REPORT FROM BAGHDAD
Tucker, William
REPORT FROM BAGHDAD Are we destined to remain an occupying force in Iraq for the next ten years—or will President Bush learn from President Nixon? AS I LOOK BACK, I think the quintessential...
...China was a land of purges and famines where only four years previously the Cultural Revolution had added death and disruption to the tens of millions of deaths during the collectivization of the 1950s...
...Max Boot’s Savage Wars of Peace holds up 19th-century British colonialism as the model for future American foreign policy...
...The machine gunner in the overhead turret empties a few practice rounds into a sandpit, and the convoy sallies forth in the dual role of battling the insurgents and winning the hearts and minds of the people...
...It is the Peace Corps with M-16s...
...See what daily insight from R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Y ET THERE IS A COLONIAL ASPECT to this mission that makes it seem doomed to failure...
...This suggests the fundamental dilemma facing US policymakers...
...Eighty miles north in Tikrit, the 82nd Airborne occupies a former Republican Guard air force base dotted with bomb craters that look like they are left over from the Gulf War—although no one seemed to remember...
...WILLIAM TUCKER At the first house we hit in a middle-class district, the occupants had already fled but well-placed tips turned up several hand grenades...
...road ahead of us is a suicide bomber...
...The next house belonged to the owner of a local cell phone store...
...A regional war would be a disaster for 25 years in the Middle East...
...The recruits were all young men barely past the Philadelphia...
...Do they want a separate Kurdish state...
...They were taken into custody...
...As often happens, there was a detonating wire leading to a nearby house...
...The recruit’s job was to dom he had learned at home and trying to apply it to BY WILLIAM TUCKER 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 the people of Iraq...
...It’s a constant game of cat-and-mouse,” Iraq...
...A week before I arrived in Tikrit a patrol had spotted another IED by the roadside...
...Communism was a world religion determined to yoke its population under a totalitarian dictatorship that left the people starving and imprisoned (think North Korea...
...I had even minimum age of 18—and a couple who seemed even asked him which was worse, Philadelphia or Siniyah...
...The administration’s current switch from an aggressive attempt to defeat the insurgents in combat to a broader “clear, hold, secure, and build” strategy is a recapitulation of what Gen...
...had was murders and robbers...
...This is an Iraqi policeman...
...IEDs—improvised explosive devices— now account for 70 to 80 percent of American deaths in Iraq...
...This is never going to work...
...Daniel Woodcock followed the wire and opened the door...
...Anyone could argue that Nixon was shaking a hand drenched in blood—and many conservatives did...
...Some active units have served three, four, or even five combat deployments...
...In most instances we have taken over Saddam Hussein’s former bases so that we are, in effect, the country’s new military...
...But if our commitment to Israel remains unimpeachable, then Israel becomes another player whose favor will be sought by both sides...
...If the Bush administration cannot do it, some Republican candidate for president better pick up the banner and lead the charge before it is too late...
...Nixon defied all expectations—both in the general public with China...
...This President will have the remainder of his months in office beleaguered by his political opponents...
...The American brass is housed in Saddam’s former Baghdad palace—a Taj Mahal-like structure with marble walls and 40-foot chandeliers that must have cost $100 million...
...Many have been killed or had relatives threatened for participating in the new government...
...However, in the coming five years it will be a prerequisite to a successful US military withdrawal that we open a neutral and permanent political forum (perhaps in Saudi Arabia) in which Iraq’s neighbors are drawn into continuing cooperative engagement...
...Instead of helicopterled assaults, American troops actually moved into villages in the Mekong Delta and started winning hearts and minds...
...So it is time for the Bush administration to get a grip...
...We found ourselves in poorer and poorer neighborhoods, rousting households with only women and children...
...Philip Klein Plus: AmSpecBlog Updated As We Speak...
...Therefore our planning horizons should assume that there are less than 36 months remaining of substantial US troop presence in Iraq...
...One elderly man seemed to have leprosy and could barely drag himself across the floor...
...have signed on for a ten-year colonial occupation of “There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it,” One of the eeriest sights in Iraq is to see a figure looking like a Middle Eastern terrorist out of central casting, wrapped in black pajamas and a long headscarf, holding an my escorting major replied stoically...
...It sits just outside Baghdad surrounded by a nature park where Saddam used to hunt wild beasts...
...Well intentioned as he was, the ex-officer was basically training his charges how to deal with crime on the streets of Police...
...The instructor, a retired Philadelphia police officer, was part of an American organization that is trying to upgrade the Iraqi keep both hands on the gun to prevent the “mugger” from grappling it away...
...Every soldier I talked to in Iraq thought he or she was doing good in the country—and in most cases they obviously were...
...They had no uniforms and looked like a group He rolled his eyes...
...Here more than 5,000 American soldiers live not terribly differently from life back on a stateside base...
...An even smaller number would acquiesce...
...Clifford convinced Johnson he was throwing good money after bad and a vast change began...
...You’ve got all kinds of archaeological history...
...Today East Asia contains the fastest growing market economies in the world, with Vietnam desperately trying to tag along in an attempt to join...
...We are now routinely extending nearly all combat units in both Iraq and Afghanistan.… The current deployment requirement of 20+ brigades to Iraq and 2+ brigades in Afghanistan is not sustainable...
...Here you’ve got IEDs The regimen was strenuous...
...gets quoted by the who’s who in Washington and talk radio...
...There are good things going on...
...happen...
...Although he too had fled, a ransacking search of his house turned up a rifle and some suspected bomb material...
...Yet Nixon’s approach had a realism that the antiCommunist agitprop did not...
...All the while, his attractive wife and her sister sat watching in stony contempt...
...Although it was obviously necessary and bore fruit, it was hard to feel we weren’t trying to beat back the tide...
...The Baker-Hamilton Report was a good beginning...
...It is too bad Nixon lives in ignominy in American history, because we could use a little of his wisdom today...
...People over here still live in Biblical times,” said one civil affairs officer as we passed yet another group of shepherds by the roadside...
...Occasionally, a male in his 20s would turn up...
...They see children running around the streets and want to educate them...
...Johnson finally had a “Jim matic initiative of the 20th century and open relations It is too bad Nixon lives in ignominy in American history because we could use a little of his wisdom today...
...The Vietnamese government actually stood for two years...
...Taking Jim Baker’s advice to talk to Syria and Iran is no different from Nixon taking Henry Kissinger’s advice to talk to China in 1971...
...Each received grants of more than a hundred thousand dollars...
...The whole assumption is that Iraqis must live a long time under American tutelage...
...This place could be a tourist attraction...
...Find out what the Washington Prowler has uncovered...
...Over there all we of street kids preparing for a pickup basketball game...
...Barry McCaffrey, now adjunct professor of International Affairs at West Point, toured the country, assessing the situation...
...Creighton Abrams introduced to Vietnam in 1969...
...China soon began adopting Americanstyle enterprise and Nixon’s gambit allowed President Reagan to isolate the Soviet Union, bringing down the whole Communist world...
...For a while, soldiers were protected by the heavily armored humvees...
...When Sgt...
...The 19th-century British experience in the Sudan, our own experience in the Philippines, the Malaysian uprising in the 1960s—all have taken a decade to put down...
...T HE FIRST IMPRESSION YOU GET in Iraq is how well provisioned our military bases are and how well established we are in the country...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23...
...Not a chance...
...Iraq is ripped by a low-grade civil war which has worsened to catastrophic levels with as many as 3,000 citizens murdered per month,” he wrote...
...The recruits took turns playing both roles and seemed to get a sense of accomplishment...
...McCaffrey says the troops are doing a magnificent job but their mission remains clouded...
...Do they want theocracies or democracies...
...All this echoes the collective wisdom of the Pentagon, which has now published a whole literature on what is called “asymmetrical warfare...
...There was a memorial service for him the day I arrived—and one almost every other day after that...
...The incident eventually seemed to symbolize the difficulty with our involvement in Iraq...
...foot-two African American, would line them up in Yet that was the whole point...
...All this transpired in the relatively peaceful north, where ethnic violence has not yet broken out...
...Can the legitimate states in the region combine to isolate and oust al Qaeda...
...O]ur next President will only have 12 months or less to get Iraq straight before he/she is forced to pull the plug...
...No insurgency has ever been put down in less than ten years,” says General Benjamin Mixon, commander of the Multinational Division North, sitting in his modest offices in Tikrit...
...The insurgency will continue in some form for a decade...
...www.spectator.org William Tucker, a New York writer, was embedded with the U.S...
...Here the odds for survival become much more 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 said the major...
...As time goes by, they will become more like us...
...AS I LOOK BACK, I think the quintessential moment of my three-week tour of Iraq came one afternoon at the Siniyah Police Station, where I was watching a former American police officer train a group of Iraqi rookies...
...The other was a pair of Iraqi women who were opening a sewing factory right across the street that would employ 125 women...
...younger...
...REPORT FROM BAGHDAD Are we destined to remain an occupying force in Iraq for the next ten years—or will President Bush learn from President Nixon...
...And the mice are very, very smart...
...Far from just talking with Iran and Syria, we should present ourselves to all the Middle East’s ethnic and religious rivals as an honest broker...
...Its title derives from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1898 to encourage America JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 REPORT FROM BAGHDAD to hold on to the Philippines after inheriting it in the random...
...I took part in one all-night raid...
...But the wisdom didn’t always fit...
...however, it was booby-trapped, killing him...
...In 1966, we faced the twin Communist monoliths, the USSR and Red China, the world’s two largest countries, both bent on our destruction...
...What happens if that car pulled over on the Spanish-American War...
...Vietnam was the first “domino” in a sequence of small countries that would topple across Southeast Asia...
...Three million Iraqis are internally displaced or have fled the country to Syria or Jordan.… There is no function of government that operates effectively across the nation.… No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi— without heavily armed protection...
...The instructor, a sixand suicide bombers...
...It had little to do with Iraq...
...It is not an uncomfortable existence...
...Until that point, President Lyndon Johnson had endorsed Gen...
...R IGHT NOW PRESIDENT BUSH IS LURCHING around like a drunk in a barroom, ready to fight anyone who comes along but with no clear recollection of how he got here or how he intends to get home...
...They jog the roads, work out at any one of half a dozen gyms, play a football version of ultimate Frisbee, and eat at a mess hall that features custommade omelets and make-your-own ice cream sundaes...
...One was opening an indoor market that would incubate a dozen small businesses...
...Women in burkas wept and wailed...
...But America’s political will had been exhausted...
...Failing to differentiate among these factions, we have ended up fighting them all...
...In a country where religious factions have been battling each other for 13 centuries, it seemed more than a little patronizing—and hopelessly naïve...
...Shi’ia and Sunni are squared off against each other with al Qaeda a wildcard, fomenting civil war everywhere and hoping to gain from the chaos...
...A Republican convert like Nixon is the only credible candidate to do the job...
...Baker moment” in which he called in Clark Clifford, Washington’s Democratic Wise Man, who sat down on the White House couch and told Johnson: “Get a grip...
...His report, posted on the Internet, has gained wide circulation among military veterans...
...Regular appearances by Jed Babbin Paul Beston Lawrence Henry Enemy Central Dave Holman Shawn Macomber Quin Hillyer John Tabin and of course, Wlady...
...The bloodbath and exile of the Boat People followed...
...Nixon defied all expectations—both in the general public and probably in his own mind—by opening and probably in his own mind—by opening a dialogue with Mao Tse-tung...
...McCaffrey found both the public and the military growing weary of the conflict: US domestic support for the war in Iraq has evaporated and will not return...
...This is already happening to some degree...
...By 1972, American troops had been phased out and almost 90 percent of South Vietnam was under the control of the South Vietnamese government...
...F OR ALL THE GOOD DEEDS, it is still necessary to pursue the enemy in a way that cannot help but alienate large portions of the population...
...It didn’t occur because we won or lost on the After four years, search-and-destroy had engaged ground in Vietnam...
...William Westmoreland’s aggressive “search-and-destroy” strategy—the one that produced “body counts...
...You just have to take your chances...
...The death toll in Iraq is slow but inexorable...
...D URING THE THREE WEEKS I was in Iraq, retired Gen...
...Do they want a partitioned Iraq...
...As General McCaffrey writes: Finally, we must focus on the creation of a rational dialog led by the Iraqis with US active participation...
...It happened because President 750,000 American troops and Westmoreland was ask-Nixon used the opportunity to take the boldest diploing for 500,000 more...
...They see innocent people being tortured and killed and want to protect them...
...One of the eeriest sights in Iraq is to see a figure looking like a Middle Eastern terrorist out of central casting, wrapped in black pajamas and a long headscarf, holding an automatic weapon and wearing a ski mask, standing in the road directing traffic...
...And a heck of a lot of ’em don’t want it to change...
...Are you kidding...
...In fact, it is far easier...
...But when he came to power, he performed an amazing re-examination and decided to talk to China, which was, if anything, a far worse enemy than the North Vietnamese...
...The population is in despair.… Thousands of attacks target US Military Forces (2900 IEDs) a month...
...On our patrol we stopped at the provincial government headquarters to ink agreements with several entrepreneurs starting businesses in the region...
...The danger, of course, is that they will all simply say, “We want Israel wiped off the map...
...I asked on my Few Americans have any awareness that they first patrol as we approached the outskirts of Tikrit...
...Supposedly Johnson’s initial endorsement came from an off-hand remark in which he told WestmoreJUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 REPORT FROM BAGHDAD land to “go out and nail those coonskins to the wall...
...He was usually taken into custody— since all men of military age in such zones are regarded as potential “bad guys...
...Would a Democratic president in 2008 take this course...
...By 1974, however, we had elected the Watergate Congress—the largest majority of liberal Democrats ever—and when the North Vietnamese Army suddenly invaded, Congress would not even offer logistical support...
...Whatever intentions we had originally about replacing Saddam Hussein or finding weapons of mass destruction, the whole occupation has now settled into a colonial effort...
...How did this baiter who virtually coined the accusation “soft on Communism...
...Army’s 82nd Airborne in Iraq earlier this spring...
...Later I wondered if having a rifle hidden beneath your living room couch in Iraq was necessarily a sign of being an insurgent...
...They see raw sewage running in the streets and they want to build sewage systems...
...N OTHING RILES CONSERVATIVES MORE than mentioning the word “Vietnam” in connection with Iraq, but it is worth taking another look— since the parallels are now becoming so obvious that they often involve the same terminology...
...The house had been previously occupied by insurgents and one of the men had $2,300 in brand-new U.S...
...Now the insurgents automatic weapon and wearing a ski mask, have developed armor-piercing devices...
...They see poverty and chaos around them and want to organize and improve things...
...Each has a dog in the fight in Iraq...
...The Middle East does not present two nuclear-armed giants but a series of underdeveloped desert countries split between religious factions that go back 1,350 years...
...Even the best-intentioned soldiers in Iraq are getting a little tired of it...
...What is needed is a diplomatic initiative: We have very little time left...
...Every day several dozen soldiers in “full battle rattle” lumber past the checkpoint in heavily armored humvees...
...What were our objectives...
...A continuing peace discussion 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 WILLIAM TUCKER forum may give us the diplomatic leverage to neutralize these malignant forces that surround and menace Iraq...
...Like so many goodformation and then grab one from behind, trying to hearted Americans in Iraq, he was carrying the wispull the gun out of his holster...
...It was only a few days later that the incongruity of the situation began to weigh on me...
...The great majority of the country thinks the war was a mistake...
...standing in the road directing traffic...
...mysterious guest bloggers...
...Call a Middle Eastern Summit, sit down with the entire Persian and Arab world, and ask, “All right, what do you people want...
...You’ve got beautiful weather...
...In summary, the US Armed Forces are in a position of strategic peril...
...All this would be depressing enough and it would be fair to say the same fate awaits Iraq except for one thing—it is possible to argue that, from a regional perspective, we actually won the Vietnam War...
...After that, however, the rewards rapidly diminished...
...But of course it was entirely possible that, once these businesses are open, someone will blow them up—just as they have blown up police stations, university buildings, government offices, and even the Iraqi Parliament...
...The diplomatic process in the short run is unlikely to produce useful results...
...Iraq is now the epicenter of this conflict but its fault lines radiate everywhere, from oil-rich-but-underpopulated Sunni Saudi Arabia to oil-poor-but-overpopulated secular Egypt to oil-and-population-rich Shi’ia Iran...
...Yet “insurgency” is a term derived solely from the colonial era...
...In the battleground cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf, and of course Baghdad, the battle against the insurgency is far more intense...
...dollars in his pockets...
...As a result, the “Us-versus-Them” loggerhead became a pas-de-trois, where we could play the two Communist rivals off against each other...
...If their candidate is elected on a wave of anti-war sentiment, the Democrats will do as they did in 1974: orchestrate a complete pullout and let the region fall into chaos...
...Anyone and anything associated with America is fair game...
...You have a beautiful country here,” said one company captain as we sat around talking with a group of provincial officials in Tikrit...
...He had risen to prominence, after all, as a rabid reda dialogue with Mao Tse-tung...
...The third house turned up the biggest prize— three men in their 30s who had traces of bomb material on their hands and in their car...
...In 1969, General Abrams replaced Westmoreland and introduced clear-and-hold—an exact replica of what we are doing in Iraq today...
...All this changes drastically when they venture “outside the fence...
...Their explanation for living together was hardly convincing—they had met in a restaurant the week before and decided to become roommates...
...Neoconservatives embrace this model unabashedly...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
