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Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, The Iraqi Insurgency and Us

Remember Saddam's "killing fields"? By now, the Bush administration has turned whole swathes of Iraq into a charnel house. Last week Hala Jaber, a fine British reporter, returned to Baghdad and visited one of today's killing fields -- that city's morgue into which, from what she calls "the nightly slaughter," approximately 6,000 corpses have been delivered since the first of the year. "Each corpse," she writes, "tells a different story about the terrors of Iraq. Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills. Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back, bear bullet wounds. Many are charred and dismembered."

Baghdad, she relates, is a city in which the "main topic of conversation in most households is death -- who is the latest to have been killed, what depraved technique was used and whether it is safe to go out."

It was into that city of death -- or rather its American death-lite version -- that our President flew last week, just over three years after he famously declared "mission accomplished" on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He landed at Baghdad's airport, helicoptered into the Green Zone, that heavily fortified American citadel, in 25 pounds of body armor, surprised the new prime minister, looked him "in the eyes," and declared himself "inspired." It was, as Sidney Blumenthal put it, "‘mission accomplished' in a business suit."

The last time he was there, he hoisted a giant fake turkey for Thanksgiving. This time, he returned home and, visibly recharged like some Energizer Bunny, gave a thumbs-up press conference in which he hoisted a whole fake Iraq. He also made his intentions clear for the remainder of his second term -- and it was nothing short of more of the same until victory. ("What you hear from me, no matter what these polls and all the business look like, is that it's worth it, it is necessary, and we will succeed.")

If you're measuring by original administration dreams and plans for Iraq after the invasion (as well as for reordering the Middle East along neocons lines), what's happened since has been a catastrophe, but does that make "victory" of some sort inconceivable? Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game, a striking history of how successive American administrations bedded down with right-wing Islamic movements, thinks not and offers some clear-eyed, provocative thoughts below on the Sunni insurgency and the antiwar movement as well as mainstream "opposition" in the U.S.

It's worth remembering that the last time Iraqis rose up against an imperial occupier -- Britain in the 1920s -- they were, in the end, defeated; and, unlike then, the present insurgency remains a minority one. On the final fate of the Bush project in Iraq, as Dreyfuss makes clear, the jury remains out. No one should assume an end that may never come and so turn to other issues prematurely.

On the ability of the United States -- not just this administration but future ones -- to maintain an Iraqi occupation force of perhaps 100,000 thousand (or even 50,000) troops under charnel-house conditions or worse, I have my doubts, possibly more of them than Dreyfuss. For one thing, Iraq is not a contained situation. Its chaos is spreading in the region. How far and how dangerously we don't yet fully know, but these are, after all, the oil heartlands of the planet. In addition, the U.S. position as the globe's sole "hyperpower" continues to deteriorate as, I suspect, does its global economic situation. More than Iraq (and even Washington) will help determine how the situation in that country resolves itself.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 10:53 PM