American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  The history that’s really been forgotten, though, is even more recent. The fact is, the Iraqis don’t have an air force because Washington didn’t want them to. Much attention has been paid to the Bush administration’s lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq, but relatively little to what it did plan. In May 2003, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi Army. Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future, border-patrolling Iraqi military-lite of perhaps forty thousand men with minimal armaments and no air force to speak of. In the Middle East, this had only one meaning: from a series of mega-bases already on Pentagon drawing boards as American troops crossed the Kuwaiti border in 2003, the U.S. Army and Air Force would fill in as the real Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of a fierce Sunni insurgency, the army part of that plan was soon jettisoned. But “standing up” the Iraqi military—“As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” was long President Bush’s mantra—has meant just that: two feet on the ground.

  Until relatively recently, the Iraqis were essentially not permitted to take to the skies. Now, the lack of that air force will surely come to the fore as an excuse for why any U.S. “withdrawal” will have to have caveats and qualifications—and why, if ours proves to be a non-withdrawal withdrawal, it will be Iraq’s fault.

  A history of devastation in Iraq: Until the United States arrived in Baghdad, things seemed bad enough. There was Saddam Hussein, the megalomanic dictator of the endless Disneyesque palaces, with his secret prisons, torture chambers, and helicopter gunships. There were the international sanctions strangling the country. There were the mass graves in the north and the south. There was an oil industry held together by duct tape and ingenuity. It was a gruesome enough mess.

  That was before the invasion to “liberate” the country. Since then, Saddam Hussein’s killing fields have been dwarfed by a fierce set of destructive U.S. military operations, as well as insurgencies-cum-civil-wars-cum-terrorist-acts: major cities have been largely or partially destroyed, or ethnically cleansed; millions of Iraqis have been forced from their homes, becoming internal refugees or going into exile; untold numbers of Iraqis have been imprisoned, assassinated, tortured, or abused; and the country’s cultural heritage has been ransacked. Basic services—electricity, water, food—were terribly impaired and the economy was simply wrecked. Health services were crippled. Oil production, upon which Iraq now depends for up to 90 percent of its government funds, has only relatively recently barely surpassed the worst levels of the pre-invasion era.

  Iraq, in other words, has been devastated. The U.S. invasion and the occupation that followed acted like whirlwinds of destruction, unraveling a land already bursting with problems and potential animosities.

  In what once was the breadbasket of civilization, Iraqi agriculture, ignored by the occupiers, is withering and the country is desertifying at a frightening pace under the pressure of a several-year-old drought. Rivers are drying up, wells are disappearing, and desperate Iraqi farmers are deserting the land for the city (where unemployment rates remain high). Everywhere dust gathers, awaiting the winds that create the monstrous dust storms that carry the precious soil of Iraq into the fragile lungs of urban Iraqis. “Now,” writes Liz Sly of the Los Angeles Times, “the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of [Iraq’s] land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5 percent a year.” Expecting the worst harvest in a decade and with the wheat crop at 40 percent of normal, the government has been forced to buy enormous amounts of grain abroad at a time when oil prices, dropping precipitously from 2008 highs, left it with far less money available. However overused the image may be, the Bush administration created the perfect storm in Iraq, a “mission accomplished” version of hell on earth. And it’s because Iraq is in such desperate shape that, of course, we, as the protectors of its fragile “stability,” can’t leave.

  A history of justifications: When we invaded Iraq, serial justifications were offered. There was the grim dictator who threatened the world. There were his killing fields. (Never again!) There was 9/11 and his “support for terrorism.” (Top Bush administration officials long claimed a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, despite convincing evidence to the contrary.) There was liberation for the Shiites and the ending of what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called “criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.” There was the reestablishment of an American version of order in the region. There were those heavily emphasized, if nonexistent, weapons of mass destruction the dictator supposedly had squirreled away, as well as his (also nonexistent) program to get his hands on a nuclear weapon.

  Later, when things began to take a turn for the worse and another reason was needed, there was the propagation of democracy (a great guiding principle to which the Bush administration arrived rather late in Iraq and only under pressure from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani). Even later, when things were going far worse, there was the idea that it was far better to fight the terrorists over there than here. And, as the president liked to confide to foreign leaders, there was God himself commanding him to strike Saddam Hussein and so thwart Gog and Magog.

  Among the cognoscenti, of course, there were other expectations and justifications, caught best perhaps in the neoconservative quip of 2003, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” After all, the neocons in and around the Bush administration truly did believe that a Middle Eastern Pax Americana was within their shock-and-awe grasp. As for oil—or what President Bush referred to, on the rare occasions when he mentioned it, as Iraq’s “patrimony”—mum was the word, even though that country had the world’s third-largest proven petroleum reserves and sat strategically at the heart of the energy heartlands of the planet.

  Now, with almost 100,000 troops still there, not to speak of the scads of rent-a-guns and private contractors, with that overstuffed, overstaffed embassy the size of the Vatican, with a series of major military bases still well occupied, with significant numbers of Iraqis and small numbers of Americans dying each month, with millions of Iraqis still internal or external refugees, with the land devastated and basic services hardly restored, with ethnic tensions still running high and a government quietly allied to Iran in place in Baghdad backed by a 250,000-man military, with the nature of an American withdrawal still a matter of definition, no one even bothers to offer the slightest justification for being in Iraq. After all, why would explanations be necessary when we’re getting ready to leave?

  If you go hunting for an official explanation today, you’ll be disappointed. Why are we in Iraq? Because we’re there. Because the Iraqis need us. Because something terrible would happen if we left precipitously. So we still occupy Iraq and no one even asks why.

  A history of withdrawal from Iraq: There is none.

  How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington

  Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass. So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone, two-day trip to Pakistan in January 2010. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home, having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated…and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”

  In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23 piece on the trip:Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis
that he regretted their country’s “trust deficit” with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

  His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching “Seven Days in May,” the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.

  Three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban missile crisis. All three concerned nuclear politics, “oops” moments, and Washington. The first, and best remembered, was Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s classic vision of the end of the world, American-style. (“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed, tops,” General “Buck” Turgidson notes in the film.) The second was Fail-Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing a U.S. president to save the world by nuking New York City. It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight. (It’s worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11.) The third was the secretary of defense’s top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: “You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!” In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d’état against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union. The plot is uncovered and defused by a marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas. (“I’m suggesting, Mr. President,” says Colonel Martin “Jiggs” Casey, “there’s a military plot to take over the government. This may occur sometime this coming Sunday.”)

  These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time. Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two half-forgotten. All three would make a perfect film festival for a secretary of defense with fourteen hours to spare. Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a “homeland” where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you. After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outré exactly because, in the Washington of today, such a thought is ludicrous. After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first-century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.

  Think of the week after the secretary of defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.

  After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 would likely cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out about the president’s plans to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the 2010 funds already approved by Congress for that task.

  Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than one trillion congressionally approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to these budget figures. And bear in mind that these costs don’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn-out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher.

  Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.

  To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs goes through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over ten years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that this figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.”

  Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police. Forget, for a moment, all obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it’s ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe/Blackwater or other mercenary private contracting companies. Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.

  Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the secretary of defense’s movie tastes: Do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix. Unlike Star Trek, the James Bond films, Bewitched , and other sixties “classics,” Seven Days isn’t likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there’s little left to save—and every week is the Pentagon’s week in Washington.

  SEVEN

  Living in the Shadow of War

  G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero

  In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy soldiers—a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the West, a bag or two of tiny olive-green plastic marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Alternately, I grabbed my toy six-guns, or simply picked up a suitable stick in the park, and with friends replayed scenes from the movies of World War II, my father’s war. It was second nature to do so. No instruction was necessary. After all, a script involving a heady version of American triumphalism was already firmly in place, as it had been long before my grandfather made it to this land in steerage in the 1890s.

  My sunny fantasies of war play were intimately connected to the wars Americans had fought by an elaborate mythology of American goodness and ultimate victory. If my father tended to be silent about the war he had taken part in, it made no difference. I already knew what he had done. I had seen it at the movies, in comic books, and sooner or later in shows like Victory at Sea on that new entertainment medium, television.

  And when, in the 1960s, countless demonstrators from my generation went into opposition to a brutal American war in Vietnam, they did so still garbed in cast-off “Good War” paraphernalia—secondhand army jackets and bombardier coats—or they formed themselves into “tribes” and turned goodness and victory over to the former enemies in their childhood war stories. They transformed the “V for Victory” into a peace sign and made themselves in
to beings recognizable from thousands of Westerns. They wore the Pancho Villa mustache, sombrero, and serape, or the Native American headband and moccasins. They painted their faces and grew long hair in the manner of the formerly “savage” foe, and smoked the peace (now, hash) pipe.

  American mytho-history, even when turned upside down, was deeply embedded in their lives. How could they have known that they would be its undertakers, that their six-shooters would become eBayable relics?

  You can bet on one thing today: in those streets, fields, parks, or rooms, children in significant numbers are not playing G.I. versus Sunni insurgent, or special ops soldier versus Taliban fighter; and if those kids are wielding toy guns, they’re not replicas from the current arsenal, but flashingly neon weaponry from some fantasy future.

  As it happens, G.I. Joe—then dubbed a “real American hero”—proved to be my introduction to this new world of child’s war play. I had, of course, grown up years too early for the original G.I. Joe (b. 1964), but one spring in the mid-1980s, during his second heyday, I paid a journalistic visit to the Toy Fair, a yearly industry bash for toy-store buyers held in New York City. Hasbro, which produced the popular G.I. Joe action figures, was one of the Big Two in the toy business. Mattel, the maker of Joe’s original inspiration and big sister, Barbie, was the other. Hasbro had its own building and, on arriving, I soon found myself being led by a company minder through a labyrinthine exhibit hall in the deeply gender-segregated world of toys. Featured were blond models dressed in white holding baby dolls and fashion dolls of every imaginable sort, set against an environment done up in nothing but pink and robin’s egg blue.