Iraq: Why immediate withdrawal
makes sense By Michael Schwartz
That the United States is in a military
quagmire in Iraq has become a fact of life among
Americans of all political persuasions. Though
Bush 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.
This will be followed by the
"sustained presence of a large American
contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers" who will be
housed in the huge permanent bases the US is
continuing to construct and upgrade in Iraq. In
addition, General John P
Jumper, the Air Force chief
of staff, recently told New York Times reporter
Eric Schmitt that US 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 George W 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, notably Juan Cole, the most widely
respected anti-war 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 US
forces be pulled out in stages and only as the
threat of civil war recedes. Dreyfuss expresses
the thinking of many anti-war activists thus:
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 racked by civil war; yes, there is
widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against
the US occupation forces, and periodic clashes
between Sunnis and Shi'ites. 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 [Ali
al-] 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.
But where
Dreyfuss and Cole are mistaken is in concluding
that US forces can be part of an effort "to
prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil
conflict". Despite the plausible logic of this
argument, the US presence doesn't deter, but
contributes to, a thickening civil-war-like
atmosphere in Iraq.
It is always a dicey
matter to project the present into the future,
though that never stopped anybody from doing so.
The future, by definition, is unknown and so open
to the unexpected. Nonetheless, it is far more
reasonable, based on what we now know, to assume
that if the US were to leave Iraq quickly, the
level of violence would be reduced, possibly
drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key
reasons:
1. The US military is already
killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die
in any threatened civil war.
2. The US
presence is actually aggravating terrorist
(Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it.
3. Much of the current terrorist violence
would be likely to subside if the US left.
4. The longer the US stays, the more
likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil
war will prove accurate.
American
violence in Iraq In listing the problems
faced by Iraqis ("widespread terrorism, a
guerrilla war against the US occupation forces,
and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites"),
Dreyfuss is succumbing to the reportage of the
mainstream press, which rarely mentions the
immense toll that American forces are taking every
day inside Iraq.
In fact, the best
estimate is that the occupation has been killing
about 40,000 Iraqi civilians each year. These
figures were first published a year ago in a
path-breaking, yet largely neglected, study
published in the British medical journal the
Lancet by a mixed team of researchers from Johns
Hopkins University and Iraqi universities; but
careful vetting of war reports indicates that
something close to these rates seems to have been
maintained ever since.
That helps explain
why even the distinctly limited numbers collected
by US and Iraqi official sources (when released at
all) almost always report that American (or other)
occupation forces account for at least two-thirds
of all civilian deaths in military actions, with
an unknown proportion of the remainder due to the
actions of the Iraqi government, not the
resistance.
There are four main ways
American forces in Iraq accomplish such mayhem.
First, there are the hundreds of
checkpoints around Baghdad and in other contested
cities, sites of numerous violent incidents.
Because of the danger created by the threat of
suicide bombers, those guarding the checkpoints
are ordered to fire at suspicious activity. The
following account of the death of Reuters reporter
Waleed Khaled, offered by Major-General Rick Lynch
based on an official US Army investigation, makes
clear why even the most savvy Iraqi is risking his
or her life approaching a checkpoint:
Lynch said soldiers reacted when they saw the car
traveling "forward at a high rate of
speed. That particular car looked like cars that
we have seen in the past used as suicide bombs. It
wasn't a new car, it was an older model car ...
And there were two local nationals inside the car.
Our soldiers took appropriate measures. We mourn
the loss of life of all humans ... But our
soldiers are trained to respond in those
situations. Put yourself in the place of the
soldiers, knowing that the insurgents, who have
been known to use suicide bombs, suicide car
bombs, suicide vests, to attack innocent
civilians, will always have an attack and then
respond to that attack when the first responders
come forward. So our soldiers took appropriate
action on that particular case."
With some
600 checkpoints in Baghdad alone, and as many as
100 cars approaching each checkpoint during a
non-curfew daylight hour, there are upwards of
250,000 chances each day for an Iraqi driver to
fail to slow down soon enough, or, distracted,
fail to see the checkpoint in time, or do
something to make jumpy soldiers jump. If only one
out of 40,000 drivers makes this mistake that
still would produce perhaps six lethal incidents a
day - in which case about 2,000 Iraqis would meet
Waleed Khaled's fate each year, although without
the benefit of news coverage and a US Army
investigation, however perfunctory. (Note that, at
this point, we have just about no way of knowing
in any of the death situations discussed here and
below how many Iraqis are dying, so these are the
crudest of figures.)
Second, American
troops are constantly patrolling contested areas
in Iraqi cities under instructions to use
"overwhelming force" in firefights with actual or
suspected resistance fighters. If they encounter
sustained resistance, the rules of engagement call
for demolishing buildings occupied by snipers, and
treating all inhabitants of such buildings as the
enemy. Among the several hundred patrols or more
each day around Iraq, it appears that about one in
10 result in lethal firefights. Even if fewer than
half of these firefights produce a single
collateral civilian death, this tiny percentage
would yield perhaps 15 deaths on an average day or
close to 5,000 civilian deaths a year.
A
third staple of the occupation is entering houses
in search of suspected insurgents, either because
they have been identified by informants, or as
part of house-to-house searches after improvised
explosive devices or other guerrilla attacks. US
statistics indicate that no fewer than 75% of all
entered houses do not contain an insurgent, but
the army rules of engagement require that soldiers
enter without knocking and by crashing through
doors in order to retain the element of surprise,
and thus prevent either an ambush or an escape by
suspects.
Lethal force is used at the
first sign of resistance or attempted escape - to
preempt attacks with weapons that suspected
insurgents might have hidden nearby. (The army
argues that, while more humane treatment might
create less anger among the tens of thousands of
non-resistant families whose homes are invaded,
such restraint would also expose the soldiers to
many more casualties from the occasional
resistance fighter. Military philosophy in this
and other settings is to protect the lives of
American soldiers "even if those methods do not
always win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi
populace".)
With several hundred such
missions undertaken each day, and such patrols
entering as many as a dozen houses on a patrol,
American troops enter something like 2,000 Iraqi
homes on an ordinary day. If only one of every one
hundred entries results in violence, and far less
than half end in a dead civilian, these home
invasions can still account for 10 or so deaths
per day, or another 3,500 per year.
Fourth
and finally, we come to American air power. When
American patrols, large or small, encounter
violent resistance, their rules of engagement call
for the use of overwhelming fire power to
eliminate the enemy. Where their immediate
response fails to destroy the enemy, an air
assault is often ordered, with either gunships or
bombers. Air assaults are also ordered against
suspected insurgent "safe houses".
Although they are rarely reported, such
air assaults are the most terrifying and ferocious
forms of American violence. Virtually all of these
strikes occur in highly populated areas, sometimes
destroying whole houses, or even whole groups of
houses, and (where the inhabitants haven't fled)
they sometimes kill whole families in the process.
The New York Times recently reported such
an attack in the border city of Husaybah, which
"destroyed three houses in an area that has
experienced intense fighting". Unlike most such
news items, this one also contained an Iraqi
Interior Ministry report of casualties. Based on
local hospital reports, the ministry claimed that
the air strikes "had killed more than 40
civilians, mostly members of an extended family
who had sought shelter from the bombings".
(American officials, as is their general practice,
said they "knew of no civilian casualties".)
American officials do concede that they
average about "50 close air support and armed
reconnaissance missions every day". These occur at
all of the familiar urban hotspots: Baghdad,
Fallujah, Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, Samarra, as
well as numerous smaller towns. If only one in
five of these missions produces civilian
casualties, and if the average death toll is only
four instead of 40, then 15,000 Iraqi civilians
die every year from US air attacks.
The
depressing total of these very rough calculations
is over 25,000 civilian deaths each year, more
than five times the number caused by car bombs and
other Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. (And remember,
we're not even figuring in major American military
campaigns against the insurgency.) To add to the
levels of mayhem, keep in mind that, at any given
moment, the US military keeps perhaps another
12,000-15,000 Iraqis locked in its prisons,
holding areas and interrogation centers.
Numbers like this, or even lower versions
of the same, explain why in a country with a
population of only 25 million, so many Iraqis see
the Americans as the main source of the daily
violence they endure, and why 60% regularly tell
even American-sponsored pollsters that they want
an American withdrawal immediately, if not sooner.
This also explains why the primary condition for a
cease fire set by the Association of Muslim
Scholars (AMS, the political arm of the Sunni
resistance) was an American "troop pullout from
most urban areas and an end to military
checkpoints and raids". AMS leader Isam al-Rawi
explained:
The Americans and British must leave
all residential areas ... This is very sensitive
for our feelings. When they retreat to military
bases outside the major cities, the Iraqis will
no longer be meeting military tanks and trucks
in the streets and highways, and they will no
longer be afraid their homes will be invaded at
night.
Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence
The prospect of a civil war is, of course,
horrendous, but the ongoing American violence is
massive enough that it would take several Bloody
Wednesdays every week to match it. This, of
course, is a possibility, but a more reasonable
guess would be that, in a trade-off between the
end of US violence and an escalation in the civil
war, the result would actually be a decline in
civilian casualties in Iraq.
But a quick
US withdrawal would be less likely to produce a
civil war than leaving American troops in place as
a barrier against such a development. The killing
and imprisonment policies of the occupation itself
are the main generating and sustaining force for
the rising levels of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. The
sooner the occupation ends, the sooner Iraqi civil
violence is likely to begin to subside.
To
grasp this point, it is necessary to understand
that there are - broadly speaking - two tendencies
within the Sunni resistance against the US
occupation. While they share the goal of expelling
the Americans, their strategies and tactics are
fundamentally different.
One tendency,
which many Iraqis designate the "nationalist
resistance", seeks in the short run to expel the
Americans from their local communities by
attacking American patrols and checkpoints with
roadside explosives and hit-and-run attacks. An
operation is a success when it ties down American
troops and therefore prevents them from manning
checkpoints, marching through neighborhoods, or
conducting house-to-house searches. While their
attacks often kill innocent bystanders, they do
not usually purposely target civilians, and often
condemn those who do, calling them terrorists and
outlaws.
The other tendency, designated
the "jihadis" by many Iraqis, fights to weaken the
resolve of the Americans and of Iraqis who, by
their definition, help the occupation. For the
jihadis, an operation is a success when it
inflicts either a huge toll in casualties or
scores a propaganda victory against the occupation
or its supporters. Their tactics are designed to
intimidate and demoralize their opposition. They
therefore try to mount spectacular attacks on US
forces, the Iraqi military and police, Iraqi
government officials, and also Iraqi civilians
they feel are aiding the Americans, attempting to
intimidate them away from voting in elections,
participating in local government, or joining the
police force or the new Iraqi military.
Beyond this immediate terrorist purpose,
the leadership of the jihadis, most notably Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, seeks sooner or later to create
a mega-state among all Sunni Arabs in the Middle
East. Zarqawi and others of his persuasion believe
that Shi'ite Muslims are the main barrier to such
a state and that, in the long run, they must be
defeated. They therefore focus their terrorist
attacks on the Shi'ites, who, they believe,
support the American-installed Iraqi government
(rather than on the Kurds, who support that
government far more avidly than any Shi'ite
group). In this way, the jihadi leadership hopes
simultaneously to undermine Shi'ite support for
the American-sponsored government and to weaken
the Shi'ites in what they consider to be a larger,
longer term confrontation.
Numerically,
the jihadis represent a tiny minority of
resistance fighters in Iraq (certainly no more
than 10%). The vast majority (probably well over
90%) of the 70 or so attacks each day are
conducted by the nationalist resistance. But the
jihadis are responsible for the high-profile car
bombings and the spectacular attacks against
Shi'ite mosques and other "soft targets". These
account for the vast majority of all the civilian
casualties inflicted by the resistance.
Given this situation, how might a speedy
American withdrawal affect the levels of
Iraqi-generated violence? Most obviously, it would
eliminate the presently predominant form of Iraqi
violence - the 65 or so guerrilla attacks against
American forces every day, (though many guerrilla
units might redirect their attention to the Iraqi
army, insofar as it chose to conduct American-type
patrols in disputed neighborhoods). And it would
also obviously eliminate the jihadi attacks
against American troops and bases.
But
those fearful of civil war worry that the American
absence would remove the main deterrent to
terrorist attacks and simply free up jihadi
resources from anti-American operations to unleash
further mayhem. The full jihadi effort could then
be concentrated on attacking the Shi'ites.
Violence after an American departure
What this assumption ignores, however, is
a simple (though not obvious) fact: the terrorist
offensive against the Shi'ites is largely a
consequence of American brutality in Iraq. Despite
Zarqawi's oft-repeated desire to launch a holy war
against the Shi'ites, his success in doing so is
directly linked to a continuing US presence.
His primary appeal in Iraq, after all,
rests on the claim that the occupation is "being
aided by their allies from Shi'ites". Moreover,
because, he claims, "the Shi'ite sect has always
spearheaded any war against Islam and Muslims
throughout history", he insists that they can
never be brought into a movement to oppose the
occupation and therefore have to be treated like
the enemy. It is this appeal that, in Sunni areas,
has allowed him to recruit supporters for his
anti-Shi'ite campaign.
University of
Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, author of
Dying to Win, the definitive book on
suicide terrorism, spoke for virtually all
terrorism experts when he made this very point to
the American Conservative magazine, asserting that
every suicide bombing campaign "is driven by the
presence of foreign forces on the territory that
the terrorists view as their homeland. The
[American ] operation in Iraq has stimulated
suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism
a new lease on life."
Thus, while Zarqawi
is seeking a holy war against the Shi'ites, the
real question - as Pape puts it - is whether
"anybody listens to him". In other words, his
success depends on his ability to recruit new
martyrs (inside and outside Iraq) to undertake
suicide missions. This recruitment, in turn,
depends on two factors: the level of mayhem the
occupation creates, which generates the anger that
creates his volunteers; and the credibility of his
claims that the Shi'ite are allies of the
Americans.
On both accounts, the military
occupation of the country, by its very presence
and its actions, continually pours more gasoline
on an already burning fire, and cannot help but
continue to do so as long as it attempts to pacify
the resistance. After all, the daily mayhem in
Baghdad and other cities, and the spectacular
American assaults on cities like Fallujah and Tal
Afar, are broadcast across Iraq and the entire
Muslim world (even if they are often largely
ignored in the American media). These increase
support for both the nationalist guerrillas and
the jihadi terrorists.
In addition, under
the strain of an exhausted army and a fractured
budget, the Bush administration is seeking to
"Iraqify" the occupation by replacing American
troops with Iraqis. In 2004, after Sunni police
and military units melted under fire or defected
to the guerrillas, the US began relying more
heavily on Shi'ite recruits (as well as Kurdish
militiamen, or Peshmerga) in their battles with
the Sunni resistance.
The brutality of the
American military plan for pacifying the country,
now being enacted by ever more Shi'ite and Kurdish
soldiers, has convinced increasing numbers of
Sunnis that Zarqawi's claims about the Shi'ites
are all too correct, and so has allowed him to
recruit increasing numbers of willing martyrs,
both in Iraq and in neighboring countries.
Just before Bloody Wednesday, at Tal Afar,
Shi'ite (as well as Peshmerga) soldiers were given
frontline responsibility for lethal house-to-house
searches, spearheading the wholesale destruction
of individual homes, many with residents still
inside, and whole neighborhoods. It was no
surprise, therefore, when, a few days later,
Zarqawi declared that Bloody Wednesday was the
beginning of the "battle to avenge the Sunni
people of Tal Afar" and also the beginning of a
"full scale war on Shi'ites around Iraq, without
mercy". Here again, American action exacerbated
rather than suppressed internal Iraqi friction.
This constant and escalating provocation
only swells the reservoir of willing martyrs and
increases the plausibility of Zarqawi's claim that
the sole route to "liberation" involves direct
attacks on Shi'ite citizens.
On the other
hand, history indicates that once the provocation
of foreign troops is removed, the reservoir tends
to quickly drain. Terrorism expert Pape reports
that, in recent history, it is almost unknown for
suicide bombings to continue after the withdrawal
of the occupying power:
Many people worry that once a large
number of suicide terrorists have acted that it
is impossible to wind it down. The history of
the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite.
Once the occupying forces withdraw from the
homeland territory of the terrorists, they often
stop - and often on a dime.
American
withdrawal is therefore the cornerstone of any
strategy that wants to maximize the hope of
avoiding civil war. It would, at one and the same
moment, remove the major source of Iraqi civilian
deaths - and remove the primary flash point that
leads to the car bombings. It would certainly mean
as well the withdrawal of Shi'ite and Kurdish
troops from Sunni cities - the key to Zarqawi's
ability to convince (some) Sunnis that the Shi'ite
are willing pawns of the occupation and so their
eternal enemies.
The clock is ticking
however. With each new American attack, more
Sunnis are convinced that their hope for
liberation lies with Zarqawi's strategy. And with
each new terrorist attack, Shi'ite anger - already
at a high level, given the degrading nature of the
American occupation and two years of
American-style "reconstruction" - is likely to
become ever more focused on the Sunni community
that appears to be harboring the terrorists.
Recently there have been growing signs of
violent Shi'ite retaliation. If the terrorist
attacks continue unabated, then increasing numbers
of Shi'ites may adopt an attitude complementary to
Zarqawi's - blaming the entire Sunni community for
the terrorist attacks. If this occurs, Zarqawi
will have succeeded in his personal goal of
"dragging them into the arena of sectarian war",
and a raging civil war may truly develop.
Zarqawi's plan will be in danger of
collapsing, however, if the US withdraws.
American withdrawal would undoubtedly
leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea
of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous
possibilities for future violence. The either/or
of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim
landscape, a single reality stands out clearly:
not only is the American presence the main source
of civilian casualties, it is also the primary
contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq.
The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the
situation is likely to get - for the US and for
the Iraqis.
Michael Schwartz,
professor of sociology at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook 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 sites,
including Tomdispatch, Asia Times Online,
MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print at
Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His
books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure, The Power Structure of American
Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social
Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited,
with Clarence Lo). His email address is
Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.
