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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Iraq withdrawal
follies By Tom Engelhardt
American critics are hustling it
toward and is flogging that future for all it's
worth.
Early this month, US Ambassador
Ryan Crocker began to issue grim warnings about
just such a future should the US withdraw. The New
York Times reported, "The US ambassador and the
Iraqi foreign minister are warning that the
departure of American troops could lead to sharply
increased violence, the deaths of thousands
of
people, and a regional conflict that could draw in
Iraq's neighbors."
Ever since, such
predictions have only ramped up. In his July 12
press conference, President George W Bush quickly
picked up on the ambassador's predictions,
heightened them further, and wove together many of
the themes that would thereafter come out of Iraq
as the "advice" of his commanders. He said:
I know some in Washington would like
us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin
withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are
ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the
region, and for the United States. It would mean
surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda. It
would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on
a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the
terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to
replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It
would mean increasing the probability that
American troops would have to return at some
later date to confront an enemy that is even
more dangerous.
A version of this
(lacking the al-Qaeda twist) quickly became part
of what passes for common wisdom among experts and
pundits in the US - as in the Michael Duffy story
that went with the Time withdrawal cover. Should
the US draw down, no less withdraw, precipitously,
the result, suggested Duffy, is likely to be
violence at levels impossible to calculate but
conceivably just short of genocidal. As Marine
Corps commander James Conway put it recently in
words similar to Bush's, "My concern is if we
prematurely move, we're going to be going back."
This mood was caught perfectly in a
question nationally syndicated right-wing radio
host Hugh Hewitt posed to General Petraeus: "Some
have warned that a genocide of sorts, or absolute
terms, would follow a precipitous withdrawal of
coalition forces. Do you agree that that is a
possibility ... and a significant one?" To which
Petraeus responded, "One would certainly expect
that sectarian violence would resume at a very
high level ... That's not to say there's not still
some going on right now ..."
The future
in slo-mo In the meantime, the Bush
administration, its ambassador in Baghdad, and its
commanders were hard at work trying to push any
full-scale assessment of the president's "surge"
plan - promised for September - and the plan
itself ever further into the future. This was part
of a larger campaign for "more time". In press
conferences, teleconferences to Washington,
briefings for Congress, leaks to the press, and
media appearances of all sorts, they appealed for
time, time, time. (Nowhere in the media, by the
way, have the reporters who benefit from this
flood of official and semi-official commentary
suggested that it might be part of a concerted
propaganda campaign.)
Lieutenant-General
Raymond T Odierno, who oversees day-to-day
operations in Iraq, typically claimed that the
September deadline was "too early" for any real
assessment of "progress" and suggested November as
the date of choice. Under pressure, he
half-retracted his comments the next day, assuring
Congress that there would indeed be a September
Progress Report. He added: "My reference to
November was simply suggesting that as we go
forward beyond September, we will gain more
understanding of trends."
Petraeus took a
similar tack in that Hugh Hewitt interview: "Well,
I have always said that we will have a sense by
[September] of basically, of how things are going,
have we been able to achieve progress on the
ground, where have their been shortfalls ... But
that's all it is going to be." In essence, the
once-definitive September report was already being
downgraded to a "snapshot" of an ongoing
operation.
While Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace even hinted
that US troop numbers in Iraq might rise in the
near future, the horizon for the surge plan to end
began to be pushed toward summer 2008. Yochi
Dreazen and Greg Jaffe reported in the Wall Street
Journal ("Gap widens over Iraq approach"):
"Despite growing calls from lawmakers for drastic
change in Iraq, senior US military officials on
the ground say they believe the current [surge]
strategy should be maintained into next year - and
already have mapped out additional phases for
doing so through January." They indicated that
this was part of a Bush administration "gamble" -
think campaign - "that Congress will be unable or
unwilling to force a drawdown and that the
military will have a free hand to keep the added
troops in place well into next year".
There was a drumbeat of commentary by
various commanders pushing the plan deeper into
the future. Major-General Richard Lynch, commander
of the 3rd Infantry Division, typically said:
"It's going to take through [this] summer, into
the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle
space [south of Baghdad], and it's going to take
me into next spring and summer to generate this
sustained security presence."
Leaks of
plans that took the US presence into the
increasingly distant future also began to occur.
The most striking came on July 24 in a New York
Times front-page piece by Michael R Gordon. Its
headline said it all: "US seen in Iraq until at
least '09". Gordon reported that a "detailed
document" known as the Joint Campaign Plan and
developed by Petraeus and Crocker "foresees a
significant American role for the next two years".
The article revealed plans to be in Iraq
in force at least through the summer of 2009 - in
other words, well into the tenure of the next
administration. Gordon identified the source of
this leak as "American officials familiar with the
document". As is often the case with reporter
Gordon, the sourcing was indecipherable but
undoubtedly administration-friendly, part of
Bush's rolling, roiling campaign to secure the
future (having lost the past and present).
As it happened, the future was also being
wielded in another way. Bush's commanders now
embraced their own version of withdrawal and began
to turn it into another version of prolonged
occupation. Their general attitude went something
like this: if you think it took a long time to get
into this mess, you have no idea how long it will
take to get out.
As an example, General
Pace recently claimed that a month would be needed
to withdraw each of the United States' 20 combat
brigades in Iraq non-precipitously; in other
words, once
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