{"id":3212,"date":"2014-06-20T09:40:38","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T15:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3212"},"modified":"2014-06-20T09:40:38","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T15:40:38","slug":"who-won-iraq-lost-dreams-lost-armies-jihadi-states-and-the-arc-of-instability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/who-won-iraq-lost-dreams-lost-armies-jihadi-states-and-the-arc-of-instability\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Won Iraq?: Lost Dreams, Lost Armies, Jihadi States, and the Arc of Instability"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt<\/a>, Tom Dispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002.\u00a0 At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with \u201ca senior advisor\u201d to President George W. Bush (later\u00a0identified<\/a>\u00a0as Karl Rove).\u00a0 Here\u2019s how he\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0part of their conversation:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe aide said that guys like me were \u2018in what we call the reality-based community,\u2019 which he defined as people who \u2018believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.\u2019 I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.\u00a0 \u2018That’s not the way the world really works anymore,\u2019 he continued.\u00a0 \u2018We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement.\u00a0 The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed \u201chistory\u2019s actors.\u201d \u00a0They did create \u201cnew realities\u201d and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to \u201cstudy\u201d what they did.<\/p>\n

And oh, what they did!\u00a0 Their geopolitical dreams couldn\u2019t have been grander or more global.\u00a0 (Let\u2019s avoid the word “megalomaniacal.”)\u00a0 They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East,garrison<\/a>\u00a0Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, “drain<\/a>” the global “swamp” of terrorists, and create a global\u00a0Pax Americana<\/em>\u00a0based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it.<\/p>\n

It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.\u00a0 Just as Rove suggested they would — just as in the summer of 2002, he\u00a0already knew<\/a>\u00a0they would — they acted to create a world in their image, a world they imagined controlling like no imperial power in history.\u00a0 Using that unchallengeable military, they launched an invasion that blew a hole through the oil heartlands of the Middle East.\u00a0 They took a major capital, Baghdad, while \u201cdecapitating<\/a>\u201d (as the phrase then went) the regime that was running Iraq and had, in a particularly brutal fashion, kept the lid on internecine tensions.<\/p>\n

They lacked nothing when it came to confidence.\u00a0 Among the first moves of L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul they appointed to run their occupation, was an order\u00a0demobilizing<\/a>\u00a0Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein\u2019s\u00a0350,000-man army<\/a>\u00a0and the rest of his military as well.\u00a0 Their plan: to replace it with a lightly armed border protection force — initially of 12,000 troops and in the end perhaps\u00a040,000<\/a>\u00a0— armed and trained by Washington.\u00a0 Given their vision of the world, it made total sense.\u00a0 Why would Iraq need more than that with the U.S. military hanging around for, well, ever, on a series of permanent bases the Pentagon’s contractors were building?\u00a0 What dangers could there be in the neighborhood with that kind of force on hand?\u00a0 Soon enough, it became clear that what they had really done was turn the Iraqi officer corps and most of the country\u2019s troops out onto unemployment lines, creating the basis for a militarily skilled Sunni insurgency.\u00a0 A brilliant start!<\/p>\n

Note that these days the news is filled with commentary on the lack of a functional Iraqi air force.\u00a0 That\u2019s why, in recent months, Prime Minister Maliki has been\u00a0calling on<\/a>\u00a0the Obama administration to send American air power back into the breach.\u00a0 Saddam Hussein did have an air force.\u00a0 Once it had been one of the biggest in the Middle East.\u00a0 The Bush administration, however, came to the conclusion that the new Iraqi military would have\u00a0no need<\/a>\u00a0for fighter planes, helicopters, or much of anything else, not when the U.S. Air Force would be in the neighborhood on\u00a0bases<\/a>\u00a0like Balad in Central Iraq.\u00a0 Who needed two air forces?<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Be Careful What You Wish For<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly accomplished,<\/strong>\u00a0and \u201cmajor combat operations\u201d ended in a flash — as George Bush so infamously\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0on May 1, 2003, after his\u00a0Top Gun landing<\/a>\u00a0on the deck of the USS\u00a0Abraham Lincoln<\/em>.\u00a0 No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie.\u00a0 After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz\u00a0pointed out<\/a>\u00a0at the time, Iraq \u201cfloats on a sea of oil,\u201d which meant that a \u201cliberated\u201d country could cover all \u201creconstruction\u201d costs without blinking.<\/p>\n

The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were building an American protectorate.\u00a0 So why wouldn’t it be a snap to carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy, dismantle the country\u2019s vast public sector (throwing another army of employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging from years of sanctions and ill-repair?\u00a0 In the end, Washington\u2019s Iraq would — so they believed — pump enough crude out of one of the greatest fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil.\u00a0 As the occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued \u201corders\u201d that\u00a0read<\/a>\u00a0as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.<\/p>\n

In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing —\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0— worked out as planned.\u00a0 You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred.\u00a0 For those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it\u2019s long been apparent that their war and occupation would cost the U.S., literally and figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove beyond calculating).\u00a0 More than\u00a0two trillion dollars<\/a>later — without figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come — Iraq is a catastrophe.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0$25 billion<\/a>\u00a0later, the last vestige of American Iraq, the security forces that, in the end, Washington built up to\u00a0massive proportions<\/a>, seem to be in a state of dissolution.\u00a0 Just over a week ago, faced with the advance of a reported\u00a0800<\/a>–1,300<\/a>\u00a0militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the opposition of tribal militias and local populations, close to\u00a050,000<\/a>army officers and troops\u00a0abandoned<\/a>\u00a0their American weaponry to Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadis, shed their uniforms by various roadsides, and fled.\u00a0 As a result, significant parts of Iraq, including Mosul, its second largest city, fell into the hands of Sunni insurgents,\u00a0some<\/a>\u00a0of aSaddamist coloration<\/a>, and a small army of jihadis evidently\u00a0funded<\/a>\u00a0by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, both U.S. allies.<\/p>\n

The arrogance of those occupation years should still take anyone\u2019s breath away. Bush and his top officials remade reality on an almost unimaginable scale and, as we study the region today, the results bear no relation to the world they imagined creating. \u00a0None whatsoever.\u00a0 On the other hand, there were two dreams they had that, after a fashion, did come into existence.<\/p>\n

Many Americans still remember the Bush administration\u2019s bogus pre-invasion\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0— complete with visions of mushroom clouds\u00a0rising<\/a>over American cities — that Saddam Hussein had a thriving nuclear program in Iraq.\u00a0 But who remembers that, as part of the justification for the invasion it had decided would be its destiny, the administration also\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0a \u201cmature and symbiotic\u201d relationship between Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq and al-Qaeda? \u00a0In other words, the invasion was to be justified in some fashion as a response to the attacks of 9\/11 (which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with).\u00a0 Who remembers that, the year after American troops took Baghdad, evidence of the nuclear program having gone down the toilet, Vice President Dick Cheney,backed<\/a>\u00a0by George W. Bush, doubled down on the al-Qaeda claim?<\/p>\n

“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to,”\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0the vice president on CNBC in June 2004. “The evidence is overwhelming.\u00a0 It goes back to the early ’90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.” Based on cherry-picked intelligence, such claims proved fraudulent, too, or as David Kay, the man assigned by the administration to hunt down that missing weaponry of mass destruction and those al-Qaeda links, put it politely, “evidence free.”\u00a0 By then, however, 57% of Americans had been convinced that there was indeed some significant relationship between Saddam\u2019s Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 20% believed that Saddam was linked directly to the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n

Be careful, as they say, what you wish for.\u00a0 More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries).\u00a0 A decade later, the evidence is in.\u00a0 Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration.\u00a0 Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa.<\/p>\n

Creating an Arc of Instability<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the period before and after the invasion of Iraq, top Bush officials and their neocon supporters spoke with relish about taming an area stretching from northern Africa through the Middle East and deep into Central Asia that they termed an \u201carc of instability.\u201d\u00a0 In a February 2006 address to the American Legion focused on his Global War on Terror, for instance, President Bush\u00a0typically said<\/a>, \u201cSlowly but surely, we’re helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we’ll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then that \u201carc,\u201d which in the period before 9\/11 had been reasonably stable, was already\u00a0aflame<\/a>.\u00a0 Today, it is ablaze.\u00a0 Almost 13 years after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the first bombing runs in Afghanistan, 11 years after a global antiwar protest went unheard and the invasion of Iraq was launched, and three years after Americans gathered in front of the White House to\u00a0cheer<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0death<\/a>\u00a0of Osama bin Laden, that arc has been destabilized in a stunning way.<\/p>\n

As things recently went from bad to worse in Iraq, jihadist militants in Pakistan\u00a0attacked<\/a>Karachi International Airport, an assault that stunned the country and suggested that the reach of the Pakistani Taliban was growing.\u00a0 At the same time, after a six-month pause, the Obama administration\u00a0resumed<\/a>\u00a0its CIA drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a deeply unpopular program that has been a significant destabilizing factor in its own right.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in Yemen, where the U.S. has for years been conducting a special operations and drone war against a growing al-Qaeda wannabe outfit, unknown militantsknocked out<\/a>\u00a0the electricity in Sanaa, the capital, for days.\u00a0 The Syrian bloodbath, of course, continues with estimates of\u00a0160,000<\/a>\u00a0or more deaths in that multi-sided conflict, while in Libya, now an essentially ungovernable and chaotic land of jihadist and other militias and ambitious generals, tensions and fighting increased.<\/p>\n

Think of this as George W. Bush\u2019s nightmare and Osama bin Laden\u2019s wet dream.\u00a0 On September 11, 2001, a relatively small, modestly funded organization with a knack for planning terror surprises every couple of years had a remarkable stroke of\u00a0televised luck<\/a>.\u00a0 From those falling towers, everything followed, thanks in large part to the acts of the fundamentalists of the Bush administration, whose top officials thought they had spotted their main chance, geopolitically speaking, in the carnage of the moment.<\/p>\n

Almost 13 years later, there is a jihadist proto-state, a fantasy caliphate, in the heart of the Middle East.\u00a0 Now a\u00a0dime a dozen<\/a>\u00a0in the region, jihadists of an al-Qaedan bent are armed to the teeth with\u00a0cast-off American weaponry<\/a>.\u00a0 In\u00a0northern Africa<\/a>, other jihadists are using weaponry from the former arsenals of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, looted in the aftermath of President Obama\u2019s can\u2019t-miss 2011 intervention in that country.\u00a0 The jihadists of ISIS now have hundreds of millions of dollars\u00a0stolen<\/a>\u00a0from the Mosul branch of the Iraqi central bank for funding and have advanced toward Baghdad.\u00a0 Even Osama bin Laden might not have assumed things would go quite so swimmingly.<\/p>\n

The Guns of Folly<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the wake of Mosul’s fall, ISIS advanced even more rapidly than the American army heading for Baghdad in the spring of 2003. \u00a0In some Sunni-dominated cities and towns, the takeovers were remarkably bloodless.\u00a0 In Baiji, with a power plant that supplies electricity to Baghdad and Iraq\u2019s\u00a0largest oil refinery<\/a>\u00a0(now\u00a0under attack<\/a>), the insurgents reportedly\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the police and asked them to leave town — and they complied.\u00a0 In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that the Kurds have long claimed as the natural capital for an independent Kurdistan, Iraqi troops quietly abandoned their weaponry and uniforms and left town, while armed Kurdish forces moved in, undoubtedly permanently.<\/p>\n

All in all, it\u2019s been a debacle the likes of which we\u2019ve seen only twice in our history.\u00a0 In China, when in 1949 Chiang Kai-shek\u2019s largely American armed and trained military disintegrated before the insurgent forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and a quarter-century later, when a purely American military creation, the South Vietnamese army, collapsed in the face of an offensive by North Vietnamese troops and local rebel forces.\u00a0 In each case, the resulting defeat was psychologically unnerving in the United States and led to bitter, exceedingly strange, and long-lasting debates about who \u201clost\u201d China and who \u201clost\u201d Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Early signs of an equally bizarre debate over the \u201closs\u201d of Iraq are already appearing here. \u00a0This should surprise no one, as the only thing left to pass around is blame.\u00a0 Senator John McCain, a fervent supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation, launched the most recent round of the\u00a0blame game<\/a>. He pinned fault for the onrushing events on the Obama administration\u2019s decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq in 2011 (thanks to an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration) without leaving a significant presence behind.\u00a0 Citing himself as if he were someone else, he said, \u201cLindsey Graham and John McCain were right.\u00a0 Our failure to leave forces in Iraq is why Senator Graham and I predicted this would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was typical of the Republican politicians who began promoting this line. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s a desperate situation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s moving quickly. It appears to me that the chickens are coming home to roost for our policy of not leaving anybody there to be a stabilizing force.\u201d \u00a0In a similar blast, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0editorial page\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cIn withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America’s strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so it goes.\u00a0 In this case, however, none of it may matter much.\u00a0 In a country visibly sick of our wars of this century in which even many elite figures find further intervention in Iraq distasteful, \u201cWho lost Iraq?\u201d may never gain the sort of traction the other two \u201clost\u201d debates did.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, however, the world of the Middle East is being turned upside down.\u00a0 Take the example of Iran.\u00a0 Once upon a time, Iraq was thought to be just a way station.\u00a0 As neocons of that moment liked to\u00a0quip<\/a>, \u201cEveryone wants to go to Baghdad.\u00a0 Real men want to go to Tehran.\u201d\u00a0 As it happened, the neighborhood around Baghdad quickly grew so ugly and the Bush administration soon found itself so bogged down in unwinnable minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that it never put the U.S. military on that road to Tehran.<\/p>\n

Today, the Iranians, it seems, are riding to Washington\u2019s rescue in Iraq.\u00a0 It’s already\u00a0rumored<\/a>that they may be sending, or considering sending, elements of the Republican Guard in to protect Baghdad.\u00a0 As a result, the U.S. finds itself in a tacit alliance with Iran in Iraq, while still in opposition to it in Syria.\u00a0 At the same time, it’s still allied with Saudi Arabia in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while facing the disastrous fruits of Saudi funding of the\u00a0brutal<\/a>newborn jihadi state at least temporarily coming into existence in the Sunni borderlands of Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

The Middle Eastern system as once known has, with the singular exception of Israel, largely evaporated and where it was, there is now increasingly chaos.\u00a0 In all likelihood, it will only get worse.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u201d may not have \u201clost\u201d Iraq, but can there be any question that Washington lost in Iraq?\u00a0 American goals in the region went down in flames in a fashion so spectacular, so ignominious, that today nothing is left of them.\u00a0 To the question, \u201cWho won Iraq?\u201d there may be no answer at all, or perhaps just the grim response: no one.\u00a0 In the end, Iraqis will surely be the losers, big time, as Syrians are just across the now nonexistent border between what until recently were two countries.<\/p>\n

As for the future Washington has on offer, the Obama administration is, it seems,\u00a0considering<\/a>responding to the crisis in Iraq in the\u00a0only way<\/a>\u00a0it knows how: with\u00a0bombs<\/a>, cruise missiles, and drones.\u00a0 The geopolitical dreams of the Bush era are buried somewhere deep in the rubble of Iraq, while the present White House has neither visionaries nor global dreams, grandiose or otherwise.\u00a0 There are only managers and bureaucrats desperately trying to handle an uncooperative planet.\u00a0 The question that remains is: Will they or won\u2019t they send American air power back into Iraq?\u00a0 Will they or won\u2019t they, that is, loose the guns of folly and so quite predictably destabilize a terrible situation further?<\/p>\n

In the meantime, a small footnote to future history: given what we\u2019ve just seen, it might be worth taking with a grain of salt the\u00a0news<\/a>\u00a0out of Afghanistan about the\u00a0increasingly<\/a>\u00a0impressiveabilities<\/a>\u00a0of the Afghan security forces, another gigantic crew set up, funded, trained, and armed by the U.S. military (and associated private contractors).\u00a0 After all, haven\u2019t we heard that somewhere before?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch click here for original article As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002.\u00a0 At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with \u201ca senior advisor\u201d to President […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/jonessoldiers.jpg?fit=140%2C250&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3214,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212\/revisions\/3214"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}