[Dialogue] Petraeus's Ponzi Scheme

Tue Apr 8 12:38:56 EDT 2008

Published on Monday, April 7, 2008 by The
<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=307286>  Nation 

Petraeus’s Ponzi Scheme

by Tom Engelhardt

They came, they saw, they
 deserted.

That, in short form, is the story of the recent Iraqi government “offensive”
in Basra (and Baghdad). It took a few days, but the headlines on stories out
of Iraq (”Can Iraq’s Soldiers Fight?”) now tell a grim tale and the
information in them is worse yet. Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New
York Times estimate
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html>  that at
least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent
into Basra, “abandoned their posts” during the fighting, including “dozens
of officers” and “at least two senior field commanders.”

Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan
Raghavan and Ernesto Londoño of the Washington Post suggest
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR200804030
0309.html?nav=rss_world>  that 30% of government troops had “abandoned the
fight before a cease-fire was reached.” Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times
offers
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-battle3apr03,1,3312843,
full.story>  50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle
in Baghdad’s vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s
Mahdi Army militia.

In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and
an investment of $22 billion dollars, US military spokesmen are once again
left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster (from which they
were rescued thanks to negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and advisors to
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, brokered in Iran by General Qassem
Suleimani, a man on the U.S. Treasury
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/32141.html>  Department’s terrorist
watch list). Think irony. “From what we understand,” goes the lame American
explanation, “the bulk of these [deserters] were from fairly fresh troops
who had only just gotten out of basic training and were probably pushed into
the fight too soon.”

This week, with surge commander General David Petraeus back from Baghdad’s
ever redder, ever
<http://www.bostonherald.com/news/international/middle_east/view.bg?articlei
d=1084231&srvc=rss>  more dangerous “Green Zone,” here are a few realities
to keep in mind as he testifies before Congress:

1. The situation in Iraq is getting worse: Don’t believe anyone who says
otherwise. The surge-ified, “less violent” Iraq the general has presided
over so confidently is, in fact, a chaotic, violent tinderbox of city
states, proliferating militias armed to the teeth, competing regions armed
to the teeth, and competing religious factions armed to the teeth. Worse
yet, under Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. has been the great
proliferator. It has armed and funded close to 100,000 Sunnis organized into
militias reportedly intent on someday destroying “the Iranians” (i.e. the
Maliki government). It has also supported Shiite militias (aka the Iraqi
army). In Basra, it took sides in a churning Shiite civil war. As Nir Rosen
summed matters up in a typically brilliant
<http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20080421&s=rosen>  piece in the
Nation, Baghdad today is but a set of “fiefdoms run by warlords and
militiamen,” a pattern the rest of the country emulates. “The Bush
administration,” he adds, “and the U.S. military have stopped talking of
Iraq as a grand project of nation-building, and the U.S. media have
dutifully done the same.” Meanwhile, in the little noticed north, an
Arab/Kurdish civil war over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and possibly Mosul
as well, is brewing. This, reports
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD03Ak01.html>  Pepe Escobar of
Asia Times, could be explosive. Think nightmare.

2. The Bush administration has no learning curve. Its top officials are
unable to absorb the realities of Iraq (or the region) and so, like the
generals of World War I, simply send their soldiers surging “over the top”
again and again, with minor changes in tactics, to the same dismal end.
Time.com’s Tony Karon, at his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, caught this
<http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/02/a-teachable-moment-in-basra/>  phenomenon
strikingly, writing that Maliki’s failed offensive “shared the fate of
pretty much every similar initiative by the Bush Administration and its
allies and proxies since the onset of the ‘war on terror.’”

3. The “success” of the surge was always an expensive illusion, essentially
a Ponzi scheme, for which payment will someday come due. To buy time for its
war at home, the Bush administration put out IOUs in Iraq to be paid in
future chaos and violence. It now hopes to slip out of office before these
fully come due.

4. A second hidden surge, not likely to be discussed in the hearings this
week, is now under way. U.S. air
<http://www.coxwashington.com/hp/content/reporters/stories/2008/01/21/IRAQ_A
IRWAR19_COX.html>  reinforcements, sent into Iraq over the last year
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174896> , are increasingly being
<http://www.janes.com/news/defence/air/jdw/jdw080404_1_n.shtml>  brought to
bear. There will be hell to pay for this, too, in the future.

5. A reasonably undertaken but speedy total withdrawal from Iraq is the only
way out of this morass (and, at this late date, it won’t be pretty); yet
such a proposal isn’t even on the table in Washington. In fact, as
McClatchy’s Warren Strobel and Nancy Youssef report
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/32337.html> , disaster in Basra
has “silenced talk at the Pentagon of further U.S. troop withdrawals any
time soon.”

Since April 2003, each administration misstep in Iraq has only led to worse
missteps. Unfortunately, little of this will be apparent in this week’s
shadowboxing among Washington’s “best and brightest,” who will again plunge
into a “debate” filled with coded words, peppered with absurd fantasies, and
rife with American symbolism that only an expert like professor of religion
Ira Chernus is likely to decipher
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174915/ira_chernus_the_general_and_the_trap
> . “It’s time,” he writes, while considering the upcoming Petraeus
testimony, “to insist that war should be seen not through the lens of myth
and symbol, but as the brutal, self-defeating reality it is.”

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>  (”a regular antidote to the mainstream
media”), is the co-founder of the American
<http://www.americanempireproject.com/>  Empire Project and, most recently,
the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1560259388?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1560259388&adid=1J6Y8E517CDS5W79TZZY&>  Iconoclasts
and Dissenters
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1560259388?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1560259388&adid=1J6Y8E517CDS5W79TZZY&> (Nation
Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews. His book, The End of
Victory Culture
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019846?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0465019846&adid=0BQBY4JD7RVB3HXVBFZV&>  (University
of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued
edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/07/8123/

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