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Withdrawal on the
agenda
By Tom Engelhardt
Republican Congressman Walter B Jones
(famed for insisting that the Congressional
cafeteria re-label French fries as "freedom fries"
on its menu), a man who represents North
Carolina's 3rd Congressional District, home to the
Marine's Camp LeJeune, voted enthusiastically for
the Iraq War, but recently changed his mind. Last
week he became one of four congressional sponsors
of a resolution calling for a timetable for
withdrawal. "Do we want to be there 20 years, 30
years?" he asked at a Capitol Hill news
conference. "That's why this resolution is so
important: We need to take a fresh look at where
we are and where we're going."
Various
explanations for his unexpected change of mind
(and heart) have been offered. In the last lines
of a June 13 piece, "Sunni-Shi'ite Quarrel Edges
Closer to Political Stalemate", New York Times
reporter Sabrina Tavernise made the following
connection:
[Jones's] remarks came two weeks
after military commanders told a Congressional
delegation visiting Iraq that it would take
about two years before enough Iraqi security
forces were sufficiently trained to allow the
Pentagon to withdraw large numbers of American
troops. About two years. I was
struck by that phrase in part because I had just
been rereading a piece I wrote less than seven
months after our president announced from the deck
of the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended". I called it The Time of Withdrawal
and posted it on October 31, 2003. At the time, I
offered the following:
Two years hence, according to
[occupation head] L Paul Bremer's men in
Baghdad, we Americans are still going to be
"reconstructing" the country. In the Pentagon,
according to the latest reports, generals are
discussing what our troop levels there will be
in 2006. That was then, this is now -
or do I mean, that was now, this is then? After
all, as Tavernise and other reporters, quoting our
military commanders in Iraq, make clear, we're
still that miraculously receding "two years" away
from significantly drawing down US forces and
having a reconstructed Iraq (not that the
reconstruction of Iraq is much mentioned any
more). In other words, in October 2003 we were
talking about 2005-06. In June 2005, we're talking
about 2007-08. What's wrong with this
picture?
Sadly, if anything, the
similarities may be deceptive. After all, at the
end of October 2003 it was still possible for most
Americans to imagine a pacified - or as the Bush
people would now say, "democratic" - Iraq by
2005-06. Today, as poll figures indicating
fast-sinking support for the war and the president
tell us, as edgy monthly casualty figures tell us,
as Walter Jones' changed position tells us, as the
latest nose-dive in military recruitment figures
tells us, as the fact that 35% of Americans,
according to a Pew poll, think we are now back in
Vietnam tells us, things in Iraq are just getting
worse and worse.
John Newton, a reader
from Michigan, recently framed this in an
interesting way when, after reading a Jonathan
Schell piece (The bright, shining lie,
Jun 17) on our failing attempt to create an Iraqi
army, he sent the following into the Tomdispatch
e-mail box:
It occurred to me that
we've reached the point where we've got to bribe
everyone to fight this war. The Iraqi army
salaries aren't much by our standards, but they
are probably twice or three times what an ordinary
Iraqi makes. And yet in a place with massive
unemployment, they still desert. We have perhaps
20,000 or more "contractors" doing security work
who make salaries in the six figures to be in
Iraq. And now the military is offering signing
bonuses of up to $40,000. For a high school kid,
that is a down payment on a house and a car. That
is not so easy to pass up, but the recruiters
still can't get them to sign.
He's right. In a sense,
between 2003 and 2005, we've moved decisively to
the devolving side of our first free-market war.
Before the invasion of Iraq even began, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was eagerly privatizing
the Pentagon, stripping its forces, beefing up its
technology and outsourcing many matters that were
once distinctly military to the private economy.
(In other words, Halliburton, of which our vice
president was previously the CEO, and its
subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, or KBR, are
off constructing bases and doing KP.) Hence, even
before the invasion of Iraq, when General Eric
Shinseki was essentially laughed out of
neo-conservative Washington for telling Congress
that we would need an army of "several hundred
thousand" men to occupy a defeated Iraq, such an
army already didn't exist. (The statement was
undoubtedly Shinseki's way of saying: don't go
in.)
Next, under the label of
"reconstruction," the Bushniacs attempted
(catastrophically) to privatize Iraq, more or less
turning it over to friendly "free market"
corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton (which
had the good fortune of getting global "war on
terror" goodies coming and going - it was, after
all, responsible for building much of that jewel
in the crown in the Bush administration's Bermuda
Triangle of injustice, Guantanamo prison, and only
recently got a $30 million contract to add further
facilities there). Now, as Newton points out in
his letter, the Bush administration is trying to
privatize defeat by turning military recruitment
in Iraq and at home into a bonus-plus bidding war.
Under these circumstances, the draft-era phrase
from the Vietnam years, "Hell no, we won't go," is
morphing into the volunteer army phrase, "Hell no,
I won't join."
In 2003, when I wrote "The
Time of Withdrawal", I offered the following
simple summary of our situation and why withdrawal
should be on the American agenda:
History, long term and more recent, is
not on our side.
We are a
war-making and an occupying force, not a
peacekeeping force.
We never
planned to leave Iraq.
Time is
against us.
Or to boil all this down
to a sentence: we are not and never have been
the solution to the problem of Iraq, but a
significant part of the problem.
I
wouldn't change a word. In October of 2003,
however, the "time of withdrawal" was distinctly
not on us. Now - finally - it is. We seem to have
reached the actual moment when the idea of
"withdrawal", at least, is being placed on the
American agenda - by the unlikely Walter Jones,
among others. This is, of course, a far worse
moment for withdrawal than in 2003, for Iraqis as
well as Americans, just as 2007 will be worse than
today.
But at least it's here. How can we
tell? Several signs (other than just the
Congressional resolution) point to its arrival.
First of all, there's the return of Vietnam. It's
on everyone's mind these days - and not just
because our president is at the moment welcoming
the Vietnamese prime minister to the White House
and announcing that a visit to our former enemy's
land is in the offing. (Keep in mind that when
Richard Nixon started feeling the combined
pressure of Vietnam/Watergate, he used travel to
strange lands - think: communist China and the
Soviet Union - as a way to try to distract public
attention.)
Representative Jones, for
instance, recently said: "When I think about what
happened in Vietnam - we lost 58,000 - I wonder,
wouldn't it have been nice if, two years into the
war, some representatives would have said, 'Mr
President, where [are] we going'?" At about the
same time, Marine Lieutenant General James T
Conway, director of operations for the Pentagon's
Joint Staff, "alluded to the precedent of Vietnam,
in which plummeting public support for the war was
blamed for undercutting the US effort". You could
pile up such examples endlessly.
Perhaps
more important, the president is now working off
what clearly seems to be the Vietnam playbook -
Lyndon Johnson's playbook circa 1967. Like
Johnson, facing falling polling figures and calls
for withdrawal, he is staging a series of major
addresses to "reassure" the American people (and
shore up those polls). Just last Saturday in his
radio address, he declared that there would be no
cutting-and-running for him, no withdrawal option
at all: "This mission isn't easy," he said, "and
it will not be accomplished overnight. We're
fighting a ruthless enemy that relishes the
killing of innocent men, women, and children. By
making their stand in Iraq, the terrorists have
made Iraq a vital test for the future security of
our country and the free world. We will settle for
nothing less than victory."
Words to eat,
of course.
As readers never hesitate to
remind me, Iraq is not Vietnam - or, as Daniel
Ellsberg put it sardonically, "In Iraq, it's a dry
heat. And the language that none of our troops or
diplomats speak is Arabic rather than Vietnamese."
But the Vietnam experience is fused into American
consciousness in such a way that the minute things
start to go wrong, our leaders find themselves,
almost helplessly, following that Vietnam
playbook. So, as we enter the terrain of
withdrawal, we should be thinking about Vietnam as
well.
The withdrawal resolution Jones and
his co-sponsors put forward was, on the face of
it, "Vietnamish" in the sense that it had
relatively little to do with actual withdrawal.
(In the Vietnam years, almost every "withdrawal"
plan or strategy that came out of Washington had a
great deal to do with keeping us in Vietnam, not
getting us out.) This particular resolution
evidently proposes that, by the fall of 2005, the
administration create a "timetable" for a
withdrawal to be begun by the fall of 2006 (with
no designated end in sight, nor total withdrawal,
it seems, even mentioned). This is, on the face of
it, a non-withdrawal withdrawal proposal.
But the details may make little
difference. The Bush administration, which could
essentially have accepted the proposal and had
endless "withdrawal" time to spare, attacked it
strongly because what they can see - as well they
should - is the first cracks appearing in
Republican Party support. You know something's
happening when Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck
Hagel says, "Things aren't getting better; they're
getting worse. The White House is completely
disconnected from reality. It's like they're just
making it up as they go along. The reality is that
we're losing in Iraq." Or Republican Senator from
Florida Mel Martinez pronounces himself
"discouraged" by the "lack of progress" in Iraq.
This is no small thing. This is not a party that
is eager to be pulled into a Vietnam-like hell and
then swept out of Congress in 2006 or 2008. As
University of North Carolina professor (and former
US Air Force historian) Richard Kohn puts it,
"You've got Republican grandees in the Senate who
probably aren't willing to put up with this much
longer."
Paralyzing fantasies
So, here we are on Vietnam-like withdrawal
turf, and one sure sign of that is the sudden
foregrounding of a series of predictions about the
horrors that would occur if the United States were
to withdraw from Iraq. These are well summed up in
a recent piece by Richard Whittle of the Dallas
Morning News ("Experts: Iraq withdrawal now would
be bad idea"). According to the "foreign-policy
experts" Whittle interviewed, these nightmare
scenarios could "at worst" include:
A
civil war in Iraq resulting in far greater
bloodshed than the current conflict, though
presumably without further US losses.
The transformation of western Iraq,
which is dominated by Sunni Muslims, into a haven
for international terrorists from al-Qaeda and
other groups.
A collapse of US
credibility among nations of the Middle East,
whose leaders would probably distance themselves
from Washington.
A collapse of the
Bush administration's push for democracy in the
region.
Instability in the Persian
Gulf that could lead to steep increases in oil
prices, driving the cost of gasoline beyond
current record levels.
Now, here's the
fascinating thing when you look over a list like
this: all these predicted nightmares-to-come
constitute a collective warning not to act in a
certain way; but each of the specific potential
nightmares also represents a phenomenon
intensifying at this very moment exactly because
we are in Iraq. Each is in operation now largely
because we have almost 140,000 troops on the
ground in that country; a vast intelligence and
diplomatic network, a shadow government, embedded
in a kind of Forbidden City in Baghdad's Green
Zone; huge military bases all over the land, some
of which have the look of permanency; an air Force
that is periodically loosed to bomb heavily
populated urban areas of Iraq - all of this, in a
very foreign land which, under any circumstances,
would be hostile to such an alien presence.
Between the moment in late 2003 when I
wrote "The Time of Withdrawal" and today, Iraq
has, in fact, crept ever closer to some kind of
civil war - it may already have begun; western
Iraq has been transformed into a "haven" for
terrorists and jihadis; American "credibility" has
collapsed not just in the Middle East but
globally; the Bush push for "democracy" does look
embattled; and oil prices, which in 2003 were
surely hovering around $30 a barrel, are now up at
close to double that price, while Iraq is almost
incapable of exporting significant amounts of oil
and "instability" in the Gulf has risen
significantly.
A similar situation played
itself out in Vietnam back when nightmarish
visions of what might happen if we withdrew ("the
bloodbath") became so much a part of public debate
that the bloodbath actually taking place in
Vietnam was sometimes overshadowed by it.
Prediction is a risky business. Terrible things
might indeed happen if we withdrew totally from
Iraq, or they might not; or they might - but not
turn out to be the ones we've been dreaming about;
or perhaps if we committed to departure in a
serious way, the situation would actually ease. We
don't know. That's the nature of the future. All
we know at the moment, based on the past two
years, is what is likely to happen if we stay -
which is more and worse of the very nightmares we
fear if we leave.
The most essential
problem in such thinking is the belief that, if we
just hang in there long enough, the US will be
capable of solving the Iraqi crisis. That is
inconceivable, since the US presence is now
planted firmly at the heart of the crisis to be
solved.
One guarantee: the Bush
administration won't hesitate to deploy such
fantasies of future disaster to paralyze present
thinking and planning. Expect it. And it will be
all too easy to take our eyes off this disastrous
moment and enter their world of grim future
dreams. After all, they already live in a kind of
ruling fantasy world. They step to the podium
regularly, their hands dipped in blood, call it
wine or nectar, and insist that the rest of the
world drink. They will be eager to trade in their
best future nightmares so that the present
nightmare can continue. (They argue, by the way,
for the use of torture, under whatever name, in
quite a similar fashion, proposing future
nightmares - let's say we held a terrorist who had
knowledge of an impending nuclear explosion in a
major American city and you only had two hours to
get that information from him, what would you do?
- in order to justify the ongoing horrors at
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and other
places.)
Returning to what I wrote in
October 2003, on only one point was I wrong, I
believe. I wrote then:
What is bad now for us - and for the
Iraqis - will only be worse later. The
resistance will be greater, more organized, and
more determined. Our allies, both within and
without Iraq, ever more distant; American troops
more isolated, angry and embattled; money in
shorter supply; military morale lower; and the
antiwar movement here
stronger. Generally on the money,
except when it came to the antiwar movement. I
was, of course, projecting from the huge antiwar
marches of the prewar moment. But so far, at
least, Iraq has not proved to be Vietnam when it
comes to an antiwar movement; or rather, it's as
if we had arrived at the end of the Vietnam-era
antiwar movement first. In 1972, when the
non-military part of that movement more or less
collapsed, the antiwar soldiers remained. Vietnam
Veterans Against the War was the official name of
the main organization they formed, but the
military in Vietnam itself was in near-revolt -
rising desertions and absent without leave,
fraggings, "search and avoid" missions (where
patrols just left perimeters and then sat out
their assigned duties), escalating drug use,
demonstrations by veterans in the US, and so on.
In the Iraq war, though in a far more
modest way so far, the antiwar movement has been
emerging in large part from the world of the
military itself - from worried parents of soldiers
and would-be soldiers, angry spouses of soldiers
in danger or killed in Iraq, and (slowly and
quietly) from within the military itself. This is
what has moved Walter B Jones. Along with growing
cracks in the Republican Party, the alienation of
the military (including many officers who clearly
believe that Iraq = madness) is a real threat -
perhaps the only real withdrawal threat at
present. Predicting the future is a chancy thing
to attempt. We humans are notoriously lousy at it.
This I was incapable of fully imagining.
Withdrawal is now on the agenda, not just
ours, but the Iraqi one as well. Just the other
day in a letter, "82 Shi'ite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab,
Christian and communist legislators", just under a
third of the newly elected Iraqi parliament,
called for the withdrawal of American occupation
forces. Given this administration, withdrawal is
likely to be on the agenda for a long time to
come. But that shouldn't stop us. Let the thoughts
pour out. Let the plans pour in. (Note that Juan
Cole, at his always invaluable Informed Comment
website, has recently taken a first stab at
offering a reasonable withdrawal plan, one
involving the UN. Don't hold your breath, of
course, if John Bolton arrives at UN headquarters
after being rejected by the Senate.
Another letter as a reminder - the sort
that Jones evidently got in his district - that
there is a complex constituency out there, people
connected to soldiers, sailors and airmen and
women deployed in or around Iraq, who are also
considering what we really should be doing and how
our world actually works in fascinating and
sometimes inspiring ways.
My grandson's father came home from
Iraq two weeks ago. He is one of the lucky ones
as the air force appears (I have no
documentation either way) to not be in harm's
way over there, but time will tell.
I am
happy for my grandson and his father. My only
concern now is the 1,700 men and women who have
died needlessly in this unholy war - my version
as a devout Catholic, but I believe all
Christian people regardless of their religious
beliefs, not the religious right, but the true
Christians who believe in and pray for peace are
against this war. Let us not forget that Muslims
also pray to the same God we do, and believe we
are doing them harm by occupying their country,
so naturally, they feel God is on their side.
There is too much labeling going on in the media
right now and it is difficult to watch. We all
have a birth-right to follow our conscience,
without judgment or bias from the media.
What concerns me is most Americans are
just like me, trying to squeak out a living, pay
their mortgage, pay their bills and take care of
their children, and grandchildren. Example, I
hit the ground running each day, fire up the
laptop, answer the endless e-mail requests I
receive at work, spend long hours at work due to
the volume and corporate greed which keeps our
VPs from hiring enough staff, so all of us carry
the jobs of two or more people. I grew up here
and now that I'm 53, I think my state is going
to hell in a hand-basket (pardon the
expression).
I have an interesting
parallel going on in my life. My son has a
Vietnamese girlfriend who is as cute as a button
(she came here when she was a year old) and her
dad has returned to Vietnam to live, and my son
and his girlfriend are considering visiting
there in the next year. When our boys were in
Vietnam, it never for a moment crossed my mind
that in my wildest dreams any of my descendents,
let alone my only son, would even think of going
to visit Vietnam. It was unthinkable because of
the war, which we thought would never end.
Next slide: can you picture your
grandchildren visiting Iraq on vacation? No, I
can't imagine it either. But it brings me back
to the fact that war is momentary, even if it
lasts for 20 years, and then life changes,
making things we never thought possible,
possible.
I hope and pray we can get out
of Iraq sooner, not later, or another 20 years
of conflict and another 58,000 of our men and
women will have lost their lives for nothing.
There was absolutely no reason to start this war
and it's brought pain and suffering to many
parents in America and many citizens of
Iraq.
Don't get me wrong, I pray every
day for the men and women who are over there; I
know they are following orders and went into the
military with open and true hearts. As a
country, we have let them down. I said when
George W became president in January 2001, I'd
be lucky if my job was still there by the end of
his presidency, never dreaming he would be in
office for eight years.
Well, off to get
ready for another Monday. Please keep our
soldiers and their parents in your prayers. I
came so close to losing my daughter in the
hospital in '99, and still can't imagine what
it's like to lose a child; I'm grateful I didn't
and pray for those who have. We can't give up on
ending this war, but we have to find a better
way to mobilize America. We can't give up. I
pray every, every day for an end to this. Take
care and Godspeed ... It's up to all
of us to consider the timing and the time of
withdrawal.
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch.com and
the author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch)
(Published with permission of TomDisptach.com) |
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