the U.S. military in "support" of
its Iraqi allies in the Maliki government has fought fierce battles in
both the southern oil city of Basra and Sadr City against Sadr's
militia, with the usual sizeable numbers of civilian casualties.
In other words, despite all the talk about onrushing "stability,"
looked at another way, the U.S. faces an ever more complicated and
spreading, if intermittent, war. With it has gone another, somewhat
less publicized kind of body count. Consider, for instance, a small
passage from a recent piece by New York Times correspondent Thom
Shanker on inter-service rivalries in Iraq. The U.S. Army, he reports,
is now ramping up its own air arm (just as it did in the Vietnam era).
In the last year, it has launched Task Force ODIN, the name being an
acronym for "observe, detect, identify and neutralize," but also the
ber-god of Norse mythology (and perhaps a reminder of the godlike
attitudes those in the air can develop towards those being
"neutralized" on the ground).
With its headquarters at a base near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old
hometown, the unit consists of only "about 300 people and 25
aircraft." Shanker calls it "a Rube Goldberg collection of
surveillance and communications and attack systems, a mash-up of
manned and remotely piloted vehicles, commercial aircraft with
high-tech infrared sensors strapped to the fuselage, along with attack
helicopters and infantry."
Here's the money paragraph of his piece with its triumphalist body
count:
"The work of the new aviation battalion was initially kept secret, but
Army officials involved in its planning say it has been exceptionally
active, using remotely piloted surveillance aircraft to call in Apache
helicopter strikes with missiles and heavy machine gun fire that have
killed more than 3,000 adversaries in the last year and led to the
capture of almost 150 insurgent leaders."
We have no idea how that figure of more than 3,000 dead Iraqis was
gathered (given that we're talking about an air unit), or what
percentage of those dead were actually civilians, but certainly some
among them died in the recent fighting in heavily populated Sadr City.
In any case, consider that number for a moment: One modest-sized Army
air unit/one year = 3,000+ dead Iraqis.
Now, consider that the Air Force in Iraq in that same year, according
to Shanker, "quadrupled its number of sorties and increased its
bombing tenfold." Consider that significant numbers of those sorties
have been over heavily populated cities, or that, according to the
Washington Post, between late March and late May, more than 200
powerful Hellfire missiles were fired into Baghdad (mainly,
undoubtedly, into the Sadr City area); or that the unmanned aerial
vehicles, the Predator (armed with two Hellfire missiles) and the
larger, far more deadly Reaper (armed with up to 14 of those
missiles), carried out, according to Shanker, 64 and 32 attacks,
respectively, in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of March
and June.
And we're not even considering here U.S. military operations on the
ground in Basra earlier in the year (special forces units were sent
into the city when the Iraqi military and police seemed to be
buckling), or in campaigns in Sunni or mixed areas to the north of
Baghdad, or simply in ongoing everyday operations. Although individual
body counts are now regularly announced for specific operations (not
the case in the early years in Iraq), who knows what the overall
carnage amounts to. One thing can be said however: The pacification
campaign in Iraq really hasn't flagged since the Sunni insurgency
gained strength in late 2003. Reformulated by General David Petraeus
in 2007, it's just the sort of effort that occupying Great Powers have
long been known to apply to rebellious possessions.
Iraq as a Surge-athon
To fully assess just what lurks beneath the "good news" from Iraq,
including those 3,000 "adversaries" that Task Force ODIN
"neutralized," we would have to do a different kind of counting of
which we're incapable, not because no one's doing it, but because we
have minimal access to the numbers. Let me try, however, to outline
briefly some of what can be known -- and then you can judge the good
news for yourself.
American troop strength in Iraq now stands at about 146,000. That's
perhaps 16,000 more than in January 2007 just before the surge began.
It's also about 16,000 more than in April 2003 when Baghdad was taken.
According to Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, the latest
Pentagon plans are to order about 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in
2009, which would keep troop levels at or above that 140,000 mark.
In addition, a vast force of private contractors, armed and unarmed,
is in the country. There is no way to know how many of these hired
hands and hired guns are actually there, but it's a reasonable guess
that they add up to more -- possibly substantially more -- than the
troops on hand.
Since February 2007 in the U.S., only one "surge" has been discussed,
almost nonstop -- those 30,000 ground troops the President ordered
largely into the Baghdad area. A surprising number of other surges
have, however, been underway, even if barely noted in the U.S. These
add up to a remarkable Bush administration urge to surge that puts
American policy in Iraq in quite a different light.
Among these surges, for instance, has been a political surge of U.S.
"advisors" and "mentors" to the Iraqi government, police, and
military. In another of his superb reports for the New York Review of
Books, "Embedded in Iraq," Michael Massing says that the main elements
of this "little known political surge were spelled out in a classified
'Joint Campaign Plan' completed in May 2007." It represented, he
writes, a "sharp expansion."
"Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were
assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out
sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the
Army Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and
reinforce dams. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in
Baghdad and elsewhere to help repair infrastructure, improve water and
electrical systems, and stimulate the economy."
We know as well that American advisers are now deeply involved with
local government bodies in contested areas; that American advisers,
evidently hired from private contractors, are embedded in the key
interior, defense, and oil ministries; that advisers, also hired from
private contractors, are helping the Iraqi police and that a new
multiyear contract with DynCorp International, which already has 700
civilian police advisers in the country, will raise that number above
800. Their mission: "to advise, train and mentor the Iraqi Police
Service, Ministry of Interior, and Department of Border Enforcement."
In this period, even academics have surged into Iraq as the military
has embedded anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists
from the "Human Terrain System" in military units to advise on local
customs and "cultural understanding." One of them, a political
scientist completing her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, was
recently killed in a bombing in Sadr City.
We know that more than 20,000 Iraqis are now in two U.S. prisons, Camp
Bucca in the south of the country and state-of-the-art Camp Cropper on
the outskirts of Baghdad. Both of these have been continually
upgraded. In this period, though, it seems that a surge in prison
building (and assumedly prisoners) has also been underway. The
Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports that a new "Theater Internment
Facility Reconciliation Center" -- i.e. prison -- is being built near
Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. A "new contract calls for
providing food for 'up to 5,000 detainees' [there] and will also cover
150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility."
Another "reconciliation center" is to be opened at Ramadi in al-Anbar
Province.
All of this is, again, being done through private contractors,
including a contract for some company to "guard" the "property" of up
to 60,000 Iraqi detainees. ("The contracted personnel will be
responsible for the accountability, inventory, and storage of all
property.") This, reports Sharon Weinberger of Wired's Danger Room
blog, is evidently in anticipation of a "surge of approximately 15,000
detainees in the upcoming six months."
In addition, the Iraqi military, with its embedded American advisors,
remains almost totally dependent on the U.S. military. According to a
recent Government Accountability Office report, based on "a classified
study of Iraqi Army battalions," just 10% of them "are capable of
operating independently in counterinsurgency operations and even then
they rely on American support." For logistics, planning, supplies --
almost everything that makes a military function -- the Iraqi military
relies on the U.S. military and would be helpless without it.
More than five years after Baghdad fell, there still is no real Iraqi
air force. The Iraqi military now depends ever more on the quick and
constant application of American air power -- and U.S. air power in
the region has surged in the last year and a half. The use of drones
like the Predator and Reaper, whose pilots are stationed at Nellis Air
Force Base outside Las Vegas and other distant spots, has also surged,
doubling since the beginning of 2007. Meanwhile, new machines,
including a "platoon" of 30 of the Army's experimental Micro Air
Vehicles, which can hover "in one place [and] stare down with
'electro-optical and infrared cameras,'" are being rushed into action
in Iraq, which is increasingly a laboratory for the testing of the
latest U.S. weaponry.
In addition, for unknown billions of dollars, the upgrading of
American bases in that country, especially the mega-bases, continues,
while possibly the largest embassy on the planet, a vast citadel
inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone meant to house 1,000 "diplomats"
(and large numbers of guards and support staff of every sort), is
nearly finished.
Finally, among the various surges of these last 18 months, there has
been a surge in Bush administration demands for an American future in
Iraq. In ongoing negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, U.S.
negotiators have demanded access to nearly 60 bases, control of Iraqi
air space to 29,000 feet, the right to arrest Iraqis without
explanation or permission, the right to bring troops into and out of
the country without permission or notification, the right to launch
military operations on the same basis, and immunity from prosecution
in Iraqi courts for troops and private contractors.
In other words, wherever you might have looked over the last year or
more, a surge-athon was under way. It was meant to solidify the
American position in Iraq for the long term as an occupying power. Not
withdrawing or drawing down, but ramping up has been the order of the
day, no matter what was being debated, discussed, or written about in
the United States.
That ramping up makes some sense of the "good news" and "stability" of
this moment. Among other things, it's hardly surprising that weakly
armed guerrilla forces (whether Shiite or Sunni), when faced with such
a display of power have no desire to take it on frontally.
Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion,
to speak of this urge to surge and its results as "success" or as
"good news" is essentially obscene. Think of Iraq instead as a cocked
gun. It's loaded, it's held to your head, and things are improving
only to the extent that, recently, it hasn't gone off.
Iraq itself is wreckage beyond anything that could have been imagined
back in March 2003; liberation is, by now, a black joke; the Bush
administration's "benchmarks" for Iraqi success remain largely unmet,
and still we keep "liberating" that land, still we keep killing Iraqis
in prodigious numbers. A Vietnam-style body count, once banished by an
administration that wanted no reminders of the last disastrous
American counterinsurgency war, is now back with a vengeance, even if
violence is down. These days, in its statements, the U.S. military is
counting scalps almost everywhere there's fighting in Iraq.
A Great Lie of History
"We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore
control of that country to its own people." This was one of the great
lies of history. And all the while, the price of oil -- the one
product Iraq has and, in present conditions, can't get at adequately
-- continues to soar. There is no "good news" in any of this, unless
you happen to be an undertaker, nor is there any end to it in sight.
Of the political surge in Iraq -- all those advisers and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams pouring into the country -- Michael Massing has
written bluntly: "[I]t has been an utter failure. 'Dysfunctional' is
how one visiting adviser described it, citing bitter inter-agency
battles, micromanagement from Washington, and an acute mismatch
between the skills of the advisers and the needs of the Iraqi
government."
The same could be said -- and someday undoubtedly will be -- of the
rest of the U.S. effort, including the much lauded recent
counterinsurgency part of it.
So let me offer this bit of advice. When you read the news, skip the
"good" part. The figures demonstrating "improvement" may (or may not)
be perfectly real, but they also represent an effort to dominate (as
well as divide and conquer) in an essentially colonial fashion; worse
yet, it's an effort barely held together by baling wire and reliant on
the destruction of ever more Iraqi neighborhoods.
If you want a prediction, here it is and it couldn't be simpler: This
cannot end well. Not for Washington. Not for the U.S. military. Not
for Americans. And, above all, not for Iraqis.
[Note for readers: This piece could profitably be read in conjunction
with Juan Cole's recent post, "The Real State of Iraq," for a full and
thoroughly devastating picture of what American policy has meant in
that country.]
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 30, 2008.
Five years after the invasion, to speak of this urge to surge and its
results as "success" or as "good news" is essentially obscene.
On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was
being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation. "My fellow
citizens," he began, "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." We were entering
Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great
civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no
ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of
that country to its own people."
Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted,
pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship
was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been
officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying
Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in
Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and
interior ministries -- were just looted shells. Schools, hospitals,
museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or
meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in
Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were
already bringing in the administration's crony corporations --
Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish
off the job of looting the country under the rubric of
"reconstruction." Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend"
$20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for
Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no
effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the
London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least
transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the
competition.)
Before the Sunni insurgency even had a chance to ramp up in 2003, they
were already pouring billions of U.S. tax dollars into what would
become their massive military mega-bases meant to last a millennium,
and, of course, they were dreaming about opening Iraq's oil industry
to the major oil multinationals and to a privatized future as an oil
spigot for the West.
On May 1, 2003, six weeks after he had announced his war to the nation
and the world, the President landed on the deck of the USS Abraham
Lincoln, an aircraft carrier returning from the Persian Gulf where its
planes had just launched 16,500 missions and dropped 1.6 million
pounds of ordnance on Iraq. From its flight deck, he spoke
triumphantly, against the backdrop of a "Mission Accomplished" banner,
assuring Americans that we had "prevailed." "Today," he said, "we have
the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and
aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can
achieve military objectives without directing violence against
civilians." In fact, according to Human Rights Watch, the initial
shock-and-awe strikes he had ordered killed only civilians, possibly
hundreds of them, without touching a single official of Saddam
Hussein's "regime."
Who's Counting Now?
Since that first day of "liberation," Iraqis have never stopped dying
in prodigious numbers. Now, more than five years after the U.S.
"prevailed" with such "precision," a more modest version of the same
success story has once again taken the beaches of the mainstream
media, if not by storm, then by siege. When it comes to Iraq, the good
news is unavoidable. It's in the air. Not victory exactly, but a
slow-motion movement toward a "stable" Iraq, a country with which we
might be moderately content.
The President's surge -- those extra 30,000 ground troops sent into
Iraq in the first half of 2007 -- has, it is claimed, proven the
negativity of all the doubters and critics unwarranted. Indeed, it is
now agreed, security conditions have improved significantly and in
ways "that few thought likely a year ago."
You already know the story well enough. It turns out that, as in
Vietnam many decades ago, the U.S. military is counting like mad. So,
for instance, according to the Pentagon, attacks on American and Iraqi
troops are down 70% compared to June 2007; IED (roadside bomb) attacks
have dropped almost 90% over the same period; in May, for the first
time, fewer Americans died in Iraq than in Afghanistan (where the
President's other war, some seven-plus years later, is going poorly
indeed); and, above all else, "violence" is down. ("All major
indicators of violence in Iraq have dropped by between 40 and 80
percent since February 2007, when President Bush committed an
additional 30,000 troops to the war there, the Pentagon reported.")
Think of this as the equivalent of Vietnam's infamous "body count,"
but in reverse. In a country where the U.S. generally occupies only
the land its troops are on, the normal measures of military victory
long ago went out the window, so bodies have to stand in. In Vietnam,
the question was: How many enemy dead could you tote up? The greater
the slaughter, the closer you assumedly were to obliterating the other
side (or, at least, its will). As it turned out, by what the grunts
dubbed "the Mere Gook Rule" -- "If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's
VC [Vietcong] " -- any body would do in a pinch when it came to the
metrics of victory.
In Iraq today, the counting being most widely publicized runs in the
opposite direction. Success now can be measured in less deaths; and,
by all usual counts, Iraqi deaths have indeed been falling since the
height of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in the early months
of 2007. In part, this has occurred because millions of people have
already been driven out of their homes and many neighborhoods,
especially in the capital, "cleansed." At the same time, in Sunni
areas, significant numbers of insurgents have joined the Awakening
Movement. They have been paid off by the U.S. military to fight
al-Qaeda in Iraq, while, assumedly, biding their time until the
American presence ebbs to take on "the Persians" -- that is, the
Shiite (and Kurdish) government embedded in Baghdad's fortified,
American-controlled Green Zone.
As a result, cratered Iraq -- a land with at least 50% unemployment,
still lacking decent electricity, potable water, hospitals with drugs
(or even doctors, so many having fled), or courts with judges (40 of
them having been assassinated and many more injured since 2003) or
lawyers, many of whom joined the more than two million Iraqis who have
gone into exile -- is, today, modestly quieter. But don't be fooled.
So many years later, Iraqis are still dying in prodigious numbers, and
significant numbers of those dying are doing so at the hands of
Americans.
It's not just the family, including possibly four children under the
age of 12, who died last week when a U.S. jet blasted their house in
Tikrit (after their father, evidently believing thieves were about,
fired shots in the air with a U.S. patrol nearby); or the manager and
two female employees of a bank at Baghdad International Airport
("three criminals," according to a U.S. military statement) killed
when their car was shot up by soldiers from a U.S. convoy; or the
unarmed civilian, a relative of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who
died in an early morning American raid in the southern town of Janaja;
or the men, woman, and child in a car "which failed to stop at a
[U.S.] checkpoint on the outskirts of Mosul because, according to a
U.S. military statement, the two men were armed and one man inside the
car made 'threatening movements'"; or, according to the U.N., the
estimated 1,000 dead in Baghdad's vast, heavily populated Shiite slum
of Sadr City, mostly civilians, 60% women and children, in fighting in
April and May in which U.S. troops and air power played a significant
role.
In fact, one great difference between the "liberation" moment of 2003
and the "stabilization" moment of 2008 is simply that what began as
"regime change" -- missiles and bombs theoretically meant for that
Saddamist deck of 55 leadership cards -- then developed into a war
against a Sunni insurgency, and is now functionally a war against
Shiites as well. Particularly targeted of late has been the movement
headed by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a fierce opponent of the American
occupation, who is especially popular among the impoverished Shiite
masses in Baghdad and southern Iraq. In Shiite areas, his party,
according to a U.S. intelligence estimate, would probably win upwards
of 60% of the votes in the upcoming provincial elections, if they were
fairly conducted. In recent months, the U.S. military in "support" of
its Iraqi allies in the Maliki government has fought fierce battles in
both the southern oil city of Basra and Sadr City against Sadr's
militia, with the usual sizeable numbers of civilian casualties.
In other words, despite all the talk about onrushing "stability,"
looked at another way, the U.S. faces an ever more complicated and
spreading, if intermittent, war. With it has gone another, somewhat
less publicized kind of body count. Consider, for instance, a small
passage from a recent piece by New York Times correspondent Thom
Shanker on inter-service rivalries in Iraq. The U.S. Army, he reports,
is now ramping up its own air arm (just as it did in the Vietnam era).
In the last year, it has launched Task Force ODIN, the name being an
acronym for "observe, detect, identify and neutralize," but also the
ber-god of Norse mythology (and perhaps a reminder of the godlike
attitudes those in the air can develop towards those being
"neutralized" on the ground).
With its headquarters at a base near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old
hometown, the unit consists of only "about 300 people and 25
aircraft." Shanker calls it "a Rube Goldberg collection of
surveillance and communications and attack systems, a mash-up of
manned and remotely piloted vehicles, commercial aircraft with
high-tech infrared sensors strapped to the fuselage, along with attack
helicopters and infantry."
Here's the money paragraph of his piece with its triumphalist body
count:
"The work of the new aviation battalion was initially kept secret, but
Army officials involved in its planning say it has been exceptionally
active, using remotely piloted surveillance aircraft to call in Apache
helicopter strikes with missiles and heavy machine gun fire that have
killed more than 3,000 adversaries in the last year and led to the
capture of almost 150 insurgent leaders."
We have no idea how that figure of more than 3,000 dead Iraqis was
gathered (given that we're talking about an air unit), or what
percentage of those dead were actually civilians, but certainly some
among them died in the recent fighting in heavily populated Sadr City.
In any case, consider that number for a moment: One modest-sized Army
air unit/one year = 3,000+ dead Iraqis.
Now, consider that the Air Force in Iraq in that same year, according
to Shanker, "quadrupled its number of sorties and increased its
bombing tenfold." Consider that significant numbers of those sorties
have been over heavily populated cities, or that, according to the
Washington Post, between late March and late May, more than 200
powerful Hellfire missiles were fired into Baghdad (mainly,
undoubtedly, into the Sadr City area); or that the unmanned aerial
vehicles, the Predator (armed with two Hellfire missiles) and the
larger, far more deadly Reaper (armed with up to 14 of those
missiles), carried out, according to Shanker, 64 and 32 attacks,
respectively, in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of March
and June.
And we're not even considering here U.S. military operations on the
ground in Basra earlier in the year (special forces units were sent
into the city when the Iraqi military and police seemed to be
buckling), or in campaigns in Sunni or mixed areas to the north of
Baghdad, or simply in ongoing everyday operations. Although individual
body counts are now regularly announced for specific operations (not
the case in the early years in Iraq), who knows what the overall
carnage amounts to. One thing can be said however: The pacification
campaign in Iraq really hasn't flagged since the Sunni insurgency
gained strength in late 2003. Reformulated by General David Petraeus
in 2007, it's just the sort of effort that occupying Great Powers have
long been known to apply to rebellious possessions.
Iraq as a Surge-athon
To fully assess just what lurks beneath the "good news" from Iraq,
including those 3,000 "adversaries" that Task Force ODIN
"neutralized," we would have to do a different kind of counting of
which we're incapable, not because no one's doing it, but because we
have minimal access to the numbers. Let me try, however, to outline
briefly some of what can be known -- and then you can judge the good
news for yourself.
American troop strength in Iraq now stands at about 146,000. That's
perhaps 16,000 more than in January 2007 just before the surge began.
It's also about 16,000 more than in April 2003 when Baghdad was taken.
According to Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, the latest
Pentagon plans are to order about 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in
2009, which would keep troop levels at or above that 140,000 mark.
In addition, a vast force of private contractors, armed and unarmed,
is in the country. There is no way to know how many of these hired
hands and hired guns are actually there, but it's a reasonable guess
that they add up to more -- possibly substantially more -- than the
troops on hand.
Since February 2007 in the U.S., only one "surge" has been discussed,
almost nonstop -- those 30,000 ground troops the President ordered
largely into the Baghdad area. A surprising number of other surges
have, however, been underway, even if barely noted in the U.S. These
add up to a remarkable Bush administration urge to surge that puts
American policy in Iraq in quite a different light.
Among these surges, for instance, has been a political surge of U.S.
"advisors" and "mentors" to the Iraqi government, police, and
military. In another of his superb reports for the New York Review of
Books, "Embedded in Iraq," Michael Massing says that the main elements
of this "little known political surge were spelled out in a classified
'Joint Campaign Plan' completed in May 2007." It represented, he
writes, a "sharp expansion."
"Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were
assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out
sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the
Army Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and
reinforce dams. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in
Baghdad and elsewhere to help repair infrastructure, improve water and
electrical systems, and stimulate the economy."
We know as well that American advisers are now deeply involved with
local government bodies in contested areas; that American advisers,
evidently hired from private contractors, are embedded in the key
interior, defense, and oil ministries; that advisers, also hired from
private contractors, are helping the Iraqi police and that a new
multiyear contract with DynCorp International, which already has 700
civilian police advisers in the country, will raise that number above
800. Their mission: "to advise, train and mentor the Iraqi Police
Service, Ministry of Interior, and Department of Border Enforcement."
In this period, even academics have surged into Iraq as the military
has embedded anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists
from the "Human Terrain System" in military units to advise on local
customs and "cultural understanding." One of them, a political
scientist completing her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, was
recently killed in a bombing in Sadr City.
We know that more than 20,000 Iraqis are now in two U.S. prisons, Camp
Bucca in the south of the country and state-of-the-art Camp Cropper on
the outskirts of Baghdad. Both of these have been continually
upgraded. In this period, though, it seems that a surge in prison
building (and assumedly prisoners) has also been underway. The
Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports that a new "Theater Internment
Facility Reconciliation Center" -- i.e. prison -- is being built near
Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. A "new contract calls for
providing food for 'up to 5,000 detainees' [there] and will also cover
150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility."
Another "reconciliation center" is to be opened at Ramadi in al-Anbar
Province.
All of this is, again, being done through private contractors,
including a contract for some company to "guard" the "property" of up
to 60,000 Iraqi detainees. ("The contracted personnel will be
responsible for the accountability, inventory, and storage of all
property.") This, reports Sharon Weinberger of Wired's Danger Room
blog, is evidently in anticipation of a "surge of approximately 15,000
detainees in the upcoming six months."
In addition, the Iraqi military, with its embedded American advisors,
remains almost totally dependent on the U.S. military. According to a
recent Government Accountability Office report, based on "a classified
study of Iraqi Army battalions," just 10% of them "are capable of
operating independently in counterinsurgency operations and even then
they rely on American support." For logistics, planning, supplies --
almost everything that makes a military function -- the Iraqi military
relies on the U.S. military and would be helpless without it.
More than five years after Baghdad fell, there still is no real Iraqi
air force. The Iraqi military now depends ever more on the quick and
constant application of American air power -- and U.S. air power in
the region has surged in the last year and a half. The use of drones
like the Predator and Reaper, whose pilots are stationed at Nellis Air
Force Base outside Las Vegas and other distant spots, has also surged,
doubling since the beginning of 2007. Meanwhile, new machines,
including a "platoon" of 30 of the Army's experimental Micro Air
Vehicles, which can hover "in one place [and] stare down with
'electro-optical and infrared cameras,'" are being rushed into action
in Iraq, which is increasingly a laboratory for the testing of the
latest U.S. weaponry.
In addition, for unknown billions of dollars, the upgrading of
American bases in that country, especially the mega-bases, continues,
while possibly the largest embassy on the planet, a vast citadel
inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone meant to house 1,000 "diplomats"
(and large numbers of guards and support staff of every sort), is
nearly finished.
Finally, among the various surges of these last 18 months, there has
been a surge in Bush administration demands for an American future in
Iraq. In ongoing negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, U.S.
negotiators have demanded access to nearly 60 bases, control of Iraqi
air space to 29,000 feet, the right to arrest Iraqis without
explanation or permission, the right to bring troops into and out of
the country without permission or notification, the right to launch
military operations on the same basis, and immunity from prosecution
in Iraqi courts for troops and private contractors.
In other words, wherever you might have looked over the last year or
more, a surge-athon was under way. It was meant to solidify the
American position in Iraq for the long term as an occupying power. Not
withdrawing or drawing down, but ramping up has been the order of the
day, no matter what was being debated, discussed, or written about in
the United States.
That ramping up makes some sense of the "good news" and "stability" of
this moment. Among other things, it's hardly surprising that weakly
armed guerrilla forces (whether Shiite or Sunni), when faced with such
a display of power have no desire to take it on frontally.
Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion,
to speak of this urge to surge and its results as "success" or as
"good news" is essentially obscene. Think of Iraq instead as a cocked
gun. It's loaded, it's held to your head, and things are improving
only to the extent that, recently, it hasn't gone off.
Iraq itself is wreckage beyond anything that could have been imagined
back in March 2003; liberation is, by now, a black joke; the Bush
administration's "benchmarks" for Iraqi success remain largely unmet,
and still we keep "liberating" that land, still we keep killing Iraqis
in prodigious numbers. A Vietnam-style body count, once banished by an
administration that wanted no reminders of the last disastrous
American counterinsurgency war, is now back with a vengeance, even if
violence is down. These days, in its statements, the U.S. military is
counting scalps almost everywhere there's fighting in Iraq.
A Great Lie of History
"We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore
control of that country to its own people." This was one of the great
lies of history. And all the while, the price of oil -- the one
product Iraq has and, in present conditions, can't get at adequately
-- continues to soar. There is no "good news" in any of this, unless
you happen to be an undertaker, nor is there any end to it in sight.
Of the political surge in Iraq -- all those advisers and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams pouring into the country -- Michael Massing has
written bluntly: "[I]t has been an utter failure. 'Dysfunctional' is
how one visiting adviser described it, citing bitter inter-agency
battles, micromanagement from Washington, and an acute mismatch
between the skills of the advisers and the needs of the Iraqi
government."
The same could be said -- and someday undoubtedly will be -- of the
rest of the U.S. effort, including the much lauded recent
counterinsurgency part of it.
So let me offer this bit of advice. When you read the news, skip the
"good" part. The figures demonstrating "improvement" may (or may not)
be perfectly real, but they also represent an effort to dominate (as
well as divide and conquer) in an essentially colonial fashion; worse
yet, it's an effort barely held together by baling wire and reliant on
the destruction of ever more Iraqi neighborhoods.
If you want a prediction, here it is and it couldn't be simpler: This
cannot end well. Not for Washington. Not for the U.S. military. Not
for Americans. And, above all, not for Iraqis.
[Note for readers: This piece could profitably be read in conjunction
with Juan Cole's recent post, "The Real State of Iraq," for a full and
thoroughly devastating picture of what American policy has meant in
that country.]