DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA How (not) to withdraw from
Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
On the September 27 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 Secretary of
State 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
Sub-committee, 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 US 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 December 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 neo-con 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 - 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.
As if on
cue this month - in fact, it's hard to believe it
could have been happenstance - Richard Nixon's
secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, the man who
claims he invented the term "Vietnamization", has
returned as if from the dead (in an article in
Foreign Affairs magazine) to argue that his policy
actually worked, and so would "Iraqification".
Maybe Laird was simply called back into
existence when Vice President Dick Cheney
denounced those intent on "rewriting history", but
now we know from the horse's mouth that we coulda,
woulda, shoulda won - except for a pusillanimous
Congress! ("The truth about Vietnam that
revisionist historians conveniently forget is that
the United States had not lost when we withdrew in
1973 ... I believed then and still believe today
that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam
was capable of defending itself, just as I believe
Iraq can do the same now.")
The essence of
Laird's Vietnamization policy was a realization
that, on the draft-era home front, the Vietnam War
was being driven by American casualties and that
the army itself was in a state of incipient revolt
and disintegration. So Nixon abolished the draft,
began the all-volunteer military, put an emphasis
on building up the South Vietnamese army, and
withdrew 500,000 American ground troops over a
three-year period.
What he replaced them
with was a fiercely intensified air war over South
Vietnam (and neighboring countries). And this
policy was indeed successful in tamping down
protest at home, though (despite Laird's claims)
it created insuperable problems in South Vietnam
(as Iraqification will in Iraq). These led, after
much further bloodshed, to the collapse of our
allies in the south.
The Bush
administration's new "plan", such as it is, to
draw-down our troops (while pressing our shrinking
set of allies not to do the same) is clearly
modeled on Laird's Vietnamization experience - a
failed strategy being re-imagined as a successful
one. By a shift of tactical priorities, it is
meant to create the look of withdrawal before the
2006 congressional elections, and it, too, will
emphasize the mayhem of air power. On the ground,
American forces are to be slowly withdrawn from
Iraq's cities to their bases, cutting down on both
casualties and, for Iraqis, that oppressive sense
of being occupied by foreigners.
In
draw-down terms, the plan seems to go something
like this: while withdrawal was making it onto the
public agenda, our actual force in Iraq has risen
in recent months from approximately 138,000 to
about 160,000. So the first "withdrawals" (plural)
the administration will be able to announce after
the December 15 election - about 20,000 troops -
will simply get us back to the levels that
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his
planners always meant us to be at.
General
George Casey, US commander in Iraq, and others
have been letting the news ooze out for a while
(despite rumors of presidential slap-downs for
doing so) that, if all goes half-well, we will
perhaps withdraw another 40,000 troops (the
figures vary depending upon the leak) in 2006,
leaving us with just under 100,000 troops there.
In 2007 ... well, who knows, but the process, it's
clear, is meant to be more or less unending, and,
mind you, that's according to the Pentagon's
"moderately optimistic" scenario. (Seymour Hersh
claims that the administration's "most ambitious"
plans call for all troops designated "combat",
which is not all troops, to be withdrawn by the
summer of 2008.)
Nothing in the past
two-and-a-half-plus years, of course, should lead
anyone to be "moderately optimistic". If you want
a little dose of realism, just consider the latest
report on the new Iraqi army from the Atlantic
Monthly's James Fallows; or visit the rare Iraqi
unit that has been more or less "stood up" with
Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter and consider what
it's been stood up for (a Shi'ite revenge war in
Sunni neighborhoods); or check in with "two senior
army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the
turmoil that would be unleashed by the US invasion
of Iraq" and now claim it is "no longer clear that
the United States will be able to create [Iraqi]
military and police forces that can secure the
entire country no matter how long US forces
remain"; or visit with "the only non-American
author on the US Army's list of required reading
for officers", Hebrew University military
historian Martin Van Cleveld, who recently called
George W Bush's little Iraqi adventure "the most
foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent
his legions into Germany and lost them".
In perhaps the most important piece of
reportage of the year, "Up in the Air", Hersh
dissects the sinews of the administration's
Iraqification strategy. Unsurprisingly, while
drawing-down troops (in hopes of lessening
American casualties), the Pentagon is to intensify
the air war, which means, of course, loosing the
US Air Force on Iraq's urban areas where the
insurgency thrives and undoubtedly increasing
Iraqi casualties. Or as Hersh puts it:
A key element of the drawdown plans,
not mentioned in the president's public
statements, is that the departing American
troops will be replaced by American airpower.
Quick, deadly strikes by US warplanes are seen
as a way to improve dramatically the combat
capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat
units. The danger, military experts have told
me, is that, while the number of American
casualties would decrease as ground troops are
withdrawn, the overall level of violence and the
number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless
there are stringent controls over who bombs
what.
As Hersh essentially points
out, what this is likely to mean in practice - if
combat is significantly turned over to the new
Iraqi army - is sending our air force against
targets of that army's choosing; that is, putting
American air power in service to a Shi'ite and
Kurdish revenge war against the Sunnis - not
exactly a recipe for a pacified Iraq.
The
thinking behind such strategies is, in fact, as
recognizable to those of us who lived through the
Vietnam era as "Vietnamization". Here's what I
wrote about such "withdrawal" plans during the
Vietnam era in my book, The End of Victory
Culture, published a distant decade ago. See
if it doesn't have a familiar ring to it:
The idea of "withdrawing" from
Vietnam was there from the beginning, though
never as an actual plan. All real options for
ending the war were invariably linked to
"cutting and running", or "dishonor", or
"surrender", or "humiliation", and so dismissed
within the councils of government more or less
before being raised. The attempt to prosecute
the war and to withdraw from it were never
separable, no less opposites. If anything,
withdrawal became a way to maintain or intensify
the war, while pacifying the American public.
"Withdrawal" involved not departure but
all sorts of departure-like maneuvers – from
bombing pauses that led to fiercer bombing
campaigns to negotiation offers never meant to
be taken up to a "Vietnamization" plan in which
ground troops would be pulled out as the air war
was intensified. Each gesture of withdrawal
allowed the war planners to fight a little
longer; but if withdrawal did not withdraw the
country from the war, the war's prosecution
never brought it close to a victorious
conclusion.
Clash of languages
So now, having passed through much of the
Vietnam era's strategy and language in a mere
couple of years, we find ourselves in the
Vietnamization/Iraqification period. Forgetting
for a minute that, among other differences with
Vietnam, this seems increasingly to be a war not
for national unification but for national
disunification, we seem finally, as in those
distant years, to be on the downhill slope of
language and imagery.
To give but one
example: proud neo-con neo-colonials like Paul
Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the president himself,
regularly talked about bringing "democracy" to
Iraq in patronizingly parental terms. They liked
to say that they were trying to figure out the
moment to take the "training wheels" off the Iraqi
bike and let the toddler wheel around the nearest
corner on his own. Now we find one of our many
anonymous generals quoted in a Washington Post
piece using that very image no less patronizingly
but far more fearfully in military terms. "Another
senior general likened an accelerated withdrawal
to 'taking the training wheels off of a bike too
early'."
Or here's another example:
American "senior officials" in the glory days of
our Iraq adventure spoke regularly and without
shame about the need to "put an Iraqi face" on
Iraq. This was a wonderfully grim phrase which, in
a strange way, expressed their deeper meaning
exactly; they wanted to put a comforting Iraqi
mask over the American face of the occupation.
Now, we find a military version of the same, whose
bluntness makes a certain sense of our moment, as
quoted in a mid-November piece from Anton La
Guardia, diplomatic editor of the British
Telegraph:
Senior US military commanders have
long argued that the way to defeat the
insurgency is to reduce substantially the number
of foreign troops in order to "reduce the
perception of occupation" and draw Sunnis into
the political process.
To "reduce the
perception of occupation", that's a phrase to
savor for its truth-telling essence. It catches
something of the administration's policy now that
it's actually on the run at home.
In the
meantime, our president, in the first of several
speeches he is to give on Iraq before the December
15 elections, took a roller-coaster ride through
Iraqi Disneyland. As Dan Froomkin of the
Washington Post commented, "President Bush's
safety zone these days doesn't appear to extend
very far beyond military bases, other federal
installations and Republican fundraisers."
Not exactly surprising, then, that his
speech should have been so la-la-(out)landish. For
instance, as Paul Woodward of the War in Context
website pointed out, he promoted his "strategy for
victory in Iraq" by referring to "progress" a mere
28 times before the assembled cadets of the Naval
Academy. And then there was "victory", once quite
hard to find in administration documents that
emphasized how we were in an endless
multi-generational struggle against terrorism.
Yet, at this desperate moment, the president
managed to mention "victory" 15 times (and add
another for the title of the speech) - and not
just victory but the fact that we would not
"accept anything less than complete victory".
That had a ring not heard since Americans
called for total victory and unconditional
surrender in World War II, but then the president
remains in a World War II dream world, that
thrilling place he experienced in the movies of
his childhood where the Marines always advance;
our grinning native sidekicks are friendly and
remarkably willing to die in our place; the enemy
is destined to fall by their hundreds before our
fire; and total victory is an American birthright.
In fact, the president, who mentioned no
post-1945 war (except the Cold one) - and there
were so many to chose from - spoke of World War II
twice. You know, that war so like the present one
in which "free nations came together to fight the
ideology of fascism, and freedom prevailed". (Just
in case you've forgotten, that was the war in
which the other side had the Guantanamos ...)
Perhaps there's poetic justice in seeing a
president trapped in his fantasy world being
driven from pillar to post by a fantasy public,
while his generals and top officials do their best
to ignore him as they search desperately for ways
out, and his advisers (and political supporters)
hire lawyers.
How to tell withdrawal
from its doppelgangers If you pay
attention not to the war of words or the storm of
confusing withdrawal proposals, but to four
bedrock matters, you'll have a far better sense of
where we're really heading. These are air power,
permanent bases, an "American" Kurdistan, and oil;
and, not surprisingly, they coincide with the
great uncovered, or barely covered, stories of the
war.
In the present flurry of withdrawal
discussions, only air power, thanks to Hersh, is
getting any attention. The others have so far gone
largely or totally unmentioned - and yet, without
them, none of this makes any sense at all.
Air power: It remains
amazing to me that Hersh's report is the first
serious mainstream piece since the invasion of
Iraq to take up the uses of air power in that
country. It's a subject I've written about for the
past two years. After all, we've loosed our air
force on heavily populated urban Iraq, regularly
bombing (and sometimes destroying significant
sections of) Sunni cities and towns (and in 2004
Shiite ones as well).
There have been
hundreds and hundreds of reporters in Iraq, many
embedded with the military - and yet it's as if
they simply never look up. Figures on the use of
air power are almost impossible to come by, though
Hersh tells us in his Democracy Now interview that
the bombing has "gone up exponentially, certainly
in the last four or five months in the Sunni
triangle". He adds, however, that "we don't have
reporters at the air bases. We don't know what's
going on with the air war."
Here's just
one passage that gives a modest sense of some of
what the Bush administration has been doing from
the air: "Naval efforts in Iraq include not only
the Marine Corps but also virtually every type of
deployable naval asset in our inventory. Navy and
Marine carrier-based aircraft flew over 21,000
hours, dropped over 54,000 pounds of ordnance and
played a vital role in the fight for Fallujah."
Add in another reality of America's Iraq:
L Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority,
in a burst of blind pride in 2003, disbanded the
Iraqi military. For well over a year or more,
Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a
future Iraqi military force (lite) of only 40,000
men with minimal armaments and essentially no air
force at all! This is the Middle East, mind you.
What that meant, simply enough, was that
the Bush administration intended the American army
and air force to be the Iraqi military for eons to
come. Under the pressure of the insurgency, the
army part of that plan was thrown out the window.
But "standing up" the Iraqi military has meant
just that. Standing on the ground. There is still
no real Iraqi air force. Iraq was never to "fly",
but to stay on that "bike" and under the tutelage
of Washington.
The actual use of American
air power will undoubtedly prove tricky indeed
(without many American ground troops around) and
probably no more successful in the long run than
it was in Iraq - except, of course, in terms of
devastating the country. But watch the Iraqi skies
as best you can. They will tell you something.
Permanent bases: We were to
control military-less Iraq and perhaps the region
from a small series of permanent bases, already
imagined and on the drawing boards as the invasion
began. At the height of our base-building mania,
we had about 106 bases there, ranging from
multibillion-dollar Vietnam-era-sized
mega-structures like Camp Victory North (renamed
Camp Liberty) just outside of Baghdad to tiny base
camps in outlying parts of the country.
We
now claim to be turning these over to the Iraqis.
Part of our draw-down plan, according to Hersh,
includes "heavily scripted change-of-command
ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American
flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones" -
one of these occurred, conveniently enough, near
the Syrian border the day the president spoke.
We have so many of these bases that we can
hand them back one by one with appropriate special
ceremonies almost in perpetuity without ever
getting to the small core of four to five bases
that the Pentagon planned on permanently
garrisoning as American troops first crossed the
Iraqi border. So here's what to watch for: if any
of these key bases are handed back, with flags
lowered and troops removed, then you can begin to
believe that an actual withdrawal may be in the
offing.
Kurdistan: You would
largely not know that the Kurdish parts of Iraq
existed from most daily news reports on the war.
But one major change from the Vietnam era is that
we have potential "sanctuaries" in the area to
withdraw to. Murtha suggested one of them, Kuwait,
and it is the focus of attention at the moment.
But Kurdistan, at present the quietest
part of Iraq (despite fierce tensions between the
two main Kurdish political parties and non-Kurdish
residents of the as-yet somewhat undefined area),
is also likely to be the most welcoming to
American forces "withdrawing" from "Iraq".
Present-day Kurdistan was created under
the American and British no-fly zones in the 1990s
and its future autonomy, no less independence,
would be at least temporarily guaranteed by the
presence of American troops there. Even the Turks
might prefer American forces in Kurdistan, if they
restrained local forces from any kind of
cross-border shenanigans in Kurdish regions of
Turkey.
The sole reference I've seen to
this possibility was in a recent piece by veteran
reporter Martin Walker who wrote:
There are other ideas circulating in
the Pentagon, including the establishment of a
major and possibly permanent base in the Kurdish
region of northern Iraq, where US troops are
less controversial, and would be welcomed by the
neighboring Turks, always worried at the
prospect of an independent Kurdistan becoming a
magnet for their own disaffected Kurdish
minority.
Were the rest of Iraq to
fall completely out of our hands, it's easy to
imagine an "American" Kurdistan (conveniently near
the Iranian border), possibly expanded to include
the oil lands around the tinderbox city of Kirkuk,
with its own set of bases.
Interestingly,
the Los Angeles Times has just revealed that one
of the Kurdish political parties signed a private
oil exploration deal with a Norwegian company. Of
course, the Kurdish areas would have their own set
of explosive problems, but over the next year
watch for Kurdistan to surface as part of any
American draw-down which isn't actually a
withdrawal.
Oil: So here we
are at another of the great, hardly covered
stories of the Iraq war. As Mark LeVine has
recently made so clear, the Bush administration,
with its former energy industry execs and
consultants, was thinking oil - and Iraqi oil in
particular - from literally the first moments of
its existence.
The few documents that have been
made public from [Vice President Cheney's]
Energy Task Force ... reveal not only that
industry executives met with Cheney's staff [in
February 2001] but that a map of Iraq and an
accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors"
were the center of discussion.
Hmmm
... These were people who already had "peak oil"
on their minds. They entered Iraq, a nation
sitting on untold amounts of oil, thinking about
the global control of future energy resources.
They sent soldiers to guard the Oil Ministry and
the oil fields, while allowing pretty much
everything else to be looted as the country fell
to them.
They have no desire to abandon
either their permanent bases or that reservoir of
"black gold" to others. But beyond pious
statements about preserving the Iraqi "patrimony"
(ie oil) in the early days of the war, they never
broached the subject publicly and the media
followed their lead. It's rare today - though a
perfectly obvious point to make - for someone to
say, as ambassador Khalilzad did recently, "You
could have a regional war that could go on for a
very long time, and affect the security of oil
supplies." Keep your eyes on this issue. It's what
separates Vietnam, which itself contained nothing
special for a foreign power, from Iraq.
In
the end, ignore (if you can) the whirlwind of
withdrawal language that will turn all sorts of
non or semi-withdrawal schemes into something
other than what they are, and try to keep your
eyes on those shoals of reality. This is not
Vietnam, which happened in slow-time. This war, as
the historian Marilyn Young claimed in its first
weeks so few years ago, is "Vietnam on crack
cocaine" and, whatever anyone is saying now, it's
a fair bet that events will outpace all
administration plans and fantasies in the
explosive year to come.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
