Michael Schwartz on Immediate Withdrawal

by Tom Engelhardt, Editor at large

Not long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent that the United States was part of the problem, not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There's no reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be any less destabilizing than the last.

Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today's catastrophic tinderbox: First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush's nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi "reconstruction" that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country. Finally, let's not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own "liberation."

It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon's determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time "enduring camps") in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to "withdraw" or "draw down" our Iraqi presence.

On all the points above, matters simply continue down their hideous path. The bases are still being built; the looting of Iraq, which never ended, has now extended in an open-armed way to the Iraqis under our tutelage. Just this week, Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent reported that the Iraqi defense ministry is missing more than $1 billion, certainly one of the larger thefts in history, contracted out in a familiarly no-bid way for arms purchases from Poland and Pakistan. These arms were, of course, for the new Iraqi military on which the administration is counting so heavily, and the money is now simply gone. As for a policy of force, the U.S. military, which has just conducted an assault on the largely Turkmen city of Tal Afar, causing, it seems, great damage, is threatening to repeat such operations (modeled in a modest way on the destruction of Falluja last November) in urban areas elsewhere. ("'You will see the same thing [as at Tal Afar] down along the Euphrates Valley to push back out and restore Iraqi control to the area around Qaim,' Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said in an interview in Baghdad.") This is, of course, the American version of the infamous Roman Carthaginian solution, meant to bring the Sunni resistance to an intimidated halt. (Don't count on that.) And in the process, of course, more Americans died, 12 of them in recent days, sending the total of American dead over the 1,900 levee.

The results can be observed from Baghdad to Basra in the Shiite south where the Brits are now in some trouble. Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website (the single must-visit Iraq stop on the Internet) reported recently on the security situation ("sinking like the Titanic" in his phrase) in Baghdad where whole neighborhoods seem to have fallen into the hands of insurgents or Zarqawi followers. We're not talking here about Tal Afar, or Mosul, but about the Iraqi capital itself which "our" government inside the Green Zone simply does not control. What more do we need to know about how desperate the situation is. Should you want a sense of what that situation feels like up close and personal, check out Baghdad Burning by Riverbend, the remarkable young woman blogger who has just come back on-line after a two-month hiatus, a "vacation" daily lacking in electricity, water, and the other amenities of life in a modern city.

But let's look on the bright side. A year ago, withdrawal was a subject that simply couldn't be brought up in a serious way in the mainstream American world. Now, it's a word everyone is bandying about. In the wake of Katrina, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, "52% of people interviewed called for an immediate withdrawal, even if that means abandoning President Bush's goal of restoring stability to that country." (A Gallup poll reported that "66 percent of respondents favored the immediate withdrawal of some or all of the U.S. troops in Iraq, a 10 percentage point jump in two weeks.") In this, they are far ahead of the politicians they've elected, whether Democrats or Republicans. {mosgoogle right}

Below, Michael Schwartz makes the case, both simple and sophisticated, for withdrawing quickly from Iraq, but more than that for stopping thinking of ourselves as part of the solution –- a bulwark, for instance, against an onrushing civil war -- rather than part of the problem. With the antiwar demonstration in Washington DC this weekend, this is a moment to consider just what kinds of pressure for what kinds of solutions we want to bring to bear on this stumbling, if still utterly recalcitrant administration. Tom

Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense
By Michael Schwartz

That we are in a military quagmire in Iraq has become a fact of life among Americans of all political persuasions. Though Administration officials still sometimes speak of troop reductions in early 2006, and some top military men clearly no longer endorse "staying the course," the muted voices of reason within the military and the State Department still talk in terms of a three-to-five year drawdown of forces followed by the "sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers," to be housed in the huge permanent bases the U.S. is continuing to construct and upgrade in Iraq. In addition, Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force Chief of Staff, recently told New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt that U.S. air power would be flying combat missions inside Iraq "more of less indefinitely."

Many in the anti-war movement, despite the high-intensity moments generated by Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan's demand that President Bush at least meet with her "before another mother's son dies in Iraq," also seem increasingly resigned to a long-term military engagement with Iraq. While most continue to advocate the "immediate withdrawal" of American troops, such calls are uttered with little sense of hope. In fact, there appears to be a growing feeling that any form of "immediate" withdrawal will prove a thoroughly unsatisfactory option, destined only to intensify the present chaos in Iraq, trigger a civil war, and/or unleash a round of ethnic violence that could escalate to levels of near-genocidal mass murder. Instead, ever more critics of Bush's Iraqi adventure are proposing "phased" withdrawal scenarios that could keep American troops at the ready for years to prevent the Iraqi pressure cooker from blowing its top.

Many of these cautious withdrawal scenarios are advocated by staunch opponents of the war. I am thinking, in particular, of Juan Cole, the most widely respected antiwar voice, and Robert Dreyfuss, a thoughtful critic of the war who publishes regularly at the independent website Tompaine.com as well as in the Nation and Mother Jones. Both have offered forceful warnings against a hasty American withdrawal, advocating instead that U.S. forces be pulled out in stages and only as the threat of civil war recedes. Dreyfuss expresses the thinking of many antiwar activists thusly:

"They worry that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, the result will be an all-out civil war among three major ethnic and religious blocs. (It's facile to argue that Iraq is already wracked by civil war; yes, there is widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites. But it hasn't reached anything like civil war proportions yet, and it might: Things could get far, far worse.) Maybe it's too late for the United States to be able to do anything to prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict. But because there is so much at stake, it's worth a try."

Cole captures the same logic in a phrase: "All it would take would be for Sunni Arab guerrillas to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Sistani. And, boom"

And they are right. Black Wednesday, September 14, with its 12 Baghdad car bombs, killing at least 160 Iraqis, and wounding upward of 600, offered a flash of civil-war-level violence. Ordinarily, Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence accounts, on average, for fewer than 100 civilian deaths a week. This was true even during the car-bomb offensive just after the January elections. If a Black Wednesday occurred every week, the death toll from such violence might reach 15,000 per year, and we could start talking about a real civil war. So things could indeed get much worse.