The Last War and the Next One

by Tom Engelhardt

".....Now, skip a few years, and U.S. troops have once again entered Baghdad in battle mode. This time, they've been moving into the vast Sadr City Shi'ite slum "suburb" of eastern Baghdad, which houses perhaps two-and-a-half million closely packed inhabitants. If freestanding, Sadr City would be the second largest city in Iraq after the capital. This time, the forces facing American troops haven't put down their weapons, packed up, and gone home. This time, no one is talking about "liberation," or "freedom," or "democracy." In fact, no one is talking about much of anything.......

Buried in a number of news stories from Sadr City are reports in which attacks on "insurgents," "criminals," or "known criminal elements" (now Shi'ite, not Sunni) destroy whole buildings, even rows of buildings, even in one case recently damaging a hospital and destroying ambulances. Every day now, civilians die and children are pulled from the rubble. This is brutal indeed. ....

"'The sole burden of responsibility lies on the shoulders of the militants who care nothing for the Iraqi people….' He said the militiamen purposely attack from buildings and alleyways in densely populated areas, hoping to protect themselves by hiding among civilians. 'What does that say about the enemy?… He is heartless and evil.'"

Mind you, this comes from the representative of a military that now claims to grasp the true nature of counterinsurgency warfare (and so of a guerrilla war); and you're talking about a militia largely from Sadr City, fighting "a war of survival" for its own families, its own people, against foreign soldiers who have hopped continents to attack them. The Sadrist militiamen are defending their homes and, of course, with Predator drones and American helicopters constantly over their neighborhoods, it's quite obvious what would happen to them if they "came out and fought" like typical good-hearted types. They would simply be blown away. (Out of curiosity, what descriptive adjectives would Lt. Col. Stover use to capture the style of fighting of the Predator pilots who "fly" their drones from an air base outside of Las Vegas?).......

So, to sum up, let me see if I have this straight: The Bush administration liberated Iraq in order to send U.S. troops against a ragtag militia that has nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's former government (and many of whose members were, in fact, oppressed by it, as were its leaders) in the name of another group of Iraqis, who have long been backed by Iran, and… uh…

Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and, in Afghanistan, are moving ever closer to the Afghan capital, Kabul. And even though the "last war" in Iraq won't end (so that troops can be transferred to the even older war in Afghanistan that is, now, spiraling out of control), inside the Pentagon some are thinking not about how to get out, but about how to get in. They are pondering "the next war." ......."