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March 7, 2013 |
I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to
be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire
up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and
oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy
media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least
sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to
be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.
Not
to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to
be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers,
and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of
all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from
hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line,
though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize
the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we
-- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long
time.
The Madness of King George
It’s
easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009,
when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it
came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single
worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a
State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction
teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the
chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.
By
then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in
rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American
efforts -- at least after
Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as
liberators, crashed and burned -- we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a
Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.
In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a
huge facility in
the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and
sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance
the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis
running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up
with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and
wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores.
Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the
plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White
House.
Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account
for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or
logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or
working capital, or... um... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming
$2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords
of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized
and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty,
dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were
plucked.
In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the
simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals
did not mean the project wasn't a success. In fact, the factory was a
hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to
the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens,
geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er,
chicken-and-rooster, show.
In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the
PotemkinChicken
Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to
rise with the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a
visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success.
Robert Ford,
then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow ambassador
to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq.
General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the
propaganda,
which proclaimed that “teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own
gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing
to rely on Americans,” is still
online (including this
charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine).
We
weren’t stupid, mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough
to learn to look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at
first, a kind of insider’s joke you all think you know the punch line
to. Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a
war whose costs will someday be toted up in the
trillions. Really, at the end of the day, what was the harm?
The
harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to
advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on
obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean
water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State
Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At our
project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory
‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential
services such as water and power.” How could we help stabilize Iraq when
we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing
naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps
put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am
naked.”
By 2009, of course, it should all have been so obvious. We
were no longer inside the neocon dream of unrivaled global
superpowerdom, just mired in what happened to it. We were a chicken
factory in the desert that no one wanted.
Time Travel to 2003
Anniversaries
are times for reflection, in part because it’s often only with
hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our lives.
On the other hand, on anniversaries it’s often hard to remember what it
was really like back when it all began. Amid the chaos of the Middle
East today, it’s easy, for instance, to forget what things looked like
as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had been invaded and occupied
quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets (the British, the ancient
Greeks…) could never have dreamed of. Iran was frightened, seeing the
mighty American military on its eastern border and soon to be on the
western one as well, and was
ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S. was
rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for torture.
Most
of the rest of the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with
dictators reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception,
though predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make
some sort of deal. (
He did.)
All that was needed was a quick slash into Iraq to establish a
permanent American military presence in the heart of Mesopotamia. Our
future garrisons there could obviously oversee things, providing the
necessary muscle to swat down any future destabilizing elements. It all
made so much sense to the neocon visionaries of the early Bush years.
The only thing that Washington couldn’t imagine was this: that the
primary destabilizing element would be us.
Indeed, its mighty plan
was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their lust for
everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team
missed a
diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today’s saber
rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq imploded.
As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by history, turned
up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret gulags, rendition,
drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at home. The sleaziest of
deals were cut to try to salvage something, including ignoring the
A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi Rice-Qaddafi
photo-oprapprochement in Libya.
Inside
Iraq, the forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by
the U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a
proxy warbetween the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war between Israel and Iran inside
Lebanon (where another destabilizing event, the
U.S.-sanctioned Israeli
invasion of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended.
Today, in fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host,
Syria, with multiple powers using “humanitarian aid” to push and shove their Sunni and Shia avatars around.
Staggering neocon expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically more powerful, with sanctions-busting
trade between the two neighbors now
valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that decade, the
U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran’s strategic counterbalances,
Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run by Nouri al-Malaki,
who had once found
asylum in Tehran.
Meanwhile, Turkey is now engaged in an
open war with
the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey is, of course, part of NATO, so
imagine the U.S. government sitting by silently while Germany bombed
Poland. To complete the circle, Iraq’s prime minister recently
warned that
a victory for Syria's rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own
country and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda which would further
destabilize the region.
Meanwhile, militarily burnt out,
economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lacking
any moral standing in the Middle East post-Guantanamo and
Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring
flickered out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region. And even that hasn’t stopped Washington from pursuing the
latest version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.
Having
noted the ease with which a numbed American public patriotically looked
the other way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell,
our leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American
drones and special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever deeper into
Africa, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier version of the state of
perpetual warGeorge
Orwell once imagined for his dystopian novel 1984. And don’t doubt for a
second that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that
chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes for
our American world.
Happy Anniversary
On
this 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any
measure, a dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny
Department of State
advises American
travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens “remain at risk for kidnapping...
[as] numerous insurgent groups, including Al Qaida, remain active...”
and notes that “State Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq
advises the use of Protective Security Details.”
In the bigger
picture, the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in
2003. Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness
the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In
2003, at that infamous “
mission accomplished” moment, only Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were considered
“extreme danger posts.” Soon
enough, however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya,
once boring but secure outposts for State’s officials, now fall into the
same category.
Other places once considered safe for diplomats and their families such as
Syriaand
Mali have been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at all. Even sleepy
Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department had its Arabic language
school there, is now on reduced staff with no diplomatic family members resident.
Egypt teeters.
The
Iranian leadership watched carefully as the American imperial version
of Iraq collapsed, concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed
away from initial offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at
least for a while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity,
aided by the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network.
North Korea,
another A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther
from Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor
China pursued its own path of
economic dominance, while helping to “pay” for the Iraq War by becoming the
number-one holder of U.S. debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S. debt held overseas.
And
don’t put away the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief
for an absent George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration
on this 10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair
recently
reminded us
that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he had “long since
given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the right decision,” Blair
added that new crises are looming. “You’ve got one in Syria right now,
you’ve got one in Iran to come,” he said. “We are in the middle of this
struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very
arduous and difficult. But I think we are making a mistake, a profound
error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle.”
Think of his
comment as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe,
Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that it
stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was not an
aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of thinking that
is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the U.S. will have a
big enough military to ensure that our decline is slow, bloody, ugly,
and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however, even the drones will
have to land.
And so, happy 10th anniversary, Iraq War! A decade
after the invasion, a chaotic and unstable Middle East is the unfinished
legacy of our invasion. I guess the joke is on us after all, though no
one is laughing.
