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COMMENTARY
An Iraqi 'quackmire' in the
making
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - "We know where they are," Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld assured television interviewers
about the location of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
March 30, two weeks into the war in Iraq. "They are in
the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."
"I really
do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice
President Dick Cheney declared on television just as US
troops massed along the border between Kuwait and Iraq
on the eve of the war.
"Wildly off the mark,"
declared Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, when asked
by senators just before the war whether then army chief
of staff Eric Shinseki's estimate that more than 200,000
troops would be needed as an occupation force after
hostilities was reasonable.
"I believe it is
definitely more likely than not that some degree of
common knowledge between [al-Qaeda and Iraq] was
involved [in the September 11, 2001, attacks]", former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief and member of
Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board James Woolsey testified
before a federal court just before the war.
Now,
more than two months after US troops established control
over the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, not only have
no WMD been discovered, but evidence of ties between
Iraq and al-Qaeda, let alone Iraqi knowledge or
complicity in the September 11 attacks, is simply
non-existent.
If that were not embarrassing
enough, Washington still has about 150,000 troops in
Iraq - twice the number projected before the war - and
is desperately seeking as many as 30,000 more troops
from its "coalition" partners, all expenses to be paid
by the US taxpayer. That such a number may not be nearly
enough was underscored this weekend when unknown persons
in a remote desert area blew up a key oil pipeline that
supplies Baghdad power plants.
The "Q" word -
for quagmire - has also made it back into
mainstream-media discourse as the impression grows that
US troops may be facing a guerrilla war, rather than
isolated "pockets or resistance" of die-hard Ba'athists.
Some officers on the ground have complained
before television cameras that they are far too thinly
spread to impose order over such a large country,
particularly when it appears that, at least in some
parts at least, the natives do not particularly
appreciate the presence of US troops, and a well-armed
and tenacious few are trying to kill them. What's more,
they are succeeding, and at an accelerating rate; in the
past couple of weeks - that is, six weeks after Bush
declared the war won, they have killed an average of
about one US soldier every two days and wounded several
more.
"Facing daily assaults from a well-armed
resistance, US troops in volatile central Iraq say they
are growing frustrated and disillusioned with their role
as postwar peacekeepers," was the way the Washington
Post reported it. "The war is supposed to be over, but
every day we hear of another soldier getting killed," a
US sergeant told the Post. "Saddam [Hussein] isn't in
power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we
still here"?
"The army is getting bogged down in
a morale-numbing fourth generation war in Iraq that is
now taking on some appearances of the Palestinian
intifada," noted one recent comment on an all-military
website, Defense and the National Interest, while
another on the same site predicted that the Pentagon's
plans for rotating new units into occupation duty could
well "melt down" the army's personnel system within the
year.
And then there was this little-noticed
headline that appeared in USA Today based on a Senate
hearing in which Wolfowitz had testified, "US troops may
be in Iraq for 10 Years: defense officials reportedly
seek up to $54 billion a year." Wolfowitz, who before
the war had ridiculed Shinseki's estimates, now agreed
that a US withdrawal was not in prospect.
Indeed, he suggested, permanent bases may have
to be built to house them, a notion that cannot be
expected to go down well, even with US-backed exiles,
like Ahmed Chalabi, who spent much of the past two weeks
back in the US complaining vehemently about how the US
occupation authorities are, essentially, blowing it.
Meanwhile, a prestigious joint task force of the
Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society
released a report suggesting that if the United States
did not sharply increase its commitment to peacekeeping
and reconstruction in Afghanistan, the country could
quickly collapse back into the chaos that resulted in
the rise of the Taliban.
The question that comes
to mind is, what is going on? Until now, most foreign
policy analysts in the US - if not the regional
specialists - have been inclined to give Washington's
hawks the benefit of the doubt about whether their basic
assumptions about Iraq corresponded to any tangible
reality on the ground. After all, no one has ever
accused Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz or Woolsey of being
stupid.
So how could they have gotten the nation
into this position? One probability is that they, like
many policymakers, tend to believe the own propaganda
which they and their supporters have been spouting since
even before the dust of the World Trade Center towers
settled over Lower Manhattan. The degree to which they
themselves helped twist the intelligence about Iraq has
become increasingly clear over the past few weeks as
angry intelligence professionals have taken their
complaints to the press.
Hints of a second, not
unrelated reason may be found in recent, plain-speaking
comments on the enormous budget deficits the
administration is running up, even as it continues its
drive to cut taxes. "The lunatics are now in charge of
the asylum," declared the Financial Times last month in
an editorial seconded by New York Times columnist and
Harvard economist Paul Krugman about George W Bush's
fiscal policy. They argued that administration
ideologues were creating, apparently deliberately, a
fiscal crisis in order to achieve their goal of doing
away with a social and economic system that ensured
domestic tranquility since the New Deal.
"The
people now running America aren't conservatives: they're
radicals," wrote Krugman. "How can this be happening?
Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They
don't realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and
they don't read what the ideologues write."
The
same may now be said about the Iraq hawks. Despite the
radical trajectory on which they have taken US foreign
policy since September 11, the complacency, especially
among Democrats, has been truly remarkable, and much of
the "opposition" still isn't reading, or at least
absorbing, what the foreign policy ideologues behind
Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz write or say, for that
matter.
"This fourth World War, I think, will
last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II
did for us," Woolsey said in the third week of the war,
as Rumsfeld was locating the WMD between Baghdad and
Tikrit. "As we move toward a new Middle East over the
years, and, I think, over the decades to come ... we
will make a lot of people very nervous."
They're
succeeding.
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