Yes, it had “won” largely meaningless victories—in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein’s helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995. On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand
up to American power, while also, in more minor operations, running afoul of Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993.
It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese Communist armies had entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950, and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces without being able to sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a “meat grinder” of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded. Yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States. In this way began the infamous body count of enemy dead.
The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American “success” in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called “the light at the end of the tunnel.” When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a “credibility gap” opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat, helping to stoke an antiwar movement.
This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein’s shattered military in 2003—the administration expected a “cakewalk” campaign that would “shock and awe” enemies throughout the Middle East—they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration’s Afghan operation in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, put the party line succinctly: “We don’t do body counts.” As the president finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had “made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team.” Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisers had planned out an opposites war on the home front (anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around), and that meant not offering official
counts of the dead that might stoke an antiwar movement—until, that is, frustration truly set in, as in Korea and Vietnam.
When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more a cap-stone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the U.S. military dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when “victory” (a word that the president still invoked fifteen times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn’t stop themselves. A frustrated President Bush expressed it this way: “We don’t get to say that—a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.”
Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations, and, in December 2006, the president, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing: “Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.”
It wasn’t, of course, that no one had been counting. The president, as we know from
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward, kept “his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]”—photographs with “brief biographies and personality sketches” of the “Most Wanted Terrorists” ready to be crossed off when U.S. forces took them out. The military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it did represent a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration that never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.
That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and, in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans—civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men—were dying in prodigious numbers.
The Charnel House of History
As it happened, others were also counting. Among the earliest of them, Iraq Body Count carefully added up Iraqi civilian deaths as documented in reputable media outlets. (Their estimate has over the years reached about 100,000—and, circumscribed by those words “documented” and “civilian,” doesn’t begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.) Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques, including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions, to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps twenty-six million. UN representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile—exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death—and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, were “internally displaced.”
Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country. But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known. One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should routinely be portrayed as a success, thanks to the Bush administration’s “surge” policy in 2007-08. Only a country—or a punditry or a military—incapable of facing the depths of destruction let loose could reach such a conclusion.
If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first-term fantasy about a pacified “Greater Middle East” and its late second-term vision of a facilitated “peace process” between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. The Bush administration’s Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in
effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of one trillion taxpayer dollars (but sure to be in the multitrillions when all is said and done), Bush’s mad “global war” simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a street-corner hustler. Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other people’s money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster. The laid off, the pensionless, the foreclosed, the suicides—imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them. And the price tag continues to soar.
Bernie Madoff ended up behind bars, but Bush administration officials will face no such accountability. Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt. All this was brought to us by a president who said the following in his first inaugural address: “I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility…to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.”
Bush ruled, we know, by quite a different code. Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar—of destruction.
Veni, vidi, vastavi…
I came, I saw, I devastated.
With Us or Against Us?
On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase “the war on terror.” On September 13, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.” We were, Bush said that day, in a state of “war.” In fact, we were already in “the first war of the twenty-first century.” As R. W. Apple Jr. of the
New York Times
reported, “[T]he Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism…or face the certain prospect of death and destruction.”
Stand with us against terrorism
—or else. That would be the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the United States would “rip [the bin Laden] network up” and “when we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism.”
A global assault on terrorism.
How quickly the president’s Global War on Terror was on the scene. And no nation was immune. On September 14, the news was leaked that “a senior State Department official” had met with “15 Arab representatives” and delivered a stiff “with us or against us” message: Join “an international coalition against terrorism” or pay the price. There would be no safe havens. The choice—as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would reportedly inform Pakistan’s intelligence director after the 9/11 attacks—was simple: Join the fight against al-Qaeda or “be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”
From that day to this, the Global War on Terror would be the organizing principle for the Bush administration as it shook off “the constraints,” loosed the CIA, and sent the U.S. military into action—as it went, in short, for the Stone Age jugular. The phrase “Global War on Terror,” while never quite catching on with the public, would become so familiar in the corridors of Washington that it would soon morph into one of the least elegant acronyms around (GWOT), sometimes known among neocons as “World War IV”—they considered the cold war as World War III—or by military men and administration officials, after Iraq devolved from fantasy blitzkrieg into disaster, as “the Long War.”
In the administration’s eyes, the GWOT was to be the key to the magic kingdom, the lever with which the planet could be pried open for American dominion. It gave us an interest everywhere. After all, as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke would say in January 2002, “The estimates are anywhere from 50 or 60 to 70 countries that have al Qaeda cells in them. The scope extends far beyond Afghanistan.” Administration officials, in other words, were already talking about a significant portion of existing states as potential targets. This was not surprising, since the GWOT was meant to create planetary free-fire zones. These al-Qaeda targets or breeding grounds, after all, had to be emptied. We were, as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials were saying almost immediately after 9/11, going to “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists. And any countries that got in the way had better watch out.
With us or against us, that was the sum of it, and terror was its measure. If any connection could be made—even, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a thoroughly bogus one—it immediately offered a compelling home-front explanation for possible intervention. The safety and security of Americans was, after all, at stake in every single place where those terrorist mosquitoes might be breeding. If you had the oil lands of the planet on your mind (as was true with Dick Cheney’s infamous Energy Task Force), then the threat of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, was a safe bet. If you wanted to fortify your position in new oil lands, then the ticket was to have the Pentagon move in, as in Africa, to help weak, possibly even failing, states prepare themselves against the forces of terror.
At home, too, you were for us or against us. Those few who opposed the Patriot Act, for instance, were obviously not patriots. The minority who claimed that you couldn’t be at “war” with “terror,” that what was needed in response to 9/11 was firm, ramped-up police action were simply laughed out of the room. In the kindliest light, they were wusses; in the worst light, essentially traitors. They lacked not only American redbloodedness, but a willingness to be bloody-minded. End of story.
In the wake of those endlessly replayed, apocalyptic-looking scenes of huge towers crumbling and near-mushroom-clouds of ash billowing upwards, a chill of end-time fear swept through the nation. War, whatever name you gave it, was quickly accepted as the obvious, commensurate answer. In a nation in the grips of the politics of fear, it seemed reasonable enough that a restoration of “security”—American security—should be the be-all and end-all globally. Everything, then, was to be calibrated against the successes of the GWOT.