Posted on 15-4-2003
Rout
Proves Anti-War Point
by David Olive, Toronto Star, Sunday 13
April 2003
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 neighbours 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. defence 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 defence planners seek to justify regime
change and validate their Iraq strategy of rapid, lightly armed
strikes at an enemy.
Since the spectre 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 favourable 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 kilometres 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
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