American Way of War (24 page)

Consider that a little history of expertise about our recent wars. There’s a corollary. If you’re not anointed an expert, you’re never likely to be one. Among those automatically disqualified for expertise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of the catastrophe that ensued before it happened. Disqualified above all were any of those antiwar types who actually took to the streets of cities across the United States by the hundreds of thousands before the invasion to raise homemade placards to its un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their very stance indicated a bias that evidently disqualified them on the spot.

Someone—I can’t claim to remember who—once made the point that within any administration you could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a dove and right. When it comes to TV war commentators, that seems to hold true as well.

It would, of course, be easy enough to imagine the antiwar equivalent of those generals-as-analysts. In our world of expertise, though, it’s unthinkable.

A history of the Iraqi Air Force
: For all the talk of “taking the training wheels off,” here is an interesting fact: Iraqis will not be able to defend their own airspace for the foreseeable future. The Iraqi Air Force will remain the U.S. Air Force for some time to come, which undoubtedly means the United States will be running the giant airbase it built at Balad, as well. The Iraqis have said they want American F-16s. Unfortunately, according to
New York Times
reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, General Odierno, the top American commander in that country, has claimed that “it would be impossible to build and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the Iraqis were able to afford them.” And even in that unlikely
event, Iraq has no trained pilots to fly them. In other words, years of work still remain on the horizon for the U.S.A.F. in Iraq.

Fortunately,
Aviation Week
reported that the Iraqis have a plan to overcome their problem. It’s a “three-phase, 11-year improvement plan” that will move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few dozen F-16s by “the middle of the next decade” (in case you were wondering just how long the U.S.A.F. is likely to be filling in).

Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We want to leave Iraq. Maybe not as quickly as Colonel Reese would like, but really we do. President Obama has made that clear. Unfortunately, the Iraqis just won’t let us. Imagine! They weren’t even thinking about an air force until recently—and what would a country in the Middle East be if, as Bumiller points out, it had “no way to intercept another jet that invades the country’s airspace.” Just who might invade Iraqi airspace remains a subject for speculation.

Since it’s so easy to obliterate the past, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of the history of the Iraqi Air Force. Now that Iraq essentially has no air force, who remembers that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq once had a very large and active one? Baghdad had 950 planes in the 1980s. In 1990, according to the website
GlobalSecurity.org
, it still had the sixth-largest air force in the world and plenty of trained pilots to go with it. During the First Gulf War, nearly half of that air force fled to neighboring Iran, on which Iraqi planes had dropped more than their share of bombs and even poison gas in the 1980s. Those planes were never returned. Of the relatively small force that remained, many were destroyed in the First Gulf War and some of the rest, at Saddam Hussein’s orders, were buried in the desert as the invasion of 2003 began.

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.

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:

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.