Election Myths and the Asian Challenge
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By Craig B Hulet
Asia Times
Jul 15, 2004
The administration of President George W Bush will have to play into this election year using all available tools at its disposal - nobody wants to call anyone a liar these days when feigned niceties are the rule; plastic responses and pretend patriotism reign. But for the administration to suggest that, just more than two weeks after allegedly turning Iraq over to Iraqis, which no thinking person actually believes has taken place, they instruct the Pentagon to mislead Congress about where the administration intends to go in its global commitments.
The New York Times reported that "with an interim Iraqi government now in place, the Pentagon is beginning long-range planning on how to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq, senior military officials said. Pentagon officials have previously said that about 135,000 troops would stay in Iraq through 2005. But the military's joint staff is working on detailed plans to reduce that number by 2006, on the assumption that the Iraqi army and other security forces will be ready to take on more responsibility by then," a situation that is highly problematic in itself.
It was decided that this mythology was best put forward at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on July 7, with the top operations officer for the joint staff, Lieutenant-General Norton A Schwartz of the air force, signaling that this thinking was well under way. But when asked about planning for the actual size of the US force that could move into Iraq for year-long assignments beginning in early 2006, he declined to give specific figures, saying only, "The bottom line is, it is different than what we anticipate" for 2005. He then added, "There is a significant planning effort that will wrap up later this summer," though this says absolutely nothing about reducing troop strength in Iraq.
But even that isn't all the mythology at present; troop strength is growing in Afghanistan, the US is, well, peacefully invading Central and South Asia, and the region surrounding the Korean Peninsula has only just begun to see a new buildup. (This while some 3,500 troops stationed in South Korea have been reassigned to Iraq.)
A senior defense official said later that the joint staff was developing options for a smaller force in Iraq, proposals that would be consistent with the goal of General John P Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, to reduce the US military presence in Iraq over time. Some officials said those options revolved around 100,000 troops or fewer, but troop levels could increase if security in Iraq worsened. (Source: "US starts drawing plans to cut its troops in Iraq" by Eric Schmitt. New York Times, July 8.)
This then is the rub: there is an indication that security will not get any easier in the foreseeable future in Iraq, or throughout the Middle East, as long as there remain US and British troops on the ground. In the same New York Times article, Schmitt makes this clear: "The continued American presence is also a sore spot for the new Iraqi government as it seeks to establish credibility with the Iraqi people. And reducing it would lessen the strains placed on the United States army by troop commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries."
The paper reported the ongoing myth dutifully when it repeated, drone-like, "Reducing American forces in Iraq has been a consistent goal of the Bush administration. While any reduction would almost certainly occur after the November elections, the prospects could blunt Democrats' contentions that the administration planned poorly for the period after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government." This is the epitome of understatement, lest we forget the Iraqis were supposedly going to welcome US troops and place flowers in the barrel of their guns.
Both Democrats and Republicans voiced concern at the hearing that the army was wearing out its active duty and reserve forces, a worry that even a top army officer said he shared. "Are we stretched thin with our active and reserve component forces right now?" said General Richard A Cody, the new army vice chief of staff. "Absolutely."
But Cody, along with the Pentagon's top personnel official, David S C Chu, flat-out misled the Congress when he said "the army was meeting its commitments, and recruitment and retention remained generally strong". There have been almost 500 suicides in Iraq alone, with some taking their own life and that of their spouse on returning home; there have been no fewer than 1,800 desertions from all branches of the armed forces, though generally the army has suffered the greater number of those absent without leave; recruitment has been reported as being off by 90%. The only way the military is keeping its commitments and retention has been by using the widely reported "stop-loss or stopgap" measures whereby the armed services keep troops in the country long after their enlistment or tour of duty is up, and even then, many are being recalled to active status; "draft light" as it has been called by many senators and congressmen.
For the first time, and not uncoincidentally, "General Schwartz outlined the Pentagon's strategy for how Iraqi national guard and army forces could gradually replace American troops around the country, starting in the relatively stable north, where he said security patrols would soon be conducted exclusively by Iraqi forces. In parts of the country where the insurgency is still fierce, American forces will remain in strength and conduct patrols on their own or with Iraqi troops," reported the New York Times.
"The bottom line is ... that this will be done incrementally and it will be done in locations around Iraq where transitions can occur and the Iraqi security forces can be successful," Schwartz was reported to have said, adding that as Iraqi forces proved they could secure a region, US forces there would move to more restive areas. "We will cascade American forces from those locations to places where they can be better utilized ... and ultimately, naturally, we'll reduce the force structure in Iraq," the New York Times reported.
Not only is the paper's headline - "US starts drawing plans to cut its troops in Iraq" - apparently a contradiction, the reporter repeated that contradiction in the article when he wrote: "How long American forces stay in Iraq and in what numbers will be driven by security conditions and how quickly Iraqi security forces establish themselves, senior military officers here and in Iraq said. The United States army, which is providing the bulk of the troops in Iraq, is preparing worst-case contingency plans to keep troop numbers at their current levels of 135,000 to 140,000 for the next several years, if necessary."
During an appearance on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on July 1, General Richard B Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We've got plans to do that for as long as it takes because this will be event-driven, not time-driven." And on July 7, Schwartz said that, based on the experience of training indigenous forces in Afghanistan, it would be "several years" before Iraq would develop "a full complement of security forces".
If any of the arguments put forward in the hearing were true, and not just orchestrated by the administration's need to calm the public down about a looming military draft and settle the Democratic candidates' accusations of the Bush team's poor handling of the post-Saddam Iraq planning, there would be some evidence pointing to this truth. Indeed, last week, the very same week that the New York Times article ran, the Associated Press reported the opposite of what the Pentagon officials stated above to Congress, and was reported in the New York Times:
The Iraq insurgency is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at its core, US military officials say, and it's being led by well-armed Iraqi Sunnis angry at being pushed from power alongside Saddam Hussein. Although US military analysts disagree over the exact size, dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams, can call upon part-time fighters to boost forces to as high as 20,000 - an estimate reflected in the insurgency's continued strength after US forces killed as many as 4,000 in April alone. And some insurgents are highly specialized - one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers. The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state. 'We're not at the forefront of a jihadist war here', said a US military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity.
(Source: "Iraq insurgency larger than thought", By Jim Krane. Associated Press, July 7) Importantly, the same official and others told the Associated Press "the guerrillas have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of US troops that they cannot be militarily defeated".
Again, US military analysts disagree over the size of the insurgency, with estimates running as high as 22,000 fighters when part-timers are added. Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the US Naval War College, said the higher numbers squared with his findings in a study of the insurgency completed in Iraq.
There are a few that think American leaders have utterly misread the insurgency altogether, something I must say I am in agreement with since I wrote of it long before Bush invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter.
Retired marine and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter, vilified in the United States because of his views on Iraq, is even more disconcerting to Washington than he was two years ago after recently writing:
In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's regime shifted toward an amalgam of Islamic fundamentalism, tribalism and nationalism that more accurately reflected the political reality of Iraq. Thanks to his [Saddam's] meticulous planning and foresight, Saddam's lieutenants are now running the Iraqi resistance, including the Islamist groups ... Not only has the United States failed to put into place a viable government to replace the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] in the aftermath of the so-called 'transfer of sovereignty', but more importantly, it continues to misidentify the true nature of the Iraqi insurgency. As a consequence, the resistance will inevitably continue to flourish and grow until no force can defeat it, Iraqi or American.
(Source: "Facing the enemy on the ground", Scott Ritter. July 7)One hint that the number is larger is the sheer volume of suspected insurgents - 22,000 - who have cycled through US-run prisons. Most have been released. And in April alone, US forces killed as many as 4,000 people, including Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militiamen fighting under the banner of a radical cleric.
Guerrilla leaders come from various corners of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, including lawyers' groups, prominent families and especially from his military bureau, an internal security arm used to purge enemies. (Source: "Iraq insurgency larger than thought." Associated Press, July 7)
The same week Pentagon officials were telling Congress of their "long term" plans to reduce troop strength in Iraq, this was reported:
American and Iraqi officials say that a decision in April to pull back American forces from Fallujah inadvertently created a safe haven for terrorists and insurgents there. But officials are reluctant to send American troops back into the city for fear of touching off another uprising ... The officials say they are unsure how to proceed, but agree they merely postponed the problem when the Americans halted an attack in April, brokering a deal to keep Americans out of Fallujah and allow local Iraqis to police the city instead ... Iraqi and American officials say they would prefer to re-enter the city with a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers, perhaps backed up by Americans. But they concede that an Iraqi force capable of mounting an effective assault on Fallujah, a city of 250,000 people, is months or even years away.
(Source: "Fallujah pullout left haven of insurgents, officials say" by Dexter Filkins. Associated Press, July 8)Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's director of national intelligence, said that the Americans and the Iraqis could defeat the insurgents in Fallujah, but that the cost would be great indeed. "We could take the city," the Associated Press reported him to have said, "but we would have to kill everyone in it."
If that were true for the Iraqi military, such as it is, how true is it for the US forces? Americans cannot bring themselves to admit defeat at any level, but certainly the marines retreated in April from Fallujah in no less of a fashion than we accused the Taliban of doing in Afghanistan at the beginning of that invasion in late 2001. Retreat is no defeat of course, but Ritter may be the one that turns out to be correct, along with some of the US ground commanders when they say "we cannot win this war".
All the newly appointed (former Central Intelligence Agency asset) interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi can do is declare martial law: "The Iraq government issued a long-anticipated package of security laws today to help crush insurgents, including a provision allowing interim Prime Minister [Allawi] ... to impose martial law." (Source: "Emergency powers law invoked in Iraq: The government compares the laws to the US Patriot Act", Associated Press July 7)
The new laws, drafted by former administrator of Iraq L Paul Bremer before leaving Iraq on June 28, give Allawi the right to impose curfews, to conduct search operations and detain individuals with weapons, once he receives unanimous approval from the presidential council. They also give him the right to assign governors, including military leaders, in specific areas, and they empower him to freeze the assets of suspects and monitor their communications. Allawi signed the law on July 7 while the Pentagon officials mentioned earlier were explaining to Congress how they were planning to downsize the number of US troops in Iraq.
Estimates of the insurgents' manpower tend to be too low. Last week, a former coalition official said 4,000-5,000 Ba'athists formed the core of the insurgency, with other attacks committed by a couple hundred supporters of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and hundreds of other foreign fighters. Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press that the figure of 5,000 insurgents "was never more than a wag and is now clearly ridiculous ... Part-timers are difficult to count, but almost all insurgent movements depend on cadres that are part-time and that can blend back into the population."
Classic guerrilla warfare tactics, as Mao Zedong wrote, "Be like fish in the sea." The sea is the cities and villages throughout Iraq. In Afghanistan it is the mountains and gorges. Again, US military analysts will always disagree over the size of this insurgency, but with estimates running as high as 22,000 fighters when part-timers are added, that really means it could be twice that number. Al-Qaeda went from a mere 2,000 fighters pre-September 11, 2001, to now over 18,000 as a direct result of Bush falling into the trap Osama bin Laden set for him by invading the Middle East and Central Asia, according to Anonymous's new book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. And US Naval War College Professor Ahmed Hashim said the higher numbers in Iraq squared with his findings in a study of the insurgency completed in Iraq.
In addition, there has been no letup in the attacks. On July 8, insurgents detonated a car bomb and then attacked a military headquarters in Samarra, a center of resistance 60 miles north of the capital, killing five US soldiers and one Iraqi guardsman.
One official said many car bombings bore the "tradecraft" of Saddam's former secret police and were aimed at intimidating Iraq's new security services.
Many in the US intelligence community have been making similar points, but have encountered political opposition from the Bush administration, a State Department official in Washington said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Civilian analysts generally agree, saying US and Iraqi officials have long overemphasized the roles of foreign fighters and Muslim extremists. A closer examination paints most insurgents as secular Iraqis angry at the presence of US and other foreign troops.
"Too much US analysis is fixated on terms like jihadist, just as it almost mindlessly tries to tie everything to [Osama] bin Laden ... Every public opinion poll in Iraq ... supports the nationalist character of what is happening." ("Iraq insurgency larger than thought", by Krane. Associated Press July 7)
At the orders of General John Abizaid, the US commander of Mideast operations, army analysts looked closely for evidence that Iraq's insurgency was adopting extreme Islamist goals, an official said. Analysts learned that ridding Iraq of US troops was the motivator for most insurgents, not the formation of an Islamic state. The officer said Iraq's insurgents had a big advantage over guerrillas elsewhere: plenty of arms, money and training. Iraq's lack of a national identity card system - and guerrillas' refusal to plan attacks by easily intercepted telephone calls - makes them difficult to track.
"They have learned a great deal over the last year, and with far more continuity than the rotating US forces and Iraqi security forces," Cordesman said of the guerrillas. "They have learned to react very quickly and in ways our sensors and standard tactics cannot easily deal with." ("Iraq insurgency larger than thought", by Krane. Associated Press, July 7)
This war may last a very long time indeed, no matter what election-year propaganda emanating from the White House says, whether through press releases, hearings, or the New York Times, which very often these days resembles that old Soviet organ called Truth: Pravda. The new military footprint has its sights set on the greater Middle East and Central Asia as well as South Asia and the Korean Peninsula. And further evidence suggests China and Russia will not allow the United States and a handful of "the coalition of the willing" states to dominate these regions. The world is moving away from the West in general and the US in particular.
Global power shift in the making
One well-known analyst put it this way: "Major shifts of power between states, not to mention regions, occur infrequently and are rarely peaceful." After World War II everyone can recall what happened in Europe, and everyone saw the US rise to global preeminence, where its hegemony has yet to be challenged.
Today, the transformation of the international system will be even bigger and will require the assimilation of markedly different political and cultural traditions. This time, the populous states of Asia are the aspirants seeking to play a greater role. Like Japan and Germany were then, these rising powers are nationalistic, seek redress of grievance and want to claim their place in the sun. (Source: "A global power shift in the making: Is the United States ready?" James F Hoge Jr, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004)
China and Asia together are translating their economic power and cultural size into military power. Thus, according to Hoge, creating an environment of potential conflict in the regions affected; "flash points for hostilities - Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and divided Kashmir - have defied peaceful resolution". There have been new security treaties signed between nations like India, China, Iran and Russia for military support. Iran has begun to lean even further to the East where it has always had the ability and statesmanship to offer prospective economic relations building a North/South trade corridor from Russia and Azerbaijan and the Black Sea/Caspian region South to the Persian Gulf; while simultaneously negotiating with Central Asian states and China to implement the Silk Road strategy American diplomats and oil executives tried fruitlessly to accomplish throughout the 1990s.
Long before the world worried about Islamic extremism, China was hard at work building back doors through the Islamic world beyond, for example, the fabled Karakoram Highway, chiseled into forbidding mountains and ultimately designed to connect China's far west to the Pakistani port of Karachi. There is also the need for oil; China is now a major importer and, therefore, a competitor for access to energy in the Persian Gulf, the Indonesian archipelago, and the waters adjacent. (Source: "The other orientalism", by Charles Horner. The National Interest, page 44, Spring 2002)
The economic growth rates China, India and other Asian states now boast are almost in the double digits, making US gross national product rates pale in comparison. The Asian Tigers are back from the late 1990s financial crises stronger than ever. China's economy is set to double the size of Germany's by 2010. India may in time be even larger, as many analysts think.
For Hoge, India looms large on the radar screen. "Despite the halting progress of its economic reforms, India has embarked on a sharp upward trajectory, propelled by its thriving software and business-service industries, which support corporations in the United States and other advanced economies. Regulation remains inefficient, but a quarter-century of partial reforms has allowed a dynamic private sector to emerge. Economic success is also starting to change basic attitudes: after 50 years, many Indians are finally discarding their colonial-era sense of victimization," Hoge wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Other Southeast Asian states are steadily integrating their economies into a large web through trade and investment treaties. Unlike in the past, however, China - not Japan or the US - is at the hub. The members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), finally, are seriously considering a monetary union. The result could be an enormous trade bloc, which would account for much of Asia's - and the world's - economic growth.
China has already surpassed all Western nations, including America, as the largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the past two years. Hoge noted that "some Bush officials remain convinced that the United States and China will ultimately end up rivals. For them, the strategic reality is one of incompatible vital interests."
Militarily, the US is hedging its bets with the most extensive realignment of US power in half a century. Part of this realignment is the opening of a second front in Asia. No longer is the US poised with several large, toehold bases on the Pacific rim of the Asian continent; today, it has made significant moves into the heart of Asia itself, building a network of smaller, jumping-off bases in Central Asia.
The Bush administration has used the "war on terror" as the precedent for a great deal of extraordinary moves, domestically and in the Middle East. Less well known is what they have been doing in Central and South Asia. "Chinese analysts suspect that the unannounced intention behind these new US positions, particularly when coupled with Washington's newly intensified military cooperation with India, is the soft containment of China," Hoge reported.
He goes on the point out that "China is modernizing its military forces, both to improve its ability to win a conflict over Taiwan and to deter US aggression." Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing much the same thing with the Russian military and for the same reasons as Bush continues to advance into regions long considered these two countries' prospective areas, or spheres of influence. "Chinese military doctrine now focuses on countering US high-tech capabilities - information networks, stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and precision-guided bombs," Hoge wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Beijing cannot but notice that US efforts against terrorist influence in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines also manage to strengthen the US position against China in the contentious South China Sea. The civil and military presence of the United States and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies in Afghanistan and the other "stans" is comparably ominous from Beijing's perspective. (Source: "The other orientalism", by Horner)
Russia views America's encroachment into these regions as suspiciously as China for much the same reasons. Before Bush invaded Iraq under the pretense of eliminating weapon's of mass destruction, which were already eliminated by Saddam Hussein in the decade before, one analyst wrote these words: "The United States is far more powerful relative to other powers than was Britain at it imperial zenith. And instead of having to manage a shifting balance of power, America counts on NATO and Japan as the linchpins of stable alliances west and east. Still, let us take a leap. Might not Russia and China form a kind of Zweikaiserbund, their objective to diminish American influence in their respective spheres?" And should Bush, upon re-election find his new mandate from God to go even further into the east? "If and when the United States decides to act against [Iraq] or, better yet, Iran could we find our European allies, Bismarck-like, proposing an international conference to avoid a conflict?"(Source: "Disraeli's secret", by Harvey Sicherman. The National Interest, pg 56, Spring 2002)
History may repeat itself as farce - Marx
Once again what we find in these regions is fledgling democracies and unsettled grievances. But more than that, we find the driving forces of nationalism coupled with either religious movements or secular ones or both vying at the same time to dominate the countries' people and their often unacceptable governing elite. But again, it is important to point this out, democracy may not bring about pacific relations between these countries' people, whether Muslim or Hindu, and the West, especially the US.
Nationalistic populations may just demand of their elected democratic leaders that the United States be evicted from their region just as is happening (to unify contending parties) in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The idea that democracy will fundamentally alter these nation-states' behavior is valid, unfortunately their behavior so altered may be the push needed to curb the Bush administration's hegemonic dreams of dominating regions long sought after for resources and markets by several major powers not yet ready to counter the United States' imperial ambitions.
They, the populace, may just go to war with this established democracy to remove the US from their lands. It wouldn't be a great surprise for Americans to awaken one day to their own unrepresentative democracy (Huntington) and find themselves facing a World War III conventional war unless their footprint begins to land a little less heavy on the necks of these nation-states' people, democracy or not.
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Craig B Hulet is a Vietnam veteran, 101st Airborne (1969-70), and was special assistant for Special Projects to Congressman Jack Metcalf. Hulet is a consultant to federal law enforcement (ATF&E with Justice and Homeland Security); he has written four books on international relations and philosophy, his latest titled The Hydra of Carnage: Bush's Imperial War-making and the Rule of Law, 2002. Hulet can be reached at www.kcandassociates.org or by e-mail: orders@kcandassociates.org .
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