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Rout Proves Anti-War Point |
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by David Olive
(No verified email address) |
13 Apr 2003
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Not since Vietnam has mendacity so thoroughly characterized both the goals and methods of U.S. foreign policy. |
Sometimes the United States and its allies are wrong, and the rest of the world is right.
The opponents of war in Iraq France, Germany, Russia, China, Canada, Mexico, the Arab nations and the many others were vindicated last week when Baghdad fell just 21 days after the U.S.-led invasion began.
The anti-war argument had always been that Saddam Hussein posed no significant threat to the U.S. or its neighbors because Iraq's military power was vastly degraded after Saddam's humiliation in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent dozen years of punitive United Nations-imposed sanctions.
And that any nuclear, chemical and biological weapons Iraq might still possess could be destroyed through the U.N. inspection process without resorting to a war that has cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis.
With an invasion force the U.S. itself now boasts was of relatively minimal strength, Saddam's regime was easily toppled. On that point, the neo-con war hawks were correct. Iraq was poised to fall like a house of cards.
By the second week of the conflict, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying he felt embarrassed by the Iraqis' poor fighting skills or unwillingness to fight at all.
As the enormity of the rout was clear early last week, the Pentagon was dismissing the Iraqi forces as "a paper army."
Pushed to the wall, the Iraqi regime did not try to blunt the enemy advance by dipping into its vaunted stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction" or perhaps that, too, was a paper inventory.
Of course, the outcome of this dubious contest between the world's lone superpower and a puny, impoverished adversary with no allies was never in doubt. The U.S. and its British ally were taking on an enemy that had not been able to obtain spare parts for its tanks for the past decade and proved unable to get its fighter jets airborne.
Still, Americans need to know they got their money's worth from this unprecedented adventure, which will cost U.S. taxpayers already suffering from a weak economy at least $200 billion (all figures U.S.) in war expenses and anticipated spending on Iraqi reconstruction.
And both Americans and future "rogue states" targeted by the Bush administration for discipline also need to know that the United States can effortlessly project its power across the globe. Hence last week's triumphalism by Bush officials.
"Saddam Hussein is now taking his place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators," said Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary.
Equating the regional bully Saddam with the savage imperialism of Hitler, who brought about the death of more than 40 million people, is dime-store sophistry. But it's essential in the bid to approximate Rumsfeld's genius as a military strategist with that of William Tecumseh Sherman or Dwight Eisenhower.
It's not that Rumsfeld's ego needs the boost. In exaggerating both the monstrosity of Saddam and the sagacity of his conqueror, Rumsfeld's civilian defense planners seek to justify regime change and validate their Iraq strategy of rapid, lightly armed strikes at an enemy.
Since the specter of serial regime change is new, it is imperative, too, that Americans be comforted in knowing that "Rummy" has devised a new method of warfare for achieving it. Never mind that blitzkrieg wasn't new even when Hitler used it.
And that hubris from their early success with it led both Hitler and Douglas MacArthur to disaster in Russia and Korea, respectively.
Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice-president, also heaped praise on the new Rumsfeld doctrine last week, approvingly quoting historian Victor Davis Hanson's gushing tribute to the early phases of the Iraq campaign:
"By any standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton's romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties."
That is pure bunk.
We'll never know how "light" the casualties were. For, as the New York Times reported last week, "powerful munitions used by American and British forces probably left hundreds or thousands of battlefield victims pulverized, burned or buried in rubble."
The Bush administration wants it known that it has achieved battlefield wizardry that can be safely deployed in future. But what the U.S. forces did in Iraq against a poorly trained, poorly motivated enemy on favorable terrain does not begin to compare with the 38 days it took the Wehrmacht to bring the Low Countries and France, one of the world's great military powers, under Nazi subjugation in the spring of 1940.
Against fierce resistance in 1944, U.S. Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army swept roughly 900 kilometers across northern France in two weeks more than twice the distance traversed by U.S. forces between Kuwait and Baghdad. By war's end, Patton had inflicted 1.4 million casualties on the enemy.
But bold nonsense is to be expected of a Bush administration whose foreign policy has been marked by deception. This dates from its success in winning congressional approval for war in Iraq by grossly inflating the threat posed by Saddam and later its failure to win pro-war votes on the U.N. Security Council with documents about alleged Iraqi nuclear plans that were revealed as forgeries.
Not since Vietnam has mendacity so thoroughly characterized both the goals and methods of U.S. foreign policy.
Feigning diplomacy, the U.S. built up its forces in the Persian Gulf. Declaring itself committed first to the objective of Mideast security, then of destruction of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction," then of Saddam's ouster and finally of "liberating" a long-oppressed people, the Bush administration is only now revealed to be in apparent pursuit of something it dares not formally promulgate the imposition of democracy, Western-style capitalism and a benign regard for Israel throughout the region.
Having come this far by prevarication, administration officials cannot now extricate themselves from their deceptions, indeed, self-deceptions.
Wedded of necessity to the concept of ad hoc coalitions as an alternative to the constraints of the U.N. and NATO, the Pentagon has come to believe what it says about its latest "coalition of the willing" that it is one of the largest, if not the largest, such coalition in history.
Former U.S. allies can react only with disbelief at such revisionism.
How soon the U.S. forgets the significant military contributions by Europe, Pakistan, Egypt, Canada and others to the Persian Gulf War, and the more genuine multinationalism of the coalition to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban only a year and a half ago.
The prime minister of Solomon Islands, one of many Pacific microdots hastily recruited into the coalition of the willing by the U.S. State Department, was asked about his role in the Iraqi conflict. He could only express surprise. He was, he said, "completely unaware" of his country's involvement in Iraq.
Even the once-dovish Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, now in penance after U.S. failure to achieve the Security Council's blessing for war in Iraq, has begun to lose his grip on the truth.
Irritated by a German TV interviewer, Powell snapped that the U.S. would not, as many expect, abandon post-war Iraq to its own devices.
"And guess who will be the major contributor, who will pay the most money to help the Iraqi people to get back on their feet?" Powell said. "It will be the United States, as always."
As always? As chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Gulf War, Powell would very well know that America's allies paid $53 billion of the $63 billion cost of that war.
That about two-thirds of humanitarian and reconstruction work in the developing world is paid for by Europeans.
That European and Canadian forces, among others, cleaned up after the Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Of the U.S. record in post-war Afghanistan, already in chaos as insurgent Taliban gangs terrorize civilians and aid workers, Powell said: "We are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We're very proud of it. It's been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again and again."
That claim is preposterous. After the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. returned Kuwait to its despotic emirs and left Saddam to murder thousands of dissidents.
In the aftermath of 1990s U.S. interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan, local autocrats and warlords lost no time re-imposing their violent rule.
In a must-read analysis of Bush war strategy in the current Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall writes that the administration's "preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda impossible not to pursue .... Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con."
On the economic front, the audacious Bush's tax cuts for the rich have swollen the deficit, which becomes the justification for slashing social programs including a Bush-endorsed cut in veterans-affairs spending by $15 billion over the next decade. (Yes, at a time like this.)
On the war front, it means explaining that a buildup of military force in the Gulf is the only means of pressuring Saddam to comply with U.N. sanctions.
It means letting unofficial spokesmen like Henry Kissinger suggest that those forces must be unleashed for combat in Iraq because "if the United States marches 200,000 troops into the region and then marches them back out ... the credibility of American power ... will be gravely, perhaps irreparably impaired."
And it means orchestrating dire warnings from unnamed Pentagon sources that if an Iraqi assault didn't commence soon, it would bog down in seasonal sandstorms. (It was darkly amusing to watch one U.S. commander after another on CNN these past three weeks insisting that weather conditions had not, after all and never would stall the progress of an Abrams tank column for more than an afternoon.)
It is that cumulative duplicity, much of it almost comically transparent, that baffled and finally alienated so many world leaders over the past months.
These included Jacques Chirac, the most pro-American French president of modern times, who once operated a forklift at a Budweiser plant in St. Louis and was the first head of state to pay an official visit to the Bush White House.
That France had commercial interests in Saddam's Iraq might have had less to do with Chirac's war skepticism than his experience as a combat veteran in the Algerian desert.
For Chirac and his peers, so little of what came out of the Bush administration made any sense.
And they hardly grasp it now.
The neo-con theory behind the Iraq campaign is that a democratized Middle East will be a safer place, because democracies don't make unprovoked attacks on other countries.
It's an attractive idea. But when the world's most powerful democracy launched its invasion of Iraq last month, that theory failed its first test.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
http://www.thestar.com/ |
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America Targeted 14,000 Sites. So Where Are The Weapons Of Mass Destruction? |
by Andrew Gumbel
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Apr 2003
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They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat the rank-and-file troops feared most.
And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction those weapons that President Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States have still to be identified.
Many influential people disarmament experts, present and former United Nations arms inspectors, our own Robin Cook have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all.
The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the US and Britain. Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the United Nations.
The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumor, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two.
It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?
As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread skepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons.
Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harbored, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a "grave and gathering" threat: precisely zero.
Much of what has been unearthed points to something we knew about all along: the weapons programs that Iraq ran before the 1991 Gulf War, before sanctions, before regular US and British bombing raids in the no-fly zones and before the UN weapons inspection regime that ran from 1991 to 1998.
US troops have discovered a few suspect barrels here, a sample bottle of nerve agent there, stacks of chemical suits and some drugs typically used to counteract the effects of a chemical attack, such as atropine and 2-pam chloride. According to many military experts, these finds suggest the vestiges of a weapons program that has been dismantled, not one that is up and running. The US government argues that the weapons have been deliberately dispersed and hidden a claim that would have more merit if there were any evidence of where the materials might have gone.
In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people as if liberation, not disarmament, had been the project all along.
The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council.
A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.
Nonsense, say the disarmament experts. "It's clear there wasn't much," said Professor Wright, "otherwise they would have run into something by now. After all, they've taken Baghdad." Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector who spent four months badgering the United States and Britain in vain for reliable intelligence information about the whereabouts of lethal weapons, now says he believes the war was planned on entirely different criteria, well before his inspection teams went back into Iraq in December.
"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [weapons]. I think they now believe less in that possibility," he told the Spanish daily El Pais. "You ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try to show that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger."
Anxious to find a "smoking gun", a team of US disarmament experts has been set up to question Iraqis involved in weapons programs, while others comb sites and analyze samples in the field using mobile labs.
The move has alarmed the weapons inspectors at the UN, where Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, pointedly said last week: "I think they are the ones with the mandate to disarm Iraq, and when the situation permits they should go back to resume their work."
The US team has attempted to lure some of the inspectors, who are recognized as the sole legitimate international authority on Iraq's weapons programs
The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbors and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.
Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.
But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock's films a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.
If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://www.independent.co.uk/ |
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