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Page 3 of 3 The last time those elections were only made possible, and it's now often forgotten, because the U.S. military forbade vehicular traffic for three days. They locked down the country. They made everybody walk wherever they wanted to go. And so they stopped the car bombing -- otherwise the elections couldn't have been held. So that's going to be necessary again. If the elections can be held and they are relatively successful this time, then I look to see a beginning of drawdown of ground forces from the Bush administration. My fear is that either they will do it too slowly, and they will continue to follow tactics on the ground that will encourage the guerrilla war to spread, or they will do it too fast, and the country will fall into civil war. They won't give proper thought to what structures could be put in place to maintain stability as they leave. I'm afraid that as we move into the 2006 election process here, domestic politics may begin dictating Iraq policy in ways that might be very bad both for the Iraqis and the United States. AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got Republicans joining with Democrats in calling on President Bush to change policy. Some of the most ardent supporters of the war, like Walter Jones, who renamed French fries “freedom fries,” so that's putting pressure. Also, you have got Cindy Sheehan and the growing movement of military mothers and family members. How significant do you think that is in Crawford right now in terms of determining policy? JUAN COLE: It's certainly very significant, and as I said, although the rhetoric coming from the Bush camp has stayed the course, and this week President Bush is making a push to justify the war, the fact is that his polling numbers on the Iraq situation are very low. His general approval ratings are extremely low for a president at this stage of the second term. Karl Rove and other White House strategists are extremely sensitive to these kinds of numbers, and so, the -- certainly the White House and the Republican Party are thinking very hard about the political fallout of a continued unpopular war in Iraq. But I think that the problem is that they have gotten themselves stuck. They're thinking in terms of the necessity of keeping ground troops on the ground in order to prevent a civil war, to curb the guerrillas, and then the terrorist groups, and they are just not thinking imaginatively enough about how U.S. military forces might be used to maintain stability while doing a rapid withdrawal. I suspect – and I cannot prove it, but I suspect also that business interests around Bush and Cheney are still hoping that a long-term U.S. military presence will segue then into major U.S. corporate opportunities for investment in the new Iraq and that a withdrawal of ground troops, U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, might then throw the country open to free competition. China would come in, Western Europe, and so forth, and so business opportunities will be lost. And I'm a little bit afraid that that kind of consideration may in part be causing Bush and Cheney to drag their heels on keeping so many ground forces in Iraq for so long. And I really think it's beginning to backfire. AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, runs a blog called “Informed Comment.” It can be found at JuanCole.com, speaking to us from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, TV studios. This is Democracy now!, DemocracyNow.org. Later in the week we'll play part two of this interview, where we also talk about what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank and, in Saudi Arabia, the meeting that Vice President Dick Cheney had with the new king. Recommend this article...
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