Paul Thomas: American military unsuited to role of occupying force

COMMENT

Last Thursday, my local paper devoted half its front page to a photo story about 10-year-old Shane Ellis who walked to school in his pyjamas as a protest against prisoner abuse in Iraq. He had been upset by a photo of a naked man being menaced by dogs. His supportive father characterised that incident as "a case of bullying".

Indeed. To some men of a certain age and background, the first round of stories and images that emanated from the Abu Ghraib Prison would have been faintly redolent of humiliating rituals endured at boarding school. There were certainly overtones of the initiation rite and sexual harassment scandals that periodically erupt in American military academies.

Shane and his father appear to have a clearer perspective on this issue than some media outlets whose coverage was coloured by the promiscuous and unenlightening use of terms like "horrific", "gruesome" and "sickening".

Given that United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted there is worse to come, the headline writers should perhaps ration the shriek words in their thesauruses. (Beneath the pyjama protest story - a juxtaposition that connoisseurs of unconscious irony would have savoured - was a pointer to a report elsewhere in the paper on the videotaped beheading of an American hostage.)

This is not to trivialise the abuse but to put it in context and proportion. Whatever else emerges, and rest assured it won't be pretty, the situation cannot be compared with the systematic evil that characterised Saddam Hussein's regime, not that this obvious truth has deterred some commentators and editorialists from sliding into moral equivalence.

Survivors of Saddam's torture chambers, with their meat hooks and pack rapes and mutilations, must contemplate the heat generated by this affair and wonder if they have stumbled into an alternative reality. And let's not forget, they were the lucky ones - if surviving to relive the nightmare counts as luck.

These incidents are repellent but, as yet anyway, do not represent unthinkable cruelty as an instrument of official policy. What they do represent is a monumental public relations disaster.

They demonstrate that some of the American servicemen and women in Iraq are unfit for the hugely difficult and ambitious tasks they've been set: first, restoring law and order and basic values of human decency to a society that has been corrupted, brutalised and dehumanised by war, deprivation and Saddam's gross and barbarous rule; second, overseeing that society's transition to a functioning democracy.

Should we be surprised?

It's safe to assume that the educated and worldly middle-classes aren't heavily represented in the rank and file of the US military. The average grunt is far more likely to be young - early 20s - and drawn from the urban, mainly black and Hispanic, or rural, mainly white, underclass. He or she would not seem, on the face of it, to be highly qualified for nation-building.

This PR disaster threatens to undermine the entire Iraqi project and bring down its architects because it highlights a fundamental flaw in the exercise: the American military is geared to win the war, not the peace, which, in turn, demonstrates that the enterprise was never fully thought through.

Secretary of State Colin Powell warned George W. Bush, "You break it, you own it". In other words, if America brought down Saddam, it had a responsibility to run Iraq until it replaced the regime with something better.

And Powell with his Army background would have understood that the US military, for all its global reach and advanced weaponry, isn't prepared for or suited to the role of an occupying power.

This is the age of the American Empire. But while it is underpinned by a vast military apparatus, the primary manifestations of US hegemony are financial, commercial and cultural, as opposed to territorial. Where American troops are stationed abroad, as in South Korea and, anachronistically, Germany, they are there to protect the local population from external threats.

Only in Iraq are they operating as an imperial power, simultaneously engaged in repressing local opposition and imposing their systems and values.

Powell would also know that morale and discipline can quickly fray when an occupying force becomes embroiled with a resourceful and ruthless underground resistance supported by sections of the local population and employing the classic guerrilla strategy of provoking the occupier into increasingly heavy-handed and indiscriminate use of force.

It happened to the French in Algeria. It happened to the Americans in Vietnam. It happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan.

And in the end they all walked - or ran - away.


Herald Feature: Iraq