Bush Good At Making Enemies
Making Enemies
Hamas and Hizbullah should not be confused with Al Qaeda. Bush's insistence on doing so shows his failure to understand his foes.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 3:52 p.m. CT July 26, 2006
July 26, 2006 - Reading "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks's devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.
As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide. Such rules were apparently unknown to the 4th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno. The general is a particular and deserving target of Ricks's book, which is perhaps the most exhaustive account to date of all that went wrong with Iraq. Nonetheless—according to that iron law of the Bush administration under which incompetence is rewarded with promotion, as long as it is accompanied by loyalty—Odierno will soon be returning to Iraq as America's No. 2 commander there, the man who will oversee day-to-day military operations. (Odierno, asked by Ricks to respond to criticism, replied that he had studied the insurgency and "adapted quickly.")
Like Ricks, The Washington Post's first-rate Pentagon correspondent, I don't really fault the soldiers on the ground for the mistakes made. These young men and women were in a hellish situation, and as warriors they performed superbly. But once they began breaking into Iraqi homes, cool and competent GIs turned into Keystone Kops, pressed into a counterinsurgency role they'd never been taught. So the soldiers improvised, often amateurishly, apparently—according to Ricks—directed by Odierno to kick down doors. The American soldiers themselves were aware of how inane many of their night raids were. Back in January 2004, the unit I was with jokingly called their raids "Jerry Springers." Why? Because the intelligence was often based on unreliable sources who had agendas of their own. "Lots of times it turns out to be some guy who wants us to arrest another guy who's interested in the same girl," one soldier told me.
The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.
How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel's retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran's influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America's interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush's fierce defense of it: "In the back of everyone's head is Iran looming as a threat over the region," says one Israeli official.
But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.
And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.
Our confusion now about the delicate process of winning over populations—in what is in effect a worldwide insurgency of Muslim extremists—is no less than it was back then, when I embedded with the 4th ID in Samarra. During those night actions, one dubious piece of intelligence would lead to a raid on another Iraqi house, based on even flimsier info. They were more wild goose chases than military operations. During one raid someone spotted a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, lying in a pile of paper. "Who is that?" asked Capt. Andy Depanais, a young tank commander who would have been in grade school at the time of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. None of the soldiers seemed to know, but Khomeini did look suspicious to them. Never mind that the insurgency, even then, was mostly Sunni, while the Iranians and Khomeini were Shiite. "I usually just round up all the military-age men," Ben Tomlinson, the lieutenant in command of the platoon, told me. As Ricks writes, this had become doctrine for all of Odierno's 4th ID.
At one point we burst into a small hotel, or hostel, whose guests were said to be Iranian-influenced insurgent sympathizers. Finding none, we moved onto a house supposedly occupied by the Iraqi hostel owner, arresting him and his three sons. One son, I remember, protested that he was a medical student, and the soldiers riffled through what were clearly English-language medical textbooks surrounding his bed. No matter, the youth was shoved to the floor. Another, by appearance the youngest, was hyperventilating and coughing incessantly, obviously feverish and ill with some respiratory ailment. On the floor he went, an American boot to his back. On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before—most weren't—many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.
Back home meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still denying there was an insurgency at all. Bush was pretending that angry Iraqis who might be sympathetic to the insurgency were terrorists of the same ilk as Al Qaeda. Odierno, who allowed credit for Saddam's capture to accrue to him though Special Forces had led the operation, was suggesting that he was close to defeating the insurgency. "The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees,"' Odierno declared two and a half years ago. Today, despite these disastrous misjudgments, not only do all these men still have their jobs, some, like Odierno, are destined to run the future U.S. Army. And as the Sunni-led insurgency rages on, it has led to harsh Shiite reprisals, which in turn has led to renewed support for the insurgency among the Sunnis. This may finally lead to civil war, as a grim Maliki acknowledged this week.
What's sad is that the "war on terror" began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. The enemy was clear, and the evidence against Al Qaeda was solid: there was a decade's worth of fatwas, of declarations of war, monitored conversations and bin Laden's own monstrous bragging, on videotape, about how the World Trade Center collapse had far exceeded his expectations. We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.
But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.
Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.
Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14046789/site/newsweek/page/2/
Hamas and Hizbullah should not be confused with Al Qaeda. Bush's insistence on doing so shows his failure to understand his foes.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 3:52 p.m. CT July 26, 2006
July 26, 2006 - Reading "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks's devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.
As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide. Such rules were apparently unknown to the 4th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno. The general is a particular and deserving target of Ricks's book, which is perhaps the most exhaustive account to date of all that went wrong with Iraq. Nonetheless—according to that iron law of the Bush administration under which incompetence is rewarded with promotion, as long as it is accompanied by loyalty—Odierno will soon be returning to Iraq as America's No. 2 commander there, the man who will oversee day-to-day military operations. (Odierno, asked by Ricks to respond to criticism, replied that he had studied the insurgency and "adapted quickly.")
Like Ricks, The Washington Post's first-rate Pentagon correspondent, I don't really fault the soldiers on the ground for the mistakes made. These young men and women were in a hellish situation, and as warriors they performed superbly. But once they began breaking into Iraqi homes, cool and competent GIs turned into Keystone Kops, pressed into a counterinsurgency role they'd never been taught. So the soldiers improvised, often amateurishly, apparently—according to Ricks—directed by Odierno to kick down doors. The American soldiers themselves were aware of how inane many of their night raids were. Back in January 2004, the unit I was with jokingly called their raids "Jerry Springers." Why? Because the intelligence was often based on unreliable sources who had agendas of their own. "Lots of times it turns out to be some guy who wants us to arrest another guy who's interested in the same girl," one soldier told me.
The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.
How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel's retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran's influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America's interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush's fierce defense of it: "In the back of everyone's head is Iran looming as a threat over the region," says one Israeli official.
But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.
And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.
Our confusion now about the delicate process of winning over populations—in what is in effect a worldwide insurgency of Muslim extremists—is no less than it was back then, when I embedded with the 4th ID in Samarra. During those night actions, one dubious piece of intelligence would lead to a raid on another Iraqi house, based on even flimsier info. They were more wild goose chases than military operations. During one raid someone spotted a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, lying in a pile of paper. "Who is that?" asked Capt. Andy Depanais, a young tank commander who would have been in grade school at the time of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. None of the soldiers seemed to know, but Khomeini did look suspicious to them. Never mind that the insurgency, even then, was mostly Sunni, while the Iranians and Khomeini were Shiite. "I usually just round up all the military-age men," Ben Tomlinson, the lieutenant in command of the platoon, told me. As Ricks writes, this had become doctrine for all of Odierno's 4th ID.
At one point we burst into a small hotel, or hostel, whose guests were said to be Iranian-influenced insurgent sympathizers. Finding none, we moved onto a house supposedly occupied by the Iraqi hostel owner, arresting him and his three sons. One son, I remember, protested that he was a medical student, and the soldiers riffled through what were clearly English-language medical textbooks surrounding his bed. No matter, the youth was shoved to the floor. Another, by appearance the youngest, was hyperventilating and coughing incessantly, obviously feverish and ill with some respiratory ailment. On the floor he went, an American boot to his back. On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before—most weren't—many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.
Back home meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still denying there was an insurgency at all. Bush was pretending that angry Iraqis who might be sympathetic to the insurgency were terrorists of the same ilk as Al Qaeda. Odierno, who allowed credit for Saddam's capture to accrue to him though Special Forces had led the operation, was suggesting that he was close to defeating the insurgency. "The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees,"' Odierno declared two and a half years ago. Today, despite these disastrous misjudgments, not only do all these men still have their jobs, some, like Odierno, are destined to run the future U.S. Army. And as the Sunni-led insurgency rages on, it has led to harsh Shiite reprisals, which in turn has led to renewed support for the insurgency among the Sunnis. This may finally lead to civil war, as a grim Maliki acknowledged this week.
What's sad is that the "war on terror" began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. The enemy was clear, and the evidence against Al Qaeda was solid: there was a decade's worth of fatwas, of declarations of war, monitored conversations and bin Laden's own monstrous bragging, on videotape, about how the World Trade Center collapse had far exceeded his expectations. We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.
But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.
Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.
Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14046789/site/newsweek/page/2/
posted by Joseph Khoury at 10:47 PM
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