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Iraq exit on the
agenda
By Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON - Growing pessimism
about averting civil war in Iraq as well as
concerns that the US military presence there may
itself be fueling the insurgency and Islamist
extremism worldwide, have spurred a spate of new
calls for the United States to withdraw its
140,000 troops sooner rather than later.
Though resolutions to establish at least a
timeline for withdrawal have so far gained the
support of only about a quarter of the members of
Congress, the absence of tangible progress in
turning back the insurgency is adding to fears on
Capitol Hill that the administration's hopes of
stabilizing the situation, let alone giving birth
to a pro-Western democracy in the heart of the
Arab world, are delusory.
"In January, we
had Congressional staff hanging up on us when we
called to say that we want to discuss shifting US
policy from more guns and more troops towards
withdrawal,” said Jim Cason, communications
director of the lobby group Friends Committee on
National Legislation. ”Now they want to talk about
it.”
While the Bush administration still
insists that civil war will be avoided and current
negotiations to produce a new constitution by the
middle of next month remain on track, the
continuing high level of violence and the strength
and sophistication of predominantly Sunni
insurgents and foreign fighters are clearly having
an effect here.
That was made clearest in
two New York Times articles published Sunday,
including one entitled ”Defying US Efforts,
Guerrillas in Iraq Refocus and Strengthen,” and
another, by John Burns, a veteran Times reporter
who has spent considerable time in Iraq, entitled
”If It's Civil War, Do We Know It?”
The
latter story recounted the recent intensification
of Sunni violence against the Shi'ite community
that provoked even the ever-patient Shi'ite
religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to whom
Washington has increasingly deferred in guiding
the political transition, to call on the
Shi'ite-led government to ”defend the country
against mass annihilation”.
”From the
moment American troops crossed the border 28
months ago”, Burns wrote, ”the specter hanging
over the American enterprise here has been that
Iraq, freed from (Saddam) Hussein's tyranny, might
prove to be so fractured ... that [it] would
spiral inexorably into civil war”.
”Now,
events are pointing more than ever to the
possibility that the nightmare could come true,”
according to Burns, who noted that Shi'ite
militias and Shi'ite and Kurdish-led army and
police units were taking increasingly aggressive
counter-measures, including abducting, torturing,
and executing suspected insurgents and their
perceived sympathizers and defenders.
The
other article, by two Baghdad-based Times
correspondents, quoted unnamed senior military
officers reiterating two big frustrations that
have been heard since July 2003: that the
insurgency appears to be ”growing more violent,
more resilient and more sophisticated than ever”,
and that prosecuting the war is like sowing
dragons' teeth.
”We are capturing or
killing a lot of insurgents,” one senior US Army
intelligence officer told the Times. ”But they're
being replaced quicker than we can interdict their
operations. There is always another insurgent
ready to step up and take charge.”
Such
assessments are spurring what rapidly has become a
cottage industry - particularly from the
Democratic side of the political spectrum - fueled
in part by the leak in early July of a British
contingency plan that called for halving the
number of US and British troops in Iraq by the
latter part of 2006.
Thus on July 15,
former Central Intelligence Agency director John
Deutch published a column in the Times calling for
a ”prompt withdrawal plan”, with the initial
drawdown set to coincide with the Iraqi elections
scheduled for December 15. That would include a
timetable for reducing the scope of military
operations, while maintaining a ”regional
quick-reaction force” in reserve, as well as
ongoing intelligence and training programs.
At the same time, the US would urge the
Iraqi government and its neighbors to recognize
their common interest in Baghdad's peaceful
evolution without external intervention and commit
itself to an economic assistance program to Iraq
”so long as it stays on a peaceful path” as well
as to the wider region so as to encourage
cooperation.
A more detailed plan emerged
several days later from the Boston-based Project
on Defense Alternatives (PDA) calling for complete
withdrawal by September 2006, except for the
retention of a multinational civilian and military
monitoring and training contingent of less than
10,000 (of which the US military presence would be
limited to 2,000 troops).
The plan, to
take effect August 1, would begin with the
adoption of a withdrawal timeline, a sharp
deescalation of the war in Sunni areas, a shift of
US resources to its training mission, and the
transfer to elected officials of foreign military
control of localities "without the interference of
federal or coalition authorities”.
”The
key to enabling total US troop withdrawal from
Iraq within 400 days is achieving a political
accord with Sunni leaders at all levels and with
Iraq's neighbors - especially Syria and Iran,”
according to the report by defense analyst Carl
Conetta. "The proximal aim would be to immediately
lower the level of conflict inside Iraq by
constricting both active and passive support for
the insurgency, inside and outside the country.”
Like the two other authors, veteran Middle
East analyst Helena Cobban also believes that the
continued US military presence in Iraq is
counterproductive to longer-term American
interests and is effectively fueling the
insurgency. But she goes further than the other
two, calling for a withdrawal strategy that is
”total, speedy, and generous to the Iraqi people”.
Her model is Israel's 2000 exit from
southern Lebanon, noting that, despite deep fears
that that withdrawal would touch off "mayhem and
revenge, none came to pass”.
A prior
announcement of ”imminent total withdrawal” would
serve to ”focus the minds of Iraqis considerably”,
particularly on reconstruction if the US and other
countries are sufficiently generous and "make
[Iraqis] far less hospitable to insurgents,
especially those who get their impetus from the
prospect of a prolonged foreign occupation”.
All the authors take issue with the
conventional assumption that the US military
presence is a stabilizing factor, without which
Iraq's descent into civil war would be more
certain or bloody.
They also argue that
the administration's argument that Washington's
global ”credibility” is outweighed by other
considerations, including the damage that the
continued US presence does to American interests
in the Arab and Islamic world, and the reduced
ability of the US to deal with other important
security challenges while it remains bogged down
in Iraq.
As noted by former CIA director
Deutch, continued investment in a losing
proposition could result in "an even worse loss of
credibility down the road”.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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