Whose Analogy Is This Anyway?

Here are parts of a rather ordinary summary report on 24 hours in Iraq from Slobodan Lekic of the Associated Press. They nonetheless manage to highlight several aspects of the present crisis. His piece (11/8/03) begins:

 

"A senior U.S. official insisted on Saturday that the U.S. military has the upper hand in the escalating war in Iraq, on a day when two paratroopers died in a roadside ambush and the international Red Cross said it was closing two main offices due to deteriorating security. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage described Iraq as a 'war zone,' but noted that 'we have the momentum in this process.'"

 

Here we have the sort of mad spin that anyone who lived through the Vietnam era can't help but remember -- the insistence on "progress" of one sort or another against all evidence on the ground, an anti-truth telling meant to "buy time" during which, it is hoped, evidence of the very momentum, the very progress being described will appear on the radar screen. Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense, was an expert at this sort of thing and, as with McNamara, we'll undoubtedly discover when the tell-alls and memoirs come out that Armitage and most of the others knew things were much, much grimmer, but just went right on anyway. (Responsibility being something reserved for less eminent types.)

 

Lekic also describes an attack on an American military vehicle in the streets of Mosul, resulting in several wounded American who abandon the vehicle which is then burned not by the insurgents but by "local people" -- this in a city 250 miles north of Baghdad and so beyond the "Sunni Triangle," further evidence that the insurgency may be spreading northwards. (I use "insurgents," by the way, simply to keep up with the latest usage. The Los Angeles Times, according to Dan Whitcomb at the Commondreams website, "has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as 'resistance fighters,' saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism. The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms 'insurgents' or 'guerrillas.'" In any case Lekic reports the following individual response in Mosul:

 

"'They (Americans) are occupying the world,' said Shazad Ahmed, a resident who saw the attack. 'What do you want the people to do? Kiss them?'"

 

This seems to catch a response one might have heard in any colonial or neo-colonial occupation by any superpower of the moment any time in the last century. And talking of responses, Lekic reports the following American response to the crash (assumedly due to enemy fire) of a Blackhawk helicopter near Tikrit in which six Americans died and for which no one has claimed credit and no insurgents were found -- an event that has yet to be definitively declared the result of an act of "insurgency":

 

"Late Friday, U.S. troops fired mortars around the crash site and Air Force jets dropped at least three 500-pound bombs on the same area. U.S. commanders said they were trying to warn the locals against supporting insurgents…."

 

On television, this was reported as an assault involving tanks and howitzers as well, a whole air-land assortment of weaponry, all firing into nearby areas and at houses which insurgents (however unknown) "might" have used to aid in the attack. Consider that and you know that you have signs of collective punishment, though (as in Vietnam) it's seldom reported that way in our media; a collective punishment assumedly ordered from on high in a spirit of revenge for the dead, and possibly for the humiliations of the week, with a distinct edge of frustration undoubtedly thrown in for good measure. This is being referred to as a "show of force" in the Sunni Triangle and it takes us a small way toward the mindset that turned much of South Vietnam into a "free fire zone" in which anything that moved was fair game and, inevitably, it takes us into the world of war crimes. There is simply no way to have an occupation of this sort and resistance to it of any sort that grows rather than fades, and not head down this path. And, if this isn't ended soon, there can only be worse to come.

 

For instance, our forces are globally stretched so thin that the decision has been made to ship up to 20,000 Marines to Iraq, perhaps early next year. To the phrase "send in the Marines" is seldom appended "for guard duty" or "convoy guard duty" or some such. They are a fighting force, not a long-term occupying force. It doesn't take much imagination to realize the kinds of acts that are likely to result when adolescent Marines, trained for invasion and war, are sent in as "peace-keepers" and begin to experience the frustrations and casualties involved in a low-level guerrilla war with unknown enemies. We've been here before, that's for sure, so prepare for either court marshals or cover ups in the months to come.

 

And keep in mind what the results of that "show of force" in Tikrit are likely to be. That's easy enough to guess with only Vietnam in mind. But Patrick Graham of the British Observer (11/9/03) has just filed a report from Falluja in the heart of the heart of the Sunni Triangle on the subject. It begins:

 

"Sarab rolls up her sleeve and looks at the thick scar across her upper arm. The eight-year-old says she was playing in the bathroom of her house when the shots were fired but cannot remember anything else. 'It is their routine,' said her grandfather, Turk Jassim. 'After the Americans are attacked, they shoot everywhere. This is inhuman - a stupid act by a country always talking about human rights.'…While the US authorities maintain that resistance attacks are carried out by former Baathists and supporters of Saddam, they continue to ignore the tribal nature of the insurgency which has grown steadily over recent months. Deeply conservative clans like the 50,000-strong Albueisi have codes of honour which they complain the American army ignores at checkpoints and during raids on houses.

 

"In the area around Falluja, the US army appears to be winning hearts and minds -- for their enemy. 'The American army is our best friend,' a resistance fighter told us. 'We should be giving them medals.'"

 

According to Graham, the angry tribesmen claim to have shot down that Chinook helicopter last week and also to have shot up a train carrying military supplies. Anthony Shadid, the incomparable Washington Post reporter in Iraq (who actually speaks Arabic and so has an immense advantage over just about any other American, military or civilian, except the commander of our forces Gen. Abizaid) spotlighted similar problems in a recent article. Pointing out that "with a limited number of interpreters and interrogators, the military is often forced to take people to bases for questioning," he then wrote about one such case (11/6/03):

 

"[The mother of a fugitive son the Americans couldn't find] said brown burlap bags were placed over their heads. Terrified and crying, they were driven in Humvees to the nearby U.S. base at Habbaniya… 'God does not accept this,' she said simply… As the U.S. military searches for tactics to break an escalating guerrilla war in a region where grievances tend to accumulate but rarely fade, few occurrences have unleashed more anger and etched deeper the cultural divide than several recent arrests of wanted men's relatives -- particularly women -- in Khaldiya and nearby hamlets in the Euphrates River valley. Some villagers insist the relatives have been taken as hostages to force fugitives to turn themselves in, a charge the military has denied."

 

Cultural ignorance deep enough to be staggering, superpower arrogance -- that is, a sense of our own superiority powerful enough to replace old-fashioned racism as a powering force in new-style colonial relations -- and a confusing mix of counterinsurgency tactics that might have been designed for, in Shadid's words, "creating enemies" makes up a powerful trio that, again, had its parallels in our Vietnam moment.

 

Not surprisingly, much of this has a deeply familiar ring to it to many Americans. Senator Fritz Hollings gave a speech in the Senate last week on his feeling that this was just déjà vu all over again:

 

"I voted for the [war] resolution. I was misled. Now we hear that this is not Vietnam… The heck it is not. This crowd has got historical amnesia. There is no education in the second kick of a mule. This was a bad mistake. We were misled. We are in there now, and I am hearing the same things that the Senator heard in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 right on through 1973… There are the misleading statements…, the litany by the President telling us all there was reconstituted nuclear. Here again we are in a guerilla war. It is an urban guerilla war, not in the bushes of Vietnam but we still again are trying to win the hearts and minds.

 

"Mr. President, I do not know how many more similarities we are going to get. Iraq is Vietnam all over for the Senator from South Carolina… We either have to get in or get out. We can't stand for operation meat grinder to continue day in and day out. [In Vietnam era documents, by the way, American generals referred to that war, too, as a "meat grinder."]

 

"...Was it for nuclear? No. Was it for terrorists? No, they didn't have terrorists there. Your son gave his life for what? As their Senator, I am embarrassed. It wasn't for any of those things. Why we went in, the administration has yet to tell us. They keep changing the rules and the goalposts every time…"

 

And here is a response to the Hollings speech from a mother whose son died in Iraq, the kind of statement that, later in the Vietnam Era became ever more common, if never less gut wrenching (Lauren Markoe, TheState.com [South Carolina], 11/6/03):

 

"'He is so right; there is no reason for the war,' said Carolyn Hutchings of Boiling Springs. Her son, Marine Private Nolen Ryan Hutchings, 20, died on the outskirts of Nasiriyah in a friendly fire incident. 'First of all, we're after al Qaeda, and then all of a sudden it turns to Iraq. Iraq wasn't connected to 9/11 ... My son died for no good reason. My son was always proud to be a Marine. He always wore the uniform proudly, but he shouldn't have had to wear it over there.'"

 

The final sentence of Slobodan Lekic's piece is perhaps the most telling -- and it reminds us that whatever reality we Americans are inhabiting right now, we are not, in fact, in Vietnam:

 

"[Secretary of State Colin] Powell said in an interview that it remained unclear who was behind the spate of attacks."

 

Such a statement could never have been made in Vietnam. As our leaders then weren't willing to take Vietnamese nationalism seriously, there was certainly confusion about the ultimate enemy -- Russian Communism, Chinese Communism World Communism? -- but there was no doubt that North Vietnam existed, that it had a charismatic leader, that there was an organized guerrilla movement in the south of the country, and so on. It was true that American soldiers often couldn't sort the "enemy" from the civilian population and so confronted a "faceless" foe, but that did not extend to the top.

 

Now, in some sense, we are literally unsure who it is we're fighting. This sort of passage, from a Howard LaFranchi piece in the Christian Science Monitor (11/6/03), would have been inconceivable then:

 

"Who makes up the resistance and why it is strengthening -- with attacks two nights in a row this week on the American civilian authority's fortress compound in central Baghdad -- are queries with answers that remain to a large extent murky and conjectural. American authorities, admitting they have poor intelligence on what appears to be a diffuse but increasingly organized insurgency, plan to step up development of Iraqi intelligence sources they hope can get a better handle on this new opposition."

 

"… even though the US has a large intelligence operation here, experts say it is hampered by a lack of contacts on the ground, or 'human intelligence.' The FBI has a large number of agents here, for example, investigating recent car bombings and the increasing rocket attacks. But the American prowess with high-tech surveillance and investigative wizardry is often useless in a country where records and phone service are in a shambles, and where low-tech person-to-person contact reigns."

 

There's a certain pathos in the fact that we entered Iraq gulled by a few Iraqi exiles and, it seems, without real intelligence about anything. As Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times (11/9/03), "The Bush crowd hurtled into Baghdad on the law of Disney: Wishing can make it so." Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern comments on this fall from a beautiful dream of domination into the darkness of complete ignorance in "Helicopter down" from the Tompaine.com website which conjures up Vietnam-in-Iraq about as effectively as anything I've seen:

 

"After many weeks of refusing to admit the word 'guerrilla' into evidence, Rumsfeld seems to have made his peace with it. Yet, when asked this past weekend on television who the guerrillas are, he foundered, admitting in so many words that he hasn't a clue. I was actually embarrassed for him. A terrific debater and otherwise reasonably smart man, Rumsfeld was reduced to telling us once again that Iraq is the size of California and bemoaning the deficiencies in 'situational awareness' and lack of 'perfect visibility' into who it is that are killing our troops."

 

In our world, then, Vietnam has arrived -- like the return of the repressed -- with a bang. Its language is now with us big time; no surprise, since it's lived like an unexorcised demon in our collective brains for decades. "Quagmire" or the Q-word came first, but so many others have followed and most of them from the mouths of those otherwise fighting hardest against the analogy. It's as if they were possessed.

 

There is "cut and run," a Lyndon Johnsonism that somehow won't die even with several stakes in its syntactic heart; "progress," McNamara's creature; "nightmare" into which in Vietnam we were always descending; Vietnamization (in the form of "Iraqification"), a state towards which we're suddenly running as if into the arms of a lover, though most of our leaders seem to have forgotten what "Vietnamization" really entailed -- a South Vietnamese army that was a funnel for arms going to the guerrillas and that proved anything but a trustworthy ally in the war; and recently, "credibility"(whatever we do, we can't leave, because we can't afford to lose it, whatever it is). It was the Vietnam-era word par excellence and it's now flooding into Washington.

 

This week Senator John McCain, still perhaps quietly positioning himself for a New Hampshire dash, just in case the presidential polls suddenly collapse, gave a "this is not Vietnam" speech, filled with all sorts of curious, obsessive denials (Yale Global on-line):

 

"Iraq is not Vietnam because our ally is not a corrupt government unwilling to defend itself, but a newly-freed people that desperately want to build a new future. Most fundamentally, Iraq is not Vietnam because the United States and the Iraqi people share the same goal of building a free, prosperous, and secure Iraq."

 

He's not completely wrong, of course. If the Iraqi "enemy," top to bottom, remains faceless and largely speechless, so do the Iraqis on our side. Note that McCain talks about the Iraqi people, not the isolated, powerless Governing Council. It, too, is largely "faceless." At least in South Vietnam we had a semi-functioning government to support and be supported by us. In the end, McCain, our most famous Vietnam-era POW, cannot stay away from Vietnam:

 

"Our defeat in Vietnam nonetheless holds cautionary lessons. We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal [and so on]... Failure to make the necessary political commitment to secure and build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, put American security at risk, empower our enemies, and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny. It would be the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam."

 

In the meantime, let's note that as Vietnam words arrive, some key post-9/11 words seem to be disappearing: "Mullah Omar" (who remembers him, even though he's leading a reorganized Taliban in the land that time forgot, Afghanistan); "Anthrax killer" (He/she/they have long been in absentia, except when the odd pond is drained in Virginia, despite the fact that his/her/their attack -- the first to employ a weapon of mass destruction in the United States -- was a significant factor in driving us toward a "war" on terror, when it was still thought that the anthrax came from al-Qaeda, not from our own weapons labs); "Osama bin Laden" (except on the days when he releases a new tape); and what about that hangman's "noose" (first around Osama and then around Saddam Hussein, in both cases "tightening" rapidly); even "Saddam" seems MIA most of the time -- and that may be the strangest thing of all since to topple him we first enforced a decade of fierce sanctions, helping destroy the Iraqi infrastructure and inflicting vast suffering on the Iraqi people and then, despite (as reported this week) his last minute attempts to settle up, launched a war essentially against a single man, causing yet more suffering among Iraqis. The three personalized targets of our "war" against terror as it bled into our war against Saddam as it bled back into a war against terror are all evidently still free and plotting against us. If a police force had such results in a high profile series of cases for which the national treasury had been opened heads would obviously roll.

 

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