by Matt Kennard
The decline of the ability of the military to handle combat or even recruit enough troops has seriously compromised the ability of the US to project its power and secure victories. Memories of the returning soldiers’ treatment will be hard to shake, and this will likely lead to a version of Vietnam Syndrome, in which many Americans will spurn the military. Even the war-booty expected from the occupations has largely evaded the American imperialist class this time around. Analysis of the two rounds of oil and gas contracts in Iraq shows that US companies won only two of the eighteen contracts, both in joint ventures with other companies. The original plan by the Bush administration was for the Iraqi government to pass a new oil law which would have indirectly privatized Iraq’s hydrocarbons through an unconventional type of contracting called “production sharing agreements,” which would have given foreign oil companies shares of production and exclusive control over Iraq’s oil fields for up to thirty-two years. But the Iraqi constitution requires the parliament to ratify laws, and because of the internal dynamics in the country at the time the parliament ended up being controlled by nationalist parties with anti-occupation politics. Despite the fact that the ruling parties in the Iraqi executive branch were very happy with the Bush oil law, the other parties controlling the legislative branch were opposed to it and ended up blocking it. The Iraqi government then had to revert to an older law that only allows for “technical service agreements,” which kept the oil under Iraqi ownership while giving foreign oil companies a flat rate in exchange for services.
As I write this, the US and the world are still in the grips of the crisis that has rocked the global economy since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Unemployment in the US has stayed stubbornly high, which, according to some, has put the issues raised in this book on a temporary back burner as people who can no longer find work turn to the military for salvation. But it would be a mistake to assume this will solve the deep problems in the military. What the War on Terror has shown is that the Pentagon is prepared to dispense with both its regulations and its moral compass when faced with the need to stock any future wars with soldiers. Whatever regulations have been brought back as the wars have wound down—not many, in truth—are therefore still at threat of being ignored again should the situation demand. And this war isn’t near to being at its close, either. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have radicalized thousands of Muslims to take up the fight against the West, it has emboldened Iran through the deposition of the Sunni minority in Iraq, and it has been prosecuted so badly that the invincibility of American power is no longer an illusion that pervades the world. Unfortunately, however, a wounded tiger is much more dangerous than a healthy one.
The US needs to re-evaluate its role in the world and move away from the use of military force which has, in recent history, become self-perpetuating thanks to its competitive advantage. In his autobiography, the former Secretary of State Colin Powell notes how Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asked him, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”48 With China rapidly closing in on the US economically, this massive military machine will prove even more dangerous: if you have the means of violence in place, there’s a very strong temptation to use it. This is new. America has fought dozens of wars since 1945, but during the Cold War nearly all were fought through “proxy forces,” meaning that the US government provided financial and military support to an element in a foreign country that was fighting the “Red Menace.” The tactic was used by both the US and the Soviet Union essentially because they both wanted to avoid direct military conflict, and this was met with moderate success.
But at the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet deterrent gone, US planners failed to realize that the military was not designed for the direct interventions and occupations of foreign countries that would now be much easier to execute. Their theory went that with the threat of the Soviet Union gone, the US would be able to use its “full-spectrum military dominance” to entrench its “economic rights.” Since the economic supremacy of the US was being challenged, planners were intent on fighting back by exploiting their biggest advantage: the military. In many ways the US turned to attacking Iraq because it could no longer control the global economy and was seeking to regain ground by military means, trying to stem a decades-long structural decline by sending its guns around the world. This was the express philosophy of the lobby group called Project for the New American Century, many members of which became part of the George W. Bush administration. The most informative document produced by this think tank, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, noted: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security” and “the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification . . . for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf.”49 But it wasn’t what America was good at. “The US in terms of its offensive fire power and global deployment remains absolutely unrivalled, but its weakness is that its forces are not well suited for policing activities,” historian Michael Mann tells me. In other words, it has the ability to defeat foreign armies and conquer their cities, but it doesn’t have the ability to bring them under control afterwards.
There are a number of reasons for this: first, the US military has no policing record—unlike, for example, the British army in Northern Ireland—while pacification is mostly a political not a military problem. Throughout the Cold War, the US only intervened in foreign countries where there were local allies who with American help could run their countries for them—“even in Vietnam it wasn’t implausible that the South Vietnamese government, which had an army of over 200,000 men, could be propped up and successfully pacify the country,” adds Mann. The Muslim world is different: the US never had such allies in Iraq or Afghanistan, but launched pre-emptive strikes anyway. But there is another profound problem that renders old-style imperial American power anachronistic: the country has a domestic culture which is not conducive to long-drawn out wars of aggression, as demonstrated by the turmoil during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. “American kids are not brought up to be as racist, as stoic in combat, as self-denying in crisis, or as obedient to authority as British kids once were,” writes Mann.50 That lack of an imperial American culture is a proud tradition: its citizens don’t want to be part of the Empire however much they are pressured to take up arms for it. I want to give the final word to them.
Never Did, Never Will
One afternoon while I was living in Harlem, New York City, I decided to visit Brownsville, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, to talk to local people and find out how the War on Terror had affected them. I walked down Pitkin Avenue, which divides the neighborhood into two neat but equally deprived enclaves, an experience miles away from postcard New York with its narrative of gentrification and urban renewal. Homeless addicts pleaded for some change, children pushed each other off rusty bikes, an old woman pulled her luggage behind her, trying to dodge splinters of urban decay. Brownsville was the silent New York City. “We never get journalists here, apart from shootings,” the old woman told me. Overwhelmingly populated by people of Afro-Caribbean lineage (78.2 percent), with one of the worst crime rates in the United States, one of the highest infant mortality indicators, and stellar points in every department of deprivation, it was a military recruiter’s dream.
In the national conversation on Iraq that has cluttered newspapers and magazines to the point of saturation over the past decade, the academics and journalists conducting it have been men and women mostly from a similar class and with narrow ideological differences, used to getting finicky over minor points of disagreement. Most of them didn’t have children in Iraq and haven’t served in the armed forces themselves. Most of them don’t use the public welfare systems and none of them, we can be sure, live in places where the child mortality rate is 11.8 percent. In short, for them, the war and its consequences r
emains an abstract idea. In Brownsville, New York City, this abstract idea condenses into something very real. People talk effortlessly about how the war has impacted their lives in a tangible and often tragic way. Decquan Copeland, seventeen, is a student on the Acorn program for social justice. He grew up in Brownsville and lives in one of the housing projects off East New York Avenue. “The war has been a disaster for this country and it is still causing so many problems,” he told me. He is a devout Christian and practices at the Mount Sinai Cathedral, the main place of worship in the area. “I know about fifteen people at the Cathedral who have lost uncles, fathers and cousins in the war. And what for?” He pauses and clears his throat. “We often pray for them at Mount Sinai, but it just gets me so angry, that these people have died for nothing.”
Copeland is the prime age for recruitment to the army, and mentions that he has been approached by recruiters on numerous occasions with all of the usual incentives on offer. Brownsville Recruitment Center is located on Pitkin Avenue, an oasis of calm among the chicken shops and street-sellers. In the window are pictures of hardened men and women in combat regalia, affecting faces taut with strength. “There’s strong,” goes the strap, “Then there’s army strong.” US Army Recruiter Sergeant Christopher M. Penrod is reluctant to talk and clams up when I mention I’m a journalist. Before speaking to the press, recruiting officers have to receive approval from higher authorities, which is not forthcoming. Inside, the offices are decrepit and decorated with more yellowing pictures of combat action shots. “I am a Warrior,” reads another poster.
“I can’t deal with death, that’s why I’d never join the army,” says Copeland. What about his friends? “They have all seen what has happened and I think they are probably scared and angry; the thing is, the recruiters are everywhere around here, in our schools, in our streets, in our stores. They tell us we can get some money, make something of ourselves. All that. Some kids fall for it.” In a community district with 50.9 percent of the population on some form of income support, the military is still an appealing career path. Saskia Wilson, sixteen, is a student at Flushing High School. I find her watching television in a laundromat on Legion Street. She wants to go into the military when she finishes school. “It doesn’t scare me; you know, my uncle was in the military, I remember he used to talk about it all the time and I remember getting excited about it. I’ve always been interested in the military—I watch movies and all that shit. When 9/11 happened I thought they were gonna come here, to Brownsville. So you got to defend your country, they came and bombed us so we bomb them back.” Was she talking about Iraq? “Oh sure, it was Iraq that bombed us, so I want to protect my country.” I wondered if her uncle was in Iraq now. “Oh no, my uncle died, he died in the military.” And that doesn’t scare her? “I’m not gonna feel safe, but everybody gotta die someday, it’s not like it’s heaven here in Brownsville.” Her mother is a post office worker, and her father does “nothing,” according to Saskia. Her other uncle is in the military in South Carolina. “I used to want to be a teacher,” she says. “But that was when I was very young, ever since I was twelve, I’ve wanted to be in the military, they take care of you.”
I find Stevery Carrington, forty-seven, outside Microhousing off Rockaway Avenue. He has been a heroin addict for thirteen years and is living in sheltered accommodation. His eyes burn with real intensity when the subject of Iraq is brought up. “I don’t know if I should care,” he says. I wondered if the war had affected him personally. “Well, hell yeah, look at all the homelessness around, look at this program,” he says, and points to the shelter behind him. “There’s subsidized programs, day programs, all these things helping people get their life back on track and they wasting all this money on the war—they could be putting it in here. I’ve relapsed four times for drug abuse, I need the help, I can tell you.” I suggest that the people of Brownsville seem like they have strong feelings about the conflict. “They don’t care!” he shouts back. “You live here, you shit here, you fuck here, if anybody know anything they don’t say shit, nobody gives a fuck, but the war comes to them through deaths of people they know. That’s my relationship with the war—seeing my brothers come back in coffins.”
Brownsville has a large Muslim community, mainly African American converts, but there are a sizeable number of believers and an active mosque. I spoke to Abdullah Aziz, fifty-two, who was sitting on Pitkin Avenue outside his friend’s shop. He had converted to Islam thirty years ago and worked as a plumber and drug counselor. “I have a son in Iraq,” he begins. “He just went, he’s in Kuwait until weather conditions allow him to go into Iraq for a year. I think the invasion was politically incorrect, it was unjust, it was for oil, but it’s the power that be, and that’s it, it is, it be’s, so we can’t do nothing about it. They talk about due processes, but they are the process!” It was strange that a devout Muslim, against the war morally, would allow his son, twenty years old, to go to the Middle East to fight for the US. “He wanted a career, there’s not much else he could do,” he says. “The decision was his—he understands he’s Muslim and the Koran says Muslims shouldn’t kill other Muslims, but then look at Iraq that’s what’s happening. It’s a job to him, they get you young and dumb, but he’s also a grown man so we’re supporting him. Of course, every parent is worried about it, but you can’t do anything, he’s got to find his own way, a lot of kids round here do the same shit.”
Many people in Brownsville are employed off the record, using anything they have or can get hold of to make money. Melvin Ford, twenty-six, is selling grubby second-hand teddy bears on the main thoroughfare, along with coverless Sudoku and coloring books. He has some strong opinions on the war and gives a historical context on the whole operation: “Well, Bush senior did some stupid shit,” he says. “He let Saddam make all that money and get away with it. People forget,” he adds, “that’s not our oil . . . They should leave Iraq alone,” he expands, “bring the troops home and let the Iraqi President deal with it.” It transpires that Ford has two cousins who have been in Iraq. One, Lans Franklin, was sent home for going AWOL while the other, Richard Franklin, remains there. “Richard don’t know anything,” says Ford. “He’s been there since 2004, or whenever it started and now I think he’s switched to Kuwait or something. He sends letters, tells us he’s doing good, how wonderful it all is. But it’s the school he went to: they trained him for guns and war, told him how good all that shit is.” Richard Franklin has five children, three boys and two girls. They haven’t seen him for four years. His brother, Lans, went AWOL and was discharged by the military after going out to Iraq. “He fucked up and it turned him a little crazy, and they said, ‘You are gonna drop a fucking bomb on us one day so we’re sending you home, we don’t need you.’” Lans, from the Bronx originally, had been back for about six months; he has problems hearing, after a bomb went off nearby when he was asleep. “I don’t know if he’s changed at all,” says Ford, getting agitated. “He was definitely drinking more than usual when I last saw him: ‘Let’s get a six-pack, blah blah,’ that kind of shit. He was drinking two six-packs and liquor every day when I saw him last. He’s kind of crazy now, but the military don’t help him.” He pauses and looks down. “Never did, never will.”
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 Christopher Griffin, “The War at Home,” Armed Forces Journal, March 2006.
2 http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430.
3 Pierre Tristam, “Private Contractors in Iraq Still Double Overall Troop Presence,” About.com, August 29, 2010; http://middleeast.about.com.
4 See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater (Nation Books, 2007) and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Picador, 2008).
5 Michael O’Hanlon, “Come Partly Home, America: How to Downsize U.S. Deployments Abroad,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2001.
6 President Bush Speaks at Naval Academy Commencement, May 25, 2001; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext052501.htm.
8 “TOP SECRET POLO STEP,” The National Security Archive; http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm.
9 “The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq: Conversation with Harry Kreisler”; http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Gordon/gordon-con3.html.
10 “Army Chief says 200,000 Troops Needed to Keep the Peace,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2003.
11 “TOP SECRET POLO STEP,” The National Security Archive.
12 Ibid.
13 Ann Scott Tyson, “Two Years Later, Iraq War Drains Military,” Washington Post, March 19, 2005.
14 Andrew F. Krepinevich, “The Thin Green Line,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, August 14, 2004, p. 1; http://www.observulsion.com/docs/B.20040812.GrnLne.pdf.
15 Ibid., p. 7.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 15.
18 Ibid., p. 18.
19 Bryan Bender, “Military Considers Recruiting Foreigners,” Boston Globe, December 26, 2006.
20 “Stray Voltage,” Armed Forces Journal, June 1, 2005.
21 Press Release from Rangel Office, “Rangel Reintroduces Draft Bill,” February 14, 2006; http://www.house.gov/list/press/ny15_rangel/CBRStatementonDraft02142006.html.