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Tomgram: Truths of a Lost War
[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is part 2 of a dispatch on the Bush administration and Iraq. Part 1 was Losing the Home Front. One of the sections below is devoted to Riverbend, the pseudonymous "girl blogger" of Baghdad. For it, I read the collection of her blog entries that the Feminist Press at CUNY published in 2005, Baghdad Burning, Girl Blog from Iraq, and then the newest volume, Baghdad Burning II, More Girl Blog from Iraq, just now being published. These represent an unparalleled record of the American war on, and occupation of, Iraq (and Riverbend writes like an angel). The two volumes are simply the best contemporary account we are likely to have any time soon of the hell into which we've plunged that country. I can't recommend t! hem too highly. Tom]
Fiasco Then, Fiasco Now
Why Baghdad Will Keep BurningBy Tom Engelhardt
Are we now officially out of our minds? On Tuesday, General George W. Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq, gave a joint press conference in Baghdad that was all for home consumption. By home, I mean Washington DC. I mean Indiana. I mean Texas. Baghdad's Green Zone was essentially a stage set for a political defense of the Bush presidency.
If the news hadn't been quite so grim, this tandem's act might have qualified as an Abbott and Costello comedy routine, including the moment when the lights went out -- while "gunfire and bomb blasts echoed around the city" -- thanks to our inability to resuscitate Iraqi electricity production. In fact, the New York Times just reported that, on some projects, more than 50% of U.S. reconstruction dollars are being spent on "overhead" as, for months at a time, whole reconstruction teams sit idly with the meter going waiting to begin work.
Some Democratic critics had been calling on the Bush administration for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Well, a timetable they got (though Ambassador Khalilzad preferred to call it a "timeline"). The catch was: The hopeless, essentially powerless Iraqi "government" inside Baghdad's Green Zone was to deliver that timeline as a pre-election present to a disgruntled American public. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself would produce it with genuine "benchmarks" for upping oil production and splitting oil revenues, for disarming and dismantling Shiite militias and police death squads, and for negotiating with Sunni rebels.
Not only that, Maliki would have his "plan" in place (perhaps for the Iraqis to withdraw from their own country) "before the end of the year" -- and this was just one of a welter of mini-schedules offered by the ambassador and general that would shove Iraqi matters at least beyond November 7th, if not into the relatively distant future. The ambassador, for instance, assured Americans that all those benchmarks would be met and "significant progress" achieved "in the course of the next twelve months" -- the slight catch being: "assuming that the Iraqi leaders deliver on the commitments that they have made."
General Casey chimed in with his own timeline: "And it's going to take another 12 to 18 months or so until I believe the Iraqi security forces are completely capable of taking over responsibility for their own security." ("Still probably with some level of support from us.") Probably? These are the same forces some of whose battalions "demobilized" rather than accept transfer assignments to work with Americans in the dangerous streets of distant Baghdad. These are battalions that can have 30-50% of their troops either on leave, AWOL, or perhaps as ghost soldiers for whom commanders receive pay?
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Tomgram: Playing the Numbers Game with Death in Iraq
[Note for Tomdispatch readers: In my recent post, George Bush's War of the Words, while highlighting the virtues of the new Tomdispatch book Mission Unaccomplished, Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters, I wrote about what the Bush administration had done to our language. Now, in this first of a two-parter on our Iraq disaster, I consider how imagery became part of the President's war to pacify the home front. Let me take this opportunity again to urge all readers who, in the winter evenings to come, would like a little splendid company and freewheeling conversation with eleven of our more provocative thinkers to pick up a copy of the new book and, if you're in the mood to give this site a special vote of confidence, perhaps an extra copy or two as prospective presents for the holiday season. Tom! ]
Losing the Home Front (Part 1)
The Bush Administration's War of the ImagesBy Tom Engelhardt
Recently, speaking of his war in Iraq, George Bush put the Vietnam analogy back in the public eye. He was asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos if New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was on the mark in suggesting that what "we might be seeing now is the Iraqi equivalent of the Tet Offensive."
The President's reply: "Mm-hmm. He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence. And we're heading into an election."
The nationwide Tet Offensive has, of course, long been seen as the turning point in the Vietnam War, the moment when the American political establishment lost both the media and the American public in its Vietnam venture. That's what the President is certainly alluding to, though the present chaos in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq hardly qualifies as a "Tet Offensive" and, as the polls indicate, the American public had already been lost to his war.
Nonetheless, for Bush, who (like the rest of his administration) had previously avoided Vietnam-analogy admissions like the plague, it was certainly a sign that he feared the loss of the war he had fought most fiercely since September 12, 2001 -- the war to pacify the American public and the media. No administration in memory has devoted more time to thinking out and polishing its language, its signature phrases and images, in the pursuit of that war; so, for instance, the announcement that the President is now "cutting and running" from his own signature phrase "stay the course" -- one-half of the linguistic duo (the other being, of course, "cut and run") on which he and Karl Rove had clearly planned drive the Democrats into retreat in the midterm election period -- is no small matter. (White House ! Press Spokesman Tony Snow: "[Stay the course] left the wrong impression about what was going on. And it allowed critics to say, well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is, when, in fact, it's just the opposite.")
If this is, in any sense, a turning-point moment, then it's important to take another look at aspects of the war on the home front that this administration has fought so relentlessly these last years and is now losing -- the first being its image wars in regard to Iraq and the second, the numbers games it's played when it came to deaths in that country.
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Tomgram: Schwartz, 9 Paradoxes of a Lost War
"The first, the Sunni extremists, al Qaeda, and the Iraqis that are supporting them. Second, the Shi'a extremists, the death squads and the more militant militias. In my view, those represent the greatest current threats in Iraq. The third group is the resistance, the Sunni insurgency that sees themselves as an honorable resistance against foreign occupation in Iraq."
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben on Our Planetary Fate
The pronghorn antelope, "the prairie ghost," is capable of running at up to sixty miles an hour, twice as fast as any predator in its environment. That extra mileage might seem odd until you realize that, before the last great mammalian megafaunal die-out in North America, some 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, there were evidently creatures (perhaps lions or wolves) which could power along at something close to such speeds. So all those thousands of years, encompassing significant parts of our prehistory and the totality of recorded history from the first days of Ur to the latest disasters in Iraq, and the pronghorn still outraces its ghostly companion. So much time, in human terms, and it still hasn't "registered" its loss; so much time and that niche in our environment remains empty.
It's an evolutionary blink of the eye for the antelope (and its ghost partner). It's not even an evolutionary blink for planet Earth. For us, it's everything. If we wreck our planet, we can't wait another 13,000-16,000 years, no less the millions of years normally involved, to forge a new, well-stocked Earth. For us, when it comes to our environment now is forever.
So, it continually surprises me that this supposedly can-do country, transformed recently into a "homeland" focused on "security," can't lift a finger to do a thing about the environmental degradation going on all around us. The title of Bob Woodward's new bestseller, State of Denial, might have been far better applied to the Bush administration's reaction to our melting planet, or to their complete lack of interest in getting us ready for our "wild" weather ride to come. The odd thing is that, even for those not ready to take global warming or climate change (or whatever name you care to give it) for the staggering danger it is, betting on preparations for it should still be a no-brainer, if not the only sure-fire wager in town. The worst that happens, after all, is that you've put real money into energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources -- and so into future ! energy independence, the very thing this energy-drunk country obviously needs and, if we are to believe the polls, most American want. Imagine where we'd be now, if we hadn't laughed Jimmy Carter out of the room in 1979 when he suggested investing in a big way in alternative energy R&D. Instead, as Bill McKibben notes below, we've largely ceded the development of wind power -- in fact, the lead in all sorts of alternate energy paths -- to other countries. Haven't we learned anything from the disastrous take-the-money-and-run SUV strategies of GM and Ford in recent years?
Bill McKibben has made something of a career of being ahead of the learning curve in this country on a variety of issues. He's energetic and he's a resource for us all. Thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books, you can check out his latest state-of-the-planet update below. (It will appear in the November 16th issue of the magazine.) Tom
How Close to Catastrophe?
By Bill McKibben[This piece, which appears in the November 16, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
James Lovelock is among the planet's most interesting and productive scientists. His invention of an electron capture device that was able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals enabled other scientists both to understand the dangers of DDT to the eggshells of birds and to figure out the ways in which chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer. He's best known, though, not for a gadget but for a metaphor: the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism (for which he used the name of the Greek earth goddess Gaia) struggling to keep itself stable.
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Tomgram: Iraq at the Gates of Hell
George Bush's Iraq in 21 Questions
By Tom EngelhardtRecently, in one of many speeches melding his Global War on Terror and his war in Iraq, George W. Bush said, "Victory in Iraq will be difficult and it will require more sacrifice. The fighting there can be as fierce as it was at Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal. And victory is as important as it was in those earlier battles. Victory in Iraq will result in a democracy that is a friend of America and an ally in the war on terror. Victory in Iraq will be a crushing defeat for our enemies, who have staked so much on the battle there. Victory in Iraq will honor the sacrifice of the brave Americans who have given their lives. And victory in Iraq would be a powerful triumph in the ideological struggle of the 21st century."
Over three years after the 2003 invasion, it's not unreasonable to speak of George Bush's Iraq. The President himself likes to refer to that country as the "central front [or theater] in our fight against terrorism" and a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), part of which was recently leaked to the press and part then released by the President, confirms that Iraq is now indeed just that -- a literal motor for the creation of terrorism. As the document puts it, "The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause célèbre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." A study by a British Ministry of Defense think tank seconds this point, describing Iraq as "a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world"
So what exactly does "victory" in George Bush's Iraq look like 1,288 days after the invasion of that country began with a "shock-and-awe" attack on downtown Baghdad? A surprising amount of information related to this has appeared in the press in recent weeks, but in purely scattershot form. Here, it's all brought together in 21 questions (and answers) that add up to a grim but realistic snapshot of Bush's Iraq. The attempt to reclaim the capital, dipped in a sea of blood in recent months -- or the "battle of Baghdad," as the administration likes to term it -- is now the center of administration military strategy and operations. So let's start with this question:
How many freelance militias are there in Baghdad?
The answer is "23" according to a "senior [U.S.] military official" in Baghdad -- so write Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Hosham Hussein in the New York Times; but, according to National Public Radio, the answer is "at least 23." Antonio Castaneda of the Associated Press says that there are 23 "known" militias. However you figure it, that's a staggering number of militias, mainly Shiite but some Sunni, for one large city.
How many civilians are dying in the Iraqi capital, due to those militias, numerous (often government-linked death squads), the Sunni insurgency, and al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia-style terrorism?
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