Mission Accomplished
September 28, 2004
From the moment President Bush strode across the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to declare "Mission Accomplished", he and his War Cabinet have had to contend with, and spin, growing evidence that little is going as planned in Iraq. Not only was the "mission" based on spurious intelligence and largely baseless fear mongering but also, because pre-war planning was at best hopeful and at worst delusional, there is not much the administration can claim to have "accomplished".
During a recent episode of the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher, host Maher compared Bush's recent assessments of the siutation in Iraq with those of "Baghdad Bob", the former Iraqi Minister of Information Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, whose job it was to present to the world daily accounts of the invasion of his country that were drafted in some alternate reality. The comparison is apt and yet another example of Maher's knack for keen insight and sense of irony. But while it is tempting to dismiss Bush as simply delusional it is essential to bear in mind that in the overarching geostrategic scheme concocted by Hawkish administration members--including Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. The invasion, occupation, and ultimate control of Iraq are steps in a much broader geo-political role articulated by the think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In their own words, a liberated Iraq would serve as a shining example to the rest of the troubled region, and regimes unfriendly to the aims of the United States were officially put on notice. In that light, the dissembly and obfuscation issuing daily from the White House and the Pentagon is little more than a rhetorical holding pattern.
The media in its role as governmental watchdog is dropping the ball with respect to the situation in Iraq. Too much reporting is merely puppeting administration talking points. Discussion of Iraq, and the espoused goals of this adminstration are occuring in a journalistic vacuum with lax investigation, a draught of fact checking and distracting side argments about the veracity of minutia. This vacuum keeps intact the carefully established cover for the catastrophe of the American invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration is running out of options but steadfastly refuses to alter course.
Even the term "occupation" is a misnomer. Occupation implies that hostilities have ended, that some semblance of law and order exists, that the continued presence of military forces is only necessary to secure and stabilize the country during its transition. The reality is that American and British forces are now engaged in the pacification of Iraq. This is clearly illustrated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent comments about the prospects for Iraq's elections, scheduled to take place next January:
"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said, hours after the leaders of the United States and Iraq met in Washington."Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he said.
In other words, Iraq will be overhauled, piece by piece if necessary. The long term geostrategic aims are further occluded by deliberate misrepresentation of the Iraqi insurgency. Last Sunday General John Abizaid, U.S. Central Command, made the following claim on NBC's Meet The Press:
GEN. ABIZAID: I think the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is probably below 1,000, but it's kind of difficult to know because people infiltrated into Iraq to fight next to Saddam before the movement phase of the war began back in March of '03. It's also clear thatthere is foreign fighter infiltration. There is foreign terrorist activity such as Zarqawi. There is activity by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Iraq. But it's not just in Iraq, and sometimes we tend to look at Iraq through a soda straw, and also Afghanistan through a soda straw, whereas we really have a problem of terrorism that is ideologically motivated throughout the entire Middle East and Central Asia that has to be faced, and it's got to be faced with the will and the perseverance of the American armed forces and the American people, but most importantly with the moderate peoples in the region that don't want to have this type of life be dictated to them by the extremists....I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Ba'ath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process.
But what if the deteriorating situation in Iraq is not entirely the result of extremists, terrorist infiltration, or ex-Ba'athist provacateurs?
"Early one morning this week, when the police have yet to set up too many checkpoints, Abu Mujahed will strap a mortar underneath a car, drive to a friend's in central Baghdad and bury the weapon in his garden. In the evening he will return with the rest of his group, sleep for a few hours and then take the weapon from its hiding place. He will calculate the range using the American military's own maps and satellite pictures - bought in a bazaar - and fire a few rounds at a military base or the US Embassy or at the Iraqi Prime Minister's office. Then Abu Mujahed will shower, change and, by 10am, be at his desk in one of the major ministries."
What if this crisis was the result of a profound misunderstanding of the historical forces at play?
"The United States military, unable to relate to a tribal society, finds itself the player in a nationwide blood feud. To understand the intensity of these feelings of honor and kinship, read "Othello" or watch "The Godfather." This is how many tribal Iraqis perceive the world. It is not necessarily a lack of sophistication but a mark of being outside the West. Tribal culture in Iraq goes back thousands of years. When an Iraqi man loses a family member to an American missile, he must take another American life to even the score. He may not subscribe to the notion that some Americans are noncombatants, viewing them instead as the members of a supertribe that has come to invade his land."
Our current policy in Iraq is the combination of at least two broken perceptions of the world. First, there is an underlying ideological framework which says the people of Iraq will offer themselves up to an American vision of democracy, regardless of their historical relationship to Western invaders. Second, an administration that is unwilling to accept nuance and modify their position in the face of obvious failure. In January of 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, the National Intelligence Committee delivered a report to the White House that warned of potential chaos following an American invasion of Iraq:
"Intelligence reports compiled in January 2003 predicted that an American invasion would result in a divided Iraq prone to internal violence, and increased sympathy in the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.... Another government source dismissed the significance of prewar predictions of unrest in a postwar Iraq. ``Anybody who studied Iraq for a semester could say that was possible,'' the source said."
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