An Occurrence at a Tigris River Bridge

“a nation which has lost the initiative has lost the war”
--Benito Mussolini


Watching President Bush deliver his awkward remarks about Iraq—yet another Internet video clip of a man being pilloried for his brutal rule in Iraq—I could not help but think: “Where is Saddam now that we need him?” To hear Bush describe the front lines, the United States and its allies are confronting civil war, although here it is defined with words like “sectarian violence” (a phrase that might also have worked for Gettysburg). In other words, the center has not held around Baghdad. The response of the Bush administration, which has invested $359 billion dollars in the concept of a democratic Iraq, is to send in 20,000 more American troops and lure suicide bombers away from their missions with offers of on-the-job training. Sadly, neither embedding American forces in Iraqi patrols nor stuffing ballot boxes in the provinces will alter the reality that to keep Iraq together as one country, you have to adopt Saddam’s methods and brutality. Judging by the 34,000 civilian Iraqi deaths in 2006, it might be concluded that the U.S. is at least giving it a try.

The reason the President has become Saddam’s surrogate is because he believes that Iraq is an important domino in his War on Terror. In his address the President states that, should Iraq fall, “radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” He believes the U.S. is fighting enemies that have “declared their intention to destroy our way of life.” According to the President, the politics of the Middle East constitute “the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” The Great Game between Islam and the West looks and sounds a lot like the old Cold War.

Not since the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon has the domino theory had such an advocate as it now finds in President Bush. By his logic, the war in Iraq—like Vietnam to an earlier generation—is a test case of America’s resolve. Win in Iraq, and you will have broken the will of terrorism. Admit defeat and withdraw, and Iraq will slide into the terrorist camp from which attacks will be launched against the U.S. Cutting and running from Iraq will also embolden Iran to continue with its nuclear research, give al-Qaida access to oil revenue, and strengthen Syria—all at the expense of American interests.

The original pretext for the American-led invasion of Iraq was to dislodge weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam might use on his neighbors, and to remove the Ba’athist regime. (“We’re taking out that fucker,” is how the President summarized his war aims to his then National Security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.) Previously, the front lines in the War on Terror were further east, near the Hindu Kush, where the followers of Osama bin Laden were in mountainous caves hatching plans against the West. In his speech, Mr. Bush tiptoes bravely past that graveyard—“America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan – and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq”—although from all accounts the Taliban has recently made inroads in recapturing large parts of Afghanistan. Nor was there any mention of Osama being wanted ‘dead or alive’. Instead the President is betting the ranch on winning the battle for Baghdad, on the theory that winning in Iraq will make “success in the War on Terror much easier.” He seems unfamiliar with the military maxim, “never reinforce failure.”

Oddly, given the stakes (“our way of life…”) in such a professed global struggle, the President’s tactics fail to rise above the defeatist posture of Vietnamization, President Nixon’s strategy to dump the war in Vietnam on Saigon. In Iraq, President Bush speaks of embedding American forces (as if they were television reporters) in Iraqi brigades and holding the Baghdad government accountable to “benchmarks” (as if it were an illiquid hedge fund). Under this logic, the administration says the U.S. is fighting a mortal enemy, one that threatens American society to the core; in response to this grave threat, our plan is to order American soldiers out on joint patrols with Iraqi police (who may or may not show up for work).

One of the dirty secrets in the War on Terror is that the U.S. is running short of front-line soldiers, which may explain the decision to outsource to the Iraqi police. Despite a Homeland Security and defense budget of nearly half a trillion dollars, for the U.S. to do battle in Iraq it has had to rotate the same Army and Marine Corps divisions in and out of the country. Some regiments of these elite divisions (First Marines, 82nd Airborne) have done five or six tours of duty. In his speech, the President pleads: “We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Maine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century.” At the same time weekend warriors from the National Guard find themselves forgotten in Iraq, stranded at bases scattered around the country as if forming a Muslim Maginot Line.

All the “surge” in American forces accomplishes is to bring up the troop numbers, in country, to what they were in May 2003. It tops up with Americans those soldiers withdrawn from the coalition of the increasingly unwilling. Using the ratio of five supports troops for every soldier in combat, the numbers of those doing the actual fighting in Iraq would be about 30,000. More likely only about 15,000 American soldiers are at the sharp end, in a country geographically larger than France. Even Alexander the Great came to Mesopotamia with more men.

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Another problem in the struggle against terrorism is that President Bush and his administration cannot articulate exactly with whom Americans are at war. In addition to Bush’s presidential address, I also have a copy of the National Security Council’s “Iraq Strategy Review,” the background paper from which President Bush developed his New Way Forward strategy. That power point (available at the White House Web site, as is the Bush speech) makes many references to the “War on Terror” and to how “Iraq remains a central front in the Global War on Terror.” But the only detail as to the face of the enemy is an elliptical statement that “Al-Qaida in Iraq has declared and shown its intentions to establish a caliphate in Iraq.” Not clear is whether the enemy is Al-Qaida or sharia or a combination or both. Nevertheless, to fight against the threat of a caliphate puts the U.S. in the business of religious warfare, not unlike those we profess to be opposing.

Given that terror is a tactic, not a country or a standing army, for the Americans to fight a theocratic War against Terror is to anchor its crusader pennants into something resembling quick sand. Since most resistance movements now embrace the deployment of terror it puts the U.S. at odds with all sorts of groups between Algeria and the Philippines. (On the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, I count 34.) Take Iraq, for example. Prior to the American-led invasion, Saddam’s Ba’athist government (a Sunni minority) dominated a country that has a Shiite majority and a large Kurdish minority. We “took them out,” although Saddam rarely resorted to terrorism, preferring the brute strength of dictatorship to silence his opponents. Now in Iraq, according to President Bush, Iran is supplying weaponry and money to the Shiite majority, and that terrorist threat needs to be opposed (“I have recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region”). But these Shiites, aided and abetted by Iran, are the same Shiites freely elected to run the Maliki government that has brought democracy to Iraq—and thus are our allies, worthy of defense. Only in the Middle East is the enemy of our enemy still our enemy.

Next comes the quandary of Syria and its support of terrorism in Iraq. Although the government of Bashar al-Assad is nominally Ba’athist (a pan Arabist movement) and Sunni, and thus should have been allied to Saddam, in actual fact it supported Iran in the Iraq-Iran war, and it has recently sided with the Iranians in funding the Shiite Party of God in Lebanon (Hezbollah). Domestically in Syria, however, the al-Assad government opposes any kind of fundamentalist movement. In Iraq, according to President Bush, Syria and Iran have the affiliated goal of promoting anarchy (“We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq”). But if, in fact, Syria has provided safe havens to al-Qaida operatives fighting in Anbar Province, then Syria and Iran are on opposite sides of the barricades in Iraq and thus, in principle, one of them should be on our side. (Shia Muslims detest al-Qaida. Hence the reason Iran assisted the U.S. in 2001 when it attacked the Taliban.) If Syria is the Iraqi benefactor of al-Qaida, it should be the enemy of Iran, which, by some logic, then should be an American friend. But in the shadows of the War on Terror, America has only enemies; hence the announced mobilizations against both Damascus and Tehran.

In addition to dispatching Iraqi policemen to the front lines in the global struggle, President Bush has also unfurled the crusader standard of democracy. He says the U.S. is in Iraq to ensure “the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security.” Elsewhere in the address he speaks of “advancing liberty across a troubled region” and suggests that “functioning democracy” is a way to wage a war against all terrorists. But the problem with detonating democratic cluster bombs across the Middle East is that they generally blow up in the face of our friends more than our enemies.

The briefing memo of the National Security Council speaks of supporting moderates around the Middle East and applauds our Christian soldiers marching on their behalf. (“The United States has a national interest in seeing moderates succeed.”) It sounds good on paper, but few, if any of these moderates enjoying our support have democratically elected governments. (Israel and Lebanon are among the few democracies in the Middle East, and they are at war with each other. Countries like Egypt and Syria, while they nominally have elections, are dominated by one-party rule.) The rest of the Middle East, moderate or otherwise, has self-proclaimed royal families or mullahs in the throne rooms. The National Security Council and President Bush may believe that the “decisive ideological struggle of our time” is being waged against the caliphate pretensions of al-Qaida. At the same time they find all sorts of friends among what might be called petroliphates, which no more want to hold elections than they wish to cut the price of oil.

Nor is the U.S. all that happy when it counts the region’s electoral returns. For example, the U.S. refuses to recognize Hamas, despite it having won an election in the West Bank and Gaza. The same can be said about Hezbollah, which has the largest party bloc in the Lebanese parliament, but which was attacked, in part, with American weaponry. In Iraq, the Bush administration now has to two-step around the fact that it has fought a war of liberation for the Shiite majority, which down the road may vote not just for a caliphate but to cede large chunks of southern Iraq to Iran. Ironically, one of the poster boys in the War on Terror, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has won elections both as mayor of Tehran and as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

* * *

After his speech on Iraq, the President admitted to a reporter that he had, after all, watched Saddam Hussein’s You Tube hanging. Previously his spokesmen had maintained that he had been too busy contemplating a positive future for Iraq to linger over something as routine as an execution. Some days later, he did take time to tell a reporter that the Iraqi government had “fumbled” a subsequent session at the gallows, this time when they hung two of Saddam’s relatives who were also members of his government. The football expression was particularly apt, however, as the hangman for Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti got his weight calculations wrong, and the noose decapitated the former chief of Saddam’s secret police. The President’s only general comment on Saddam’s fall from grace was to say that the Maliki government, which presumably diagrammed the end zone celebration, “has still got some maturation to do.” He made it sound like the airing of snuff films is a phase all young democracies have to go through. He did not say, when he looked at the film, whether he had more sympathy for the role played by the trash-talking hangmen or his predecessor as Iraq’s strongman.

Of the many remarks I read about the Saddam execution, the one that best conveys the revulsion of the Muslim world came from a research fellow and Palestinian writer at the University of Exeter, Ghada Karmi, who found the “spectacle…shocking to those of us who respect propriety and human dignity.” Focusing only on Hussein’s last days, not the crimes that brought him to the gallows, she makes the points that he was killed while saying his prayers, that the execution took place on the dawn of Islam’s holy feast of Eid al-adha, that Saddam was held in custody by the U.S. until marched to the gibbet, that his body was flown away in an American helicopter, that his trial had aspects of a farce in which judges were threatened and defense lawyers were killed, and that the court may have frog-marched him to justice before he could explain from a witness box the extent to which he had done the West’s bidding when Iraq invaded Iran. “Yet,” she concludes, “this was billed as an independent decision of a ‘sovereign state’, as if any such thing were possible under occupation.”

Actually one of the few people that might have warmed to the spectacle of his hanging was Saddam Hussein himself, who always had a soft spot both for humiliation and summary execution. Writing his obituary in the Guardian, David Hirst concludes: “The Soviet dictator Stalin was his exemplar…Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind a façade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind—an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.” He killed three men while still in his teens—no doubt as he was “maturing”—and made his first presidential assassination attempt at age 22. When he finally succeeded to power in July 1969, he gathered the cabinet and senior members of the government and explained, with sadness and regret, that 66 of those present were “in the service of Zionism” not to mention “the forces of darkness.” One by one they were marched from the room. Then Saddam proposed to those remaining that they join him in carrying out what he called “democratic executions.” Hence Saddam’s first cabinet meeting reconvened as a firing squad, which perhaps the subsequent minutes covered under “new business.”

* * *

Watching Saddam get fitted with a noose, my own thoughts turned to the Ambrose Bierce short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The story is a standby in high school English courses. It was also a popular movie. So most readers will recall that the Confederate partisan on those gallows imagines the rope breaking, his drop into the river and then a return to the welcome arms of his wife—until the escape is proven nothing more than a dying man’s fleeting wish, and he is hanged. Bierce ends the story famously:

"At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon -- then all is darkness and silence!"

Less well remembered about the story is the profile of the man on the scaffold. He is not a Southern soldier, but an amateur, drawn romantically to the Confederate cause, who has set out from his homestead with the dream of avenging the invasion of the South. He is caught near the bridge, tried, and sentenced on the spot. Bierce describes him in terms that remind me of President Bush dragging the U.S. into war in Iraq:

"Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war."

At least when his end came, it was done with respect. Bierce writes: “Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.”

* * *

One problem for the U.S. President, among many, in the sloppy prosecution of the War on Terror is that the house rules of engagement have included political assassination. In theory, the U.S. outlawed targeting foreign leaders in 1975, after the findings of the Church Committee into various plots against Fidel Castro and others out of American favor. In those days presidential rubouts were the province of the Central Intelligence Agency, and its weapons included exploding cigars. In recent years, ever since President Ronald Reagan used stealth bombers to try to eliminate Muammar al-Qaddafi, the preferred method of assassination is to have the Army or the Air Force carry out the contract.

In the war over Kosovo, for example, American jets bombed the home of Slobodan Milosevic, with the hopes of killing him. In Iraq, members of the armed forces surrounded the safe house of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, and sprayed it with machine fire for six hours, as if perhaps they were rival bootleggers. More recently, U.S. planes strafed what has been described as an al-Qaida cell in Somali and killed numerous inhabitants. Undoubtedly, American troops have shoot to kill orders against Osama bin Laden, even though he has never been sentenced, to my knowledge, in a U.S. or international court. Anyone who has watched the Saddam hanging knows that his killing varies only in small degrees from the ritual executions that hooded terrorists carry out against Western hostages and then post on grainy Web sites, complete with a soundtrack of angry chanting.

I suppose it could be argued that all war is a form of assassination. But I see a distinct legal and moral difference between defending your citizens and borders from invasion as opposed to putting together secret lists of enemies and sending operatives (in both planes and trench coats) to kill them. What is also clear from recent trends in international law is that world leaders no longer enjoy immunity, by virtue of holding a political office, from crimes against individuals or humanity. Look at the dock in The Hague, and then estimate how many defendants believe that they authorized killings in the interest of a particular state. Certainly Milosevic thought he was fighting to provide for a more perfect union. Would Donald Rumsfeld sound much different in arguing his defense, if he is ever picked up at the Amsterdam airport?

To be sure, only losers are put on trial at the International Court or otherwise brought to justice. (An American at the Nuremburg trials quipped to a friend: “If we had lost, that would be us on trial.”) In committing more lives and money to the lost cause in Iraq, President Bush may be acknowledging his personal discomfort with being at the head of a state that could be losing a war. Better to muddle through until he is safely from office? Hence the token reinforcements and the campaigns slogans about a Job Corps. Mussolini knew well about lost initiatives and wars, and spent his first day of eternity dangling from a meat hook at a Milan gas station. As we know from Saddam’s hanging, trying to keep Iraq together isn’t easy, and losing is not a pretty picture.