Remember "Groundhog Day," with Bill Murray? He played a TV
weatherman, doomed to live the same day, Groundhog Day, over and over again.
As this odd summer slowly winds down, I feel a bit like Murray. I've been
here before.
Take the tunnel in Iraq, already filled with military and
intelligence analysts by the hundreds reporting that there's light somewhere
up ahead. Here, for example, is Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and on his better days,
nobody's fool.
On Washington's carousel, Cordesman is a prominent fixture. The
Center is the prime Republican think tank on K Street, where an elevator
ride can confront you with museum pieces stretching all the way back to
Reagan's first National Security Council adviser, Richard Allen. Cordesman
has held down big jobs in the Defense and Energy departments, has served as
Senator John McCain's national security assistant and strides confidently
before the cameras whenever ABC News summons him for analysis and
commentary.
Last Dec. 3, from all his dignity as the Arleigh Burke Chair at
CSIS, Cordesman issued a "rough draft" memo that derided Operation Oust
Saddam as the recipe for a bloody mess. Title of paper: "Planning for a
Self-Inflicted Wound: U.S. Policy to Shape a Post-Saddam Iraq." Theme:
Operation Oust Saddam is an "uncoordinated and faltering effort." "We face
an Arab world where many see us as going to war to seize Iraq's oil, barter
deals with the Russians and French, create a new military base to dominate
the region, and/or serve Israel's interest ... We may well face a much more
hostile population than in Afghanistan. We badly need to consider the
Lebanon model: Hero to enemy in less than a year." (He was wrong here, of
course. In Iraq it took less than a week.) The Iraqi National Congress, he
sneered, was far stronger inside the Washington Beltway than in Iraq. Most
of the existing structure of the Iraqi government was "vital." Iraq "is not
going to become a model government or democracy for years."
It didn't take long to run through Cordesman's 11 pages, and
the momentum of the argument was clear enough, as clear as the same
arguments were to Bush the Elder and his advisers back in 1991: Why get
deeper into this mess? Let Saddam keep his security forces intact and
butcher the Shiites. Offer protection to the Kurds, and let the place stew
under the weight of sanctions.
Now, here comes Cordesman again, with another memo fresh minted
after a tour of inspection in Iraq. He titles it: "What is Next in Iraq?
Military Developments, Military Requirements and Armed Nation Building."
Cordesman starts by announcing, "It now seems likely that the
United States will face some form of low intensity conflict in Iraq for at
least 6-12 more months." U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Iraq
"(a) admit on background that they have no real numbers and the situation is
constantly evolving, (b) see some kind of loose regional coordination but
cannot identify its scale and structure with any detail, (c) see the Iraqi
threat as still more pro-Saddam and Ba'athist than Islamic but note there is
no clear separation between the groups, (d) see a loose structure of
cooperation between diverse groups that do not share a common agenda other
than anger or hatred of the United States and secular change, (e) see
growing numbers of young Sunni Iraqis entering the opposition as part of a
postwar reaction to the U.S. failures in nation building . "
So is the answer more U.S. Army forces? Cordesman says there
simply aren't that many available, they would take months to train, and
there are severe budgetary constraints.
What about the current bipartisan efforts in Washington,
delayed by the terminal departure from Baghdad in a vertical direction of
U.N. Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, to draft in U.N. forces to
provide political cover and security manpower? "War and armed nation .
require focused and coordinated efforts that cannot be run by a giant
committee or carried out by inexperienced troops."
Cordesman points derisively at the current assemblage of the
Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, involving 31 countries with troops there
or getting there soon, with 11,000 from the U.K., 2,400 from Poland, 1,800
from the Ukraine, 1,300 from Spain, 1,130 from Italy and 1,100 from the
Netherlands. The other 25 countries have 24 different languages, lack
standardized communications, and generally require U.S. logistic and
transportation support.
This is where we begin to feel like Bill Murray. What does
Cordesman offers as the way forward? It boils down to the traditional
"nation-building" mix: a blend of the Phoenix program and Vietnamization.
Let Cordesman say the words, and you can whistle the tune.
"The United States must seek to win as quickly as possible, and
it cannot win in Iraq by fighting on the defense ... Unless it can hunt down
and seize or kill the opposition, however, it will always see new successful
hard return attacks and sabotage.
"The key to winning in this offensive mission is not numbers,
but intelligence, skilled cadres of expert troops, area and language
specialists, mixed with constant civic action, and political warfare to win
heats and minds .
"Winning hearts and minds means putting Iraqis in charge as
fast as possible even at the cost of political compromises and problems in
efficiency. "In Iraq, 'cost-effectiveness' will be a synonym for defeat, and
doing things on the cheap will be a recipe for constant vulnerability. 'Win
through waste' has always been the secret American recipe for victory; it
will be in this case as well."
In other words, recruit death squads from the Iraqis, rehire all
the old torturers (they already are, up to the rank of major from Saddam's
old Mukhabarat), and then let the Sunnis restore the old police state. You
can bet that Cordesman, who has a sensitive nostril for which sewage pool
the political winds on Washington are wafting over, is relaying the likely
shape of things to come.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
