The Vision Thing

Tom Engelhardt at Mother Jones takes a good look at the Iraq War debacle and pleads Last One to Leave, Please Turn On the Lights:

Recently, our top commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., was brought back to the United States, officially to consult with George Bush on what the President still calls "our strategy for victory." Along with retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Centcom Commander Gen. John Abizaid, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Casey then testified before Congress on military "progress" in Iraq. As Rumsfeld confidently told the Armed Services Committee, "Every single week that goes by, the number of [Iraqi] security forces goes up, the total.'' In a statement from the White House Rose Garden after meeting with his generals, the President made the same point: "The growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping our coalition address a challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war. And General Casey discussed this with us in the Oval Office? Now, the increasing number of more capable Iraqi troops has allowed us to better hold on to the cities we have taken from the terrorists? We're on the offense. We have a plan to win."

Before Congress, however, Casey painted a rather different picture of the Iraqi national-army-that-isn't. In fact, on a crucial point, his testimony bore little relation to the assessments that either George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld claimed they had heard. Last June, the Pentagon informed Congress that three Iraqi battalions were finally at "Level 1" of preparedness -- that is, "fully trained, equipped, and capable of operating independently" of U.S. forces. On Thursday, Casey lowered this estimate to one battalion (evidently not even one of the previous three), calling it a "step backward." In other words, of the 100-plus battalions in the American-created Iraqi army, only one -- perhaps 1,000 soldiers -- is capable of heading off on its own to fight, out of sight of its American protectors. Donald Rumsfeld has often talked about the "metrics" of success. Well, here's perhaps the most significant metric we have on the Iraqi military -- the essence of what passes for a Bush administration plan for the pacification of Iraq -- and it speaks the world.

When queried on this dismal statistic, after at least a year of an intensive American focus on "standing up" the Iraqi army, the general said defensively, "It's not going to be like throwing a switch, where all of a sudden, one day, the Iraqis are in charge." This was perhaps an ill-chosen image in a country in which the Bush administration and its crony corporations have been unable to deliver electricity with any regularity to the inhabitants of that country. (During a blistering summer, parts of the capital got less than eight hours of electricity a day.)

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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?

... If you set aside, for a moment, what is believed in, it obviously helps to believe in something if you plan to "stand up" and fight. At the most basic level in our age, it helps if you feel your country has been violated and occupied by foreigners. In the last two centuries, no emotion has mobilized more people in arms than the one we call "nationalism" when other people take up arms and "patriotism" when we do so. Call it love of country. Add religion to that -- or the belief that your country or region has been taken over by unbelievers -- and you have a powerful combination. The issue here is not years of training, it's motivation. And our Iraqis have next to none...

Based on the evidence, what favor exactly have we been doing the Iraqis these last two disastrous years by occupying their country?