America’s war and how to get out of it

So far America has not gotten one thing right about Iraq. The New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (TWP), the two most liberal dailies in the USA, repeat over and over Bush’s “chaos” and Bush’s “mess” and Bush’s “disaster”. But it is not Bush’s anything but America’s. It is even arguable that in whatever happens in Iraq the NYT and TWP, and the American media in general, have as much of a hand as Bush.

The war itself was wrong. Iraq had no WMD and the Saddam Hussein regime had no links to Al Qaida. No serious resistance was expected and the invasion was undermanned. The American pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly disbanded the Iraqi army and fired all Baathists in the administration that Saddam Hussein left in place. Shortly after the occupation, the resistance began. Saddam Hussein and his chief military commander Gen. Izzat Ibrahim were blamed. When Saddam was captured, he denied that he had anything to do with the resistance. For a time the American command was bewildered as to whom to blame, so it tried to pin it on Al Qaida. At first it had no idea of the existence of the Mahdi army and it was perplexed by Shiite resistance to the occupation. Ironically, the one who got it right was Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, later removed under a cloud of complicity with torture, when he compared Iraq to Vietnam.

Iraq and Vietnam: a very pertinent comparison

When Bush in 2007, re-invoked the comparison he was lambasted. But there is a calculation that no one in America seems to have made. According to a Congressional Research Report titled “American War and Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics” (updated to June 29, 2007), 2,594,000 US armed services personnel served in South Vietnam and suffered 211,512 casualties (dead and wounded) for a total of 8%. Assuming that the original occupation force in Iraq was 130,000 and that from the start of the war to the present it has been replaced three times through recalls and replacements, then approximately 390,000 American armed forces personnel have been engaged in Iraq. The official casualties figure to September 2007 stands at 31,534, which is nearly 9%, a higher proportion than for Vietnam. The Vietnam comparison far from being far-fetched is very pertinent.

In July 2004, “hard-core Saddamists” were still being considered as the leaders of the insurrection. By August, the Mahdi army had been identified. The detainment of thousands of terrorism suspects all over the world has had no effect whatsoever on the war in Iraq, nor for that matter on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The Guantánamo concentration camp has yielded not one single element to further the “war on terror”. Gradually only, the occupation authorities realized the existence of an Al Qaida in Mesopotamia led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with no ties to bin Laden’s Al Qaida. The importance of Moktada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi army, was only realized tardily and his offer to enter politics and even to lay down arms was disdained. It took years for the American occupiers to conclude that the Iraqi army and police they were training had little if any effectiveness. Every American claim of military progress has proven to be mistaken, as when supposedly pacified or conquered areas reverted to insurrectionary violence. No one knows, and least of all Americans, the size of the insurgency.

Every Iraqi election has been touted as a step forward to democracy, but the result has been a Shiite government incapable of re-constituting Iraq. Bush dismissed the first Iraqi constitutional prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, because of his inability to conciliate Sunnis. His replacement, Nouri al-Maliki, has fared even worse in that respect. All American efforts to seal the Iraqi-Syrian border have failed. Sectarian violence had been going on in Iraq since not long after the start of the occupation, but American spokesmen stated flatly that it began with the blowing up of the dome of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The much-trumpeted American alliance with Sunni tribal chiefs in Anbar, got a real head-butt when the leading collaborator was killed by a bomb. After Moktada al-Sadr assumed a less aggressive stance in Baghdad, at the beginning of 2007, the Americans claimed that the “surge”, an increase of 30,000 American troops in Iraq, begun in February, was the cause of the city’s relative pacification. Recently, the American occupiers have been blaming the government of Iran for the Iraqi insurrection, on grounds so shaky that it is almost surreptitious. The one idea that should have crossed their minds, that there is such a thing as Iraqi nationalism, never has.

It was America that made the Iraq war

After 9/11, Bush declared an incoherent and un-winnable “war on terror”. His bargain-victory over Afghanistan, which has so far yielded nothing publicly known on “war on terror”, is now becoming more like Iraq-type quicksand. When Bush started his campaign to carry “war on terror” to Iraq, he did not count with the support of Congress. The American electorate in November 2002 gave him the mandate he needed to attack Iraq. According to polls, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. By November 2004, it was well-known that the occupation of Iraq was a disaster on the way to a catastrophe, yet Americans gave Bush a large majority in the presidential elections. Was it because Kerry did not offer a better Iraq plan? Was it that he was Jewish? Whatever the twists of American collective mentality, call it “public opinion”, Bush was given another mandate to continue his Iraq policy. And it wasn’t only the war-mongering American presidency that was ratified. The Republican majority in Congress too was increased. True, the elections were at the beginning of November, the month in which America has suffered the highest number of fatal casualties during the entire Iraq war, but that figure was 141 and in April 2004 there had been 140 dead. So to say that Americans were voting without knowing what lay ahead can only mean that Americans cannot think straight or that they don’t like getting out of conflicts they start without getting bashed really bad. By the elections of November 2006, a majority of Americans had second thoughts on Bush’s Iraq policy, but the fact is that a large majority of Americans had previously enthusiastically supported that policy. They made it happen.

But one should not blame Americans full stop. The “average American” has never shined as particularly knowledgeable on foreign affairs. But the media do claim that they have “insights” and that at least they call the shots as they see them. After all, that is the essence of American freedom of thought and freedom of expression. So how has the media, and the liberal dailies NYT and TWP in particular, done for or against the Iraqi situation? Every one cheered the invasion of Afghanistan. “War on terror” was accepted, in all its worthlessness, as a true standard for foreign policy. It is only recently that the NYT and the TWP have stopped using the expression regularly. Now, if these formidable data bases and powerhouses of reportorial and editorial information and guidance did not have the wits to see a political gimmick when they saw one, why should more be expected of those they poll?

The media and the most gullible people on earth

When things in Iraq started going really bad, the NYT sent a letter chiding its writers and editors for relying too much on official sources. But as far as one can tell today, it is still the American government guiding the hands of the mostly Jewish-dominated great media outlets. On the Israel/Palestine contention there is no objectivity at all, as ex-president Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, which the media of course shredded and have mostly cast to oblivion. A book which could have generated constructive debate was treated as just another anti-Semitic whimsy not worthy of more than a passing glance. Carter was wrong about the reporting on Palestine, which he considers objective but isn’t. On media distortion, Noam Chomsky is a much better critic than he is. Americans are bombarded since birth to the world view that the USA is always right and that what goes against that delusion is wrong. And those that do the bombarding are Hollywood, television and the media in general, which of course affects the parents of children and what children learn in school. Those opinion polls to which the media are addicted could as well be done inside the offices of TV news programs or of the editorial departments in the NYT or TWP than in the streets or over phones.

Of course, Americans are not the only gullible people on earth, but they are probably the most gullible, because they have been nurtured on the belief in America’s self-importance and on the ceaseless repetition of the clichés that the media broadcast without respite or a blink of self-doubt. Hence, Israel is good and Arabs are bad. Iranians are the worst of the lot. Probably a majority of Americans do not know that Iranians are not Arabs. American fundamentalists do not apply that category to themselves because it is only fit for evil, scheming Arabs, and where could Americans go for the idea that they could possibly be mistaken? Not to the media for sure, which do not actually say things in so many words but do say things in an underhanded and tireless manner. So basically then Iraq is Bush’s war to the extent that the media made it also America’s war and Americans swallowed the lie because they had no place to go for a balanced view of the facts.

Trying to make the war go away

Bush’s or the media’s or America’s war is there. No one can make it go away, but the problem is how to get out of it now. So let’s see how this process is going. Though almost unbelievable, it is probably likely that, despite the polls and Bush’s supposed lack of support, when push comes to shove Americans will back the war. Maybe the NYT or the TWP are not letting by opportunities to deride or contradict Bush—demonization is not an option, as Chavez learned when he failed to get his country a seat in the Security Council after literally calling Bush a devil—but are they really trying to make Americans see the starkness, or for that matter, seeing it themselves? During the run-up to the November 2004 presidential election, even though Iraq was getting worse by the day, most of the news was about the candidates. So now too Iraq is not quite as important as what Democratic candidates—among whom these dailies are probably discounting that the future president will come—are saying about getting the USA out of the war. But have Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, just to get into the hustle of the game, presented new ideas? Every one knows that Obama is not going to be the next president of America, because he is a black man and it would take an amazingly miraculous leap for Americans to elect him. But, as I say, let’s not spoil the fun.

Neither Hilary nor Obama have said anything basically different from what Bush is saying: the pull out or “drawdown” or whatever has to be gradual, but it has to be done. Even Bush under a real griddling would have to admit this. So what’s the difference? The difference is that the media keep saying that there is a difference where there is none. When the election results of November 2006 were in, the media said that change was on its way, but they should have made the public notice that many of the Democratic candidates who had won were actually quite conservative, not likely to jump at bold solutions to anything. There is much talk of political “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government to fulfill, but as we shall argue in another article, these are self-contradictory, unachievable, or meaningless. The only realistic exit strategy for America out of Iraq is to internationalize the crisis. The NYT said so in a September 14, 2007, editorial: “If Mr. Bush were serious about ending the war, rather than threatening Iran and Syria, he would make a serious effort to persuade them that they too have a lot to lose from a disintegrating Iraq.” This is sort of crab-like straight talk. Unfortunately, it is only an editorial. Few people read editorials. This point of view is hardly widespread. And the aim of the editorial is deflected by reporting, which the NYT does habitually, that Iran is a menace to world peace, an untrustworthy country that wants atomic bombs to destroy the world, a land where ideas are banned, etc. As to Syria, I doubt that you will find one NYT editorial that has ever said anything good about that country. Needless to say, the reporting about Syria is as crooked as that on Iran with the added opprobrium that Syria is next to Israel and Israel’s will prevails over any other priority in the media and in politics and Syria is not going to play an important part in any negotiation over a Middle Eastern settlement that is not to Israel’s liking. Hilary Clinton would be committing political suicide if she had Carter’s clarity on Israel.

Obama recently said that he would start reducing troop levels in Iraq immediately, for which he was criticized by all the “experts” the media consulted. That sounds daring but it is just a ploy because to do that and not leave worse behind he will need, as the NYT editorial said, “to draw Iraq’s neighbors into a solution”, and whenever the issue of “bad” states comes up Obama trips over himself in condemning them. You see, he has too. He is no different from the rest of Americans in the conditioning that he has received from the media. He cannot opine at variance with the media-determined core beliefs of Americans. He has to be anti-Iran and anti-Syria.

This is the two-layered situation. American freedom of thought and freedom of expression are compromised by conformism. If these freedoms are not employed, it’s as good as if they didn’t exist. The media are the source of conformism. The American government makes people conform through the media. The mostly Jewish-controlled media dutifully fulfill their role in the system. They have no quarrel with being part of the ruling clique. The objective is that Americans think alike, which they do very nicely. An editorial like the one we cited from the NYT is plainly hypocritical if the reporting of the news is biased.

The other layer is Iraq. Bush sold America on the war on Iraq with the wholehearted support of the media, no matter that editorially the NYT and TWP were against. Editorials are so much excrescence, no better than an Easter bonnet or an Ascot extravagance. If Israel puts down its foot these exercises in editorial derring-do will cease. America has to get out of Iraq. It already has made Saddam Hussein the better historical option many times over, which is something Americans will never understand because they have no sense of history and their arrogance does not allow them to contemplate bitter facts. Democrats are not offering solutions. Maybe Hilary Clinton is dissembling to do something dramatic once she is in the White House (just assuming). But how is she going to placate her Jewish political base if she brings in Iran and Syria (and Turkey) to season the Iraqi cauldron? Besides, there is no assurance that a really anti-Bush candidate will not be elected. American conformism is also passionately conservative and plutocratic and arrogant. Don’t discard a Republican winner and a Vietnam exit from Iraq. But there cannot be a Vietnam exit because there is no “alternative Iraq” to take over. Maybe Americans will have to do a lot of bile-swallowing in the near future. Arrogance will be the real obstacle to beat down.