From WHYY Public Media.
One of Philadelphia's Gold Star
Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the
19th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of
the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the
first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the
Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the
future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the
regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry
(D-MA) charged in 2004
that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than
they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush
Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size
of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard
in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the
military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In
2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and
retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier
to do keep the military fully staffed.
Why did the Bush Administration depend
so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?
Much of the planning for the occupation
of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate.
The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or
much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then
was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built
upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz
concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was
entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context”
and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over
the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both
Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried
out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither
case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the
inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country.
The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for
making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had
all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and
had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have
been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm
and support for the war.
As it was, the left wing was proven
correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely
uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly
happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply
limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he
didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very
upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for
this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:
As for why my
sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a
searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years
old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby
daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.
The point here is that Goldberg's
attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported
the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend
years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in
learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different
culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.
According to Summers, yes, any military
or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief
military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the
country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant
time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally
involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of
immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it.
Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as
civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of
the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with
Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the
“Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all
surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.
Getting Americans motivated
The first step to getting Americans
enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998.
Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio.
It was a PR disaster
as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a
threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright
and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton
Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public
to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.
It's generally accepted among many
former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney
didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid
facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good
reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously
via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years
after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a
war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians
was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:
The Iraq invasion
cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian
intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a
"shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of
cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with
the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no
evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention,
such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a
terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes
were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly
not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the
absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During
his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin
Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were
labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm".
Even if regular people didn't buy that
Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps
certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney
manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence
agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with
9-11.
The deleted
paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:
"Baghdad for
now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist
attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing
that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a
stronger cause for making war.
Iraq probably
would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad
feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were
imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."
Many on the right wing have made their
defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that
Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and
that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to
the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though
Iraq was a threat.
As
documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures
available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation
Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5
million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the
population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to
4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in
World
War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in
World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as
well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.
The
US absolutely must
prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are
we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness
of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far
too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in
Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear
to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they
discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back
into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The
US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership
knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US
invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I
think the public would be very highly likely to resist.
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