Page 2 of
2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA
How
never to withdraw from
Iraq By Tom
Engelhardt
money away profligately
in one of the more flagrantly corrupt enterprises
in recent history, now wants us to believe that
future planning for draw-downs or withdrawals must
be based on the need to preserve whatever we
brought - and are still bringing - into the
country.
In the land the Bush
administration "liberated", violence remains at a
staggering daily level; electricity is a luxury;
the national medical-care system has been largely
destroyed; perhaps 4.5 million Iraqis have either
fled the country or become internally displaced
persons; approximately 70% lack access to clean
water; and 4 million, according to the UN, don't
know where their
next
meal is coming from. Yet, even with such a record
before us, the logic of the moment in Washington
and in the media remains clear: The last thing we
should be doing is getting out of the country with
any alacrity. After all, if we do, a disaster, a
bloodbath, even genocide might happen.
Put
another way, the most self-interested party in the
"withdrawal" debate continues to set the terms of
that debate. Imagine if, in football, the
quarterback calling plays for his team also had
the power to assess penalties, declare first
downs, and decide whether a ball was caught in or
out of bounds.
In the meantime, since the
anti-war movement remains relatively moribund,
there are no "out now" or "bring the troops home"
chants ringing in the streets of our country. You
have to look to the fringes for perfectly
reasonable suggestions on getting out. Take
Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, who wrote an
essay, "Walking Away: The Least Bad Option," which
you won't find in your local paper. To him,
"walking away" would mean "a statement by the US
government that it will withdraw all troops
without exception and shut down all bases in Iraq
within say six months of the date of
announcement". He adds: "US withdrawal would mark
the first step on the long and difficult path to
healing the United States of the sicknesses
brought on by its imperial addiction, the first
step in a painful effort to restore the good name
of the United States in the world community."
Right now, however, any form of "walking
away," itself a polite euphemism for retreat from
a desperate stalemate or even a lost war, is off
that "table" on which this administration has so
often placed "all options". As a result, if either
Clinton or Obama were to win the next election,
enter office in January 2009, and follow his or
her present plan - a relatively long period of
drawdown not leading to full withdrawal - he or
she would, within months, simply inherit the
president's war. At that point, the present war
supporters would turn on the new president with a
ferocity the Democrats are incapable of mustering
against the present one, attacking her or him as a
cut-and-runner of the first order, even possibly
even a traitor.
We don't do
permanent Senator John McCain made a small
stir recently by saying that he doesn't care if
American troops stay in Iraq "100 years" as long
as "Americans are not being injured, harmed or
killed". In fact, as Mother Jones' David Corn
reported, the senator later elaborated on that
statement, adding "a thousand years", "a million
years". The president and various top
administration officials have offered similar, if
more restrained formulas, speaking vaguely of
"years" in Iraq, or a "decade" or more in that
country, or simply of the "Korea model", a
reference to our garrisoning of the southern part
of the Korean Peninsula for well over half a
century with no end yet in sight.
Of
course, this administration has already built its
state-of-the-art mega-bases in Iraq as well as a
mega-embassy, the largest on the planet, to suit
such dreams. Yet in April 2003, the month Baghdad
fell to American forces, former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld first denied that the US
was seeking "permanent" bases in Iraq. Ever since
then, administration officials have consistently
denied that those increasingly permanent-looking
mega-bases were "permanent".
Just the
other day, the president again told Fox News, "We
won't have permanent bases ... [but] I do believe
it is in our interests and the interests of the
Iraqi people that we do enter into an agreement on
how we are going to conduct ourselves over the
next years." Dana Perino, White House press
spokesperson, offered further clarification by
indicating that we do not actually have permanent
bases on Planet Earth, even in Korea more than
half a century later. "I'm not aware," she said,
"of any place in the world - where we have a base
- that they are asking us to leave. And if they
did, we would probably leave." (She made a
singular exception for Guantanamo.)
Consider this a philosophic position.
Evidently, we don't do permanent because all
things are evanescent; everything must end. Where,
after all, are the Seven Wonders of the World?
Mostly gone, of course.
Such a position
might be applied to far more than the permanency
of bases. Let me offer two linked predictions
based on impermanency:
As a start, the
surge-followed-by-pause solution the Bush
administration whipped up is a highly unstable,
distinctly impermanent strategy. It was never
meant to do much more than give Iraq enough of the
look of quiescence that the President's war could
be declared a modest "success" and passed on to
the next president. It relies on a tenuous
balancing of unstable, largely hostile forces in
Iraq - of Sunni former insurgents and the Shi'ite
followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, among others.
It is unlikely to last even until the November
presidential election.
And let's remember
that those on the other side(s) are just as
capable of reading drawdown - and election -
schedules, of gauging weakness and strength, as we
are. It's likely that by the fall the surge effect
will have worn off - signs of this are already in
the air - and Iraq will be creeping back onto
front pages and to the top of the TV news.
Given that McCain is so tightly linked to
the surge's "success", as well as the war itself,
he is likely to prove a far weaker Republican
candidate than now generally imagined. Similarly,
it may be far harder to Swift Boat the Democrats
over Iraq by this fall - if, that is, the
Democratic presidential candidate doesn't move so
close to McCain on the war as to take the sting
out of his situation. Already, as Gary Kamiya has
written at Salon.com, the Democrats' "timid,
Republican-lite approach to Iraq and the 'war on
terror' has put the country to sleep ... Indeed,
polls show that the main reason the public has
such a low opinion of Congress is that it failed
to force Bush to change course in Iraq".
Iraq is a deeply alien land whose people
were never going to accept being garrisoned by the
military of a Western imperial power. It was
always delusional to think that our situation
there could be "enduring", no matter how many
permanent-looking structures we built. It is no
less delusional for Senator McCain to imagine a
100-year garrisoning - in fact, one of any length
- in which Americans will not be "injured, harmed
or killed".
The time for withdrawal from
Iraq has long passed. In those endless years in
which withdrawal didn't happen, the Bush
administration definitively proved one thing: we
are incapable of "solving" Iraq's problems,
"building" a nation there, or preventing an
endless string of horrific things from occurring.
After all, it was under US occupation and in the
face of the overwhelming presence of American
forces that Iraq devolved and massive ethnic
cleansing occurred. It was during the months of
the president's surge in 2007, with US troops
flooding the streets of the capital, that many of
Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods were most
definitively "cleansed".
It is a delusion
to believe that the US military is a force that
stands between Iraqis and catastrophe. It is a
significant part of the catastrophe and, as long
as Washington is committed to any form of
permanency (however euphemistically described), it
cannot help but remain so.
Every day that
passes, the Bush administration is digging us in
further, even though surge commander General David
Petraeus recently observed that "there is no light
at the end of the tunnel that we're seeing". Every
day that passes makes withdrawal that much harder
and yet brings it ineradicably closer.
Getting out, when it comes, won't be
elegant. That's a sure thing by now; but,
honestly, you don't have to be a military
specialist to know that, if we were determined to
leave, it wouldn't take us forever and a day to do
so. It isn't actually that hard to drive a combat
brigade's equipment south to Kuwait. (And there's
no reason to expect serious opposition from our
Iraqi opponents, who overwhelmingly want us to
depart.)
When withdrawal finally comes,
the Iraqis will be the greatest losers. They will
be left in a dismantled country. They deserve
better. Perhaps an American administration
determined to withdraw in all due haste could
still muster the energy to offer better. But leave
we must. All of us.
Tom Engelhardt
is editor of Tomdispatch and the
co-founder of the American Empire Project. His
book, The End of Victory Culture, has been
thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that
deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel
in Iraq.
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