Beyond Disaster
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070806_beyond_disaster/
Posted on Aug 6, 2007
By Chris Hedges

The war in Iraq is about to get worse—much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books. It will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground. There are 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible. Iraq is in a state of anarchy. The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions. But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this. Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News? They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States—people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation. The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool—all ensured a swift descent into chaos. But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police.

Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia. Iraq has oil—lots of it. It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water. And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states. The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive. But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave. A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries. The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed. The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world. Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias. This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq. No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die. And it is our fault.

The neoconservatives—and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons’ useful idiots when it comes to Iran—have learned nothing. They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes. Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict. Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war—especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do. There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal “war of aggression.”

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us. It has scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states. It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation. This is what George W. Bush and all those “reluctant hawks” who supported him have bequeathed us.

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper’s team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” His latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winning physicist, the Pauli in the Pauli Exclusion Principle, as the tale is told, once succinctly reviewed a young physicist’s paper, saying sadly, “That’s not right; it’s not even wrong.” I heard a soundbyte of O’Hanlon on NPR last week, and those three words said themselves to me with my own mouth. Not even wrong. Almost every statement that comes out of Bush and his overt or covert defender’s mouths is so dumb and delusional that their assertions (pre-programed or otherwise) do not even rise to the level of being wrong. Not falsifiable, as Karl Popper put it; not susceptible to proof, because the proposition has no testable hypothesis. The Decider doesn’t have a plan or a goal, much less a strategy, he has articles of faith so slippery that they can explain any fact and elude any test.

People speak of framing the debate on the war; that we must change the frame, that is to say, we must alter the rhetoric and metaphors of political discourse in our favor, ala George Lakoff. That’s OK as far as it goes. We are all soldiers on the field of memes. But a frame is just a frame; it may largely and elaborately distract from, subtly direct attention to a particular aspect of, or complement the essence of the picture; but the picture is still the same picture no matter what the frame. It’s the same picture if it has no frame at all. And the picture we’re looking at is ugly. It’s so ugly people can’t bear it. We can’t face our shame. No one is putting a frame on this picture, we’re all putting a good coat of whitewash on the picture so we don’t have to look at it. We don’t want to look in the mirror and see ourselves as we truly are. George Bush, like Tom Sawyer, is standing by and collecting our treasures one by one, as we each take our turn with the sopping brush.

Every day I listen to NPR and the BBC World Service. I read the blogs, sometimes even WaPo or other MSM. If I pinched myself every time I thought, “I can’t believe that Bush is President, it just can’t be this bad,” I’d be covered with so many welts I could get a job exhibiting myself at a freakshow as “The Pincher.” I feel like I am living in some alternate reality, but that hypothesis is not testable.

We already got us right where they want us. Some Republican or other, I can’t recall who, had the absolute, fatuous arrogance to assert that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel, come September. The conventional riposte is, “Yeah, and it’s the headlight of an oncoming train.” There is no light. We’re groping in black void, hoping to find a wall, and to feel our way to the opening of a tunnel. The tunnel has already left the station.

Follow the tropes.

We have our ass in a crack in Iraq, and Dead Eye Dick keeps offering Iran the other cheek. The longer we stay, the bigger chunk we leave behind. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda has the Enemas-R-Us franchise. In all seriousness, folks, what we are facing away from is the Crack of Doom. It is too late to do our duty and get off the pot. The situation calls for a crowbar, not a plunger. Congress has handed the Plumber-in-Chief a new plunger; he’s already got a fan.

Open a frame shop, invest in Sherwin Williams, pray to the murderous God of Love, if conscience permits; we, as individuals, as a people, as a nation, will not make this right because we can’t even make it to wrong.

However, the poll numbers do not reflect the recent bad news coming out of Iraq- the unaccountable status of 30% of all weapons sent by the US to arm the Iraqi army, and the defection of 10 Parliament members from Maliki’s government.

Yup, this shows that about 10% of the American population still fall for every right wing spin. I guess they’ll never learn.
:-/