Journalists in Name Only: Just(?) 50,000
Non-Combat(?) Troops in Iraq
by Dave Lindorff
I was listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” broadcast this morning in
the car, and I heard a reporter say that President Obama was
“redefining” the American role in Iraq, now that he had brought the
number of US forces in that country down to “only” 50,000 troops, and
that “combat operations” would be ending effective this month.
The
remaining forces, the reporter announced, with no hint of irony and no
explanation, would “only” be engaged in helping to train Iraqi troops
and police, and in “counter-insurgency” operations.
Excuse me, but aren’t we at war in Afghanistan, and isn’t that
operation, involving about 200,000 US, Australian and NATO troops
(excluding the Dutch, who are pulling out after the country’s
participation in it brought down the conservative government), called a
“counter-insurgency” campaign?
Isn’t counter-insurgency by definition a
kind of “combat”?
WTF? This crap is being called journalism?
By the way, about that 50,000 number. For the record, that is a lot
of soldiers. It is for one thing two times the number of US troops
stationed in South Korea. It is twice the number of troops that were
employed in the invasion of Panama in 1989. It is about the number of
troops the US had in Vietnam in early 1964 after the first round of
escalation by then President Lyndon Johnson.
This is not a small number. It’s a huge commitment of men, women and
money, and trying to pretend it is winding down that war is the height
of deceit.
The New York Times, in its report today on Obama’s claim to
be formally ending US combat operations in Iraq as of the end of this
month, at least noted that the remaining 50,000 troops “constitute a
powerful force in their own right, capable of handling various
contingencies.” But even that is only hinting at the level of official
deception going on here.
The Obama administration and the Pentagon are trying to trick a
war-weary American public into believing that the 50,000 US troops that
will be more or less permanently garrisoned in the rather
permanent-looking bases that the US has constructed around Baghdad and
elsewhere in Iraq will be just like the US troops lodged more or less
permanently in Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea and in other countries
around the world. But those troops aren’t doing any fighting, except in
bars, and are mostly just hanging around playing at soldiering and
wasting taxpayer money on prostitutes, gambling, drinking and cars.
That will not be the case for the soldiers based in Iraq, however,
which is a country still torn by internecine conflicts created or
unleashed by the US invasion, and which also has many armed fighters who
are committed to ousting the US entirely from their occupied country.
And indeed, that 50,000-troop army is actually an army of occupation.
Its role in training an Iraqi army and police force, as in Afghanistan,
is to create a puppet military that will do its bidding. This is
fundamentally different from the role of garrisons in South Korea,
Japan, Italy or Germany.
The failure of journalists, even at the supposedly less corporate
NPR, to call attention to this propaganda scheme, is yet another
betrayal of the profession.
