asia times : How (not) to withdraw from Iraq

By Tom Engelhardt

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The realities of the moment are, in a sense, simple and strange all at once. The grandiose preparations for planetary military and energy domination hatched by a group of utopian (or, if you prefer, dystopian) thinkers in Washington, aided and abetted by "native" dreamers and schemers in exile, and meant to begin but hardly end in Iraq, have by now run aground on the shoals of reality.

A modest-sized but fierce and well-stocked insurgency, conducting a low-level guerrilla war - Americans are basically killed on roads on their way somewhere, seldom in regular battles or on their bases - fueled by our president's hubris, by an unquenchable urge for national sovereignty, and by religious fundamentalism as well as fanaticism, has driven this administration from its emplacements.

Now, a second force has joined the fray, turning this into one of the stranger two-front "wars" in memory. Unlike in the Vietnam era, the second front at home remains something of a specter. Perhaps it's not so surprising though that a president ever in fantasy-land and his utopian followers (many now set out to pasture) are being driven by publics that, at the moment, exist largely as sets of poll-driven numbers.

The streets are seldom filled with demonstrators; the universities are not up in arms; and yet it's quite clear that some ghostly form of popular pressure is indeed at work - in combination with growing pressures from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (think Watergate) and a military command that, as in the Vietnam era, fears, if something doesn't happen soon, the wheels might truly start coming off the American military machine.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL03Ak01.html

....The Bush administration's new "plan", such as it is, to draw-down our troops (while pressing our shrinking set of allies not to do the same) is clearly modeled on Laird's Vietnamization experience - a failed strategy being re-imagined as a successful one. By a shift of tactical priorities, it is meant to create the look of withdrawal before the 2006 congressional elections, and it, too, will emphasize the mayhem of air power. On the ground, American forces are to be slowly withdrawn from Iraq's cities to their bases, cutting down on both casualties and, for Iraqis, that oppressive sense of being occupied by foreigners.

In draw-down terms, the plan seems to go something like this: while withdrawal was making it onto the public agenda, our actual force in Iraq has risen in recent months from approximately 138,000 to about 160,000. So the first "withdrawals" (plural) the administration will be able to announce after the December 15 election - about 20,000 troops - will simply get us back to the levels that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his planners always meant us to be at.

General George Casey, US commander in Iraq, and others have been letting the news ooze out for a while (despite rumors of presidential slap-downs for doing so) that, if all goes half-well, we will perhaps withdraw another 40,000 troops (the figures vary depending upon the leak) in 2006, leaving us with just under 100,000 troops there. In 2007 ... well, who knows, but the process, it's clear, is meant to be more or less unending, and, mind you, that's according to the Pentagon's "moderately optimistic" scenario. (Seymour Hersh claims that the administration's "most ambitious" plans call for all troops designated "combat", which is not all troops, to be withdrawn by the summer of 2008.)

Nothing in the past two-and-a-half-plus years, of course, should lead anyone to be "moderately optimistic". If you want a little dose of realism, just consider the latest report on the new Iraqi army from the Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows; or visit the rare Iraqi unit that has been more or less "stood up" with Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter and consider what it's been stood up for (a Shi'ite revenge war in Sunni neighborhoods); or check in with "two senior army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the turmoil that would be unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq" and now claim it is "no longer clear that the United States will be able to create military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long US forces remain"; or visit with "the only non-American author on the US Army's list of required reading for officers", Hebrew University military historian Martin Van Cleveld, who recently called George W Bush's little Iraqi adventure "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them". ......

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by US warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the overall level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

As Hersh essentially points out, what this is likely to mean in practice - if combat is significantly turned over to the new Iraqi army - is sending our air force against targets of that army's choosing; that is, putting American air power in service to a Shi'ite and Kurdish revenge war against the Sunnis - not exactly a recipe for a pacified Iraq.

The thinking behind such strategies is, in fact, as recognizable to those of us who lived through the Vietnam era as "Vietnamization". Here's what I wrote about such "withdrawal" plans during the Vietnam era in my book, The End of Victory Culture, published a distant decade ago. See if it doesn't have a familiar ring to it:

Here's just one passage that gives a modest sense of some of what the Bush administration has been doing from the air: "Naval efforts in "Iraq include not only the Marine Corps but also virtually every type of deployable naval asset in our inventory. Navy and Marine carrier-based aircraft flew over 21,000 hours, dropped over 54,000 pounds of ordnance and played a vital role in the fight for Fallujah."

Add in another reality of America's Iraq: L Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, in a burst of blind pride in 2003, disbanded the Iraqi military. For well over a year or more, Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future Iraqi military force (lite) of only 40,000 men with minimal armaments and essentially no air force at all! This is the Middle East, mind you.

What that meant, simply enough, was that the Bush administration intended the American army and air force to be the Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of the insurgency, the army part of that plan was thrown out the window. But "standing up" the Iraqi military has meant just that. Standing on the ground. There is still no real Iraqi air force. Iraq was never to "fly", but to stay on that "bike" and under the tutelage of Washington."

it shows what I have always been writing on DU that the "Iraqui army" is a red herring. This for the reason above and also for the reason that the loyalty of the Iraqui doesn't go to the state, but to the different ethnicities, tribes and religious factions. The Iraqui army of today is basically militias excluded from heavy weaponry.

Therefore the "iraquisation" is doomed to fail. In Vietnam the south was at least coherent. But it didn't matter. Because when the North advanced (and won by the way regular warfare battles against the US/South Vietnamese - the guerilla was only in the beginning), the south vietnamese swapped sides and attacked the US. And they had US planes !

When history repeats itself it's first as a farce, then as a tragedy.

Tom nails it again.