Seymour Hersh: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?

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Hersh is one of my heroes in journalism, from his coverage of Vietnam on through to Iraq. He has either cornered the market on most of the useful covert sources since Deep Throat or he has a vivid imagination that both makes sense of things and is prophetic. His fall ’03 New Yorker article on ‘stovepiping’, Cheney’s castration of the intelligence machinery in the service of hearing what he wanted to hear to justify the invasion of Iraq was the single most important piece on dysadministration duplicity and its roots since the runup to the invasion. It presaged exactly what people now think Bush and Co. were up to with the ‘uranium lie’, but it was two years before Plamegate shaped the country’s perceptions.

More people should have listened to him then, but of course the country didn’t read The New Yorker then, and they don’t now, as he writes about the shape of our engagement in Iraq to come. He points out that the wdespread speculation that Bush will begin troop pullouts in the face of the growing unpopularity of the war at home may be thwarted if he perceives that a pullout will impede the war against the insurgency. Bush is impervious to political pressure given his sense of religious mission to bring democracy to Iraq. He disparages any information conflicting with his sense of the purpose and progress of the war and continues to live with the belief that the American people settled the issue of what they wanted in Iraq on election day 2004, and that he need not listen to the subsequent changes in public opinion. Hersh describes one illustrative encounter:

‘The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”’

The institutional Army is not conferred with for troop strength decisions. Given that there is no drive toward — I would say no possibility of — increasing troop strength, Army officials say in private — but do not dare do so publicly — that it would be impossible to stay the course in Iraq without current troops doing four or five tours of duty, with disastrous consequences for morale and competency. Pentagon commanders have shared their feelings with Rep. John Murtha for decades, and Murtha’s November 17th speech which so enraged the dysadministration was filled with devastating inside information. Murtha’s speech, predictably however, only strengthened Bush and Cheney’s resolve.

‘Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”’

Hersh reports that departing US troops will be replaced by American airpower to improve the combat capabilities of even the weakest Iraqi units and vastly decrease American casualties, at the expense of course of overall violence and Iraqi fatality levels. Count on the dysadministration to lie to the public again when it says it plans to diminish the war. Hersh dwells at length on how unhappy Air Force officials are about the idea that targeting decisions would devolve upon Iraqis and not Air Force forward air controllers. In urban areas where the insurgency is concentrated, precision laser-guided bombs must be used to avoid collateral damage, and these must be directed by lasers ‘painted’ on the target by ground units. Because there needs to be a ‘hot read’ on the ground, targets cannot be identified in advance in a preflight briefing and because the Air Force needs to maintain radio silence, there is no confirmation between the spotters and the mission pilots. “The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify. And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”” The Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire has created “impatience and resentment” within the military. “There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.”

Things will be especially ugly if Iraqi counter-insurgency efforts continue to operate as the US Army and Marines have been doing, and have presumably been training them to do — plowing through Sunni stronghold areas on search-and-destroy sweeps. Casualties would go up with injudicious use of airpower, and political scientists who study airpower say it would not necessarily be any more feasible to put a lid on the insurgency with bombing than it has been on the ground. But

“[t]he Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate political goal after the December elections is to show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.”

Hersh reflects on the fact that American and British support is solidifying around Iyad Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister, for the December elections, perhaps with the other secular Shiite leader Ahmed Chalabi in coalition. Allawi would make a show of asking America to leave but allow continuing Special Forces covert operations, including expanding operations to Syria. Hersh’s sources describe a covert Special Forces unit ordered under stringent cover to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency over the Syrian border. The other consequence of a rapid US withdrawal will, of course, be the furtherance of the civil war which, although underreported, is already in full swing.