Draining
the Swamp
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted by Bulatlat
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"'We
didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory,' said a veteran State
Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy…' The Bush
administration's failure to plan to win the peace in Iraq was the product
of many of the same problems that plagued the administration's case for
war, including wishful thinking, bad information from Iraqi exiles who
said Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators and contempt for
dissenting opinions." (Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott, Post-war
planning non-existent, Knight Ridder Newspapers)
"'It
is only the beginning, from a military point of view,' said Janabi, who
heads the mujaheddin shura, an 18-member council of clerics, tribal sheiks
and former Baath Party members that assumed control of the city of 250,000
shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April.
'We have succeeded in drawing them into the quagmire of Fallujah, into the
alleys and small pathways. They have fallen into the trap of explosive
charges, land mines and, now, the defenders' short supply lines inside the
neighborhoods.'" (Part of insurgent Sunni Cleric Abdullah
Janabi's face-to-face interview with an Iraqi reporter working for the Washington
Post in Falluja after the city was declared taken by U.S. forces.
Anthony Shadid, Troops
Move to Quell Insurgency in Mosul, the Washington Post)
Improving
the Odds
Here
was our tactical kindness: By threatening the invasion of Falluja for
months and launching a bombing campaign against parts of the city long
before the assault was to begin, the Bush administration managed to turn
an unknown but staggering number -- up to 90% -- of that city's
250,000-300,000 residents out of their homes and into refugees living off
relatives elsewhere or in the most pitiful of makeshift camps often
without enough food, or clean drinking water, electricity, or medical aid.
The first mainstream account of such a camp finally appeared Friday in the
New York Times (Robert A. Oppel, Jr., Refugees:
Fallujans in Flight: Transit Camps Are Not Much Safer Than
Siege They Left), even though some of the residents described in it had
been relocated there weeks, if not months before.
It's
not simply a matter of journalistic lack of concern. Most non-Iraqi
journalists have little choice but to be "embedded," whether in
actual U.S. military units (allowing for movement into "no-go"
parts of Sunni Iraq but only where the military is conducting operations,
not exactly the best perspective from which to get an Iraqi view of
things) or essentially in their hotels. Hannah
Allam of Knight Ridder Newspapers, for instance, writes:
"The
hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is
tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece. Baghdad has never been
tougher for journalists. Treacherous roads and kidnapping squads restrict
travel. 'Embedding' with the military or going with Iraqi government
officials is the safest way to leave the capital. Our ability to uncover
and tell the truth about Iraq -- good and bad -- has suffered terribly…
As the close calls grew, the Iraq we knew shrank. The northern mountains
and southern marshes are off-limits now because the roads out of Baghdad
are lined with bombs and gunmen. Even a jaunt to the grocery store is a
meticulously planned affair. Do you have a radio? A flak vest? A second
car to watch for kidnappers?"
A
recent piece in the Washingtonian magazine on-line about the
return of the Washington Post's superb Anthony Shadid to Iraq after
months out of the country, described the situation of Western
correspondents in Iraq this way:
"[S]ome
television news crews have hired security firms with armed Americans to
follow their teams. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington
Post prefer former British military or armed Iraqis in vehicles that
follow their cars. 'They could lay down cover fire,' says Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, who recently returned from 18 months as the Washington
Post's bureau chief in Baghdad. 'It's a matter of improving your
odds.'"
While
journalists in Iraq narrowed their scope and improved their odds, the
American military, after a fashion, did the same. Military commanders
gathered 12,000-15,000 American troops and a couple of thousand
questionable Iraqi ones and then pulled up the artillery, the planes with
their 500-to-2000 pound bombs, the helicopters armed with Hellfire
missiles, the lethal AC-130 gunships, the tanks, the Bradley Fighting
Vehicles, the mortars, and the heavy machine guns. After months of careful
planning in the wake of last April's aborted attempt to take Falluja, they
then launched these forces against relatively small numbers of reasonably
well-prepared insurgents, a few thousand at most, scattered in a
significant-sized city.
In
recent years, the American military has paid a great deal of attention to
the matter of urban warfare -- much feared by our commanders before the
invasion of Iraq. The question then was: Would the American army be caught
in a final block-by-block urban battle for Baghdad? (Given the way things
are going, the answer may still be yes.) Cities are considered great
levelers of the playing field between otherwise asymmetric military
forces. The Iraqi rebels are armed largely with AK-47s, rocket-propelled
grenades, some mortars, and, of course, those car bombs and IEDs; but in
Falluja as elsewhere in urban Iraq, they know the terrain intimately, the
warren of city streets, and street fighting has a notorious reputation for
cutting down on sight lines and negating technological advantages. As it
happens, our military seems to have dealt with this in Fallujah largely by
bringing asymmetric amounts of firepower to bear on the slightest signs of
resistance even by lone sniper! s; in other words, as far as can be told,
they responded to the challenge of urban warfare in some areas of Falluja
by quite literally leveling the playing field.
Rubblizing
the Neighborhood
News
about the resulting devastation grows
worse by the day, though the announced body counts of dead
insurgents -- 1,200 or more -- can't be trusted. (I'm reminded of the
informal "Mere Gook Rule" of the Vietnam War when it came to
body counts: "If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC
[Vietcong].") But the main point no one will make in the American
news mainstream -- where U.S. military self-constraint tends to be
emphasized and military claims about efforts to avoid civilian casualties
are printed without significant comment -- is simple indeed: The levels of
destruction in Falluja were not a by-product of the campaign, but the
product itself. The rubblizing of whole neighborhoods was meant.
The
Bush administration may indeed have invaded Iraq on a theory, not a plan,
but the assault on Falluja itself was planned with great care over
significant periods of time. So what remains of that city in which hardly
a building evidently emerged unscathed (among those that remain standing)
must be considered the Falluja that was supposed to be. The brief shots on
the nightly news are breath-taking (or breath-stopping) in the visible
levels of destruction whenever the camera bothers to pull back for a few
seconds. You have to return to 1968 and the old Vietnamese imperial
capital of Hue to find a city flattened in anything like this manner by
the American war machine; and in that case, the Americans were responding
to Hue's surprise seizure by the other side in the midst of the nationwide
Tet Offensive.
As
I've argued in the past, it was in the Vietnamese countryside -- where we
instituted free-fire zones and bombed at phenomenal levels -- that similar
planning and results could be found. The free-fire zone that was much of
rural Vietnam, including in some cases literal "jungle," has
been replaced in Iraq by the "urban jungle." Veteran journalist
Simon Jenkins made just this point in a striking piece recently in the
British Sunday Times (A
wrecked nation, a desert, a ghost town. And this will be called victory).
"In Vietnam," he wrote, "the Americans destroyed the
village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it."
Some
of you may remember that Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong famously
compared guerillas to fish swimming in the sea of the people. During the
Vietnam era, there was much talk among American counterinsurgency
strategists about how to "drain" that sea. In Vietnam, what this
turned out to mean in practical terms was grim indeed -- the forcible
removal of Vietnamese peasants from rebel-controlled areas (and so their
lands), their resettlement in government-controlled "strategic
hamlets" (or as refugees in the South's then swelling cities) and the
creation of "free-fire zones" in large swaths of the countryside
which was devastated by a bombing campaign of almost unparalleled
fierceness (Laos was worse), involving record tons of bombs dropped per
square inch of territory. This bombing campaign in the South, unlike the
one against North Vietnam, went largely unreported in our media at the
time.
This
was, of course, a punitive strategy leveled collectively against a
population without reference to what any individual peasant might have
thought or done. It gave the counterinsurgency strategy of "draining
the sea" a bleakness beyond words. It also, not unsurprisingly,
alienated the rural population from both the South Vietnamese government
and the Americans in ways that seem all too repetitively familiar in Iraq
today, and it created an especially atrocity-conducive environment for
young Americans sent into an alien and hostile landscape, knowing nothing
of Vietnamese culture or history, unable to communicate, and generally
having no way to separate friend from foe. Does this sound the least bit
repetitive to anyone?
In
such circumstances acts of war grow ever more brutal. Just the other day,
for instance, Tom
Lasseter, a fine reporter for Knight Ridder wrote a small piece
about a Marine company in Falluja whose commander had been "shot
through the torso" by an RPG. In grief and anger here's what they
did, according to Lasseter: "In the surrounding neighborhood, troops
furious at the news of their fallen leader called in revenge, in the form
of a 2,000 pound bomb airstrike and a storm of 155 millimeter artillery
shells. A mosque lost half a minaret, its main building smoldering in fire
and smoke." This is what you tend to do, and do ever more of, under
conditions of war in an alien and increasingly hostile land.
Much
of this, though not yet on a Vietnamese scale, is already taking place,
not in Iraq's "countryside," but in its heavily populated
cities. Just as we dropped leaflets warning residents to depart the
free-fire zones of Vietnam, so we seem to have dropped endless leaflets on
Falluja. (It would be interesting to have some reporter tell us just what
these actually said.) It seems that, as in Vietnam where napalm and white
phosphorus -- unbearably gruesome weapons -- were commonly employed,
American troops have already used white phosphorus in Falluja. ("Some
artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a
screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported
being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction
consistent with white phosphorous burns.") Similarly, they seem, at
least informally, to have declared parts of Falluja the ! equivalents of
"free-fire zones."
Imagine
in any case simply pouring artillery fire into a cityscape. For example, New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who flew out to
"Camp Falluja" with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen Richard Myers
(now, there's high-class embedding for you) to "inspect the toughest
problems in Iraq firsthand" had this throwaway line in a piece about
-- what else? -- how we've arrived at the "tipping point" in
Iraq: "Most of the fighting in Falluja was over by the time we
arrived at this headquarters compound, although the tom-tom beat of
155-millimeter howitzers, still pumping rounds into the city, was
constant." Remind me one more time about that definition of
"over..."
Draining
the Swamp
Nor
is the media doing a better job of covering the air war in Iraq than they
did in South Vietnam. As I've written numerous times, while individual air
strikes may be reported daily -- all those "targeted" bombings
of "terrorist safe houses" in Falluja, for instance -- the
loosing of air power against urban Iraq has now gone on for almost a year
with increasing ferocity (as overstretched American troops, lacking any
serious support from Iraqi troops or police, have to deal with an
ever-widening rebellion). And yet no significant account of the overall
use of air power in Iraq or of the military or political calculations
behind it has yet appeared. There's a special irony here, since early in
the last century the British first tested the punitive abilities of air
power on rebellious Iraqi villages.
Iraq
may indeed not be "Vietnam," and there may be many other more
plausible historical analogies for what's happening in Iraq to draw on,
but let's face it, Vietnam is unavoidable. When we train Iraqi troops with
hopes that someday they will replace American ones, military officials and
reporters naturally speak about "'Iraqifying'
security and politics" (as once such officials and
reporters talked about "Vietnamizing" them). Similarly when our
military men on the ground express "disappointment" in the Iraqi
troops we're training and a sneaking respect for the willingness of those
they oppose to fight and die ("The
insurgency has shown 'outstanding resilience'"), Vietnam
will naturally come to mind.
The
fact is that "Vietnam = Iraq" will never go away as long as we
occupy Iraq. As a start, Vietnam (or avoiding the subject) has been
obsessively on the collective brain of the Bush administration for years
now; but it's been no less on the minds of others around the world. And
that makes good sense. Vietnam was, after all, the last great moment
before this one of American imperial overstretch and the last great
American defeat. How can people everywhere not be amazed to see so many of
its elements uncannily reappear, even after U.S. leaders have spent over
three decades trying to obliterate that era from American memory. (It was,
after all, the elder Bush at the time of Gulf War I who exulted: "By
God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!")
If
the people of the world in some sense cannot help but be focused on the
last remaining superpower and its catastrophic encounter with Iraq, then
how could they not help but think about Vietnam as well. It's not a
mistake that Saddam's
military officers studied the Vietnam experience and evidently
considered it in planting the seeds of a post-war insurgency before our
invasion even began; nor that rebellious Shiites in the Baghdad slum of
Sadr City last June were writing "Vietnam
Street" on walls along their embattled avenues ("This
is called Vietnam Street because this is where we kill Americans.");
nor that a rebellious Sunni cleric in Falluja this week spoke about
drawing the Americans into the "quagmire of Fallujah." Even
giving some leeway for translation, the reference has to be to Vietnam,
just as thoughts of the Vietnam "quagm! ire" never quite depart
from the minds of Americans, top to bottom, assigned to Iraq. (As
one American soldier in Samarra recently put it to a French
reporter: "I don't think we're going to win this place. It's going to
be like another Vietnam. We'll be here for a long time.")
"Quagmire"
(or its cognates swamp, quicksand, bog, morass, sinkhole, bottomless pit)
was, of course, the single most famous image of the Vietnam war -- we were
being drawn in step by step and couldn't extricate ourselves -- and a
strange one it was, as
I've written elsewhere. After the September 11th 2001 assaults,
it was, I believe, the first Vietnam image to come to mind in official
Washington and in a curious form that combined the quagmire environment
with the counterinsurgency idea of draining the sea. The phrase was
"draining the swamp" (assumedly so that the mosquitoes and other
evil creatures there would have no place left to propagate), and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used it within days of 9/11. Tony
Karon of Time magazine reported on September 20, 2001 that
earlier in the week Rumsfeld had said of Bin Laden and h! is followers in
Afghanistan, "[T]he campaign would combine military, political,
intelligence and diplomatic initiatives to ‘drain the swamp they live
in.'"
A
week later, Undersecretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz addressed a meeting of NATO ministers
in Brussels saying, "While we'll try to find every snake in the
swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp" -- and,
though he didn't quite point a finger at Iraq by name, his references were
clear. Everyone there had to know, even then, just two weeks after 9/11,
that in his mind the snake of snakes was Saddam, and the swamp of swamps,
Saddam's Iraq.
One,
two, three, many Fallujas?
In
Iraq, the phrase is still "drain the swamp." Falluja was
actually our second attempt to drain the Iraqi "swamp" by
obliterating it -- our first having been in the Old City of Najaf -- which
meant of course draining out of it those hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,
many of whom may have felt little sympathy for the Talibanization of
Falluja but undoubtedly now feel great anger at the brutal actions of
their occupiers. Unsurprisingly, the process of draining the swamp in Iraq
has had the effect of turning what were previously cities into the
equivalent of swamps, places fit only for those "snakes."
Parts
of Falluja were evidently quite literally turned into "swamps,"
according to Patrick
J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times who wrote of "[s]hattered
water and sewage pipes have left pools of sewage-filled water, sometimes
knee-deep." It seems that our memorial, thus far, in Iraq is a
"swamp" where a city once stood. And this is supposed to be, as
Jonathan Schell pointed out at Tomdispatch recently, the
prelude to a democratic vote. Now that the Falluja solution is in place
(actually the Najaf-solution done far more methodically), administration
planners will naturally find themselves considering "Fallujah-type
solutions" for Sunni Iraq's other rebellious cities.
Another less! on of Vietnam was that there's a kind of grim momentum to
such things.
And
here's the present black humor punch line to the Iraqi joke, as McDonnell
of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Reconstruction of Fallouja is
on hold as the fighting persists." There is now much press-talk about
the reconstruction of Falluja, the difficult task ahead, and the
challenges we face, but imagine for a minute that after nearly two years,
under far better circumstances, we haven't been able to bring 24-hour a
day electricity or clean water to much of Baghdad and then think about
just what kind of reconstruction we can possibly do in a destroyed
but not fully subjected city in the heart of the inflamed Sunni Triangle.
Subject closed.
In
the meantime, "draining the swamp" in such wars, it's worth
remembering, is hardly a unidirectional activity. As the London Times'
Jenkins comments, reaching back to Napoleon's 19th century invasion of
Russia (and an early version of the quagmire image),"The Russian
general, Kutusov, called Moscow ‘the sponge that will suck Napoleon
dry.' Sunni Iraq is taking on the same function for the Americans."
And the rebels of various factions are intent on hastening the process by
performing their own grim "draining" activities -- draining away
all support for the occupiers. The horrific murder of Margaret Hassan of
CARE was heavily reported here. Hers was the death of an innocent and the
act of brutes, but of course it only hastened the withdrawal of aid
organizations from the country (which, though certainly harmful to the
American effort, is undoubtedly devastating to the lives of many ordinary
Iraqis).
Yet
more brutal (if such things can even be measured) has been the remarkably
coordinated campaign to "drain the swamp" of anyone willing to
associate with the Americans, even laundrywomen on American bases, for
instance, no less translators, truck drivers, or policemen.
Assassinations, beheadings, the slaughter of innocents via car bombs and
roadside bombs, kidnappings, murders of every sort are met on the American
side, as on Friday, by the raiding of mosques and hospitals, by the use of
weapons that are, by their very nature, indiscriminate in the
neighborhoods of great cities. These surely are the gates of hell. It's
difficult even to remember a time when Americans could have dreamt about
"liberating" Iraqis. That might as well have been in another
world.
Our
gamblers in Washington cast the die in March 2003 and invaded Iraq based
on a "theory." Now, the game is being played out ever more
extremely and murderously by others on the ground. In the penultimate
paragraph of a recent piece -- oh, those last, seldom-read paragraphs of
news reports in our imperial press where reporters can finally slip in
their hunches and opinions, usually through the words of others -- Thomas
Ricks of the Washington Post quotes a "Special Forces
veteran, who speaks Arabic" as summing up the situation this way:
"Across Baghdad, Latifiyah, Mahmudiyah, Salman Pak, Baqubah, Balad,
Taji, Baiji, Ramadi and just about everywhere else you can name, the
people absolutely hate us. . . . The Iraqi people have not bought into
what the Americans are selling, and no amount of military activity is
going to change this fact."
Simon
Jenkins writes this:
"No
statement about Iraq is more absurd than that ‘we must stay to finish
the job.' What job? A dozen more Fallujahs? The thesis that leaving Iraq
would plunge it into anarchy and warlordism defies the facts on the
ground. Iraq south of Kurdistan is in a state of anarchy already, a land
of suicide bombings, kidnapping, hijackings and gangland mayhem. There is
no law or order, no public administration or police or proper banking. Its
streets are Wild West. The occupying force is entombed in bases it can
barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for
terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule
nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the
Sahara."
But
perhaps the simplest way to sum up where matters may rest in Iraq today I
ran across in the final lines of a recent long New York Times piece by
Edward Wong and James Glanz (Rebels
Attack in Central Iraq and the North): " [T]he violence
[in Mosul] had calmed since then, and children could be seen playing in
some parks. At one playground, Amin Muhammad, 10, and his friends raced
around with plastic guns. 'We divide ourselves into two teams,' he said,
'the mujahedeen versus the American forces.'' And in their battles, he
said, the mujahedeen always win."
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of The
American Empire Project and the author of The
End of Victory Culture among other books.
Copyright
C2004 Tom Engelhardt
Nov.
19, 2004
Bulatlat
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