Send In the Clowns

Peter Lee

January 13, 2005

Or, more accurately, the death squads.

Hot on the heels of the Gonzales hearings, which enshrined “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” and “physical and mental pain and suffering” (stop calling it “torture”, folks!) as the hallmarks of our detention policy, Newsweek reports that an administration faction is agitating for the deployment of death squads in Iraq to make the Sunni population at large pay for its support and sympathy for the insurgents.

The argument being, “it worked in El Salvador”.

I don’t know how central a role death squads played in bringing peace and democracy to El Salvador, though Marc Cooper, speaking from personal experience , is more than a little skeptical.

And I’m not going to be a liberal pussy and point out that the massacre of 70,000 people, many of them innocent civilians, is kinda wrong.

But, as Robert Parry suggests , I think it’s worth noticing that the (alleged) Roberto A’Buissons of Iraq…

…the hard case, no holds barred, ruthless and violent killer elite…

…with generations of bloody, hands-on experience using terror against a civilian population as a tool of intimidation and control…

…the ones who have dedicated a lifetime to filling up the death lists with the names of real and potential opponents, erasing them, and replenishing them once more…

…are working for the other side, not for us.

The insurgency’s got the spiritual sons of Saddam and Uday, the dark lords of the Republican Guard, and the dungeon masters of the Mukhabarat.

We’ve got a sorry collection of cream puffs, collaborators, and renegades.

When push comes to shove, we know who is going to “rule the night” in the Sunni heartland.

Not only is a me-too white-terror policy stupid tactically, it’s stupid strategically.

Because ordinary Sunnis are becoming more and more alienated by the violent tactics of the insurgency:

As unpopular as the American presence may be, with a large majority of Iraqis saying they want U.S. troops to leave, according to public opinion polls, the insurgents are wearing out their welcome as well.

Residents of Ramadi — having seen Fallujah almost completely destroyed by a U.S. offensive to retake the city from insurgents — have voiced a sharpened appetite for order. They said they upbraided guerrillas for using residential neighborhoods to stage attacks against U.S. troops and putting families at risk from crossfire.

Iraqi Security Forces: Hunters and Hunted , Karl Vick, Washington Post, January 11, 2005

It might even be worthwhile to delay the elections, so that the escalating fury of the insurgents’ terror campaign would be prolonged until universal nationwide revulsion results, instead of culminating in the reassuringly clear and imminent bloody coda of the January 30th elections.

But nah.

Just when the Sunnis are getting sick of terror, we’ll fight terror with terror.

Brilliant.

We obviously don’t have a clue about what to do in Iraq.

Other people do.

As we blunder in blind desperation from torture to Fallujah-style collective punishment to death-squads, the Karl Roves leading the Iraq insurgency have been meticulously plotting the protracted political and military struggle in which the January 30 elections is a mere punctuation point.

It looks like the political aspect of the insurgency — the Sinn Fein to the insurgency’s IRA — has emerged with the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars’ proposal that it would participate in the elections if the U.S. set a timetable for withdrawal.

It was a clever tactic.

Either Sunni political prestige and influence would immeasurably enhanced by extracting the key concession from the United States, or the Sunnis could opt out of the elections with excuse that U.S. intransigence is to blame, and not the insurgency’s campaign of terror.

Of course, there was no way the United States would dare alienate the Shi’a theocracy — that it hopes will save its post-January 30 bacon — by negotiating with the Sunnis instead of the Shi’as for that glittering crown jewel of Iraqi popular politics: the privilege of telling the U.S. to get the fuck out of Iraq.

So, with the characteristic suicidal obstinacy that makes one believe we have no policy other than to accelerate the oncoming train wreck, we declined even to give lip service to the idea.

And now a well-nursed sense of Sunni grievance at the existence of an illegitimate, Shi’a-dominated regime will poison Iraq’s political life and enable the ethnic confrontation and civil war that the insurgency seeks to detonate in post-election Iraq.

Then the Sunni Ba’athists can fight for control of Iraq’s heartland on militarily and politically favorable ground, denying the Shi’as the unchallenged ascendancy they claim as their political and moral birthright.

We don’t have a clue about what to do in Iraq, and maybe that’s a good thing.

As the Nelson Report told us , George Bush isn’t interested in the truth from Iraq. He only wants the positive news.

And you know what?

He’s right.

There’s nothing he can do about the true situation in Iraq. Iraq is fucked up beyond repair.

The only thing he can hope for is a deus ex machina (that’s hand of God, folks), some unexpected event that will rescue his sorry ass…

…just like 9/11 proved the salvation of his presidency.

That’s the touchstone of this presidency and the disaster in Iraq:

The idea that the rational, secular concept of continual fact gathering, analysis, planning, response, and adjustment is trumped by the sound and fury of random catastrophe and divine intervention.

Bush rolls the dice, and a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals and reality-based policy wonks tilting the table and frantically blowing on the dice as they tumble is not going to change the randomness of the outcome.

The great leader, Bush-style, does not seek to understand or control events; he just keeps his head down and waits for some unexpected holy thunder to rescue him and vindicate his denial and passivity.

As Karl Rove reminded Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, (I’m paraphrasing here) Bush has the steadfast resolve to disregard the promptings of logic or caution, while waiting devoutly for God to bail him out of the military and political Arbusto that is present-day Iraq. (Moral Clarity, Courage Needed, Bush Aide Says , AP, May 9, 2004)

So it’s ironic that the determined, forward-planning secular socialists of the Ba’ath Party who direct the Iraq insurgency may deliver to Bush what the United States desperately needs…

…a massive military and political collapse that allows us to disengage our forces from Iraq pronto and permit us to discard the meager Mesopotamian political and strategic capital we have been fruitlessly attempting to preserve and enlarge over the last two years.

God’s will and Bush’s incompetence — how can we distinguish between the two? - is already working in mysterious ways.

The growing sense of despair permeating our military and security elites has reduced our government to George Bush levels of wishful thinking and desperate hope.

The death squad idea is its latest, most extreme manifestation.

We can only hope it fails sooner rather than later, before the death count runs into the tens of thousands.

Now it looks like the best solution for Iraq is failure: to accelerate the compounded, escalating incompetence that makes our continued presence militarily and politically untenable and bring our troops home as quickly as possible.

So send in the clowns.

It’s our only hope.

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.

top ^