Originally posted at TomDispatch.
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech
at Riverside Church in New York City titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to
Break Silence." In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money
that the U.S. was pouring into it as symptoms of a societal disaster. President
Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program was being "broken and eviscerated,"
King said from the pulpit of that church, "as if it were some idle political
plaything on a society gone mad on war… We were taking the black young men
who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away
to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest
Georgia and East Harlem. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation
of the poor." Twice more in that ringing speech he spoke of "the
madness of Vietnam" and called for it to cease.
Don’t think of that as just a preacher’s metaphor. There was a
genuine madness on the loose – and not just in
the "free-fire zones" of Vietnam but in policy circles here
in the United States, in the frustration of top military and civilian officials
who felt gripped by an eerie helplessness as they widened a terrible war on
the ground and in the air. They were, it seemed, incapable of imagining any
other path than escalation
in the face of disaster and possible defeat. Even in the years of Ronald Reagan’s
presidency, when there was a brief attempt to paint that lost war in a more
heroic hue ("a noble
cause," the president called it), that sense of madness, or at least
of resulting mental illness, lingered. It remained embedded in a phrase then
regularly applied to Americans who were less than willing to once again head
aggressively into the world. They were suffering from, it was said, "Vietnam
syndrome."
Today, almost 25 years into what someday might simply be called America’s
Iraq War (whose third iteration we’ve recently entered), you can feel
that a similar "madness" has Washington by the throat. Just as King
noted of the Vietnam era, since 9/11 American domestic programs and agencies
have been starved while money poured
into the coffers of the Pentagon and an increasingly bloated national security
state. The results have been obvious. In the face of the spreading Ebola virus
in West Africa, for instance, the president can no longer turn to civilian agencies
or organizations for help, but has to call on the U.S. military in an "Ebola
surge" – even our language has been militarized – although
its forces are not
known for their skills, successes, or spendthrift ways when it comes to
civilian "humanitarian" or nation-building operations.
We’ve already entered the period when strategy, such as it is, falls
away, and our leaders feel strangely helpless before the drip, drip, drip of
failure and the unbearable urge for further escalation. At this point, in fact,
the hysteria in Washington over the Islamic State seems a pitch or two higher
than anything experienced in the Vietnam years. A fiercely sectarian force in
the Middle East has captured the moment and riveted attention, even though its
limits in a region full of potential enemies seem obvious and its "existential
threat" to the U.S. consists of the possibility that some stray American
jihadi might indeed try to harm a few of us. Call it emotional escalation in
a Washington that seems remarkably unhinged.
It took Osama bin Laden $400,000
to $500,000, 19 hijackers, and much planning to produce the fallen towers
of 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria in this country that launched the disastrous,
never-ending Global War on Terror. It took the leaders of the Islamic State
maybe a few hundred bucks and two grim videos, featuring three men on a featureless
plain in Syria, to create utter, blind hysteria here. Think of this as confirmation
of Karl Marx’s famous
comment that the first time is tragedy, but the second is farce.
One clear sign of the farcical nature of our moment is the inability to use
almost any common word or phrase in an uncontested way if you put "Iraq" or
"Islamic State" or "Syria" in the same sentence. Remember when the worst Washington
could come up with in contested words was the meaning
of "is" in Bill Clinton’s infamous statement about his
relationship with a White House intern? Linguistically speaking, those were
the glory days, the utopian days of official Washington.
Just consider three commonplace terms of the moment: "war,"
"boots on the ground," and "combat." A single question
links them all: Are we or aren’t we? And to that, in each case, Washington
has no acceptable answer. On war, the secretary of state said
no, we weren’t; the White House and Pentagon press offices announced
that yes,
we were; and the president fudged. He called
it "targeted action" and spoke of America’s "unique
capability to mobilize against an organization like ISIL," but God save
us, what it wasn’t and wouldn’t be was a "ground war."
Only with Congress did a certain clarity prevail. Nothing it did really mattered.
Whatever Congress decided or refused to decide when it came to going to war
would be fine and dandy, because the White House was going to do "it"
anyway. "It," of course, was the Clintonesque "is" of
present-day Middle Eastern policy. Who knew what it was, but here was what it
wasn’t and would never be: "boots on the ground." Admittedly,
the president has already dispatched 1,600
booted troops to Iraq’s ground (with more
to come), but they evidently didn’t qualify as boots on the ground
because, whatever they were doing, they would not be going into "combat"
(which is evidently the only place where military boots officially hit the ground).
The president has been utterly clear on this. There would be no American "combat
mission" in Iraq. Unfortunately, "combat" turns out to
be another of those dicey terms, since those non-boots had barely landed in
Iraq when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey started
to raise the possibility that some of them, armed, might one day be forward
deployed with Iraqi troops as advisers and spotters for U.S. air power in future
battles for Iraq’s northern cities. This, the White House now seems intent
on defining as not being a "combat mission."
And we’re only weeks into an ongoing operation that could last
years. Imagine the pretzeling of the language by then. Perhaps it might
be easiest if everyone – Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and Washington’s
pundits – simply agreed that the United States is at "war-ish"
in Iraq, with boots on the ground-ish in potentially combat-ish situations.
Former State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch
regular Peter Van Buren spent his own time in Iraq and wrote We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People about it. Now, he considers the mind-boggling strangeness of
Washington doing it all over again, this time as the grimmest of farces. ~ Tom
Apocalypse Now, Iraq Edition
By Peter Van Buren
I wanted to offer a wry chuckle before we headed into the heavy stuff about
Iraq, so I tried to start this article with a suitably ironic formulation.
You know, a déjà-vu-all-over-again kinda thing.
I even thought about telling you how, in 2011, I contacted a noted author
to blurb my book, We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People, and he presciently declined, saying sardonically, "So
you’re gonna be the one to write the last book on failure in Iraq?"
I couldn’t do any of that. As someone who cares deeply about this country,
I find it beyond belief that Washington has again plunged into the swamp of
the Sunni-Shia mess in Iraq. A young soldier now deployed as one of the 1,600
non-boots-on-the-ground there might have been eight years old when the 2003
invasion took place. He probably had to ask his dad about it. After all, less
than three years ago, when dad finally came home with his head "held
high," President Obama assured
Americans that "we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant
Iraq." So what happened in the blink of an eye?
The Sons of Iraq
Sometimes, when I turn on the TV these days, the sense of
seeing once again places in Iraq I’d been overwhelms me. After 22 years as
a diplomat with the Department of State, I spent 12 long months in Iraq in
2009-2010 as part of the American occupation. My role was to lead two teams
in "reconstructing"
the nation. In practice, that meant paying for schools that would never be
completed, setting up pastry shops on streets without water or electricity,
and conducting endless propaganda events on Washington-generated themes of
the week ("small business," "women’s empowerment,"
"democracy building.")
We even organized awkward soccer matches, where American
taxpayer money was used to coerce reluctant Sunni teams into facing off against
hesitant Shia ones in hopes that, somehow, the chaos created by the American
invasion could be ameliorated on the playing field. In an afternoon, we definitively
failed to reconcile the millennium-old Sunni-Shia divide we had sparked into
ethnic-cleansing-style life in 2003-2004, even if the score was carefully
stage managed into a tie by the 82nd Airborne soldiers with whom I worked.
In 2006, the U.S. brokered the ascension to power of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki, a Shia politician handpicked to unite Iraq. A bright, shining
lie of a plan soon followed. Applying vast amounts of money, Washington’s
emissaries created the Sahwa,
or Sons of Iraq, a loose grouping of Sunnis anointed as "moderates"
who agreed to temporarily stop killing in return for a promised place at the
table in the New(er) Iraq. The "political space" for this was
to be created by a massive escalation of the American military effort, which
gained a particularly marketable name: the surge.
I was charged with meeting the Sahwa
leaders in my area. My job back then was to try to persuade them to stay
on board just a little longer, even as they came to realize that they’d been
had. Maliki’s Shia government in Baghdad, which was already ignoring
American entreaties to be inclusive, was hell-bent on ensuring that there
would be no Sunni "sons" in its Iraq.
False alliances and double-crosses were not unfamiliar to the Sunni warlords
I engaged with. Often, our talk – over endless tiny glasses of sweet,
sweet tea stirred with white-hot metal spoons – shifted from the Shia
and the Americans to their great-grandfathers’ struggle against the British.
Revenge unfolds over generations, they assured me, and memories are long in
the Middle East, they warned.
When I left in 2010, the year before the American military finally departed,
the truth
on the ground should have been clear enough to anyone with the vision to take
it in. Iraq had already been tacitly divided into feuding state-lets controlled
by Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. The Baghdad government had turned into a typical,
gleeful third-world kleptocracy fueled by American money, but with a particularly
nasty twist: they were also a group of autocrats dedicated to persecuting,
marginalizing, degrading, and perhaps one day destroying the country’s
Sunni minority.
U.S. influence was fading fast, leaving the State Department, a small military
contingent, various spooks, and contractors hidden behind the walls of the billion-dollar
embassy (the largest
in the world!) that had been built in a moment
of imperial hubris. The foreign power with the most influence over events
was by then Iran,
the country the Bush administration had once been determined to take down alongside
Saddam Hussein as part of the Axis of Evil.
The Grandsons of Iraq
The staggering costs of all this – $25
billion to train the Iraqi Army, $60
billion for the reconstruction-that-wasn’t, $2
trillion for the overall war, almost 4,500
Americans dead and more than 32,000 wounded, and an Iraqi death toll of more
than 190,000
(though some estimates go as high
as a million) – can
now be measured against the results. The nine-year attempt to create an American
client state in Iraq failed, tragically and completely. The proof of that
is on today’s front pages.
According to the crudest possible calculation, we spent blood and got no
oil. Instead, America’s war of terror resulted in the dissolution of a Middle
Eastern post-Cold
War stasis that, curiously enough, had been held together by Iraq’s
previous autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein. We released a hornet’s nest
of Islamic fervor, sectarianism, fundamentalism, and pan-nationalism. Islamic
terror groups grew stronger
and more diffuse
by the year. That horrible lightning over the Middle East that’s left
American foreign policy in such an ugly glare will last into our grandchildren’s
days. There should have been so many futures. Now, there will be so few as
the dead accumulate in the ruins of our hubris. That is all that we won.
Under a new president, elected in 2008 in part on his promise to end American
military involvement in Iraq, Washington’s strategy morphed into the
more media-palatable mantra of "no boots on the ground." Instead,
backed by aggressive intel and the "surgical" application of drone
strikes and other kinds of air power, U.S. covert ops were to link up with
the "moderate" elements in Islamic governments or among the rebels
opposing them – depending on whether Washington was opting to support
a thug government or thug fighters.
The results? Chaos in Libya, highlighted by the flow
of advanced weaponry from the arsenals of the dead autocrat Muammar Gaddafi
across the Middle East and significant parts of Africa, chaos in Yemen, chaos
in Syria, chaos in Somalia, chaos in Kenya, chaos in South
Sudan, and, of course, chaos in Iraq.
And then came the Islamic State (IS) and the new "caliphate,"
the child
born of a neglectful occupation and an autocratic Shia government out to put
the Sunnis in their place once and for all. And suddenly we were heading back
into Iraq. What, in August 2014, was initially promoted as a limited humanitarian
effort to save the Yazidis,
a small religious sect that no one in Washington or anywhere else in this
country had previously heard of, quickly morphed into those 1,600 American
troops back on the ground in Iraq and American planes in the skies from Kurdistan
in the north to south
of Baghdad. The Yazidis were either abandoned, or saved, or just not needed
anymore. Who knows and who, by then, cared? They had, after all, served their
purpose handsomely as the casus belli of this war. Their agony at
least had a horrific reality, unlike the supposed attack in the Gulf
of Tonkin that propelled a widening war in Vietnam in 1964 or the nonexistent
Iraqi WMDs
that were the excuse for the invasion of 2003.
The newest Iraq war features Special Operations "trainers," air
strikes against IS fighters using American weapons abandoned
by the Iraqi Army (now evidently to be resupplied
by Washington), U.S. aircraft taking to the skies from inside
Iraq as well as a carrier in the Persian Gulf and possibly elsewhere,
and an air war across the border into
Syria.
It Takes a Lot of Turning Points To Go In a Circle
The truth
on the ground these days is tragically familiar: an Iraq even more divided
into feuding state-lets; a Baghdad government kleptocracy about to be reinvigorated
by free-flowing American money; and a new Shia prime minister being issued
the same 2003-2011 to-do list by Washington: mollify the Sunnis, unify Iraq,
and make it snappy. The State Department still stays hidden behind the walls
of that billion-dollar embassy. More money will be spent to train the collapsed
Iraqi military. Iran remains
the foreign power with the most influence over events.
One odd difference should be noted, however: in the last Iraq war, the Iranians
sponsored and directed attacks by Shia militias against American occupation
forces (and me); now, its special operatives and combat advisors fight side-by-side
with those same
Shia militias under the cover of American air power. You want real boots
on the ground? Iranian forces are already there. It’s certainly an example
of how politics makes strange
bedfellows, but also of what happens when you assemble your "strategy"
on the run.
Obama hardly can be blamed for all of this, but he’s done his part
to make it worse – and worse it will surely get as his administration
once again assumes ownership of the Sunni-Shia fight. The "new"
unity plan that will fail follows the pattern of the one that did fail in
2007: use American military force to create a political space for "reconciliation"
between once-burned, twice-shy Sunnis and a compromise Shia government that
American money tries to nudge
into an agreement against Iran’s wishes. Perhaps whatever new Sunni organization
is pasted together, however briefly, by American representatives should be
called the Grandsons of Iraq.
Just to add to the general eeriness factor, the key people in charge of putting
Washington’s plans into effect are distinctly familiar faces. Brett
McGurk, who served in key
Iraq policy positions throughout the Bush and Obama administrations, is
again the point
man as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran. McGurk was
once called the "Maliki
whisperer" for his closeness to the former prime minister. The current
American ambassador,
Robert Stephen Beecroft, was deputy chief of mission, the number two at the
Baghdad embassy, back in 2011. Diplomatically, another faux coalition
of the (remarkably un)willing is being assembled. And the pundits
demanding war in a feverish hysteria in Washington are all familiar names,
mostly leftovers from the glory days of the 2003 invasion.
Lloyd Austin, the general
overseeing America’s new military effort, oversaw the 2011 retreat.
General John
Allen, brought out of military retirement to coordinate the new war in
the region – he had recently been a civilian advisor to Secretary of
State John Kerry
– was deputy commander in Iraq’s Anbar province during the surge. Also
on the U.S. side, the mercenary security
contractors are back,
even as President Obama cites,
without a hint of irony, the ancient 2002 congressional authorization to invade
Iraq he opposed
as candidate Obama as one of his legal justifications for this year’s war.
The Iranians, too, have the same military commander on the ground in Iraq,
Qassem
Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force.
Small world. Suleimani
also helps direct Hezbollah operations inside Syria.
Even the aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf launching air strikes, the
USS George H.W. Bush, is fittingly named after the president who
first got us deep into Iraq almost a quarter century ago. Just consider that
for a moment: we have been in Iraq so long that we now have an aircraft carrier
named after the president who launched the adventure.
On a 36-month
schedule for "destroying" ISIS, the president is already ceding
his war to the next president, as was done to him by George W. Bush. That
next president may well be Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state as
Iraq War 2.0 sputtered to its conclusion. Notably, it was her husband whose
administration kept the original Iraq War of 1990-1991 alive via no-fly zones
and sanctions. Call that a pedigree of sorts when it comes to fighting in
Iraq until hell freezes over.
If there is a summary lesson here, perhaps it’s that there is evidently
no hole that can’t be dug deeper. How could it be more obvious, after more
than two decades of empty
declarations of victory in Iraq, that genuine "success," however defined,
is impossible? The only way to win is not to play. Otherwise, you’re
just a sucker at the geopolitical equivalent of a carnival ringtoss game with
a fist full of quarters to trade for a cheap stuffed animal.
Apocalypse Then – And Now
America’s wars in the Middle East exist in a hallucinatory space where
reality is of little import, so if you think you heard all this before, between
2003 and 2010, you did. But for those of us of a certain age, the echoes go
back much further. I recently joined a discussion on Dutch
television where former Republican Congressman Pete
Hoekstra made a telling slip of the tongue. As we spoke about ISIS, Hoekstra
insisted that the U.S. needed to deny them "sanctuary in Cambodia."
He quickly corrected himself to say "Syria," but the point was
made.
We’ve been here before, as the failures of American policy and strategy in
Vietnam metastasized into war in Cambodia and Laos to deny sanctuary to North
Vietnamese forces. As with ISIS, we were told that they were barbarians who
sought to impose an evil philosophy across an entire region. They, too, famously
needed to be fought "over there" to prevent them from attacking
us here. We didn’t say "the Homeland" back then, but you get the
picture.
As the similarities with Vietnam are telling, so is the difference. When
the reality of America’s failure in Vietnam finally became so clear that there
was no one left to lie to, America’s war there ended and the troops came home.
They never went back. America is now fighting the Iraq War for the third time,
somehow madly expecting different results, while guaranteeing only failure.
To paraphrase a young John Kerry, himself back from Vietnam,
who’ll be the last to die for that endless mistake? It seems as if it will
be many years before we know.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement
during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We
Meant
Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
A Tom
Dispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog,
We Meant Well.
His latest book is Ghosts
of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook
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Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men
Explain Things to Me.
Copyright 2014 Peter Van Buren