Wartime Sacrifices/They Lied Their Way into Iraq. Now They Are Trying to Lie Their Way out

Wartime Sacrifices
By Arlen Parsa
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Sunday 25 November 2006

Never before in American history has such a costly war been fought with so little immediate sacrifice asked of all Americans. Less than one year into his first term, President Bush made clear the terms of his war: every other country was either with us, or against us.

Just this year, the president raised the stakes again, saying that his "War on Terror" (how you can wage war against a tactic escapes me) is the "calling of our generation" and that America is once again a participant in a grand "struggle for civilization." This rhetoric should come as no surprise considering that the commander in chief has already likened himself to other wartime leaders such as Winston Churchill and compared his "War on Terror" to World War II. Even his branding of the two sides involved in the fight - the "Axis of Evil" versus "America and her allies" - is the same "axis versus allies" language used in Churchill's war. Yet, for such a war with so much in the balance, our leaders have asked surprisingly little of us.

President Bush has encouraged Americans to go about their daily lives: take vacations, he once suggested. He certainly took his own advice, having taken well over 300 days off so far. Clinton took only about 150 days off in all of his eight years as president - and he wasn't even leading the free world in a struggle for civilization itself.

More Americans have now died as part of the president's so-called "War on Terror" than perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. America has now been fighting in the name of "civilization itself" for longer than it ever was during World War I and World War II. Outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that it could take "any number of years ... five, six, eight, ten, twelve years" to achieve peace in Iraq alone - much less win the "greater War on Terror."

At the same time, President Bush became the very first American president ever to grant tax cuts during a time of war. The largest corporations have gotten billions of dollars of taxes back from the government, and the wealthiest Americans annually get more money back in the form of tax refunds than the average American earns in a year. Meanwhile, the largest federal surplus ever (which Bush inherited from Clinton) quickly turned into the largest deficit ever. When President Bush's Democratic predecessor left office, American national debt lingered around 5.5 trillion dollars, and was shrinking at a faster rate than it ever had before. Years into Bush's presidency, we find ourselves with the largest national debt in history (the president's new debt ceiling is now 9 trillion dollars, which the US is expected to surpass before he leaves office).

This is perhaps ironic because Republicans have always prided themselves in their ability to reduce the size of government and maintain fiscal responsibility. Democrats, on the other hand, are oft portrayed as irresponsible, big tax-and-spend liberals. Under the current White House administration, however, it seems that the Republican party has become the party of big-spenders and no-taxers. If there's a worse way to run government during a war that supposedly threatens every civilized culture in the entire world and will supposedly drag on for ages (many in the administration are already calling it "The Long War"), I can't think of it.

Of course, they didn't plan things this way. Originally, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had wanted to wage his war in Iraq "on the cheap." He ignored the suggestions of his top generals who said that his mission would need far more troops than he had allotted. Rumsfeld even fired highly-decorated four-star general Eric Shinseki after the latter maintained that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq to secure the country after invasion and prevent an insurgency (key members of the White House administration later claimed that nobody had predicted an insurgency would arise after the invasion). Instead, a meager force of American troops went into Iraq with lightly-armored humvees and inadequate body armor.

Our soldiers resorted to bulking up their 'thin-skinned humvees' with scrap metal they found in Iraqi junkyards (which they termed "hillbilly armor"). Later on, a group of Congressional Republicans voted against sending more body armor for American soldiers because they wanted to keep the budget down. Poor military families back home passed collection plates at church asking for donations that would help cover the few hundred dollars it would cost to send their sons and daughters the life-saving vests that they had been deployed without. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want," Rumsfeld told one soldier who confronted him about it with a trembling voice at a televised question and answer session.

The White House has promised time and time again that during this conflict (in which the entire world is at stake) there would be under no circumstances a draft. Rich sons and daughters would never be called up to serve alongside their less-well-off fellow Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. "We will have an all-volunteer army" the president has loudly proclaimed. The military for its part has kept quiet, but bent over backwards not to reinstate conscription.

The Pentagon has lowered the IQ requirement and lowest acceptable test scores of enlistees, and increased the maximum age at which people can enlist (now 42 years old). And now, there are even foreigners serving in our armed forces. Still no gay people allowed, though. (It was reported earlier this year that Pentagon manuals still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder like schizophrenia, a consensus that the medical community abandoned in the 1970s.) The Reserves and National Guard have been sent to Iraq, and some of them are on their second tour of duty. Reports circulated not long ago that one recruiter was so desperate to fulfill his monthly enlistment quota, he persuaded an autistic kid to sign on the dotted line (after great embarrassment, the Army was later forced to let him go).

President Bush and his fellow powerful Republicans have viciously attacked Democrats and others who don't embrace their war endlessly. When the president is challenged (which is seldom), he backs away from his harsh rhetoric and replaces it instead with a condescending glare. People who don't agree with me aren't unpatriotic, he replies; they just "don't understand the stakes in the War on Terror."

December is coming up, and President Bush is expected to be on vacation for much of the month. If he continues taking time off at the rate he has been, by the time he leaves his second term, the president will have vacationed for more than 1 of his 8 years in office. Earlier this year, the Pentagon ordered an entire brigade of soldiers back to Iraq - before they had even made it home from their first tour. They literally turned around and boarded airplanes headed in the opposite direction. At least the president will be home for Christmas. Not everyone is so fortunate.

During World War II, Churchill ordered strict food rationing. World War I vets formed the British Home Guard to fend off the potential German invasion with pitchforks and shotguns more suited to hunting with bird-shot (while all the younger men and equipment were on the front lines fighting the Axis). Nowadays, putting yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your SUV is strictly optional and tax cuts are mandatory. President Bush thinks history will look back upon his war as just as important as the one Churchill and the rest of the world waged half a century ago. From the way this president acts, you wouldn't think so.

Arlen Parsa is a documentary film student at Columbia College Chicago. In between classes, Parsa writes about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.

source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112606D.shtml
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Published on Monday, November 27, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
They Lied Their Way into Iraq. Now They Are Trying to Lie Their Way out.
Bush and Blair will blame anyone but themselves for the consequences of their disastrous war - even its victims
by Gary Younge

'In the endgame," said one of the world's best-ever chess players, José Raúl Capablanca, "don't think in terms of moves but in terms of plans." The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower. Whatever mandate the occupiers may have once had from their own electorates - in Britain it was none, in the US it was precarious - has now eroded. They can no longer conduct this war as they have been doing.

Simultaneously, the Iraqis are no longer able to live under occupation as they have been doing. According to a UN report released last week, 3,709 Iraqi civilians died in October - the highest number since the invasion began. And the cycle of religious and ethnic violence has escalated over the past week.

The living flee. Every day up to 2,000 Iraqis go to Syria and another 1,000 to Jordan, according to the UN's high commissioner for refugees. Since the bombing of Samarra's Shia shrine in February more than 1,000 Iraqis a day have been internally displaced, a recent report by the UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration found last month.

Those in the west who fear that withdrawal will lead to civil war are too late - it is already here. Those who fear that pulling out will make matters worse have to ask themselves: how much worse can it get? Since yesterday American troops have been in Iraq longer than they were in the second world war. When the people you have "liberated" by force are no longer keen on the "freedom" you have in store for them, it is time to go.

Any individual moves announced from now on - summits, reports, benchmarks, speeches - will be ignored unless they help to provide the basis for the plan towards withdrawal. Occupation got us here; it cannot get us out. Neither Tony Blair nor George Bush is in control of events any longer. Both domestically and internationally, events are controlling them. So long as they remain in office they can determine the moves; but they have neither the power nor the credibility to shape what happens next.

So the crucial issue is no longer whether the troops leave in defeat and leave the country in disarray - they will - but the timing of their departure and the political rationale that underpins it.

For those who lied their way into this war are now trying to lie their way out of it. Franco-German diplomatic obstruction, Arab indifference, media bias, UN weakness, Syrian and Iranian meddling, women in niqabs and old men with placards - all have been or surely will be blamed for the coalition's defeat. As one American columnist pointed out last week, we wait for Bush and Blair to conduct an interview with Fox News entitled If We Did It, in which they spell out how they would have bungled this war if, indeed, they had done so.

So, just as Britain allegedly invaded for the good of the Iraqis, the timing of their departure will be conducted with them in mind. The fact that - according to the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett - it will coincide with Blair leaving office in spring is entirely fortuitous.

More insidious is the manner in which the Democrats, who are about to take over the US Congress, have framed their arguments for withdrawal. Last Saturday the newly elected House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, suggested that the Americans would pull out because the Iraqis were too disorganised and self-obsessed. "In the days ahead, the Iraqis must make the tough decisions and accept responsibility for their future," he said. "And the Iraqis must know: our commitment, while great, is not unending."

It is absurd to suggest that the Iraqis - who have been invaded, whose country is currently occupied, who have had their police and army disbanded and their entire civil service fired - could possibly be in a position to take responsibility for their future and are simply not doing so.

For a start, it implies that the occupation is a potential solution when it is in fact the problem. This seems to be one of the few things on which Sunni and Shia leaders agree. "The roots of our problems lie in the mistakes the Americans committed right from the beginning of their occupation," Sheik Ali Merza, a Shia cleric in Najaf and a leader of the Islamic Dawa party, told the Los Angeles Times last week.

"Since the beginning, the US occupation drove Iraq from bad to worse," said Harith al-Dhari, the nation's most prominent Sunni cleric, after he fled to Egypt this month facing charges of supporting terrorism.

Also, it leaves intact the bogus premise that the invasion was an attempt at liberation that has failed because some squabbling ingrates, incapable of working in their own interests, could not grasp the basic tenets of western democracy. In short, it makes the victims responsible for the crime.

Withdrawal, when it happens, will be welcome. But its nature and the rationale given for it are not simply issues of political point-scoring. They will lay the groundwork for what comes next for two main reasons.

First, because, while withdrawal is a prerequisite for any lasting improvement in Iraq, it will not by itself solve the nation's considerable problems.

Iraq has suffered decades of colonial rule, 30 years of dictatorship and three years of military occupation. Most recently, it has been trashed by a foreign invader. The troops must go. But the west has to leave enough resources behind to pay for what it broke. For that to happen, the anti-war movement in the west must shift the focus of our arguments to the terms of withdrawal while explaining why this invasion failed and our responsibilities to the Iraqi people that arise as a result of that failure.

If we don't, we risk seeing Bono striding across airport tarmac 10 years hence with political leaders who demand good governance and democratic norms in the Gulf, as though Iraq got here by its own reckless psychosis. Eviscerated of history, context and responsibility, it will stand somewhere between basket case and charity case: like Africa, it will be misunderstood as a sign not of our culpability but of our superiority.

Second, because unless we understand what happened in Iraq we are doomed to continue repeating these mistakes elsewhere. Ten days ago, during a visit to Hanoi, Bush was asked whether Vietnam offered any lessons. He said: "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while ... We'll succeed unless we quit."

In other words, the problem with Vietnam was not that the US invaded a sovereign country, bombed it to shreds, committed innumerable atrocities, murdered more than 500,000 Vietnamese - more than half of whom were civilians - and lost about 58,000 American servicemen. The problem with Vietnam was that they lost. And the reason they lost was not because they could neither sustain domestic support nor muster sufficient local support for their invasion, nor that their military was ill equipped for guerrilla warfare. They lost because it takes a while to complete such a tricky job, and the American public got bored.

"You learn more from a game you lose than a game you win," argued the chess great Capablanca. True, but only if you heed the lessons and then act on them.

source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1127-25.htm