O izborima, muslimanima, Amerima, diplomatama, Bambijima, istinama, fantazijama i inima.
The Sunday Times wrote:The fatal fantasy
How did the liberation of Iraq turn into a bloody fiasco with a stunned America fumbling for an exit strategy? Mark Danner, in an extraordinary account of official incompetence at the highest level, charts the dream world of the warmongers. Use the box at the bottom of the page to have your say
In the ruined city of Falluja, behind the lines of giant sandbags and barbed wire that surrounded a klix American outpost, I sat in my body armour and helmet and thought of George F Kennan, the grand old man of American diplomacy.
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I was thinking of the brilliant young Kennan who during the late 1920s and 1930s gazed out on the crumbling European order from Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.
In Falluja I met his reincarnation in the person of a junior State Department official. This bright, aggressive young man spent his 20-hour days rumbling down the ruined streets with reluctant marine escorts, meeting Iraqis and writing tart cables back to Baghdad or Washington telling his bosses the truth of what was happening on the ground.
As I watched him joking and arguing with the local sheikhs, politicos and technocrats I thought of the indomitable young Kennan of the inter-war years, and of how, if the American effort in Iraq could ever be made to “work”, only undaunted and farseeing young men like this one, Kennan’s spiritual successor, could make it happen.
This was October 2005, on the eve of the nationwide referendum on Iraq’s proposed constitution. I had come to Falluja, the heart of rebellious Anbar province, to see whether the Sunnis could gather the political strength to vote it down.
The Sunnis had boycotted the first postSaddam election. This time, after Herculean efforts of persuasion by the American ambassador, most Sunnis were expected to vote. Would they affirm the political process or doom it?
After midnight, in the dimly lit American bunker on the eve of the vote, the young diplomat suddenly leant forward and confided quietly: “You know, tomorrow you are going to be surprised. Everybody is going to be surprised.
People here are not only going to vote. People here — a great many people here — are going to vote yes.”
I was stunned, but I took his words as an invaluable bit of inside wisdom from the American who knew this ground better than any other.
As I travelled from polling place to polling place a few hours later, however, Fallujans told me of their hatred for the constitution, which they believed was meant to divide and destroy Iraq. In fact, 97% of those who voted in the province voted no.
With all his contacts and commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on the most basic and critical issue of politics on the ground my young “Kennan” had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.
The real Kennan, listening at 98 to the war drums in the autumn of 2002, had warned: “Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”
He knew from eight decades of experience to focus first of all on the problem of what you know and what you don’t know.
You know that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting Americans are very often dependent on the Americans for their livelihoods and survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is limited, and that what they convey is selected to please their interlocutor.
You know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life. But hundreds of conversations lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what’s happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know.
As this precious stream of flickering knowledge travels “up the chain” from those collecting it on the shell-pocked ground to those in Washington offices ultimately making decisions based upon it, the problem of what we really know intensifies.
Policymakers, peering second, third, fourth-hand into a twilight world, must learn a patient, humble scepticism. Or else, confronted with an ambiguous reality they do not like, they turn away, ignoring the shadowy, shifting landscape and forcing their eyes stubbornly toward their own ideological light. Unable to find clarity, they impose it.
Consider these words of Donald Rumsfeld, speaking about the Iraq war last month two days after the Republicans’ defeat in the congressional election and the day after President Bush had fired him as defence secretary: “It is very clear that the major combat operations were an enormous success. It’s clear that in phase two of this, it has not been going well enough or fast enough.”
More than 3½ years after the Iraq war began, Rumsfeld and his allies see not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War — the “outright success”. And then. . . what? Well, whatever we are in now.
In the Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died — and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a nonwar, something unnamed, unconceptualised — unplanned.
ANYONE seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war — how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential and obvious mistakes, which much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes — must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification.
Senior officials decided in the spring and summer of 2002 to fight a War of Imagination. Victory was to be decisive and overwhelming, evincing a terrible power — enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world.
In his book State of Denial, Bob Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war. “Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”
But the purpose was not only to “humiliate” the forces of radical Islam and reestablish American prestige and credibility but also to serve as a “demonstration model” to ward off attacks from any rogue state that might threaten the United States, and to transform the Middle East by sending a “democratic tsunami” cascading from Tehran to Gaza.
Only Rumsfeld’s transformed military — a light, quick, lean force dependent on overwhelming firepower directed precisely by high technology and with very few boots on the ground — could make this happen, or so he and his planners thought.
Victory would be quick and awe-inspiring; in a few months the Americans, all but a handful of them, would be gone: only the effect of the “demonstration model”, and the cascading consequences in the neighbouring states, would remain.
The transformation would roll forward, carried out by forces of the same thrilling “democratic revolution” that had erupted on the streets of Prague and Budapest and East Berlin more than a decade earlier, and indeed on the streets of Kabul the previous year. Here was an evangelical vision of geopolitical redemption.
Thus the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalised society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it.
The War of Imagination was built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about “spreading democracy” and “greetings with sweets and flowers”, and then about “staying the course” and refusing “to cut and run”. Under the pressure of nearly 3,000 American dead and perhaps 100,000 or more dead Iraqis, however, it finally began to give way to grim reality.
Last month’s congressional election marked the moment when the War of Imagination decisively gave way to the war on the ground. Officials throughout the American government, not least the president himself, were forced to acknowledge what much of the American public had discerned months or years before.
The ideological canopy has now lifted. Americans have come to know what they do not know. We seem to know less and less, certainly about “where we are going to end”. Thus we arrive at our present therapeutic moment — the moment of “solutions” brought on by the recognition that we have no idea how to “end” phase two.
This is now a matter not just for James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which reported last week, but also for the military’s “strategic review team” and the new Democratic congressional committee chairmen who will offer to a chastened president the “new ideas” he now professes to welcome.
However quickly the discussion now moves to the geopolitical hydraulics, to weighing partition against partial withdrawal against regional conferences and contact groups and all the rest, the truth is that none of these proposals, alone or in combination, will end the war any time soon.
It bears noticing that Kennan himself, having predicted that we will never know where we are going to end in Iraq, lived to see disproved, before his death at the age of 101 last March, what even he had taken as a given: that “you know where you begin”.
For as the war’s presumed ending has flickered and vanished, the war’s beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead.
HOW does one fix on “how we began” in Iraq? One might do worse than the national security presidential directive entitled Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy, the top-secret statement of American purpose signed by President George W Bush on August 29, 2002:
“US goal: Free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and associated programmes, to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond.
“End Iraqi threats to its neighbours, to stop the Iraqi government’s tyrannising of its own population, to cut Iraqi links to and sponsorship of international terrorism, to maintain Iraq’s unity and territorial integrity. And liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy . . .
“Objectives: To conduct policy in a fashion that minimises the chance of a WMD attack against the United States, US field forces, our allies and friends. To minimise the danger of regional instabilities. To deter Iran and Syria from helping Iraq. And to minimise disruption in international oil markets.”
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