From New Rome to Sadr City
Toronto Star | 14.05.2008 15:11 | Anti-militarism | World
The Madness of the current situation highlights the corrupt nature of international politics and social engineering. This was the plan all along.
The Next War
From New Rome to Sadr City
Despite the Iraq disaster Pentagon planners envisage endless conflict on 'global commons'
May 14, 2008 04:30 AM
Tom Engelhardt
Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably distant past of 2002-2003.
Afghanistan had been "liberated" in a matter of weeks; "regime change" in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk," and it would be followed by the reordering of "the Greater Middle East." No one who mattered was talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said about counter-insurgency. The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short order, and then, of course, stay. It would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically beg us to garrison their countries.
Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and in Afghanistan are moving ever closer to Kabul. U.S. troops are in block-by-block fighting in Baghdad's vast Shiite Sadr City slum and they're wheeling in the Abrams tanks and calling in helicopters, Hellfire-missile-armed drones and jets for help in brutal urban warfare as the bodies pile higher.
As in Vietnam, so four decades later, we are observing a full-scale descent into madness. In 2003, American troops were heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal, a city to take. Now, five years later, they are heading for the heart of a slum city, which they cannot hold, in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighbourhoods are essentially beside the point. No matter what the Bush administration has tried to do, the war in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be transferred to the even older war in Afghanistan). And oh, while we're at it, welcome to future wars in the slum cities of the planet. Inside the Pentagon, some are thinking not about how to get out of Sadr City, but how to fight Sadr City wars more effectively. They are pondering "the next war."
With that in mind, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates recently gave two sharp-edged speeches, one at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, the other at West Point, each expressing his frustration with the slowness of the armed services to adapt to a counter-insurgency planet and to plan for the next war.
There's nothing illogical about a country's military preparing for future wars. That's what it's there for and every country has the right to defend itself. But it's a different matter when you're preparing for future "wars of choice" (which used to be called wars of aggression) – for the next war(s) on what Gates now calls the "the 21st-century's global commons." By that, he means not just planet Earth in its entirety, but "space and cyberspace" as well. For the American military, it turns out, planning for a future "defence" of the United States means planning for planetwide, over-the-horizon counter-insurgency. It will, of course, be done better, with a military that, as Gates put it, will no longer be "a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force." (It was at the Fulda Gap, in Germany, that the U.S. military once expected to meet Soviet forces invading Europe in full-scale battle.)
So, the secretary of defence is calling for more foreign-language training, a better expeditionary culture, and more nation-building. In essence, he accepts that the future of American war will, indeed, be in the Sadr cities and Afghan backlands of the planet; or, as he says, that "the asymmetric battlefields of the 21st century" will be "the dominant combat environment in the decades to come." And the American response will be high-tech indeed – all those unmanned aerial vehicles that he can't stop talking about.
Gates describes America's war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the `Long War' is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."
"There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying the U.S. military is likely to be in one, two, many Sadr cities for a long time to come. This is Gates's ultimate insight, and his response is to urge the military to plan for more and better of the same. For this Congress gives the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year.
The irony is that, in both speeches, Gates praises outside-the-box thinking in the military and calls upon the armed services to "think unconventionally." Yet, his own thoughts couldn't be more conventional, imperial or potentially disastrous. In a nutshell: If the mission is heading into madness, then double the mission. Bring in yet more of those drones whose missiles are already so popular in Sadr City. This is brilliantly prosaic thinking, based on the assumption that the "global commons" should be American and that the "next war" will be American, and the one after that, and so on.
But I wouldn't bet on it. John McCain got a lot of flak for saying that American troops could stay in Iraq for "100 years ... as long as Americans are not being injured, harmed or killed." The secretary of defence, a "realist" in an administration of bizarre dreamers and inept gamblers, has just cast his vote for more and better Sadr cities. In a Pentagon version of an old Maoist slogan: Let a hundred slum guerrilla struggles bloom!
It's a recipe for being bogged down in such wars for 100 years – with the piles of dead rising ever higher. No wonder some of the top military brass, whom he criticizes for their bureaucratic inertia, have been unenthusiastic. They don't want to spend the rest of their careers fighting hopeless wars in Sadr City or its equivalent. Who would?
Americans should feel the same way. The phrase "the next war" should make them wince. It means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.
Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Don't we have enough examples of American counter-insurgency operations under our belt? The American people evidently think so. For some time now, significant majorities have wanted out of Baghdad, out of Iraq. All the way out.
In a major survey just released by the influential journal Foreign Affairs, similar majorities have, in essence, "voted" for demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy. In their responses, they offer quite a different approach to how the United States should operate in the world. According to journalist Jim Lobe, 69 per cent of respondents believe "the U.S. government should put more emphasis on diplomatic and economic foreign policy tools in fighting terrorism," not "military efforts." (Sixty-five per cent believe the U.S. should withdraw all its troops from Iraq either "immediately" or "over the next 12 months.") But, of course, no one who matters listens to them.
And yet, the path to Sadr City and beyond is one that even an imperialist should want to turn back from. It's the road to hell and it's paved with the worst of intentions.
Tom Engelhardt is author of The End of Victory Culture.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/425079
From New Rome to Sadr City
Despite the Iraq disaster Pentagon planners envisage endless conflict on 'global commons'
May 14, 2008 04:30 AM
Tom Engelhardt
Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably distant past of 2002-2003.
Afghanistan had been "liberated" in a matter of weeks; "regime change" in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk," and it would be followed by the reordering of "the Greater Middle East." No one who mattered was talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said about counter-insurgency. The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short order, and then, of course, stay. It would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically beg us to garrison their countries.
Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and in Afghanistan are moving ever closer to Kabul. U.S. troops are in block-by-block fighting in Baghdad's vast Shiite Sadr City slum and they're wheeling in the Abrams tanks and calling in helicopters, Hellfire-missile-armed drones and jets for help in brutal urban warfare as the bodies pile higher.
As in Vietnam, so four decades later, we are observing a full-scale descent into madness. In 2003, American troops were heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal, a city to take. Now, five years later, they are heading for the heart of a slum city, which they cannot hold, in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighbourhoods are essentially beside the point. No matter what the Bush administration has tried to do, the war in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be transferred to the even older war in Afghanistan). And oh, while we're at it, welcome to future wars in the slum cities of the planet. Inside the Pentagon, some are thinking not about how to get out of Sadr City, but how to fight Sadr City wars more effectively. They are pondering "the next war."
With that in mind, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates recently gave two sharp-edged speeches, one at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, the other at West Point, each expressing his frustration with the slowness of the armed services to adapt to a counter-insurgency planet and to plan for the next war.
There's nothing illogical about a country's military preparing for future wars. That's what it's there for and every country has the right to defend itself. But it's a different matter when you're preparing for future "wars of choice" (which used to be called wars of aggression) – for the next war(s) on what Gates now calls the "the 21st-century's global commons." By that, he means not just planet Earth in its entirety, but "space and cyberspace" as well. For the American military, it turns out, planning for a future "defence" of the United States means planning for planetwide, over-the-horizon counter-insurgency. It will, of course, be done better, with a military that, as Gates put it, will no longer be "a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force." (It was at the Fulda Gap, in Germany, that the U.S. military once expected to meet Soviet forces invading Europe in full-scale battle.)
So, the secretary of defence is calling for more foreign-language training, a better expeditionary culture, and more nation-building. In essence, he accepts that the future of American war will, indeed, be in the Sadr cities and Afghan backlands of the planet; or, as he says, that "the asymmetric battlefields of the 21st century" will be "the dominant combat environment in the decades to come." And the American response will be high-tech indeed – all those unmanned aerial vehicles that he can't stop talking about.
Gates describes America's war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the `Long War' is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."
"There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying the U.S. military is likely to be in one, two, many Sadr cities for a long time to come. This is Gates's ultimate insight, and his response is to urge the military to plan for more and better of the same. For this Congress gives the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year.
The irony is that, in both speeches, Gates praises outside-the-box thinking in the military and calls upon the armed services to "think unconventionally." Yet, his own thoughts couldn't be more conventional, imperial or potentially disastrous. In a nutshell: If the mission is heading into madness, then double the mission. Bring in yet more of those drones whose missiles are already so popular in Sadr City. This is brilliantly prosaic thinking, based on the assumption that the "global commons" should be American and that the "next war" will be American, and the one after that, and so on.
But I wouldn't bet on it. John McCain got a lot of flak for saying that American troops could stay in Iraq for "100 years ... as long as Americans are not being injured, harmed or killed." The secretary of defence, a "realist" in an administration of bizarre dreamers and inept gamblers, has just cast his vote for more and better Sadr cities. In a Pentagon version of an old Maoist slogan: Let a hundred slum guerrilla struggles bloom!
It's a recipe for being bogged down in such wars for 100 years – with the piles of dead rising ever higher. No wonder some of the top military brass, whom he criticizes for their bureaucratic inertia, have been unenthusiastic. They don't want to spend the rest of their careers fighting hopeless wars in Sadr City or its equivalent. Who would?
Americans should feel the same way. The phrase "the next war" should make them wince. It means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.
Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Don't we have enough examples of American counter-insurgency operations under our belt? The American people evidently think so. For some time now, significant majorities have wanted out of Baghdad, out of Iraq. All the way out.
In a major survey just released by the influential journal Foreign Affairs, similar majorities have, in essence, "voted" for demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy. In their responses, they offer quite a different approach to how the United States should operate in the world. According to journalist Jim Lobe, 69 per cent of respondents believe "the U.S. government should put more emphasis on diplomatic and economic foreign policy tools in fighting terrorism," not "military efforts." (Sixty-five per cent believe the U.S. should withdraw all its troops from Iraq either "immediately" or "over the next 12 months.") But, of course, no one who matters listens to them.
And yet, the path to Sadr City and beyond is one that even an imperialist should want to turn back from. It's the road to hell and it's paved with the worst of intentions.
Tom Engelhardt is author of The End of Victory Culture.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/425079
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