The American Way Of War Part 7

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national security disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say: Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.

SIX.

Obama's War.

How Safe Do You Want to Be?

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death-so many lives snuffed out so regularly for years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They're so repet.i.tive that, once you've started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs-so many "insurgents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or "anti-Afghan forces" killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area insists that those dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral. (A recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq war, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that air strikes are notoriously good at taking out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated, women and children, and of all methods, including suicide and car bombs, airpower "killed the most civilians per event.") Then come the standard-issue denials from U.S. military officials or coalition spokespeople: those killed were insurgents, and the intelligence information on which the strike or raid had been based was accurate. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step. Admittedly, there's been some change in the a.s.sertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern inst.i.tuted by American forces. Now, a.s.sertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgment, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. This new tactic has been a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself-those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night-continues.

Consider just one incident that went almost uncovered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence France-Presse account, in a raid in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first reported a small success: four "armed militants" killed. It took next to no time, however, for those four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan National Army artillery commander named Awal Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in another province at the time. According to the report, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves against armed men they evidently believed to be robbers or bandits, included Awal Khan's "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded." The report continues, "After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen." She survived, but her fetus, "hit by bullets," didn't. Khan's wife worked at a school supported by the international aid organization CARE, which issued a statement strongly condemning the raid and demanding that "international military forces operating in Afghanistan are held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country."

In accordance with its new policy, the United States issued an apology:Further inquiries into the Coalition and [Afghan National Security Forces] ANSF operation in Khost earlier today suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported.... Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe that this family was involved with militant activities and that they were defending their home against an unknown threat.... "We deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this precious family. Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy and we will ensure the surviving family members are properly cared for," said Brig. Gen. Michael A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

A U.S. military spokesman added, "There will undoubtedly be some financial a.s.sistance and other types of a.s.sistance [to the survivors]."

But the family quite reasonably wanted more than a press-release apology. The grieving husband, father, and brother said, "I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them," adding, "[T]he Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people." Afghan president Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation for the deaths and asked that such raids and air strikes be drastically curtailed.

What Your Safety Is Worth.

All of this, however, is little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan, civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as "collateral damage," increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the true collateral activity.

Pretending that these "mistakes" will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all, "mistake" after "mistake" continues to be made. The first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001, when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only 2 survivors. At least 4 more have been blown away since then. And count on it, there will be others.

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a striking rise over the previous year's figure, of which 828 were ascribed to U.S., NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. Given the difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any figures like these are likely to be significant undercounts.

By now, we've filled up endless "towers" with dead Afghan civilians. And that's clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S. forces are "surging" into the southern and eastern parts of the country, while the CIA's drone war on the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever-rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It's being done, so we've been told, for our safety and security here in the United States. The former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11. And President Obama continues to play the 9/11 card heavily. As he reportedly put it, he is not "'naive about how dangerous this world is' and...wakes up every day and goes to bed every night thinking and worrying 'about how to keep the American people safe.'"

Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two U.S. emba.s.sy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn't have cared less about al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, that the "Defense Department" imagined its job to be "power projection" abroad, not protecting American sh.o.r.es (or air s.p.a.ce), and that our intelligence agencies were in chaos. So those towers came down and rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us, we invaded Afghanistan ("no safe havens for terrorists") and began plans for "regime change" in Iraq and beyond. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security, and simultaneously turned "security" into a lucrative endeavor.

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited, or the money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper, "Weeki Wachee Mermaids in Terrorists' Cross Hairs?" It began:Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids?

It staggers the imagination.

Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to "harden the target" by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason....

Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be "security breaches," he said.

But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds.

This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Terror, while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling economic insecurity.

Let's for a moment a.s.sume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What's your "safety" really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan's family for a blanket guarantee of your safety, and not just his family, but all those Afghan one-year-olds, all those wedding parties that are-yes, they really are-going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

If, in 1979, as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars. Now, three decades later, it's possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans.

Maybe it's time to put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and d.i.c.k, is now in the process of breaking us. Even if d.i.c.k Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there's no evidence they did), in doing so, look what they brought down around our ears-and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions, then, in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan's to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else for years, even decades, to come? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

General "Manhunter"

Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So his appointment by President Obama to run the Afghan War seems to signal an administration going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy," doubling down on the bad decisions of his predecessor.

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive a.s.sa.s.sination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. Cheney returned the favor by giving McChrystal a ringing endors.e.m.e.nt for position of Afghan War commander: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan."

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush touted him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded in Iraq had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." (Since some of the task force's members were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.) In the Bush years, McChrystal was extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command, not to speak of a role in the cover-up of the circ.u.mstances surrounding the death of army ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman. The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak-that is, expanded-war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate...of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blow-back in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches"-to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words-that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the firstborn child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

But none of this matters to what remains of mainstream news a.n.a.lysis. The press establishment has had a long-term love affair with McChrystal. Back in 2006, when Bush first touted him, Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'" More recently, in that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius claimed that CentCom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "a.s.sembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?

When it comes to pure hagiography, however, the prize goes to Elisabeth b.u.miller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint. Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who...usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod.... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists.... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians." The quotes b.u.miller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal...I think of no body fat."

Above all, General McChrystal was praised for being "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He would, as b.u.miller and Thom Shanker reported in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we were a.s.sured, liked operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite said this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, his mentality was undoubtedly a GWOT one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."

McChrystal's appointment, then, represented a decision by Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the china shop. The Post's Ignatius even compared McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concluded his paean to all of them with this pa.s.sage: "Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway." McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

Of course, there were now so many bulls in this particular china shop that smashing was increasingly the name of the game. The early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, resulted in a surprisingly sweeping expansion of the Af-Pak War. President Obama has, in fact, opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal was the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General David McKiernan believed that, "as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas." Not so Stan McChrystal. The idea that the "responsibilities" of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War "ended at the border with Pakistan," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times reported, was now considered part of an "old mind-set." McChrystal represented those "fresh eyes" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt pointed out, "Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border."

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation after escalation. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, leading to further expansions of what is already "Obama's war."

Obama and the Imperial Presidency.

Let's face it. Barack Obama did not win an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States, which means that he is head honcho for the globe's single great garrison state that now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war. He is today the proprietor of U.S. bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all of the above) in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a major air force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call "the Greater Middle East." Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others, like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases.

When he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest emba.s.sy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as a thousand "diplomats." As it happens, this project wasn't just an aberration of the Bush era. Another emba.s.sy, just as gigantic, expected to house "a large military and intelligence contingent," will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar emba.s.sy. Each of these command centers will, a.s.sumedly, anchor the U.S. presence in the Greater Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander in chief of eleven aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol the planet's sea-lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that's what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least sixteen squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other's throats. They have a c.u.mulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the idea of "intelligence" that it is willing to support sixteen sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that's not even counting various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.) The new president will preside over a country that now ponies up almost half the world's total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the Bush years.

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Inst.i.tution whining that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to "maintain" U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7 to 8 percent per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which forward looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how to turn "programmable matter" into future Transformer-like weapons of war.

While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy, health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so from the first post-election transitional moments. His key economic players and advisers are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or proteges like Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that, in the 1990s, led directly to global economic catastrophe.

As for foreign policy, had the November election results been different, Obama's top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National Security Adviser James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates is someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton is a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama's key foreign policy figures and advisers are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.

The Dream Team in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama didn't just inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn't just sitting atop it. He's actively using it. He's wielding power. In foreign policy terms, Obama is settling in-and doing so in largely predictable ways. He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He chose to appoint as his Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal, who from 2003 to 2008 ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted a.s.sa.s.sination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were a.s.sa.s.sinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and turn over their own personal enemies as well). Although he's being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and "protect" the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is "counterterrorism."

The team McChrystal a.s.sembled to lead his operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan tells you what you really need to know. It's filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra thousand special operations troops are being "quietly" dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about five thousand. The special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan twenty-one thousand troops and advisers (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisers, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to the New York Times,has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many special operations veterans....

[He] is a.s.sembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside special operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like the new mega-emba.s.sy in Pakistan, this figure tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in which the planet's super-garrison state fights its wars.

That team of Spartans, according to the New York Times, is being formed with, minimally, a three-year time horizon (though the actual Spartans needed only three hundred warriors in total at the battle of Thermopylae). This in itself is striking. After all, the Afghan War started in November 2001. So when the shortest possible Afghan tour of duty of the four hundred is over, the war will have been going on for more than ten and a half years-and no one dares to predict that, three years from now, the war will actually be at an end. If we are more honest, the figure cited should be not one decade, but three. After all, our Afghan adventure really began in 1980, when, in the jihad against the Soviets, we were supporting some of the very same fundamentalist figures now allied with the Taliban and fighting against us in Afghanistan-just as, once upon a time, we looked positively upon the Taliban; just as, once, we looked positively upon Saddam Hussein, who was for a while seen as our potential bulwark in the Middle East against the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably enough, only Iran has steadily retained its position as our regional enemy over these decades.) What a record, then, of blood and war, of great power politics and imperial hubris, of support for the heinous (including various fundamentalist groups and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes who remain our allies to this day). What a tale of imperial power frittered away and treasure squandered. Truly, Rudyard Kipling would have been able to do something with this.

As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of folly. I'm no Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry tale has taken up almost half of my lifetime with no end in sight.

In the meantime, our new president has loosed the manhunters. His manhunters. This is where charisma disappears into the charnel house of history.

A War That No Longer Needs a Justification.

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down to 30,000 or 40,000 and housed in newly built, permanent military bases largely away from the country's urban areas. This was to be part of what now is called a "strategic partnership" in the Middle East. Almost five and a half years later, the United States still has approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq. Top administration officials are now talking about "modestly accelerated" rates of troop withdrawal, if all goes well. This is what pa.s.ses for progress in Iraq today.

To understand the real prospects for withdrawal, we would do well to consider some interlocking histories in Iraq.

A history of the bicycle in Iraq: In imagistic terms, the Bush administration biked into Iraq. Top Washington officials loved the idea that they were training the eager Iraqi kid in how to ride the bike of democracy. President George W. Bush talked regularly about the moment when we might take the "training wheels" off the Iraqi bike and let the little fella ride into the democratic sunset on his own. His secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about the difficult moment when a parent has to decide whether to take that steadying hand off the bike seat and let the tyke pedal on his own. "You're running down the street," as he put it in 2004, "holding onto the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off, they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it."

Some years later, after kid and parent had made it around one of those "corners" they were always turning-on the way to various "tipping points"-and found themselves instead at the "precipice," after Rumsfeld had, in fact, been asked to resign by his president, he wrote a final memo to the White House, the last of his famed "snowflakes," on "new options" in Iraq. In it, he suggested, "Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start 'taking our hand off the bicycle seat'), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country."

Rumsfeld's tenure could qualify as the longest biking lesson in history and still, it seemed, the Iraqis couldn't do without that hand on the seat. Even when his president followed him two years later, their imagery of choice remained behind. In March 2009, for instance, the chief American military spokesperson in Iraq, Major General David G. Perkins, discussing a possible drawdown of American forces, said, "We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point."

Colonel Timothy R. Reese, an American adviser to the Iraqi military's Baghdad command, created a stir in summer 2009 in a memorandum leaked to the New York Times in which he also used the metaphor. While the official Obama-era target for an American withdrawal remained then (as in the last months of the Bush era) the end of 2011, Reese urged that all U.S. forces be pulled out on an expedited schedule by August 2010. In this, he resurrected a Vietnam-era suggestion of Vermont Republican senator George Aiken by headlining his memo: "It's Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home."

And there, in the midst of a generally scathing a.s.sessment of the deficiencies of the Iraqi military (and the Iraqi government), was that bicycle again:The SA [Bush-era Security Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq] outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, a.n.a.logous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels.... We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current compet.i.tors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.

It just goes to show. Under the pressure of war, images that won't go away, like people, have the capacity to change. The Iraqi child with the training wheels was now, according to Reese, old enough to enter an actual bike race.

Who exactly will bike out of Iraq under the Obama withdrawal plan, however, still remains to be defined. After all, at the end of his memo, the most urgent call for withdrawal from Iraq yet to emerge from the higher levels of the U.S. military, Colonel Reese offered his version of a full-scale American withdrawal. "During the withdrawal period," he wrote, "the USG [United States government] and GOI [government of Iraq] should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it should not include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise." Moreover, his proposal was, with rare exceptions, rejected out of hand by all and sundry, in and out of the military high command and in Washington. In other words, even the most Xtreme American biker of this moment still imagines us in Iraq forever and a day.

A history of experts on Iraq: Once upon a time, the playing field, the stadium, and sports events were regularly compared to war, even considered suitable preparation for actual battle. Ever since the First Gulf War, this has been reversed. Now, war-or at least its coverage-is based on sports. And just as, sooner or later, the smoothest players and savviest coaches depart the "field of battle" for the press box and the TV spotlight, for pre-game, game, and post-game commentary, so the commanders of the last war now leave the battlefield for the TV booth and offer us their expertise on the next war. As former Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy has been paid to discuss the decisions of his brother Stan, coach of the Orlando Magic, in ESPN playoff commentary, so the commanders of our previous wars cover our next wars and their commanders, possibly even officers once under their own command.

We now live with the ESPN version of war, including slo-mo replays, and the logos, interactive charts, and fabulous graphics of the sports world. And once anointed as experts, our John Maddens of war, like their sports counterparts, never go away. In April 2008, for instance, New York Times journalist David Barstow wrote a front-page expose focused on the many retired military officers who had been hired as media consultants for the Iraq War. As a group, they made up, he suggested, a "kind of media Trojan horse," because most of them were marching to a carefully organized Pentagon campaign of disinformation on the war. In addition, most of them had ties, not acknowledged on the air, "to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to a.s.sess."

Barstow's piece concluded:To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military a.n.a.lysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post- Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those a.n.a.lysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance.

Barstow named names and made connections. Those names included, for example, retired air force general and Fox News senior military a.n.a.lyst Thomas G. McInerney, retired army general and NBC/MSNBC military a.n.a.lyst Montgomery Meigs, and retired army general and NBC/MSNBC military a.n.a.lyst Barry R. McCaffrey. After the expose appeared, though, they seem to have just carried right on with their media duties.

Much of the print media has similarly adhered to the principle of once-an-expert-always-an-expert. For instance, on the fifth anniversary of Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq, the New York Times decided to ask a range of "experts on military and foreign affairs" to look back on that fiasco-and then rounded up the usual suspects. Of the nine experts it came up with, six were intimately involved in that catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed-Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, and Frederick Kagan (enthusiasts all), Richard Perle (aka "the prince of darkness"), L. Paul Bremer (the administration's first viceroy in Baghdad), and General Paul D. Eaton (who trained Iraqi troops in the early years of the occupation). Notably absent was anyone who had seriously opposed the invasion. The closest was Anne-Marie Slaughter, a "liberal hawk" who wrote a supportive New York Times op-ed on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began, headlined, "Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N."

The Times anniversary spread appeared in March 2008. Jump ahead a year-plus and the Times once again launched what undoubtedly was a mighty search for experts who might consider Colonel Reese's suggestion that we take our hand off that Iraqi bike-and came up with a typical crew of seven: One, retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to General David Petraeus, former top U.S. commander in Iraq, now Centcom commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A second, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, was also an adviser to Petraeus and had most recently been on the "team" that advised General Stanley A. McChrystal in his review of Afghan War strategy. A third, Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was on the same McChrystal team. A fourth, Thomas Ricks, former Washington Post military reporter and now senior fellow at Nagl's center, was the author of the bestselling book The Gamble, a highly complimentary account of Petraeus's role in Iraq in which Nagl is, of course, a figure. (Ricks, by the way, has long made it clear that he believes we will be in that country for years to come.) A fifth, Kori Schake, now at the Hoover Inst.i.tution, was a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush. A sixth, Jonathan Morgenstein, was a senior national security policy fellow at Third Way, another Washington think tank, and "was a military transition team adviser to the Iraqi Army." Not surprisingly, all six of these experts, with the most modest of caveats, dismissed Reese's suggestion out of hand, agreeing that it was in no one's interest to expedite an American departure. ("The pace of progress in Iraq will be slow, but we can't throw up our hands and walk away," as one of them commented.) Only a seventh expert, author and retired colonel Douglas Macgregor, agreed with Reese.

Consider that a little history of expertise about our recent wars. There's a corollary. If you're not anointed an expert, you're never likely to be one. Among those automatically disqualified for expertise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of the catastrophe that ensued before it happened. Disqualified above all were any of those antiwar types who actually took to the streets of cities across the United States by the hundreds of thousands before the invasion to raise homemade placards to its un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their very stance indicated a bias that evidently disqualified them on the spot.

Someone-I can't claim to remember who-once made the point that within any administration you could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a dove and right. When it comes to TV war commentators, that seems to hold true as well.

It would, of course, be easy enough to imagine the antiwar equivalent of those generals-as-a.n.a.lysts. In our world of expertise, though, it's unthinkable.

A history of the Iraqi Air Force: For all the talk of "taking the training wheels off," here is an interesting fact: Iraqis will not be able to defend their own airs.p.a.ce for the foreseeable future. The Iraqi Air Force will remain the U.S. Air Force for some time to come, which undoubtedly means the United States will be running the giant airbase it built at Balad, as well. The Iraqis have said they want American F-16s. Unfortunately, according to New York Times reporter Elisabeth b.u.miller, General Odierno, the top American commander in that country, has claimed that "it would be impossible to build and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the Iraqis were able to afford them." And even in that unlikely event, Iraq has no trained pilots to fly them. In other words, years of work still remain on the horizon for the U.S.A.F. in Iraq.

Fortunately, Aviation Week reported that the Iraqis have a plan to overcome their problem. It's a "three-phase, 11-year improvement plan" that will move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few dozen F-16s by "the middle of the next decade" (in case you were wondering just how long the U.S.A.F. is likely to be filling in).

Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We want to leave Iraq. Maybe not as quickly as Colonel Reese would like, but really we do. President Obama has made that clear. Unfortunately, the Iraqis just won't let us. Imagine! They weren't even thinking about an air force until recently-and what would a country in the Middle East be if, as b.u.miller points out, it had "no way to intercept another jet that invades the country's airs.p.a.ce." Just who might invade Iraqi airs.p.a.ce remains a subject for speculation.