General Odierno and What We Learned in Iraq
by Hugh Fitzgerald (October 2010)
General Odierno admitted to the interviewer from the Times that from the very beginning the men who had arrived in Iraq, and those who sent them on their mission, to bring peace, stability, the American Way (free markets, free elections, as if this were all any country needed, or as if this could be transplanted without hundreds of years, or more, of history to make people ready for such things) were ignorant of a great many things, and that the last seven years had been, for them, what some call a learning experience:
Also sprach General Odierno.
We know that George Bush knew almost nothing about Iraq when he decided to invade that country. Nor did he appear to learn very much after the Americans entered Iraq. We have all read, or heard about, the passage, in one of Bob Woodward’s books in which Bush, early on in his Iraq venture, hearing someone mention the “Sunnis and the Shi’a,” expressed surprise because, he said, he had thought they “were all Muslims in Iraq.” We know that Paul Wolfowitz, second in the Pentagon after Donald Rumsfeld, that weapons analyst, had been deeply impressed, as had others above and below him, with the many Iraqi exiles who seemed like such thoroughly Western men, and who managed to convince the likes even of Bernard Lewis that when the Americans entered Iraq, the jubilation that would certainly follow would make that which had in late 2001, in Kabul, “look like,” as Lewis predicted, “a funeral procession.” Neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney, nor Wolfowitz, nor Lewis, nor anyone else, seemed to realize, or think it important, that all of those Iraqi exiles whom they listened to, such as smooth Ahmad Chalabi, with his eye ever on what was good for Ahmad Chalabi, or earnest Kanan Makiya, he of the “Republic of Fear” in which he expressed outrage that no Arabs inside or outside of Iraq had uttered a syllable of protest about the mass murder of Kurds by Arabs under the direction of Saddam Hussein, were Shi’a in background.
Saddam Hussein knew he had nothing to fear from Christians. They could not possibly ally themselves with his most dangerous opponents – the religious Shi’a who rose against him in 1981, and whom he killed by the hundreds of thousands. The Christians in a Muslim state would have to submit to the will of the ruler, to curry his favor, and hope that he would protect them from the Muslim masses. But when Saddam Hussein was removed (by Americans, representing a “Christian” power to Iraq), Muslims of all stripes-Sunni Arabs, and Shi’a Arabs, and even some Kurds (though the Kurds were generally less dangerous, and some Kurds even sought – possibly to curry favor with the Americans – to offer Iraqi Christians a haven in the Kurdish-controlled territory in the north) Muslims found they could attack Christians with impunity. Many were killed. And as a result, half of the Christian population has fled, and will not return (despite recent appeals by Maliki for them to do so), and who can blame them? And this too could have been understood as an almost certain result of the removal of a regime that, however monstrous, was for the Christians the best that they could hope for. And while Saddam Hussein increasingly used Islam, presented himself as devout, built gigantic mosques, and became, for the Iraqi public, more and more outwardly devout as time went by, it was a little along the lines of Stalin, during the desperate days of World War II, permitting the Orthodox hierarchy a little more freedom in order to enroll the faithful, and their faith, in the war campaign. But this did not result in the trust that the Christians put — even as they understood he was a monster, but a monster in what was for them a permanently monstrous situation, as Christians in an ever-threatening Muslim sea.
It is fascinating to hear Iraqi Christians, such as Donny George, former head of the Baghdad Museum, in their infrequent appearances on American radio. They are full of bitterness that those whom they describe as “the turbans” have taken over. Their American interlocutors never bother to ask what they mean by that, because American interviewers are not curious, or even not alert enough to ask what should be the obvious questions. But by “the turbans” they mean the Shi’a, whom they now blame for their forced exile from Iraq, and some utter phrases – unsettling to, because not understood by, American audiences, which suggest they think the Americans blundered in their removal of the Ba’athist regime.
Perhaps General Odierno will have time, back in the United States, to ponder a bigger picture than Iraq, bigger even than Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, bigger even than all of the Middle East and Central Asia and the subcontinent, and embracing the whole world, the world where the adherents of Islam work to remove all obstacles to the spread and then to the dominance of Islam, as they have always done, whenever they had the chance. And now OPEC trillions, and Muslim immigrant millions, and the appropriation of Western technology to disseminate the message of Islam, have provided them with that chance.
One waits for our generals and other high officers to put down their insurgency manuals, and to look at the war of self-defense against Islam in a broader perspective, and to identify all the ways in which the Jihad is conducted, all the instruments that are being employed, some seemingly unstoppable but, in fact, quite stoppable if we only have the will to declare that long-desired Full Stop.
#1. The Commander of the British Forces that wrested Mesopotamia [Iraq] from the Turks, 1917: #2. Gertrude Bell, 1920: [Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.] __________________________________________ #3. Gertrude Bell, 1920: [Source: Lady Gertrude Bell, 1920, The Letters of Gertrude Bell.] #3. Winston Churchill, 1922: 1 September 1922 Surveying all the above, I think I must ask you for definite guidance at this stage as to what you wish and what you are prepared to do. The victories of the Turks will increase our difficulties throughout the Mohammedan world. At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.
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#5. King Faisal of Iraq, 1933:
Do you think such material, had it been thoroughly read in its full context and digested, might have helped make American policymakers a bit more realistic and less messianic about Iraq? Do you think Richard Perle would not have so excitedly declared in 2003 that he wouldn’t be surprised if a boulevard were named after George Bush in Baghdad? Or that Wolfowitz would estimate that the “cost” of the Iraq War might be “$20 billion,” and therefore so much more of a bargain than the cost of the sanctions program — when the cost now, at a minimum, has been estimated at between $1 and $2 trillion dollars, if the costs incurred for the treatment of the wounded, and the macroeconomic costs are factored in? (See the paper of Stiglitz and Bilmes, and if you wish, forget the macroeconomic costs and take the lower figure, and if you like, reduce even that to something we can all agree on as an absolute base — say, $750 billion.) Or that Bernard Lewis would confidently predict that when the Americans overturned the regime the spectacle of rapture and gratitude in Baghdad “would make the liberation of Kabul seem like a funeral procession.”
It’s difficult to recognize that you took part in what was always a Fool’s Errand. But if one can do that, and admit it, however slowly, to oneself, and proceed from that recognition, what an achievement. An achievement insufficiently recognised, but worthy fistfuls of medals and ribbons.
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