Tom EngelhardtNation Institute
There is simply no way to keep up at the moment. Even Paul Rogers, the ever reliable analyst at the openDemocracy website can't get his pieces on-line fast enough for unfolding events. Parts of his most recent analysis, Broken Lives, Bitter Hearts, were outdated almost as they were written.
Still, given that he's a generally cautious soul, it's interesting that he's already estimating as many as 10,000 Iraqi soldiers killed and 30,000 injured in the three weeks of "war." With approximately 100 "coalition" battle deaths, we have the kind of one-hundred-to-one casualty rate that goes all too well with several centuries of colonial warfare. Based purely on the history of Western wars in the Third World, this math could have been done beforehand, and I noticed only yesterday that the biggest of American bombs, the nearly sub-nuclear MOAB ("Mother of All Bombs," a nickname that's been like an arrow pointing at Iraq) is being rushed to the Middle East in preparation for possible use -- assumedly against Tikrit. Administration figures like John Bolton are already emphasizing that this war was meant as a "demonstration" or a "lesson" - that is, to other nations to behave or else. But it was another kind of demonstration as well -- of the latest generations of weaponry and equipment. The urge to try it all in such situations must be well nigh unbearable.
There has, since September 11th, been much discussion of "asymmetrical warfare," usually emphasizing the novel tactics of the weaker side (and of terrorist groups), but estimated casualty figures like these have been the real meaning of asymmetrical warfare in our history. It's in this context that it's worth reading Cakewalk Revisited, yesterday's I-told-you-so op-ed in the Washington Post by Kenneth Adelman, Don Rumsfeld's former assistant, defending his February 2002 op-ed, "Cakewalk in Iraq" -- such promises were much criticized in the war's second week.
"What a difference a week makes. The chump-to-champ cycle usually takes longer, even in Washington. Administration critics should feel shock over their bellyaching about the wayward war plan. All of us feel awe over the professionalism and power of the U.S. military. Now we know…."
A "cakewalk," according to my dictionary, is a "strutting dance." The original "cakewalk," from Adelman's point of view, was Gulf War I with its minimalist American casualties and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones. But in truth the cakewalkers of our moment are the Adelmans, Rumsfelds, Boltons, and Wolfowitzs. They, and their president, have now been "bloodied." They have all, for the first time, passed through the blood rites of war -- admittedly on op-ed pages and in venues like "Meet the Press" and Pentagon news conferences, which are their true battlefields -- and now they're strutting their stuff.
Now, while they are doing their cakewalk, poor Iraq careens from iron-fisted rule to no authority at all - that's perhaps the definition of system shock. Countrywide looting of everything down to the light switches in palatial houses, the murder of a supposedly pro-American Shia imam, another suicide bombing, a cache of arms disastrously blown up in a Baghdad neighborhood, scattered fighting, large-scale surrenders, the Kurdish capture of major cities in the North (despite promises to Turkey)… chaos reigns under heaven, and already the men in Washington are beginning to consider who might be next. And yet who even knows what next week will bring? Let me just suggest some of the better reporting and immediate responses to this moment that I've seen.
The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid has consistently produced more striking and revealing first person reports from Baghdad than any other reporter I've read in the American press. His most recent piece is on the looting of Baghdad, A City Freed from Tyranny Descends into Lawlessness
"On the banks of the Tigris River," he begins, "in an overgrown grove of apple trees and date palms, they came in rickety cars, flatbed trucks and battered taxis today to the home of a man whose very name evoked the crimes of ousted president Saddam Hussein. And in hours, fearless and ecstatic, they had lugged away the symbols of his luxurious life in a country left deprived…"
The British Independent's Robert Fisk has in recent weeks been simply superb. He has returned to form (something he understandably lost after being beaten almost senseless in a village on the Pakistani border during the Afghan War). It helps to have a reporter in place who has a sense of the deeper history of the region. I include below his most striking recent piece -- one which reminds us, sadly, of similar street scenes when the Ba'athist Party came to power so many years ago and, no less sadly, of all the centuries of conquerors who have passed through that great city. (To read more Fisk, go to www.independent.co.uk, and enter Robert Fisk in their search window.)
And speaking of history, United Press International has just released a remarkable piece of historical investigation (or perhaps collation) tracing the young Saddam Hussein's beginnings as a CIA boy-toy, part of an assassination team's botched attempt in 1959 to kill the then- Prime Minister, and of the days when the authoritarian and anticommunist Ba'athist Party was the CIA's chosen "instrument." Talk about unintended consequences.
I also include a brief piece by Dilip Hiro also in the Independent that touches on Iraq's history and the kind of pressure-cooker nation the Americans plan to "reconstruct." Finally, I add a superb column by the Paul Krugman of the New York Times, "Conquest and Neglect."
It's true that our brains are prediction machines, that we can't turn them off, and that, ridiculously enough, our ability to predict what will happen in the next ten minutes, no less ten weeks or ten years is pathetically poor. What we call the media, especially the TV part of it, seems increasingly to exist mostly in the future, as a vast brain analog, an amalgam of pundits and prognosticators doing exactly what we do worst, moment by moment, making endless predictions for which they are never responsible because it's always tomorrow and the next set of predictions are due. We all fall into it. I certainly have and I've made my share of mistakes, including on the taking of Baghdad.
The future, of course, is as yet unmade, always, and so always has the potential to surprise and confound, which it regularly does. But we can look into the past, as Krugman does, consider this administration's slash-and-burn record both at home and abroad, and draw at least reasonable inferences. The Bush men, he points out, have quite a record of conquest and not much of a record for anything afterwards. Unfortunately, he concludes, "the rest of the world has to live in the wreckage they leave behind."
