6. Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would like to achieve. I assume that, when you refer to "fundamentalist Muslims," you are referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and those who attacked the World Trade Center, the London tube, and the Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree with this identification of the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with all fundamentalist Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building as "fundamentalist Christians" and then implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all fundamentalist Christians yearn to achieve. 
Second, I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow withdrawal will allow the terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and impose a horrible regime on an Iraq, bent on attacking its neighbors and the United States. A large part of my commentary in favor of withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush administration actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening the terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the U.S. stays, the more the Islamic terrorists there are likely gain strength; the sooner the U.S. leaves, the more quickly the resistance will subside, and -- with it -- support for terrorism. The administration's Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy.
7. Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S. evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5 years). I think we need to disentangle two different events involving the (forced) American departure from Southeast Asia. First, there was Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath would follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly deaths there after the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country, some for the United States. But whatever these figures may have been, they were dwarfed by the incredible bloodbath that the U.S. created by being in Vietnam in the first place. Reputable sources suggest that millions of Vietnamese died (and countless others were permanently wounded) during the war years. We must conclude, therefore, that in Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline in the levels of violence, and -- sometime afterward -- an end to the havoc and destruction; not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the United States has had plenty of "credibility" in Vietnam.
Second, there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have resulted in a million or more deaths. This was also, however, a complex consequence of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, not a result of our departure. Cambodia had a stable, neutral government until the Nixon administration launched massive secret bombings against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the regime, and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of murderous Khmer Rouge. If the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 or 1968, that holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.
The situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the U.S. withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly and that peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer the U.S. stays -- further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur. 
8. Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it retreats. Don't forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama Bin Laden. "Cut and Run." Here we agree. If the U.S. withdraws, this "retreat" will undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an administration threatens to use military power to force another country to submit to its demands (and may also, as after Vietnam, make Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad to fight presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important implications that derive from this observation.
The first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most crystalline case making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than now that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. (In fact, the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically and in the Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century. (See my recent article on this at Tomdispatch.) In other words -- from your point of view -- the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.
From my point of view -- and this is the second implication I want to point out -- the undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the few good things that has resulted from the war in Iraq. I do not believe that anything positive is likely to come from American military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration (and the Clinton , earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used military power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be much better off, I believe, with the multi-polar world that many Americans advocate (and this administration loathes the very thought of), in which no single state (including the U.S.) could impose itself on others without at least the support of a great many others. We would be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and started spending some of that money on things that would actually improve the welfare of our people. 
9. Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea, and the former Yugoslavia. Should we get out of those? Where was the pre-war planning to get out of all those locations. Did Lincoln have a pre-war plan to leave the South? I agree that some wars, some interventions, and some occupations can be positive things (without evaluating the particulars of the examples you offer). That does not mean that all, or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq is neither justified, nor moral.
10. Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by fundamentalist Muslims. How do we change their attitudes? This query rests on two premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration and was part of the package of lies and intelligence manipulations that it used to hustle Congress and the American people into war -- the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 had anything in common or any ties whatsoever. They didn't and the truth is that 9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any discussion of the war there -- or at least that was certainly true until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to recreate Iraq as the "central theater in the war on terror."
The second premise is one held by many Americans -- that the only way to change the attitudes of those who are fighting the U.S. involves "whipping their ass," which rests on another commonly held opinion -- that "these people only understand force." Attitudes are never changed in this way. Every serious scholar who studies terrorism agrees on this essential point: Terrorism arises from the misery that many people are forced to live in or in close proximity to. It is misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives from complaints people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations they experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.
The best way to transform such attitudes, built as they are on hopelessness, would be to take a fraction (a fraction!!) of the money we are now spending on the war in Iraq and on our military and invest it in the lives of others. One example: a panel of expert development economists just delivered a report to the UN saying that for $50 billion annually we could bring the income of the poorest people in the world up to a level that would largely eradicate the famines and mass starvation currently spreading from one continent to another. That project, if enacted, would do more to reduce terrorism than all the "anti-terrorist" activities of our government, including the entire official defense budget (about $400 billion a year), the $200 billion for the war in Iraq, and the $80 or so billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Put another way, if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it could fund an entire program to alleviate global suffering with but a modest portion of the money it saved, and start to reduce terrorism instead of increasing it.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz
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