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Xlea321
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Registered: 02/25/01
Posts: 9,134

Iraq isn't another Vietnam

#2700611 - 05/19/04 10:10 AM (19 years, 10 months ago)

Iraq isn't another Vietnam - it's much worse. The images of abused prisoners demonstrate not just American depravity, says the philosopher John Gray, but the folly of waging war as a moral crusade
19 May 2004

Misguided from the start, the war in Iraq is spiralling out of control. Any legitimacy the occupying forces may ever have possessed has been destroyed, and there are signs that Iraqi insurgents are coming together to mount a movement of resistance that could render the country ungovernable. With even more damning images likely to find their way into the public realm in the near future, the United States is facing an historic defeat in Iraq - a blow to American power more damaging than it suffered in Vietnam, and far larger in its global implications.

The inescapable implication of currently available evidence is that the use of torture by US forces was not an aberration, but a practice sanctioned at the highest levels. Undoubtedly there were serious breaches of discipline, and the blank failure to understand that they had done anything wrong displayed by some of the abusers does not speak well for the levels of training of sections of the US military.

Abuse on the scale suggested by the Red Cross report cannot be accounted for by any mere lapse in discipline or the trailer-park mentality of some American recruits. It was inherent in the American approach to the war. American military intervention in Iraq was based on neo-conservative fantasies about US forces being greeted as liberators. In fact, as could be foreseen at the time, it has embroiled these forces in a brutal and hopeless war against the Iraqi people. From being regarded as passive recipients of American goodwill, they are now viewed as virtually subhuman. If, as seems clear, British forces are innocent of anything resembling the systemic abuse that appears to have been practised by the Americans, one reason is that they do not share these attitudes.

The resistance mounted by the Iraqi insurgents can be compared to the anti-colonial liberation struggles of the 1950s, but the closest parallels with the intractable conflict now under way are found in Chechnya, which remains a zone of anarchy and terror despite the ruthless deployment of Russian firepower and the systematic use of torture for more than a decade. It was the prospect of an intractable guerrilla conflict that led many soldiers in the Pentagon to express deep reservations regarding the war. When the civilian leadership launched the invasion of Iraq, US forces were plunged into a type of conflict for which they are supremely ill equipped.

In the wake of Vietnam and Somalia, American military doctrine has been based on "force protection" and "shock and awe". In practice, these strategies mean killing anyone who appears to pose any threat to US forces and overcoming the enemy through the use of overwhelming firepower. Effective in the early stages of the war when the enemy was Saddam and his regime, they are deeply counter-productive when, as in Iraq today, the enemy comprises much of the population. As Douglas Hurd has observed, filling the hospitals and mortuaries is not the best way to win hearts and minds. The effect has been to make the conflict more savage. It is in circumstances such as these that torture becomes routine. In Iraq over the past year, as in Chechnya, and before that in Algeria where the French fought a similar dirty war, anyone could end up a victim of torture.

In Iraq, the Bush administration evaded international law by a different route. They outsourced security duties at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities to private contractors not covered by military law and not regulated by the Geneva Convention. In effect, the Bush administration deliberately created a lawless environment in which abuse could be practised with impunity.

The Bush administration's self-defeating approach to terrorism is symptomatic of a dangerous unrealism running right through its thinking. For Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary, and other neo-conservatives, the solution to terrorism was to "modernise" the Middle East. For them, that meant overthrowing many, if not most, of the area's regimes and replacing them with secular liberal democracies. They appear not to have noticed that the region's secular regimes were authoritarian states such as Syria and Iraq. In the Middle East today, as in Algeria in the past, democracy means Islamist rule.

In part, the attack on Iraq was simply another exercise in the type of neo-Wilsonian fantasy that is a recurring feature of US foreign policy, but it was also an exercise in realpolitik - and a resource war. A key part of the rationale for the invasion was to enable the US to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, which had come to be seen as complicit with terror and inherently unstable.

If it was to pull out from Saudi Arabia, the US needed another source of oil. Only Iraq has it in sufficient quantities - hence the drive for regime change. In this Dr Strangelove-like vision, once Saddam had been removed and Iraq remodelled as a Western-style democracy, the oil would start flowing. The war would be self-financing, and the world economy would move smoothly into the sunlit uplands.

Things have not turned out quite like that. Oil prices have risen, not fallen, and they could easily rise further. Partly this is a result of the increasingly desperate security situation in Iraq. The Americans did more than overthrow Saddam's despotic regime; they also destroyed the Iraqi state, with the result that the country is now in a condition of semi-anarchy.

If he decides to cut and run, Bush may yet survive the d?b?cle in Iraq. No such prospect beckons for Tony Blair. It was his brand of messianic liberalism that dragged Britain into the war. For the Prime Minister, going to war in Iraq offered an intoxicating feeling of rectitude combined with the reassuring sense of being on the side of the big battalions. But American invincibility was a neo-conservative myth, and the notion that Blair can survive the hideous fiasco that is unfolding in Iraq is as delusional as the thinking that led to the war in the first place. It cannot be long before he is irresistibly prompted to seek new avenues for his messianic ambitions.

In the US, American withdrawal will be represented as a reward for a job well done. The rest of the world will recognise it as a humiliating defeat, and it is here that the analogy of Vietnam is inadequate. The Iraq war has been lost far more quickly than that in South-east Asia, and the impact on the world is potentially much greater. Whereas Vietnam had little economic significance, Iraq is pivotal in the world economy. No dominoes fell with the fall of Saigon, but some pretty weighty ones could be shaken as the American tanks rumble out of Baghdad.

The full implications of such a blow to American power cannot be foreseen. One consequence is clear enough, however. The world has seen the last of liberal imperialism. It died on the killing fields of Iraq. It is no consolation to the people of that country, but at least their sufferings have demonstrated the cruel folly of waging war in order to fight a liberal crusade.

John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the LSE.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522568

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