Crawling from the Wreckage (14 page)

That personal vendetta has virtually paralyzed the politics of a country with half the population of the United States. Ever since democracy was restored in Bangladesh in 1990, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have alternated in power, each woman devoting all of her time in opposition to sabotaging the other’s initiatives. But now the page may have turned.

The Supreme Court’s confirmation of the death sentences on the ageing conspirators of 1975 may finally enable the country to move past
its obsession with those horrific murders. If there was a political motive behind the Bangladesh Rifles mutiny, it was to stop that verdict from being passed, but the insubordination did not spread.

Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League won the last election by a landslide, and the army stayed loyal to the elected government right through the crisis. The Bangladeshi Shakespeare may be running out of material.

The Iraq War was a year and a half old when I wrote this piece, and the pattern for the next few years was already clear: a relentless guerrilla war against the American occupation, with one or more Iraqi civil wars on top. I had mostly stopped raging against the stupidity and illegality of the invasion by then, but I still couldn’t get over the sheer military incompetence of the operation
.

“We’re going to raise the Iraqi flag over Falluja and give it back to the Fallujans,” Major-General Richard Natonski told the First Marine Division at the start of the battle for the western Iraqi city. After six days of one-sided fighting (38 American soldiers and about 1,200 Iraqi
resistance fighters killed), what’s left of the city has indeed been captured, but most Fallujans fled weeks ago, as did most of the resistance fighters who were making it their base.

An estimated thirty to fifty thousand of the city’s three hundred thousand people did stay, however, not realizing how devastating U.S. firepower would be in the final assault. Many of them are now dead or injured, though we will never know how many because the U.S. forces refuse to count the civilians killed in their operations and forbid Iraqi official organizations to do so either.

In the end nothing has been accomplished. As Falluja was being reduced to ruins, rebels were seizing the centre of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and a third of the U.S. blocking force around Falluja had to be sent north to deal with it. It’s like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole: bash down one mole and up pops another elsewhere. And the U.S. has just not got enough troops in Iraq to whack all the centres of the resistance at once.

This was the main issue from the start for the U.S. Army, which was deeply opposed to the invasion plan that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced on the professional soldiers. As Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (forced into retirement by Rumsfeld) told a Senate committee in February of last year, a force “on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to control Iraq after the war.

Rumsfeld retorted publicly that Shinseki’s figure was “far from the mark,” and his neo-conservative ally, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said: “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself …” But that’s exactly what the professional soldiers did foresee.

Anybody could have invaded Iraq. With a little help on sealift and air support, Belgium could have done it. The Iraqi army was comprehensively smashed in the 1991 Gulf War, and due to
UN
sanctions it had neither repaired its losses nor acquired any new weapons in the following twelve years. Only the toadies in the upper ranks of Western intelligence services managed to persuade themselves that Iraq had functioning weapons of mass destruction; working-level analysts overwhelmingly doubted it. The problem wasn’t the war; it was the occupation.

“All of us in the Army felt … that the defeat of the Iraqi military would be a relatively straightforward operation of fairly limited duration, but that
the securing of the peace and security of a country of twenty-five million people spread out over an enormous geographic area would be a tremendous challenge that would take a lot of people, a lot of labour, to be done right,” said Thomas White, Secretary of the Army in 2001–03, in the Public Broadcasting System’s recent
Frontline
documentary “Rumsfeld’s War.”

If there had been three hundred thousand U.S. troops in Iraq when the war ended, the orgy of looting, the collapse of public order and public services, and all the consequent crime and privation that alienated the Iraqi public might have been averted. The U.S. armed forces could have come up with that many soldiers for a year—and if order had been maintained in Iraq and elections held a year ago it would have been over by now. But on Rumsfeld’s insistence there were only 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Why did he insist on that? Because proving that he could successfully invade foreign countries on short notice with relatively small forces, and without demanding major sacrifices from the U.S. public, was key to making President Bush’s new strategic doctrine of “preemptive war” credible. It was also essential to the neo-conservatives’ dream of a lasting
Pax Americana
, which could easily involve an Iraq-sized war every couple of years. So the generals were told to shut up and follow orders.

It’s too late to fix Iraq by pumping in larger numbers of U.S. troops now. As Don Rumsfeld used to say sarcastically at his press conferences back when he was sure he was right and both the media and the professional soldiers were all wrong: “All together now: ‘quagmire.’ ”

In January 2005, the United States finally allowed a general election in Iraq. It had resisted the move for almost two years, instead imposing “interim governments” filled with its own placemen. But it was forced to hold the election by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who threatened a Shia general strike if it did not
.

Sistani’s purpose was to secure the permanent hold on power of the Shia Arab majority (60 percent of Iraq’s population), and he succeeded. But the election also increased the alienation of the Sunni Arab minority (20 percent of the population), almost all of whom boycotted the event. They had lost their historic dominance in Iraqi society because of the U.S. invasion, they were already the backbone of the armed resistance to the
occupation—and, in less than a year, they would end up in a civil war with the Shias. Even before that happened, American support for the war was collapsing at home
.

If mere rhetoric could bridge the gulf of credibility, President George W. Bush might have turned the tide with his nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening. As usual, he strove to blur the distinction between the “war on terror” (which almost all Americans still see as necessary) and the war in Iraq (which they are finally turning against), and promised viewers that all would end well if they only showed “resolve.” His pitch didn’t work: the audience has heard it too many times before.

A majority of Americans now understand that the terrorist attacks in Iraq are a result of the U.S. invasion, not a justification for it. Many have also seen the leaked
CIA
report that concluded that Iraq is producing a new breed of Arab jihadis, trained in urban warfare, who are more numerous and deadlier than the generation that learned its trade in Afghanistan. And so they don’t believe the war in Iraq is making them safer, and they see no light at the end of the tunnel.

Since Vice-President Dick Cheney boasted in early June that the insurgency in Iraq was “in its last throes,” more than eighty American soldiers and about seven hundred Iraqi civilians have been killed. On Monday, the new Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, declared that “two years will be enough and more than enough to establish security”—but the previous evening, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mused aloud on U.S. television that the insurgency in Iraq might last for “five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.”

Even more than it hates casualties, the American public hates defeat, and it can sense panic and confusion among the president’s allies and advisers. The latest polls show a huge swing against the Iraq War in American public opinion, with around 60 percent now opposing the war and refusing to believe that the Bush administration has a clear plan for winning it. But that doesn’t mean that U.S. troops will be leaving Iraq any time soon: there is still the question of saving face.

People forget that American public opinion turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, but that the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops was not completed until 1973. The intervening five years—resulting in two-thirds of all American casualties in the war—were devoted to the search for a way to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam without admitting defeat. At the very least, there had to be a “decent interval” after the U.S. left before the victors collected their prize.

In the end, the humiliation was far greater than if the United States had simply walked away in 1968—the desperate helicopter evacuation on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975 is among the best-known images of American history—and the U.S. army became so demoralized that it was virtually useless as a fighting force for a decade afterwards. But we are dealing with human psychology here, and so the pattern is likely to be repeated in Iraq.

The current administration in Washington has identified itself with the Iraq adventure so closely that it would have great difficulty just walking away—especially since Mr. Bush is loyal beyond reason to the neoconservative ideologues whose obsessions landed him in this mess. There will be mid-term elections to Congress in only sixteen months, but it stretches credulity to believe that U.S. forces could be extracted from Iraq by that time without having a negative effect on Republican chances in the vote.

The real deadline for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is the three and a half years that the Bush presidency has left. Keeping control of the White House will be the most important consideration for American Republicans in 2008, so there must be some resolution of the Iraq problem by then. What might it be?

There is the happy-ever-after ending, constantly promised by the Bush administration and its Iraq collaborators, where all the Iraq communities reconcile, the insurgency dies down, and a genuinely democratic government begins to deliver security and prosperity to the exhausted Iraqis. Such an outcome is not impossible in principle, but it is unlikely to occur while U.S. troops are still occupying the country and goading both Islamists and Arab nationalists into resistance.

There is also the roof-of-the-embassy scenario, but that is equally unlikely. The Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq, drawn from a solid block of 20 percent of the population occupying the heart of the country, have the
power to thwart any peace settlement that excludes them. But they cannot drive U.S. troops out, and they cannot re-establish their political domination over the Shia Arabs and the Kurds even if the Americans leave.

So it’s going to be messy, and it’s even possible that U.S. troops won’t be out of Iraq three and a half years from now. In which case, the next U.S. president will be a Democrat.

The long anticipated civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias got underway about eight months later, after the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine on February 22, 2006. It was a horrific civil war—in 2006 and early 2007 an average of a hundred people a day were being kidnapped and killed, usually after horrendous torture, in the Baghdad area alone—but it never really threatened Shia control of the government. Furthermore, it actually brought the American casualty rate down, because U.S. troops were no longer the primary target of the Sunni fighters. And it may not even have raised the overall Iraqi death rate that much, because the number of Iraqi dead was already very great
.

The final indignity, if you are an Iraqi who was shot for accidentally turning into the path of a U.S. military convoy (they thought you might be a terrorist), or blown apart by a car bomb or an air strike, or tortured and murdered just for being a Sunni or a Shia, is that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair will deny that your death happened. The script they are working from says (in Mr. Bush’s words last December) that only “30,000, more or less” have been killed in Iraq during and since the invasion in March 2003.

So they have a huge incentive to discredit the report in the British medical journal
The Lancet
this week that an extra 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion in excess of the natural death rate: 2.5 percent of the population. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” said Mr. Bush, without giving any reason why not. “It is a fairly small sample they have taken and they have extrapolated it across the country,” said a spokesman of the British Foreign Office, as if such a methodology were invalid. But it’s not.

The study, led by Dr. Les Roberts and a team of epidemiologists from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was based on a survey of 1,849 households, containing 12,801 people, at forty-seven different locations chosen at random in Iraq. Teams of four Iraqi doctors—two men and two women—went from house to house and asked the residents if anybody had died in their family since January 2002 (fifteen months before the invasion).

If anybody had died, they then inquired when and how. They asked for death certificates, and in 92 percent of cases, the families produced them. Then, the Johns Hopkins team of epidemiologists tabulated the statistics and drew their conclusions.

The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the pre-war death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002–March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the U.S. government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculated that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the pre-war and post-war death rates over a period of forty months is 655,000 deaths.