Page 2 of 2 Fiddling while Baghdad
burns By Tom Engelhardt
embassy in the world, a vast, nearly
complete, nearly billion-dollar complex set in the
heart of Baghdad's Green Zone and armed with its
own anti-missile system, which no "exit" strategy
on any table in any foreseeable future is likely
to mention.
Talk about a plan being DOA,
when it comes to changing policy, even before an
adamant president has the chance to consider how
to reject some of its essential parts! After all
those endless
months, this, it seems, is
the best the present generation of Washington
"wise men" (and one woman) can actually deliver.
I think I can guarantee that, with eight
months and a giant staff of experts at your beck
and call, you and a small group of your neighbors
- with no ties to Washington, a cursory knowledge
of America's 1,347-plus days already embedded in
Iraq, and - no, let's say with just eight days, or
maybe eight minutes - could have come up with a
plan at least this hopeless.
While the
Iraqis were experiencing an actual civil war,
combined with an actual insurgency, combined with
actual US attacks from the air and the ground on
actual city neighborhoods, combined with actual
terrorist attacks, combined with actual widespread
criminal activity, combined with the actual
collapse of their economy, combined with the
actual non-delivery of essential social services,
combined with the actual flight of whole
populations from ethnically cleansed or simply
half-destroyed neighborhoods, combined with actual
staggering death tolls, the US media and White
House officialdom have passed through their own
maelstrom over whether or not to apply the term
"civil war" to the Iraqi situation. The National
Broadcasting Co and the Los Angeles Times have
finally voted "yes"; others are waffling; the
administration continues to deny that the
"sectarian violence" in Iraq could possibly be a
"civil war", which is evidently imagined inside
the Oval Office as nothing short of Armageddon
itself.
While the media, politicians, and
administration spokesmen fight over how exactly to
characterize the mountains of dead Iraqis, the
urban killing fields where militias now deposit
tortured and murdered former human beings, and the
stuffed morgues of Iraq's cities, there are
perhaps a few other words and phrases passing
around Washington that might be reconsidered.
Let's start with "phased withdrawal".
Withdrawal ("the act or process of withdrawing, a
retreat or retirement") usually means
sayonara, arrivederci, so long. And
a "phase", of course, is a "stage". But put them
together and, at least in the present collective
Washingtonian imagination, the US is still somehow
embedded in Iraq the year after next with no
actual plan for leaving in sight and none of its
basic structures - five or six bases the size of
US towns and a Goliath of an embassy - in that
country touched. Perhaps it's time to relabel this
"option", something like "phased staying" or
"phased permanency".
In turn, the ISG's
findings, which, as The Atlantic Monthly's James
Fallows recently noted, have been layered into our
world these last weeks via "obviously
authoritative leaks", might be relabeled "phased
recommendations". They may not, however, faze
Bush, who has already responded (or perhaps
presponded) by ordering two other sets of reviews
to be conducted, ensuring that Washington will be
flooded with recommendations. We face a veritable
war of the recommendations. All of this is a
classic case of Washington fiddling while Baghdad
burns.
"Redeploy", according to my
dictionary, means to "move [military forces] from
one combat zone to another". That may turn out to
be all too correct, if redeployment, or "a
responsible redeployment outside of Iraq", or even
(gulp) "phased redeployment" turns out to be the
order of the day. Redeploying to, say, various
Persian Gulf statelets and Kuwait, we Americans
may indeed take our combat zones with us, as we
did in the early 1990s when, in the wake of Gulf
War I, US troops were plunked down in sizable
numbers in Saudi Arabia. (Does the
missing-in-action name Osama bin Laden come to
anyone's mind?)
Don't confuse any of this,
as often happens in the press, with an "exit
strategy". An exit, my dictionary tells me, is
"the act of going away or out; a passage or way
out". Classically, critics have wondered whatever
happened to former secretary of state Colin
Powell's famed post-Vietnam dictum that no US war
should be launched without its exit strategy in
place. The answer was always that the Bush
administration simply never imagined leaving Iraq.
To a large extent, despite all the ado, this
remains true even in recently resigned secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld's final, secret memo of
options to Bush.
So here's a small hint.
You'll know something's in the air when some
serious panel gets together to sort out America's
future strategy in Iraq, and you start regularly
seeing "withdrawal" surface in the media without
an adjective attached, or when you see any sober
discussion of permanent bases, US air power, or
oil.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
