Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper
by Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes, September 8, 2008.

Bob Woodward, tireless scribe to the powerful, has a new book with stunning revelations like the fact that the United States has been spying on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In other news, George Bush is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, the Republicans sometimes lie, and the sun frequently rises in the east.

According to Woodward, the “surge” is not primarily responsible for the success in Iraq. Apparently, nameless high-tech methods, described by the president as “awesome,” have enabled much better targeting of insurgents in Iraq.

The U.S. military is engaged in a war of words about how many innocents were slaughtered in the small Afghan village of Azizabad. The military says 5 to 7 civilians and 30 to 35 insurgents were killed; every other observer, including the villagers, officials from the Afghan government and human rights organizations, and U.N. investigators, say over 90 civilians, the majority of them women and children were killed.

U.S. forces have been involved in ground raids in Pakistan, supplementing their frequent random airstrikes.

The United States has officially turned over responsibility for security in al-Anbar province to the Iraqi government – along with responsibility for pay of the remaining Awakening militias.

The only criticisms of the Iraq war heard in recent months from Democratic politicians are that we need to pull soldiers out of Iraq, where they have been successful, to Afghanistan, where they are needed, and that we need to pull soldiers out of Iraq because they have done their job, but the Iraqis have shirked their duties and must be forced to be more self-reliant, not shiftless, lazy, and ungrateful for all that has been done for them.

Everything that one sees or hears just rounds out the dominant narrative, that the United States has finally succeeded in Iraq; Republicans say the success is fragile and must be nurtured by lots of Americans with guns, while the Democrats say it’s robust.

A bipartisan consensus seems to have evolved on a need for U.S. escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although Barack Obama was ahead of John McCain on this one, because of the convenient fact that he had opposed the Iraq war and could thus convincingly portray Iraq as the bad war and Afghanistan as the good one, McCain, the Bush administration, and the military are all on the same page as him now.

It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost nothing interesting to say about U.S. foreign policy any more. One can point to relatively more minor matters, like U.S. adventurism regarding Georgia, but about the two wars the United States is currently waging there is a rigid lockstep.

Indeed, the only thing that keeps an atmosphere of triumphalism from emerging and engulfing everything is the increasingly nonsubstantive partisan divide. The Democrats still have to make noises about Iraq and about how the U.S. strategy isn’t quite working, even though they don’t seem to believe what they’re saying. And Obama still pulls some sleight of hand about complete U.S. withdrawal, although that has become utterly implausible.

What person within the whole foreign policy establishment would countenance abandoning Iraq to a ferociously anti-American and pro-Iranian government when there is no force capable of making the United States leave? The military is under strain because of the enhanced deployment schedule necessitated by the surge, but that is far from becoming a serious problem. To the extent that it is, there will be gradual drawdowns in the troop numbers. With the extremely low casualty rates coming out of Iraq and complete public passivity about the war in the United States, there is no particular reason for the government to change its strategies.

After all the Sturm und Drang of the past few years, the large numbers turning out to oppose the war, the delegitimization of everything the Bush administration has done, the emergence of militant organized liberalism, the collapse of the easy support for U.S. military intervention that has prevailed ever since the Gulf War, what a strange state of affairs we have come to – seemingly excessively stormy waters that, on closer examination, turn out to be a dead calm.

And yet, what depraved monster would wish on any country the “success” that Iraq has been subject to? If there were an antiwar movement left, its task would be to save Afghanistan and Pakistan from any similar successes. Will another one rise? I’m not going to hold my breath, but then holding your breath isn’t the best way to change things anyway.