This is from antiwar.com.
This article not only gives information about how the Af-Pak was is expanding under Obama but also has more info about Stanley McChrystal and shows his connection to the worst Bush hawks and neo-cons. The two party system in the U.S. is absolutely useless as far as producing much in the way of change but then that is how it is designed to work. Change occurs mostly at the level of rhetoric especially in foreign policy although Obama has opened up a little re Cuba and it is just possible that he might abandon the missile defence system and he also has spoken out against torture and some day he may even close Guantanamo but will still adopt Bush lite military tribunals and may also introduce indefinite detention without trial. One step forward two steps back.
An interesting aspect of this article is the discussion of the role of Zalmay Khalilzad in the new Afghan govt. assuming Karzai wins. Originally the US groomed him for the job as president but having decided that he could not be elected they are now going to force Karzai to appoint him as a sort of chief of staff to actually run the government. Perhaps this is possible but it would leave Karzai totally without credibility or power. Karzai might not worry too much about the first once he is elected but he probably will not be willing to give up all power!
Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
Posted By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander Gen. David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal’s appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seem to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy.”
Gen. McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of then-vice president Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)
McChrystal gained a certain renown when then-president Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.
In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak – that is, expanded – war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate … of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.
All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches” – to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ words – that the Obama administration expects Gen. McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
Hagiography
And here’s the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.
We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the Army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’”
It’s no different today in what’s left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?
When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.
Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who… usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod. … [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists. … [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians…” and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal … I think of no body fat.”
From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the “elite” world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.
Above all, as we’re told here and elsewhere, what’s so good about the new appointment is that Gen. McChrystal is “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we’re assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to “take the gloves off” on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”
Think of McChrystal’s appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the china shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won’t be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post’s Ignatius even compares McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage – far more ominous than he means it to be:
“Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.”
McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.
An Expanding Af-Pak War
Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular china shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:
1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a “surge” of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50 percent. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisers and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a “civilian surge” of diplomats, advisers, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisers couldn’t be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.
In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region’s “desert of death.” When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the “largest such project in the world in a combat setting.”
2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a “targeted” assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks – the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 – have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room Web site:
“According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed ‘at least 25 militants.’ In the local media, the dead were simply described as ‘29 tribesmen present there.’ That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors.”
David Kilcullen, a key adviser to Petraeus during the Iraq “surge” months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. (”Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent – hardly ‘precision.’”) As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.”
3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.
4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports – hotly denied by Holbrooke and others – broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to “undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the government.” Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to “figurehead” status, while a “chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers” not provided for in the Afghan constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.
This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He “could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.” He would then be “the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.”
Cooper’s report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.
Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It’s best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration’s 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.
5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military – pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) – has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call “the Pakistani Taliban.”
It’s been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.
With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, UN officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.
In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an “Islamic Pashtunistan” would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true,” applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.
6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).
Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban “militants”; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as “thinly sourced”); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were “extremely over-exaggerated,” and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.
An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a “very exhaustive” investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.
Two things make this “incident” at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines’ version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself “Taskforce Violence”), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat province. McChrystal’s appointment, reports Starkey, has “prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.”
Second, back in Washington, National Security Adviser James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai’s repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Well, I think he understands that… we have to have the full complement of… our offensive military power when we need it. … We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back….”
In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “No hands,” he said, “are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam.”
Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge “I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back” is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.
Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one “hand” tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.
The Pressure of an Expanding War
President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander Gen. McKiernan believed that, “as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don’t consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.”
That the “responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War “ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an “old mindset.” McChrystal represents those “fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general’s appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, “Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”
For those old enough to remember, we’ve been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in – psychically, if nothing else – if things don’t work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post’s Ignatius puts it, cracking the “Taliban coalition” and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.
So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already “Obama’s war.” With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don’t expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.
As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: “The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban’s reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement’s heartland.” And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country’s intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.
So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive “team” in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn’t go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops Gen. McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region “crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.”
And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the “Washington coalition” is the one that cracks first? What then?
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com
URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/05/21/six-ways/
Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label Tom Engelhardt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Engelhardt. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Having a carnage party!
THis is from the blog tomdispatch
As usual Tom Engelhardt's articles are hard hitting with lots of references and backup material.
It seems that a lot of US media don't comprehend at all the arrogance involved in passing a motion in the US senate to "divide" Iraq. Tom captures this aspect of the situation quite well. The material about the length of the US occupation is also interesting. Whether Democrat or Republican the agreement is that the US will be in Iraq indefinitely although there may be fewer troops of course. No one has any intention of "giving up" and bringing everyone home. I fail to see the analogy with Korea except that the troops will be there for a long time. Is Iran supposed to be analagous to North Korea or what?
Even Tom does not catch the obvious point to those in the Arab world. The tripartite divison is a classic divide and rule tactic. The US will be faced with three feuding but weak quasi states and the US can justify staying in Iraq forever in the interests of security--and security of oil supplies.
Tomgram: Having a Carnage Party
We Count, They Don't
By Tom Engelhardt
Counting to Three
At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was "a significant milestone…, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy." Murray added, "The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq's constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution."
In Iraq, the plan was termed a "disaster" by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He added, according to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states." In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.
Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate "messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it."
But here's the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three -- simply that it happened in the United States. Let's imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi Parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington DC or to allow California's electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?
Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it -- whether agreeing with the proposal or not -- seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.
No matter how meaningless Biden's resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems -- specifically, that it is America's global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…
Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one -- not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress -- will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true -- if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won't let it happen."
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…") Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.
And let's remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently: "Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind -- though they weren't calling it that at the time.)
This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on -- a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.
Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.
Counting Bodies
Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: "We don't do body counts." And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team."
Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it's evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.
The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items -- or to have understood all too well their real use -- and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.
As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, ‘to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy.... During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")
And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too -- and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.
Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit -- which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy -- especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.
Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again.... [but] everything is tabula rasa."
Counting Squads
Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Counting to a Million and Beyond
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
As usual Tom Engelhardt's articles are hard hitting with lots of references and backup material.
It seems that a lot of US media don't comprehend at all the arrogance involved in passing a motion in the US senate to "divide" Iraq. Tom captures this aspect of the situation quite well. The material about the length of the US occupation is also interesting. Whether Democrat or Republican the agreement is that the US will be in Iraq indefinitely although there may be fewer troops of course. No one has any intention of "giving up" and bringing everyone home. I fail to see the analogy with Korea except that the troops will be there for a long time. Is Iran supposed to be analagous to North Korea or what?
Even Tom does not catch the obvious point to those in the Arab world. The tripartite divison is a classic divide and rule tactic. The US will be faced with three feuding but weak quasi states and the US can justify staying in Iraq forever in the interests of security--and security of oil supplies.
Tomgram: Having a Carnage Party
We Count, They Don't
By Tom Engelhardt
Counting to Three
At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was "a significant milestone…, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy." Murray added, "The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq's constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution."
In Iraq, the plan was termed a "disaster" by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He added, according to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states." In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.
Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate "messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it."
But here's the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three -- simply that it happened in the United States. Let's imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi Parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington DC or to allow California's electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?
Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it -- whether agreeing with the proposal or not -- seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.
No matter how meaningless Biden's resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems -- specifically, that it is America's global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…
Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one -- not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress -- will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true -- if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won't let it happen."
Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…") Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.
And let's remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently: "Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind -- though they weren't calling it that at the time.)
This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on -- a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.
Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.
Counting Bodies
Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: "We don't do body counts." And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team."
Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it's evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.
The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items -- or to have understood all too well their real use -- and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.
As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, ‘to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy.... During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")
And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too -- and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.
Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit -- which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy -- especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.
Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again.... [but] everything is tabula rasa."
Counting Squads
Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Counting to a Million and Beyond
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Launching Brand Petraeus
Perhaps Tom is a bit unfair to Petraeus. The report parts that I heard seemed to be rather cautious as if the report may have been massaged by the White House but certainly not dictated to Petraeus. What is impressive in the article are all the numbers at the end showing just how bad things are.
Launching Brand Petraeus
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
[Note for Readers: This is the third in TomDispatch's "by the numbers" series, leading up to this week's White House "Progress Report" from the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. The first, in July, was "Iraq by the Numbers"; the second, in August, was "Escalation by the Numbers." You can check them for topics missing this time around. Tom]
"Progress" by the Numbers
It was about this time of year in 2002, in the halcyon days of the Bush administration, that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card offered a little political marketing advice to the world. In explaining why the Bush administration had not launched its "case" against Iraq (and for a future invasion) the previous month, he told a New York Times reporter, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
It's a piece of simple business wisdom, and when it comes to manipulating the public, the Bush administration is still sticking to it five years later. The corollary, which Card didn't mention, is: Do your market research and testing in the dog-bites-man news months of July and August. And that's just what the Bush administration did in the run-up to what will certainly be its victorious battle with congressional opponents to extend its surge plan into next spring and its occupation of Iraq into the distant future. (As present White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten said in a meeting with the USA Today editorial board last week, he doesn't think "any 'realistic observer' can believe that 'all or even most of the American troop presence' will be out of Iraq by the end of Bush's presidency.")
The core marketing decision was, of course, finding the right spokesman for the product. As Robert Draper, author of the new book Dead Certain, reported recently, the president was "fully aware of his standing in opinion polls" and so, earlier this year, decided that "his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could." As Bush put it, ""I've been here too long. Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn't make it on the news." Indeed.
So launching "Brand Petraeus" and providing him with some upbeat Iraqi news (Sunnis in al-Anbar Province ally with U.S.) and numbers (violence down in August) were the two necessities of the summer. In July, the celebrity surge general, who had already shown a decided knack on earlier tours of Iraq for wowing the media, was loosed. Petraeus, in turn, loosed all his top commanders to enter vociferously into what previously would have been a civilian debate over U.S. policy and the issue of "withdrawal." This campaign, by the way, represents a significant chiseling away at traditional prohibitions on U.S. military figures entering the American political arena while in uniform.
Like any top-notch PR outfit, the administration also put various toes in the water in August and wiggled them vigorously – including offering rousing presidential speeches and radio addresses, especially a "Vietnam speech" to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At the same time, an allied $15 million, five-week ad campaign was launched by a new conservative activist group, Freedom's Watch, led by former White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer. The ads, "featuring military veterans," were aimed directly at congressional opposition to the president's surge strategy. In the meantime, key pundits and experts like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (who helps produce that organization's anodyne, New York Times-published tabulation of numbers from Iraq) and former invasion enthusiast Kenneth Pollack (both of whom re-billed themselves as "critics"), not to speak of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and others, arrived in Iraq. There, they were given well-organized, well-scripted, Green Zone-style Pentagon-led tours and sent back home to write Petraeus-style news releases about modest, but upbeat, "progress."
Next, of course, came the full-scale September launching of the campaign. This involved a "dramatic" presidential secret exit from the White House and secret Air Force One flight to al-Asad Airbase in Iraq's isolated western desert, one of our giant "enduring" bases (whose imposing nature U.S. reporters tend to be oblivious to, even when reporting from them). With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and hand-picked reporters along, Bush performed what was, as PressThink's Jay Rosen has written, not just a photo-op, but "a propaganda mission that required the press to complete the mission for him." And so they did, as he met Brand Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, along with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and various Sunni tribal sheiks from al-Anbar province – with smiles and handshakes all around.
Even CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric flew into Iraq to deal with her dreadful ratings by – guess what? – interviewing Brand Petraeus et al. and reporting on the reports of "progress." Finally, the military completed its early September groundwork by releasing a spate of new numbers from Iraq – doubted by pundits and experts of many stripes. Military officials claimed (could anyone be surprised?) that, by their count, a miraculous August turnaround had occurred; and here's another shock, credulous reporters like Michael Gordon of the New York Times swallowed, and front-paged, this one, too (though the Times also had a far more sober report the following day).
Under the circumstances, you couldn't do it much better. And this week, we have the full-scale media spectacle of testimony to Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, along with the delivery of the so-called "Progress" or Petraeus Report which, thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we now know – though the mainstream media has made nothing of it – was actually written not in Baghdad by the general and ambassador, but in the White House. (There's yet another shock for us all!)
Why anyone in the media or Congress takes this situation seriously as "news," or even something to argue about, is hard to tell. Think of it this way: The most political general in recent memory has been asked to assess his own work (as has our ambassador in Iraq), and then present "recommendations" to the White House in a "report" that is actually being written in the White House. You couldn't call it a political version of "the honor system"; but perhaps the dishonor system would do.
Numbers in Iraq are a slippery matter at best, though again, why anyone pays serious attention to U.S. military numbers from that country is a mystery. On countless occasions in the past, these have been ridiculous undercounts of disaster.
In the midst of such chaos, mayhem, and pure tragedy, of course, who exactly is counting? Nonetheless, wherever you look, numbers, however approximate, are indeed pouring out – and, when you consider them, there is no way on Earth to imagine that the situation is anything but grim and deteriorating: first for the Iraqi people; second for the overstretched U.S. military; and finally, for the rest of the region and us.
So here, on the eve of the orbiting of Brand Petraeus, is my best attempt at "progress" by the numbers:
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq before the president's "surge plan" or "new way forward" was launched in February 2007: 130,000
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq by September 2008, if General Petraeus' reported "drawdown" plan is followed: Approximately 130,000, according to a "senior official" quoted by the Washington Post.
Number of American troops in Iraq when President Bush declared "major combat operations" to have "ended" on May 1, 2003: Approximately 130,000.
Number of American troops Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilian strategists predicted would be stationed in Iraq in August 2003, four months after Baghdad fell: 30,000-40,000, according to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his best-selling book Fiasco.
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq in July 2007: 162,000; in September 2007, 168,000; later in the fall of 2007, an expected 172,000 – each an all-time high in its moment.
Number of British troops in southern Iraq, May 1, 2003: 45,000 in four provinces.
Number of British troops in southern Iraq, August 2007: 5,000, all gathered in a heavily fortified, regularly mortared base at Basra airport; number of British troops expected to be in Iraq by spring 2008, 3,000.
Number of nations that have withdrawn their troops from the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq: At least 17, according to GlobalSecurity.org. Poland is expected to withdraw its drawn-down forces by year's end and other countries have been drawing down their minimal forces as well. Among the remaining powers in the "coalition": Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Estonia, Mongolia, and Ukraine.
Number of months before the Iraqi army can "independently fulfill [its] security role": At least 24, according to a report recently issued by a congressionally-appointed commission of retired senior U.S. military officers. (Donald Rumsfeld, October 2003: "In less than six months we have gone from zero Iraqis providing security to their country to close to a hundred thousand Iraqis. … Indeed, the progress has been so swift that … it will not be long before [Iraqi security forces] will be the largest and outnumber the U.S. forces, and it shouldn't be too long thereafter that they will outnumber all coalition forces combined." George Bush, November 2005: "Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over responsibility for areas in south-central Iraq, sectors of southeast Iraq, sectors of western Iraq, and sectors of north-central Iraq. … The Iraqis, General Dempsey says, are 'increasingly in control of their future and their own security – the Iraqi security forces are regaining control of the country.'" Commander of Multinational Forces IraqGen. George Casey, October 2006: "And the third step is you make [the Iraqi army] independent, and that's what you'll see going on here over the better part of the next 12 months.")
Amount President Bush is to request from Congress in September to pay for his "surge" plan: Up to $50 billion – in addition to a pending $147 billion "supplemental" bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this fiscal year. ("The decision to seek about $50 billion more appears to reflect the view in the administration that the counteroffensive will last into the spring of 2008 and will not be shortened by Congress.")
Cost of the war in Iraq per week, if this $197 billion joint request is granted by Congress: More than $3 billion.
Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798.00 in "transportation costs," according to the Washington Post. This was part of a defense contractor's plan to bilk the Pentagon, based on its weak system of financial oversight.
Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million, more than $200 million over budget, according to the Washington Post based on "previously undisclosed data." The contracts to the two companies have a combined "burn rate" of $18 million a month and support a private army of approximately 2,000 hired guns, the equivalent of three military battalions.
Cost of Aegis' armored vehicles and the guards manning them: Approximately $150,000 per vehicle and $15,000 a month per guard.
Percentage of team members in the $2 billion U.S. civilian-military Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) program with "the cultural knowledge and Arabic-language skills needed to work with Iraqis": 5 percent or just 29 out of 610 PRT members, according to Ginger Cruz, the deputy special inspector for Iraq reconstruction
Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan: 73, according to an Army spokesman.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2004: Approximately 33 percent.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2007: Approximately 80 percent.
Amount Pentagon invested in counter-IED jamming technology in the last year: $1.6 billion; $6 billion since the war began.
Amount needed to make a typical IED (which can be built from instructions on the Internet): "About the cost of a pizza," according to Newsweek magazine.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in 2005: $100.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in central Iraq in 2007: As low as $40.
Percentage of the West Point class of 2001 who chose to leave the U.S. Army last year: Nearly 46 percent, according to statistics compiled by West Point. More than 54 percent of the class of 2000 had chosen not to re-up by January 2007. Over the previous three decades, the percentages for those departing the service at the five-year mark after graduation ranged from 10-30 percent. The major reason given now: wear and tear from multiple deployments to Iraq.
Number of U.S. Army suicides, 2006: 99 (more than one quarter while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan), according to the Army, or 17.3 per thousand, the highest rate in 26 years (during which the average rate was 12.3 per thousand). 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in Iraq itself since 2003, according to Greg Mitchell, editor of the Editor & Publisher Web site; and Army suicide numbers do not, Mitchell notes, include "many unconfirmed reports [of suicides], or those who served in the war and then killed themselves at home."
Percentage of 1,320 soldiers interviewed in Iraq who ranked their unit's morale as "low or very low": 45 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Seven percent ranked it "high or very high."
Percentage increase in U.S. Army desertions in 2006: 27 percent or 3,196 active duty soldiers, according to figures corrected by the Army, which had inaccurately been reporting much lower numbers. The percentage rise for 2005 had been 8 percent. From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army prosecutions of deserters tripled (compared with the five-year period from 1997 to 2001) to roughly 6 percent of deserters, Army data shows.
Number of states authorized by the Army National Guard to accept "the lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those who scored between 16 and 30 on the armed services aptitude test": 34 (plus Guam), according to the New York Times. ("Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from enlisting.")
Percentage of Army recruits since late July who have accepted a $20,000 "quick ship" bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of September: 90 percent, part of an Army campaign to meet year-end recruiting goals after a two-month slump. A soldier coming out of basic training is paid on average $17,400 a year.
Percentage of U.S. military equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq (and Afghanistan): 40 percent or $212 billion worth.
Percentage of Iraqi national police force which is Shiite: 85 percent.
Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500 (and rising), up 50 percent since the president's surge plan began in February, according to Thom Shanker of the New York Times; nearly 85 percent of these prisoners are Sunnis. (U.S. holding facilities at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper near Baghdad are still being expanded.)
Number of foreign suspected jihadists held in those prisons: 280.
Number of juveniles, aged 11-17, held in those prisons: Approximately 800 (also 85 percent Sunni).
Number of U.S. reconstruction projects officially considered "completed" in al-Anbar Province by July 2007: 3,300 projects "with a total value of $363 million," according to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad; 250 more projects at a price tag of $353 million are supposedly under way.
Percentage of U.S. reconstruction money estimated to go to Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq militants for "protection" for any convoy of building materials entering al-Anbar Province: 50 percent or more, according to reporter Hannah Allam of the McClatchy Newspapers. ("Every contractor in Anbar who works for the U.S. military and survives for more than a month is paying the insurgency," according to a "senior Iraqi politician.")
Estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters: 850 or 2-5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, who "has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq."
Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaeda in a speech on the Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.
Percentage of unemployed in the now-"secure" city of Fallujah, three-quarters of whose buildings were destroyed or damaged by U.S. firepower in November 2005 in al-Anbar Province: More than 80 percent, according to local residents.
Percentage of U.S. military supplies carried on the vulnerable "Route Tampa," the 300 miles of highway from Kuwait to Baghdad: 90 percent of the food, water, ammunition, and equipment, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
Percentage increase of alcoholics in care in Iraq: Up 34 percent in May-June 2007, compared to previous year, according to the Iraqi Psychologists Association, based on a study of 2,600 of patients and inhabitants of Baghdad's suburbs.
Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of electricity a day: $171 a month in a country where $400 is a reasonable monthly wage.
Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809, according to an Associated Press count, the highest figure of the surge year so far. Surge commander Gen. Petraeus is evidently going to claim a 75 percent drop in sectarian killings as well as a drop in civilian deaths (especially in Baghdad) in his upcoming report. To the extent that those questionable figures are accurate, they may, in part, result from the fact that, in the surge months, the ethnic cleansing of the capital actually increased significantly. Experts also believe the U.S. military's figures for "surge success" rely on carefully defined and cherry-picked numbers. The AP, in fact, claims that sectarian deaths have nearly doubled since a year ago. All such figures are, in any case, considered significant undercounts in a country where it is no longer possible to report anywhere near the total number of deaths from violence.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2007: 62, according to the AP count.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2006: 37, according to the AP count.
Number of daily attacks on civilians, February to July 2007: Unchanged, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
Number of Iraqis fleeing their homes on average during each surge month, February to July 2007: 100,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. The United Nation's International Organization for Migration offers the lower, but still staggering figure of 50,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes each month.
Number of internally displaced Iraqis during the surge months: Over 600,000, more than doubling the number of internal refugees to 1.14 million, according to the Red Crescent Society. (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has offered the higher estimate of 2.2 million internal refugees.)
Percentage of Iraqis who fled their neighborhoods in the surge months due to direct threats on their lives: 63 percent, according to the UN. ("More than 25 percent said they fled after being thrown out of their homes at gunpoint.") Iraqis leaving their homes in Baghdad in the same time period "grew by a factor of 20."
Number of Iraqi "bus people" now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This is the fastest growing – and already the third-largest – refugee population in the world.
Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. in August: nearly 530, more than all those admitted in the previous 11 months. Number of Iraqi refugees estimated to be in Syria alone: 1.5 million.
Total number of Iraqis killed, sent into exile, or turned into internal refugees: More than 4 million by a conservative estimate, or somewhere between one out of every five and one out of every six Iraqis. (There is no way even to estimate the numbers of Iraqis who have been wounded in these years.)
Total number of Americans who would have been killed or turned into refugees, if these numbers were extrapolated to the far more populous United States: 50 million, according to Gary Kamiya of Salon.com, a figure "roughly equal to the population of the northeastern United States, including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and all of New England."
Percentage of people across the globe who "think U.S. forces should leave Iraq within a year": 67 percent, according to a just-released BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23 percent think foreign troops should remain "until security improves."
Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49 percent.
Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year: 61 percent, according to the same BBC poll, including 24 percent who favor immediate withdrawal and 37 percent percent who prefer a one-year timetable; 32 percent of Americans say U.S. forces should stay "until security improves." In a recent Harris poll, 42 percent of Americans favored U.S. troops leaving Iraq "now"; 30 percent in a recent CBS poll (with another 31 percent favoring a "decrease").
Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led "coalition" members in Iraq, who want forces out within a year: 65 percent of Britons, 63 percent of South Koreans, and 63 percent of Australians, according to the BBC poll. Even a majority of Israelis want either an immediate American withdrawal (24 percent), or withdrawal within a year (28 percent); only 40 percent opt for "remain until security improves."
Percentage of Americans who believe, "in the long run," that "the U.S. mission in Iraq [will] be seen as a failure": 57 percent, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. Only 29 percent disagree.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press) has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[Note: Let me thank, yet again, the many Web sites which collect crucial Iraq material and so make a piece like this possible, especially Antiwar.com, Juan Cole's Informed Comment, and Paul Woodward's the War in Context.]
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
Launching Brand Petraeus
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
[Note for Readers: This is the third in TomDispatch's "by the numbers" series, leading up to this week's White House "Progress Report" from the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. The first, in July, was "Iraq by the Numbers"; the second, in August, was "Escalation by the Numbers." You can check them for topics missing this time around. Tom]
"Progress" by the Numbers
It was about this time of year in 2002, in the halcyon days of the Bush administration, that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card offered a little political marketing advice to the world. In explaining why the Bush administration had not launched its "case" against Iraq (and for a future invasion) the previous month, he told a New York Times reporter, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
It's a piece of simple business wisdom, and when it comes to manipulating the public, the Bush administration is still sticking to it five years later. The corollary, which Card didn't mention, is: Do your market research and testing in the dog-bites-man news months of July and August. And that's just what the Bush administration did in the run-up to what will certainly be its victorious battle with congressional opponents to extend its surge plan into next spring and its occupation of Iraq into the distant future. (As present White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten said in a meeting with the USA Today editorial board last week, he doesn't think "any 'realistic observer' can believe that 'all or even most of the American troop presence' will be out of Iraq by the end of Bush's presidency.")
The core marketing decision was, of course, finding the right spokesman for the product. As Robert Draper, author of the new book Dead Certain, reported recently, the president was "fully aware of his standing in opinion polls" and so, earlier this year, decided that "his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could." As Bush put it, ""I've been here too long. Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn't make it on the news." Indeed.
So launching "Brand Petraeus" and providing him with some upbeat Iraqi news (Sunnis in al-Anbar Province ally with U.S.) and numbers (violence down in August) were the two necessities of the summer. In July, the celebrity surge general, who had already shown a decided knack on earlier tours of Iraq for wowing the media, was loosed. Petraeus, in turn, loosed all his top commanders to enter vociferously into what previously would have been a civilian debate over U.S. policy and the issue of "withdrawal." This campaign, by the way, represents a significant chiseling away at traditional prohibitions on U.S. military figures entering the American political arena while in uniform.
Like any top-notch PR outfit, the administration also put various toes in the water in August and wiggled them vigorously – including offering rousing presidential speeches and radio addresses, especially a "Vietnam speech" to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At the same time, an allied $15 million, five-week ad campaign was launched by a new conservative activist group, Freedom's Watch, led by former White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer. The ads, "featuring military veterans," were aimed directly at congressional opposition to the president's surge strategy. In the meantime, key pundits and experts like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (who helps produce that organization's anodyne, New York Times-published tabulation of numbers from Iraq) and former invasion enthusiast Kenneth Pollack (both of whom re-billed themselves as "critics"), not to speak of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and others, arrived in Iraq. There, they were given well-organized, well-scripted, Green Zone-style Pentagon-led tours and sent back home to write Petraeus-style news releases about modest, but upbeat, "progress."
Next, of course, came the full-scale September launching of the campaign. This involved a "dramatic" presidential secret exit from the White House and secret Air Force One flight to al-Asad Airbase in Iraq's isolated western desert, one of our giant "enduring" bases (whose imposing nature U.S. reporters tend to be oblivious to, even when reporting from them). With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and hand-picked reporters along, Bush performed what was, as PressThink's Jay Rosen has written, not just a photo-op, but "a propaganda mission that required the press to complete the mission for him." And so they did, as he met Brand Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, along with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and various Sunni tribal sheiks from al-Anbar province – with smiles and handshakes all around.
Even CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric flew into Iraq to deal with her dreadful ratings by – guess what? – interviewing Brand Petraeus et al. and reporting on the reports of "progress." Finally, the military completed its early September groundwork by releasing a spate of new numbers from Iraq – doubted by pundits and experts of many stripes. Military officials claimed (could anyone be surprised?) that, by their count, a miraculous August turnaround had occurred; and here's another shock, credulous reporters like Michael Gordon of the New York Times swallowed, and front-paged, this one, too (though the Times also had a far more sober report the following day).
Under the circumstances, you couldn't do it much better. And this week, we have the full-scale media spectacle of testimony to Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, along with the delivery of the so-called "Progress" or Petraeus Report which, thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we now know – though the mainstream media has made nothing of it – was actually written not in Baghdad by the general and ambassador, but in the White House. (There's yet another shock for us all!)
Why anyone in the media or Congress takes this situation seriously as "news," or even something to argue about, is hard to tell. Think of it this way: The most political general in recent memory has been asked to assess his own work (as has our ambassador in Iraq), and then present "recommendations" to the White House in a "report" that is actually being written in the White House. You couldn't call it a political version of "the honor system"; but perhaps the dishonor system would do.
Numbers in Iraq are a slippery matter at best, though again, why anyone pays serious attention to U.S. military numbers from that country is a mystery. On countless occasions in the past, these have been ridiculous undercounts of disaster.
In the midst of such chaos, mayhem, and pure tragedy, of course, who exactly is counting? Nonetheless, wherever you look, numbers, however approximate, are indeed pouring out – and, when you consider them, there is no way on Earth to imagine that the situation is anything but grim and deteriorating: first for the Iraqi people; second for the overstretched U.S. military; and finally, for the rest of the region and us.
So here, on the eve of the orbiting of Brand Petraeus, is my best attempt at "progress" by the numbers:
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq before the president's "surge plan" or "new way forward" was launched in February 2007: 130,000
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq by September 2008, if General Petraeus' reported "drawdown" plan is followed: Approximately 130,000, according to a "senior official" quoted by the Washington Post.
Number of American troops in Iraq when President Bush declared "major combat operations" to have "ended" on May 1, 2003: Approximately 130,000.
Number of American troops Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilian strategists predicted would be stationed in Iraq in August 2003, four months after Baghdad fell: 30,000-40,000, according to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his best-selling book Fiasco.
Number of U.S. troops in Iraq in July 2007: 162,000; in September 2007, 168,000; later in the fall of 2007, an expected 172,000 – each an all-time high in its moment.
Number of British troops in southern Iraq, May 1, 2003: 45,000 in four provinces.
Number of British troops in southern Iraq, August 2007: 5,000, all gathered in a heavily fortified, regularly mortared base at Basra airport; number of British troops expected to be in Iraq by spring 2008, 3,000.
Number of nations that have withdrawn their troops from the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq: At least 17, according to GlobalSecurity.org. Poland is expected to withdraw its drawn-down forces by year's end and other countries have been drawing down their minimal forces as well. Among the remaining powers in the "coalition": Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Estonia, Mongolia, and Ukraine.
Number of months before the Iraqi army can "independently fulfill [its] security role": At least 24, according to a report recently issued by a congressionally-appointed commission of retired senior U.S. military officers. (Donald Rumsfeld, October 2003: "In less than six months we have gone from zero Iraqis providing security to their country to close to a hundred thousand Iraqis. … Indeed, the progress has been so swift that … it will not be long before [Iraqi security forces] will be the largest and outnumber the U.S. forces, and it shouldn't be too long thereafter that they will outnumber all coalition forces combined." George Bush, November 2005: "Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over responsibility for areas in south-central Iraq, sectors of southeast Iraq, sectors of western Iraq, and sectors of north-central Iraq. … The Iraqis, General Dempsey says, are 'increasingly in control of their future and their own security – the Iraqi security forces are regaining control of the country.'" Commander of Multinational Forces IraqGen. George Casey, October 2006: "And the third step is you make [the Iraqi army] independent, and that's what you'll see going on here over the better part of the next 12 months.")
Amount President Bush is to request from Congress in September to pay for his "surge" plan: Up to $50 billion – in addition to a pending $147 billion "supplemental" bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this fiscal year. ("The decision to seek about $50 billion more appears to reflect the view in the administration that the counteroffensive will last into the spring of 2008 and will not be shortened by Congress.")
Cost of the war in Iraq per week, if this $197 billion joint request is granted by Congress: More than $3 billion.
Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798.00 in "transportation costs," according to the Washington Post. This was part of a defense contractor's plan to bilk the Pentagon, based on its weak system of financial oversight.
Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million, more than $200 million over budget, according to the Washington Post based on "previously undisclosed data." The contracts to the two companies have a combined "burn rate" of $18 million a month and support a private army of approximately 2,000 hired guns, the equivalent of three military battalions.
Cost of Aegis' armored vehicles and the guards manning them: Approximately $150,000 per vehicle and $15,000 a month per guard.
Percentage of team members in the $2 billion U.S. civilian-military Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) program with "the cultural knowledge and Arabic-language skills needed to work with Iraqis": 5 percent or just 29 out of 610 PRT members, according to Ginger Cruz, the deputy special inspector for Iraq reconstruction
Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan: 73, according to an Army spokesman.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2004: Approximately 33 percent.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2007: Approximately 80 percent.
Amount Pentagon invested in counter-IED jamming technology in the last year: $1.6 billion; $6 billion since the war began.
Amount needed to make a typical IED (which can be built from instructions on the Internet): "About the cost of a pizza," according to Newsweek magazine.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in 2005: $100.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in central Iraq in 2007: As low as $40.
Percentage of the West Point class of 2001 who chose to leave the U.S. Army last year: Nearly 46 percent, according to statistics compiled by West Point. More than 54 percent of the class of 2000 had chosen not to re-up by January 2007. Over the previous three decades, the percentages for those departing the service at the five-year mark after graduation ranged from 10-30 percent. The major reason given now: wear and tear from multiple deployments to Iraq.
Number of U.S. Army suicides, 2006: 99 (more than one quarter while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan), according to the Army, or 17.3 per thousand, the highest rate in 26 years (during which the average rate was 12.3 per thousand). 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in Iraq itself since 2003, according to Greg Mitchell, editor of the Editor & Publisher Web site; and Army suicide numbers do not, Mitchell notes, include "many unconfirmed reports [of suicides], or those who served in the war and then killed themselves at home."
Percentage of 1,320 soldiers interviewed in Iraq who ranked their unit's morale as "low or very low": 45 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Seven percent ranked it "high or very high."
Percentage increase in U.S. Army desertions in 2006: 27 percent or 3,196 active duty soldiers, according to figures corrected by the Army, which had inaccurately been reporting much lower numbers. The percentage rise for 2005 had been 8 percent. From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army prosecutions of deserters tripled (compared with the five-year period from 1997 to 2001) to roughly 6 percent of deserters, Army data shows.
Number of states authorized by the Army National Guard to accept "the lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those who scored between 16 and 30 on the armed services aptitude test": 34 (plus Guam), according to the New York Times. ("Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from enlisting.")
Percentage of Army recruits since late July who have accepted a $20,000 "quick ship" bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of September: 90 percent, part of an Army campaign to meet year-end recruiting goals after a two-month slump. A soldier coming out of basic training is paid on average $17,400 a year.
Percentage of U.S. military equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq (and Afghanistan): 40 percent or $212 billion worth.
Percentage of Iraqi national police force which is Shiite: 85 percent.
Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500 (and rising), up 50 percent since the president's surge plan began in February, according to Thom Shanker of the New York Times; nearly 85 percent of these prisoners are Sunnis. (U.S. holding facilities at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper near Baghdad are still being expanded.)
Number of foreign suspected jihadists held in those prisons: 280.
Number of juveniles, aged 11-17, held in those prisons: Approximately 800 (also 85 percent Sunni).
Number of U.S. reconstruction projects officially considered "completed" in al-Anbar Province by July 2007: 3,300 projects "with a total value of $363 million," according to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad; 250 more projects at a price tag of $353 million are supposedly under way.
Percentage of U.S. reconstruction money estimated to go to Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq militants for "protection" for any convoy of building materials entering al-Anbar Province: 50 percent or more, according to reporter Hannah Allam of the McClatchy Newspapers. ("Every contractor in Anbar who works for the U.S. military and survives for more than a month is paying the insurgency," according to a "senior Iraqi politician.")
Estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters: 850 or 2-5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, who "has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq."
Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaeda in a speech on the Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.
Percentage of unemployed in the now-"secure" city of Fallujah, three-quarters of whose buildings were destroyed or damaged by U.S. firepower in November 2005 in al-Anbar Province: More than 80 percent, according to local residents.
Percentage of U.S. military supplies carried on the vulnerable "Route Tampa," the 300 miles of highway from Kuwait to Baghdad: 90 percent of the food, water, ammunition, and equipment, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
Percentage increase of alcoholics in care in Iraq: Up 34 percent in May-June 2007, compared to previous year, according to the Iraqi Psychologists Association, based on a study of 2,600 of patients and inhabitants of Baghdad's suburbs.
Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of electricity a day: $171 a month in a country where $400 is a reasonable monthly wage.
Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809, according to an Associated Press count, the highest figure of the surge year so far. Surge commander Gen. Petraeus is evidently going to claim a 75 percent drop in sectarian killings as well as a drop in civilian deaths (especially in Baghdad) in his upcoming report. To the extent that those questionable figures are accurate, they may, in part, result from the fact that, in the surge months, the ethnic cleansing of the capital actually increased significantly. Experts also believe the U.S. military's figures for "surge success" rely on carefully defined and cherry-picked numbers. The AP, in fact, claims that sectarian deaths have nearly doubled since a year ago. All such figures are, in any case, considered significant undercounts in a country where it is no longer possible to report anywhere near the total number of deaths from violence.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2007: 62, according to the AP count.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2006: 37, according to the AP count.
Number of daily attacks on civilians, February to July 2007: Unchanged, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
Number of Iraqis fleeing their homes on average during each surge month, February to July 2007: 100,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. The United Nation's International Organization for Migration offers the lower, but still staggering figure of 50,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes each month.
Number of internally displaced Iraqis during the surge months: Over 600,000, more than doubling the number of internal refugees to 1.14 million, according to the Red Crescent Society. (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has offered the higher estimate of 2.2 million internal refugees.)
Percentage of Iraqis who fled their neighborhoods in the surge months due to direct threats on their lives: 63 percent, according to the UN. ("More than 25 percent said they fled after being thrown out of their homes at gunpoint.") Iraqis leaving their homes in Baghdad in the same time period "grew by a factor of 20."
Number of Iraqi "bus people" now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This is the fastest growing – and already the third-largest – refugee population in the world.
Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. in August: nearly 530, more than all those admitted in the previous 11 months. Number of Iraqi refugees estimated to be in Syria alone: 1.5 million.
Total number of Iraqis killed, sent into exile, or turned into internal refugees: More than 4 million by a conservative estimate, or somewhere between one out of every five and one out of every six Iraqis. (There is no way even to estimate the numbers of Iraqis who have been wounded in these years.)
Total number of Americans who would have been killed or turned into refugees, if these numbers were extrapolated to the far more populous United States: 50 million, according to Gary Kamiya of Salon.com, a figure "roughly equal to the population of the northeastern United States, including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and all of New England."
Percentage of people across the globe who "think U.S. forces should leave Iraq within a year": 67 percent, according to a just-released BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23 percent think foreign troops should remain "until security improves."
Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49 percent.
Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year: 61 percent, according to the same BBC poll, including 24 percent who favor immediate withdrawal and 37 percent percent who prefer a one-year timetable; 32 percent of Americans say U.S. forces should stay "until security improves." In a recent Harris poll, 42 percent of Americans favored U.S. troops leaving Iraq "now"; 30 percent in a recent CBS poll (with another 31 percent favoring a "decrease").
Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led "coalition" members in Iraq, who want forces out within a year: 65 percent of Britons, 63 percent of South Koreans, and 63 percent of Australians, according to the BBC poll. Even a majority of Israelis want either an immediate American withdrawal (24 percent), or withdrawal within a year (28 percent); only 40 percent opt for "remain until security improves."
Percentage of Americans who believe, "in the long run," that "the U.S. mission in Iraq [will] be seen as a failure": 57 percent, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. Only 29 percent disagree.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press) has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[Note: Let me thank, yet again, the many Web sites which collect crucial Iraq material and so make a piece like this possible, especially Antiwar.com, Juan Cole's Informed Comment, and Paul Woodward's the War in Context.]
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Tom Engelhardt: All Time Highs in Iraq
Engelhardt's articles are almost always worth reading. This one has a wealth of revealing detail "by the numbers" and is part of an excellent series.
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-08-13 09:40:44
Tomgram: All-time Highs in Iraq
[Tomdispatch returns on a light August schedule. The next TD piece will be posted Thursday. This is the second in an ongoing series of Tomdispatch "by the numbers" reports. The first, posted at the end of June, was "Iraq by the Numbers." Tom]
Escalation by the Numbers
What "Progress" in Iraq Really Means
By Tom Engelhardt
Someday, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term "surge" -- as in the President's "surge" plan (or "new way forward") announced to the nation in January -- was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam era. As there were to be no "body bags" (or cameras to film them as the dead came home), as there were to be no "body counts" ("We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team" was the way the President put it), as there were to be no "quagmires," nor the need to search for that "light at the end of the tunnel," so, surely, there were to be no "escalations."
The escalations of the Vietnam era, which left more than 500,000 American soldiers and vast bases and massive air and naval power in and around Vietnam (Laos, and Cambodia), had been thoroughly discredited. Each intensification in the delivery of troops, or simply in ever-widening bombing campaigns, led only to more misery and death for the Vietnamese and disaster for the U.S. And yet, not surprisingly, the American experience in Iraq -- another attempted occupation of a foreign country and culture -- has been like a heat-seeking missile heading for the still-burning American memories of Vietnam.
As historian Marilyn Young noted in early April 2003 with the invasion of Iraq barely underway: "In less then two weeks, a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds." By August 2003, the Bush administration, of course, expected that only perhaps 30,000 American troops would be left in Iraq, garrisoned on vast "enduring" bases in a pacified country. So, in a sense, it's been a surge-a-thon ever since. By now, it's beyond time to call the President's "new way forward" by its Vietnamese equivalent. Admittedly, a "surge" does sound more comforting, less aggressive, less long-lasting, and somehow less harmful than an "escalation," but the fact is that we are six months into the newest escalation of American power in Iraq. It has deposited all-time high numbers of troops there as well, undoubtedly, as more planes and firepower in and around that country than at any moment since the invasion of 2003. Naturally enough, other "all-time highs" of the grimmest sort follow.
This September, General David Petraeus, our escalation commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, our escalation ambassador there, will present their "progress report" to Congress. ("Progress" was another word much favored in American official pronouncements of the Vietnam era.) The very name tells you more or less what to expect. The report has already been downgraded to a "snapshot" of an ongoing set of operations, which shouldn't be truly judged or seriously assessed until at least this November, or perhaps early 2008, or...
With that in mind, here is the second Tomdispatch "by the numbers" report on Iraq. Consider it an attempt to put the Iraqi quagmire-cum-nightmare -- two classic Vietnam-era words -- in perspective.
Few numbers out of Iraq can be trusted. Counting accurately amid widespread disruption, mayhem, and bloodshed, under a failing occupation, in a land essentially lacking a central government, in a U.S. media landscape still dizzy from the endless spin of the Bush administration and its military commanders is probably next to impossible. But however approximate the figures that follow, they still offer an all-too-vivid picture of what the President's much-desired invasion let loose. No country could suffer such uprooting, destruction, death, loss, and deprivation, yet remain collectively sane.
American civilian and military officials now talk about staying in Iraq through 2008, or 2009, or into the next decade, or for undefined but lengthening periods of time. And yet Iraq (by the numbers) has devolved month by month, year by year, for four-plus years. There was never any reason to believe that the latest escalation -- or any future escalation, whatever it might be called, and whether accomplished via the U.S. military or by a growing shadow army of guns-for-hire employed by private-security firms -- could be capable of anything but hurrying the pace of that devolution. So imagine what Iraq-by-the-numbers will be like in 2008 or 2009, given the clear determination of the Bush administration's "strategic thinkers" to garrison that country into the distant future.
Here, then, is escalation in Iraq by the numbers -- almost all of them continue to "surge" -- as of mid-August 2008:
Number of American troops stationed in Iraq: 162,000 (plus at least several thousand government employees), an all-time high.
Estimated number of U.S.-(taxpayer)-paid private contractors in Iraq: More than 180,000, again undoubtedly an all-time high. That figure includes approximately 21,000 Americans, 43,000 non-Iraqi foreign contractors (including Chileans, Nepalese, Colombians, Indians, Fijians, El Salvadorans, and Filipinos among others), and 118,000 Iraqis, but does not include a complete count of "private security contractors who protect government officials and buildings," according to State Department and Pentagon figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Percentage of private contractors in total U.S. forces deployed in World War II and the Korean War: 3-5%, according to the Congressional testimony of human rights lawyer Scott Horton. In Vietnam and the first Gulf War, that figure reached 10%. Now, it is at least near parity.
Number of private companies working in Iraq on contract for the U.S. government: 630, with personnel from more than 100 countries, according to Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Typical pay of a former U.S. Special Forces soldier working for a private-security company in Iraq: $650 a day, according to Scahill, "after the company takes its cut." That rate, however, can hit $1,000 a day.
Number of trucks on the road each day as part of the U.S. resupply operation in Iraq: 3,000.
Number of attacks from June 2006 through May 2007 on U.S. supply convoys guarded by private-security contractors: 869, a near tripling from the previous twelve months.
Number of private contractors who have died in Iraq: Over 1,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, based on partial figures because private companies do not have to declare their war dead.
Predicted cost of a surge of 21,500 American troops into Iraq, according to White House calculations in January 2007: $5.6 billion, a figure offered the month the President's surge strategy was announced.
Predicted cost of a one-year surge of 30,000-40,000 troops, according to Robert Sunshine, assistant director for budget analysis of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: $22 billion (two years for a cut-rate $40 billion). These figures were offered in testimony to Congress five months after the President's surge was officially launched.
Percentage of dollars annually appropriated by the U.S. government and spent on Iraq-related activities: More than 10%, or one dollar out of every 10, according to the CBO's Sunshine.
Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq (and Afghan) Wars: $12 billion -- $10 billion for Iraq -- a third higher than in 2006, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
Estimated total cost of the Iraq War, if Robert Sunshine's "optimistic scenario" -- 30,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq by 2010 -- plays out: Over $1 trillion. (If his less optimistic scenario proves accurate -- 75,000 troops in 2010 -- closer to $1.5 trillion.)
Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: Between 2 million and 2.5 million. An estimated 750,000 to Jordan; 1.5 million to Syria; 200,000 to Egypt and Lebanon -- with another 40,000-50,000 fleeing each month, 2,000 a day, according to UN figures. Officials at the central travel office in Baghdad are deluged by up to 3,000 passport applications a week. In addition, though it's anyone's guess, more than two million Iraqis may now be internal refugees, uprooted from their homes largely by sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing. Approximately 70% of these are women and children, according to UNICEF.
Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States in July: 57; only 133 for the year to date.
Number of Iraqis held in American prisons in Iraq: Approximately 22,500, according to U.S. military officials, a leap to an all-time high from 16,000 in February when the surge began. (American prisons in Iraq also continue to undergo expansion.)
Number of Iraqis released from American incarceration in the last month: 224.
Number of foreign fighters (jihadis) held by the U.S. military in Iraq: 135 (nearly half are Saudis).
Estimated number of bullets fired by U.S. troops for every insurgent killed in Iraq (or Afghanistan): 250,000, according to John Pike, director of the Washington military-research group GlobalSecurity.org. This comes out to 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition yearly. With U.S. munitions factories unable to meet the demand, 313 million rounds of such munitions were purchased from Israel last year for $10 million more than if produced domestically.
Percentage of amputations performed on U.S. war-wounded in Iraq: An estimated 6%. The average in earlier U.S. conflicts, where the equivalents of IEDs and car bombings did not play such a role, was 3%.
Estimated replacement limbs needed yearly for Iraqis in northern Iraq alone: 3,000, according to the Red Crescent Society and the director general for health services in Mosul. (Unlike American soldiers, Iraqis who have lost limbs have access only to limited numbers of outdated prostheses.)
Cost of a coffin in Baghdad: $50-75. Cost of a coffin in Saddam Hussein's time, $5-10.
Number of Iraqi civilians who died in July 2007: 1,652, according to figures compiled by the Iraqi Health, Defense, and Interior Ministries; 2,024, according to the tally of the Associated Press; 1,539 according to the Washington Post. All but the Post claim this as a "spike" in casualties. All such figures are, for a variety of reasons, surely significant undercounts.
Approximate number of American civilians who would have died in July if a similar level of killings were underway in the United States: 18,000, according to Middle East scholar Juan Cole.
Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007, if the Lancet study's median figure of 655,000 deaths was accurate and similar death rates held true for the year since it was published: Just over one million, according to Just Foreign Policy. (The Lancet study has been the single, on-the-ground, scientific report on Iraqi casualties in these years.)
Number of Iraqi civilians killed in July in mass-casualty bomb attacks: 378, a sharp rise over June, according to the Washington Post. The five-month U.S. surge has caused "no appreciable change" in vehicle-bomb attacks, according to figures collected by reporters from the McClatchy Newspapers.
Number of unidentified bodies, assumedly murdered by death squads, found on the streets of Baghdad in June 2007: 453, a rise of 41% over January 2007, the month before surge operations began, according to unofficial Iraqi Health Ministry statistics taken from morgue counts.
Number of Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in "escalation of force" incidents at American checkpoints or near American patrols and convoys in the past year: 429, according to U.S. military statistics obtained by the McClatchy Newspapers. These statistics, which "spiked" during the recent escalation months, don't include civilian deaths during raids on homes or in the midst of battle (and are considered incomplete in any case, since an unknown number of escalation-of-force deaths go unreported by U.S. units).
Total number of attacks against U.S. and coalition forces, Iraq security forces, Iraqi civilians, and infrastructure targets in June 2007: 5,335. This works out to a daily average of 177.8, an all-time high since May 2003, according to the Pentagon, and 46% more than in June 2006; more than 68% of these attacks -- 3,671 to be exact -- were launched against U.S. troops, up 7% from May 2007.
Number of attacks in July 2007 using the most powerful type of roadside bomb: 99, an all-time high, according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, U.S. second-in-command in Iraq, accounting for one-third of American casualties that month.
Number of American military deaths in the surge months, February-July 2007: 572, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualties website. This represents 189 more American deaths than in the same set of months in 2004, 215 more than in 2005, 237 more than in 2006.
Average daytime summer temperature in Baghdad: 110-120 degrees, though 130 degrees is not uncommon. It rarely drops below 100 degrees even at night.
Number of megawatts of electricity produced daily in Iraq: Less than 4,000 megawatts, below pre-invasion levels in a country where daily demand is now in the 8,500 to 9,500 range.
Hours of electricity normally delivered to Baghdadis by the national electricity grid: 1-2 hours a day. The only recourse, according to French reporter Anne Nivat, who lived in "red zone" Baghdad for two weeks recently, is electricity produced by small local generators, which consume up to 20 gallons of gasoline a day.
Number of nationwide blackouts in just two days in July 2007: 4. The Shiite Holy city of Karbala was without any power for at least 3 consecutive days in July, during which its water mains "went dry." ("'We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having,' said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.")
Cost of a bottle of purified water during the present water shortages: $1.60 for a 10-liter bottle, a rise of 33%. (Many Iraqis can't afford to buy bottled water in a country where, according to a recent Oxfam summary study of the Iraqi humanitarian crisis, 43% of Iraqis live in "absolute poverty," earning less than a dollar a day.)
Percentage of water engineers who have left Iraq: 40%, according to Oxfam's report. Similar percentages of middle-class professionals -- doctors, teachers, lawyers -- have evidently fled as well. According to Oxfam, some universities and hospitals in Baghdad have lost up to 80% of their staffs.
Number of Iraqis who have access to clean drinking water: 1 in 3, according to UN figures. (In 2007, waterborne diseases, including diarrhea, "the most prolific killer of children under 5," are up in some areas by 70% over the previous year.)
Of the 3.5 million cubic meters of water Baghdad's six million people are estimated to need, amount actually delivered: 2.1 million cubic meters.
Number of high-tension lines running into Baghdad that are in operation: 2 of 17, thanks to insurgent sabotage, according to an Electricity Ministry spokesman. These are contributing to the worst electricity shortages since the invasion summer of 2003. The country's power grid is reportedly nearing collapse.
Number of ministers still in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: 20.
Number of ministers who have walked out: 17.
Number of senior officers who have recently resigned from the Iraqi Army in protest over the Maliki government: 9, including Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Babaker Zebari.
Number of countries for which Iraq's parliamentarians, who adjourned for a month-long August vacation, have departed: At least six, according to the New York Times, including Jordan, Syria, Dubai, Iran, Great Britain, and Egypt as well as "a resort in Iraq's safest region, autonomous Kurdistan."
Estimated cost of that vacation time to the U.S. per minute for ongoing operations in Iraq: $200,000, according to Bob Schieffer of CBS News.
Amount of oil Iraq possesses: 115 billion barrels in proven oil reserves, the third largest reserves in the world (after neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran). Estimates of possible oil deposits still to be discovered range from 45 billion additional barrels up to 400 billion additional barrels.
Price of 40 gallons of gas under Saddam Hussein: 50 cents.
Price of 40 gallons of gas in July 2007: $75 on the black market; $35 if a motorist is willing to spend hours, or even days, in line at a gas station.
Percentage of Iraq's revenues that come from the export of oil: More than 90%, though oil production remains below that of the worst days of Saddam Hussein's rule.
Amount the Iraqi Oil Ministry budgeted for capital expenses to bolster the oil industry last year: $3.5 billion, according to the latest report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Amount the Iraqi Oil Ministry actually spent: $90 million.
Percentage of allocated capital funds spent by the Iraqi government on oil, electricity, and education projects in 2006: 22%.
Amount of money missing due to governmental corruption, as uncovered in investigations by Iraq's top anti-corruption investigator, Judge Rahdi al Rahdi: $11 billion.
Number of U.S. dollars invested in "standing up" (training) the Iraqi military and police: $19.2 billion. This works out to $55,000 per Iraqi recruit, according to a bipartisan U.S. Congressional investigation.
Amount the Pentagon has requested for continued training and equipping of Iraqi security forces: $2 billion.
Percentage of equipment the Pentagon has issued to Iraqi security forces since 2003 that cannot be accounted for: 30%. That includes at least "110,000 AK-47 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets," according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). According to the Washington Post, "One senior Pentagon official acknowledged that some of the weapons probably are being used against U.S. forces."
Number of U.S. steel-shipping containers in Iraq and Afghanistan now considered "lost": 54,390 or one-third of them, according to the GAO.
Estimated cost of training Iraqi (and Afghan) security forces over the next decade, if present course continues: At least 50 billion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq: More than 75, according to the New York Times.
Cost of U.S. bases in Iraq (which Congress has mandated as not "permanent") and in Afghanistan (which the Pentagon refers to as "enduring"): Unknown. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of "several billion dollars" being sunk into base construction. According to the Washington Post, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) claims $2 billion went into "military construction" in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004-2006; another $1.7 billion was approved by Congress for 2007. And the Pentagon is still building. For fiscal 2008, $738.8 million was requested "for 33 critical construction projects for Iraq and Afghanistan." (When it comes to base construction, these figures are undoubtedly undercounts.)
Amount that former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root (now known as KBR) has received so far for a prewar contract to supply the American military with food, fuel, housing, and other necessities: At least $20 billion. A Pentagon audit of $16.2 billion worth of KBR's work "found that $3.2 billion in KBR billing was either questionable or unsupported by documentation."
Percentage of Iraqis who cannot afford to buy enough to eat: 15%, according Oxfam.
Percentage of Iraqi children who are malnourished: 28% (compared to 19% before the invasion); Percentage of babies born underweight, 11% (compared to 3% before the invasion).
Percentage of Iraqi children now considered to suffer from learning "impediments": 92%, according to one study cited by Oxfam.
The cost of a single Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), armed with two Hellfire missiles: More than $3 million. (At least 5 Predators have crashed or been shot down in the last year in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Cost of the latest UAV, the "hunter-killer" MQ-9 Reaper, now being deployed to Afghanistan and soon to be deployed to Iraq: $7 million. The Reaper is four times as heavy as the Predator and can be armed with 14 Hellfire missiles, or four Hellfires and two 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. It is considered equivalent in firepower to the F-16. According to Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley, "Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada."
Number of American planes in Iraqi air space at any moment: 100, according to Hanley.
Increase in bombs dropped in Iraq in the first six months of 2007 compared to the first six months of 2006: Fivefold.
Percentage of Iraqi oil resources around Basra in Shiite southern Iraq, where, in September 2006, the British launched their own unsuccessful version of the present American "clear, hold and reconstruct" escalation operation in Baghdad: 66%.
Number of doctors assassinated by "unidentified gunmen" in "peaceful" Basra since 2003: 12.
Number of times the airport base outside Basra, which houses a well-barricaded regional U.S. Embassy office and the last 5,500 of the 40,000 troops England dispatched to Iraq, has been attacked by mortars or rockets over the past four months: 600.
Effect of Iraq War spending on the profits of major weapons corporations: Northrop Grumman has just announced a 15% second-quarter increase in sales over 2006 for its information and services division, 7% for its electronics division; General Dynamics' combat systems unit just recorded a 19% rise in sales. Lockheed Martin's profits went up 34% to $778 million, according to Eli Clifton of Inter Press Service.
Estimated cost of deploying an American soldier to Iraq for one year: $390,000, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Cost of flying a soldier home from the war zone: $627.80. That's the price the Pentagon pays FedEx and UPS, among other companies, for each soldier brought back to the U.S.
Estimated tonnage of U.S. equipment that might be driven out of Iraq and shipped home from Kuwait in case of a decision to withdraw: One million tons.
Percentage of Americans in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll who had served in Iraq or "had a close friend or relative who served in Iraq," who approve of the President's handling of the Iraq conflict: 38%. In a May New York Times/CBS News poll, fewer than half of military families and military members agreed that "the United States did the right thing in invading Iraq."
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books).
[Note: Where, in the above list, a number is unsourced, check the previously sourced number. I have relied on numerous other websites, as well as my own reading, in compiling this report. Oxfam's recent study of the Iraqi humanitarian crisis has been indispensable. I used several figures directly from that report without sourcing above, because it was a pdf file. The full report can be found by clicking here (pdf file); a succinct summary of some of its numbers can be found in Peter Rothberg's "Worse than You Think" at the Nation magazine website. I'm now hooked on Noah Shachtman's "Danger Zone" blog at Wired magazine, which is invaluable on military and national security matters. Juan Cole's Informed Comment website remains a must-read, early-morning stop in my Web day, as does Antiwar.com and Paul Woodward's The War in Context, all of which I made good use of in compiling this post. Take a look as well at the always useful website Electronic Iraq.]
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-08-13 09:40:44
Tomgram: All-time Highs in Iraq
[Tomdispatch returns on a light August schedule. The next TD piece will be posted Thursday. This is the second in an ongoing series of Tomdispatch "by the numbers" reports. The first, posted at the end of June, was "Iraq by the Numbers." Tom]
Escalation by the Numbers
What "Progress" in Iraq Really Means
By Tom Engelhardt
Someday, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term "surge" -- as in the President's "surge" plan (or "new way forward") announced to the nation in January -- was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam era. As there were to be no "body bags" (or cameras to film them as the dead came home), as there were to be no "body counts" ("We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team" was the way the President put it), as there were to be no "quagmires," nor the need to search for that "light at the end of the tunnel," so, surely, there were to be no "escalations."
The escalations of the Vietnam era, which left more than 500,000 American soldiers and vast bases and massive air and naval power in and around Vietnam (Laos, and Cambodia), had been thoroughly discredited. Each intensification in the delivery of troops, or simply in ever-widening bombing campaigns, led only to more misery and death for the Vietnamese and disaster for the U.S. And yet, not surprisingly, the American experience in Iraq -- another attempted occupation of a foreign country and culture -- has been like a heat-seeking missile heading for the still-burning American memories of Vietnam.
As historian Marilyn Young noted in early April 2003 with the invasion of Iraq barely underway: "In less then two weeks, a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds." By August 2003, the Bush administration, of course, expected that only perhaps 30,000 American troops would be left in Iraq, garrisoned on vast "enduring" bases in a pacified country. So, in a sense, it's been a surge-a-thon ever since. By now, it's beyond time to call the President's "new way forward" by its Vietnamese equivalent. Admittedly, a "surge" does sound more comforting, less aggressive, less long-lasting, and somehow less harmful than an "escalation," but the fact is that we are six months into the newest escalation of American power in Iraq. It has deposited all-time high numbers of troops there as well, undoubtedly, as more planes and firepower in and around that country than at any moment since the invasion of 2003. Naturally enough, other "all-time highs" of the grimmest sort follow.
This September, General David Petraeus, our escalation commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, our escalation ambassador there, will present their "progress report" to Congress. ("Progress" was another word much favored in American official pronouncements of the Vietnam era.) The very name tells you more or less what to expect. The report has already been downgraded to a "snapshot" of an ongoing set of operations, which shouldn't be truly judged or seriously assessed until at least this November, or perhaps early 2008, or...
With that in mind, here is the second Tomdispatch "by the numbers" report on Iraq. Consider it an attempt to put the Iraqi quagmire-cum-nightmare -- two classic Vietnam-era words -- in perspective.
Few numbers out of Iraq can be trusted. Counting accurately amid widespread disruption, mayhem, and bloodshed, under a failing occupation, in a land essentially lacking a central government, in a U.S. media landscape still dizzy from the endless spin of the Bush administration and its military commanders is probably next to impossible. But however approximate the figures that follow, they still offer an all-too-vivid picture of what the President's much-desired invasion let loose. No country could suffer such uprooting, destruction, death, loss, and deprivation, yet remain collectively sane.
American civilian and military officials now talk about staying in Iraq through 2008, or 2009, or into the next decade, or for undefined but lengthening periods of time. And yet Iraq (by the numbers) has devolved month by month, year by year, for four-plus years. There was never any reason to believe that the latest escalation -- or any future escalation, whatever it might be called, and whether accomplished via the U.S. military or by a growing shadow army of guns-for-hire employed by private-security firms -- could be capable of anything but hurrying the pace of that devolution. So imagine what Iraq-by-the-numbers will be like in 2008 or 2009, given the clear determination of the Bush administration's "strategic thinkers" to garrison that country into the distant future.
Here, then, is escalation in Iraq by the numbers -- almost all of them continue to "surge" -- as of mid-August 2008:
Number of American troops stationed in Iraq: 162,000 (plus at least several thousand government employees), an all-time high.
Estimated number of U.S.-(taxpayer)-paid private contractors in Iraq: More than 180,000, again undoubtedly an all-time high. That figure includes approximately 21,000 Americans, 43,000 non-Iraqi foreign contractors (including Chileans, Nepalese, Colombians, Indians, Fijians, El Salvadorans, and Filipinos among others), and 118,000 Iraqis, but does not include a complete count of "private security contractors who protect government officials and buildings," according to State Department and Pentagon figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Percentage of private contractors in total U.S. forces deployed in World War II and the Korean War: 3-5%, according to the Congressional testimony of human rights lawyer Scott Horton. In Vietnam and the first Gulf War, that figure reached 10%. Now, it is at least near parity.
Number of private companies working in Iraq on contract for the U.S. government: 630, with personnel from more than 100 countries, according to Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Typical pay of a former U.S. Special Forces soldier working for a private-security company in Iraq: $650 a day, according to Scahill, "after the company takes its cut." That rate, however, can hit $1,000 a day.
Number of trucks on the road each day as part of the U.S. resupply operation in Iraq: 3,000.
Number of attacks from June 2006 through May 2007 on U.S. supply convoys guarded by private-security contractors: 869, a near tripling from the previous twelve months.
Number of private contractors who have died in Iraq: Over 1,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, based on partial figures because private companies do not have to declare their war dead.
Predicted cost of a surge of 21,500 American troops into Iraq, according to White House calculations in January 2007: $5.6 billion, a figure offered the month the President's surge strategy was announced.
Predicted cost of a one-year surge of 30,000-40,000 troops, according to Robert Sunshine, assistant director for budget analysis of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: $22 billion (two years for a cut-rate $40 billion). These figures were offered in testimony to Congress five months after the President's surge was officially launched.
Percentage of dollars annually appropriated by the U.S. government and spent on Iraq-related activities: More than 10%, or one dollar out of every 10, according to the CBO's Sunshine.
Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq (and Afghan) Wars: $12 billion -- $10 billion for Iraq -- a third higher than in 2006, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
Estimated total cost of the Iraq War, if Robert Sunshine's "optimistic scenario" -- 30,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq by 2010 -- plays out: Over $1 trillion. (If his less optimistic scenario proves accurate -- 75,000 troops in 2010 -- closer to $1.5 trillion.)
Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: Between 2 million and 2.5 million. An estimated 750,000 to Jordan; 1.5 million to Syria; 200,000 to Egypt and Lebanon -- with another 40,000-50,000 fleeing each month, 2,000 a day, according to UN figures. Officials at the central travel office in Baghdad are deluged by up to 3,000 passport applications a week. In addition, though it's anyone's guess, more than two million Iraqis may now be internal refugees, uprooted from their homes largely by sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing. Approximately 70% of these are women and children, according to UNICEF.
Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States in July: 57; only 133 for the year to date.
Number of Iraqis held in American prisons in Iraq: Approximately 22,500, according to U.S. military officials, a leap to an all-time high from 16,000 in February when the surge began. (American prisons in Iraq also continue to undergo expansion.)
Number of Iraqis released from American incarceration in the last month: 224.
Number of foreign fighters (jihadis) held by the U.S. military in Iraq: 135 (nearly half are Saudis).
Estimated number of bullets fired by U.S. troops for every insurgent killed in Iraq (or Afghanistan): 250,000, according to John Pike, director of the Washington military-research group GlobalSecurity.org. This comes out to 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition yearly. With U.S. munitions factories unable to meet the demand, 313 million rounds of such munitions were purchased from Israel last year for $10 million more than if produced domestically.
Percentage of amputations performed on U.S. war-wounded in Iraq: An estimated 6%. The average in earlier U.S. conflicts, where the equivalents of IEDs and car bombings did not play such a role, was 3%.
Estimated replacement limbs needed yearly for Iraqis in northern Iraq alone: 3,000, according to the Red Crescent Society and the director general for health services in Mosul. (Unlike American soldiers, Iraqis who have lost limbs have access only to limited numbers of outdated prostheses.)
Cost of a coffin in Baghdad: $50-75. Cost of a coffin in Saddam Hussein's time, $5-10.
Number of Iraqi civilians who died in July 2007: 1,652, according to figures compiled by the Iraqi Health, Defense, and Interior Ministries; 2,024, according to the tally of the Associated Press; 1,539 according to the Washington Post. All but the Post claim this as a "spike" in casualties. All such figures are, for a variety of reasons, surely significant undercounts.
Approximate number of American civilians who would have died in July if a similar level of killings were underway in the United States: 18,000, according to Middle East scholar Juan Cole.
Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007, if the Lancet study's median figure of 655,000 deaths was accurate and similar death rates held true for the year since it was published: Just over one million, according to Just Foreign Policy. (The Lancet study has been the single, on-the-ground, scientific report on Iraqi casualties in these years.)
Number of Iraqi civilians killed in July in mass-casualty bomb attacks: 378, a sharp rise over June, according to the Washington Post. The five-month U.S. surge has caused "no appreciable change" in vehicle-bomb attacks, according to figures collected by reporters from the McClatchy Newspapers.
Number of unidentified bodies, assumedly murdered by death squads, found on the streets of Baghdad in June 2007: 453, a rise of 41% over January 2007, the month before surge operations began, according to unofficial Iraqi Health Ministry statistics taken from morgue counts.
Number of Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in "escalation of force" incidents at American checkpoints or near American patrols and convoys in the past year: 429, according to U.S. military statistics obtained by the McClatchy Newspapers. These statistics, which "spiked" during the recent escalation months, don't include civilian deaths during raids on homes or in the midst of battle (and are considered incomplete in any case, since an unknown number of escalation-of-force deaths go unreported by U.S. units).
Total number of attacks against U.S. and coalition forces, Iraq security forces, Iraqi civilians, and infrastructure targets in June 2007: 5,335. This works out to a daily average of 177.8, an all-time high since May 2003, according to the Pentagon, and 46% more than in June 2006; more than 68% of these attacks -- 3,671 to be exact -- were launched against U.S. troops, up 7% from May 2007.
Number of attacks in July 2007 using the most powerful type of roadside bomb: 99, an all-time high, according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, U.S. second-in-command in Iraq, accounting for one-third of American casualties that month.
Number of American military deaths in the surge months, February-July 2007: 572, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualties website. This represents 189 more American deaths than in the same set of months in 2004, 215 more than in 2005, 237 more than in 2006.
Average daytime summer temperature in Baghdad: 110-120 degrees, though 130 degrees is not uncommon. It rarely drops below 100 degrees even at night.
Number of megawatts of electricity produced daily in Iraq: Less than 4,000 megawatts, below pre-invasion levels in a country where daily demand is now in the 8,500 to 9,500 range.
Hours of electricity normally delivered to Baghdadis by the national electricity grid: 1-2 hours a day. The only recourse, according to French reporter Anne Nivat, who lived in "red zone" Baghdad for two weeks recently, is electricity produced by small local generators, which consume up to 20 gallons of gasoline a day.
Number of nationwide blackouts in just two days in July 2007: 4. The Shiite Holy city of Karbala was without any power for at least 3 consecutive days in July, during which its water mains "went dry." ("'We no longer need television documentaries about the Stone Age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having,' said Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a stall in the Karbala market.")
Cost of a bottle of purified water during the present water shortages: $1.60 for a 10-liter bottle, a rise of 33%. (Many Iraqis can't afford to buy bottled water in a country where, according to a recent Oxfam summary study of the Iraqi humanitarian crisis, 43% of Iraqis live in "absolute poverty," earning less than a dollar a day.)
Percentage of water engineers who have left Iraq: 40%, according to Oxfam's report. Similar percentages of middle-class professionals -- doctors, teachers, lawyers -- have evidently fled as well. According to Oxfam, some universities and hospitals in Baghdad have lost up to 80% of their staffs.
Number of Iraqis who have access to clean drinking water: 1 in 3, according to UN figures. (In 2007, waterborne diseases, including diarrhea, "the most prolific killer of children under 5," are up in some areas by 70% over the previous year.)
Of the 3.5 million cubic meters of water Baghdad's six million people are estimated to need, amount actually delivered: 2.1 million cubic meters.
Number of high-tension lines running into Baghdad that are in operation: 2 of 17, thanks to insurgent sabotage, according to an Electricity Ministry spokesman. These are contributing to the worst electricity shortages since the invasion summer of 2003. The country's power grid is reportedly nearing collapse.
Number of ministers still in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: 20.
Number of ministers who have walked out: 17.
Number of senior officers who have recently resigned from the Iraqi Army in protest over the Maliki government: 9, including Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Babaker Zebari.
Number of countries for which Iraq's parliamentarians, who adjourned for a month-long August vacation, have departed: At least six, according to the New York Times, including Jordan, Syria, Dubai, Iran, Great Britain, and Egypt as well as "a resort in Iraq's safest region, autonomous Kurdistan."
Estimated cost of that vacation time to the U.S. per minute for ongoing operations in Iraq: $200,000, according to Bob Schieffer of CBS News.
Amount of oil Iraq possesses: 115 billion barrels in proven oil reserves, the third largest reserves in the world (after neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran). Estimates of possible oil deposits still to be discovered range from 45 billion additional barrels up to 400 billion additional barrels.
Price of 40 gallons of gas under Saddam Hussein: 50 cents.
Price of 40 gallons of gas in July 2007: $75 on the black market; $35 if a motorist is willing to spend hours, or even days, in line at a gas station.
Percentage of Iraq's revenues that come from the export of oil: More than 90%, though oil production remains below that of the worst days of Saddam Hussein's rule.
Amount the Iraqi Oil Ministry budgeted for capital expenses to bolster the oil industry last year: $3.5 billion, according to the latest report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Amount the Iraqi Oil Ministry actually spent: $90 million.
Percentage of allocated capital funds spent by the Iraqi government on oil, electricity, and education projects in 2006: 22%.
Amount of money missing due to governmental corruption, as uncovered in investigations by Iraq's top anti-corruption investigator, Judge Rahdi al Rahdi: $11 billion.
Number of U.S. dollars invested in "standing up" (training) the Iraqi military and police: $19.2 billion. This works out to $55,000 per Iraqi recruit, according to a bipartisan U.S. Congressional investigation.
Amount the Pentagon has requested for continued training and equipping of Iraqi security forces: $2 billion.
Percentage of equipment the Pentagon has issued to Iraqi security forces since 2003 that cannot be accounted for: 30%. That includes at least "110,000 AK-47 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets," according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). According to the Washington Post, "One senior Pentagon official acknowledged that some of the weapons probably are being used against U.S. forces."
Number of U.S. steel-shipping containers in Iraq and Afghanistan now considered "lost": 54,390 or one-third of them, according to the GAO.
Estimated cost of training Iraqi (and Afghan) security forces over the next decade, if present course continues: At least 50 billion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq: More than 75, according to the New York Times.
Cost of U.S. bases in Iraq (which Congress has mandated as not "permanent") and in Afghanistan (which the Pentagon refers to as "enduring"): Unknown. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of "several billion dollars" being sunk into base construction. According to the Washington Post, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) claims $2 billion went into "military construction" in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004-2006; another $1.7 billion was approved by Congress for 2007. And the Pentagon is still building. For fiscal 2008, $738.8 million was requested "for 33 critical construction projects for Iraq and Afghanistan." (When it comes to base construction, these figures are undoubtedly undercounts.)
Amount that former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root (now known as KBR) has received so far for a prewar contract to supply the American military with food, fuel, housing, and other necessities: At least $20 billion. A Pentagon audit of $16.2 billion worth of KBR's work "found that $3.2 billion in KBR billing was either questionable or unsupported by documentation."
Percentage of Iraqis who cannot afford to buy enough to eat: 15%, according Oxfam.
Percentage of Iraqi children who are malnourished: 28% (compared to 19% before the invasion); Percentage of babies born underweight, 11% (compared to 3% before the invasion).
Percentage of Iraqi children now considered to suffer from learning "impediments": 92%, according to one study cited by Oxfam.
The cost of a single Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), armed with two Hellfire missiles: More than $3 million. (At least 5 Predators have crashed or been shot down in the last year in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Cost of the latest UAV, the "hunter-killer" MQ-9 Reaper, now being deployed to Afghanistan and soon to be deployed to Iraq: $7 million. The Reaper is four times as heavy as the Predator and can be armed with 14 Hellfire missiles, or four Hellfires and two 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. It is considered equivalent in firepower to the F-16. According to Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley, "Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada."
Number of American planes in Iraqi air space at any moment: 100, according to Hanley.
Increase in bombs dropped in Iraq in the first six months of 2007 compared to the first six months of 2006: Fivefold.
Percentage of Iraqi oil resources around Basra in Shiite southern Iraq, where, in September 2006, the British launched their own unsuccessful version of the present American "clear, hold and reconstruct" escalation operation in Baghdad: 66%.
Number of doctors assassinated by "unidentified gunmen" in "peaceful" Basra since 2003: 12.
Number of times the airport base outside Basra, which houses a well-barricaded regional U.S. Embassy office and the last 5,500 of the 40,000 troops England dispatched to Iraq, has been attacked by mortars or rockets over the past four months: 600.
Effect of Iraq War spending on the profits of major weapons corporations: Northrop Grumman has just announced a 15% second-quarter increase in sales over 2006 for its information and services division, 7% for its electronics division; General Dynamics' combat systems unit just recorded a 19% rise in sales. Lockheed Martin's profits went up 34% to $778 million, according to Eli Clifton of Inter Press Service.
Estimated cost of deploying an American soldier to Iraq for one year: $390,000, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Cost of flying a soldier home from the war zone: $627.80. That's the price the Pentagon pays FedEx and UPS, among other companies, for each soldier brought back to the U.S.
Estimated tonnage of U.S. equipment that might be driven out of Iraq and shipped home from Kuwait in case of a decision to withdraw: One million tons.
Percentage of Americans in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll who had served in Iraq or "had a close friend or relative who served in Iraq," who approve of the President's handling of the Iraq conflict: 38%. In a May New York Times/CBS News poll, fewer than half of military families and military members agreed that "the United States did the right thing in invading Iraq."
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books).
[Note: Where, in the above list, a number is unsourced, check the previously sourced number. I have relied on numerous other websites, as well as my own reading, in compiling this report. Oxfam's recent study of the Iraqi humanitarian crisis has been indispensable. I used several figures directly from that report without sourcing above, because it was a pdf file. The full report can be found by clicking here (pdf file); a succinct summary of some of its numbers can be found in Peter Rothberg's "Worse than You Think" at the Nation magazine website. I'm now hooked on Noah Shachtman's "Danger Zone" blog at Wired magazine, which is invaluable on military and national security matters. Juan Cole's Informed Comment website remains a must-read, early-morning stop in my Web day, as does Antiwar.com and Paul Woodward's The War in Context, all of which I made good use of in compiling this post. Take a look as well at the always useful website Electronic Iraq.]
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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