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America's Fallujan Dystopia
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Monday, December 20 2004, 6:59:33 (CET)
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America's Fallujan Dystopia
by Tom Engelhardt

published by Tom Dispatch

America's Fallujan Dystopia

A week after the assault on Falluja began in early November, our military announced that the city had been secured -- at the cost of a thousand or more dead Iraqis and 51 American soldiers, articles about the "reconstruction" of Falluja soon began appearing in our papers and tales of fighting fell away. You had to turn to the inside pages and read deep into articles to discover by early December that, somehow, in secured Falluja, the fighting hadn't ended and another 20 Americans had died. Then all discussion of American casualties in Falluja itself disappeared, while greater numbers of casualties were suddenly reported more generally in al Anbar province (where Falluja is located), including 8 Marines killed on Sunday. On that day as well, missile-armed jets were once again called in to "pound" neighborhoods where insurgent holdouts were still clearly fighting tenaciously. "Although the Marines did not specify where or how their men died in al-Anbar, citing operational security," writes Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter, "a top officer there confirmed that efforts to pick through every house in Fallujah are plagued by ambushes and gun battles… [Lt. Col. Dan Wilson, deputy of operations for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallujah] emphasized that the number of attacks last week was 58 percent lower than during the assault on Fallujah, Nov. 4-11. ‘We have the insurgents on the run,' he said."

In the meantime, as Michael Schwartz recounts below, reports began to ooze out about an American plan to "reconstruct" Falluja by turning it into some kind of Orwellian (or do I mean Kafka-esque) mini-statelet of control. As some of the Iraqi resistance clearly wanted to Talibanize Falluja (and other cities in the Sunni heartland), so now it seems Americans want to create their own fantasy city along more familiarly Western and technological but no less draconian lines. Our President has long said that Iraq is the "central theater in the war on terrorism"; in this spirit, the wanton destruction associated with the jet, the Apache helicopter, and the Hellfire-missile armed Predator drone has been pitted competitively against the wanton destruction associated with the suicide car bomber and the IED in Iraq's heavily populated cities. Each of these weapons can be "targeted" -- against "terrorist safe havens" in one case, against occupation forces and their "collaborators" in another. But each is defined by the "collateral damage" -- dead civilians, the young and the old, noncombatants of every sort -- which in any city has to be part and parcel of their mission.

Now we see evidence that the extreme fantasies of the most extreme elements on both sides of this struggle have similarly been loosed to compete in the Iraqi rubble. It's a competition that offers subtle, almost farcical reminders of past Cold War competitions. Dystopian fantasies of a better (that is, more controlled) world, on both sides, are just that -- fantasies (though the results of trying to impose such fantasy constructs on a real-life population are bound to be devastating).

From the beginning, the American invasion and "liberation" of Iraq has been little but a set of fantasies concocted by dreamy imperialists inside Washington's Beltway, aided and abetted by exiled Iraqi tale-spinners who knew a group of suckers when they spotted one. Not surprisingly, then, almost any American postwar "plan" has proven to be no less fantastical. While touting Iraqi reconstruction, for instance, the Bush administration's representatives in Iraq have been largely incapable of reconstructing anything in areas in which the insurgency has strength (and little where it doesn't). So, don't expect the "reconstruction" of Falluja to be much more than a pottage of unrealizable fantasies either. But fantasies, especially dystopian ones, especially ones that are seriously meant to be imposed on a real-world population, can tell us a great deal about those who dream them up, most of it painful. The rest of our particular Fallujan fantasy I leave it to Michael Schwartz to analyze below. Let me instead turn briefly to American realities in Iraq.

While we chalk up our destructive "victories" in places like Falluja, it turns out that, as befits those fighting what is essentially a brutal guerrilla war against an occupying army, the rebels have been achieving victories of their own. We are trying to take back Sunni cities. They are trying, with significant success, to choke off major supply lines by constantly attacking vulnerable supply convoys. Almost two weeks ago, the 20 kilometer road from Baghdad International Airport to the capital's Green Zone was declared off limits first to British and then to American personnel who must now make it to town via helicopter. As Paul Rogers, geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, commented recently, "Thus, the highway that connects possibly the two most significant American locations in Iraq is now considered too precarious for US forces to use."

This week the Air Force announced that it was "sharply expanding its airlifts of equipment and supplies to bases inside Iraq to reduce the amount of military cargo normally hauled in ground convoys vulnerable to roadside bombings." This includes cargo going not just to major military bases, but to smaller and more remote ones as well. This is, of course, a far more expensive way to resupply than by truck (as anyone will realize who remembers, at an extreme, the Berlin Airlift of 1948) and so it represents a secret testimonial to the effectiveness of the Iraqi resistance -- as were the recent tour-of-duty extensions for American troops slated to leave Iraq that effectively upped our troop levels there close to 150,000.

In the meantime, let me just lay out some of the grim American figures for this war, the ones that (buried though they might often be) don't cede ground to anyone's fantasies. Last month, 136 Americans died while the battle for Falluja raged, the highest U.S. monthly death toll of the war. This month, with American combat deaths since the invasion passing 1,000, a marker little noted here, another 39 Americans have already died at December's not-quite-halfway point.

Overall 1,297 Americans have died so far in Iraq, a figure not in dispute. But it is also a deceptive figure because so many more soldiers, thanks to improved medical care and better body armor, are surviving their wounds -- a number, according to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, 17% higher than in Vietnam (and representing the greatest disparity between wounded and killed of any American war). This in turn means that many soldiers with wounds that would previously have killed them are coming home to exceedingly difficult lives. According to Raja Mishra of the Boston Globe, "US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars." The Pentagon has announced 9,844 wounded in Iraq, though it is calculating this in a highly restrictive way. The real figure, as the reliable antiwar.com website estimates it, is in the range of 15,000-20,000. According to Atul Gawande, the author of the report cited above, "At least as many US soldiers have been injured in combat in this war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first five years of the Vietnam conflict, from 1961 through 1965." (In addition, back at home, in a predictable pattern, the first vets from Iraq and Afghanistan are showing up at homeless shelters.)

That is one grim part of the picture of our overstretched military. In all, according to recent Pentagon data, one million Americans have been deployed to either the Iraqi or Afghan wars, one out of every three of them more than once -- a clear indication of the increasing strain the military is experiencing from an insurgency Bush administration strategists never even imagined possible. According to CBS's "60 Minutes," 5,500 U.S. troops, under the pressure of an increasingly unpopular war, have already deserted, while military recruitment figures are down. Elaine Monaghan of the British Times reports that "for the first time in a decade, the Army National Guard missed its recruitment target this year. Instead of signing up 56,000 people, it found 51,000." Ferment is growing in our all-volunteer military. Legal challenges are rising to the "semi-draft" of the National Guard and Reserves. There has been a rise in resignations of reserve officers, and a recent Army survey indicates that less than half of all soldiers are at the moment planning to re-up. It is in this context of increasing desperation that the decision to destroy Falluja took place; it is in this context that planning for the New Falluja has occurred -- and it shows.



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