Op/Ed,

How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq

On the September 27th Charlie Rose Show, interviewing New Yorker editor David Remnick, Rose brought up the question of what the United States should do in Iraq. Should we "get out" -- or, as Remnick so delicately put it, should we "bolt"? Here was how Remnick ended their discussion, while talking about those who had written on Iraq for his magazine:

"There's Jon Lee Anderson and George Packer and Sy Hersh and Rick [Hertzberg], they all look at it from different angles. But I think all of those people would agree -- I don't know about Sy -- would agree that an immediate American withdrawal just, you know, just pick up your skirts and run, would not lead to a happy situation in the short term or the long."

Pick up your skirts and run. Forget the Republicans, that more or less sums up the state of mainstream liberal opinion on Iraq just two months ago. Only that recently "withdrawal" was still synonymous with cowardice, or, in a classic phrase of the Vietnam era (that like so many others has taken an extra bow in our own moment), "cutting and running." Withdrawal from Iraq was a subject for the margins and the political Internet (as well as secret Pentagon planning); certainly not something to be bandied about in Congress or taken seriously by the mainstream media. What a difference a few weeks can make -- a few weeks and one hawkish congressman with heart (channeling the views of a panicky military facing an increasingly unwinnable war). When Congressman John Murtha stood up -- and there wasn't a "skirt" in sight (not, at least, until Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accused him, briefly, of cowardice on the floor of the House of Representatives) -- and suggested a withdrawal of American ground troops from Iraq on a six-month timetable, you could hear the administration's angry heart thumping.

Then, Chicken Little, the sky began to fall and withdrawal proposals, withdrawal trial balloons, withdrawal op-eds, withdrawal hints, clues, and suggestions of every sort suddenly rained down on us like those cats and dogs of children's books. It turns out that there was hardly a major mainstream figure anywhere who didn't have some kind of "withdrawal" proposal in his or her hip pocket; or put another way, when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden come out with positions that fit, however faintly, under the ever-widening label of "withdrawal" and only good ol' Joe Lieberman is left twisting, twisting in the Presidential hot air of "progress" and "victory," something is certainly afoot.

It gives one heart, really, to think about the strange processes that sometimes suddenly unclog the arteries of American discussion and debate, turning the previously impermissible into a topic quite suitable for the mainstream to take possession of. Give us another two months and who knows, maybe Judge Alito will actually go down to a filibuster; give us a year and maybe impeachment, just now creeping out from the margins, will find itself a topic in Congress and on the editorial pages of our papers. Like Charlie Rose, everybody knows what the proper limits of conversation are… until, of course, they unpredictably change.

Watch the Words

That said, this new withdrawal season of ours will undoubtedly prove a difficult one to sort out. With the President's speech at Annapolis, after a huge hint from Condoleezza Rice earlier in the week ("I do not think that American forces need to be there in the numbers that they are now because -- for very much longer -- because Iraqis are stepping up"), "withdrawal" or "pullout" or "draw-down" is everybody's property. In some ways, it was the Iraqis, meeting in Cairo, who helped get the withdrawal ball rolling by calling for a withdrawal "timetable" -- promptly rejected by the Bush administration. Now, Bush officials and military men are jumping on board in a thoroughly confusing way. No surprise there, since a lot of yesterday's non-withdrawal people have a fair amount at stake in muddying the waters today.

We've just entered a period where you won't be able tell the players without a scorecard and, unfortunately, nobody in the know is going to be selling scorecards. In fact, as the public withdrawal debate began, and the administration first "lashed out" in anger at its suddenly voluble opponents and then rushed to put forward its own "plans," the news in our papers and on TV promptly shifted into full-frontal anonymity mode. Even Congressman Murtha spoke with, it might be said, more than one tongue. After all, as a key figure on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he is known for his closeness to the military brass; and, in laying out his proposal, he offered some startling figures (on soaring attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and on the 50,000 soldiers who are likely to suffer from "battle fatigue") that clearly came directly from the military. Here's how the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh explained the Murtha proposal in a recent interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman:

"He's known for his closeness to the four-stars. They come and they bleed on him… So Murtha's message is a message… from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I'm not over-dramatizing this. It's a shot across the bow. They don't think [the Iraq war is] doable. You can't tell that to this President. He doesn't want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha."

So when, for instance, you read in the press about some general officially worrying that we may "draw-down" too quickly, you have no way of knowing whether at this point his real position is the one Murtha articulated. Get the hell out fast!

In a typical recent front-page piece on "withdrawal," for instance (As Calls for an Iraq Pullout Rise, 2 Political Calendars Loom Large), David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker of the New York Times start with the "mounting calls to set a deadline to begin a withdrawal from Iraq." By paragraph two, however, that "withdrawal" has somehow been pluralized: "But in private conversations American officials are beginning to acknowledge that a judgment about when withdrawals can begin…" ("withdrawals" being, of course, something less than "withdrawal"). By the fifth paragraph (just after the jump to an inside page), anonymous "White House aides" are saying that the President "will begin examining the timing of a draw-down after he sees the outcome of the Dec. 15 election in Iraq."

So in five paragraphs and a headline, you have pullout, withdrawal, withdrawals, draw-down… and by then you've already met a plethora of pluralized sources as well -- not just those "White House officials," but even vaguer "American officials," and lest even that give away too much, "several officials." They're soon joined by a roiling mass of other obscurely less-then-identified beings ("current and former White House officials," "one former aide with close ties to the National Security Council," "senior officers," plain old "officers," and "senior Pentagon civilians and officers"). And if that isn't murky enough for you, just throw in the "ifs" that go with any story of this sort and tend to negate even the best proposed plan:

"[O]fficials in the Bush White House were already actively reviewing possible plans under which 40,000 to 50,000 troops or more could be recalled next year if ‘a plausible case could be made' that a significant number of Iraqi battalions could hold their own."

Here, for instance, are typical phrases from correspondent Rosiland Jordan's withdrawal story on NBC national news last Sunday: "The debate is focusing on how many and when… that depends on how quiet the situation is… if conditions on the ground allow it… provided the situation on the ground improves." Or consider the following quote from a Los Angeles Times piece: "'It looks like things are headed in the right direction to enable [a large drawdown of forces] to happen in 2006,' said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. But he said those hopes could be derailed if there were setbacks." Or take this bit from the latest report on Hillary Clinton's ponderously shifting position: "…troops could be redeployed next year if coming elections in Iraq go well." So our news is now filled with posses of unidentifiable officials offering limited "withdrawal plans," which are actually draw-down plans, which are so provisionally linked to matters unlikely to unfold as expected that they may, in a sense, simply be meaningless.

The Return of Vietnamization

What then are the "plans" of those in power, as best we can tell?

The realities of the moment are, in a sense, simple and strange all at once. The grandiose preparations for planetary military and energy domination hatched by a group of utopian (or, if you prefer, dystopian) thinkers in Washington, aided and abetted by "native" dreamers and schemers in exile, and meant to begin but hardly end in Iraq, have by now run aground on the shoals of reality. A modest-sized but fierce and well-stocked insurgency, conducting a low-level guerrilla war -- Americans are basically killed on roads on their way somewhere, seldom in regular battles or on their bases -- fueled by our President's hubris, by an unquenchable urge for national sovereignty, and by religious fundamentalism as well as fanaticism, has driven this administration from its emplacements.

Now, a second force has joined the fray, turning this into one of the stranger two-front "wars" in memory. Unlike in the Vietnam era, the second front at home remains something of a specter. Perhaps it's not so surprising though that a President ever in fantasy-land and his utopian followers (many now set out to pasture) are being driven by publics that, at the moment, exist largely as sets of poll-driven numbers. The streets are seldom filled with demonstrators; the universities are not up in arms; and yet it's quite clear that some ghostly form of popular pressure is indeed at work -- in combination with growing pressures from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (think Watergate) and a military command that, as in the Vietnam era, fears, if something doesn't happen soon, the wheels might truly start coming off the American military machine. Still, it is fascinating that, without a significant political opposition yet in sight, we're witnessing what looks ever more like an administration and Republican meltdown. (For those of you who believe that the Republicans have put all election victories beyond anyone's grasp, rising Republican fears about the 2006 congressional elections should indicate that this is not yet so.)

In the eye of its own strange storm, the administration is finally starting to put policy back into the hands of those who pass for "realists," as journalist Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service has been pointing out recently. For instance, the astute and Machiavellian neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, our former ambassador to Afghanistan and present-day ambassador to the Green Zone of Iraq, has just been given permission to negotiate with the Iranians for help in Iraq and is, according to Newsweek, beginning to put American funds where they might actually matter -- into bribes to Sunni officials. In the meantime -- just a little straw in the gale -- Secretary of State Rice recently met for the first time in who knows how long for a chat with her former mentor, the elder Bush's National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. (If Daddy's men are ever actually called back in, then you'll know for sure that the White House is in humiliating "withdrawal" mode.)

In the meantime, we are once again seeing the return of the repressed (that is, the Vietnam era) to American consciousness. It's not just the language of that moment -- White House aides "circling the wagons" and going into "bunker mode," or Democratic Senator Jack Reed insisting that the President has a growing "credibility gap" -- but the way the White House is digging itself ever deeper into the Big Muddy of that era's playbook.