[NYTr] The Surge and American Military Triumphalism

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Steven Robinson - activ-l

The Huffington Post - Jan 4, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/the-surge-and-american-mi_b_79914.html


The Surge and American Military Triumphalism

by Gareth Porter

Right-wing pundit Michael Barone has published a column on the surge in
Iraq that may be the clearest expression so far of the American
triumphalism over the U.S. military and Iraq that emerged in 2007. The
current popularity of that idea reflects the degree to which the
apologists for war, having been discredited earlier on Iraq, are now on
the offensive.

Barone's theme is he "lessons to be learned" from what he calls the
"dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq". The first lesson, he
suggests, is that "just about no mission is impossible for the United
States military". A year ago, he writes, everyone thought that
"containing the violence in Iraq was impossible", but not, "we have
seen it done".

Intoxicated by the hosannahs bestowed on Gen. David Petreaus's strategy,
Barone pushes the military triumphalist creed to a new level. He goes
so far as to assert the inevitability of American military triumph,
regardless of the circumstances of any war. Barone says it's simply a
matter of finding the right general with the right strategy. He points
to the examples of George Washington at Yorktown, Lincoln and the civil
war and Roosevelt and World War II.

And then there was Vietnam. Many Americans have been under the
impression that the United States did not prevail in Vietnam, mainly
because a powerful nationalist movement had mobilized Vietnamese
against foreign domination since the end of the World War II. For
Barone and true believers in the efficacy of American military power,
however, the United States actually won the Vietnam War, and it was all
because of the brilliant strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams. The only
reason they can't celebrate that victory fully, Barone insists, is that
Congress refused to "allow the aid the United States had promised".

That now familiar explanation of why the American defeat in Vietnam was
actually a victory may be the most astonishing feat of rewriting history
ever accomplished by the apologists for a criminal war. Let's just
recapitulate briefly what actually happened: Nixon and Kissinger had
begun withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam beginning in 1969. The North
Vietnamese were not stupid, and they withdraw most of their troops from
South Vietnam during 1970 and 1971 while that U.S. withdrawal was
proceeding to reduce their losses. That relative North Vietnamese
stand-down in the war allowed the United States and the Saigon regime
to gain control over large areas of South Vietnam for the first time
since 1960. The U.S. military and apologists for the war claimed that
it was all because Abrams had followed such a brilliant strategy.

Then North Vietnam struck across the demilitarized zone in spring 1972,
undoing most of that control and forcing Nixon and Kissinger to
negotiate the Paris Agreement of January 1973. Two years later, the
Saigon regime simply crumbled in the face of a second North Vietnamese
offensive across the DMZ, despite the fact that the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam had more assistance from the United States than
Hanoi had from its Communist allies. That's why the "stab in the back"
myth had to be invented by those who political fortunes were tied to
the fortunes of the U.S. war.

That brings us to the alleged "dazzling success" of the surge in Iraq.
Just as the triumphalist narrative on Vietnam turns a real defeat into
an imagined victory, the narrative now being constructed by Barone and
others on Iraq tries to make a pointless military occupation that
cannot prevail in the end into a glorious triumph of U.S. military
power.

Again, let's recapitulate. In 2003 U.S. military forces destroyed the
Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein and installed a Shiite regime in its
stead. The Sunnis predictably launched a military resistance, and the
U.S. military began its own war against Sunni insurgents. The presence
of a U.S . military occupation force in an Islamic country with some of
Islam's holiest sites predictably incited much greater popular support
among Sunnis, both within Iraq and in neighboring Sunni countries, for
jihadi extremists aligned with al Qaeda.

Thus al Qaeda, which had practically no support in Iraq in 2003, quickly
became a major force in 2003 and 2004. By 2005, however, the tensions
between al Qaeda and the predominantly Baathist nationalist Sunni
insurgents had reached the point of open warfare. That warfare had
become even more violent during 2006. The main non-al Qaeda Sunni
resistance groups tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the United
States in 2005-2006, but Bush refused.

By 2007, however, the Bush administration had changed sides in Iraq. It
was more concerned with Shiite forces they associated with Iran than
with the Sunni resistance. The United States finally began allowing
them to police their own cities - something the Sunnis themselves had
been proposing since 2005 but which Bush had refused to approve. The
nationalist Sunnis have shown they were perfectly capable of taking
care of al Qaeda themselves if the United States would only stop
attacking them and get out of the way, which is what they had been
saying all along.

However the problem for the U.S. military is now Shiite resistance to
the occupation in the form of the Mahdi Army. It is part guerrilla army
and part government security force, and it is far larger than the Sunni
armed resistance was when the U.S. military admitted that it could gain
control over it. For all the brave talk by the Bush administration
about bottom-up reconciliation, which suggests that end of resistance
is coming, the Shiite struggle against the occupation led by Moqtada
al-Sadr is still in an early phase of its development.

The triumphalist vision embraced by Barone and large segments of the
American political elite and news media thus depends on an
understanding of the conflict that omits all the facts that are
inconvenient. Unfortunately for the triumphalists, those happen to be
the facts that are most central to the problem.

The truth that the triumphalists can never accept is that, once a large
part of the population is mobilized to oppose U.S. domination, U.S.
military power becomes the main problem rather than part of the
solution. Ironically, there is reason to believe that, after nearly
five years of war in Iraq, the U.S. military leadership - including
Petraeus himself - now understand that reality. It is the armchair
triumphalists like Michael Barone who believe that it is really
American military power that is winning in Iraq.

Unfortunately Barone has plenty of company in what Ari Berman once
called "the strategic class".