The War Nobody Won

Part 1: Chaos, crime and incredulity

By Henry C K Liu

04/24/03: (Asia Times) Very few serious observers in the Middle East, if any, expect the United States to achieve its declared aims of establishing a democratic government in Iraq. Some are openly skeptical of US intent, while others give the US the benefit of the doubt, but consider its aim a hopeless fantasy.

Three days after US invasion forces officially announced the fall of the Iraqi government and proclaimed military control of the city of Baghdad, they allowed, if not encouraged, lawlessness to destroy a cradle of civilization on a scale thousands of times worse than that which the US accused the Saddam Hussein government of having done to the Iraqi nation and its people. The war itself has made a reality of harsh misery out of the abstract discontent of political oppression, the liberation from which had been the pretext for the war. Instead of saving the Iraqi people from alleged oppression, the war has brought them undeniable destruction.

Liberation has come in the form of senseless killing, looting and burning. In the name of defending freedom, the United States has unilaterally denied the people of Iraq their freedom to live a normal life for years to come. The war has robbed the Iraqi people of freedom from lawlessness, freedom to preserve and enjoy their historical and cultural treasures, and freedom from foreign occupation.

The wartime suffering of millions has been aggravated by the postwar loss of even the essentials of life, such as clean water, electricity, medicine, food and personal safety. The Geneva Convention regarding responsibility of occupation powers toward the population in occupied territory has been ignored, resulting in a breakdown of security, anarchy, widespread looting and arson of public property and the proliferation of violent acts of revenge and lawless of settling personal and tribal scores.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld justified this crime of barbarism dismissively by telling the press that "democracy is untidy" and that "freedom includes freedom to commit crimes". While it may be debatable whether the definition of war crimes should include the killing of civilians by uniformed US soldiers as a standard tactic against urban guerrillas, there is no need to debate that peace crimes against civilization and humanity have become part of the collateral damage of the liberation imposed by US armed occupation of Iraq.

Overwhelming force to shock and awe had been available to military plans with ample reserve. But the world's sole superpower pleads powerlessness to protect civilians and national properties and treasures under its coercive military control. Despite total US control of Iraqi airspace, there is no around-the-clock airlift of humanitarian supplies as in the Berlin blockade, notwithstanding that the toppling of Saddam's statue in central Baghdad by a handful was eagerly compared with the fall of the Berlin Wall by the US media. Apparently, Arabs don't need food and water as much as Europeans do. The US military can summon hundred of cruise missiles and precision bombs to target Saddam on a few minutes' notice, yet this superpower that spends more on its military than all the world's other nations combined cannot provide law and order and basic sustenance for the people it has just conquered. This is a superpower only of destruction, and a paper tiger when it comes to humanitarian rescue.

Presidential palaces were precision-bombed as war targets despite the fact that common sense would surmise that Saddam would be stupid to stay in any of them once hostilities had begun. Television images of US marines trashing the palaces and the subsequent looting by lawless mobs waving to approving GIs were supplemented by embedded media commentary about popular rejoicing over the fall of tyranny. Yet these palaces were built with the resources of the Iraqi people, thus they belong to the people and should be returned to the Iraqi people for their popular enjoyment, rather than trashed by an invading horde. These palaces, albeit not examples of good taste, are nevertheless national assets that could have been turned into a Palace for Youth, Palace for Women, Palace of Science, Palace of Islam, Palace of Freedom, etc. Instead, they are now useless rubble that will constitute heavy added cleanup burdens for the war-battered people of Iraq.

The US Marine Corps in the past has earned well-deserved respect in the journals of military valor. In Iraq, its political officers failed to protect the honor of this once fine and proud military organization.

If this war is about spreading US values, it has scored only defeat by spreading barbarism. The destruction of the Iraqi network of presidential compounds, government and cultural institutions and facilities bring to mind the 19th-century burning and looting of the Summer Palace in Peking by barbaric Western imperialist plunderers.

Contrast that with the flawless protection of oilfields and the commercial records of the Ministry of Petroleum while truly priceless artifacts from the dawn of civilization were looted, some say by foreign professional thieves, with the theft masked by subsequent destruction from looting local mobs hailed as joyful expression of freedom from oppression. So much for the priorities of US freedom and values.

For weeks the world has been talking about the war on Iraq. But in reality, there was no war. There was no formal declaration of war by the invader and there was no formal surrender by a vanquished government. There was a largely unopposed foreign invasion preceded by massive precision hits from thousands of cruise missiles launched from distant warships and bombs dropped from high-altitude planes from distant carriers and air bases. Tens of thousands of precision cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs added up to a slaughter by remote control. But one side of the conflict did not fight, for reasons that have yet to become clear. There were some minor skirmishes and paramilitary resistance in the initial phase in the south. But there was no war in the sense of major force-on-force battles and there was no decisive Battle of Baghdad.

Peter Maass wrote in the April 20 New York Times Magazine: "To get to Baghdad, the marines of the 3rd Battalion fought the old-fashioned way, by shooting as many of the enemy as they could. The victims weren't all soldiers." The enemy was Iraqi civilians whom the US had come to liberate. Maass reported that after a shooting spree that killed a dozen civilians, the marine squad leader shouted: "My men showed no mercy. Outstanding."

The Iraqi government was not vanquished; it merely vanished. After US forces took control of the capital, there was widespread looting that finally stopped only because there was nothing else left to loot, not because of orderly US postwar planning.

Most of the world's professional military experts had been misled about the prospect of urban warfare inside Baghdad, while the US high command apparently knew it was going to be a cakewalk into Baghdad. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney knew something that even uniformed officers in the field did not know, which was that no Iraqi resistance was going to materialize.

Was all the pre-invasion bombing merely a fireworks overture to augment the disinformation that the Iraqi military could be expected to be a lethal force of tenacious resistance? The invasion of an enemy capital defended by hundreds of thousands of elite troops was deftly accomplished by a small, fast-moving, light forward force. Is Cheney a military genius, or did he know something the rest of the world did not know when he confidently predicted that the "war" would be over in a matter of weeks?

The "victory" appeared to be less than honorable, achieved mainly through treason on the part of the enemy high command induced by bribes. The Battle of Baghdad was no Iwo Jima or Stalingrad. It appeared that the massive precision bombing did not destroy the Iraqi army as much as treason facilitated through the uninterrupted linkage between the Iraqi high command and its former handlers in the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon Special Section. If these conspiracy theories are valid, then the question arises whether the intensive bombings of Baghdad and other cities, with tragic collateral damage of sizable civilian casualty, were militarily necessary, and whether the chaos after the fall of Baghdad was part of the war plan.

With the military phase of the war in Iraq drawing to a close by the third week of conflict, General Tommy Franks, commander of the US forces, laid out in a CNN interview a timetable that could see his troops in Iraq for another year. "The Iraqi army has been destroyed. There's no regime command and control in existence right now, but we know there are pockets of anything from paramilitaries to death squads," he said. But the winding-up of the military campaign does not signal a quick US exit from Iraq. "We have simply bypassed villages and towns, and we will go to every single one of them to be clear that we don't have some last small stronghold," Franks said. He added that if the country remained fractious, the number of US troops required to stay on for a lengthy period would be significant.

Le Monde, the French daily, reported that Maher Sufyan, commander of the Republican Guard, reached an agreement to cease resistance in exchange for money and postwar protection for himself and his top officers. Maher Sufyan is not included in the infamous "deck of cards" identifying the most wanted officials in the Saddam Hussein government. Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf, its foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and the minister of health, Oumid Medhat Mubarak, are also not included on the list. Vladimir Titirenko, the Russian ambassador to Iraq, told NTV upon returning to Moscow: "I am confident that the Iraqi generals entered into secret deals with the Americans to refrain from resistance in exchange for sparing their lives."

The question then: Is the "victorious" Iraqi war plan based on treason applicable to other wars, such as the pending wars on Syria and Iran? Or have future targets of US preemptive invasion learned to adopt new strategies of asymmetrical and unconventional warfare of counter-preemption?

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman defines Saddamism as an entrenched Arab mindset, born of years of colonialism and humiliation that insists that upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the West is more important than freedom, democracy and modernization. And he identifies Saddamism as the real enemy of the United States.

Saddamism will now form the new basis of pan-Arabism. No one knows for certain why Saddam did not put up a fight, as expected by everyone except Rumsfeld, Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Perhaps this is Saddam's new "unconventional" tactic, to turn the fight into a protracted guerrilla struggle, perhaps not. Either Saddam is dead or he merely failed to answer the call of history. Perhaps he was betrayed by the Republican Guard commanders. But if he did not intend to fight, he should have given up before the hostilities began. The entire Arab world is puzzled by his behavior to date and disappointed by the turn of military events in Iraq.

Whatever actually happened, there was no superpower victory. It was a fixed match in a superbowl in which one opponent took a fall. Or the real war has yet to start with a vanished opponent that has merged into the general population to fight a protracted unconventional war. Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress favored by the US Defense Department for a key role in postwar Iraq, told BBC radio on Monday that his group was tracking Saddam Hussein, who remains in Iraq and is moving around the country.

Either way, the potential of Saddamism is very much alive. Many in the Arab world insist that those Iraqis recorded by US television stamping and spitting on the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein were Kurds, not Arabs, or unprincipled paid hooligans, not freedom fighters. "Millions loved Saddam" was a common comment throughout the Arab world, and widely reported in the Arab press.

A Brookings Institution study by Christine Moss Helms in 1984 (before the official US demonization of Saddam) did not contain one single word about the Saddam regime torturing anyone. It characterized the Iraqi Ba'ath Party as a political organization of clandestinity and ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists might deviate from strict interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab unity, freedom from foreign domination and tribal socialism, yet Ba'athist doctrine generally set guidelines for Iraqi policy formulation, such as geopolitical non-alignment, pan-Arabism and accommodation with diverse religious and ethnic groups, throughout its history. Leadership was not hereditary, setting it apart from other Arab regimes. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as distinct from Ba'athism in the Arab world in general, were directed toward specific Iraqi needs and problems, keeping Iraq from extreme pan-Arabism.

Since the Iraqi Ba'athists took control of the country in 1968, the leader had to deal with practical problems of governance of a less-developed country, by devoting considerable resources to internal development, irrigation projects, upgrading of agriculture, industrialization, education and freedom for women. It also had to deal with problems facing any oil-producing nation: economic imperialism, globalized finance and US dollar hegemony.

Resistance by Arabs to foreign intervention and influence generally takes two forms that share diagnosis of the problem but are diametrically opposed in proposed solutions. The first is that Islam provides the raison d'etre for unity, despite a variety of beliefs such as Islamic modernism, reformism, conservatism and fundamentalism. Postmodernist foreign interference in the Muslim world poses increased and profound consequences that push many Islamic movements to adopt political goals, with a return to perceived purity of Islamic values.

The second response is Arab nationalism. While recognizing the importance of Islam, Arab nationalists feel that it, as an ideology, does not fully encompass the modern needs of the Middle East. The reasons are threefold: 1) the region includes non-Arabs and non-Muslims, 2) there are differences of interpretation within Islam and 3) Islamic fundamentalism cannot effectively adapt to changes facing the region. Arab nationalists are committed to modernization through secularization that would also facilitate pan-Arab unity. Nasirism has been generally accepted as the main representation of Arab nationalism. In contrast to Nasirism, as espoused in Egypt, which relied more on personality cult, Ba'athists attained a high level of organization. Although the leader is also inescapably tied to supremacy in the tradition of tribal culture, the Ba'ath Party is designed to function in the event of the leader's sudden death or ouster.

The Brookings study warned that it would be erroneous to assume that all non-Ba'athists opposed the Ba'athist central government, despite the radical and ruthless image with which the Ba'ath Party had been portrayed in the West and by opposition groups in exile. Many Iraqis benefited from the Ba'ath economic and social policies during the 1970s and valued the stability of continuous government since 1968. Many older Iraqis who were not Ba'athists were proud that their children were party members. And party membership did not particularly enhance advancement in the general economy outside of government. One of the Ba'ath Party's goals was to broaden the base of support from Iraq's heterogeneous society. The party launched a Literacy Campaign to reduce the 44 percent illiteracy rate to 20 percent. The party emphasized a policy that the wealth of the nation is in its youth and promoted education for women. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1970 gave women the right to own land on an equal basis as men, and equal wages for female farm-cooperative workers. Women were granted voting rights, and benefited from marriage reform. It was not until 1991, at the start of the first Gulf War, that US demonization of Saddam began in earnest.

Despite US media spin about pent-up Iraqi hatred for Saddam, looting is not political expression. It is mere US propaganda that the looting encouraged by the US military all over Iraq was the joyous expression of an oppressed people suddenly liberated. The New York Times reported isolated incidents of looting by some firemen in the collapsed World Trade Center towers in New York. Surely, New York firemen as a group are patriotic and honorable public servants. If massive bombing were to hit New York, with the sudden disappearance of the police force, and the absence of the National Guard, with indifferent foreign troops waving criminals on, there would also be widespread looting in New York. Rumsfeld acknowledged as much in his news conference by pointing out that riots also happened in US cities even when the government had not collapsed.

Political freedom is not about senseless destruction. The lootings of museums and libraries are crimes against civilization. If only US marines had also failed to protect the Ministry of Petroleum and the oilfields the way they failed to protect these cultural institutions that belong to the all humanity, the excuse of shortage of troops would be more credible. Rumsfeld's lame excuse of "catastrophic success" in war would be more credible if he had not been so confident, in defiance of common-sense expectation, that the military operation would be over within weeks, a confidence that even his own field commanders challenged as unfounded. A war plan that had taken into account all unforeseen contingencies, that had miraculously predicted that the war would end within weeks, had been caught off guard by "catastrophic success"? It is a no-win argument. You cannot have it both ways. Either unpreparedness for success is a poor excuse or predictive confidence in success has been a bluff.

Copyright Asia Times

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