Stop the Presses! I Think We Have A Winner!
The consequences of catastrophic success
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 1, 2004
For a man of limited verbal ability, President Bush occasionally gets off an unforgettable line.
In keeping with his new campaign tactic of admitting mistake (singular) in Iraq, Bush recently told reporters that U.S. forces had advanced so quickly that Saddam Hussein’s army "laid down their willingness to fight and just dissipated into the countryside." He said it twice. He probably meant "dispersed."
" Dissipated" perhaps better describes his own missing time from the vaunted Flying Playboys unit of the Texas Air National Guard. But that’s not the epigram I had in mind. Asked to name his worst mistake, Bush confessed kicking Saddam’s butt too hard. "Had we had to do it over again," he said, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy... escaped and lived to fight another day."
People, I think we have a winner. Just as destroying a village to save it summed up Vietnam, so "catastrophic success" may come to symbolize America’s ongoing misadventure in Iraq. Remember "shock and awe"? Well, forget it. There was never any doubt that the U.S. military would easily defeat Iraq’s Third World army. Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, tried to warn that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure the peace. For this offense against neoconservative dogma, Shinseki was forced into early retirement.
Now comes the bitter proof.
For the second time in months, determined U.S. Marines have fought Iraqi militiamen to a bloody standoff, this time in the Shiite stronghold of Najaf. Once again, as in the Sunni city of Fallujah, a deal has been cut to prevent an even bloodier battle, possibly involving the destruction of the tomb of the Imam Ali, one of Shia Islam’s most revered holy places, an event sure to inflame the Muslim world.
Many think the big winner is" radical" cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who protected the shrine from U.S. "infidels." Meanwhile, back in Fallujah, The New York Times reports, Sunni fundamentalist militias have assumed near-total control of the entire province. Apart from occasional armored convoys and bombing raids that strengthen the guerrillas by killing civilians, U.S. forces remain inside fortified compounds as grisly videos documenting the torture and execution of its Iraqi allies are sold openly in the marketplace.
The pro-government Iraqi Fallujah Brigade installed months ago basically no longer exists. "Marine commanders," the Times reports, say that the city "has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States."
Anybody who really wants to understand the Iraqi chaos must read Naomi Klein’s "Baghdad Year Zero" in the September Harper’s magazine. With extraordinary clarity, Klein documents the Bush administration’s madcap efforts to turn Iraq into a corporate paradise by seizing its assets and selling them to foreign (mostly U.S.) investors. If you’re curious exactly what so-called rebel clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr are rebelling against, Klein’s article, subtitled "Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia," makes it appallingly clear. Under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist rule, see, Iraq’s non-oil economy functioned as a kind of Arab socialism.
About 200 state-owned companies made everything "from cement to paper to washing machines"corrupt, inefficient, but the only paying jobs hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had. Bush-appointed emissary Arthur Bremer set about to change all that with revolutionary fervor by holding what Klein calls" the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union. "He pronounced a set of radical economic" reforms, "lowering corporate taxes to virtually nothing and allowing Iraq’s putative new owners to export 100 percent of their profits.
Exactly what gave American true believers the right to sell what they never owned troubled them not. Alas, however, the U. N. Security Council resolution empowering the Coalition Provisional Authority to make laws specifically forbade seizing captive nations’ assets—as international law has done for almost a century. Plan B was to strong-arm the newly appointed Iraqi Governing Council into writing said reforms into its constitution. After al-Sadr’s al Hawza newspaper objected, the government shut it down.
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men saw no recourse but armed rebellion." Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq, "Klein writes," has become a blood sport. "Iraqi collaborators are kidnapped and murdered, along with foreign businessmen seen as thieves. Insurance companies have quit writing policies for Iraq. Multinational corporations are pulling out. The Bush administration, Klein writes, has transformed the country" into the mirror opposite of what the neo-cons envisioned, not a corporate utopia, but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded. "
In two words: catastrophic success.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 1, 2004
For a man of limited verbal ability, President Bush occasionally gets off an unforgettable line.
In keeping with his new campaign tactic of admitting mistake (singular) in Iraq, Bush recently told reporters that U.S. forces had advanced so quickly that Saddam Hussein’s army "laid down their willingness to fight and just dissipated into the countryside." He said it twice. He probably meant "dispersed."
" Dissipated" perhaps better describes his own missing time from the vaunted Flying Playboys unit of the Texas Air National Guard. But that’s not the epigram I had in mind. Asked to name his worst mistake, Bush confessed kicking Saddam’s butt too hard. "Had we had to do it over again," he said, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy... escaped and lived to fight another day."
People, I think we have a winner. Just as destroying a village to save it summed up Vietnam, so "catastrophic success" may come to symbolize America’s ongoing misadventure in Iraq. Remember "shock and awe"? Well, forget it. There was never any doubt that the U.S. military would easily defeat Iraq’s Third World army. Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, tried to warn that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure the peace. For this offense against neoconservative dogma, Shinseki was forced into early retirement.
Now comes the bitter proof.
For the second time in months, determined U.S. Marines have fought Iraqi militiamen to a bloody standoff, this time in the Shiite stronghold of Najaf. Once again, as in the Sunni city of Fallujah, a deal has been cut to prevent an even bloodier battle, possibly involving the destruction of the tomb of the Imam Ali, one of Shia Islam’s most revered holy places, an event sure to inflame the Muslim world.
Many think the big winner is" radical" cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who protected the shrine from U.S. "infidels." Meanwhile, back in Fallujah, The New York Times reports, Sunni fundamentalist militias have assumed near-total control of the entire province. Apart from occasional armored convoys and bombing raids that strengthen the guerrillas by killing civilians, U.S. forces remain inside fortified compounds as grisly videos documenting the torture and execution of its Iraqi allies are sold openly in the marketplace.
The pro-government Iraqi Fallujah Brigade installed months ago basically no longer exists. "Marine commanders," the Times reports, say that the city "has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States."
Anybody who really wants to understand the Iraqi chaos must read Naomi Klein’s "Baghdad Year Zero" in the September Harper’s magazine. With extraordinary clarity, Klein documents the Bush administration’s madcap efforts to turn Iraq into a corporate paradise by seizing its assets and selling them to foreign (mostly U.S.) investors. If you’re curious exactly what so-called rebel clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr are rebelling against, Klein’s article, subtitled "Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia," makes it appallingly clear. Under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist rule, see, Iraq’s non-oil economy functioned as a kind of Arab socialism.
About 200 state-owned companies made everything "from cement to paper to washing machines"corrupt, inefficient, but the only paying jobs hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had. Bush-appointed emissary Arthur Bremer set about to change all that with revolutionary fervor by holding what Klein calls" the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union. "He pronounced a set of radical economic" reforms, "lowering corporate taxes to virtually nothing and allowing Iraq’s putative new owners to export 100 percent of their profits.
Exactly what gave American true believers the right to sell what they never owned troubled them not. Alas, however, the U. N. Security Council resolution empowering the Coalition Provisional Authority to make laws specifically forbade seizing captive nations’ assets—as international law has done for almost a century. Plan B was to strong-arm the newly appointed Iraqi Governing Council into writing said reforms into its constitution. After al-Sadr’s al Hawza newspaper objected, the government shut it down.
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men saw no recourse but armed rebellion." Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq, "Klein writes," has become a blood sport. "Iraqi collaborators are kidnapped and murdered, along with foreign businessmen seen as thieves. Insurance companies have quit writing policies for Iraq. Multinational corporations are pulling out. The Bush administration, Klein writes, has transformed the country" into the mirror opposite of what the neo-cons envisioned, not a corporate utopia, but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded. "
In two words: catastrophic success.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 21:20
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