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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Iraq withdrawal
follies By Tom Engelhardt
Withdrawal is now so mainstream. Last
week, debate about it led to a sleep-in protest in
the US Senate and, this week, it has hit the cover
of Time magazine, of which there's no more
mainstream publication around. The Time cover
couldn't be more graphic. The word "Iraq" is in
all-capitals giant type, the "I", "R" and "Q" all
black, and a helicopter is carting off a Stars and
Stripes "A" to reveal the phrase, "What will
happen when we leave." (Some
military weblogs now claim
that the helicopter in silhouette is actually an
old Soviet Mi-24 Hind; if so, maybe the designer
had the embattled Russian withdrawal from
Afghanistan in mind.)
Still, is there
anyplace in the news where you can't find the word
"withdrawal", or its pals "exit", "pull out", and
"leaving", right now? Here are just a few recent
headlines featuring the word that has come in from
the cold: "Most Americans want Congress to make
withdrawal decision, according to poll"; "The
logistics of exiting Iraq"; "US withdrawal from
Iraq would be a massive undertaking"; "Americans
want withdrawal, deadline in Iraq"; "Washington's
House Democrats join in calling for Iraq troop
withdrawal"; "Withdrawal fallout could lead to
chaos"; "Exit strategies"; "Iraq warns against
early US withdrawal"; and so on ad infinitum.
Think of that as "progress" - as in
Baghdad commander General David Petraeus' upcoming
mid-September "Progress Report" to Congress. After
all, it wasn't so long ago that no one (except
obscure sites on the Internet) was talking about
withdrawing US forces from Iraq.
Here's
the odd thing, though: "withdrawal", as an idea,
has been undergoing a transformation in full
public view. In the world of the Washington
consensus and in the mainstream press, it has been
edging ever closer to what normally might be
thought of as "non-withdrawal" (just as happened
in the Vietnam era). In fact, you can search far
and wide for reports on "withdrawal" plans that
suggest a full-scale US withdrawal from Iraq and,
most of the time, find nothing amid the pelting
rain of withdrawal words.
As imagined
these past months, withdrawal turns out to be a
very partial affair that will leave sizable
numbers of US occupation forces in Iraq for a long
period. If anything, the latest versions of
"withdrawal" have been used as cudgels to beat
upon real withdrawal types.
The president,
vice president, top administration officials and
spokespeople, and the increasingly gung-ho team of
commanders in Iraq - most of whom haven't, in
recent years, been able to deliver on a single
prediction, or even pressure the Iraqis into
achieving one major administration-set "benchmark"
- have nonetheless managed to take possession of
the future. They now claim to know what it holds
better than the rest of us and are turning that
"knowledge" against any suggestion of genuine
withdrawal.
Worst of all, we've already
been through this in the Vietnam era, but since no
one seems to remember, no lessons are drawn.
Fast-forward to the future In
recent months, General David Petraeus, the "surge"
commander in Iraq, has popularized a double or
triple clock image: "We're racing against the
clock, certainly. We're racing against the
Washington clock, the London clock, a variety of
other timepieces up there, and we've got to figure
out how to speed up the Baghdad clock." In fact,
he and his commanders have done just that,
resetting the "Baghdad clock" for future time.
There's a history of the future to
consider here. In the late 1950s, when nuclear
weapons made war between the US and the Soviet
Union inconceivable, the Pentagon and associated
think-tanks found themselves forced to enter the
realm of the future - and so of fiction - to
"fight" their wars. They began, in strategist
Herman Kahn's famous phrase, to "think the
unthinkable" and so entered the realm of science
fiction, the fantasy scenario, and the war game.
In those decades, possessing the future
was of genuine significance to the Pentagon. It
led to a culture in which weapons systems were
planned out long years, sometimes decades, in
advance, and so the wars they were to fight had to
be imagined as well. Today, Baghdad 2025 is
becoming ever more real for the Pentagon, as
Baghdad 2007 descends into ever greater chaos.
As a corollary, the more the present seems
out of control, the stronger the urge to plant a
flag in the future. In the case of Iraq, where
control is almost completely lacking, we see this
in a major way. When General Petraeus first
arrived to oversee the "surge", he and his
commanders spoke cautiously about the future, but
as their desperation has grown, their comments
have become increasingly bold and their claims to
predictive powers have expanded accordingly.
Just the other day, General Walter
Gaskins, in charge of US forces in al-Anbar
province, even appropriated a predictive phrase
whose dangers are well known. He said: "There's
still a lot of work left to do in al-Anbar.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is still trying to make its
presence felt, but I believe we have turned the
corner." He added that "another couple of years"
would nonetheless be needed to get the local Iraqi
forces up to speed. "Although we are making
progress, I will always caution and always say
that you cannot buy, nor can you fast-forward,
experience."
When it comes to withdrawal,
however, the military commanders have been doing
just that - "fast-forwarding experience" - and
reporting back to the rest of us on the results.
Recently, for instance, Karen DeYoung and Thomas
Ricks of the Washington Post reviewed a host of
elaborate Iraq war games conducted for the
Pentagon, including one that found that "if US
combat forces are withdrawn" - note that those are
only the "combat brigades", not all US forces -
Iraq would be partitioned, Sunnis driven from
ethnically mixed areas in and around Baghdad into
al-Anbar province, and "southern Iraq would erupt
in civil war between Shi'ite groups".
These days, along with such grim military
predictions go hair-raising suggestions about what
even a partial US withdrawal under pressure might
entail. Here's a typical comment attributed by
DeYoung and Ricks to an "officer who has served in
Iraq": "There is going to be an outbreak of
violence when we leave that makes the [current]
instability look like a church picnic."
This is already coin of the realm for an
administration that, until well into 2006, refused
to admit that major sectarian violence existed in
Iraq, no less that the country was headed for
civil-war levels of it. That changed in a major
way this year. Now, the administration has
embraced sectarian violence as the future
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