Given the jarring blackout of progress reportage on Fallujah, this supersize me screed at Cobb begged some questions. Didn't take much backchannel searching to come up with fair and balanced coverage in the south asian press
Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of War, Fallujah has still not let itself be "taken" to date. The mightiest military machine in history has met its match. A turning point in military affairs? The end of warfare, as practiced by the Americans - the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory?
No wonder it's gotten so quiet on the Fallujah front.....,
No, and neither is Asia Times Online....,
In the immortal words of Desi Arnaz, "Rummy, you got some splainin to do!" If things were copacetic in that joint, it would be mined as a pacification coup. As it is, the news blackout tells the tale of the tape. Pax Americana is getting a good old fashioned GTA beatdown - insurgent stylie.
Posted by: cnulan at December 28, 2004 03:02 PMand of course there's that other aspect of the supersized debacle Rummy and Co. have gotten us hip deep into (shhhh...., if you don't tell, I won't tell, and mebbe we can all play make believe for a little while longer)
Dec. 26, 2004. 01:00 AM
History will show U.S. lusted after oil
LINDA MCQUAIG
Decades from now, historians will likely calmly discuss the war currently raging in Iraq, and identify oil as one of the key factors that led to it.
They will point to the growing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, the importance of oil in the rising competition between the U.S. and China, and the huge untapped store of oil lying unprotected under the Iraqi sand. It will all probably seem fairly obvious.
Just don't expect to hear this sort of discussion now, however, when it might actually make a difference.
In fact, a year-and-a-half into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, with the carnage over there spiralling ever more out of control, don't expect media discussions of Iraq to stray much beyond the issue of "fighting terrorism."
Indeed, while ordinary people around the world apparently suspect Washington was motivated by oil, not terrorism, there continues to be a strange unwillingness in the mainstream media to probe such a possibility.
Perhaps it simply sounds too crass.
It implies that those at the very top of the U.S. government willingly sacrificed countless lives to further a cause that has nothing to do with liberty or democracy.
This sort of allegation certainly doesn't fit with the respectful, even deferential approach generally taken in the U.S. media towards George W. Bush, just chosen Time magazine's Man of the Year.
Raising the oil factor also perhaps sounds unsophisticated. Some commentators, like syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer, scoff at the notion of an oil motive, suggesting it's not necessary to invade countries to get their oil: "You just write them a cheque."
But buying oil isn't the goal; getting control of it is.
Dyer's cheque-book solution wouldn't have solved much back in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo temporarily left the U.S. unable to satisfy its voracious appetite for oil.
That created a deep sense of vulnerability — a rare experience for the world's most powerful country. Preventing the U.S. from ever being vulnerable like that again has been a key objective of American strategic planners ever since.
The 1973 embargo sparked a new hawkishness in Washington. An article in the March, 1975, issue of Harper's, titled "Seizing Arab Oil," unabashedly outlined plans for a U.S. invasion to seize key Middle East oilfields and prevent Arab countries from having such control over the modern world's most vital commodity.
The author, writing under a pseudonym, wasn't just any old right-wing blowhard; it turned out to be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
But seizing Arab oilfields was too risky as long as the Soviet Union existed. The Soviet collapse in 1991 opened up new possibilities.
Kissinger's old idea was taken up with new interest by a small group of right-wing Republicans who, in the late 1990s, formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In a 1998 letter, the PNAC urged President Bill Clinton to overthrow Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whose potential control over "a significant portion of the world's oil" was considered a "hazard."
One could dismiss the PNAC as just another group of right-wing blowhards — except that the group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who became key figures in the Bush administration and principal architects of the Iraq war.
Is it really such a stretch to imagine that, only a few years after forming the PNAC, oil was still on their minds?
"The plan to take over Iraq is a revival of an old plan that first appeared in 1975. It was the Kissinger plan," James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Kissinger, told me in an interview in Washington in 2003.
Dyer insists that the Iraq invasion wasn't about oil, but about extending U.S. power. But these goals go hand in glove.
Gaining control over oil is crucial to extending U.S. power, and will be even more so in the coming years as the world's easily-accessible oil reserves are depleted, creating ever fiercer competition for what remains.
All this will make controlling the Middle East that much more crucial. Or, as Cheney put it in a speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in 1999, when he was CEO of oil giant Halliburton: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Now that he's vice-president, Cheney no longer talks about the Middle East as "the prize." He talks about it as the place terrorism must be confronted.
Call me unsophisticated, but it seems to me that politicians often try to disguise what they're really up to, and we have to wait decades for historians to point out the obvious.
Nonsense.
First of all, the goal is not to exterminate the resistance, but to contain it and attrit its ability to maintain a national presence. In the end, we are only talking about the Sunni Triangle. Falluja is done, just like Najaf is done, just like Basra is done. Political speculation about the defeat of the Americans will go from city to city like suicide bombers looking for fresh targets.
Remember what one of the Iraqi ministers said. Outside of Al-Zarkawi, all of the 'insurgents' are nameless. Why? Because they have no organized leadership and they are largely foreign fighters. These are the baby bin Ladens, snipers in collapsed buildings.
The 'greatest military power in the world' does not square with the fact that we have far superior troops idled elsewhere in the world. If we wanted to, we could drop 3 million troops in country and have our way with Iraq, but that is not the strategy. If we wanted to we could carpet bomb the cities, but that is not the strategy. The American military is not being defeated, merely frustrated.
The 'greatest military power in the world' does not square with the fact that we have far superior troops idled elsewhere in the world. If we wanted to, we could drop 3 million troops in country and have our way with Iraq, but that is not the strategy. If we wanted to we could carpet bomb the cities, but that is not the strategy. The American military is not being defeated, merely frustrated.
If we wanted to?
C'mon man, now you're leg pulling.
We don't have the $$$, collective zeal, or political capital to escalate any more - at all.
"3 Million troops"? priceless....,
Remember, the action on the ground has got to square with the just-so story in the air.
We are getting a GTA beatdown - insurgent stylie.
The clock is ticking on us very ominously.
They got all the time in the world.
Oh, and possibly this is just the libertarian malthusian in me having its sayso, but there never has been a discernable "strategy" for the occupation.
The American military is being handed a wholly avoidable and most bitter defeat - primarily due to the fact that this entire debacle was discretionary from the word "go" - and therefore entirely unnecessary.
Posted by: cnulan at December 28, 2004 04:32 PM"As it is, the news blackout tells the tale of the tape. Pax Americana is getting a good old fashioned GTA beatdown - insurgent stylie [sic]."
I guess I agree with Cobb: you gotta be kidding? There is no doubt that an urban gorilla war is as problematic as the country-side version we saw in Vietnam, but "beatdown?" Not a chance.
Posted by: Ward Bell at December 28, 2004 05:12 PMThe oil question is more sophisticated than that, but also less interesting.
First of all, imagine that the commodity in question was rice or corn. I don't think there would be so much political outrage over the matter. Do we really care about 'big rice' or 'big corn' the way we care about 'big oil'? No. But we need rice and corn more than we need oil. So what is wrong with using the resources of the United States to secure our supply? Chances are that the US is doing the same all over the world to satisfy our consumer economy with everything. So I would suggest that we tone down the outrage associated with getting oil.
That said, I did some fairly simple research about the eventual availability of oil in Iraq and the picture is pretty grim in the short term. The fact of the matter is that Russian and French claims on oilfields like Majnoon are still in effect. If and when the US jumps those claims (which I sincerely doubt will happen) then perhaps we could see some ulterior motive. Will the new Iraqi government be so controlled by the US that they would limit the markets to which they sell their most valuable commodity? I find the scenario unlikely and a incredibly stupid gamble by a line of presidents whose Iraq policy included maintaing the no-fly zone.
Posted by: Cobb at December 28, 2004 05:12 PMFrom a cost-to-value perspective, (and how else would one measure the efficacy of war?) there is to me no other conceivable description for the fiasco that has played out in Fallujah. For pennies on the devalued American C-Note, the insurgents are handing out a humiliating stalemate. When the little guy brings a stick to a gun fight and somehow manages to hold his own, in my estimation, that's a beatdown.
It's so bad that the U.S. press blackout has been in effect for weeks, and we're obliged to look to Asian media to get any coverage at all.
I'm not going to bother with googling up the name of the idiotic U.S. general who grunted about our inestimable but utterly inapplicable nuclear force. That type of idiocy could only have been by a mouthbreather, for a vast and unwashed mouthbreathing contingent.
So we're back to the practical necessity of breaking insurgent resistance and despite the supersized diligence, and much up front fanfare, our best efforts have been thwarted with the result that the objective has not been achieved, and one could reasonably assert that overwhelming force application has pushed U.S. interests three very large steps backwards.
I'm not outraged over any aspect of American foreign policy behaviour that is jarringly orthogonal with the just-so stories told to keep the waddling corn-fed kiddies placated here at home. That's par for the Menckian course of modern American political life. That having been said, lying is lying. As a morally conservative participant in the American enterprise, I'm prudently concerned by the extent to which our actual behaviour has parted ways with our post hoc rationalizations(s).
As for your ad hoc commodities riff, please explain why exactly you believe we need rice and corn more than we need oil again? More to the point, given *modern* oil dependant means of agricultural production, how precisely do you propose that we will obtain either grain without mass quantities of oil?
(The Oil We Eat)
IMO - the thermodynamic aspect of the overall economic question is both the most sophisticated and the most interesting aspect of our needless and heedless predicament. The longer we collectively endure a blackout on this large writing on our economic wall, the more likely we are to incur the hard malthusian consequences for which I've spent a good chunk of my adult life preparing.
Posted by: cnulan at December 28, 2004 08:39 PMAs far as I was able to tell, the strategic necessity for the battle for Falluja was to break the rebel's hold on the city as a functional headquarters for launching other guerilla attacks. I think that everyone has conveniently forgotten that we found the hidey-holes where hostages were beheaded and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that mosques were being used as weapons caches.
Posted by: Cobb at December 28, 2004 08:53 PMThere was already no doubt that mosques were being used as weapons caches.
That said, I suspect more good came out of the Fallujah excercise than can, or will, be printed in the press.
However, this is a world war and I wish the administration would say so.
The U.S. will need to go into Iran and Syria to do some real heavy duty ass kicking to slow things down. I'm still wondering why Syria has not felt a public attack. Maybe they have felt an attack by the U.S. elite units.
yeah..., that's the party line, which is what begged my questions in the first place. I can't think of a single aspect of the party line that has held up in execution and Fallujah is a striking continuation of this dismal track record. As the most current, hyped, and heralded of exercises in discretionary misjudgement, it is yet another in the continuing series of embarrassments that would not withstand critical scrutiny and thus, the relatively uncontroversial fact of an American news blackout. If run and measured in the strictly business terms that Rummy signifies, at no level would anyone pronounce Fallujah a success, and consequently, Rummy got still more very hard splainin to do!
"Nevertheless, Fallujah should be held up as a great success precisely because our Marines and GIs at once confronted, destroyed, and dispersed a concentration of insurgents. It surely was helpful to have Fallujah magnetically draw the terrorists into its precincts, and even more helpful to have American forces rout them in large numbers -- and put the rest on the run."
NOT!!!
(p.s., and there I thought all along in my little black heart that it was payback for the karmic irony of the four lynched and crisped mercs who got caught and barbequed like they were in the heart of Dixie...,)
Posted by: cnulan at December 28, 2004 10:20 PMI would love to see our President explain to the American people that carpet bombing Iraq and 3 million troop movement is the way to go now. I imagine folks wouldn't swallow it down to easily.
Posted by: Solomon at December 28, 2004 10:44 PMI fall on the side where the American media's recent silence on Fallujah is largely a crime of neglect amplified by our gov't's ongoing compulsion with spinning events to score quick political points.
Evidently, a lot of folks haven't come to the reality that the supposed WOT -- Iraq included --is an ambitious, yet poorly planned police action that's outside of the proper use of the U.S. military. The goalposts are constantly moving and the attendant timetables for achieving said objectives are lacking critical analysis on several points. As EBrown noted mosques-as-weapons caches for being obvious, so are the ulterior motives of our WH.
It's about controlling the oil supply.
Posted by: MIB at December 29, 2004 02:52 PM
Surely you're joking.
Posted by: Cobb at December 28, 2004 11:53 AM