[A nice explanatory metaphor: like putting a wig on a corpse]
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174882
Tomgram: CSI Iraq
posted 2008-01-17 10:42:21
The Corpse on the Gurney: The "Success" Mantra in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
The other day, as we reached the first anniversary of the President's
announcement of his "surge" strategy, his "new way forward" in Iraq, I
found myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever
did. An editor at a San Francisco textbook publisher hired me to
"doctor" god-awful texts designed for audiences of captive kids. Each
of these "books" was not only in a woeful state of disrepair, but
essentially D.O.A. I was nonetheless supposed to do a lively rewrite of
the mess and add seductive "sidebars"; another technician then
simplified the language to "grade level" and a designer provided a
flashy layout and look. Zap! Pow! Kebang!
During the years that I freelanced for that company in the early 1970s,
an image of what I was doing formed in my mind -- and it suddenly came
back to me this week. I used to describe it this way:
<quote>
The little group of us -- rewriter, grade-level reducer, designer --
would be summoned to the publisher's office. There, our brave band of
technicians would be ushered into a room in which there would be
nothing but a gurney with a corpse on it in a state of advanced
decomposition. The publisher's representative would then issue a simple
request: Make it look like it can get up and walk away.
And the truth was: that corpse of a book would be almost lifelike when
we were done with it, but one thing was guaranteed -- it would never
actually get up and walk away.
<unquote>
That was in another century and a minor matter of bad books that no one
wanted to call by their rightful name. But that image came to mind
again more than three decades later because it's hard not to think of
America's Iraq in similar terms. Only this week, Abdul Qadir, the Iraqi
defense minister, announced that "his nation would not be able to take
full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able
on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least
2018." Pentagon officials, reported Thom Shanker of the New York Times,
expressed no surprise at these dismal post-surge projections, although
they were "even less optimistic than those [Qadir] made last year."
According to this guesstimate then, the U.S. military occupation of
Iraq won't end for, minimally, another ten years. President Bush
confirmed this on his recent Mideast jaunt when, in response to a
journalist's question, he said that the U.S. stay in Iraq "could easily
be" another decade or more.
Folks, our media may be filled with discussions about just how
"successful" the President's surge plan has been, but really, Iraq is
the corpse in the room.
"Success" as a Mantra
Last January, after announcing his "surge strategy," the President
called in his technicians. As it turned out, Gen. David Petraeus, surge
commander in Iraq, has been quite impressive, as has new U.S.
ambassador to that country, Ryan Crocker. Think of them as "the
undertakers," since they've been the ones who, applying their skills,
have managed to give that Iraqi corpse the faint glow of life. The
President asked them to make Iraq look like it could get up and walk
away -- and the last year of "success," widely trumpeted in the media,
has been the result. But just think about what the defense minister and
President Bush are promising: By 2018, the country will -- supposedly
-- be able to control its own borders, one of the more basic acts of a
sovereign state. That, by itself, tells you much of what you need to be
know.
In order to achieve an image of lifelike quiescence in Iraq, involving
a radical lowering of "violence" in that country, the general and
ambassador did have to give up the ghost on a number of previous Bush
administration passions. Rebellious al-Anbar Province was, for
instance, essentially turned over to members of the community (many of
whom had, even according to the Department of Defense, been fighting
Americans until recently). They were then armed and paid by the U.S.
not to make too much trouble. In the Iraqi capital, on the other hand,
the surging American military looked the other way as, in the first
half of 2007, the Shiite "cleansing" of mixed Baghdad neighborhoods
reached new heights, transforming it into a largely Shiite city. This
may have been the real "surge" in Iraq and, if you look at new maps of
the ethnic make-up of the capital, you can see the startling results --
from which a certain quiescence followed. Powerful Shiite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, called
a "truce" during the surge months and went about purging and
reorganizing his powerful militia, the Mahdi Army. In exchange, the
U.S. has given up, at least temporarily, its goal of wresting control
of some of those neighborhoods from the Sadrists.
Despite hailing the recent passage of what might be called a modest
re-Baathification law in the Iraqi Parliament (that may have little
effect on actual government employment), the administration has also
reportedly given up in large part on pushing its highly touted
"benchmarks" for the Iraqis to accomplish. This was to be a crucial
part of Iraqi political "reconciliation" (once described as the key to
the success of the whole surge strategy). It has now been dumped for
so-called Iraqi solutions. All of this, including the lack of U.S.
patrolling in al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency,
plus the addition of almost 30,000 troops in Baghdad and environs, has
indeed given Iraq a quieter look -- especially in the United States,
where Iraqi news has largely disappeared from front pages and slipped
deep into prime-time TV news coverage just as the presidential campaign
of 2008 heats up.
The surge was always, in a sense, a gamble for time, a pacification
program directed at the "home front" in the President's Global War on
Terror as well as at Iraq itself. And if this is what you mean by
"success" in Iraq, Bush has indeed succeeded admirably. As in the
Vietnam era, when President Richard Nixon began "Vietnamizing" that
war, a reduction of American casualties has had the effect of turning
media attention elsewhere.
So another year has now passed in a country that we plunged into an
unimaginable charnel-house state. Whether civilian dead between the
invasion of 2003 and mid-2006 (before the worst year of civil-war level
violence even hit) was in the range of 600,000 as a study in the
British medical journal, The Lancet reported or 150,000 as a recent
World Health Organization study suggests, whether two million or 2.5
million Iraqis have fled the country, whether 1.1 million or more than
two million have been displaced internally, whether electricity
blackouts and water shortages have marginally increased or decreased,
whether the country's health-care system is beyond resuscitation or
could still be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept
back to the low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields
of opium poppies are, for the first time, spreading across the
country's agricultural lands or still relatively localized, Iraq is a
continuing disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in
recent memory.
What Bush has done with his surge, however, is buy himself that
year-plus of free time, while he negotiates with Iraq's
inside-the-Green-Zone government to cement in place an endless American
presence there. In the process, he may create a sense of permanency
that no future president will prove capable of tampering with -- not
without being known as the man (or woman) who "lost" Iraq. Forget the
Republican presidential candidates -- Sen. John McCain, for instance,
has said that he doesn't care if the U.S. is in Iraq for the next
hundred years -- and think about the leading Democratic candidates with
their elongated (and partial) "withdrawal" plans. Barack Obama, for
instance, is for guaranteeing a 16-month withdrawal schedule, and
that's just for U.S. "combat troops," which are only perhaps half of
all American forces in the country. Hillary Clinton's plan is no more
promising.
The President's gamble, so far "successful," has been that the look of
returning life in Iraq will last at least long enough for him to turn a
marginally "successful" war over to the next administration. If the
Democrats sweep to power, he hopes to stick them with that war. As
Michael Hirsh of Newsweek put the matter recently, while discussing the
President's trip to the Middle East: "Far away in the Persian Gulf,
Bush is creating facts on the ground that the next president may not be
able to ignore." (Of course, this assumes that the Iraqis will comply.)
In that case, here would be another piece of potential Bush "success":
Nine months into any new presidential term and the Iraq War is yours.
(Those of us old enough to remember have already lived through this
scenario once with "Lyndon Johnson's war" in Vietnam, so how does
"Barack Obama's war" sound?) Then, former Bush administration
officials, Republicans of all stripes, neocons, and an array of pundits
will turn on those uncelebratory Democrats who, they will claim,
managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of "success," if not victory.
Wait for it.
<end excerpt>
Rest at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174882
Michael