ZNet
September 11, 2004
by Mike Whitney

In an interview on Sept. 5 with the "right-leaning" Washington Times Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he thought "the enemy (in Iraq) was getting weaker?"

Rumsfeld's answer was revealing: "There are people opposing the coalition, and they're getting pounded. And they have been getting pounded. The solution to that of course, if they don't want to get killed, is to stop terrorizing the Iraqi people."

These comments epitomize the Rumsfeld strategy and explain why the resistance has grown exponentially in the last six months. Aside from manifesting a tragic lack of imagination, Rumsfeld's response shows why the mission in Iraq is failing so miserably. Diplomacy and negotiation are never even seriously considered; just force.

An interview on "The Jim Lehrer News Hour" Sept 7 clarifies this point. The interview involved former members of the Military; Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-author of "The Generals' War," (a book about the 1991 Gulf War) and retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who teaches military operations and planning, and is a longtime consultant to the Defense Department.

Gen Trainor was the first to offer a summary judgment on the present situation in Iraq:

"Well, I think, Margaret (Warner), that anybody that tries to put a good face on this situation-- that they're desperate-- I think that they're just whistling in the dark.

This insurgency is going on, it's growing, it certainly has no indications of being an act of desperation at all."

Colonel Sam Gardiner's comments were more explicit: "Ray mentioned some of the numbers in terms of attacks per month. But if you look at, for example, the number of attacks per day, last October it was around 20.

At the hand-off, it was 35. This month it was 87 -- numbers of attacks on the oil pipeline -- January and February, less than five; June, 16; August, 20; September, high already. The numbers aren't good. The numbers show that the insurgency is getting worse. We seem to have turned the corner, and it's getting worse."

When Gardiner was asked what was fueling the insurgency he said:

"We did some bad things. We made some enemies.

The way we treated people in prison, knocking down doors. We insulted them as part of the hard line earlier. That's first. The second thing is there are people now in Iraq from outside. The Iranians are involved, people are coming in from Syria, so that the insurgency is being fueled from the outside."

When asked if the resistance was getting "more sophisticated, Trainor answered: "There's no question about that. You know, when you look back a year ago, the insurgency was just getting going. It was very inept. They would fire some AK-47s or fire some RPG's. And then they started to get sophisticated with I.ED's, the improvised explosive devices, and so forth.

But now they have reached a degree of sophistication, not only in terms of their weaponry, but also in the coordination of their activities, setting off a bomb here, and when the troops come up to it, they'll set off another bomb and get the follow-on forces. Yeah, but they're learning."

Both Trainor and Gardiner agreed that many of the cities in Sunni Iraq were now entirely under the control of insurgents. Again, this reflects back to Rumsfeld's one dimensional strategy of using overwhelming force where political solutions are required. Rumsfeld's insistence on "pounding" the Iraqi resistance has resulted in a situation where the battle for Iraq's cities has to be "re-fought."

Col. Gardiner went on to make this extraordinary admission:

"I must say that the people I talk to who know about what's going on inside, the diplomats, the spies and the military people, say we're never going to have stability there until the Americans get out. We are causing much of this."

Yes, the American presence is causing this war. (but we rarely expect such candor from the "talking heads" on PBS)

Gardiner's remarks were strikingly at odds with what Rumsfeld's comments earlier in an interview with the Washington Times:

"It's hard to say (if we are winning) when you've just gone through a week or two where you've peaked in terms of the number of incidents. My guess is they see they're losing. Does that mean that the pain is going to go down? Not necessarily"

Then he added this: "I feel generally quite good about how things are going there,"

Rummy feels good about our "progress" in Iraq. That should be of great comfort to the many Americans who have family members trying to stay alive in the 115 degree heat while being attacked on all sides.

Both Gardiner and Trainor take a considerably more jaundiced view of the goings on in Iraq. When Gardiner was asked how he would "fix" the current situation he offered this:

"The fix the administration has picked, which is to get it off of the newspapers. The strategic communications objectives right now, as I read them, are to take this off of the radar screen of the American people. In July, you can... we were seeing roughly 250,000 articles in the world press per day about this. It's now down to 150.

(Hmmmm. So, according to a "conservative" member of the Defense establishment, the strategy is not to win the war and "democratize" the country, but simply to keep it out of the media.)

Margaret Warner: "What about the fix on the ground?"

Col. Sam Gardiner: "There is no fix on the ground! When you get down to the point we are now, you're into tactical defense! Let's hope this thing somehow finds a solution. I don't hear anybody with a solution."

"No fix", "tactical defense", "no solution"?

Are these the euphemisms that describe our current situation in Iraq?

Perhaps, we should keep these in mind as Rumsfeld continues his futile assault on Falluja, destroying infrastructure and killing innocent civilians.

There is "no fix on the ground."

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