Iraq War: Christmas Eve thoughts on the war

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

I hope some day our "press corps" will treat optimistic pre-holiday announcements from the sitting administration with the skepticism they deserve.  Our press corps and punditocracy seem to be the only ones involved with politics that aren't aware that such pronouncements, especially before holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, are standard operating procedure.

The latest round of hints and veiled claims about US troops withdrawals from Iraq are no exception.  When you cut through the fog, the extra 20,000 or so troops that were put in before the elections are being pulled out.  Then the "baseline" force in-country will be reduced, maybe, by a couple of thousand or so.  Essentially, though, the administration has never committed to anything more than that.  Also, the media routinely ignore the level of "private contractors", aka mercenaries, that are there more-or-less taking direction from the Pentagon.

There is a broad consensus that the combination of Army personnel constraints, Iraqi political pressure and American political pressure will produce some kind of notable drawdown during the next few months beyond that currently committed.  But the alleged increase in the abilities of the Iraqi forces that is supposedly making drawdowns possible may not be all it's cracked up to be in the Bush administration's claims.  And, of course, a great deal in the short run depends on what kind of government is formed in Iraq during the next month or two.

Gareth Porter explains Why the War Has Already Been Lost by Gareth Porter Antiwar.com 12/24/05. His piece has a brief but informative summary of the evolution of the US strategic posture in Iraq during 2004 and 2005. He writes:

Despite the new surge of public belief in victory [ among the American public], however, the United States is no closer to success in defeating the insurgency – in the sense of unilaterally reducing its operations to a minimum level – than it was two years ago. On the contrary, all three major elements of US strategy in Iraq – US military operations against the insurgents, creating indigenous security forces and the political attraction of Sunnis into the Iraqi political system – have been shown to have failed to achieve any traction. The US may continue the war for some time, but it no longer has any strategy for winning.

He talks about how problematic the high expectations for Iraqi security forces (ISF) are at the moment. After 2004, he writes:

The US command would never again trust Sunnis to form local security forces. Instead it brought in nearly 2,000 Kurdish peshmurga militiamen to control Mosul. It also brought in five battalions of predominantly Shi'ite troops, with a smattering of Kurds, to replace the Sunni police in Ramadi, Samarra and Fallujah. The Iraqi commando units brought into fight in the Sunni provinces are also Shi'ites and Kurds.

These deployments further reinforced Sunni loyalties to the insurgency, because of the intense dislike and distrust between the Sunni population and the non-Sunni militias and commandoes. Despite administration claims that it has succeeded in recruiting 5,000 Sunni soldiers in 2005, the fact remains that it is still Shi'ites and Kurds who patrol the streets of Sunni cities and who search for Sunni insurgents.

He believes that the near-razing of Fallujah a year ago not only failed to significantly discourage the insurgency, but actually energized it by increasing Sunni hostility to the Americans.  He forsees a time coming when the United States, maybe even the Bush administration, will decide they have no choice but to call it quits:

The failure of the "political strategy" leaves the administration with no plan that promises the defeat of the insurgents. The failure of all three elements of US strategy in Iraq suggests that the administration will be forced in the end to negotiate some kind of an agreement with the insurgents to end the resistance. Indeed, the process may already have begun, even as Bush insists that the United States is winning the war. When it comes, that agreement will undoubtedly be preceded by still more such bluster and by an escalation of violence. But it will represent a true compromise, not a peace imposed by the United States. And the national debate over whether the entire endeavor was a success or a failure will begin.

In some ways, it's already begun.  Bush's claim that only a failure of Will here at home can cause the US to be defeated in Iraq is laying the groundwork for a stab-in-the-back claim against the  Democrats.  You don't have to listen to hard to the statements of senior military officers and the retired ones now acting as commentators to see that the generals are already concentrating on how to avoid blame for the Iraq disaster.

The Bush administration and its supporters aren't the only ones celebrating this month's Iraqi elections: Iran hails “first Islamist Arab state” in Iraq Iran Focus 12/23/05.  This article reports:

The editorial of Iran’s leading hard-line daily hailed the outcome of Iraq’s parliamentary elections as “the creation of the first Islamist state in the Arab world”, and warned against “American plots” to prevent the formation of the new Iraqi government by Iranian-backed Shiite groups. ...

Kayhan said the election outcome will “increase pressures, both inside and outside the U.S., on [President George W.] Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq”. “Bush will have to give in and withdraw the bulk of his forces from Iraq in the next few months”, the daily, which reflects the views of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote.

The paper listed the consequences of American withdrawal from Iraq, describing the current situation in Iraq as “the biggest crisis America has faced in recent decades”.

“The American defeat and withdrawal from Iraq will forever bury the Neoconservative current in the U.S.,…while the formation of an Islamist state in Iraq, which will be a natural ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will forma contiguous link between Iran and Palestine through Syria and Lebanon, will bring about a sea change in the geo-strategic balance in the region in favour of Iran and to America’s detriment. This new alliance with its huge size will directly influence all developments in the Arab and Muslim Middle East”.

The PBS Newshour for 12/23/05 had a segment featuring Col. Thomas Hammes, author  of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (2004) who focuses on counterterrorism warfare, and Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis,  who they identify as "a consultant who served in the Army for 30 years".  The segment was on Military to Reduce Troops in Iraq.  It provides a very good example of an Army conventional-war viewpoint (Maginnis) differing with a counterinsurgency perspective (Hammes). 

Maginnis argues that the Army should get itself out of the direct counterinsurgency operations and leave those to the Iraqis.  He wants the Army to pull back to a few secure bases and be available to "react to crises, especially on the border where unfriendly neighbors may try to interject some type of activity".  In other words, the Army could revert to standard conventional war mode almost completely and minimize the need to adapt its approach to active counterinsurgency operations.

Maginnis also notes that along with the announced withdrawals, "we're going to hold a reserve of sorts down in Kuwait in case something goes wrong," once again raising the question of just how serious the withdrawal talk by the administration really is.

Hammes presented what in the current situation is a very hawkish view of the Iraq War. But he also did so in a way that is far more candid than what we typically hear from official sources or from politicians like that famous Maverick McCain who also call for escalating the American role in Iraq.

Hammes emphasized that the US and its allies in Iraq currently don't have enough forces to wage a successful war against the current insurgency. He says that if we want to actually defeat the insurgency, we should not be looking at building up the ISF as substitutes for American troops.  Instead, for the foreseeable future they should be seen as additions to the total forces, while maintaining or increasing the current US troop levels.  Hammes said:

As [the ISF] stand up, they will reinforce us until we get real security, at that point we can draw down - if I'm going to draw down the first people who need to go are the armed contractors, they are the real source of irritation.

I mean, our forces are a source of irritation but the armed contractors from the Iraqis I worked with when I was there, they really don't like those people. They need to go.

And although Hammes worded his statement carefully, what he said at the end was that if we're serious about defeating the insurgency, it's going to require a sizable American troop presence engaged in active combat for years to come.  And that the Army is facing serious personnel shortages.

Hammes' comments are in contrast to the wishful thinking that is still far too common in discussions of the Iraq War.  It's exactly considerations like this that people like Joe Biden and Maverick McCain should have insisted on thoroughly discussed before they approved the 2002 war resolution.  (That would be the resolution that Bush violated anyway with his invasion of Iraq in 2003 without fulfilling either of the two conditions under which the resolution authorized military force.)  See my post from earlier this month, Why shouldn't we call a lost cause a lost cause? 12/09/05, for more discussion of such issues.

In another reminder of the need to read wartime news with a critical eye, Juan Cole questions the recent report of forged Iraqi ballots being smuggling in from Iran (20,000 Protest Election Fraud in Iraq /Leading Sunnis Scorned as Baathists Informed Comment blog 12/24/05):

There was a story floating around last week that a "tanker" full of "hundreds of thousands" of forged ballots coming from Iran was discovered and confiscated at the border, with the names but not the rest of the ballots filled in. This story, which has fed Sunni Arab discontent, makes no sense. First of all, you can't get hundreds of thousands of ballots on one truck, even a tanker. Paper is bulky. How would Iran have a list of plausible Iraqi voters? Iranians mostly print in nasta'liq script, not the naskh favored in the Arab world, and mostly use Persian, not Arabic. While Iranian printers could pull off such a thing, you have to ask, why? If you were going to print fake Arabic ballots for Iraq, why not just do it in Basra? It is not as if the United Iraqi Alliance, the presumed beneficiary of the alleged forgeries, does not control Iraqi printing presses in areas secure enough for it to commit fraud if it liked. I don't find the story plausible, but it appears that the US military has actually arrested Fazel "Abu Tayyib" Jasim, a provincial council member of Kut and a member of the Shiite Badr Organization (the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), implicating him in the affair. I'd like to see the truck and the ballots on television. One tanker, or even a fleet of them, couldn't affect centrally an election with millions of voters.

Cole is raising questions about the report here, not declaring that he believes it was a fake.  One consequence of the lack of security in much of Iraq is that it's hard for reporters to travel around the country and try to get details about stories like these.

Here's a war-related story that illustrates how urbanmyths get transmitted: From Heckles to Halos: In dramatic contrast to the Vietnam War era, U.S. service personnel now are being treated to strangers' spontaneous bursts of gratitude by Faye Fiore Los Angeles Times 12/24/05.

Many Americans have conflicted feelings about the Iraq war, but not aboutthe warriors. The gestures of gratitude and generosity that occur with regularity at Peggy Sue's - across Interstate 15 from Ft. Irwin, a military desert training site - have become commonplace across the United States.

A spontaneous standing ovation for a group of soldiers at Los Angeles International Airport. Three $20 bills passed to a serviceman and his family in a grocery store in Georgia. A first-class seat given up to a servicewoman on a plane out of Chicago.

These bursts of goodwill have little to do with the holiday season or with political sentiments about the war. In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago, today's soldiers are being treated as heroes throughout the year, in red states and blue, by peace activists and gung-ho supporters of the Iraq mission. The gestures are often spontaneous, affiliated with no association or cause, and credit is seldom claimed.

I've posted a number of times here about the rightwing claims that seem to never die out about how Vietnam veterans were allegedly despised, scorned, etc., during the Vietnam War.  Were there "hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago"?  It's a claim that would be hard to document - or to disprove.

But Fiore's article doesn't do much more than to pass on the urban legend from the Vietnam War era about scorned soldiers.  And she does document the positive and generous attitude that Americans show, even spontaneously, to servicemen and women today.  People in the Vietnam War days were just as capable of distinguishing their doubts and criticisms about the war from their personal appreciation of soldiers.  But that didn't stop the urban legend from blossoming, with the conscious help of political polemics from the rightwingers to that effect.

And reports like this won't stop similar claims from popping up when the US exits the Iraq War and the push to establish a stab-in-the-back myth is on full throttle.  But it's nice to see this documented like this so that the reality-based will be able to check out what really happen if they want.

But, as I've also posted about before, the present-day sentimental attitude toward soldiers - which is pretty much present in all wars - has a particular dark twist.  Or maybe unintended negative consequences would be a better phrase.  And Fiore's article gives us a glimpse of that, too:

This is not a nation at war so much as it is an army at war. Service members and their families mostly bear the weight of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions alone - family separations, career dislocation and danger. Many soldiers are serving third tours, and there is no clear end in sight.

For civilians, the chance to directly touch a military member or family can be irresistible, so much so that people break the comfortable anonymity of public places - airports, hotels, supermarkets - to walk up and pat a soldier on the back.

"For probably the first time in American history, civilians are asked to make no sacrifices in a time of war. We don't have a draft. There is no gas rationing the way there was in World War II. There is no increase in taxes; we get tax cuts instead," said Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist at Northwestern University. "These acts are small ways of showing some recognition, because we're not doing it any other way."

And sentimentalizing soldiers into abstract heroes can also make it easier for armchair warriors and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders to cheer for wars that abstract soldier heroes will have to kill and die and lose limbs in - not themselves or members of their family or their circle of friends. 

It's also worth mentioning that the Christian Right has tried to adopt the military and its soldiers as their partisans in the so-called "culture wars".  Andrew Bacevich in his book The New American Militarism (2005) devotes a separate chapter to this phenomenon.  He argues that formany of a more conservative turn of mind, the US defeat in Vietnam along with socialchanges at home presented a cultural and moral crisis.  He writes:

No group in American society felt more keenly the comprehensive nature of this crisis than did Protestant evangelicals.  It was here, among committed Christians dismayed by the direction that the country appeared to be taking, that the reaction to Vietnam as a foreign policy failure and to Vietnam as a manifestation of cultural upheaval converged with greatest effect. ...

Moreover, at least some evangelicals looked to the armed services to play a pivotal role in saving America from internal collapse. In a decadent and morally confused time, they came to celebrate the military itself as a bastion of the values required to stem the nation's slide toward perdition: respect for tradition, an appreciation for order and discipline, and a willingness to sacrifice self for the common good. In short, evangelicals looked to soldiers to model the personal qualities that citizens at large needed to rediscover if America were to reverse the tide of godlessness and social decay to which the 1960s had given impetus.

In practice, this has translated in part to imparting "religious sanction to the militarization of U.S. policy and helped imbue the resulting military activism with an aura of moral legitimacy," as Bacevich puts it.

No, this sentimentalizing of soldiers is not entirely a positive thing.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05