The Surge and American Military Triumphalism
Right-wing pundit Michael Barone has published a column on the surge in Iraq that may be the clearest expression so far of the American triumphalism over the U.S. military and Iraq that emerged in 2007. The current popularity of that idea reflects the degree to which the apologists for war, having been discredited earlier on Iraq, are now on the offensive.
Barone's theme is he "lessons to be learned" from what he calls the "dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq". The first lesson, he suggests, is that "just about no mission is impossible for the United States military". A year ago, he writes, everyone thought that "containing the violence in Iraq was impossible", but not, "we have seen it done".
Intoxicated by the hosannahs bestowed on Gen. David Petreaus's strategy, Barone pushes the military triumphalist creed to a new level. He goes so far as to assert the inevitability of American military triumph, regardless of the circumstances of any war. Barone says it's simply a matter of finding the right general with the right strategy. He points to the examples of George Washington at Yorktown, Lincoln and the civil war and Roosevelt and World War II.
And then there was Vietnam. Many Americans have been under the impression that the United States did not prevail in Vietnam, mainly because a powerful nationalist movement had mobilized Vietnamese against foreign domination since the end of the World War II. For Barone and true believers in the efficacy of American military power, however, the United States actually won the Vietnam War, and it was all because of the brilliant strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams. The only reason they can't celebrate that victory fully, Barone insists, is that Congress refused to "allow the aid the United States had promised".
That now familiar explanation of why the American defeat in Vietnam was actually a victory may be the most astonishing feat of rewriting history ever accomplished by the apologists for a criminal war. Let's just recapitulate briefly what actually happened: Nixon and Kissinger had begun withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam beginning in 1969. The North Vietnamese were not stupid, and they withdraw most of their troops from South Vietnam during 1970 and 1971 while that U.S. withdrawal was proceeding to reduce their losses. That relative North Vietnamese stand-down in the war allowed the United States and the Saigon regime to gain control over large areas of South Vietnam for the first time since 1960. The U.S. military and apologists for the war claimed that it was all because Abrams had followed such a brilliant strategy.
Then North Vietnam struck across the demilitarized zone in spring 1972, undoing most of that control and forcing Nixon and Kissinger to negotiate the Paris Agreement of January 1973. Two years later, the Saigon regime simply crumbled in the face of a second North Vietnamese offensive across the DMZ, despite the fact that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam had more assistance from the United States than Hanoi had from its Communist allies. That's why the "stab in the back" myth had to be invented by those who political fortunes were tied to the fortunes of the U.S. war.
That brings us to the alleged "dazzling success" of the surge in Iraq. Just as the triumphalist narrative on Vietnam turns a real defeat into an imagined victory, the narrative now being constructed by Barone and others on Iraq tries to make a pointless military occupation that cannot prevail in the end into a glorious triumph of U.S. military power.
Again, let's recapitulate. In 2003 U.S. military forces destroyed the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein and installed a Shiite regime in its stead. The Sunnis predictably launched a military resistance, and the U.S. military began its own war against Sunni insurgents. The presence of a U.S . military occupation force in an Islamic country with some of Islam's holiest sites predictably incited much greater popular support among Sunnis, both within Iraq and in neighboring Sunni countries, for jihadi extremists aligned with al Qaeda.
Thus al Qaeda, which had practically no support in Iraq in 2003, quickly became a major force in 2003 and 2004. By 2005, however, the tensions between al Qaeda and the predominantly Baathist nationalist Sunni insurgents had reached the point of open warfare. That warfare had become even more violent during 2006. The main non-al Qaeda Sunni resistance groups tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the United States in 2005-2006, but Bush refused.
By 2007, however, the Bush administration had changed sides in Iraq. It was more concerned with Shiite forces they associated with Iran than with the Sunni resistance. The United States finally began allowing them to police their own cities - something the Sunnis themselves had been proposing since 2005 but which Bush had refused to approve. The nationalist Sunnis have shown they were perfectly capable of taking care of al Qaeda themselves if the United States would only stop attacking them and get out of the way, which is what they had been saying all along.
However the problem for the U.S. military is now Shiite resistance to the occupation in the form of the Mahdi Army. It is part guerrilla army and part government security force, and it is far larger than the Sunni armed resistance was when the U.S. military admitted that it could gain control over it. For all the brave talk by the Bush administration about bottom-up reconciliation, which suggests that end of resistance is coming, the Shiite struggle against the occupation led by Moqtada al-Sadr is still in an early phase of its development.
The triumphalist vision embraced by Barone and large segments of the American political elite and news media thus depends on an understanding of the conflict that omits all the facts that are inconvenient. Unfortunately for the triumphalists, those happen to be the facts that are most central to the problem.
The truth that the triumphalists can never accept is that, once a large part of the population is mobilized to oppose U.S. domination, U.S. military power becomes the main problem rather than part of the solution. Ironically, there is reason to believe that, after nearly five years of war in Iraq, the U.S. military leadership - including Petraeus himself - now understand that reality. It is the armchair triumphalists like Michael Barone who believe that it is really American military power that is winning in Iraq.
Unfortunately Barone has plenty of company in what Ari Berman once called "the strategic class".
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I believe this truce is the calm before the next storm. Almost daily there are still random explosions in Iraq that kill large numbers. Al-Sadr is trying to climb the religious hierarchy to gain more influence than he has now. The Mahdi army will always be violently anti-American. Corruption is out of control in Iraq. A generation of children has been damaged emotionally given the constant, unpredictable violence. And the longer we stay, the less the Iraqis feel confident to run their own affairs. A colonial mentality takes grip and initiative is lost by the people, which itself is damaging. Overall, the violence will continue. Iran has been and will continue to be the ultimate beneficiary of our policies.
A favorite ploy, take a few moments of success and extrapolate it into representing eternity, eternal success in Iraq in this case. It's not like Barone has inside information coming from Iraq's, it's all B.S., made up, concocted without any facts.It's an insult to their readers, abuse, arrogance for gullible, ignorant, stupid["you can't fix stupid"] fools who don't even know they are being demeaned, abused and insulted by the writer.
We keep hearing what a success the surge has been but not much about '07 having the most casualties of any year yet. By this logic the more people and soldiers killed and wounded the more successful the occupation will be. Neocon mythmatics.
This war cannot continue strictly on a monetary basis. Bin Laden has achieved his objective. He will bankrupt us and the American Empire will collapse on its own.
I think we need to define what victory is.. that has been the problem in Iraq from day 1. Just what is victory? Great armies and Empires have won wars, but lost in the battle for enduring peace.
Can the US destroy foreign armies? yes, can they occupy a foreign country and secure peace? no. The Romans, British, Germans, French have all showed that an occupying force will suffer long term.
It we truly believed that a country like Iraq was a real threat to our nation, then by all means, invade and destroy.. but to hang around afterward and try to rebuild and secure, that was just plain stupid.
The surge did not work!!!
People are still dying- frankly the 'terrorists' have even allowed some WOMEN to join their clubhouse of suicide bombers. Bush may have brought women's rights to the Middle East!
The real problem lies in the deep seeded mindsets of the people in the Middle East. they are still killing each other over crap written in a book millenia ago.
Following the drastic rise in violence coming from the ME in the '70's I studied Soc and Anthro in College. I have exhausted all logical reasons for the Madness in the Region (economic oppression- then they need to get their leaders to kick down some of the oil revenue they've been pocketing. hate Corp's -kick them out, stop doing business..)
I'm sick of those three books and the little patch of sand. THEY'VE TERRORIZED US ALL LONG ENOUGH! The Holy Rollers seem to enjoy a good book burning and some satilite guided missils- let's give them a show! Tell everyone to get the hell out of Jeruselum (literally the Mecca of Heretical actions)- and Light the place up.
Just like the mother who takes the toy away to stop the kids from fighting over it. Now you got something to cry about ah? People are starving to death, dying horrid deaths, getting killed going to school or the market....and you have the audacity to be fighting (killing) for words in books and brick & mortar. Bullshit!
I realize I'm beating a dead horse here, but what exactly does triumph mean in the war against Iraq?
`
it ain't over 'til it's over. . .
to keep the lid on the Iraq war,
the US will have to keep 150K troops there for 150 years.
Can't be done, so after we pull out,
Iraq will partition itself, and we will have
to buy the oil from non-US oil companies.
Total cost: $$trillions & a million plus human causualties.
Long live the Bush legacy.
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No, no, no, we lost in vietnam and iraq cause those damn lazy troops keep dying! If they would just get up, we'd be fine, and winning, and we wouldn't have those retnetion issues we've got now!
They are going to do whatever they can to pin blame elsewhere, and that includes sugar-coating the whole bloody affair. Military force just doesn't work in the long run, but so much money flows out; who would want to end that kind of paycheck? Well, we would. The people not directly profiting from defense contracts who don't like war and who think it is not only counterproductive, but just plain passe.
Barone is ignorant of US military history. The problem for the military isn't that it can't win wars. They have clearly demonstrated that if permitted to develop the correct strategy and tactics, there are few wars they couldn't win. The question then becomes at what cost. Might we have won in Korea if Truman permitted MacArthur to launch nuclear strikes against China and if necessary Russia? In 1959, General LeMay proposed a first strike on USSR with the anticipated loss of some 250,000,000 people in the Northern Hemisphere: He wasn't a believer in MAD and thought we'd win such an exchange...might we have won? In Vietnam, we destroyed three countries resulting in the deaths of over 2,000,000 people...and for what purpose? And now Iraq...tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands dead and a nation in complete ruin...why?
I think Barone misses the point completely: We shouldn't be worried whether our military can win wars. We need to think about whether war is worth fighting; is the cost of war worth the potential gain: It usually isn't.
Barone is an ahistorical revisionist and should be ignored like the other pundits who think as he does. If I may quote Studs Terkel: "America Victorious has been our country's postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam. It begins at our dawn's early light and ends with the twilight's last gleaming. It is as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus."
The problem for the US military is they are frequently employed by political leaders in lieu of foreign policy especially when America might "lose face.". If we don't wise up to the realities of the world, we might end up on the ash heap of great powers along with Rome and the British Empire. Anyone interested in reading more of Engelhardt, he wrote "The End of Victory Culture." I recommend this book.
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