Escalation in Iraq by the numbers

[unhappycamper]

Escalation in Iraq by the numbers
By Tom Engelhardt
Aug 15, 2007


Some day, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term "surge" - as in US President George W Bush's "surge" plan (or "new way forward") announced to his nation in January - was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam War 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 Bush 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 War era, which left more than 500,000 American soldiers and vast bases and massive air and naval power in and around Vietnam (and 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 United States. And yet, not surprisingly, the US experience in Iraq - another attempted occupation of a foreign country and culture - has been like a heat-seeking missile heading for the still-burning US memories of Vietnam.

As historian Marilyn Young noted in early April 2003 with the invasion of Iraq barely under way: "In less than 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 US troops would be left in Iraq, garrisoned on vast "enduring" bases in a pacified country. So, in a sense, it has been a surge-athon ever since. By now, it's beyond time to call Bush's "new way forward" by its Vietnam War 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 US 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.

~snip~

Few numbers out of Iraq can be trusted. Counting accurately amid widespread disruption, mayhem and bloodshed, under a failing occupation, in a land in essence lacking a central government, in a US 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 Bush'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 US 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.


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