Adam Hochschild: The Big Push

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:


"The Big Push"
Mired in the Trenches of the Iraq Fiasco
By Adam Hochschild

If we needed more evidence that those surrounding President George W. Bush have a tin ear for the lessons of history, it came ten days ago when National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley referred to increasing the number of American troops in Iraq as "the big push" that would bring victory closer.

"The Big Push" is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge that was supposed to bring another war to victory. For months beforehand, the Big Push was how British cabinet ministers, propagandists, generals, and foot soldiers talked about the 1916 Battle of the Somme. (It is even the title of a later book on the subject.)

The First World War had been in a deadly stalemate for the better part of two years. A string of horrific battles had revealed the huge toll of trench warfare: Defenders could partially protect themselves by building deeper trenches, concrete pillboxes, and reinforced dugouts far underground. But when you went "over the top" of the trench to attack, you were disastrously vulnerable -- out in the open, exposed to deadly, sweeping machine-gun fire as you clambered slowly across barbed wire and bypassed water-filled artillery-shell craters.

So, what did the Allies do? They attacked. At the time, in numbers of men involved, it was history's largest battle. The plan was to break open the German defense line, send the cavalry gloriously charging through the gap, and turn the tide of the war. The result was a catastrophe.

The British army lost nearly 20,000 killed and some 40,000 wounded or missing on the first day alone. German machine gunners, after waiting out the long preliminary bombardment in their fortified bunkers underground, returned to the surface in time to mow down the advancing soldiers. After four and a half months of fighting, British and French troops had suffered more than 600,000 casualties. The Big Push had gained them roughly five miles of muddy, shell-pocked wasteland.

Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it's like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.

Every piece of evidence from these past nearly four bloody years makes clear that many Sunnis and Shiites alike are driven to rage by the very presence of American soldiers walking Iraqi streets, barging into Iraqi homes, and arresting or killing people who may or may not be insurgents. Furthermore, the people arrested or killed, however unsavory, are sometimes the only force protecting their communities against attacks from the opposite side in an extremely bitter civil war. Therefore, as sociologist Michael Schwartz explained the matter some six weeks ago, a previous joint U.S.-Iraqi counterinsurgency drive in Baghdad, of exactly the type now being planned, actually increased civilian casualties. .....(more)

The rest is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=159067

[JohnnyLib2]

1. 1960s. Land grant college. Mandatory ROTC classes.

(Yes, children, that was the reality for males in some locales).

There were long, tedious sections of military history. Great victories, great defeats, good and bad strategies of warfare.


"Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure."

Can't you just see that in military history books of the future?

[Tanuki]

2. Hochshild's thumping of Bush is especially sweet because

Hoschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" was one of the books that Bush famously claimed to have read recently. Hoschild also wrote a terrific piece about that:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-hochschild22dec22,1,529235.story?track=rss