A double on Iraq from AT
Jim Lobe has been writing on Iraq for Asia Times pretty regularly from the beginning. Michael Schwartz — who I met at Suny-SB — less often, but imho with more depth.
The following two pieces are part of an alternative account to the silly surge-is-working drivel being peddled by politicos and infotainment media. Lobe’s, as always, shares many assumptions with the Empire; but his description of the dilemma facing Gates is accurate in many respects. Both pieces deserve broad distribution.
In its first four years, the Iraq war created three overlapping waves of refugees and IDPs.
It all began with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which the George W Bush administration set up inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and, in May 2003, placed under the control of L Paul Bremer. The CPA immediately began dismantling Iraq’s state apparatus. Thousands of Ba’athist party bureaucrats were purged from the government; tens of thousands of workers were laid off from shuttered, state-owned industries; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military personnel were dismissed from Saddam Hussein’s dismantled military.
Their numbers soon multiplied as the ripple effect of …
…On the other hand, there’s the deep blue sea in the rapidly growing conviction among top military officers and the national security establishment in general that US ground forces are already dangerously overstretched and that retaining as many as 130,000 troops in Iraq is simply not sustainable for any appreciable length of time.
Indeed, those top military officers, notably the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and Army Chief General George Casey, have become increasingly vocal in…
peggy:
Stan, once you said that all the troops should be taken out of Iraq now. And I agree with you but read a plausible article sometime back that removing the troops in such a way as to minimize loss of life among those troops is not necessarily easy, as troops travelling in a line on the road would be an easy target. So, supposing you were commander-in-chief, or the general ordered to remove all US troops from Iraq, how would you do it in such a way as to minimize loss of life among the retreating troops?
12 February 2008, 8:57 pmStan:
Declare intent and a unilateral ceasefire. Open discussions for coordination immediately with major militias who enjoy local popular support. Prepare Kuwait with transient tent city for a BIG influx of troops and vehicles next to the airport.
Throw out the embedded press (they will turn it into a circus of perceived US humiliation).
Orders to leave everything non-essential. Prepare to destroy-in-place lethal armaments that are not carried. Begin pre-positioning convoy support.
Set up tactical air support corridors from base to base leading south, and run serial convoys with massive force (base to base) to Kuwait, reprovisioning at each base from pre-positioned logistical stores.
Vehicles that break down for more than two hours would be destroyed-in-place with thermite (an incendiary that melts the engines).
Airlift the remaining troops from the bases into Kuwait. Airlift all from Kuwait to the US. Establish airlift security at each base with whichever militia enjoys the most local popular support.
Whole process: one month to get into Kuwait, a couple more to complete the redeployment out of Kuwait.
13 February 2008, 6:43 amStan:
Despite some of the ignorant nattering about “smart” vs “dumb”, this Slate article demonstrates what worries the Generals. Not only are they forced to recruit among the less educated, they are now waiving past criminal records to bring more bodies on board. There is gang graffitti in Baghdad. This is what it looks like as the empire begins to pull itself down in chaos.
The body count was higher in Vietnam (so far), but the long-term consequences of the Iraq occupation will be seen by history as far more significant. And meanwhile, as Mark Jones once said, “The wolves of deflation are howling around the campfire.”
13 February 2008, 7:25 amKarl:
Sorry but where does one propose topics for the site? I definitely want to get to talking about Valentines day, and the beautifully blatant and unabashedly misogynistically patriarchal JC Penny commercials being shown on the east coast (wherein TV ad shows a diamond pendant swinging slowly back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, while a male voiceover says “I’m the greatest husband in the world. You love me soo much. etc”). It’s like having Hoffman lenses on (They Live reference -if you havent seen the film, do so ASAP
) or something.
Karl
13 February 2008, 2:36 pmpeggy:
Thanks, Stan. I knew you would have a good answer to my question, which is why I asked it of you. Now all we need is a really intelligent commander-in-chief, who sees the connections you see, who sees the need for the US to withdraw quickly from Iraq, and who is not too tied to corporate interests to push this withdrawal through.
14 February 2008, 4:52 amBruce F:
To Karl: I was just passing through and your comment caught my eye. I don’t know what Stan has to say about V-day, but Twisty Faster nails it here.
14 February 2008, 1:51 pmDeAnander:
TV ad shows a diamond pendant swinging slowly back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch,
hardly subtle, eh.
it’s incredible to me that millions of people can sit in front of their TVs and see this stuff w/o putting a brick through the screen.
14 February 2008, 3:18 pmStan:
For Valentines, we went whole hog. Sherry brought me home a gallon of milk. I made her a pan of chile con carne.
14 February 2008, 6:42 pmBench:
Good answer to a good question, Stan. But I wonder, what about the contractors? Do they travel with the military on its way out or are they on their own? I have heard the large number of contractors in Iraq used as a reason why we can’t begin immediately withdrawing the military. I don’t suppose anyone would want to, ahem, let the market decide.
14 February 2008, 7:30 pmeoinmonkey:
Nothing says “I love you” like spicy food, and that is a fact.
15 February 2008, 10:24 ameoinmonkey:
I was just reading this week that part of the reason historians credit with the collapse/destruction of the Roman empires was a growing refusal of Roman citizens of the educated or well-off classes to serve in the military- mainly because it was uncomfortable and poorly rewarded. This left their ongoing wars of conquest and consolidation increasingly in the hands of smaller and smaller legions of less motivated/professional troops, and (at best) untrustworthy proxies fighting for cash and booty. That rang some bells.
15 February 2008, 10:35 amMichael Anderson:
Read Kaplan’s Slate article, and one thing struck me, that generally seems to go unspoken in a lot of neo-con literature…a “smarter” soldier, I.E. one who scores in the higher percentiles and/or graduates from High School or College, is better able to perhaps reason out that the situation over there (and here in the economy) is untenable and just plain wrong. When times were relatively more peaceful, that is, when a majority of American troops were involved in mostly peaceful deployments, like to Europe and places where war was not being openly waged, this was not an issue, and a soldier (or officer) could think of his “job” instead of killing brown people for their oil. Now that the U.S. is (openly) at war with a lot of the world, these men (and potential recruits) find the rationale of a Fascist Corporatist Empire openly staring them in the face, and at a terrible contradiction to life here in the Magic Kingdom.
I would think that gang members would have the necessary mindset to kill “the other” according to turf rules.
From personal experience, I resisted the draft in ’72 and got a 4-F (legit and according to protocol), because my number was 24 in the 1968 lottery…I wasn’t going to Vietnam, period, because the contradictions of what was even then an Empire versus life growing up in a small timber town in Oregon were pretty apparent. Prediction is a dangerous thing, but…I think there will be another draft soon, perhaps after the Dems are elected in ’08; since a Democrat proposed the present legislation that is tabled in committee in Congress in the first place, with accompanying patriotic media blitz to make it legitimate; and without the loopholes that we knew in the day. This may well bring the whole thing down. I hope I’m wrong and some more equitable solution will happen, but I ain’t bettin’ on it.
15 February 2008, 2:38 pm