"The system is broken" -- that's
how a company captain in Baghdad, interviewed recently by Seymour
Hersh, explained the grossly inadequate, seriously underskilled and
undertrained US military and freelance contractors, struggling with
incompetent and ambiguous management from both the military chain of
command and the dimwitted military intelligence forces. A retired
military commander went further, calling it 'a huge leadership
failure'. About eight months ago I laid out two scenarios
-- fast exit and slow edit -- for the US to extricate itself militarily
from Iraq. Exactly what I said would happen in that article has
happened. This wasn't rocket science or brilliant analysis -- anyone
with a modicum of intelligence and basic familiarity with the lessons
of history could see exactly what was coming, and that the only
alternative to a fast, awkward and bloody exit was a slow, excruciating
and more bloody exit. It doesn't take military acumen or ageless wisdom
to know that you can't keep peacefully what you take by force, and that
a country whose peoples hugely distrust each other and distrust even
more the motivations of an outside invading army, isn't going to
magically evolve into a constitutionally liberal state and a
functioning peaceful democracy overnight. Even in elementary school
American children learn that constitutional liberalism is a delicate
and continuous balancing act between rights and responsibilities,
between personal freedoms and the need for a strong central authority
for 'law, order and good government'. They also learn that democracy is
a slow and difficult process, that occurs when (and only when) the
people of a country are ready for it, and that democracy's health
depends on the perpetual subordination of government and corporate
power to the will of an informed and vigilent citizenry.
What are we to make, then, of a government, and its military
intelligence advisors, whose every action demonstrates blind and
irrational ideological fanaticism and a collosal misunderstanding of
history, of culture, of human nature? The 'intelligence failures' are
massive and obvious:
- failure to understand the cause of widespread Arab sympathy
for Bin Ladin despite, or perhaps even because of, his bold and
despicable act on 9/11
- failure to prevent or at least mitigate 9/11 when the opportunities to do so were legion
- failure to capture Bin Ladin or Mullah Omar, despite the spending of billions of dollars
- failure to capture or assassinate Saddam Hussein without
spending billions of dollars, utterly destroying a country's
infrastructure and costing thousands of innocent lives in the process
- failure to understand that an unprovoked and unilateral attack on Iraq would drastically worsen security for Americans
- failure to understand that people and nations cannot be bullied into supporting an unconscionable war
- failure to appreciate that, having attacked Iraq, the only
program that would save any remnant of American reputation and hope for
a post-Saddam Iraq would involve the immediate spending of hundreds of
billions more dollars in humanitarian aid and funds given to Iraqis to
rebuild their infrastructure, the selection of the best possible
interim all-Iraqi government, and a quick and complete exit by the
military
- failure to understand that the only intelligent domestic
response to 9/11 was to find out and inform American citizens why it
happened, and why it wasn't prevented, to take and inform Americans
about modest, reasonable, unobtrusive steps to improve security
intelligence, and explain that in a free and open country there is no
reasonable way to prevent such incidents from occurring occasionally,
and that we all need to work to create a better world in which there is
no motivation for terrorism
And what, in the face of an America rendered massively less secure by every action of the Bush Regime,
are we to make of an American electorate, nearly half of whom, despite
these collosal failures (and even worse mismanagement of the domestic
economy) continues to believe these incompetent extremists are the best
ones for America for another four years?
In Wednesday's Guardian, and in The Nation, Jon Schell, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and William Polk offer advice
on how America can now extricate itself militarily, quickly, from Iraq.
Jon Schell warns about John Kerry's insistance that the US "must not
retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and
dominated by radicals". Schell says, as I did eight months ago, that
this is exactly what the US must
do, that despite the probability that inter-faction civil war in Iraq
(that is only on hold until the "common enemy" is driven out) will
likely continue for years, perhaps decades, and could well lead to the
balkanization of the country into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish republics,
the only sensible course is to pull out the military immediately and
send in humanitarian agencies to deal with the country's horrendous
health crisis and work side-by-side with Iraqis to start rebuilding its
devastated infrastructure. Will this humanitarian and infrastructure
work be delayed by civil war? Probably, but until Iraqis have sorted
out their own political future, this work cannot even reasonably begin.
Howard Zinn agrees, saying "The prospect, if the occupation continues,
whether by the US or by an international force (as John Kerry seems to
be proposing) is of continued suffering and death for both Iraqis and
Americans...The truth is, no one knows what will happen if the US
withdraws. We face a choice between the certainty of mayhem if we stay
and the uncertainty of what will follow if we leave." Zinn wants the UN
involved quickly in negotiating
the peace between the factions as well as keeping it. I think that's a
bit idealistic, but it's worth trying. Meanwhile the latest poll of Iraqis shows 82% are opposed to continued US and UK military presence in Iraq, and that was before the prisoner atrocities scandal.
We have been told to expect to hear much more -- and much worse --
about atrocities committed against Iraqi (and Afghani) prisoners by the
American military under the command of US Military Intelligence --
prison rape of women and young boys, and desecration of dead Iraqi
bodies, among other things. While US military and political attention
is distracted by these activities, the next humanitarian crisis is
brewing. In Sudan, the Arabic government has accelerated its genocide
of non-Arabic tribes in the West of the country, even as peace
negotiations in the civil war with Southern tribes continues. The
lesson of ignoring such problems was made crystal clear in Rwanda,
where a decade ago a genocidal bloodbath carried out mainly with
machetes killed nearly a million people. Eugene at Demagogue has details
on the latest developments in Sudan and links to the Human Rights Watch
site on this catastrophe. Why are we not hearing from the intelligence
community, and the Bush Administration, about this? Or is the slaughter
of thousands of people by insane dictators only an issue when the
country is rich in oil?
And if all that wasn't enough, Bush now wants another $53 billion dollars allotted for an anti-ballistic missile system against North Korea that expert American scientists says simply doesn't work.
"All indications are that it would not work, and the administration's
statements that it will be highly effective are irresponsible
nonsense," said a spokesman for the scientists, discussing their 70
page technical analysis of the proposal. Much of the money for the
fatally flawed program will go to Boeing, which developed the system.
In my recent readings, I've come across some alarming editorials from
non-mainstream radical groups at both ends of the political spectrum --
ultra-conservative libertarians, and anarchists and eco-radicals,
urging their members to vote for George Bush in November precisely because
he represents everything they loathe. Their argument is that four more
years of his extremism and colossal bungling will cause such an
overwhelming revulsion against government, and against corporatism, by
2008 that the winning candidate in that year, and in many elections
that follow, will have to be strongly libertarian, pro-environment and
anti-corporatist to have any chance of being elected. Pretzel logic.
But in a world where political and military actions seem to defy all
human reason and intelligence, that kind of logic seems to be in vogue.
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MADE IN CANADA
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