[R-G] Counterinsurgency American-Style

[Anthony Fenton]

October 17, 2007
The Symptomatic Case of Rep. Brian Baird's Pro-War Conversion
Counterinsurgency American-Style

http://counterpunch.org/niva10172007.html

By STEVE NIVA

When the Pentagon rolled out its new Iraq product line-the re-minted  
counterinsurgency doctrine of winning "hearts and minds" that had  
been shelved after Vietnam-branded it "the surge" and anointed Gen.  
David Petraeus as chief product spokesperson in early 2007, the main  
question was: who would buy?

Clearly not the Iraqis. The past year has included two of the  
bloodiest months of the Iraq war, a government in complete chaos and  
a persistent Darwinian nightmare for average Iraqi's attest to the  
lack of Iraqi consumers for the new product. It may as well have been  
a cyanide-soaked toy from China.

But there is one market that has proven receptive-the U.S. Congress  
and especially centrist Republicans and Democrats like Brian Baird (D- 
Wa) who came back from a recent Pentagon-hosted trip to Iraq  
declaring a conversion worthy of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Formerly a war critic--Baird had voted against authorizing the Iraq  
War and still believes that the invasion of Iraq "may be one of the  
worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation"-he now  
claims he has seen the light and firmly opposes withdrawal from Iraq.  
In a feverish media blitz, with appearances on CNN, NPR and MSNBC  
among others, Baird declared that evidence from his recent trips to  
Iraq convinced him that "the situation has at long last begun to  
change substantially for the better" and "our troops and the Iraqi  
people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to  
succeed."

Baird's conversion to Brand Petraeus and the Pentagon's new  
counterinsurgency strategy must be seen as symptomatic of the broader  
consumption of the new product-line by many Congressional Republicans  
and Democrats. The media spectacle surrounding Gen. Patraeus' and  
Ambassador Crocker's highly anticipated visit to Washington DC last  
month was all whimper and no bang. Even though the overwhelming  
empirical evidence demonstrated the abject failure of the "surge" in  
Iraq, once Petraeus boarded the return jet to Iraq, the Democrats  
dropped their once fiery rhetoric about ending the war, fired off a  
few ineffectual resolutions and conceded the battle-space to Bush's  
plans for a decades-long occupation of Iraq along the lines of what  
Bush fondly refers to as the "Korea model."

Mission accomplished.

The Petraeus visit and the subsequent Democratic cave-in reveals that  
the real target of the newly minted counterinsurgency strategy was  
never the Iraqi people but rather the American public. The widely  
publicized adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and  
the marketing of Patreaus as its guru is pure information war. It was  
concocted to simulate the appearance of a new strategy in Iraq and  
thereby create a new narrative of hope and progress in order to sell  
an endless Iraq occupation to the American public.

One doesn't need to read the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard  
on simulated realities to catch the drift of how politics is played  
in the age of Bush. In an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine  
article, the journalist Ron Suskind quoted an unnamed aide to  
President Bush:

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality- 
based community," which he defined as people who "believe that  
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible  
reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he  
continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own  
reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you  
will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can  
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's  
actorsand you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

But one should take a quick look at The U.S. Army/Marine Corps  
Counterinsurgency Field Manual rushed into print this summer by  
University of Chicago Press with a forward by Gen. Patreaus to  
understand how our Empire is simulating "new realities" as part of a  
counterinsurgency strategy aimed against the American public.

According to the Field Manual, classic counterinsurgency doctrine  
maintains that conventional military force will never defeat an  
insurgency because the primary goal of an insurgency, as classically  
stated by Mao, is political-to win over a population against a  
government or a foreign occupation. Hence, the heavy application of  
military force against an insurgency will be counter-productive by  
creating new grievances that help it gain popular support. Therefore,  
the first rule of counterinsurgency is to drive a wedge between  
insurgents and the broader population by winning their "hearts and  
minds" through addressing popular grievances and winning the war of  
ideas through better propaganda.

The Bush administration was never truly serious about employing this  
strategy in Iraq-to do so would require assuaging Iraqi demands for a  
US troop withdrawal and foreswearing permanent military bases and  
control over Iraq's oil. Instead, the Bush administration has  
employed classic counterinsurgency doctrine to quell the only  
insurgency it has a chance to defeat: the overwhelming American  
popular support for withdrawal from Iraq that was given a  
Congressional mandate in the November 2006 elections. Having learned  
its own lessons from Vietnam, the Bush administration knows that a  
primary threat to its permanent war in Iraq is a Congressional cut- 
off of the funds that are its lifeblood.

So in response to this threat, and in line with classic  
counterinsurgency doctrine, the Bush administration devised a  
marketing campaign to simulate a new strategy and promote the Brand  
Petraeus "surge" in Iraq in order to drive a wedge between the  
insurgency that mattered (growing Congressional support for  
withdrawal) and the will of the American people. The means were  
simple. Create a cult figure out of Patraeus, flood the media with  
stories of progress on the ground, and carefully nurture  
Congressional fence-sitters to prevent a majority for withdrawal  
emerging as a viable force within Congress.

And one of the most effective tools in the arsenal has been the brief  
and tightly controlled codels (short for congressional delegations)  
who are shown only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration  
wants them to see, which includes Potemkin village-like displays of  
security progress and soldiers who plead with them not to let the war  
have been in vain.

"Spin city" is how Rep. James Moran (D-Va) described his most recent  
trip to Baghdad as part of a congressional delegation. "The Iraqis  
and the Americans were all singing from the same song sheet, and it  
was deliberately manipulated," he told the Washington Post on August  
31. One U.S. soldier, Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, who was ordered to  
pay Iraqi shopkeepers to open their stores for these congressional  
visits, told the Washington Post (Sept. 4) "personally, I think it's  
a false representation. But what can I say? I'm just doing my job and  
don't ask questions."

It is precisely on the basis of two such codel's in the past year  
that Congressman Brian Baird converted from moderate critic to an  
evangelical proponent of Patreaus and "the surge." Baird has insisted  
that he was completely free to meet with whomever he wanted in Iraq-a  
bizarre claim if one considers the options for travel in Iraq alone- 
but his nearly word for word repetition of Bush administration  
talking points upon his return indicates that he swallowed the entire  
sales-pitch.

To take just one example, just as the Bush administration was  
concocting increasingly apocalyptic scenarios about the dangers of  
withdrawing from Iraq-chaos, mass murder, regional war, terrorist  
attacks on the US and the like-Baird was offering his own shrill  
hypotheticals to the editorial board of The Olympian newspaper:

"What happens to you and you and me morally if we withdraw and  
there's wholesale slaughter? What happens if a Shi'a theocracy takes  
over and progressive independent women who are currently in the  
region are suddenly all forced into burqas and they can't go to  
school and  and they're stoned to death for learning to read? What  
happens if we allow that?"

In another meeting with constituents, Baird speculated that if the US  
withdrew, Al-Qaida would become empowered and "then begin operations  
on the United States. Is that worth an American life to try and  
prevent that? I believe it is."

Never mind the fact that the odious "burqas" are only worn in  
Afghanistan and that no Iraqi women have ever been stoned to death  
for learning to read. That might be true of Saudi Arabia, but Baird  
is not calling for its invasion.

The fact of the matter is that all these claims are the stuff of  
fantasy. There will be no genocide or terrorist safe haven in Iraq  
after the US leaves. Iraq after an American withdrawal will look very  
much like Iraq today-a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and  
Kurdish states with a civil war fought along the seams of its Sunni  
and Shiite Arab zones, each ruled by rival militias and gangs. Iraq's  
Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al- 
Qaida, and in fact, in this Darwinian context al-Qaida would likely  
be destroyed as local Sunni militias assert their control.

Nevertheless, Brian Baird's conversion to war supporter and his  
repetition of the Bush administration's more outlandish talking  
points is notable as the purest expression of the counterinsurgency  
strategy being waged today against the American public and its  
representatives in Congress. And given the increasing unlikelihood of  
any Democratic-led effort to truly end the war in the near future,  
one must consider it a success thus far.

This leads to a few preliminary conclusions.

Certainly war opponents would do well to drop simplistic and  
moralizing slogans against the war and focus more on dismantling the  
phony narratives of sophisticated marketing campaigns that tout the  
successes of counterinsurgency and the dire consequences of an  
American withdrawal. We are operating in the age of information war  
and simulated realities, and the Empire knows very well that people  
support wars on the basis of symbols, emotions, stories and  
fantasies, all of which have proven to be more powerful than the most  
rational discourse. Take a look at Baird.

But ultimately, as in any insurgency, war opponents have to re- 
mobilize the widespread popular support for withdrawal into a broad- 
based and assertive movement that makes its own realities, and  
doesn't rely upon Congressional Democrats but rather gives them no  
place to hide if they continue to support the Iraq occupation, in any  
form. Only then, in Mao's felicitous phrase, will the insurgents-- 
proponents of withdrawal in Congress--be able to "move among the  
people like a fish in the sea" and turn off the spigot of permanent war.

Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International  
Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and lives in  
Brian Baird's home district.