While the world, quite understandably, trained its gaze on the destruction of Lebanon by the Israeli blitzkrieg and the inability of the Israel Defence Forces to defeat Hezbollah, something even more significant was happening to the region’s future.
This summer, the military forces of the United States were starting to realise that they were being defeated in key battlegrounds in Iraq. Last month, there were a couple of key indicators that a US defeat was looming. Just like General William C Westmoreland in Vietnam, senior US commanders in Iraq asked for “a few thousand more” troops.
President George W Bush, like his fellow Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, agreed.
The official fiction is that the locally-recruited forces loyal to the United States will be able to tackle the insurgency on their own at some point and be the muscle of a Vichy-style regime.
The “Iraqi National Guard” seems to have all the battle-readiness of the South Vietnamese army in General Westmoreland’s day.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld last month extended the year-long tour of 3,700 troops from the US cavalry by four months.
He redeployed them to Baghdad to help curb the communal bloodshed there that continues to kill scores every week.
The decision was seen as an admission that the seven-week-old Operation Forward Together, a security crackdown in the capital driven by 50,000 mostly US-trained Iraqi forces, had failed to quell the daily car bombings, shootings and kidnappings.
In the town of Ramadi, a key battleground, the US marines have reported that they face, on average, 100 improvised explosive devices — roadside bombs — per day, everyday.
The United States’ best troops, the Marine Corps, are cracking under the strain.
As with all military disasters, the initial reason for getting into the mess is long forgotten. The troops on the ground are just trying to stay alive.
The generals think that “a few more thousand” will finally solve it.
They continue to go back for incremental increases in the number of young working-class targets they present to the enemy, until the scale of the disaster is undeniable.
The politicians, if they were the ones who advocated the war in the first place, grandstand and talk tough. Meanwhile, Ramadi is clearly one of the Stalingrads of this war.
The US military cannot use its invisible warplanes and smart bombs when the enemy is within smelling distance of its own troops.
It is a bad commander-in-chief that picks a battle or indeed a war where all of your forces’ advantages are nullified in favour of the enemy’s inherent strengths. This is what has happened in Iraq.
US commanders on the ground are privately briefing US journalists that the “tipping point” in Iraq has been reached. This is military jargon for describing a situation that has become untenable.
Another feature of military disasters is the complete underestimation of the size and capability of the enemy force you are seeking to engage.
The size and durability of the insurgent forces in Iraq have completely unnerved commanders on the ground.
Out-of-control US troops rape and murder as they wish.
This is a trailer-trash army on a downward spiral.
In the town of Haditha last November, US marines ran amok, killing as many as 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in cold blood.
A dozen marines face courts martial or even charges of homicide. A separate inquiry is determining whether there was a cover-up.
One US journalist who visited the US unit accused of the Haditha massacre described the US marines as having become “feral”.
They did not live in the provided accommodation. Instead, they stayed in makeshift tents. They did not wash and did not obey their commanding officers.
The massacre at Haditha was a turning point for many Iraqis.
“It’s a disaster,” said Tareq al-Hashemi, Iraq’s Sunni vice-president, who dislikes the occupation but does not want US troops to leave until the country is stable.
“They are provoking all Iraqis, especially from the Arab Sunni community.
They are pushing them to join the national resistance and to fight…
“The situation in western Anbar province is out of control.
“This happened primarily because of the behaviour of the American army — their large-scale violation of human rights. They are killing people, hurting people, destroying towns.”
The moral collapse of US soldiers on the ground is best illustrated by the incidences of rape – especially those involving children.
Five US soldiers will soon stand trial for the rape and killing of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl, and the killing of her parents and five-year-old sister in the town of Mahmoudiya.
US soldiers accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl drank alcohol and played golf before the attack, and one of them grilled chicken wings afterwards. It is alleged that the soldiers doused the child’s body in kerosene after the murder.
The Pentagon spin is that everything in Iraq is going to plan and that the Iraqi defence forces are gaining operational effectiveness by the day and that hearts and minds are being won.
Yet the evidence on the ground directly contradicts this rosy picture.
The entire Iraq disaster has been peppered with official lies. The latest one is that central Iraq, specifically Baghdad, is not in a state of open civil war.
Recently several senior British and US officials have broken ranks.
The Iraqi civil war is happening now.
Perhaps history will judge Saddam Hussein as the last ruler of a unitary state called Iraq, created by Britain when it was a world power to suit its changing needs for oil.
The people who drew the lines on the map through the Mesopotamian desert were the same people who partitioned Ireland.
Today the latter-day Lloyd George says that Britain must “stay the course” to “get the job done”.
Of course, the original “job” is long forgotten.
The insurgents appear to be very well equipped for their business. I
n fact, the only thing they do not seem to be equipped with are weapons of mass destruction — although such weapons would be of little use to them if they did indeed possess Saddam’s phantom arsenal.
The Vietnamese insurgents realised that the closer they got to the United States’ ground forces, then the less able the US would be able to deploy its awesome air power without endangering its own troops.
The modern body armour and Kevlar helmets mean that more GIs survive than did in Vietnam, although the overall casualty rate in Iraq is higher than in southeast Asia.
In Ramstein US military hospital in Germany, there is a constant flow of the maimed, burned and blind returning from a place where they were sent by a draft-dodger commander-in-chief — sent on the basis of lies.
It is little wonder that the morale of the troops on the ground is so low and that some of them break down and drunkenly rape and murder like any broken army staring defeat in the face.
For the advocates of this war, now mainly silent about this awful conflict, it was not meant to be like this.
Phil Mac Giolla Bhain
