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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Fiddling while Baghdad
burns By Tom Engelhardt
Finally, the US president and the New York
Times agree. In a news conference with Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki last week, George W Bush
insisted that there would be no "graceful exit" or
withdrawal from Iraq; that this was not "realism".
The next day the Times in a front-page piece (as
well as "analysis" inside the paper) pointed out
that "despite a Democratic election victory this
month that was strongly based on anti-war
sentiment, the idea of a major and rapid
withdrawal seems to be fading as a
viable option".
In
fact, in the media, as in the counsels of James
Baker's and Lee Hamilton's Iraq Study Group (ISG),
withdrawal without an adjective or qualifying
descriptor never arrived as a "viable option". In
fact, withdrawal, aka "cut and run", has never
been more than a passing foil, one useful
"extreme" guaranteed to make the consensus-to-come
more comforting.
On Wednesday, at the end
of a gestation period nearly long enough to
produce a human baby, the Baker-Hamilton committee
- by now, according to the Washington Post's Robin
Wright, practically "a parallel policy
establishment" - is to hand over to Bush its
eagerly anticipated "consensus" report, its
"compromise" plan that takes the "middle road",
that occupies a piece of inside-the-Beltway
"middle ground", and that will almost certainly be
the policy equivalent of a stillbirth.
Whatever satisfaction it briefly offers,
it might as well be sent directly to the Baghdad
morgue. At a length of perhaps 100 pages,
evidently calling for an "aggressive" diplomatic
engagement with neighboring Iran and Syria - even
unofficial US officials advocating diplomacy just
can't seem to avoid some form of "aggression" - it
will also, Washington Post reporters Wright and
Thomas Ricks assure us, call for "a major
withdrawal of US forces from Iraq" (no timetables,
naturally).
It will evidently suggest the
following: talk to those hostile neighbors;
"embed" swarms of still-to-be-trained military
advisers with Iraqi troops where, so far, they
have had little luck except in generating scads of
complaints; pull out (or back into America's
massive Iraqi bases) US "combat forces", except
for those slated to be part of an in-country
"rapid-reaction force", not to speak of all those
American trainers and logistics experts; and
accomplish this by perhaps early 2008.
All
of this will be termed a "short" period of time to
change US policy, and the path to be headed down
will be labeled "phased withdrawal" or the
beginning of an "exit strategy". Oh, and while
we're at it, make sure to suggest that we embed
many of those "redeployed" troops just "over the
horizon", probably in Kuwait and some set of small
Persian Gulf states, where they can theoretically
strike at will in Iraq if the government and
military the US plans to "stabilize" there turns
out to be endangered (as, of course, it will be).
Put in a nutshell, the ISG plan - should
it ever be put into effect - might accomplish the
following: as a start, it would in no way affect
America's essential network of monumental
permanent bases in Iraq (where, many billions of
dollars later, concrete is still being poured); it
would leave many fewer "combat" troops but many
more "advisers" in-country to "stand up" the Iraqi
army (tactics already tried, at the cost of many
billions of dollars, and just about sure to fail);
many more US troops will find themselves either
imprisoned on those vast bases in Iraq or on
similar installations in the "neighborhood" where
they are likely to bring so many of America's
problems with them. And those aggressive chats
with the neighbors, whose influence in Iraq is
overestimated in any case, are unlikely to proceed
terribly well because the Bush administration will
arrive at the bargaining table, if at all, with so
little to offer (except lectures).
All of
this should ensure that, well into 2008, at least
70,000 US military personnel will still be in
Iraq, after which, in the midst of a
presidential-election season, will actual
withdrawal finally appear on some horizon? In
other words, the Baker-Hamilton Commission plan
guarantees Americans at least another three to
five years in Iraq.
And, oh yes, here's
something else no one is likely mention. Those
Americans left behind after the phased withdrawers
head for the horizon will surely be more
vulnerable, which means, as in Vietnam during the
Vietnamization years, the ratcheting up of US air
power and far more sentences in news reports that
read like this: "Two Apache helicopters firing
anti-missile flares swooped over Fadhil
neighborhood, a Sunni insurgent stronghold in one
of the oldest parts of the capital, amid the slow
thump of heavy-machine-gun fire, witnesses said."
And, oh yes, during this "short" period of
perhaps 12-14 months when the US is supposed to be
phasing away, based on present casualty rates,
perhaps another 40,000-60,000 Iraqi civilians will
die horrific deaths, as will at least modest
numbers of young Americans, reminding us that the
definitions of "short", "remarkable consensus",
and "horizon" - after all, your horizon may be
someone else's home - are in the eye of the
beholder. And just one more thing: all this will
be directed out of the largest
