In the April 21, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, Andrew Bacevich has an article entitled Surging to Defeat which notes the following:
Although violence in Iraq has decreased over the past year, attacks on coalition and Iraqi security forces continue to occur at an average rate of 500 per week. This is clearly unacceptable. The likelihood that further U.S. efforts will reduce violence to an acceptable level—however one might define that term—appears remote.
Bacevich also points out that the "reduction" in violence (which started increasing in April) can be attributed to factors other than The Surge.
Furthermore, recent improvements in security are highly contingent. The Shi’ite militias, Sunni insurgents, and tribal leaders who have agreed to refrain from violence in return for arms, money, and other concessions have by no means bought into the American vision for the future of Iraq. Their interests do not coincide with our own, and we should not delude ourselves by pretending otherwise.
With a blistering honesty encountered seldom in the so-called MSM, Bacevich details the initial stated purpose of the surge:
Unfortunately, partial success in reducing the level of violence has not translated into any substantial political gains. Recall that the purpose of the surge was not to win the war in a military sense. Gen. David Petraeus never promised victory. He and any number of other senior officers have assessed the war as militarily unwinnable. On this point, the architects of the surge were quite clear: the object of the exercise was not to impose our will on the enemy but to facilitate political reconciliation among Iraqis.
A year later, signs of genuine reconciliation are few. In an interview with the Washington Post less than a month ago, General Petraeus said that “no one” in the U.S. government “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.”
...
Iraq today qualifies only nominally as a sovereign nation-state. It has become a dependency of the United States, unable to manage its own affairs or to provide for the well-being of its own people. As recent events in Basra have affirmed, the Iraqi army, a black hole into which the Pentagon has poured some $22 billion in aid and assistance, still cannot hold its own against armed militias.
This Iraqi army is NOT the Iraqi army that dissipated in the face of U.S. armed forced march to Baghdad. That army elected to not fight. And then was disbanded, leaving it's soldiers, many of whom had fought the dreaded Iranian army to a standstill (albeit with plenty of U.S. aid, munitions, chemical weapons, and satellite intelligence) with no income and plenty of incentive to join and help train militias.
The U.S. military victory in Iraq was swift. I hope that when the war colleges do their what went wrong analysis, they acknowledge that when a military victory leaving no one with whom to negotiate terms of surrender means a political stalemate (and continuing hell on earth for the people of Iraq and the troops in occupation there).
Repeat. The U.S. military victory in Iraq was swift. We rid the country of a despotic dictator. We eliminated the despotic dictator and destroyed the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Our military is quite efficient at killing and destroying stuff. Lots of fire power. Lots of bombs. Lots of planes. Huge ships. Many computers and computer visuals. Should have proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" and returned home.
But this is not like the so-called "great wars". Of course not. The U.S. INVADED Iraq, and OCCUPIES the country. Millions of Iraqis have been displaced, died, or dispersed out of their country. And they blame us. Only willful blindness can prevent anyone from seeing why we are blamed, or for concluding that the U.S. decision to invade and occupy Iraq is the root cause of turning Iraq into a hell on earth for the Iraqi people.
Bacevich estimates the present day costs in treasury and in blood. The longer term costs will be even more substantial.
The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.
And then asks the single question that supporters of the war don't want to answer or even address:
What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
The Bush "Freedom Agenda" was never about freedom for human beings. Of course, Americans are for freedom. It's an American value, after all. Land of the free, etc. But "Freedom Agenda" is just a catchy phrase, buzz word palliatives for something entirely different agenda, as noted in an Open Democracy article by Bob Burnett:
The focus of the freedom agenda wasn't repressive regimes, but rather closed markets.Interestingly, what Burnett refers to as a "neo-conservative nostrum", Immanuel Wallerstein calls Neoliberal Globalization -- a program led by Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in England and abetted by the IMF and the World Bank; a program also referred to as the Washington Consensus.
The neocon dialectic
On 6 June 2007, during Bush's trip to the G8 summit, he reaffirmed the freedom agenda in a speech in Prague. Behind his noble words was the president's unwavering insistence on open markets. Patricia Cohen reported that Bush told G8 leaders "political liberty is the natural byproduct of economic openness." He expressed the dogmatic neo-conservatism that guides his administration: "open your markets and democracy will surely follow."
The mechanical, neo-conservative nostrum that unrestrained capitalism gives rise to democracy has guided Bush administration foreign policy in Iraq, the middle east, and the rest of the world; and has had a powerful impact on US domestic policy. Unfortunately, the Bush doctrine has failed everywhere it's been applied. Open markets didn't produce democracy in Iraq, because the American-led occupation neglected to provide for the prerequisites of democracy: namely, a viable institutional infrastructure enabling civil society to operate effectively.
Wallerstein notes the political successes of the Washington Consensus: the fall of Communists regimes in eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R. and China adopting market-friendly policies.
But Wallerstein also remarks on a conundrum. Economic success (of the policies of privatizing industries, reducing trade restrictions, and cutting back on the welfare state) failed to follow. The surge of stock markets everywhere based mostly on speculation rather than profits from production. Furthermore, while the rich got richer, especially the very rich, real income fell for much of the rest of the world.
So "neoliberal globalization" is a "neoconservative nostrum." Makes for difficulties in separating liberals from conservatives.
Per Bacevich, the military was used to "imprint liberal values". Again, this makes for difficulties in separating liberals from conservatives.
the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.
Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.
The abject failure of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine has robbed the Iraq War of any strategic rationale. The war continues in large part because of our refusal to acknowledge and confront this loss of strategic purpose.
The war also continues because our politicians do not have the will to end it. This scenario has played out before, in Vietnam. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all knew that war could not be won. But to withdraw the troops, to pull out, would be perceived as a military defeat, and no President wants to to preside over a U.S. military defeat. The recriminations would be vitriolic. Such a defeat could only happen from sabotage from within: traitors to blame. The traitors would of course be, the political party in office at the time of the eventual withdrawal, and all who opposed the war in the first place. The traitors, the internal enemy. The commies, the pinkos, the dirty hippies -- pacifists, intellectuals, liberals, women. The usual suspects plus immigrants, and certain liberal protestant denominations.
For, how can the world's largest military super-power, a nation that spends more money on the military and national defense than all the rest of the world combined, how can such a military force lose to a guerrilla insurgency?
One simple answer is this: to utilize an efficient killing and destructive machine to gain a political end will highlight your efficiency at killing and destroying, not your ability to compromise or negotiate. It will demonstrate your cruelty and callous indifference, not your strength. And ultimately your weakness, both politically, and militarily.
Is it a liberal, or a conservative value to use war to implement a geopolitical goal?
Answer. It is neither. It is a warmonger's value to use war to implement a geopolitical goal.
And such wars are crimes, for all the world to see; for all the world to judge.
