A year after Bush declared �Mission accomplished� in Iraq, a few mainstream American military and foreign policy voices are urging the US to admit defeat and withdraw.
These opinions were aired before the images of torture which end any chance that the Iraqi people will believe that America is a benign force for freedom and democracy in their nation.
Since the publication of those images on Thursday night the shocks keep coming. So tonight, updates on the tragedy of Iraq and your thoughts on what went wrong and what to do next.
The truth about American torture
* Seymour Hersh obtained the military report into America�s torture chambers in Iraq: TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB: American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?
* Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of Iraqi prisons at the time, says the block concerned was off limits to her and under the complete control of US intelligence – Rough Justice in Iraq:
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is angry. She says she warned her superiors from the first about the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners… The trouble was, Karpinski says, she didn’t have enough troops or resources to do the job right, and the men at the top ignored her complaints. “They just wanted it to go away,” she told NEWSWEEK last week… “There’s no excuse for what these people did,” says Karpinski. “They’re just bad people. But the guys involved in this were new to Abu Ghurayb. It got way out of hand.
Karpinski says the abuse took place in Abu Ghurayb’s Block 1A, which had been taken over and turned into a windowless prison-within-a-prison by military-intelligence officers. They called the shots there, not the usual military-police guards. “So far I haven’t heard of any investigation of the military-intelligence people,” she says.
* The American military denied problems in the prison for months, dead batting complaints from the British human rights envoy and Amnesty International. Hersh reports:
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba�s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
* An American veteran comments in Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
* The Americans have outsourced interrogation to private contractors (see Hersh), thus ending the last remaining core function of the State: Privatization of warfare. And now we�re losing our SAS soldiers to the private army in Iraq: Army exodus: SAS troops quit. Webdiarist Donald Brookcommented:
It’s good to see the war being privatised, with soldiers leaving the SAS and going entrepreneurial. One had thought that the blight of socialism, under which armed conflict has been seen by old Lefties like Howard et al as essentially a public enterprise, would never be cured.
* The American media hardly run the story for days, although the Hersh scoop seems to have forced them to do so. See Iraq Torture Images Vie with Photos of U.S. War Dead:
This shows U.S. newspaper editors understand what kind of war coverage interests American readers, according to David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant,” Perlmutter said in a telephone interview. “Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral damage …
As US blogger Kevin Drum said:
* Former General Sees ‘Staying the Course’ In Iraq as Untenable:
It is delusional, asserts the Army veteran, college professor and longtime Washington hand, to believe that “staying the course” can achieve President Bush’s goal of reordering the Middle East by building a friendly democracy in Iraq. For the sake of American security and economic power alike, he argues, the U.S. should remove its forces from that shattered country as rapidly as possible.
“We have failed,” Mr. Odom declares bluntly. “The issue is how high a price we’re going to pay. … Less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later?” His is not the voice of an isolationist, or a peacenik, or Republican-hater. He is talking from the conservative Hudson Institute, where he was hired years ago by Mitch Daniels, later Mr. Bush’s budget director. His office displays photos of Ronald Reagan, under whom Mr. Odom directed the National Security Agency, and Jimmy Carter, on whose National Security Council staff he served.
* Conservative� foreign policy expert Christopher Layne of the Cato Institute (one of the very few right wing think tanks which opposed the war) wrote The Best of Bad Choices in �The American Conservative�:
The United States has no good options in Iraq but the least bad is this: Washington should transfer real sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. It should tell the Iraqis to work out their own political future among themselves and turn over full responsibility for Iraq�s external and internal security to the new regime in Baghdad. Simultaneously, the United States also should suspend all offensive military operations in Iraq, pull its forces back to defensive enclaves well away from Iraq�s cities, and commence a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq that will be completed on December 31 (or on January 20, 2005).
There is no point in being Pollyannaish. In the long run, the U.S. will be better off leaving Iraq. In the short-term, however, there will be consequences � not all of which are foreseeable � if the U.S. withdraws. But that misses the point. Sooner or later the U.S. is going to end up leaving Iraq without having attained its goals. Washington�s real choice is akin to that posed in an old oil-filter commercial that used to run on television: America can pay now, or it can pay later when the costs will be even higher.
* Paul Krugman in In Front of Your Nose:
Even among harsh critics of the administration’s Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You’ve heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can’t cut and run. We have to stay the course. I understand the appeal of those arguments. But I’m worried about the arithmetic.
… I don’t have a plan for Iraq. I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant. If America’s leaders hadn’t made so many bad decisions, they might have had a chance to shape Iraq to their liking. But that window closed many months ago.
* United Press International analyst Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote in Looking for the exit:
Total alignment on Prime Minister Sharon’s anti-Palestinian strategy has turned even moderate Muslims against the United States. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak said hatred of the United States had never reached such depths.
When Mr. Bush suddenly dropped longstanding U.S. opposition to Jewish settlements on the West Bank, rooted as they were in U.N. resolutions, Israeli settlers could not believe their luck. Sharon conceded Gaza, where 7,500 Jewish settlers had no future among 1.3 million Palestinians, but in return obtained U.S. blessings for permanent Israeli habitation in large swaths of what was to be a Palestinian state. Even illegal hilltop settlements concluded they were now safe from removal and immediately began erecting permanent structures to replace mobile homes…
No sooner had the White House’s red light flashed green than the once surreptitious, crawling annexation of the West Bank resumed in the open. Jewish West Bank settlers were jubilant, while Palestinians were adrift in the Slough of Despond. With the Right of Return for Palestinians also off the table, and no viable state of their own on the West Bank, extremist organizations will have no problem recruiting more jihadis (holy warriors) and merging terrorist operations with the underground resistance in Iraq, Arab opinion has been inflamed to the point where Palestine and Iraq are now two fronts in the war against what Charles de Gaulle used to call “the Anglo-Saxons.”
Osama bin Laden is probably thinking he’s some kind of strategic genius.
After the torture photos scandal, he wrote Tutwiler’s mission impossible:
The shameful pictures of U.S. soldiers humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners were the final straw for Margaret D. Tutwiler. Moved out of her post as Ambassador to Morocco last December to become Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs, Ms. Tutwiler was instructed to spruce up the Bush administration’s image in the Arab world in particular and the Muslim world in general.
It took her only four months to conclude this was mission impossible. She was the third “image” czarina to come a cropper in three years. Competing against the Qatar-based al-Jazeera and Dubai-based al-Arabyia and their coverage of the occupation of Iraq gave Ms. Tutwiler about the same chance of success as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
* For a detailed account of the end of the neo-con power in Washington, see Jim Lobe�s US on the brink:
One year after President George W Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States appears to be teetering on the brink of strategic defeat in its Mesopotamian adventure.
Even as Bush on Friday reiterated his ambition to bring “freedom and democracy” to Iraq and the Middle East, a series of recent policy reversals � capped by Friday’s announcement that a former Ba’athist general will take charge of an all-Iraqi security force in Fallujah � suggests that an increasingly desperate Washington will settle for far less.
* The father of thus Senate and a consistent opponent of the war, Senator Robert Byrd made a speech called Mission Not Accomplished in Iraq to mark the first anniversary of Bush�s boast:
Since that time, Iraq has become a veritable shooting gallery. This April has been the bloodiest month of the entire war, with more than 120 Americans killed. Young lives cut short in a pointless conflict and all the President can say is that it “has been a tough couple of weeks”. A tough couple of weeks, indeed.
Plans have obviously gone tragically awry. But the President has, so far, only managed to mutter that we must “stay the course”. But what course is there to keep when our ship of state is being tossed like a dinghy in a storm of Middle East politics? If the course is to end in the liberation of Iraq and bring a definitive end to the war against Saddam Hussein, one must conclude, mission not accomplished, Mr. President.
The White House argues time and again that Iraq is the “central front” on the war on terrorism. But instead of keeping murderous al Qaeda terrorists on the run, the invasion of Iraq has stoked the fires of terrorism against the United States and our allies. Najaf is smoldering. Fallujah is burning. And there is no exit is in sight. What has been accomplished, Mr. President? (For Byrd�s pre-war speeches against the war, see A lonely voice in a US Senate silent on war and Today, I Weep for my Country…)
***
Allen Jay
This piece by Alex Cockburn, Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders, Useless Spies, Angry World, summarises the situation perfectly and applies equally to Howard�s Australia.
My only comment on evaluating intelligence and being able to sort the wheat from the chaff is that it requires an unbiased and open mind. When you have either a political or ideological bias there is a great temptation to ignore contrary facts and information as a matter of deliberate policy or because you subconsciously give them little credence.
That seems to be the deep corruption and failing within Australian, British and particularly US intelligence.
***
Alistair Bain in Perth
I am amazed at all these protestations of outrage at the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. We knew from interview snippets revealed during the invasion that elements of the American and British forces had little respect for the Iraqis. The abuse of prisoners is hardly surprising.
You claim not to have believed the released Japanese captive when he recounted his captor’s claims of mistreatment by the Americans – until you saw the photographs. Hmmm. We believe what we want to, don’t we? We invaded Iraq because we wanted to believe Mr Saddam had WMD. We didn’t want to believe that Iraq’s “liberators” could be brutal and inhumane.
The pictures – of which others, less “presentable”, exist – are reminiscent of the rape of Nanking, where Japanese soldiers had happy snaps taken while they abused Chinese women.
However, I acknowledge your moral courage in openly stating your changed position. What amazes me is how quickly former supporters of the invasion are changing their minds or carefully qualifying their support. Why do they think so many people raised objections to the invasion in the first place? With what REAL evidence did they offer their support?
I sympathise with Mark Latham’s pull-out call. However, part of me still believes that since Australia has allowed itself to become part of the Iraqi mire we have a moral responsibility to stay and help clean up the mess. Let’s hope we can find ways of doing so which truly make amends for the unspeakable horror we have helped create.
***
Russell Dovey in Canberra
Recent images of American and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners are more than disturbing; they are damning to a cultural tradition that upholds itself as the way of freedom, peace, and civilisation. The West is shamed by these photos, as it is by every act of barbarity that its soldiers commit in foreign wars.
Those in the US and British military who were responsible for these crimes, those who gave the orders, and those who did nothing even though they knew these crimes were being committed, should be arrested and tried in a court of law. It is the third group that I fear will get away with their crime, because the very nature of these acts means that many will have heard what was going on, making it hard to separate criminal negligence from disbelief.get away with their crime, because the very nature of these acts means that many will have heard what was going on, making it hard to separate criminal negligence from disbelief.
It is disturbing to remember that before the war, the US refused to join many other countries around the world, including Australia, in signing and ratifying the treaty for the International Criminal Court. The ICC handles war criminals who have not been adequately tried in their own countries.
It is possible that the Bush administration knew this sort of thing was likely to happen, and therefore ensured it could control the investigation. So why didn�t they make sure that soldiers knew the basic idea behind the Geneva Convention and respected a prisoner’s human rights? Why did it not respond to allegations that many of its soldiers regard Iraqis as subhuman?
However, Margo, the solution you propose in An empire in moral crisis may be worse than the problem. If the US and Britain withdrew all their forces from Iraq, then there would be no more tortures, beatings or Falluja-style massacres committed by American or British soldiers upon Iraqis.
Unfortunately, the American and British forces are not the only self-righteous, militaristic cowboys in Iraq, just the most numerous and well-armed. There are dozens, if not hundreds of militia groups of various sizes in Iraq, each one with a different view on how the country should be run. The weapons available to these groups range from the ubiquitous Kalashnikov rifle to rocket-propelled grenades capable of ripping apart a car.
An optimist might think that once the American and British forces leave, these militias would have no-one to fight anymore. They would go home and keep their rifles buried in the back yard, wrapped in oiled cloth, in case they were needed again.
No doubt, this is exactly what many of them would do. Quite a few more would simply protect their own neighbourhood, as they have ever since the fall of Saddam’s regime in the absence of any effective policing by the CPA.
Unfortunately, many of these groups were not formed in reaction to the Western occupation, or to protect their own neighbourhoods. Some are the personal armies of aspiring warlords, out to conquer as much territory as they can and hold it by force.
Other groups are motivated by religious beliefs, and intend to enforce their own rules and systems of worship wherever they can. Finally, there are terrorist groups under the banner of Al-Qaeda, using Iraq as a stage to hurt the US in their propaganda war, caring nothing for the people they kill or maim in the process.
Iraq’s borders are being enforced by the American and British military. Effectively, Iraq now exists as a nation because of the occupation. If we withdraw, then the borders are just lines on a map. While regional militias would fiercely defend their territories from Turkish, Iranian or Syrian attack, they would be hard-pressed to mount the fully co-coordinated defence required to prevail against the well-equipped armies of Turkey and Iran.
At best, if American and British forces withdrew entirely, Iraq would become a fragile coalition of diverse militias, many of whom have long histories of violence with many of the others. In another part of the world, they might even maintain stability, and be left alone to find their own way to govern themselves.
However, the land of Iraq has been blessed, or cursed, with a staggeringly large amount of oil. Especially in a time when we are constantly being told that the oil will start to run out in 30 years, it is hard for any country to resist this lure. Oil is valuable both for its financial and its geopolitical value, even if a country is already the richest, most powerful nation on earth with its own oil reserves.
If the USA is unable to go without Iraq’s oil, Iraq’s neighbours would be even more unable to resist the opportunity to grab what they can now in order to protect themselves from economic chaos in 30 years, and Iran would especially see it as a chance to gain more control over the US economy.
So the Iraqi people, far from having a chance to determine their own future, would be invaded and plunged into anarchy. Civilian deaths in the widespread fighting could be in the tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands would probably die from lack of basic infrastructure, combined with an inability to deliver food aid. The flood of refugees into surrounding countries would cause even more hardship and famine.
Therefore, even though the occupation of Iraq is wrong and must end, to simply wash our hands of the mess would be worse for Iraq’s people and for global stability. I don’t mean that the PM is right about “getting the job done”, because he wouldn’t know what the real job was if it hit him in the face.
This petty, selfish national interest that the PM seems to believe in is not what the Australian people believe in. We are not a selfish, petty little people, ready to sell another country down the river to enrich our American big brother. Our fearless leader has done a great job of convincing the world that we are, but we know better.
***