Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  The Supreme Court’s confirmation of the death sentences on the ageing conspirators of 1975 may finally enable the country to move past its obsession with those horrific murders. If there was a political motive behind the Bangladesh Rifles mutiny, it was to stop that verdict from being passed, but the insubordination did not spread.

  Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League won the last election by a landslide, and the army stayed loyal to the elected government right through the crisis. The Bangladeshi Shakespeare may be running out of material.

  9.

  IRAQ I

  The Iraq War was a year and a half old when I wrote this piece, and the pattern for the next few years was already clear: a relentless guerrilla war against the American occupation, with one or more Iraqi civil wars on top. I had mostly stopped raging against the stupidity and illegality of the invasion by then, but I still couldn’t get over the sheer military incompetence of the operation.

  November 14, 2004

  WHACK-A-MOLE IN FALLUJA

  “We’re going to raise the Iraqi flag over Falluja and give it back to the Fallujans,” Major-General Richard Natonski told the First Marine Division at the start of the battle for the western Iraqi city. After six days of one-sided fighting (38 American soldiers and about 1,200 Iraqi resistance fighters killed), what’s left of the city has indeed been captured, but most Fallujans fled weeks ago, as did most of the resistance fighters who were making it their base.

  An estimated thirty to fifty thousand of the city’s three hundred thousand people did stay, however, not realizing how devastating U.S. firepower would be in the final assault. Many of them are now dead or injured, though we will never know how many because the U.S. forces refuse to count the civilians killed in their operations and forbid Iraqi official organizations to do so either.

  In the end nothing has been accomplished. As Falluja was being reduced to ruins, rebels were seizing the centre of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and a third of the U.S. blocking force around Falluja had to be sent north to deal with it. It’s like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole: bash down one mole and up pops another elsewhere. And the U.S. has just not got enough troops in Iraq to whack all the centres of the resistance at once.

  This was the main issue from the start for the U.S. Army, which was deeply opposed to the invasion plan that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced on the professional soldiers. As Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (forced into retirement by Rumsfeld) told a Senate committee in February of last year, a force “on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to control Iraq after the war.

  Rumsfeld retorted publicly that Shinseki’s figure was “far from the mark,” and his neo-conservative ally, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said: “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself …” But that’s exactly what the professional soldiers did foresee.

  Anybody could have invaded Iraq. With a little help on sealift and air support, Belgium could have done it. The Iraqi army was comprehensively smashed in the 1991 Gulf War, and due to UN sanctions it had neither repaired its losses nor acquired any new weapons in the following twelve years. Only the toadies in the upper ranks of Western intelligence services managed to persuade themselves that Iraq had functioning weapons of mass destruction; working-level analysts overwhelmingly doubted it. The problem wasn’t the war; it was the occupation.

  “All of us in the Army felt … that the defeat of the Iraqi military would be a relatively straightforward operation of fairly limited duration, but that the securing of the peace and security of a country of twenty-five million people spread out over an enormous geographic area would be a tremendous challenge that would take a lot of people, a lot of labour, to be done right,” said Thomas White, Secretary of the Army in 2001–03, in the Public Broadcasting System’s recent Frontline documentary “Rumsfeld’s War.”

  If there had been three hundred thousand U.S. troops in Iraq when the war ended, the orgy of looting, the collapse of public order and public services, and all the consequent crime and privation that alienated the Iraqi public might have been averted. The U.S. armed forces could have come up with that many soldiers for a year—and if order had been maintained in Iraq and elections held a year ago it would have been over by now. But on Rumsfeld’s insistence there were only 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

  Why did he insist on that? Because proving that he could successfully invade foreign countries on short notice with relatively small forces, and without demanding major sacrifices from the U.S. public, was key to making President Bush’s new strategic doctrine of “preemptive war” credible. It was also essential to the neo-conservatives’ dream of a lasting Pax Americana, which could easily involve an Iraq-sized war every couple of years. So the generals were told to shut up and follow orders.

  It’s too late to fix Iraq by pumping in larger numbers of U.S. troops now. As Don Rumsfeld used to say sarcastically at his press conferences back when he was sure he was right and both the media and the professional soldiers were all wrong: “All together now: ‘quagmire.’ ”

  In January 2005, the United States finally allowed a general election in Iraq. It had resisted the move for almost two years, instead imposing “interim governments” filled with its own placemen. But it was forced to hold the election by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who threatened a Shia general strike if it did not.

  Sistani’s purpose was to secure the permanent hold on power of the Shia Arab majority (60 percent of Iraq’s population), and he succeeded. But the election also increased the alienation of the Sunni Arab minority (20 percent of the population), almost all of whom boycotted the event. They had lost their historic dominance in Iraqi society because of the U.S. invasion, they were already the backbone of the armed resistance to the occupation—and, in less than a year, they would end up in a civil war with the Shias. Even before that happened, American support for the war was collapsing at home.

  June 29, 2005

  THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

  If mere rhetoric could bridge the gulf of credibility, President George W. Bush might have turned the tide with his nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening. As usual, he strove to blur the distinction between the “war on terror” (which almost all Americans still see as necessary) and the war in Iraq (which they are finally turning against), and promised viewers that all would end well if they only showed “resolve.” His pitch didn’t work: the audience has heard it too many times before.

  A majority of Americans now understand that the terrorist attacks in Iraq are a result of the U.S. invasion, not a justification for it. Many have also seen the leaked CIA report that concluded that Iraq is producing a new breed of Arab jihadis, trained in urban warfare, who are more numerous and deadlier than the generation that learned its trade in Afghanistan. And so they don’t believe the war in Iraq is making them safer, and they see no light at the end of the tunnel.

  Since Vice-President Dick Cheney boasted in early June that the insurgency in Iraq was “in its last throes,” more than eighty American soldiers and about seven hundred Iraqi civilians have been killed. On Monday, the new Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, declared that “two years will be enough and more than enough to establish security”—but the previous evening, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mused aloud on U.S. television that the insurgency in Iraq might last for “five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.”

  Even more than it hates casualties, the American public hates defeat, and it can sense panic and confusion among the president’s allies and advisers. The latest polls show a huge swing against the Iraq War in American public opinion, with around 60 percent now opposing the war and refusing to believe that the Bush administration has a clear plan for winning it. But that doesn’t mean that U.S. troops will be leaving Iraq any time soon: there is still the question of saving face.

  People forget that American pub
lic opinion turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, but that the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops was not completed until 1973. The intervening five years—resulting in two-thirds of all American casualties in the war—were devoted to the search for a way to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam without admitting defeat. At the very least, there had to be a “decent interval” after the U.S. left before the victors collected their prize.

  In the end, the humiliation was far greater than if the United States had simply walked away in 1968—the desperate helicopter evacuation on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975 is among the best-known images of American history—and the U.S. army became so demoralized that it was virtually useless as a fighting force for a decade afterwards. But we are dealing with human psychology here, and so the pattern is likely to be repeated in Iraq.

  The current administration in Washington has identified itself with the Iraq adventure so closely that it would have great difficulty just walking away—especially since Mr. Bush is loyal beyond reason to the neoconservative ideologues whose obsessions landed him in this mess. There will be mid-term elections to Congress in only sixteen months, but it stretches credulity to believe that U.S. forces could be extracted from Iraq by that time without having a negative effect on Republican chances in the vote.

  The real deadline for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is the three and a half years that the Bush presidency has left. Keeping control of the White House will be the most important consideration for American Republicans in 2008, so there must be some resolution of the Iraq problem by then. What might it be?

  There is the happy-ever-after ending, constantly promised by the Bush administration and its Iraq collaborators, where all the Iraq communities reconcile, the insurgency dies down, and a genuinely democratic government begins to deliver security and prosperity to the exhausted Iraqis. Such an outcome is not impossible in principle, but it is unlikely to occur while U.S. troops are still occupying the country and goading both Islamists and Arab nationalists into resistance.

  There is also the roof-of-the-embassy scenario, but that is equally unlikely. The Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq, drawn from a solid block of 20 percent of the population occupying the heart of the country, have the power to thwart any peace settlement that excludes them. But they cannot drive U.S. troops out, and they cannot re-establish their political domination over the Shia Arabs and the Kurds even if the Americans leave.

  So it’s going to be messy, and it’s even possible that U.S. troops won’t be out of Iraq three and a half years from now. In which case, the next U.S. president will be a Democrat.

  The long anticipated civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias got underway about eight months later, after the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine on February 22, 2006. It was a horrific civil war—in 2006 and early 2007 an average of a hundred people a day were being kidnapped and killed, usually after horrendous torture, in the Baghdad area alone—but it never really threatened Shia control of the government. Furthermore, it actually brought the American casualty rate down, because U.S. troops were no longer the primary target of the Sunni fighters. And it may not even have raised the overall Iraqi death rate that much, because the number of Iraqi dead was already very great.

  October 12, 2006

  THE HUMAN COST OF THE IRAQ WAR

  The final indignity, if you are an Iraqi who was shot for accidentally turning into the path of a U.S. military convoy (they thought you might be a terrorist), or blown apart by a car bomb or an air strike, or tortured and murdered just for being a Sunni or a Shia, is that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair will deny that your death happened. The script they are working from says (in Mr. Bush’s words last December) that only “30,000, more or less” have been killed in Iraq during and since the invasion in March 2003.

  So they have a huge incentive to discredit the report in the British medical journal The Lancet this week that an extra 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion in excess of the natural death rate: 2.5 percent of the population. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” said Mr. Bush, without giving any reason why not. “It is a fairly small sample they have taken and they have extrapolated it across the country,” said a spokesman of the British Foreign Office, as if such a methodology were invalid. But it’s not.

  The study, led by Dr. Les Roberts and a team of epidemiologists from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was based on a survey of 1,849 households, containing 12,801 people, at forty-seven different locations chosen at random in Iraq. Teams of four Iraqi doctors—two men and two women—went from house to house and asked the residents if anybody had died in their family since January 2002 (fifteen months before the invasion).

  If anybody had died, they then inquired when and how. They asked for death certificates, and in 92 percent of cases, the families produced them. Then, the Johns Hopkins team of epidemiologists tabulated the statistics and drew their conclusions.

  The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the pre-war death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002–March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the U.S. government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculated that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the pre-war and post-war death rates over a period of forty months is 655,000 deaths.

  More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths—and because the sample is large enough it is 95 percent certain that the true figure is within that range. What the Johns Hopkins team have done in Iraq is a more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

  The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology “excellent” and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: “You can’t be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark.”

  This is not a political smear job. Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect. The Lancet, founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. These numbers are real. So what do they mean?

  Two-thirds of a million Iraqis have died since the invasion who would be alive if it had not happened. Human Rights Watch has estimated that between 250,000 and 290,000 Iraqis were killed during Saddam Hussein’s twenty-year rule, so perhaps 40,000 people might have died between the invasion and now if he had stayed in power. (Though probably not anything like that many, really, because the great majority of Saddam’s killings happened during crises like the Kurdish rebellion of the late 1980s and the Shia revolt after the 1990–91 Gulf War.)

  Of the 655,000 excess deaths since March 2003, only about 50,000 can be attributed to stress, malnutrition, the collapse of medical services as doctors flee abroad, and other side effects of the occupation. All the rest are violent deaths, and 31 percent are directly due to the actions of foreign “coalition forces,” that is, the Americans and British.

  The most disturbing thing is the breakdown of the causes of death. Over half the deaths—56 percent—are due to gunshot wounds, but 13 percent are due to air strikes. No terrorists do air strikes. No Iraqi government forces do air strikes, either, because they don’t have combat aircraft. Air strikes are done by coalition forces, and air strikes in Iraq have killed over seventy-five thousand people since the invasion.

&n
bsp; Oscar Wilde once observed that “to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To lose seventy-five thousand Iraqis to air strikes looks like carelessness, too.

  10.

  THE POST-SOVIET SPACE

  Well, what else was I going to call it? If I’d said “Commonwealth of Independent States,” everybody would look blank. The CIS includes most of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Russia accounts for more than half the population and territory of this space, but the nine full members and two associate members vary widely in language, religion and ethnicity.

  The CIS has no authority over its members, and is mainly a device for maintaining the free trade and free travel among most of the former Soviet republics. (The Baltic states were never part of it, and Georgia quit after the Rose Revolution.) But the countries that occupy this “post-Soviet space” have shared a lot of history, much of it very painful—and their fates remain linked in some ways, mainly because most of them have Russian-speaking minorities and Russia will always be the neighbourhood superpower.

  Russia is an ethnic stew itself—at least 20 percent of its population is non-Russian—and it has done a spectacularly bad job of reconciling the Muslim nationalities of the north Caucasus to their membership in the Russian state. Especially in Chechnya. So Moscow borrowed a page from Israel’s book.

  September 5, 2004

  “DECONTEXTUALIZING” CHECHNYA

  What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody’s favourite neoconservative? It was he who, some years ago, came up with the notion that we must “decontextualize terrorism”: that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons why some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill the terrorists. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.