Iraq's moment of truth is at hand, writes Mohamed Hakki from Washington What can the United States do now that it has failed completely and miserably in Iraq? Can we say defeated? I am not a military expert but most of the military opinions that one hears are suggesting that the US may be winning the battles but losing the war. For one, if the measure of success is winning the support of the Iraqi people, then America's record is definitely one of miserable defeat. This is not the view of Democratic critics of the war, but a considerable number of high ranking officers. Newspaper articles are quoting several generals in the army who are voicing their views publicly for the first time. Major General Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said that tactically the US was winning but when asked if overall it was losing, replied: "I think strategically we are." Colonel Paul Hughes, the first director of strategic planning in Iraq after the war, whose brother died in Vietnam said: "Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war we are in." The Washington Post said on 9 May that some officers are saying that restructuring of US policy should begin by ousting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They hold him responsible for a series of strategic and tactical mistakes or blunders over the past year. According to the Post profound anger is building within the army at Rumsfeld and those around him, meaning his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. Winning the initial battles was easy. Nobody expected the Iraqi army, after 12 years of attrition by the US and another 12 years against Iran, to put up stiff resistance. Furthermore, no one expected the Iraqi military to sacrifice their lives for Saddam Hussein. The US lost the moral high ground even before the shooting started. It lost it because of all the lies it spread about weapons of mass destruction and all the talk about coming as liberators and not conquerors. The Iraqi people know better. But when the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened, it was the last nail in the coffin of US credibility. At first, the spin masters tried to portray the crimes as an aberration; a small rogue element of untrained and undisciplined reserve and recruits. But now the whole world knows that it was a prevailing culture to humiliate and soften the prisoners, and orders and responsibility goes all the way up. In fact it goes all the way up to Rumsfeld -- personally. Most people suspected that army personnel do not behave this way without consent or even orders from above. Now, Seymour Hersh tells us that the scandal "lies not in the criminal inclinations of a few reservists but in a decision approved last year by Donald Rumsfeld". One can only watch Rumsfeld's arrogance and hubris in his appearances in front of congressional committees and TV interviews. He could not hide his utter disdain for the Fourth Geneva Convention. He reiterated many times that it does not apply to this case, despite the fact that the whole world says that it does. One is always left with the feeling that no rules or conventions ever apply to Mr Rumsfeld. Now the honourable thing under the circumstances would have been for Rumsfeld to resign. When he did not, a number of very influential Senators and politicians began to ask for his removal. President Bush's initial reaction was to "scold" Rumsfeld publicly. But Vice-President Cheney rushed to his defence and declared Rumsfeld the greatest secretary of defense in the history of America. The next day President Bush goes to the Pentagon and opens a "love fest" for his embattled secretary and tells him he was doing a superb job in two wars. The truth is that the first one -- against Afghanistan -- is unfinished, with the old war-lords back and the president confined to his palace and Ossama Bin Laden is sticking his tongue at Washington daily. The second war, in Iraq, is a botched up job with the number of casualties in a single month, April, exceeding those during the invasion. A number of military commanders who opposed the war initially on both moral and military grounds, like General Zinni, Odom, Shinscki and others are still opposing it today. they are all saying Washington does not have an exit strategy. The respected Economist magazine is openly asking Rumsfeld to resign. It told him "you say it is a war about law, democracy, freedom, and honesty, admirable high standards for the conduct of your forces and your government itself. Now, some of your own armed forces are shown to have fallen well below those standards. What do you do? The Economist correctly says that the abuse of prisoners forms part of a culture of extra-legal behaviour set at the highest level. Responsibility has to be taken at the highest level too. It is plain that Rumsfeld should resign. And if he won't, Bush should fire him. If this was not enough, Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker accuses him directly of being the author, the instigator of these interrogation methods. He said that Rumsfeld "authorised the establishment of a highly secret programme that was given a blanket advance approval" to this kind of behaviour. He is assisted in that programme by Stephen Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence, who shares Rumsfeld's disdain for the assessments by the CIA. Not surprisingly Cambone's military assistant, General William Boykin is a religious wacko who is on record casting the war on terror as a "religious war", that Muslims worship "an idol". His name became famous when -- speaking in uniform before a Christian group -- he said of a Saudi militia leader: "I knew my God was bigger than his", and that "radical Islamists hate America because we are a Christian nation ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." This is the guy in charge of "softening up" Iraqi prisoners and the perverted bunch who are in charge of their torture. It gets worse. I had been wondering about this administration's obsession with sex and humiliation until I read Hersh's article. He says: "The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington neo-conservatives in the months before March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The book frequently cited was The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, published in 1973." The book made a stir because of the October War of that year. When I was asked about it then, and I was working for the World Bank at the time, I said that it was a clever book with a poisonous agenda. It makes fun of the Arabs and berates their holy book, the Qur'an. In the references to the Qur'an, it says that the Arabs have no sense of history and that their holy book describes Mary, mother of Jesus, as the sister of Moses and Aaron, despite the long period of time between the two. This assertion only shows the ignorance of Patai because had he read a single book of interpretation he would have realised that the holy book puts Mary on the same level of holiness as that of Moses and Aaron and that sister in Arabic means equal too. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. Hersh says that the Patai book was the "bible of neocons on Arab behaviour". In their discussions, two themes emerge -- one, that the Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation. This is precisely why it appealed to the neo- con mafia occupying all decision making positions in Washington, who are fuelled by hate and ignorance about the Arabs and have only one agenda, which is to serve Israel. So far, the Bush administration has relied on the planning and advice of the clan of neo-cons who have proved inept, ignorant, biased against the Arabs and Islam, heavily dependent on the advice of crooks such as Ahmed Chalabi and charlatans like Fouad Ajami. In the current issue of the Stratfor Weekly, a well- known strategic studies publication, a piece entitled: "The Edge of the Razor" lists a number of tactical failures in what it calls "The US war with radical Islam". It says the United States could recover from its tactical failures, or suffer a massive defeat if it fails to do so. One thing is certain: the US cannot remain balanced on the razor's edge indefinitely. If President Bush does not fire his Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Wolfowitz, and start changing the whole course of action in Iraq, he will be faced with certain defeat, and will have only achieved the total destruction of Iraq as a sovereign country. As it looks now in the polls, it may even lose him his job in November.
