The Iraq Debacle

THE IRAQ DEBACLE

A devastating, scorching, blistering assessment of the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by Nation Institute writer Tom Englehardt.

His visit to the exceedingly modest 1,000-man Iraqi Navy, being trained at the port by the Brits, led to the observation (regularly made by Americans about every aspect of the Iraqi military) that "progress is slow. One day last week a boatload of Iraqi sailors decided to take a long lunch break and blew off the afternoon training. Too hot." The problem is that "middle-management Iraqis" won't "take the initiative." To correct this, it seems, would require "a huge cultural shift. Saddam's tyrannical rule over nearly three decades conditioned people here never to assume responsibility."

That certainly explains it; and it's pretty typical of American explanations, all of which might make sense, if those fiendishly clever insurgents weren't just down that road, exercising their ingenuity, taking the initiative like mad, upgrading their skills constantly, and fighting fiercely without the help of American trainers. I guess they just underwent a huge cultural shift that our reporters and pundits have somehow missed.

This stuff would, of course, be priceless and completely comic, if it weren't quite so tragic; if it weren't leading down desperate roads; if so many weren't dying in Iraq;, if the possibility of civil war, driven by a very minority "Sunni death cult," weren't growing; and if that country hadn't turned into a terrorist training ground. Or, as Gen. Casey put it in his testimony, in perfect militarese: "I'll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success."

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The question, of course, is: How come we can't find that switch the general spoke of, and "they" can? Or to propose a novel theory, what if the "huge cultural shift" Friedman mentions was us? What if we turned out the lights and smashed the switch. What if we invaded a country under false pretenses; occupied it;, began building huge, permanent military bases on its territory; let its capital and provincial cities be looted; disbanded its military; provided no services essential to modern life; couldn't even produce oil for gas tanks in an oil-rich land; bombed some of its cities, destroyed parts or all of others; put tens of thousands of its inhabitants in U.S. military-controlled jails (where prisoners would be subjected to barbaric tortures and humiliations); provided next to no jobs; opened the economy to every kind of depredation; set foreign corporations to loot the country; invited in tens of thousands of private "security contractors," heavily armed and under no legal constraints; and then asked large numbers of Iraqis, desperate for jobs that could be found nowhere else, to join a new "Iraqi" military force meant to defend a "government" that could hardly leave an American fortified enclave in its own capital. After that, our military trainers, our generals, our politicians, our reporters, and our pundits all began fretting about this force for not fighting fiercely, being independent, taking the initiative, or "standing up." The question should be, but isn't: Standing up for what? (Not dissimilarly, as corporate looters move in to get their "relief riches," what will those evacuees driven off by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, now homeless, car-less, and job-less, be standing up for when they sign on the dotted line for military recruiters who seem to have had less trouble getting to them with offers of help than most of the rest of our government?)

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