I have been patiently waiting for a big headline announcing the biggest story since the invasion of Iraq. Apparently, I should not hold my breath. I know it has been a a news cycle of almost unprecedented horror stories for weeks now, replete with photos and videos, making such news all the more compelling to editors. But still I thought some sharp young editor, or even more likely, a sharp senior editor closer to 50 than 30, would look at the words that General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Capitol Hill this past Thursday, jerk his head in amazement and order up a front page, above the fold Screamer: "General Myers Said We Can't Win In Iraq."
Of course, it did not happen. Oh, he said it, and it was reported. According to Google, America's highest ranking military officer's startling admission was reported in a total of 10 English language news outlets, and 7 of those were syndications of Maureen Dowd's column "Clash of Civilizations" in last Wednesday's The New York Times, which also appears in these pages. Other than Ms. Dowd's excellent column, the item was independently published in The Straits Timesas one short paragraph in a lengthy analysis piece on the war in Iraq:
As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, put it with despairing frankness in his testimony to Congress yesterday: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq. There is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
It also appeared on Yahoo News in an overview Op/Ed column by Richard Reeves:
Or maybe it is Vietnam on amphetamines. There was an astounding flashback, last Wednesday, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, told a Senate hearing: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq. There is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
Been there, heard that. We did not lose militarily in Vietnam. We lost politically and morally. And by that I do not mean that we were less moral than the communists or the North Vietnamese. I mean we were less moral than we claimed to be.
It also appeared as a small part of another analysis overview in the Sydney Morning Herald:
But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, was also wringing his hands before the same committee, telling senators: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq ... [but] ... there is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
And that is all. Frankly, I'm astonished by the lack of attention to what General Myers told a Senate panel. After all of the swagger and macho gung ho'ism of "Shock and Awe," "Mission Accomplished," and the expenditure of almost 200 Billion dollars and almost 800 American soldiers' lives, and all of the patriotic bluster and name-calling when the "Q word" or the "V word" (quagmire and Vietnam) was even mentioned, the admission that we are as stalemated in a quagmire in Iraq as we were in Vietnam, one would think that the administration would have been excoriated by journalists far and wide. But, no.
Such is the power of a scandal that includes sexual perversity, and the power of a ghoulish video-taped human butchering. As a media professional I understand it. As a social historian and lifelong student of all things political, I am absolutely flabbergasted that it didn't even merit a headline anywhere, much less the front page.
One of the articles briefly quoted above, from the Sydney Morning Herald, deserves a fuller offering, and so it follows below:
The roots of revenge May 15, 2004
The US now confronts a possible civil war of its own making
The speed is breakneck. Cycles of violence in Palestine and Northern Ireland loop from one to the next at a pace that reflects decades or centuries of occupation, but in Iraq they unfold with the power and speed of a jack-hammer on concrete.
This week's grotesque beheading of a Jewish-American in Iraq came after the appalling scandal of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their US captors, which followed the debacle of the American attack on Falluja, which was retribution for the butchery of four American security contractors in the same city, which Arab observers claim bore the hallmarks of a revenge attack for an unspecified American act at some point in the past 13 months.
It's hardly surprising, then, that since the fall of Baghdad there's been virtually no oxygen for the serious business of crafting the uncertain future of Iraq.
The Americans would have us believe that they want to be out of there by June 30, when they say they will return control of the country to Iraqis. But the reality is that the occupation will continue, and so will the war.
The US is hard at work building the camps that it wants to become permanent American bases and this week the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, flagged to the US Senate that next year the occupation will soak up billions more dollars than presently acknowledged and possibly even greater troop numbers than the current 138,000.
But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, was also wringing his hands before the same committee, telling senators: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq ... [but] ... there is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
Catch-22 - the Americans came to Iraq as the answer, but now they are the problem.
Myers very sensibly hit upon the need to "internationalise" the crisis, embracing a solution spurned so often by Washington: "The United Nations has to play the governance role. That's how we're, in my view, eventually going to win."
The UN has made a tentative return to Iraq. It is assessing the possibility of holding elections before the end of January which it says could happen if there is a significant improvement in security. And with only six weeks to the June 30 handover, the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is trying to do what Washington could not do - cobble together an interim government.
But such is the mess that the US has made of an occupation it insisted would bring democracy to the Middle East, that the chances of a full UN return to Iraq are slim. NATO says it wants nothing to do with it; France and Germany have reaffirmed they'll not send troops; and an attempt by the chief of the US Central Command, General John Abizaid, to publicly browbeat Pakistan, Morocco and Tunisia into providing troops to give the occupation a Muslim face was met with stony silence.
All of which leaves the US President, George Bush, in about the same state as a seasoned US security contractor who, when asked how he was faring at the height of the April hostage crisis in Baghdad, snapped, "Up to my ass in alligators."
The fear now is that the real American success in Iraq has been the creation of the perfect environment for a protracted guerilla war which, at any time, could become a civil war. Resistance is so entrenched that stage-managed events like this week's distribution of sweets to village children near Falluja will have little impact.
Events in recent days have graphically demonstrated the increasingly asymmetric nature of the conflict - a high-tech, digital, self-inflicted wound by the US in the prisoner abuse scandal has overarched a brutal decapitation rooted in the ancient Arab culture of revenge but transmitted globally on the internet. Both sides are reeling without having directly engaged each other.
Some Iraqis will be offended by the manner of the death of Nick Berg, but few will speak against his beheading. Arab conspiracy theorists will be well pleased with the unfolding abuse scandal - their media space is filled with allegations of American wrongdoing and all of it is helped along by the strengths of Western democracy. As a Baghdad cafe-goer told CNN in a prisoner-abuse vox pop this week: "Arabs do it, too, but we're not allowed to talk about it." However, we slice and dice the story in the West: we test it against history, we psychoanalyse it, we leave the accused defend themselves.
It fills our media space and pours selectively into the Arab media in a way that sustains the worst elements of the original allegations which, in many Arab minds, are not against individual soldiers but against the US and the Bush Administration.
It's easy for Washington's defenders and apologists to dismiss the abuse as aberrant behaviour or even as the means to justify an end. But it all looks very different to Arabs who wonder about the democracy roadshow the US is running in the Middle East.
Should they believe in the due process promised in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse - or in the allegation by the International Committee of the Red Cross that as many as 90 per cent of the Iraqis in US detention have committed no wrongdoing? Should they put aside all the lies and half-truths on the way to war: the WMD that didn't exist, the terror links that weren't there, the war to reduce terrorism that brought terrorism to their doorstep?
Those who manipulate the mythic Arab Street don't give lectures on the wonders of the Westminster system or the rich philosophical underpinning of democracy in the US. They are too busy repackaging the latest news in much the same way that Bush and Blair and Howard packaged the worst of the case - true and untrue - against Saddam Hussein before last year's war.
If Americans want a glimpse of the future of their occupation of Iraq, they should look to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the same way that Israeli settlers on Arab land have been targets, so too will US troops be in Iraq. And if they want a sense of what "June 30 return of sovereignty" means, they should look at US plans for an embassy in "independent" Iraq - there will be no fewer than three ambassadors, two of whom are military men. The existing US occupation staff and the presidential bunker they commandeered last year as an American HQ in Baghdad will simply become the embassy and they'll be able to tic-tac with the Iraqi proxies they have already locked into key positions across the bureaucracy ahead of the formation of an Iraqi government.
Presiding over it all will be Ambassador John Negroponte, whose 1980s ambassadorship in Honduras has been much questioned because of allegations of US complicity in the disappearance of people who disagreed with the regime.
