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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Iraq withdrawal
follies By Tom Engelhardt
the US started, it would
take almost two years not to get all of its troops
out of that country. Major-General Benjamin R
Mixon, US commander in northern Iraq, then topped
Pace by claiming that 18 months would be needed
just to cut the brigades in his region in half.
Think of this as the future in slo-mo -
or, as the Wall Street Journal's Dreazen and Jaffe
put it, "a complete withdrawal from
Iraq
could take as long as two years if conducted in an
orderly fashion". Not only that, but the US
military - and so the US media - suddenly
discovered the vast amount of stuff that had been
flown, or convoyed, into Iraq (mostly in better
times) and now somehow had to be returned to
sender. As Time's Duffy put it, included would be
"a good portion of the entire US inventory of
tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers,
trucks and Humvees ... They are spread across 15
bases, 38 supply depots, 18 fuel-supply centers
and 10 ammo dumps," not to speak of "dining halls,
office buildings, vending machines, furniture,
mobile latrines, computers, paper clips and acres
of living quarters".
Associated Press
reporter Charles Hanley caught the enormity of
withdrawal this way: "In addition to 160,000
troops, the US presence in Iraq has ballooned over
four years to include more than 180,000 civilians
employed under US government contracts - at least
21,000 Americans, 43,000 other foreigners and
118,000 Iraqis - and has spread to small 'cities'
on fortified bases across Iraq."
In fact,
such lists turn out never to end - as a series of
anxious news reports have indicated - right down
to the enormous numbers of Port-a-Potties that
must be disposed of. In such accounts of the
overwhelming nature of any withdrawal from a
country the Bush administration thought it could
make its own, cautionary historical examples are
cited by the Humvee-load. (After the first Gulf
War, withdrawal from Kuwait took a year under the
friendliest of conditions; Afghanistan was hell
for the Russians; Vietnam, despite the final
scramble, took forever and a day to plan and carry
out.)
And don't forget about the need to
get rid of the "toxic waste" the Americans have
accumulated - that alone is now estimated to take
20 months - or, according to reports, the shortage
of aircraft for transport, the cratered,
bomb-laden roads on which to convoy everything
out, and the possibility that America's allies,
knowing we're leaving, may turn on us in a Mad
Max-style future Iraq.
Finally, don't
forget something that, until just about yesterday,
no one outside of a few arcane military types even
knew about - the agricultural inspectors who must
certify that everything entering the US is free of
"microscopic disease". And so it goes. Withdrawal,
it turns out, is forever.
Of course, much
of this is undoubtedly foolishness, though with a
serious purpose. It's meant to turn an
unpredictable future into what former US secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld once termed a "known
known" that can be wielded against those who want
to change course in the disastrous present. You
want withdrawal? You have an ironclad guarantee
that, no matter how bad things might be, it will
be so much worse.
Withdrawal, in other
words, is fear itself. Sanity is a future that's
in essence the same as the present (with somewhat
fewer US troops) and, though no one mentions it, a
significantly ramped-up ability to bring air power
to bear. (On this, the AP's Hanley has just done
two superb, if chilling, reports from the field,
the only ones of significance on air power in Iraq
since the invasion of 2003. He has revealed that
the "surge" of US air strength there may prove far
more devastating and long-lasting than the one on
the ground.)
Vietnam redux In
the Vietnam years, the ongoing bloodbath in that
country was regularly supplanted in the United
States by a predicted "bloodbath" the Vietnamese
enemy was certain to commit in South Vietnam the
moment the United States withdrew (just as a
near-genocidal civil war is now meant to supplant
the blood-drenched Iraqi present for which we are
so responsible). This future bloodbath of the
imagination appeared in innumerable official
speeches and accounts as an explanation for why
the United States could not leave Vietnam, just as
the sectarian bloodbath-to-come in Iraq explains
why we must not take steps to withdraw our troops
(advisers, mercenaries, crony corporations, and
Port-a-Potties) from that country.
In
public discourse in the Vietnam era, this
not-yet-atrocity sometimes became the only real
bloodbath around and an obsessive focus for some
of the war's opponents within mainstream politics.
Anti-war activist Todd Gitlin recalled "the
contempt with which [activist Tom] Hayden had told
me of a meeting he and Staughton Lynd had with
Bobby Kennedy, early in 1967. Kennedy, he said
then, had been fixated on the dangers of a
'bloodbath' in South Vietnam if the communists
succeeded in taking over."
But it wasn't
only in the mainstream. Anti-war activists, too,
often had to grapple with the expected, predicted
horror that always threatened to dwarf the present
one - the horror for which, it was implied, they
would someday be responsible.
As for the
president and his men: in his memoirs, Richard
Nixon related how White House chief of staff
Alexander Haig told him of intelligence
information indicating that the North Vietnamese
and the National Liberation Front had "instructed
their cadres the moment a ceasefire is announced
to kill all of the opponents in the area that they
control. This would be a murderous bloodbath."
As the war's supporters were frustrated
whenever they tried to make the enemy's actual
atrocities carry the weight of US ones, the
thought of this future sea of blood weighed
heavily in their favor. Similarly, an Iraqi
near-genocidal civil war - the vision of seas of
sectarian blood and even a regional conflict in
the oil heartlands of the planet - weighs heavily
in favor of "staying the course" in Iraq, a course
already literally awash in a sea of blood.
Put another way, if the future was ever to
be their opponents', this was the future the
administration - Nixon's or Bush's - wished on
them. Such a bloodbath-to-come would, in their
minds, in effect wash clean the bloodbath still in
progress (as the bloodbath that happened -
unexpected to all - in Pol Pot's Cambodia indeed
did). In the meantime, the expected Vietnamese
bloodbath that never came about, like the expected
Iraqi civil war of unprecedented proportions,
deflected attention from the nature of the
struggle at hand, and from the growing piles of
dead in the present, allowing US leaders to
withdraw, but only so far, from the consequences
of their war.
Similarly, in the Vietnam
years, the non-withdrawal withdrawal was an
endlessly played-upon theme. The idea of
"withdrawing" from Vietnam arose almost with the
war itself, though never as an
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