Page 2 of
2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
last war and the next
one By Tom
Engelhardt
oppressed by it, as were
its leaders) in the name of another group of
Iraqis, who have long been backed by Iran, and ...
uh ...
Hmmm, let's try that again ... or,
like the Bush administration, let's not and
pretend we did.
In the meantime, the US
military has tried to partially "seal off" Sadr
City and, in the neighborhoods that they have
partially occupied with their attendant Iraqi
troops, they are building the usual vast, concrete
walls, cordoning off the area. This is being done,
so American spokespeople say, to keep the Sadrist
militia fighters out and to clear the way for
government hearts-and-minds
"reconstruction" projects
that everyone knows are unlikely to happen.
Soon enough, if the previous pattern in
Sunni neighborhoods is applied, they and/or their
Iraqi cohorts will start going door to door doing
weapons searches. As a result, the American and
Iraqi prisons now supposedly being substantially
emptied - part of a program of "national
reconciliation" - of many of the tens of thousands
of Sunni prisoners swept up in raids in Sunni
neighborhoods, are likely to be refilled with
Shi'ite prisoners swept up in a similar way. Call
it grim irony - or call it a meaningless nightmare
from which no one can awaken. Just don't claim it
makes much sense.
As in Vietnam, so four
decades later, we are observing a full-scale
descent into madness and, undoubtedly, into
atrocity. At least in 2003, American troops were
heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal,
a city to take. Now, they are heading for nowhere,
for the heart of a slum city which they cannot
hold in a guerrilla war where the taking of
territory and the occupying of neighborhoods is
essentially beside the point. They are heading for
oblivion, while trying to win hearts and minds by
shooting missiles into homes and enclosing people
in giant walls which break families and
communities apart, while destroying livelihoods.
Oh, and while we're at it, welcome to "the
next war", the war in the slum cities of the
planet.
'There are no exit
strategies' Remember when the globe's
imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to
wield its unsurpassed military power by moving
from country to country, using lightning strikes
and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the
now-unimaginably distant past of perhaps
2002-2003.
Afghanistan had been
"liberated" in a matter of weeks; "regime change"
in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk" and it would
be followed by the reordering of what the
neo-conservatives liked to refer to as "the
Greater Middle East". No one who mattered was
talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor
was there anything being said about
counterinsurgency (nor, as in the Powell Doctrine,
about exits either). The US military was going to
go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short
order, and then, of course, we would stay. We
would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by
natives so eternally grateful that they would
practically beg us to garrison their countries.
Every one of those assumptions about the
new American way of war was absurd, even then. At
the very least, the problem should have been
obvious once American generals reached Baghdad and
sat down at a marble table in one of Saddam's
overwrought palaces, grinning for a victory
snapshot - without any evidence of a defeated
enemy on the other side of the table to sign a set
of surrender documents. If this were a normal
campaign and an obvious imperial triumph, then
where was the other side? Where were those the US
had defeated? The next thing you knew, the
Americans were printing up packs of cards with the
faces of most of Saddam's missing cronies on them.
Well, that was then. By now, fierce
versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the
narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad
and, in Afghanistan, are moving ever closer to the
Afghan capital, Kabul. And even though the "last
war" in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be
transferred to the even older war in Afghanistan
that is, now, spiraling out of control), inside
the Pentagon some are thinking not about how to
get out, but about how to get in. They are
pondering "the next war".
With that in
mind, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently
gave two sharp-edged speeches, one at
Maxwell-Gunter air force base, the other at West
Point, each expressing his frustration with the
slowness of the armed services to adapt to a
counterinsurgency planet and to plan for the next
war.
Now, there's obviously nothing
illogical about a country's military preparing for
future wars. That's what it is there for and every
country has the right to defend itself. But it's a
different matter when you're preparing for future
"wars of choice" (which used to be called wars of
aggression) - for the next war(s) on what our
secretary of defense now calls the "the 21st
century's global commons".
By that, he
means not just planet Earth in its entirety, but
"space and cyberspace" as well. For the American
military, it turns out, planning for a future
"defense" of the United States means planning for
planet-wide, over-the-horizon counterinsurgency.
It will, of course, be done better, with a
military that, as Gates put it, will no longer be
"a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force". (It
was at the Fulda Gap, a German plain, that the US
military once expected to meet Soviet forces
invading Europe in full-scale battle.)
So
the secretary of defense is calling for more
foreign-language training, a better "expeditionary
culture" and more nation building - you know, all
that "hearts and minds" stuff. In essence, he
accepts that the future of American war will,
indeed, be in the Sadr cities and Afghan backlands
of the planet; or, as he says, that "the
asymmetric battlefields of the 21st century" will
be "the dominant combat environment in the decades
to come". And the American response will be
high-tech indeed - all those unmanned aerial
vehicles that he can't stop talking about.
Gates describes the US's war-fighting
future in this way: "What has been called the
'Long War' [ie Bush's 'war on terror', including
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is likely to be
many years of persistent, engaged combat all
around the world in differing degrees of size and
intensity. This generational campaign cannot be
wished away or put on a timetable. There are no
exit strategies."
"There are no exit
strategies." That's a line to roll around on your
tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying
that the US military is likely to be in one, two,
many Sadr cities for a long time to come. This is
Gates' ultimate insight as secretary of defense,
and his response is to urge the military to plan
for more and better of the same. For this we give
the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year.
The irony is that, in both speeches, Gates
praises outside-the-box thinking in the military
and calls on the armed services to "think
unconventionally". Yet his own thoughts couldn't
be more conventional, imperial or potentially
disastrous. Put in a nutshell: if the mission is
heading into madness, then double the mission.
Bring in yet more of those drones whose missiles
are already so popular in Sadr City. This is
brilliantly prosaic thinking, based on the
assumption that the "global commons" should be
ours and that the "next war" will be ours, and the
one after that, and so on.
But I wouldn't
bet on it. Republican presidential nominee John
McCain got a lot of flak for saying that, as far
as he was concerned, American troops could stay in
Iraq for "100 years ... as long as Americans are
not being injured, harmed or killed". Our present
secretary of defense, a "realist" in an
administration of bizarre dreamers and inept
gamblers, has just cast his vote for more and
better Sadr cities. In a Pentagon version of an
old Maoist slogan: Let a hundred slum guerrilla
struggles bloom!
It's a recipe for being
bogged down in such wars for 100 years - with the
piles of dead rising ever higher. No wonder some
of the top military brass, whom he criticizes for
their bureaucratic inertia, have been
unenthusiastic. They don't want to spend the rest
of their careers fighting hopeless wars in Sadr
City or its equivalent. Who would?
The
rest of us should feel the same way. Every time
you hear the phrase "the next war" - and
journalists already love it - you should wince. It
means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path
to madness.
Vietnam ... Iraq ...
Afghanistan ... Don't we already have enough
examples of American counterinsurgency operations
under our belt? The American people evidently
think so. For some time now, significant
majorities have wanted out of Baghdad, out of
Iraq. All the way out.
In a major survey
just released by the influential journal Foreign
Affairs (see Economic woes take US center
stage Asia Times Online, May 2, 2008) ,
similar majorities have, in essence, "voted" for
demilitarizing US foreign policy. In their
responses, they offer quite a different approach
to how the US should operate in the world.
According to journalist Jim Lobe, 69% of
respondents believe "the US government should put
more emphasis on diplomatic and economic foreign
policy tools in fighting terrorism," not "military
efforts". (Sixty-five percent believe the US
should withdraw all its troops from Iraq either
"immediately" or "over the next 12 months.") But,
of course, no one who matters listens to them.
And yet, the path to Sadr City is one that
even an imperialist should want to turn back from.
It's the road to hell and it's paved with the
worst of intentions.
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.
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