This is, perhaps, the best explanation I've read of why we are where we are
today.
Miriam
The Legacy of the Iraq War
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
23 March 18
The invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age -
it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline
Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. It was an awesome
drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all.
People were looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes,
shrugging, and asking: Can we really do this without a reason? That was the
dramatic subtext of the invasion.
In the press, no one could really make sense of the supposed justification
for the invasion. That it was compelling, no one could deny. Hell, just look
at the fonts. We all used the biggest ones we had! The New York Times said
it all with its dramatic banner:
"BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN"
GOON BOMBS CITY ON HORSESHIT PRETEXT would have been more accurate, but
editors were giving everyone the benefit of the doubt back then, and getting
on board, for patriotic reasons. The Gray Lady, who was playing such a key
role in what was going on, was certainly getting in the spirit, giving in to
the adrenaline rush of Bush's evil gambit.
It was the same with CNN's breathless coverage of that first night, with the
creepy green-hued night-cams showing explosion after monster explosion.
Shock and awe, we called it: a new plan for "achieving rapid dominance."
What a great Hollywood name, and goddamn if people didn't sit glued to their
TVs to watch its rollout, getting off like a bunch of kids blowing up frogs.
Wars are great TV. The prolonged political lead-up and the decision to kill
are rich with suspense, especially when wedded to the sight and the sound of
the bombs, after waiting all those months for one nightfall, at the hour of
crime and sex, to launch the first sorties from a secret location at sea -
it all trips the senses. It's a turn on. It makes the Super Bowl look like
paint drying. The sheer drama is how they sold this thing to the public,
fifteen years ago this week.
But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't
overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew
what they were doing.
The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined
to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a
cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets,
and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."
As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off
rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often
describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few
weeks back, talking about how we "blundered" into Iraq.
It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq
narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an
unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of
our system.
We remember things that look on the outside like dumb miscalculations. First
in line is the press corps that somehow all at once committed mass
malpractice, falling for a plainly absurd WMD fable. It wasn't a systemic
problem caused by knee-jerk belief of government sources and the exclusive
handout of network air-time to spooks, retired generals, and military
strategists - no, we just all fell for the same error.
Then there was the Bush administration, which appeared to sincerely believe
we would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq, and that we'd be able to
establish a Mesopotamian Switzerland overnight.
The Democrats will tell you they were genuinely convinced voting for the war
was politically necessary, and/or that they really believed the intelligence
about Saddam's weapons programs.
It was just a big misunderstanding, all of it. An "oops" moment, as some
commentators called it even back then.
Bullshit. The invasion was no mistake, and nobody above the age of eight
believed the WMD story. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We all knew what
was going on.
Far from being an error, the war was a perfect expression of everything we
stood for then, and still stand for now. And the survival of the
comedy-of-errors explanation as popular media myth is almost as inexcusable
as the original tidal wave of misreporting that preceded the invasion.
America by 2003 already had a long history of violent regime change. One
study, cited recently in the Washington Post, concluded we tried to change
other nations' governments a mind-blowing 72 times between 1947 and 1989.
Most of these efforts were justified under the aegis of the domino theory,
i.e. that we had to step in to prevent the cancer-like spread of communism.
"If Indochina falls," Dwight Eisenhower for instance said way back in 1951,
"the countries of Southeast Asia and Indonesia would follow, followed by
India..."
The domino theory justified rigged votes, arrests and assassinations of
elected leaders, installations of military rulers, terrorist operations (or
"sabotage," as we called them in places like Cuba), even mass bombings of
local populations. The death tolls from these operations are incredible -
millions of civilians in Indochina alone. Of course, facing up to the shame
of this blood-soaked past is not part of most American high school history
courses.
If you ever want to feel fantastic about being American, watch this
documentary showing Vietnamese parents weeping over their dead and napalmed
children while Dick Nixon tells the world that "throughout the war in
Vietnam, the United States has exercised a degree of restraint unparalleled
in the annals of war."
Or: look at these maps showing the vast areas where we sprayed dioxin over
that tiny agrarian country, using bombers to dump poison by the ton, causing
a generation of people to be left deformed, suffering and alive, with
misshapen and/or eyeless heads, like this. That's what our "unparalleled"
restraint looked like.
After communism fell, the domino theory went with it, making it difficult
for us to continue justifying this meddling. The Bill Clinton administration
tried out the "humanitarian intervention" excuse in Kosovo, but how often
could we play that card, really?
Still we continued the baseline practice of promoting colonial dictators in
economically important regions. Which was odd because we continually lost
ground over the years as we supported more and more ruthless regimes.
At the end of World War II, America had more power worldwide perhaps than
any country in history. We controlled the Atlantic and the Pacific and our
GDP was about 50% of the world economy. But from that point we experienced
one foreign policy disaster after another.
We "lost" China (it was ours?) to a communist takeover in 1949. Vietnam fell
out of French orbit in 1954, out of ours in the seventies. Iran threw us out
in 1979. Castro overthrew Batista. The Sandinistas overthrew Somoza. We even
got the Russians in our clutches after communism fell, but after one brief
decade of brutal reform policies (leading to millions of premature deaths in
an unprecedented economic disaster) and rigged elections, we lost them, too,
to a nationalist backlash that replaced our vicious puppet Yeltsin with the
equally vicious Putin.
The consistent thread throughout all of these foreign policy losses was our
relentless, stubborn belief that would have succeeded, if only we'd been
allowed to use more force and violence.
Whether it was Vietnam or Indonesia or the Dominican Republic or the
Philippines or Iran or Chile or wherever, we consistently ignored our
inability to connect and compromise with impoverished foreign populations,
and instead blamed failures of technology and/military tactics.
If only the "Dixie mission" fellow-travellers in the diplomatic corps in
China hadn't let Mao come to power; if only the press hadn't back-stabbed us
in Vietnam and turned public opinion against the war; if only Jane Fonda
hadn't gotten in the way; if only we'd been allowed to "take the gloves
off," as Rambo complained in a common pop culture trope; if only we had the
"full spectrum" weaponry we really needed to pacify all of these countries
and complete our "varied tasks" around the world, as military think tanks
like the Project for a New American Century infamously put it in the
pre-Iraq days.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 opened the door to finally take that dream of
unimpeded power out for a drive. Al-Qaeda provided the perfect replacement
for the domino theory. Here was an enemy that was at once everywhere and
nowhere, that could be in the minds of any person here or abroad, that any
country could be accused of sponsoring.
Moreover a unique feature of terrorism was no one could ever say it was
completely contained. As canny readers pointed out, the asinine color-coded
Homeland Security Threat Matrix created to scare us throughout the War On
Terror, which supposedly ranged from red (severe threat) to green (low risk
of terrorist attacks), was never once green, not for one day, in the entire
history of its existence.
From the moment the towers fell, the authorities told us no one could ever
relax again. The implication was that only a continually expanding regime of
extreme vigilance could successfully fight this new menace.
Americans agreed. They were so terrified by the sight of falling towers and
dead civilians on their own territory that they gave a thumbs-up, or at
least didn't protest much, at each request for expanded power the military
and the government made during this time.
Secret prisons? Sure. Torture? Sure. Warrantless surveillance? Sure. Need to
read our library records, toss out habeas corpus? Sure and sure.
The press, too, rolled over when the military insisted we not show photos of
dead soldiers in the war. No backstabbing this time!
And it went without saying that showing videos of Americans killing Iraqi
civilians became particularly taboo in major media, to the point where the
broadcast of the chilling "Collateral Murder" video via Wikileaks led to
actual espionage charges against Chelsea Manning.
It can't be underscored how important that series of events was. It was
proof that the lesson we learned from places like Vietnam was that the real
enemy did not live in bushes and hamlets, but in front of TVs in places like
Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.
If we could successfully prevent our own voters from seeing or thinking
about the moral costs of our policies, then we could continue down the
pure-force path indefinitely, without protest, without debate even.
The Beltway thinkers turned out to be correct on that score. Before the
invasion of Iraq, the protest movement was as intense as ever. On February
15, 2003, a month before the invasion, somewhere between six and eleven
million people marched against the war worldwide, in what some describe as
the largest protest in history.
But from the day the war began, the outrage began to recede. We started to
hear all sorts of new terms batted around, including particularly the
concept of "surgical strikes" - an insane Pentagon fantasy in which our
increasingly powerful explosive devices would somehow only kill guilty
people and destroy purely military infrastructure. No kids, no old people,
no cows, no reservoirs or hospitals. Just targets.
The propaganda goal was to sell a war without victims. When Barack Obama
declared the Iraq War over in 2011, the public still hadn't completely
embraced the idea, among other things because many thousands of Americans
were still coming home in bags or without arms and legs.
But when the war didn't really end and just quietly went on as an undefined,
borderless and mostly unmanned bombing campaign using the entire Middle East
as a staging area, the public slowly started to accept more and more the
idea of a victimless war. Fifteen years after the invasion, in fact, this
would be understood virtually in a literal sense.
The R.A.F. for instance, last year claimed it dropped over 3,400 bombs in
Syria and Iraq, but said there was "no evidence" of civilian casualties.
France similarly claimed 1,300 sorties, but la France n'a fait aucune
victime civile - France created no civilian casualties. The Americans now
claim just one civilian death per 157 air strikes.
The public buys all of it. Because the vast majority of reporters who
visited the Iraq theater beginning in 2003 agreed to be embedded with
American soldiers on Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) - even I did this - we
rarely saw the destruction we caused beyond the walls, the civilian deaths,
the misery and outrage.
The concept of bloodless war - like some twisted Rand Corporation
interpretation of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck" - has as a result become
firmly submerged in the American unconscious. Fifteen years after those
historic marches preceding the invasion, we still drone-bomb with
mind-numbing regularity, killing about 6,000 people in Iraq and Syria last
year alone. But protests are basically nonexistent.
We've defanged popular opposition by making such bombings open-ended,
mechanical and invisible. The invisibility is not just in the eyes of the
media, but more and more, in the eyes of the law as well. Our wars have
begun to vanish from our democratic process, the same way our "enemy
combatants" just magically disappear from the earth once captured, to a
secret arbitrary world we show or don't show as we please.
The legal disappearing trick evolved over several presidencies, and
particularly advanced under Barack Obama, under whose leadership a
remarkable progression took place.
The Obama White House for years wrung its hands publicly about the
justification for drone assassination. When in September of 2011 it killed
by drone in Yemen a cleric named Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was born in New
Mexico, the administration foolishly felt a need at first to try to
articulate a legal reason for killing an American without trial.
"What constitutes due process in this case is due process in war," a White
House official said, alluding to a Justice Department memorandum that
apparently existed to provide a legal context for killing even American
citizens by fiat.
But the position of the state evolved. Soon, rather than bother sharing with
the public what justification may or may not exist for these programs, the
government moved to a new policy of simply asserting that these operations
are classified and therefore not an issue, legally speaking.
When the ACLU asked under the Freedom of Information Act for documents
pertaining to the drone killings, the CIA replied that the "fact of the
existence or nonexistence" of the program was secret. So, they said, go
screw.
The ACLU sued, saying that then-CIA chief Leon Panetta obviated the secrecy
by talking about "hits" and "strikes." But a federal judge sided with the
state, saying Panetta "never acknowledged the CIA's involvement in such [a]
program." Later rulings would describe the drone program using the Orwellian
term "nonjusticiable," i.e., simply not subject to review.
Other secret bureaucracies formed. As the War on Terror expanded from
Afghanistan to Iraq and outward to places like Yemen and Syria and God knows
where else, American authorities began to tell us that the most significant
new threats actually came from within our own borders.
"Plots to attack the United States increasingly involve U.S. persons,
American citizens," then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said
in 2011.
A few years later we discovered that the authorities had unilaterally
green-lit a sweeping surveillance program here at home, capturing the phone
conversations and emails of millions of Americans without our consent or
knowledge, presumably out of concern for this threat.
We found this out by accident, after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked the
news on his way into permanent exile. This was after senior intelligence
officials like current liberal hero James Clapper openly lied to congress
about the existence of the vast extralegal spy regime.
This is the legacy of the Iraq war. It began with a crude congressional
dog-and-pony show giving Bush approval for the invasion, and was followed by
an equally thin presentation to the U.N. by sad-sack Colin Powell. These two
transparently stupid pre-war petitions secured for the war the tiniest of
fig-leafs of domestic and international legal legitimacy.
A decade and a half later, authorities no longer need to ask anyone
permission to do anything. They've created in the interim an entirely
separate, secret set of rules giving them the right to kill, imprison,
torture, or spy on anyone.
A permanent war bureaucracy, invisible beyond the executive branch. It's the
ultimate fantasy of all those Washington security think-tank types who spent
their teen years playing Risk and jerking off to Bismarck biographies and
then simmered with resentment throughout the seventies, eighties and
nineties, sure they'd never have lost Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, China, Iran,
and a dozen other places, if they'd only been given the proper tools and not
subjected to idiocies like the Church hearings and the Iran-Contra
prosecutions.
Now they have those tools. They got the world they wanted.
The chaos this has caused in the Middle East is well-documented. But the
damage all this has done to our national psyche at home has been awesome,
far-reaching, and poorly understood.
It was for sure a contributing factor in the election of Donald Trump, whose
total ignorance and disrespect for both the law and the rights of people
deviates not one iota from our official policies as they've evolved in the
last fifteen years.
Trump is just too stupid to use the antiseptic terminology we once thought
we had to cook up to cloak our barbarism. He says "torture" instead of
"enhanced interrogation" because he can't remember what the difference is
supposed to be. Which is understandable. Fifteen years is a long time for a
rotting brain to keep up a pretense.
We flatter ourselves that Trump is an aberration. He isn't. He's a depraved,
cowardly, above-the-law bully, just like the country we've allowed ourselves
to become in the last fifteen years.
That we now deserve him as president is a consequence of the final lesson of
the Iraq debacle: We lost that war. Not militarily maybe, but in the sense
that we so completely dismantled what was left of our civil society in
prosecution of it that, looking back, a battlefield loss would surely have
been preferable.
Wherever he is now, as eels perhaps slither through his eye-holes, Osama bin
Laden has to be laughing. He had to know all along that only Americans were
capable of destroying America. But he couldn't have dreamed we'd do it so
fast.
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