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since 1865

The Iraq Disaster

Page 33: A genocide not forgotten

The tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq is

upon us, and we are invited to assess the result. An unbroken
record of waste, futility and shame presents itself to the
the eruption of sectarian savagery that
retrospective view. There was the passage
has waxed and waned and waxed again
by Congress of the dangerously vague
in the years of American domination,
and elastic Authorization for Use of Miland is now becoming a regional scourge.
itary Force in place of the congressional
Today, the Shiite majority sits precarideclaration of war the Constitution reously at the top of the heap with the help
quires. There was the infamous day the
of a repressive apparatus; Sunni
shock and awe campaign was
unleashed, when a great and C O M M E N T rebels inflict scores of deaths
weekly in bombing attacks; and
ancient city was bombarded as a
the Kurds increasingly go their own way
world that overwhelmingly rejected the
in the north, threatening a messy, violent
attack watched in helpless dismaya day
partition of the country.
that burns in memory as one on which
Is there any benefit to be found in
a long-premeditated crime occurred in
this record? Only if, it seems, by drawbroad daylight. There were the flimsy
ing lessons from the disaster, we can
deceptions and self-deceptions by which
avoid future misadventures of a like kind.
the war was rationalized to the AmeriOne lesson that may be on its way to accan Congress, the American people,
ceptance is that in our postcolonial era,
the United Nations and the worldthe
COIN (counterinsurgency) warfare
false allegations that Iraqs government
is a fools game. A related lesson is that
possessed weapons of mass destruction.
neither the United States nor any other
There was the culpable, willful credulity
country can build other peoples nawith which these allegations were actions. Those peoples have to do that by
cepted by the craven US news media.
themselves, or fail by themselves. But
There was the jingoistic, cheerleading
these lessons are hardly new; they were
coverage of the ground invasion. There
taught at terrible cost a half-century ago
were the Iraqi prisoners led around on
by the Vietnam War. They were then
leashes like dogs at Abu Ghraib. There
unlearned in preparation for the regime
were the Iraqi death squads and torchange wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
ture squads allied with and advised by
How is it, then, that President
the United Statesand, if current reObama frequently threatens to attack
ports are right, directly sponsored by the
another Middle Eastern country, Iran?
United States. There was the surprising,
To understand this, we need to unearth
protracted failure of the occupation to
and learn another lesson of the Iraq
restore even basic services, such as elecWarone more timely yet more hidden
tricity, water and sanitation. Above all,
than the lesson of counterinsurgency.
there were those who lost their lives for
The intervention in Iraq was proposed,
nothingthe more than 100,000 Iraqi
and the prospective one in Iran is procivilians (many more, if you count excess
posed, in the name of a common cause:
deaths, direct and indirect, caused by the
stopping the proliferation of weapons
invasion and occupation) and the more
of mass destruction, especially nuclear
than 4,400 American soldiers.
weapons. Both interventions are or will
The only offsetting gain was the
be expressions of the same profound
downfall of the dictator Saddam Husstrategic mistake: the policy of trying
sein, but that, in turn, has been offset by

Inside
2

Letters
Editorials & Comment

3 The Iraq Disaster

JONATHAN SCHELL

5 Noted
8 Bank-Buster Brown
WILLIAM GREIDER

Columns
6 Deadline Poet
Kim Jong-un, Dictator of North Korea and
BFF of Dennis Rodman, Threatens to Use
Nuclear Weapons Against the United States
CALVIN TRILLIN

10 The Liberal Media

The Rehabilitation of Elliott Abrams
ERIC ALTERMAN

Articles
11 Chvez: Why Venezuelans Loved Him
He transformed the countrys economy
and society in fourteen tumultuous years.
GREG GRANDIN

17 A Brooklyn Corner
Day laborers who clean for ultra-Orthodox
Jewish households are learning their rights.
E. TAMMY KIM

21 US-Style School Reform Goes South

Reformers are targeting Mexican teachers,
using tests as a weapon. Sound familiar?
DAVID BACON

24 The Shame of the NCAA

March Madness generates a tidal wave of
revenue, but players dont see a dime of it.
DAVE ZIRIN

Books & the Arts

27 No Exit?
MARK MAZOWER

32 What Did Clausen See (POEM)

GRZEGORZ WRBLEWSKI

33 AKAM: The Young Turks Crime

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April 1, 2013

to stop the proliferation of nuclear arms and other WMD

with military force. We may wonder to what extent the Bush
administration believed its own propaganda about the Iraqi
threat, but it remains a fact of history that this justification was
used to sell the war to Congress and the public and that this
justification proved persuasive to so many Americans, including a majority in Congress.
The idea of unburdening countries of their nuclear facilities
through military actioncounterproliferation, in the strategic jargonactually predates the invasion of Iraq. The first
historical instance of it was Israels air attack in 1981 on Iraqs
nuclear reactor in Osirak. Then, in 1993, in a widely forgotten
crisis, the Clinton administration drew up plans (named the
Osirak option after the Israeli precedent) to attack North Koreas nuclear facilities and perhaps its conventional armed forces
as well. (The crisis ended without the use of force when former
President Jimmy Carter intervened to broker a deal.)
It is not an accident that Israel either launched or supported four pre-emptive attacks on nuclear or allegedly nuclear
facilities: the one on the Osirak reactor; the US invasion of
Iraq; the strike on a Syrian reactor in September 2007; and,
now, the possible strike against Irans nuclear program. For Israel has followed a policy never adopted by any other nuclear
power: it seeks to maintain, by military means, sole possession
of nuclear weapons in its region. (The policy is not officially
articulated, owing to another remarkable Israeli innovation in
nuclear policy: the governments silence regarding all aspects
of its large nuclear arsenal.) In all other regions, there are
nuclear competitors who seek to maintain some sort of balance among themselves.
It is true that the idea of maintaining a nuclear monopoly by
pre-emptive attack was entertained by the United States during the brief period of its nuclear monopoly, from 1945 to 1949
(when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb), but it was
always firmly rejected. Its fair to say that it was never seriously
considered by President Truman. When China developed a
nuclear weapons program, the United States and the Soviet
Union explored, both separately and jointly, the idea of a preemptive strike on Chinas nuclear facilities, but the idea was
always dismissed, again without serious consideration. The
other nuclear powers of the day, France and England, never
contemplated such a policy. Nor, as far as we know, have the
worlds other two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, considered military action to de-nuclearize the other either before or
after they became nuclear powers.
It wasnt until 9/11 happened that Israel found, in the United
States, an imitator of its pre-emptive nuclear policies. In a
quiet but epic reversal of American nonproliferation strategy, which had previously been founded on diplomacy and
treaties (including above all the worldwide Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty), President George W. Bush adopted a policy
of forcible nonproliferationof disarmament war, as I have
called itand installed it at the very core of the foreign policy
revolution he proposed at the time.
The context was, of course, the global war on terror.
The war on terror and counterproliferation intersected,
the administration explained, at the crossroads of radicalism

The Nation.

and technology, the nexus of terror and weapons of mass

destruction (in the words of the seminal strategic document
of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America), a location inhabited by that most fearsome personage
in the terrorism lineup, the terrorist with a nuclear bomb. (This
loathed character has also had a central role, not coincidentally,
in arguments in favor of torture.) A whole raft of conclusions
followed, as if logically: if the need was for pre-emption, then
obviously one could not wait until the threat materialized in
the form of the finished WMD: strikes on precursor facilities
would be required. And if mere preparations for WMD had to
be the occasion for war, then war could be launched on the basis
not of any aggressive deeds, but of mere intelligence estimates
of those preparations. Furthermore, if the cure was to be thorough, destruction from the air would not be enough. Invasion
and occupationregime changewould be needed. All of this
was embraced by the Bush administration and accepted by
mainstream opinion.
he fusion of the nonproliferation cause and the war on
terror militarized the former even as it lent the latter
an apocalyptic underpinning that this radical bid for
global American hegemony otherwise would have lacked.
Counterproliferation was to the war on terror what the
domino theory had been to the Vietnam War during the Cold
Warthe long string of vividly imagined failures that led one
after another to total defeat. All the urgency of nuclear danger (the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the
form of a mushroom cloud, as Bush warned at the time) was
superadded to the already intoxicating brew mixed by the 9/11
attacks, the anthrax attacks, the war in Afghanistan and so forth.
The offspring of this union was the Iraq War. It was to be
both act and warningboth removal of a concrete danger and
demonstration to the world of what awaited governments that
sought WMD in defiance of American wishes or that otherwise displeased the United States.

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet

Kim Jong-un, Dictator of North
Korea and BFF of Dennis
Rodman, Threatens to Use
Nuclear Weapons Against
The United States
Now Kim, whos the strangest of big bomb possessors,
Says hed use his nukes against Yankee aggressors.
Should we build some shelters? No, Kim is no menace,
Since he knows a nuke strike could take out his Dennis.

April 1, 2013

hat happened next is perhaps the most peculiar

chapter of the story. When the alleged WMD were
not found in Iraq, the war was discredited. But the
momentous change in policy that had led to the
warthe change from diplomacy and agreements
to force as the means for achieving nonproliferationwent
unchallenged, even unnoticed. Curiously, the factual mistake
regarding the war aims spared the policy the examination such
a momentous shift should have received.
Perhaps thats one reason Barack Obama could adopt that
policy virtually without revision and apply it lock, stock and
barrel to Iran. Obama did throw out much that his predecessor embraced. He ended the US combat role in Iraq and is
winding it down in Afghanistan. He did away with the term
global war on terror and a lot of the grandiose rhetoric it
occasioned. But he quietly retained, seemingly without questioning it, the steel frame of the counterproliferation policy
that Bush had placed at the core of his war on terror. In perhaps no arena is the continuity of Obamas policy with Bushs
greater than in this one.
With Iran, that has placed Obama somewhere on a ladder
of escalating coercion and force that leads, if push comes to
shove, to war. He can ease up or he can increase the pain (Iran
is in a world of hurt, he said a year ago), but he cannot easily
get off the ladder.
Wholly unsurprisingly, Israel, the pioneer in the use of
force to roll back weapons of mass destruction, pushed Obama
at every turn during the election, with its politically powerful supporters in the United States, to commit himself to
military action. And Obama did. First, he categorically ruled
out a Cold War solution (deterrence and containment) to a
nuclear-armed Iran: My policy is not containment; my policy
is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. His reason
was that the cause of nonproliferaton was too important to do
otherwise. He feared that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon
that could trigger an arms race in the region, it would undermine our nonproliferation goals, it could potentially fall into
the hands of terrorists.
Second, he was prepared to use force rather than allow Iran
to go nuclear: I have said that when it comes to preventing
Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options
off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements
of American powerand, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. And for good measure, he added,
I dont bluff. Those were serious commitments of the
prestige of the president and the United States. Like all such
public ultimatums, they will be hard to unravel or evade if the
contingencies they envision ever arrive.
They indeed have an unnerving resemblance to another Washington conundrum: the budget sequester. Like the
sequester, a vow of war against Iran has the look of a dangerous, self-created trap, a disaster for yourself and others that
you place in your own path in order to push yourself to do
something more sensibleand which, when it turns out to be
unachievable, propels you into the abyss.
Yet at the same time that Obama vows war, he shows every
sign, with abundant reason, of wishing to back off, to leave as

The Nation.

much leeway as possible at the brink, to escape from the war

trap he has made for himself. He seems to struggle to free
himself from the handcuffs that, under political pressure, he
has placed on his own hands. In all likelihood, he understands
the reasons that stopped previous presidents as well as the
leaders of other nuclear powers from going to war to stop
unwanted nuclear programs in other countries.
First, of course this president, who prides himself on winding down two wars, knows the likely immense human cost of a
war with Iran, a conflict that would be bloodier than the Iraq
War and the Afghanistan War combined, draw in a multitude
of other powers, including great powers, and tip the world
economy into a new recession or a depression. Second, he
surely knows that while an air attack on Iran might set back
its nuclear program, there is no reason to think it could stop
it. And certainly Obama knows that the only military step
that guarantees lasting disarmament (namely ground invasion followed by regime change and lasting occupation) is as
unworkable as it would be intolerable to American and world
opinionin a word, deranged. Whatever Obamas faults, a
tendency to insanity is not among the qualities of this calm,
controlled man.
ndeed, in an interview last year with Jeffrey Goldberg in
The Atlantic, Obama displayed an unmistakable, if muted,
awareness of the folly of military action. He reiterated his
avowal that the option of force is on the table. But then he
seemed to argue against it. Our argument, he said, is
going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve
this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily. And the
only way historically that a country has ultimately decided not
to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention
has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the
table. Thats what happened in Libya, thats what happened in
South Africa.
Those countries, of course, gave up their nuclear programs through voluntary national decisions, not because
force was used against them. The clear impression the president leaves is that of a man caught on an escalator leading to a
disastrous landing he does not wish to reach but does not yet
quite know how to avoid. The framework of his policy greases
the path toward war; but his instincts, it seems, pull him in
the opposite direction.
Its still possible that Iran and the United States will reach
some compromise permitting a restricted uranium enrichment
program. Negotiations are now under way to explore this possibility. But its also possible that Iran will call the bluff of this
president who says he does not bluff. It is then that the lessons
of that exercise in pointless brutality, the Iraq War, should be
heeded to protect the United States, Iran, the Middle East and
the world from a second, and greater, avoidable catastrophe.
The war in Iraq that began ten years ago would then at last
serve a good purpose. It would stop the next war.

JONATHAN SCHELL

Jonathan Schell, The Nations peace and disarmament correspondent, is the

Dorothy Shaffer Fellow at the Nation Institute.

April 1, 2013

Bank-Buster Brown
In olden days, it used to be that the bad
guys robbed the banks. Now it seems the bad guys are running
the banks, at least the big ones, and robbing the rest of us.
Nearly every day, newspapers have another disturbing report
about how the largest and most influential banks managed
to escape prosecution for their blatant fraud or else finagled
outrageous subsidies and profits from their
monopolistic dominance of the financial
COMMENT
system. The worst that happens to privileged bankers who are too big to fail is an occasional scolding
lecture from angry members of Congress.
Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, fresh from his impressive re-election victory last fall, is back again with a
simple, straightforward solution: make the big boys smaller.
He is introducing legislation, co-sponsored by Republican
Senator David Vitter, to break up the half-dozen mega-banks,
setting a hard cap on their size. This forced downsizing would
make space in the marketplace, allowing many more midsize
and smaller banking institutions to flourish. It could also protect the nation from another disastrous bailout of Wall Street
at public expense.
Its not just that they are too big to fail, the senator says.
They really are too big to understand and too big to manage.
They are certainly too big to regulate. And they have only
gotten bigger since the financial crisis. The concentration of
banking power in a few big-name firms was already dangerous.
Now it is even more dangerous.
Senator Brown explains, The four largest behemoths, now
ranging from $1.4 trillion to $2.3 trillion in assets, are the result of thirty-seven banks merging thirty-three times. In 1995,
the six biggest US banks had assets equal to 18 percent of GDP.
Today, they are about 63 percent of GDP.
In earlier eras, such a gross distortion of the economy
would have prompted popular outrage, political campaigns
for reform, then government legislation. In our time, the outrage is plentiful, but the political system is dead in the water.
Despite the vast destruction produced by the concentrated
banking system, neither party wants to embrace the remedy
Brown proposes.
The Dodd-Frank reform law of 2010, incomplete though
it was, has been utterly stymied by the billion-dollar lobbying
campaign of the financial sector. Nearly three years later, fewer
than half of the regulations needed to implement Dodd-Frank
have been completed. The presidents proud boast that the law
put an end to too big to fail banks has been twisted into Wall
Streets sick little inside joke.
Its not just the economic power these guys have, its the
political power, Brown says. The inability to get these new
rules in place is the result of these lobbying pressures from
Wall Street.
Brown is guardedly optimistic that this can be changed. In
2010, when he proposed the same concept as an amendment
to Dodd-Frank, he says he would have needed sixty votes to
pass it, but got thirty-three. Yet afterward he told me he was

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