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26 November 2009 By
Ray McGovern
You don’t have to go back 40 years to the Vietnam War
to feel the sting of déjà vu. Returning to the Iraq
War just three years ago will suffice.
Last week, Defense
Secretary Robert Gates summed up the administration’s
dilemma on Afghanistan in a single question: “How do
we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the
Afghans and the American people that this is not
open-ended?”
It is the same
question that policymakers and generals were grappling
with three years ago with respect to Iraq. Let’s hope
they learned the right lessons from that experience,
but it’s doubtful since the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM)
has been no help in shedding light on what actually
happened.
If you remember,
President George W. Bush had been voicing lots of
optimism about the Iraq War and Vice President Dick
Cheney had claimed the enemy was “in its last throes.”
But it was becoming increasingly clear by 2006 that
sectarian violence was ripping Iraq apart, that the
death toll of American troops was rising, and that
U.S. defeat was looming.
But Bush and Cheney
were hell-bent on preventing defeat from happening, at
least on their watch. Nor did they want the neo-con
dream of a U.S.-dominated Iraq to die.
However, many in
Washington – especially in the military – recognized
that the Bush/Cheney war couldn’t be open-ended and
that hard decision would have to be made for a gradual
withdrawal to begin.
To his credit, Rep,
Frank Wolf, R-Virginia, almost singlehandedly got
Congress to create the “Iraq Study Group,” a
blue-ribbon panel that was to assess the situation in
Iraq and determine what the United States could still
reasonably accomplish.
The effort was not
blessed by Bush and Cheney, who considered the idea of
second-guessing their judgments a nuisance or worse.
But the panel became more of a threat when
high-profile figures — Republican elder statesman
James Baker and Democratic fixer Lee Hamilton — were
picked to chair it.
Though Baker had been
the Bush family’s consigliere for decades, he was
considered a possible wild card. As a hard-headed
pragmatist, he reflected Establishment thinking, which
was coming to believe that the war-hungry neo-cons
around Bush had bitten off more than they could chew
in Iraq.
By fall 2006, the
members of the Iraq Study Group were convinced that a
new course was needed for Iraq. And almost no sober
thinker favored sending more troops.
The senior military,
especially CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid and his
man on the ground in Iraq, Gen. George Casey,
emphasized that sending more U.S. troops to Iraq would
signal leading Iraqi politicians that they could relax
and continue to take forever to get their act
together.
Here, for example, is
Gen. Abizaid's answer at the Senate Armed Services
Committee on Nov. 15, 2006, to Sen. John McCain, who
had long been pressing vigorously for sending 20,000
more troops to Iraq:
”Senator McCain, I met
with every divisional commander, General Casey, the
corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked
together. And I said, ‘in your professional opinion,
if we were to bring in more American troops now, does
it add considerably to our ability to achieve success
in Iraq?’
“And they all said no.
And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do
more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us do
this work. I believe that more American forces prevent
the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more
responsibility for their own future.”
U.S. Ambassador to
Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad sent a classified cable to
Washington warning that "proposals to send more U.S.
forces to Iraq would not produce a long-term solution
and would make our policy less, not more,
sustainable," according to a New York Times
retrospective on the “surge” by Michael R. Gordon
published on Aug. 31, 2008.
Khalilzad was arguing,
unsuccessfully, for authority to negotiate a political
solution with the Iraqis. Bush and Cheney would not
allow Khalilizad to do so.
Instead, Bush and
Cheney began to plan a purge of their top commanders –
moving to replace Abizaid and Casey – and easing
Khalilizad out as well.
Bush and his neo-con
advisers also had a problem with Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, who was backing his generals. On Nov.
6, 2006, a day before the mid-term elections, Rumsfeld
sent a memo to the White House that made many of the
same arguments that Abizaid, Casey and members of the
Iraq Study Group were making.
The first 80 percent
of Rumsfeld's memo addressed "Illustrative Options,"
including his preferred – or “above the line” –
options, such as "an accelerated drawdown of U.S.
bases … to five by July 2007" and withdrawal of U.S.
forces "from vulnerable positions — cities,
patrolling, etc. … so the Iraqis know they have to
pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility
for their country."
On Nov. 8, after
Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections, Bush
cut loose Rumsfeld, replacing him with former CIA
Director (and member of the Iraq Study Group) Robert
Gates. The Washington news media widely interpreted
the move as Bush’s acceptance of a more realistic
policy for winding down the Iraq War.
However, Rumsfeld’s
firing was completely misread. Behind the scenes, the
controversial Defense Secretary had been backing his
commanders on the need to keep the U.S. “footprint” as
small as possible.
The careerist Gates
was a different story, willing to support an
escalation in exchange for a place again at the
Washington power table.
Since his early days
at the CIA, Gates was never one to let truth derail
his ambition. Though privy to the analysis emerging
from the Iraq Study Group – on the need for a gradual
U.S. withdrawal – Gates was willing to play ball with
Bush on an escalation.
On Dec. 6, 2006, after
months of investigation and policy review, the Iraq
Study Group issued its final report, which began with
the ominous sentence, "The situation in Iraq is grave
and deteriorating." It called for:
"A change in the
primary mission of U.S. Forces in Iraq that will
enable the United States to begin to move its combat
forces out of Iraq responsibly. … By the first quarter
of 2008…all combat brigades not necessary for force
protection could be out of Iraq."
On the same day as the
ISG report, Gates was confirmed by the full Senate. In
retrospect the coincidence was a supreme irony, since
Gate’s Washington rebirth as Secretary of Defense
facilitated the early death of the Iraq Study Group's
recommendations.
We were in for a
“surge,” not a drawdown of troops.
Bush quickly deep-sixed
the ISG recommendations, which his neo-con advisers
depicted as defeatist, a prescription for “losing
Iraq” and – worse yet – doing so on the Bush-Cheney
watch. Bush made clear he was prepared to stay in Iraq
indefinitely and expand the fight against extremism.
At a news conference
on Dec. 20, 2006, Bush cast this wider struggle
against Islamists as a test of American toughness and
perseverance, a demonstration to the enemy that “they
can’t run us out of the Middle East, that they can’t
intimidate America.”
Rather than scale back
the neoconservative dream of transforming the Middle
East, Bush argued for an expanded U.S. military to
wage this long war.
“We must make sure
that our military has the capability to stay in the
fight for a long period of time,” Bush said. “I’m not
predicting any particular theater, but I am predicting
that it’s going to take a while for the ideology of
liberty to finally triumph over the ideology of hate.”
As Bush talked tough,
neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were
devising a plan to “surge” 20,000 to 30,000 additional
U.S. troops into Iraq, enough to stave off definitive
defeat at least until January 2009 when Bush and
Cheney could ride off into the sunset without having
lost a war.
The neo-cons even
found a retired general, Jack Keane, who had been Army
Vice Chief of Staff and knew how to work the Pentagon
side of things.
Bush announced the
“surge” on Jan 10, 2007, and the escalation was phased
in through much of 2007. U.S. casualties skyrocketed,
with more than 1,000 American troops dying, roughly a
quarter of the total killed in the Iraq War.
As author Steve Coll
put it, "The decision [to surge] at a minimum
guaranteed that his [Bush's] presidency would not end
with a defeat in history's eyes. By committing to the
surge [the President] was certain to at least achieve
a stalemate."
Gradually, the
violence in Iraq did subside, from catastrophic to
wretched. That prompted the well-placed neo-cons and
their friends in the Fawning Corporate Media to hail
the “surge” as a great success and a sterling example
of Bush’s steely-eyed courage.
That point of view
congealed into a potent conventional wisdom among
Washington insiders. However, many military analysts
believed the “surge” was at best a minor factor in
improving Iraq’s security climate.
For his book, The War
Within, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward
interviewed a number of military officials and
concluded:
“In Washington,
conventional wisdom translated these events into a
simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story
was more complicated. At least three other factors
were as important as, or even more important than, the
surge.”
Woodward reported that
the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar
province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise
decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to
order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two
important factors.
A third factor, which
Woodward argued may have been the most significant,
was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence
tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing
of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold
details of these secret techniques from his book so as
not to undercut their continued success.
But there were
previous glimpses of these classified U.S. programs
that combined high-tech means of identifying
insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and
night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned
brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot
executions of suspects.
Other brutal factors
further explained the decline in violence:
--Vicious ethnic
cleansing had succeeded in separating Sunnis and
Shiites to such a degree that there were fewer targets
to kill. Several million Iraqis were estimated to be
refugees either in neighboring countries or within
their own.
--Concrete walls built
between Sunni and Shia areas made “death-squad” raids
more difficult but also “cantonized” much of Baghdad
and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for
Iraqis even more exhausting as they sought food or
traveled to work.
--During the “surge,”
U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called
“military age males” and locking up tens of thousands
in prison on the flimsiest of suspicions.
--Awesome U.S.
firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and
civilian bystanders for more than five years, had
slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and had
intimidated many others to look simply to their own
survival.
--With the total Iraqi
death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and
many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society had been
deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout
history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of
the “successful surge” was excluded from the U.S.
political debate in 2008, much as the illegality of
Bush’s original invasion had been treated as a taboo
subject during the early years of the Iraq War.
During last year’s
presidential campaign, when Barack Obama tried to make
the more sophisticated argument about the “surge,” he
was badgered by prominent journalists, such as CBS
anchor Katie Couric and ABC’s “This Week”
host George Stephanopoulos.
For instance, on Sept.
7, 2008, Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you
escape the logic that … John McCain was right about
the surge?”
When Obama responded
that he couldn’t understand “why people are so focused
on what has happened in the last year and a half and
not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off,
saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision
about going in, but about the surge?”
Unwilling to pay the
price for challenging Washington’s conventional wisdom
regarding the “surge,” Obama finally agreed to cede
the point and “admit” that the “surge” had “succeeded
beyond our wildest dreams.”
It was an early sign
that Obama was not prepared to take on Washington’s
media/political elites over a factual issue, even one
with important national security implications.
Ironically, just as
Obama was retreating on the “surge,” Iraqi officials
were standing up against Bush’s desire to have a
“status of forces agreement” that would grant the
United States the indefinite right to operate
militarily in Iraq.
Instead, they insisted
that Bush accept a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraqi cities in 2009 and then from the country by
the end of 2011.
Bush, who had always
rejected the idea of a withdrawal timetable, was
forced to accept just such a timetable.
The timetable also
appears to have had a beneficial effect on levels of
violence in Iraq. Since the SOFA was signed, U.S.
military fatalities in Iraq have dropped by more than
half, to 142 in 2009 from 314 in 2008, according to
icasualties.org. The U.S. death toll was 904 in 2007.
However, after winning
the presidency, Obama continued to finesse the
powers-that-be. He kept on Gates – a Washington
favorite – as Defense Secretary. He also appeared
eager to score some points by describing the Afghan
conflict as “a war of necessity.”
However, these
decisions by Obama – bowing to “the myth of the
successful surge,” retaining Gates and exaggerating
Afghanistan’s strategic importance – have all served
to box the President in on what to do next about that
eight-year-old war.
The lazy Washington
analysis has remained that the “surge” worked in Iraq,
so why not do one in Afghanistan? Plus, a “surge” has
been recommended by two of Bush’s favorite generals,
David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. They want Obama
to send at least 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan,
while Gates is reportedly on board for 30,000.
If Obama is to resist
the pressure to escalate in Afghanistan, he will find
himself tacking into the stiff wind of the FCM’s
“successful surge myth” and having to maneuver around
the recommendations of his field commanders and his
Defense Secretary.
Though Democratic
officials are notoriously disinterested in history,
Obama may find that his acceptance of a false history
for Iraq has real-life consequences in Afghanistan.
At least on the
Vietnam War, thanks to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of
the Pentagon Papers, Americans have a relatively clear
understanding of how they got dragged into that mess.
Today, if the
“successful surge” myth weren’t so deeply engrained in
Washington, a case could even be made that the
expectation of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2008 and
the actuality of the U.S. military pulling troops out
of the center of Iraqi cities in 2009 have had the
most dramatic effect on tamping down violence,
compared to all other strategies.
Looking at the sharp
decline in U.S. casualties in 2008 and 2009, one might
even hypothesize that it was the presence of a foreign
occupying army that provoked many Iraqis to take up
arms.
Now that would be a
lesson that President Obama might want to take to
heart as he weighs his options for an escalation in
Afghanistan.
--
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in
inner-city Washington, DC. He was an Army
infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst
for 30 years, and is now on the Steering Group of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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