Political Views,

George's Inferno

And Other Images from a No-Name War
By Tom Engelhardt

Look at the polls. When Gallup's pollsters go out to ask Americans about the Bush administration and Iraq, they frame their questions this way: "Do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, or not?"; "Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war with Iraq?"; "Who do you think is currently winning the war in Iraq?" Mind you, never the Iraq War -- like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Gulf War -- but the war in Iraq.

The CBS and NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters sometimes use that formulation too, as does Zogby (which has also used, "the war against insurgents."). On the other hand, the pollsters at the Pew Research Center, like those at ABC/Washington Post, CBS, Newsweek, the Associated Press/Ipsos, Time, Fox News, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal all like to put the phrase "the situation in Iraq" into their questions. Pew also employs: "the U.S. military effort in Iraq." Sometimes in follow-up questions, pollsters simply speak of "the war" (always lower-cased) or, as with Harris pollsters back in November 2005, just "the situation."

As a further experiment, go to the Pentagon's website, click on "transcripts of news briefings," "transcripts of background briefings," and "speeches," and put into the search window "Iraq War." Curiously, what comes out of the archival depths of our five-sided, war-fighting headquarters is essentially nothing, or rather the words, "Iraq" and "war" in the same paragraph or even sentence but quite unconnected -- as in "Iraq" in one place and the Cold War, the War on Terror, or the Long War somewhere in the vicinity. At best, you can find our garrulous Secretary of Defense at a news briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, telling reporters that our military is "able, at a moment's notice, to respond to the pleas of millions across the world, while at the same time fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe." And here's an odd thing: As far as the Pentagon search engine can tell, "Iraq War" doesn't come up normally even in the questions reporters ask Rumsfeld and other Pentagon figures, though "the situation" obviously plays a major roll in Pentagon press briefings and announcements.

Or give a shot to the Iraq part of the U.S. Central Command's website (still headlined, by the way, Operation Iraqi Freedom) where two references pop up: one as part of a question from a Stars and Stripes reporter in a news briefing ("Throughout the Iraq war, we've been relying fairly heavily on the National Guard."); the other to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Or, just for the heck of it, check out the White House website which archives presidential and vice-presidential speeches, announcements, press conferences, radio addresses, and statements. The top item that comes up there is this: "President Addresses Nation, discusses Iraq, War on Terror." Pretty typical, it turns out.

The President's most recent major address -- to the American Legion (given after the Golden Mosque's dome was blasted to smithereens in Samarra) -- not surprisingly uses "war" twenty times and yet never directly in conjunction with events in Iraq, even though "freedom's progress" there is up for discussion, as are "our efforts in Iraq," as is "our clear strategy of victory in Iraq" (though strangely not in the Iraq War or even the Iraq war, no less the war in Iraq). What we're doing there, it turns out, is "working to defeat… every terrorist working to stop freedom in Iraq." Our goal is to make Iraq in victory our "strong ally" in the only war in town -- not the one in Iraq, even though the President that evening was grimly assuring his audience that "this is a moment of choosing for the Iraqi people" -- but the "war on terror." Only in the context of that great "global war," that multigenerational conflict which, according to the Vice President's office, gives the President all those commander-in-chief powers as a "unitary executive," can he say in no uncertain terms, "[W]e remain a nation at war."

The Vietnam War was known as such from very early on. (Of course, it helped that John F. Kennedy was pushing it as his counterinsurgency war of choice against the Soviets.) Similarly, while the war the elder Bush fought against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was dubbed Operation Desert Storm, it quickly became known as the Gulf War. That this war has no name -- and that no one even thinks to comment on it -- has represented a quiet success for the Bush administration.

In not naming the "situation in Iraq," the media and the public seem to have followed in the administration's footsteps. You can search the press, for instance, almost in vain for "the Iraq War," and when, on occasion, you do find it, that "war" is always lower-cased. Nor do people speak, say, of ‘Raq, the way in the last years of Vietnam, Americans (following the lead of the soldiers there) spoke of ‘Nam. In fact, though we now know, according to a unique Zogby poll just taken, that 72% of American soldiers stationed in Iraq today want the United States to "exit" within a year (over half within six months, and over a quarter tomorrow), if they have their own name or nickname for the conflict, we are blissfully ignorant of it.

War without a Name, Name without a War

The lack of a name for our "effort" in Iraq should not be seen as some kind of bizarre oversight, or even a reflection of the confusing or nondescript nature of that conflict. After all, the Bush administration regularly puts great time and effort into naming things. It has, for instance, created various Orwellian names for its programs in a game of opposites -- the Clear Skies Act, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and so on. And much thought went into what to label the actual invasion of Iraq. After, at least one rumored false step -- Operation Iraqi Liberation (with its obviously unacceptable acronym) -- it was dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), a name the President has proudly used many times since, but which officially was over when he landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 and declared "major combat operations" ended.

Not naming something can be as much an act as naming it. Nearly three years have passed since George Bush stood under a "mission accomplished" banner on the deck of that aircraft carrier. Almost 2,300 Americans have now been killed and almost 17,000 wounded in Iraq; untold numbers of Iraqis -- undoubtedly well over 100,000 -- have died since our invasion, while families and livelihoods have been destroyed and, ever more commonly, neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and religious institutions damaged or destroyed. The country itself has been turned into an impoverished failed state, riddled with terrorists, filled with sectarian or religious militias, bled by a still growing insurgency, and threatened by ethnic and religious divisions which seem to widen by the week. Its government exists, to the degree it does, inside a fortified zone in a capital city that itself seems beyond normal rule, and whose streets are controlled by a variety of armed groups, militias, police, and gangs. Even for the Americans, the now-famous "Pottery Barn rule" of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, "You break it, you own it," is proving surprisingly untrue. The Americans seem to control little but the Green Zone and the giant military bases they occupy. And all for an unnamed conflict.

If, by some miracle, the archives of the Bush administration are finally pried open, I have no doubt we'll discover, as with so much else that was named by these officials, that the decision not to name "the situation in Iraq" was carefully considered and fully discussed. After all, they (and various neocons supporters in or on the edges of the government) have spent parts of the last few years constantly experimenting with names for the "war" that counts for them: The Global War on Terror, acronymed GWOT, aka World War IV, the Millennial War, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, and (recently enshrined in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review as well as attributed to Centcom commander and popularizer Gen. John Abizaid)) the Long War.

Once, to the suprise of this administration's top officials, a home-grown Sunni (and from time to time Shia) insurgency "situation" took hold (as American intelligence agencies had warned them it would in 2003), they would be very clear and precise in their non-naming practices. Iraq (like Afghanistan) was not to be a war at all. It was -- and the President, Vice President, and other key officials would regularly reiterate this in speeches, press conferences, and other appearances -- only a "theater" or, at best, the "central theater" in their Global War on Terror which, as the Bush liked to say dramatically, was being "fought on many battlefronts." In his American Legion speech, for instance, he spoke of Iraq and Afghanistan as but two "fronts in this war on terror."

Just as, in administration statements in 2002-2003, the coming invasion of Iraq was repeatedly linked to the 9/11 attacks (and Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qaeda), so Iraq was now to be put forever in a subsidiary relationship to their global war of choice, the one against the 9/11 terrorists. This was the clear line of the administration -- that Iraq not be singled out as a war in itself.

As a result, we have the following strange "situation." The most obvious war we're fighting goes unnamed, as does the lower-level conflict in Afghanistan which no one even thinks of calling our second Afghan War (the first being the one we organized and funded against the Soviets in the 1980s when Osama bin Laden and his ilk were our allies). On the other hand, GWOT, a "war" that bears no resemblance to anything ever historically recognized as "war," is constantly being given that name. Turn on your TV any night and you'll get a report on the situation in Iraq amid a plethora of stories about the "war on terror" and its domestic fallout.

Recently, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post visited Patrol Base Swamp, "the forwardmost American position in the so-called Triangle of Death southwest of Baghdad" and offered this quote from Sgt. Chad Wendel of the 101st Airborne Division on fighting Sunni insurgents: "It's like trying to track down a bunch of ghosts." That line that could have come straight out of Vietnam or perhaps a host of other counter-guerrilla wars. But, in fact, there is no more ghostly "war" than the President's war on terror, fought against neither army, nor state, not even scattered guerrilla forces. It is the ultimate asymmetric conflict between the superpower that has the most advanced military on the planet and a scattered movement that is little short of virtual (and whose most imposing presence, when terror bombs don't go off, is on-line). Think of us, then, as fighting a war without a name and a name without a war.

Naming through Images

There is, however, one way in which "the situation in Iraq" has indeed been named, after a fashion -- and that's been through vivid images which seem to well up relatively spontaneously from this administration (and the military) and then are ratified by group use. So, along with various old-fashioned "struggles" for and marches of freedom or freedom's progress, often cited by the President, there was, early on, an urge to use a homier (and revealingly patronizing) image to capture our situation in Iraq. What we were doing there had nothing to do with war or, for that matter, occupation. Like any good parent, we were simply teaching an inexperienced child how to ride a bike. This was assumedly the bike of democracy. So, for instance, the President assured Republican congressional representatives back in May 2004 (according to a participant in the meeting) that it was "time to take the training wheels off… The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward"; while, on the subject of getting Iraq "straightened out," Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told American troops in March of that year: "[The Iraqis are] learning, and you're running down the street holding on to 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."

At about the same time, a second image caught the fancy of American officials -- "putting an Iraqi face" on events in Iraq. This was at a moment when they were resisting another kind of naming -- calling our occupation of that country an "occupation." The image itself, widely used, was both revelatory and oddly blunt. An Iraqi mask was to be continually placed over the actual face of Iraq, which was us. So, for example, when Saddam was finally taken by American forces in December 2003, Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times wrote:

"A decision was made early on that the capture of Mr. Hussein would need an Iraqi face, said [Gary Thatcher, the director of strategic communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority], a stipulation that Mr. Bush felt strongly about, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Sunday at a briefing. ‘Iraqis were going to be making the announcement no matter what,' Mr. Thatcher said. 'This was overall an Iraqi victory. It was obviously going to mean a great deal to the Iraqis.'"

As late as May 2005, John Burns of the Times explained the anonymous American military sources in a story of his this way:

"By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put ‘an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans. That policy has been questioned recently by senior Americans in Iraq, who say Iraqi commanders have failed to step forward, leaving a news vacuum that has allowed the insurgents' successful attacks, not their failures, to dominate news coverage."

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