Stan Goff: Hard Rain

[This is from the Freedom Road site: www.freedomroad.org/. Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.]

I am a veteran of operations gone bad, and right now I am experiencing a powerful sense of vicarious deja vu.

Four days ago, I couldn't watch CNN for more than ten minutes at a time or I was risking my own mental health. Now, I watch it with the perverse fascination one experiences when seeing a fifteen car pileup on the freeway.

Obviously, the parade of aging white Generals - even including my old commander Dave Grange - who simultaneously know that the US will prevail militarily through sheer force and that this entire operation is going terribly, terribly wrong, do not understand the wider political implications of what they are witnessing.

Still, they seem discomfited. They have been converted into cheap propagandists, and for me it's a lot like seeing a formerly tyrannical Sergeant Major who's retired and become an oily insurance salesman, reduced to haunting the barracks, kissing up to his own former troops to earn his way in the real world by selling them policies.

How the mighty can fall from great heights! Perhaps that's too majestic. The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass.

Watch Wesley Clark, the CNN military star, who reputation in the Army was that of an inveterate ass kisser. He harbors presidential pretensions, and he's smooth as a baby's butt. Watch how the worry lines now come right through the pancake makeup.

Donald Rumsfeld has become positively humble - a first in his lifetime - during his Pentagon briefs.

George W. Bush is nearly absent. No one will risk his extemporaneous gaffes. Might he be medicated? His two-line appearances are hoarse and fatigued.

What's happening?

What's happening is that the superpower came face to face with its new counterpart: an international popular movement, focused against this war, but increasingly targeting US global hegemony itself. Our world-wide movement has become a material force on the battlefield, and has midwifed a deep crisis of legitimacy for the US military-political junta.

The whole adventure is rooted in systemic crisis, a reality that so far only the left wing of the movement itself understands. (For a longer discussion of that, see Military Matters #5: Overreach) How has the antiwar movement become a material force on the Iraqi battleground?

Let's take a snapshot of the tactical situation, as least can be gleaned from different accounts.

The original battle plan was scrapped. Let's start here. The complexity of planning a military operation of this scope is simply indescribable, and it takes months to do it right. But the unexpected loss of ground fronts, in Turkey in the North and Saudi Arabia in the South, forced a complete reconstruction of plans in a matter of days. The operation could be put off no longer. The aggressor's back was against the weather wall. The pre-summer sandstorms had already begun, and by late April the heat index inside a soldier's chemical protective gear will be 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The international antiwar movement had firmed up political opposition around the world and forced the delays that culminated in the UN Security Council becoming a key arena of struggle. For all the infantile leftists who dismissed the UN on moral and ideological - and therefore idealist - grounds, I would say look now at Iraq and see how politics translates into military reality.

We stalled the Bush Administration to push to war where we could stall, and there is an effect.

The entire 4th Infantry Division is sitting in the barracks now waiting for their equipment to steam around the Arabian Peninsula in cargo ships because the Turkish parliament denied them their battlefront. Medium and short range tactical aircraft that could have struck dozens of key targets are sidelined because they are forbidden to take off from Saudi Arabia to deliver their "payloads."

Inside the Department of Defense there has been another war raging, that between the Generals of the Army and Marine Corps and the clique of doctrinal "revolutionaries" pushing Rumsfeld's crackpot theory of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), the methodological offspring of a strategic doctrine called Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD). The Rumsfeld Doctrine is cyberwar combined with commandos. Rumsfeld and his mentors have an absolute faith in the power of technology as the primary determinant of military outcomes, and a complete ignorance of politics as a force of war. (This will be the subject of a book due out this December, War Lies.)

Suffice it to say here, the combination of the failure of this new "doctrine" is creating a military debacle in Iraq. It is important to note that in war, which is an extreme form of politics, success is not measured empirically as it is in a sports competition. It is not measured in body counts or inventories of destroyed war materiel. In fact, it is not perfectly measurable at all. But success has to be gauged against the expectations of the military operation and its final objectives - which are always political. The US inflicted a terrible empirical toll on Southeast Asia and ultimately lost the Vietnam War. The US never grasped the political character of that war.

The US loss in Vietnam became the basis of the Powell Doctrine, which combines avoidance of decisive ground combat (and therefore avoidance of US casualties) with control over public perceptions of the war through the press. Rumsfeld's NCW attempts to assert that logic onto the battlefield with extremely complex technology that has displaced decision-making from human commanders to computerized hardware/software. I have referred to this in the past as "the organic composition of the military;" the relative weight of technological to cognitive process.

Every strength carries with it a corresponding weakness, and once military leaders perceive the strengths and weaknesses of their opposition, they can avoid the strengths and exploit the weaknesses.

The Iraqis are doing just that.

Accusations by the United States that the Russians are providing material assistance may very well be true. The Russians have now thrown in their lot with "old Europe" and China, and they are aiming to undermine US power at every opportunity. I suspect they have not only provided equipment and training on that equipment, but advisory assistance on the reorganization of the Iraqi military.

Someone sure has.

The Iraqi military has abandoned its former Soviet-style doctrine, predicated on armor, mass, and centralized command. It has seemingly now adopted tactics more suited to Special Operations; agile and decentralized. Such a switch requires a very intentional and systematic reorientation from top to bottom. This is an "asymmetrical" response to the high-tech doctrine the US developed to overcome the doctrine of its own predecessor. This Iraqi doctrinal reorientation is proving stunningly effective.

Rumsfeld's notion that he might "decapitate" the Iraqi military has led to an incessant and inane press speculation about whether on not Saddam Hussein is dead or alive. As the reports rolled of one setback after another, he was asked by the press whether there was any evidence to show that Saddam Hussein is dead. His response: "The word evidence is a hard word."

Less ridiculous and more telling was the statement by a Pentagon official, now dissing his boss Rumsfeld: "This is the ground war that was not going to happen in his plan."

Rumsfeld's computers told him that the Iraqis would be shocked and awed into capitulation within two days. Instead we have the (suppressed in the US) spectacle of ground troops in disarray as they attempted to cross their initial lines of departure, columns being stopped by urban resistance, ambushes of logistics tails, advances halted by blinding sandstorms, and captive American youngsters on television.

These first American prisoners of war were not Navy Seals or Delta Force, but military maintenance people and cooks, kids who signed up for an enlistment bonus, some college money, and a saleable skill. Now they stare hauntingly back at us all, with their fear almost an aura in their photographs.

The earlier uncomplicated advances, however, were remarkable. In set-piece war, Rumsfeld's impressive display of new battle software worked perfectly. Tank commanders could keep their lines dressed by simply referring to a digital display, and no one was pulling ahead into an adjacent unit's gunsights. Gee whiz.

The Generals are preoccupied now with retrieving their tactical victory from the chaos, a retrieval that will cost treasure, lives, and careers. But they are almost certainly also sharpening their knives and fantasizing about the spaces between Donald Rumsfeld's ribs.

The first images of the war were supposed to be the "liberation" of Basra, where jubilant crowds of Shi'ite Muslims would welcome the conquering American heroes. Instead, Basra fought back with a spectacular ferocity.

Now US ground forces are attempting to bypass every urban center on the road to Baghdad, but they are in the restricted terrain of the east, where bypass is not always an option. In Al Nasiriya, victory toasts turned to vinegar in their mouths.

City by city sieges have now become a real possibility, and the longer this war goes, the sharper will be the reaction throughout the region.

Aside from stalling, antiwar forces and the naked self-interest of the US regime have given us another multi-faceted victory. The US, fearing further erosion of its wounded legitimacy, has set out to genuinely limit civilian casualties. We have to be honest and clear about this. It is happening. There are certainly civilian casualties, but not nearly the mass slaughter many predicted.

One factor at play here is the need to avoid great damage to the infrastructure of their new prize. The other is the heat from the flames of an erupting international rebellion that they can illafford to fan any higher.

We must also be honest that this will cause the costs to American troops to go up, in lives. Basra can be conquered in a matter of hours, given a willingness to reduce it to rubble. So the US regime is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is international rage, including the ever more explosive rage of the Arab and Muslim masses in the region, and the concomitant certainty of further international isolation. The hard place is Colin Powell's nightmare - a parade of flag-draped coffins.

Given this choice, the US will probably be forced to abandon its precise target discrimination, and the bloodletting that has been thus far limited will likely happen after all. This underlinesthe urgency of the anti-war movement keeping up its unrelenting pressure.

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of the US strategy - prior to recent developments - was the "embedded journalists" program. This is a masterpiece of Powell Doctrine: controlling public perceptions.

The criticism of the military "pool" system from the first Gulf War was checkmated. Reporters were put directly on the battlefield, and integrated into the actual military units. Those reporters are then dependent on the troops around them for their daily human contact, and grow quickly to identify directly with the people in those units.

Overt censorship is no longer needed.

But as the campaign goes further and further awry, these embedded journalists will see some of their new friends wounded and killed, and then the Powell anxiety becomes realized, the war is in our living rooms again, just like Vietnam. This fear of graphic audio-visual images of war is why there was such outrage at Al Jazeera showing dead GIs.

The bet that this would be a quick war with images of triumph is about to break the bank.

In the North, far from the most visible action, the Turkish military has already begun its incursions. The Kurds, in response, are already signing onto yet another Faustian deal with the Americans, now mostly Special Operations - Rangers to seize airheads and Special Forces to establish relationships with the Kurdish fighters. Without its Northern Front, the US is more dependent than ever on using Kurdish combatants to fight the Iraqis around the rich oilfields near Kirkuk.

Fragile Turkey is beset by a severe economic crisis. Its majority Muslim population has just elected a moderate Islamic Party, and the popular opposition to the war is overwhelming.

The Turkish ruling class cannot afford another insurrection from Kurdish nationalists, and the Turkish military has no intention of watching a Kurdish state take form to their South. Turkey, inside its stable exterior, is becoming a powder keg, and Kurdistan is a furnace.

The political implications reach deep into Europe, where one year ago the US saw the admission of Turkey as advancing in the EU. Germany, for instance, has a substantial population of Turks and Kurds, and the German government has a real and justifiable fear that open warfare in Iraqi Kurdistan will spill over into the streets of Germany.

To mollify the Kurds, the US must hold back the Turkish military, and the Kurds will certainly not abandon their dream for an independent Kurdistan. To appease the Turkish military, the US will have to disarm the Kurds. And the Kurds, even as they sign the deal with the devil, know it. The Kurds have no intention of relinquishing their weapons, their autonomy or their dream of an independent nation. The Turks have no intention of allowing it. The US cannot have it both ways.

Stay tuned.

This diplomatic minefield has been fobbed off on Colin Powell. If he doesn't feel a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades, he's not paying attention. Once this is all over, heads will roll, and the visceral enmity between Powell and Richard Perle is well-known. It's Powell, the Kissinger-style realist and brilliant bureaucrat, versus Perle, the racist, right-wing visionary. There are already whispers that Powell will be scapegoated after the war, and other rumors that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle will be handed walking papers, and Powell will run for VP.

This fragmentation is another material result of popular resistance around the world, and for some it was the goal–the political destruction of the Bush junta.

That objective is now within sight. What comes after remains to be seen.

While we have riveted our attention on the blazing guns, a quieter weapon of mass destruction has been unleashed against the US working class - a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich that will torch the tattered remains of our social infrastructure. The political crisis that is now almost certain in the wake of the war will settle on the United States.

Then there are the soldiers.

Bear in mind that these are still the most pampered soldiers in the world. Their morale was already eroded by waiting. They were already faced with basic erosions of benefits at home. The sense of dislocation due to the doctrinal shift under Rumsfeld (that translates to a lot of confusion and turbulence in day-to-day operations), to increases in operational tempo, to the tripling of average time deployed away from home in the last decade, are taking a toll. Divorces are filed. Homesickness. Superiors who are assholes are now constant companions. A substantial number of troops - particularly Black soldiers - who really see this as a job and not some deep patriotic commitment.

Now, with the war is going badly, as they say in the Army, shit rolls downhill, and when things go wrong at the top, there is a lot of blame-shifting and carrying on that percolates down.

On a cautionary note, I will mention the incident (about which I don't know much yet) of the soldier who fragged his officers. Hasan Karim Akbar, 31, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division apparently attacked his own tactical operations center in Kuwait with hand grenades. Akbar is Black and a convert to Islam, according to reports.

What we in the movement don't know could hurt us. I want to warn against the natural desire to turn this into a cause celebre. We don't know what Akbar's motives were, and the conditions simply do not yet exist for a Vietnam-style epidemic of fragging. Sharp us-versus-them class consciousness has not yet developed in the military and there appears to be zero sympathy for Akbar's attack in the armed forces. There are already murmurings across the right-wing web of purging the armed forces of "black muslims."

Rather than a being a catalyst for generalized class struggle in the military, the fragging will more likely result in polarization between Black and white, given the latent racism in the military that reflects all of American society. This will emerge over time, and must be navigated very delicately by the left. Before more-militant-than-thou types make this sergeant a hero or martyr, and they should do some investigation. When the facts are sorted out, we will have to reckon with them.

Social polarization of all sorts - outside the military - will emerge in the coming period. It has already started, with the competing street mobilizations of anti-war and pro-war forces. And there is polarization beginning within the anti-war movement as some forces argue for moral censure and others argue for disruption. This too presents a challenge for anti-war forces, and for anti-imperialist forces within the anti-war movement.

Part of developing a critical stance on these issues, and figuring out what our role is in the context of this war is understanding the connections and consequences of what we do here, what others do around the world, and what the regime continues to do. I, for one, still see the political destruction of the Bush government as a strategic priority.

But we have to ensure that our movement is thinking strategically as well, that we are not attacking our adversaries at their strong points but exploiting their weaknesses. We have to ensure that we can function in ways that are agile and often decentralized, even as we keep the same enemy in sight.

This means that the wing of the movement, as it moves toward disruption instead of protest, will have to carefully calculate its own tactics to ensure that - even as we hold the movement accountable and preserve our own goals and identities - we do not split the movement or detach ourselves from the masses. That means that audacity and patience must reside in the same space together. Now is a time for discipline.

One thing is clear. The counter- counter-propaganda war is vital. We must begin to aim incessant, clear, rigorous, systematic, and dispassionate logic at the Bush Junta's every thinner rationalizations.

Leadership is perceived as leader-like only as long as it is respected. The content of the leadership certainly helps determine whether it is accepted, but impressions are also critical. People will take leadership from someone who is wrong, but they balk at being led by someone who is ridiculous.

We can exploit the absurdities of this administration that are now reproducing like rats.

Waving around the Geneva Conventions when our POWs get put on camera, and we've been broadcasting footage of Iraqi prisoners on for days. Invoking a UN resolution to violate a UN charter. Rumsfeld's comment that, "The word evidence is a hard word." Examples are legion.

They are down, and we dare not let them back up.

I'm dusting off an old Bob Dylan record. Hard rain's a gonna fall.

--Stan Goff

Posted by Alfred Schein at March 31, 2003 09:02 PM