- I am told by the Manchester Guardian, the New York Times,
the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that you have impeccable
academic and battlefield credentials. Bush has appointed you "Commander
of the Multinational Forces in Iraq", and so you have the power to
implement your highly publicized counter-insurgency theories. You are
nearly my namesake having a Romanized version of my Hellenized name.
You are dubbed a 'warrior' or 'counter-insurgency intellectual'. I hold
credentials as an 'insurgency intellectual' or as Alex Cockburn calls it
'a fifty-year membership in the class struggle'. You publicists have billed
you as 'America's last best hope for salvation (of the empire) in Iraq.'
Predictably the Democrats in Congress led by Senator Clinton went down
to their knees in praise and support of your professionalism and war record
in Northern Iraq. So let it be recognized that you enjoy an advantage:
the support of both parties, the White House, Congress and the mass media,
but still being an insurgent intellectual, I am not convinced that you
will or should succeed in saving Iraq for the empire. Better still; I
think you undoubtedly will fail, because your military assumptions and
strategies are based on fundamentally flawed political analyses, which
have profound military consequences.
-
- Let us start with your much-vaunted military
successes in North Iraq especially in Nineveh province. North Iraq,
particularly, Nineveh, is dominated by the Kurdish military and tribal
leaders and party bosses. The relative stability of the region has little
or nothing to do with your counter-insurgency prowess and more to do with
the high degree of Kurdish 'independence' or 'separatism' in the region.
Put bluntly, the US and Israeli military and financial backing of Kurdish
separatism has created a de facto independent Kurdish state, one based
on the brutal ethnic purging of large concentrations of Turkmen and Arab
citizens. General Petraeus, by giving license to Kurdish irredentist aspirations
for an ethnically purified 'Greater Kurdistan', encroaching on Turkey,
Iran and Syria, you secured the loyalty of the Kurdish militias and especially
the deadly Peshmerga 'special forces' in eliminating resistance to the
US occupation in Nineveh. Moreover, the Peshmerga has provided the US
with special units to infiltrate the Iraqi resistance groups, to provoke
intra-communal strife through incidents of terrorism against the civilian
population. In other words, General Petreaus' 'success' in Northern Iraq
is not replicable in the rest of Iraq. In fact your very success in carving
off Kurd-dominated Iraq has heightened hostilities in the rest of the country.
-
- Your theory of 'securing and holding' territory
presumes a highly motivated and reliable military force capable of withstanding
hostility from at least eighty percent of the colonized population. The
fact of the matter is that the morale of US soldiers in Iraq and those
scheduled to be sent to Iraq is very low. The ranks of those who are seeking
a quick exit from military service now include career soldiers and non-commissioned
officers the backbone of the military (Financial Times, March 3-4,
2007 p.2) Unauthorized absences (AWOLs) have shot up 14,000 between
2000-2005 (FT ibid). In March over a thousand active duty and reserve
soldiers and marines petitioned Congress for a US withdrawal from Iraq.
The opposition of retired and active Generals to Bush's escalation of
troops percolates down the ranks to the 'grunts' on the ground, especially
among reservists on active duty whose tours of duty in Iraq have been repeatedly
extended (the 'backdoor draft'). Demoralizing prolonged stays or rapid
rotation undermines any effort of 'consolidating ties' between US and Iraqi
officers and certainly undermines most efforts to win the confidence of
the local population. If the US troops are deeply troubled by the war
in Iraq and increasingly subject to desertion and demoralization, how less
reliable is the Iraqi mercenary army. Iraqis recruited on the basis of
hunger and unemployment (caused by the US war), with kinship, ethnic and
national ties to a free and independent Iraq do not make reliable soldiers.
Every serious expert has concluded that the divisions in Iraqi society
are reflected in the loyalties of the soldiers.
-
- General Petraeus, count your troops everyday,
because a few more will stray and perhaps in the future you will face an
empty drill field or worse a barrack revolt. The continued high casualty
rates among US soldiers and Iraqi civilians, during your first month as
Commander suggests that 'holding and securing' Baghdad failed to alter
the overall situation.
-
- Petraeus, your 'rule book' prioritizes "security
and task sharing as a means of empowering civilians and prompting national
reconciliation." 'Security' is elusive because what the US Commander
considers 'security' is the free movement of US troops and collaborators
based on the insecurity of the colonized Iraqi majority. They are subject
to arbitrary house-to-house searches, break-ins and humiliating searches
and arrests. 'Task Sharing' under a US General and his military forces
is a euphemism for Iraqi collaboration in 'administrating' your orders.
'Sharing' involves a highly asymmetrical relation of power: the US orders
and the Iraqis comply. The US defines the 'task' as informing on insurgents
and the population is supposed to provide 'information' on their families,
friends and compatriots, in other words betraying their own people. It
reads more feasible in your manual than on the ground.
-
- 'Empowering civilians', as you argue, assumes
that those who 'empower' give up power to the 'others'. In other words,
the US military cedes territory, security, financial resource management
and allocation to a colonized people. Yet it is precisely these people
who protect and support insurgents and oppose the US occupation and its
puppet regime. Otherwise, Commander, what you really mean is 'empowering'
a small minority of civilians who are willing collaborators of an occupying
army. The civilian minority 'empowered' by you will require heavy US military
protection to withstand retaliation. So far nothing of the sort has occurred:
no neighborhood civilian collaborators have been delegated real power and
those who have, are dead, hiding or on the run.
-
- Petraeus, your goal of 'national reconciliation'
presumes that Iraq exists as a free sovereign nation. That is a precondition
for reconciliation between warring parties. But US colonization of Iraq
is a blatant denial of the conditions for reconciliation. Only when Iraq
frees itself of you, Commander Petraeus, and your army and the dictates
of the White House can the warring parties negotiate and seek 'conciliation'.
Only political groups who base themselves on Iraqi popular sovereignty
can be part of that process. Otherwise what you are really writing about
is the military imposition of 'reconciliation' among warring collaborator
groups with no legitimacy among the Iraqi electorate.
-
- Former Clintonite, Sarah Sewall (ex-Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense and Harvard-based 'foreign affairs expert')
was ecstatic over your appointment. She claims the 'inadequate troop to
task ratio' may undermine your strategy (Guardian March 6, 2007). The
'troop to task ratio' forms the entire basis of Democratic Senators' Hilary
Clinton and Charles Schumers' 'critique' of Bush's Iraq policy. Their
solution is 'send more troops'. This argument begs the question: Inadequate
numbers of troops reflects the massiveness of popular opposition to the
US occupation. The need to improve the 'ratio' (greater number of troops)
is due to the level of mass opposition and is directly related to increasing
neighborhood support for the Iraqi resistance. If the majority of the
population and the resistance did not oppose the imperial armies, then
any ratio would be adequate down to a few hundred soldiers hanging
out in the Green Zone, the US Embassy or some local brothels.
-
- Your handbook's prescriptions borrow heavily
from the Vietnam War era, especially General Creighton Abram's, 'Clear
and Hold' counter-insurgency doctrine. Abrams ordered a vast campaign
of chemical warfare spraying thousands of hectares with the deadly 'Agent
Orange' to 'clear' contested terrain. He approved of the Phoenix Plan
the systematic assassination of 25,000 village leaders to 'clear'
out local insurgents. Abrams implemented the program of 'strategic hamlets',
the forced re-location of millions of Vietnamese peasants into concentration
camps. In the end Abram's plans to 'clear and hold' failed because each
measure extended and deepened popular hostility and increased the number
of recruits to the Vietnamese national liberation army.
-
- Petraeus, you are following the Abram's doctrine.
Large-scale bombing of densely populated Sunni neighborhoods took place
between March 5-7 (2007); mass arrests of suspected local leaders is accompanied
by the tight military encirclement of entire neighborhoods while arbitrary,
abusive house-to-house searches turn Baghdad into one big concentrations
camp. Like your predecessor, General Creighton Abrams, you want to destroy
Baghdad in order to save it. In fact your policy is merely punishing the
civilians and deepening the hostility of the Baghdad population, while
the insurgents blend into the population or into the surrounding provinces
of Al-Anbar, Diyala, and Salah and Din. Petraeus, you forget that you
can 'hold' a people hostage with armored vehicles but you cannot rule with
guns. The failure of General Creighton Abrams was not due to the
lack of 'political will' in the US, as he complained, but that 'clearing'
a region is temporary, because the insurgency is founded on its capacity
to blend in with the people.
-
- Your fundamental (and false) assumptions
are that the 'people' and the 'insurgents' are two distinct and opposing
groups, that your ground forces and Iraqi mercenaries can distinguish and
exploit this divergence and 'clear out' the insurgents and 'hold' the people.
The four-year history of the US invasion, occupation and imperial war
provides ample evidence to the contrary. With upward of 140,000 US troops
and close to 200,000 Iraqi and over 50,000 foreign mercenaries unable to
defeat the insurgency for the entire four years of the colonial war, the
evidence points to very strong, extensive and sustained civilian support
for the insurgency. The high ratio of civilian to insurgent killings by
the combined US-mercenary armies suggests that your own troops have not
been able to distinguish (nor are interested in the difference) between
civilians and insurgents. The insurgency draws strong support from extended
kin ties, neighborhood friends and neighbors, religious leaders, nationalists
and patriots: these primary, secondary and tertiary ties bind the insurgency
to the population in a way which can not be replicated by the US military
or its puppet politicians.
-
- General, you have already recognized after
only one month as Commander that your plan to 'protect and secure the civilian
population' is failing. While you flood the streets of Baghdad with armored
vehicles, you acknowledge that the 'anti-governmentforces are regrouping
north of the capital'. You are condemned to play what Lt. General Robert
Gaid un-poetically called 'whack-a-mole: Insurgents will be suppressed
in one area only to re-emerge somewhere else'.
-
- It is presumptions to assume, General, that the Iraqi
civilian population does not know that the 'special operations' forces
of the Occupation, with whom you are rather intimately connected, is responsible
for much of the ethno-religious conflict. Investigative reporter Max Fuller
in his detailed examination of documents, stresses that the vast majority
of atrocitiesattributed to 'rogue' Shiite or Sunni militias "were
in fact the work of government-controlled commandos of 'special forces',
trained by the Americans, 'advised' by Americans and run largely by former
CIA agents" (Chris Floyd 'Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American
Dirty War', <http://www.truthout.org/docs>www.truthout.org/docs.
-
- 2006/021307J.sthml). Your attempt to play 'Good Cop/Bad
Cop' in order to 'divide and rule' hasn't gone well, nor will it succeed
now.
-
- You have recognized the broader political context of
the war! "There is no military solution to a problem like that in
Iraq, to the insurgency In Iraq, military action is necessary to help improve
securitybut it is insufficient. There needs to be a political aspect"
(BBC 3/8/2007). Yet the key 'political aspect' as you put it, is the reduction,
not escalation, of US troops, the ending of the endless assaults on civilian
neighborhoods, the termination of the special operations and assassinations
designed to foment ethnic-religious conflict, and above all a timetable
to withdraw US troops and dismantle the chain of US military bases. General
Petraeus, you are not willing or in a position to implement or design the
appropriate political context for ending the conflict. Your reference
to the "need to engage in talks with some groups of insurgents"
will fall on deaf ears, or be seen as a continuation of the divide and
conquer (or 'salami') tactics, which have thus far failed to attract any
sector of the insurgency. Contrary to your impeccable Princeton/West Point
academic counter-insurgency credentials, you are mainly a tactician, wise
on technique, but rather mediocre in coming to grips with the 'decolonization'
political framework in which your tactics might work.
-
- Commander Petraeus, you are quick to grasp
the difficulty of your colonial mission. Just a month after taking command,
you are engaging in the same sophistry and double discourse of any 'bush'
colonel. To keep the flow of funds and troops from Washington you talk
of the "reduction of killings and discontent in Baghdad", cleverly
omitting the increase of civilian and US deaths elsewhere. You mention
'a few encouraging signs' but also admit that it is 'too early to discern
significant trends' (Aljazeera 3/8/2007). In other words the 'encouraging
signs' are of no importance!
-
- Already you have given yourself an open-ended
mission by extending the time frame for your Baghdad security crackdown
from days and weeks to 'months' (and beyond?). Isn't that a coy way to
prepare US politicians for prolonged warfare with few positive results?
There is nothing wrong with a philosopher warrior covering his ass in
anticipation of failure.
-
- General, I am sure as a military intellectual
you have read George Orwell's '1984' because you are so fluent in double-speak.
In one breath you speak of "no immediate need to request more US
troops to be sent to Iraq" (other than the 21,500 on their way):
On the other hand you request an extra 2,200 military policemen to deal
with the forthcoming massive incarceration of Baghdad civilian suspects.
-
- By 'honest talk', about troop numbers in the present
tense for your war, you prepare the ground for a greater escalation in
the proximate future. "Right now we do not see other requests (for
troops) looming out there. That's not to say that some emerging mission
or emerging task will not require that, and if it does then we will ask
for that (my emphasis)" (AlJazeera, 3/8/2006). First there's a 'surge'
then there is an 'emerging mission' and before we know it, there are another
fifty thousand troops on the ground and in the meat-grinder that is Iraq.
-
- Yes, General, you are a fine master of 'double speak'
but beyond that you are, with your colleagues in the White House
and Congress, doomed to go down the same road of political-military defeat
as your predecessors in Indo-China. Your military police will jail thousands
of civilians and perhaps many more. They will be interrogated, tortured
and perhaps some will be 'broken'. But many more will take their place.
Your policy of security through intimidation will 'hold' only as long
as the armored cars in each neighborhood point their cannons at every building.
But how long can you sustain it? As soon as you move, the insurgents
will return: they can continue for months and years because they live
and work there. You can't. You run a costly colonial army, which suffers
endless casualties. Sooner or later, the folks back home will force you
to leave.
-
- Your ambitions, General Petraeus, exceed your abilities.
Best start preparing your farewell to arms and look toward a higher post
in Washington. Remember your chances are slim: Only winning generals
or draft dodgers are elected President. There is always a professorship
at the Kennedy School at Harvard for the 'warrior intellectual' who is
good at the books but a failure in the field.
-
-
-
- James Petras is the author and editor of 67 books in
31 languages. His latest book is The Power of Israel in the United States
(Clarity Press). His writings can be found at www.petras.lahaine.org.
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