Wordyard

On Saturday, an Iraqi man drove a bomb-laden taxi into a U.S. checkpoint and killed four American soldiers.

Today, U.S. troops fired at an Iraqi van that failed to stop at a checkpoint. It was full of women and children. Seven to ten of them (the reports are conflicting) are dead now.

Why are we in Iraq, again?

Oh, right. We’re there to disarm Saddan Hussein. That’s sometimes what the Bush administration has declared as its goal for the war. At other times it has said we aim for “regime change.” At other times it has said that we are fighting to “liberate” the Iraqi people, or to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq. Still other times, it has painted the war as an extension of the post 9/11 “war on terrorism.”

This war is still young — as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts it, there’s more of it ahead of us than behind us — and it is certainly too early for anyone to foresee its outcome. But it has been underway long enough to see how catastrophically these 13 days of combat have narrowed the possible positive outcomes for the U.S. Unless some lucky U.S. pilot manages to drop a smart bomb directly on Saddam Hussein’s head — and, this time, hits him — there are now very, very few ways this conflict can conclude well for the U.S., and there’s a constantly widening universe of bad endings.

That’s because war has its own dynamic, in which violence easily proliferates while limits are constantly challenged and restraints erode. U.S. forces entered Iraq apparently expecting Iraqi citizens to greet them as liberators, throw down their arms and dance in the streets. There was only one chance for that to happen, and it is now past. Instead, we have an army surrounded by foreign civilians — who Americans must assume are hostile until proven otherwise. That assumption, necessary for U.S. soldiers’ self-defense, will lead to more accidents like today’s shot-up van. More slaughter of civilians, in turn, will lead to more Iraqi anger at Americans, and more suicide attacks.

Whether on the small scale of the drama at a checkpoint or the large scale of the bombing of Baghdad, this is the U.S.’s dilemma: The harder we push for victory by unleashing increasingly indiscriminate force against Saddam and the Iraqis, the more we stiffen the resistance of Iraqis defending their country, and the more we lay the groundwork for a disastrous postwar military occupation — a tragedy in which American soldiers will be cast in the role of the Israeli patrols in the West Bank or the British troops stationed in Belfast.

Let’s figure that there are Iraqis who are diehard Saddam Hussein supporters; Iraqis who are indifferent; and Iraqis who hate Saddam. The U.S. war plan — apparently influenced by the perspective of Iraqi exile leaders — assumed that the diehards would be limited to top government officials and the pampered legions of the Republican Guards, and that the Saddam-haters would predominate, particularly in southern Iraq (where the Shiites had already rebelled once against Saddam, and been brutally repressed as a result).

Instead, it looks like there is a significantly broader group of diehards — Baath party officials, fedayeen irregulars, Iraqis who for whatever reason have tied their fortunes to Saddam’s regime and are willing to fight and die for it. And the Saddam-haters are awfully quiet — whether because they have been intimidated by the diehards or because they dislike foreign invaders more than they dislike their dictator, we can’t know.

And then there are those indifferents in the middle — the undecideds. The U.S. is now bombing their country and killing their neighbors. They may not love Saddam. I don’t think they’re going to like their “liberators” a whole lot, either.

As former C.I.A. officer Robert Baer tells Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, “The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam… If we take 50 or 60 casualties a day and they die by the thousands, they’re still winning.”

I’ve tried to imagine the best-case scenario for the U.S. from this point forward: The Marines and the Third Infantry resume their march north to Baghdad and defeat the Medina division of the Republican Guard, while the British slowly pacify Basra and the small U.S. force in the north secures Kirkuk and Mosul with the assistance of the Kurds. Then, somehow, we manage to move in to Baghdad, defeat the forces defending it with a minimum of civilian casualties and apprehend Saddam Hussein himself — who never resorts to chemical or biological “weapons of mass destruction” as the noose closes.

This is certainly within the realm of possibility. But it seems as dangerously close to wishful thinking as the U.S.’s original war plan. In order for it to happen, everything has to go right for the U.S. And if we’ve learned anything from the first 13 days of war, it’s never to assume that everything is going to go right.

More likely, one or many of the following will happen somewhere along the line: Guerrilla warfare against U.S. forces and supply lines will increase. U.S. reprisals will kill more Iraqi civilians. Saddam will deploy chemical weapons and the U.S. will retaliate with a wider campaign of bombing against Baghdad. Civil war may break out between pro-Saddam and anti-Saddam factions in regions over which the invading forces have not yet achieved full control. Terrorist attacks against Americans, abroad or in the U.S. itself, will proliferate. Al-Qaida will win over a whole new generation of recruits weaned on the image of the U.S. as murderer of Iraqi Arabs.

Somewhere amid all this bloodshed we will also supposedly be helping Iraqis build a new democracy.

Vietnam bequeathed us the bitter remark, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Every day the Iraq war continues we march a little closer to playing out that paradox on the scale of an entire nation.

I need to address, head on, one kind of criticism that has been percolating through this blog’s comments and that I’ve noticed in various forms on other sites.

The criticism embraces a number of related arguments, but the overall package goes like this: Why are you posting so much discouraging information about the war? You sound glad that things aren’t going as well as planned for the American forces. Why are you hurting morale? Aren’t you just playing into Saddam’s hands?

Before the war started, if one suggested that the US might be underestimating the problems of an invasion of Iraq, it was considered “helping Saddam”; now that the war is on, discussing those problems as they unfold is considered “helping Saddam.” Apparently there is no appropriate time to challenge what may well prove a misguided policy. We should all just shut up and let Rumsfeld do the talking. Gee, how convenient!

Anyone who has been reading my comments from before the start of this war to the present knows that I felt all along that the Bush/Rumsfeld war plan showed scary signs of overconfidence. This has been a consistent theme. On this blog, I’m not attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of war news (some others are doing a great job of that), but I have been interested in watching to see whether my perspective is being borne out by events or not.

As things have unfolded, a whole range of people who share that perspective have now stepped forward in the media. They’re not all journalists or antiwar protesters vulnerable to the charge, however baseless, of cheering American setbacks; many are retired military people, who worry that the U.S. plan was based on faulty intelligence or selective reading of intelligence (the Iraqis won’t fight back) and overconfident assumptions about force requirements (superior U.S. technology means we don’t need to outnumber the enemy in order to win).

So, for the record, and I hope for the last time, I’ll say: I hope this war ends as soon as possible. Anyone who basically thinks the war was a mistake, as I do, must feel that way. I hope it ends with as little bloodshed as possible. Since President Bush has now declared that the war will last “as long as it will take” to remove Saddam Hussein from power — Rumsfeld says “weeks, not months,” but he’s lost a lot of credibility over the past few days — I hope, for the sake of the American and British soldiers fighting against him and the Iraqi soldiers fighting for him and the Iraqi civilians caught cruelly in the middle, that a stray bullet or missile takes the dictator out.

But, as we have heard the military saying goes, “Hope is not a plan.” The plan was Bush’s and Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s, and as a result of it, hundreds of thousands of American and British soldiers are now stuck in what could prove to be a much more harrowing situation than those planners promised. It is these men and women — not Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld — who will pay the price, either on the battlefield itself or, for the rest of their lives, in their hearts and memories of war’s nightmares.

So, personally, I’m not happy at all when I read about the trouble U.S. forces are having right now: I’m angry. Because the problems weren’t unexpected, they were out there for everyone to see — though maybe they weren’t circulated or discussed as widely, because dissenters within government and critics outside it were worried about being accused of “helping Saddam.” And in the end the problems were ignored by policymakers who had every opportunity to gather the most reliable information, but whose egotism and hubris set them up for a possible fall.

And that’s why I will continue to post here and not be too worried about presenting discouraging news and commentary that will rouse complaints I’m “hurting morale” or “helping Saddam.” Maybe we needed more of that kind of discussion before this war began.

As far as I can tell from reading CNN and the excellent running reports from Sean-Paul Kelley at agonist.org, it seems there are currently two Iraqi counterattacks going on simultaneously: One south of Baghdad, as the Republican Guard sends a column of (reportedly) 1000 armored vehicles toward Najaf, on what CNN calls a “collision course” with U.S. forces; the other south of Basra, as another force of Iraqi tanks moves south toward the port of Umm Qasr and engages the British units there.

Now, it’s quite possible that U.S. and British forces will easily repel these counterattacks, and that they are just what the U.S. command wants — to draw out Iraqi units and fight them in the open rather than tangle with them in the cities.

That said, from my armchair here in California this sure looks like a coordinated counteroffensive. No one in the media seems to be willing to give it that name. Or have I just missed it?

POSTCRIPT: CNN now reports the 1000-armored-vehicle column South of Baghdad report was “inaccurate intelligence.” The fog of war swirls…

You are invading oil-rich Iraq, and much of the world thinks — rightly or wrongly — you are doing it because you want the country’s oil. You deny this vehemently. Yet when your troops name their “forward operating bases,” they choose the names Exxon and Shell.

I’m not making this up. Those are the names of the 101st Airborne’s helicopter bases in Iraq, according to this New York Times report.

The Pentagon is apparently explaining that these camps are refueling bases, and that justifies the naming. I dunno. This may be true. But it doesn’t help us. The Bush administration has been given lots of points for its handling of this war’s PR, but this looks like a ludicrously stupid blunder.

Anyone remember the Powell Doctrine? When Colin Powell was a military man rather than a statesman, he articulated the principle of overwhelming force: don’t go to war at all, the doctrine went, unless you’re willing to go all out.

The doctrine had its roots in America’s experience in Vietnam, where a whole generation of the military — including Powell himself — felt that the U.S. failed because it was unwilling to define a clear objective and commit the resources necessary to achieve it. Often criticized as being symptomatic of a military rendered combat-shy by its Vietnam trauma, the Powell Doctrine had one redeeming feature: Wherever it has been consistently applied, it seems to have worked. (If I recall correctly, the doctrine also included a bit about the importance of having the full, united support of the public back home before committing troops to battle — another Vietnam lesson.)

What is Powell thinking today as the administration he is a part of shreds his doctrine?

Most of the reports yesterday and today of problems in the field for U.S. forces in Iraq have to do with decisions that were made, and quite rightly, for political or humanitarian reasons. American troops don’t want to fight in cities because they don’t want to inflict civilian casualties — but when they bypass the cities on their march to Baghdad, they find that they have left dangerous pockets of resistance on their flanks and to their rear. Then they wind up going back into the cities, enraging the local populace and killing civilians, after all. (This New York Times report from Nasiriya vividly tells one such tale.)

Of course it would be callous to wish that the U.S. military not try to avoid civilian casualties. But it wasn’t as if the Iraqi tactics of hiding in cities, using civilians as “human shields,” and so on were a big secret. Things change in war by the moment — and, sure, if the U.S. manages to pick Saddam off with a Cruise missile tomorrow, then these questions may become moot — but right now it looks as though the U.S. has sent an army into Iraq with its arms tied. This represents a wholesale, and almost disdainful, repudiation of the Powell Doctrine.

As this grim scenario plays out we’re stuck in a no-win trap: Either we continue to do everything we can to minimize the bloodshed, quite possibly limiting our ability to bring the war to a successful close; or we untie the military’s hands, let them bomb Baghdad and other cities to bits and not worry about the “collateral damage.” In that case, we may well succeed at “regime change” — but emerge with a losing position on the global chessboard.

The cakewalk that some seemed to expect before and immediately after the start of hostilities has now become what surely everyone should have expected it to be — a real war against an enemy that has at least some staying power.

The notion that the Iraqi forces would all just somehow roll over never made much sense. In fact, it seems that there haven’t been nearly the massive defections and surrenders that the U.S. command plainly hoped for and expected. Here’s a little nugget from the Monday Times that I didn’t see much covered elsewhere. Remember that triumphant report a few days ago that the commander of an entire Iraqi division near Basra had surrendered? Michael Gordon reports that, Sunday, “American officials … discovered that the ‘commander’ was actually a junior officer masquerading as a higher-up in an attempt to win better treatment.” It’s stuff like this puts us on warning that every piece of information we are now getting about this war, from any source, is subject to revision and reversal. Reader beware. (Viewer, beware even more.)

Comparisons to the 1991 Gulf War may have lulled Americans into thinking that all campaigns against Iraq can be wrapped up in four days — and Saddam’s army was stronger then. But there’s one absolutely crucial difference: in 1991 we were fighting to oust Saddam’s troops from Kuwait, where they probably understood they should never have been in the first place. This time the Iraqis are fighting for their homeland.

Yes, their homeland is ruled by a brutal dictator, and yes, I don’t doubt that many if not most Iraqis would be happy to see Saddam gone. But there’s a difference between wishing that your government had a better leader and welcoming the influx of hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers from halfway around the world, backed by an air force that is bombing your cities round the clock. This sort of thing tends to bring out the nationalist streak.

I can’t know, from this distance, whether the Iraqis who are fighting back today are doing so solely because Saddam’s secret police have guns to their heads — or because they believe that, on some level, they are fighting for their homes as well as for their president’s hide. It’s certainly still possible that the entire Iraqi command structure could collapse. For the sake of everyone in the field, I hope that happens, the sooner the better. But the longer the Iraqis hold out and the stronger they fight back, the greater must grow our suspicion that U.S. decision-makers were operating from some highly dubious, overconfident assumptions.

You do sometimes have to shake your head and wonder what planet American intelligence is derived from. Gordon writes, “There was no disguising the fact that the attacks [in the south] by the fedayeen” — militia fighters in civilian clothes driving SUVs and toting machine guns and grenade launchers — “were a setback and a surprise.” Surprise? What sand does your head have to be buried in not to anticipate, in 2003, that your massive Western army invading a Muslim Arab country was likely to find itself under assault from such guerrilla forces?