Chicago Indymedia : http://chicago.indymedia.org/archive
Chicago Indymedia

Commentary :: Peace

The Crash of the Victor

"That allies for years in Paris and Berlin mobilized against the war plans of the US.. led to a rupture that may never be completely patched up again.. International law becomes waste paper before the claim of sole agency.."
The Crash of the Victor

Bush’s War

By Siegesmund von Ilsemann

[This article originally published in Spiegel Online, March 10, 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,289773,00.html.]

With an ultra-technological blitzkrieg, hyper-power Americas overthrow Saddam Hussein a year ago and demonstrated how it imagines the world order of the 21st century. However reality in occupied Iraq has broken the spell of some Washington omnipotence fantasies.

Hamburg. President George W. Bush promised his nation a “war like no other”. Today, almost a year after 40 American cruise missiles and two Stealth-fighter bombers with tons of bombs launched the pursuit of Saddam Hussein on March 20, 2003, the man who declared the “end of major combat actions” in Iraq with barely controllable pride on the deck of the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” before the California coast near San Diego maintained his right. Under the huge letters “Mission Accomplished”, he proclaimed at that time the fastest Pyrrhic victory of world history.

The lightning strike in the Tigris-Euphrates country whose end was only doubted by dreamers had more victims that the strategists of the superpower expected. Iraq lay in debris after Saddam’s military defeat, previously weakened by two decades of war and nearly suffocated under the decade-long UN embargo. Many necessities fell by the wayside. Old alliances were grievously damaged. The international legal system and even the American foundation of civil and human right6s were nearly shattered under the burden imposed by the oldest democracy of the world.

Washington’s new global policy of demonstrative single-handed adventures soon collapsed in view of the Herculean task of rebuilding Iraq. A futurist military doctrine that relied on blitzkrieg advances of highly mobile commando-troops after an unparalleled mega-bombardment (“shock and awe”) proved to be short-winded in mastering subsequent security problems in conquered Iraq. The dubious policy of prevention, Bush’s stick-from-the-sack policy, for all “rogue states”, already failed when it was subject to a first reality test between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The Curse of Bush

In the measure in which the reasons for war – from Saddam’s alleged sponsorship of terror to his weapons of mass destruction – were unmasked as a house of cards, trust in their governments disappeared among the deceived citizens. These governments led them into war against their better knowledge.. Secret services were politicized and saw themselves disavowed a little later. What George W. Bush predicted right after the disastrous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in Washington, Pennsylvania and New York is now fulfilled after the blitzkrieg against Babylon: “Nothing will be the same”.

That this change is occurring very differently than George W. expected brings him into the whirlpool of the “Bush curse”. That curse was already a fate for his father George Herbert Walker in 1992. In 1991 he rose to unsuspected heights in the upswing of the first Bush war in the Persian Gulf and lost his office only a year later – after only one term of office – to the largely unknown opposing democratic candidate Bill Clinton.

The Son could have undone this disgrace. Now it threatens him. George W. has already begun the nosedive. Like lead, the victor’s laurels of Baghdad brings his popularity below his anticipated challenger in the US presidential election in November, the democratic senator John Kerry. George W. Bush, it seems, could be the most prominent victim of his Mesopotamian pyrrhic victory.

War Plans from the Drawers of the Conservatives

Ruptures opened up in the script of the revengeful campaign against Saddam, the “man who tried to kill my father”, as Bush junior once argued. The hardliners from Washington’s neoconservative think tanks brought along their war plans against Iraq when they presented their studies to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon in 2001. Presumably these plans are based on the assumption that the world that in solidarity assisted the superpower cut to the quick by terror in Afghanistan would now also crusade against Baghdad.

Only unwillingly and under the pressure of Great Britain, Washington asked for the support of the world community at the UN Security Council in New York. However the evidence – flimsy assertions about contacts between Saddam and the terrorist godfather Osama Bin Laden and a supposedly menacing arsenal of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – were not enough to make the world public ready for war. That allies for years in Paris and Berlin mobilized against the war plans of the US alongside the usual suspects from Peking and Moscow led to a fracture that may never be completely patched up again.

When London attempted to maintain at least the appearance of legitimacy with a second Iraq resolution in the UN Security Council, warlord Rumsfeld coolly declared that the US isn’t dependent on the help of the Brits. “America can do this alone.” International law becomes waste paper before this claim of sole agency or exclusive representation. The nearly unanimous judgment of competent jurists that a war without the approval of the Security Council represents a flagrant violation of international law did not dissuade Bush from giving the marching order on March 20 with a casual “Let’s do it!”

At first the thrust ran according to script. According to the new tactic of the US military, a technologically far superior offensive army would throw its numerically stronger opponent off balance “quickly and flexibly” with small troop contingents and deep advances. It will take “days or possibly one or two weeks” until Iraq is overrun, declared Richard Perle, the gray eminence of the Pentagon, to Spiegel.

No Cheers for the Liberators

Prudent minds like the political philosopher Charles Kupchan from the renowned Georgetown University warned in vain. It will take “only days or weeks until the Americans are greeted by the population with bullets instead of flowers.” The unforeseen drama began behind the front while the “embedded” journalists, partly uniformed themselves, broke one success story after another about the “unparalleled march”. The tiny harbor town Um Qasr was declared conquered several times a day before invasion troops assumed control a week later. Basra, a city of millions and center of Shiite resistance against Saddam, did not fall into the hands of the Brits without a fight. When it finally fell, the masses did not acclaim the self-styled liberators from the “coalition of the willing” either there or elsewhere in the conquered Tigris-Euphrates land.

Instead a new front arose along the long supply route. Saddam’s troops who evaded open battles almost everywhere now seem to wage a guerilla war which the despot threatened his adversaries. Months after the fall of Baghdad, a first comprehensive study of the Pentagon revealed how close the superpower had come to a logistic debacle. Happily for Washington, Saddam’s troops, the supposedly strong republican guard, collapsed even more quickly than the provider of Kellogg, Brown and Root, the firm without whose cooperation the Pentagon could hardly have waged war.

However the real debacle first began after George W. Bush proclaimed the “end of major combat operations”. For their post-war plans, the US strategists trusted too much, it appears, in the insinuations of American exile Iraqis who promised jubilant multitudes on the streets. Instead new and evermore bloody attacks forced up the casualty rate among the invaders and the civilian Iraqi population first in the Sunnite triangle between Tikrit, Baghdad and Falludscha and later in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south of Iraq.

Fizzled PR-Successes

A year after the war’s beginning, the total number of killed Americans is at least three times as high as after the official ending of the main combat actions. Washington canvasses for relief troops ever more pressingly among the previously duped partners. The UN whose decision on the war was dismissed as irrelevant should now coordinate the thankless rebuilding work and promptly became the target of radical Iraqis. Kofi Annan’s personal ambassador, the Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 other people died in a suicide attack on the UN building in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. A research team from the New York headquarters recently declared elections this year organized by the UN and desired by Americans as unrealistic. Washington’s anxious hope that NATO may ease the burden of the Tigris-Euphrates land proves the miserable failure of the Bush philosophy of the lonely sheriff in the wild East. Unlike the terror godfather Bin Laden, the tyrant Saddam was apprehended just before Christmas. However the PR success as to its effect on the popularity ratings of the president soon evaporated.

Whether the constitution solemnly signed this week can guarantee a peaceful and democratic order is still in the stars. The leaders of the Shiite majority of the population only wait for the announced elections to bring to bear their whole weight. Whether the minority rights provisionally fixed in the constitution, especially for the Kurds, will last like the federal order is unclear. Iraq could still break apart or slip into a civil war. Forces working to this end are everywhere. 300,000 men will not be enough for the control and protection of millions upon millions of people. Bill Clinton’s Iraq strategist, Kenneth Pollack, one of the most important chief witnesses for the war against Saddam, recommended this number to the Pentagon as a minimum.

The limits of US military power ultimately reveal the prevention strategy of the Bush administration as a speculation (Luftnummer). This strategy was proclaimed with overbearing self-confidence. The US army can hardly shoulder another expedition whether against the Syrians, Iranians or North Koreans armed far more than Saddam. Unlike Pyrrhus of Epirus who defeated the Romans in the 3rd century B.C., Bush will not fail in the bloodletting on the Mesopotamian battlefield. The political wounds that he suffers there could ring in his end.
 
 

Donate

Views

Account Login

Media Centers

 

This site made manifest by dadaIMC software