Stupidity piled on ignorance: Iraq

It's one of those quiet Sundays; the oppressive heat has broken, we have friends in town, now despatched to SoHomo for a glamour fix. So I have some free time to bang my head against the wall at the catatonic stupidity that is our policy in Iraq. Words are beginning to fail me at the extent of this colossal military and moral disaster; what is it? A quagmire? A morass? Mere turmoil at the bloody borders of the empire? Or a fetid sewer into which the nation has cast, in a season of madness, our blood, our treasure, our power and our honor?

Case in point: the Washington Post has a long article today titled simply "In Iraq, Military forgot lessons of Vietnam", well worth a read. It details in exquisitie detail how exactly we tumbled over this abyss, once the war had been won and this country, under leadership at once staggeringly inept and profoundly criminal, proceeded to lose the peace.

On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use.

"The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period.

"Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks," Ponce wrote. He told them, "Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03."

This was in accordance with memoranda issued by the Justice Department allowing the use of torture against "terrorist suspects". This buck goes straight to the Oval Office.

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.

In short, we picked up all the able-bodied men from entire districts and sent them to Abu Ghraib. Just a reminder: this is what happened then.



So what we - yes, we, even if you opposed this war, you're an American, and responsible for the actions of your government - did was this: we brought together harmless civilians from the bad parts of town with people who really were dangerous, and locked them all up together. Then we let dogs loose on them.

Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population.

Once again, Abu Ghraib:


Let me just re-state this for emphasis: we did mass round-ups of civilians and subjected them to this. And now, we wonder why this tormented country despises us.

But did it work? Was all the best advice considered? Once again, no.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

In Imperial Rome, a man like Bremer would have found his bloody severed head on a pike, as a punishment and a warning to others of like stupidity but perhaps more discretion.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967.

Ignored, of course, since anything French was suspect to the triumphant neocons. They had been proven right, or so they thought; all that went before by way of experience was mere dust in the bright noonday of the neocon ascendancy.

When the United States went into Iraq, his book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed.

Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war.

"A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty," he wrote, adding that "the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire."

The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize.

"The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

Call me old-fashioned, maybe not in tune with the glittering imperial prize the neocons dangle before our eyes like a new Eastern Raj, but I'd think that those entrusted by the democratic sovereign with the care of our armies and our good name might pay a little closer attention to details. Stepping back for a moment from the fact that this war was an illegal farce from the beginning - it wasn't even well executed. They risked the good name of the United States of America, and did not even see fit to learn any lessons they might have taken; because in this new age, the one they were shaping, there were no lessons to learn. One would think that the war's supporters, the ones who were sold this bauble under false pretenses, would be shouting their outrage from the rooftops.

The Iraq war was a disaster from the start, when the neo-con cabal sold it to a willing Bush administration. They had their mandate - at the time, the country supported the effort, after a concentrated and knowing campaign of treachery and deceit. What we did not know at the time was that the people who got us in had no idea what to do - indeed, had set themselves up to not want to know what to do. There is a classic Latin word for that: hubris.

Today, the entire region is going up in flames, and for what? At what cost? The Mideast is infinitely more dangerous than it was when this war began, dangerous regimes like Iran's and North Korea's have been empowered, and for what? So America could have a lesson in the dangers of listening to extremists? To chastise us for living in fear and wilfull ignorance? To humble us in our heedlessness?

Perhaps George Bush was God's instrument after all; the instrument of a God that wants to lay low our pride.