08/25/10 – Hannah Gurman – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm not a cool guy anymore.
It's just like it ever was before.
I took a look at all the signs.
Then rolled it over in my mind.
The feelings I could not finish became a bitter pill.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
What was I thinking of?
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Hannah Gurman.
She is an assistant professor at NYU's Gallatin School, and she is right now working on a book about the history of counterinsurgency in American foreign policy, which, wow, that must go all the way back to Shays' Rebellion or something.
Also, she's got these great articles at Salon.com.
Changing generals changes nothing in Afghanistan, and the subject of today's interview, the Iraq withdrawal, an Orwellian success.
Welcome to the show, Hannah.
How are you?
Good.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us here today.
So, the narrative versus the reality of the Iraq war.
They are quite different things from each other, aren't they?
Yes, certainly.
Well, according to the narrative, which I think I call the surge narrative, we have basically left Iraq successfully, and we have also left Iraq.
That narrative began as early as 2006 when Petraeus came in to take over what was really a disaster in Iraq.
And so we have many improvements in security now, though I would put many caveats on that in light of recent violence in the recent months.
But the story that we're not really getting is, in addition to the recent violence, what is the picture in Iraq for residents of Iraq?
How are they living?
What is the political situation?
What is their access to resources?
And what do they see on a daily basis?
That is the narrative that we're not getting, and I think by almost every measure we haven't left Iraq as a success.
Well, you know, I guess it's the George Carlin in me.
Maybe it's the George Orwell in me.
I guess when I was a kid and I read it, and there's the scene where his friend, who's totally into it, is really happy, and he's going, hey, guess what, the 11th version of the Newspeak Dictionary is out, and it's got fewer words than ever.
Man, it's awesome.
And so I've always been interested in how people can be manipulated simply by language, and it seems to me like the way they did it with the surge was first they coined the slogan, the surge is working, and they repeated that 700 million times, and then they changed that at some point in there.
There was a little gray area to the surge worked, but the finishing touch on it is going on right now, and it's ever since they fired McChrystal, and whenever they discuss General Petraeus, his first name now is fresh from his wonderful success in Iraq, General Petraeus is on his way now to Afghanistan.
So Iraq isn't even the topic of discussion.
The topic of discussion is Petraeus is on his way to Afghanistan, but his name now is heroic success in Iraq.
Yeah, and it is interesting that Obama ran against the Iraq war, but once he became the president and assumed the burden of that war, Iraq had to be a success for many reasons, partly because Petraeus became the man that he put into Afghanistan, and also it became something he had to do in order to end the war in Iraq.
So there's a lot of ways in which the Obama administration adopted the surge narrative, even though it was something that Obama ran against as late, really, as 2008.
Well, in a way, I don't mean to assume that the guy's an honest, he's not, he's the president, but even if he was, it would really be a steep hill to climb for him to say, no, the surge didn't work, okay?
Petraeus showed up at the end of a civil war and helped, well, all sides, I guess, were really the bad guys, but he helped some of the bad guys win over the other ones.
Big deal.
He didn't win nothing.
That would be, you know, the point, but he's not going to sit here and, you know, by way of a media that has never taken the time to explain who's who in Iraq at all and sit there and use them as the vessel to explain who's who and why it's really not true.
You know, it would be politically impossible to try to challenge this narrative now, from his position, anyway.
And it is interesting to think, though, to parse, I think it would be a very difficult thing to do, but interesting to consider, where does Obama stand actually?
There is the political expediency argument, and then there is this question of whether, in the language of C. Wright Mills, whether Obama is really a victim of or a party to this thinking that C. Wright Mills called the military metaphysics in America, which for Mills was a way of describing how really the military machine or the war machine in the U.S. that dictates American foreign policy that is in many ways controlled by the corporate elite as well as the military elite and really, really diminishes any sort of civilian presence in foreign policy.
And, yeah, you know, it's interesting.
You could really make the case, right, that the empire is the Pentagon and that they still let us hold elections and have these guys in suits stand up there to cloak themselves in the legitimacy of the old constitution and that kind of thing, and that Obama really is just a puppet.
Makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if at this point, I think in some ways we have to leave that to historians.
We don't really know what Obama's motivations are, but you can certainly see that there is more continuity than difference in Iraq with respect to the George Bush administration and the Obama administration.
Yeah, well, and the thing is, though, I don't mean to make any excuses for the guy.
I think, you know, I never really did accept the premise that he represented hope or change or anything in the first place.
But he certainly at least is smart enough to be just by default wise enough to see how wrong the Bush revolution was.
And he is the guy in the chair.
And if it was me, I would just start pardoning people and bringing troops home.
And so he could do that.
All he's got to do is put ink on paper to undo a great many things, and he has not done any of those things.
So, you know, puppet or not, tool of the people who put him there or not, he's still the one at the desk.
Yeah, and by every public opinion poll in Iraq, there is evidence that the Iraqi populace wants the U.S. to leave.
So the question of what the 50,000 advise and assist troops are doing really hasn't been asked of the Iraqi people whether they actually want them there.
Well, right.
Yeah, that's not even part of the question at all, is it?
We could talk about Iraq for a year without addressing what the people of Iraq want.
That's funny.
Yeah, well, you're totally right.
And also, of course, they never define what success is anyway.
I mean, we know that the Pentagon and the neoconservatives at the Project for a New American Century, et cetera, plan to keep Iraq forever to at least, you know, have it as a staging ground for future wars in other places and whatever.
That's what they wrote about a decade ago.
But since they never admitted that and they had this whole narrative of, oh, we just want to set the people of Iraq free, I guess it's convenient that the majority led by Muqtada al-Sadr and the Ayatollah Sistani are kicking our asses out in humiliating defeat.
And they get to say that that's a victory because they never admitted what their real goals were in the first place.
Though I would point out that the word victory doesn't really get used so much as the word success, right?
So success is the new version of victory whereby one can leave a conflict without having planted a flag, per se, but can point to all kinds of measures.
It becomes a sort of social scientific quantification, although leaving out what I would say are some of the most important rubrics and allowing for some qualified version of victory that seems to be devoid of the patriotism associated with victory, but in essence is also a sign of America's need to win every war, even the wars that are unpopular and even the wars that leave the world as unstable or even more unstable than before.
All right, everyone, we're talking with Hannah German.
She's right over at Salon.com.
Hold it right there.
We'll be back after this break.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, and I'm talking with Hannah German.
She's an assistant professor at NYU's Gallatin School, and she's got this great article at Salon.com.
It's called The Iraq Withdrawal, An Orwellian Success.
And now you were talking about, before we went out to that break there, the, I would characterize it, this wasn't your word, but the narcissistic, self-important need of the American people and their childish emotions to feel like they won, no matter how many people they killed for no reason, no matter how opposite the outcome of the war is from what they were actually doing.
It's the same thing with Vietnam and the myth that, well, we would have won, could have won, if only that the Democratic politicians had allowed us to, et cetera, because Americans just can never admit that they were the bad guys, that they were the aggressors, and they surely can never admit that some Ewoks were able to defeat their asses, you know?
And I would anticipate that, well, with every war that ends badly for the U.S., you have historians and journalists who will return to it and try to suggest that had we put in more soldiers, had we spent more money, and had the populace supported the war effort, things would have turned out differently.
And we can anticipate that the door is open for that to happen in Afghanistan, and when the reduction of troops takes place next summer, there will certainly be people who will look back on that moment and suggest that things would be differently if only we had poured more money and more military resources into the area.
Well, you know, I think they're going to have to spin the same thing about Iraq once the Ayatollah Sistani goes ahead and puts himself in the commanding position there.
I don't know what he's waiting for.
He might as well do it now.
Yeah, well, this is the other thing that isn't coming out with this success narrative is the state of politics in Iraq right now.
And it's now almost six months after the elections in March, and Iraq still hasn't convened a government.
They met once and then recently delayed a second meeting.
So there's really nobody in place to be making really serious decisions about the future of the country.
Something that isn't getting reported along those lines is the state of oil contracts.
You know, there has been this argument which many have rejected in the official sphere that the Iraq war was about oil.
Whether or not it was about oil, the outcome of the war is that Iraq is bolstering its production of oil, and before long will be the largest producer of oil in the world.
In 2009, there was a huge competition for 11 major oil contracts, and there are many people who are taking issue with the legality of those contracts, most of which were secured by multinational corporations like BP and the big Chinese corporations.
But without a parliament there to vote on whether or not, for example, the signing bonuses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars actually constituted foreign aid, there's no government there to vote on that.
And so there is, as you suggest, a sort of chaos in the politics, but of course that's not making its way into what we hear about the success of the withdrawal.
Well, you know, I don't know if I can recall each of my footnotes in order.
It was six different news stories from six different times, but I think I put it all together here one time on the show that each and every summer from the beginning of the war in 2003 all the way through late 2006, end of the summer 2006, the so-called Sunni-based insurgency, I guess it mostly was, had offered the generals the deal, look, just stop fighting us and we'll stop fighting you.
Let us patrol our own neighborhoods and all that kind of thing.
And the Americans refused to accept that deal until 2006 when Petraeus basically, I guess the way Gareth Porter puts it is he won the victory over George Bush.
He said, no, we're not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency.
You want me to do this thing?
I'm going to bribe them.
And Bush let him do it.
But what happened was they created the sons of the Iraq that concern local citizens and they let them be armed.
They gave them money and they let them patrol their own neighborhoods, I guess, primarily in the Anbar province since most Sunnis had been kicked out of Baghdad and everything.
But the promise was that they would be integrated into the Iraqi army.
And, of course, they haven't been.
And the news reports more and more are of bombs going off and of former concerned local citizens going back and joining the resistance against the central government again.
Yeah, this is a key thread in the surge narrative.
The story you're discussing that often gets called the Anbar awakening, right, that this was that Anbar province was a major turning point in the war and that Petraeus' ability to gain the hearts and minds of the Sunni insurgency is a key pivot point in the surge narrative.
But what you're saying, I think, is exactly true, that many leaders of the Anbar awakening in particular feel betrayed now that they expected to have some major voice in the government of Iraq.
And there's a lot of evidence, for example, in the March elections when several, I think as many as 10 ex-Baathists, people who ran and actually won enough votes to become members of parliament were denied office.
So there's not a lot of evidence of goodwill on the part of really the Shia who are controlling the politics in Iraq right now.
So in that respect, the surge narrative really needs to be questioned.
But I think even in a broader perspective, what we know about sectarianism, or some people refer to it as tribes in Iraq as well, what we know about Iraq from the level of elite policy makers is much less than we need to before we engage in anything like an Anbar awakening or something parallel in Afghanistan.
I think one of the stories is that there's a sort of simplistic veneer put on this strategy that some people call tribal engagement or negotiation with various sects, not that it is in theory such a bad idea, but when you have the level of ignorance in the elite policy making units sort of really kind of turning the stew and they don't really know what that stew is comprised of, then it's not surprising that we end up with as much instability as stability in Iraq.
It sounds like a libertarian economic argument about domestic policy right there.
It's the information problem.
How could Paul Bremer possibly know?
That's one of my favorite anecdotes from the whole war is he turns to the young blonde daughter of a Republican donor who has the job as sub-viceroy of the country, and he says to her, who's this Muqtada al-Sadr guy?
And she says, oh, I don't know.
He's some minor cleric.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah, well, right, because those who, the Bremer government, shall we say, of Iraq, really thought that they were going to empower the Iraqi exiles that were allies with the Bush administration, and they didn't foresee the rise of this populist-sodderist movement.
And I think that is a key example and symptom of the U.S. tendency not to really focus on what is going on with the social dynamic in the countries that we invade.
All right.
Now, there's still so many kind of little topics to discuss here, but I wanted to give you a chance to go back to why it is the Iraqi people don't want the occupation to continue, status of forces agreement or otherwise, and particularly, I mean, for you to address the water, the electricity, the sewage, the refugees, the schools, the hospitals, the excess deaths, the disaster that still is Iraq to this day.
Yeah.
Well, I don't have a window into exactly why the Iraqi people want the U.S. to leave, but the common-sense notion that every sovereign government wants to rule itself, then there is the question of what the conditions are in Iraq.
The conditions in Iraq right now on this ground are nothing really short of deplorable.
A recent U.N. report notes that there are 53% of Iraqis living in slums, as opposed to 20% before the invasion.
And life in those slums is characterized by poor access to sanitation, poor access to potable water, and also this story that does get some press, though not enough press, about the really poor access to electricity.
There are as many as 50,000 private generators that are making up for the gap between what people actually need in terms of electricity and what the national grid provides.
All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there, Hannah, but I sure do appreciate your time on the show today.
Great.
Thank you for having me.
Everybody, that's Hannah German from NYU.
You can find her article, The Iraq Withdrawal, an Orwellian Success, at Salon.com.
And we'll be right back after Fox News Live for the LRN crew and good music for the chaos audience.