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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Iraq withdrawal
follies By Tom
Engelh
actual plan to
withdraw. All real options for ending the war were
invariably linked to phrases - some of which still
ring bells - like "cutting and running", or
"dishonor", or "surrender", or "humiliation", and
so were dismissed within the councils of
government more or less before being raised (just
as they are dismissed out of hand today by the
Washington Consensus and
in
articles like that of Time's Duffy). If anything,
in the later years, "withdrawal" became - as it is
now threatening to become in Iraq - a way to
maintain, or even intensify, the war while
pacifying the American public.
"Withdrawal" then involved not departure,
but all sorts of departure-like maneuvers and
promises - from bombing pauses that led to fiercer
bombing campaigns to negotiation offers never
meant to be taken up to a "Vietnamization" plan in
which most (but hardly all) US ground troops would
finally be pulled out but only as the air war was
intensified - a distinct, if grim, possibility for
Iraq's American future. Each gesture of withdrawal
allowed the war planners to fight a little longer.
And yet, with every failed withdrawal gesture and
every failed battle strategy (as may be the case
in Iraq as well), a sense of "nightmare" seemed to
draw ever closer.
Opting for the
present We have now entered a period in the
Iraq war in which stark alternatives are being
presented to Americans that hardly wear out the
possibilities the future offers. At the same time,
Americans are being told of withdrawal "plans"
that hold little hope of fully withdrawing US
troops from Iraq.
As Duffy frames the
matter: after a reasonable withdrawal, the US
might have 50,000-100,000 troops still dug in "to
protect America's most vital interests" for an
undefined "longer stay". This would be not so much
"to referee a civil war, as US forces are doing
now, but to try to keep it from expanding". AP's
Hanley, however, suggests that, after a future
drawdown, the numbers are likely to remain just
what they were for administration planners "since
before 2003" - 30,000 US troops.
In what
passes for a "debate" about withdrawal in the
mainstream, two positions are in essence offered:
US troops in some numbers will remain for an
undefined period of years to preserve some kind of
"stability" and "security" for the Iraqi populace
and some cover for the Iraqi government, or those
troops will be withdrawn precipitously and a whole
series of horrors, ranging from a bloodbath of
unknown proportions to the establishment of the
beginnings of Osama bin Laden's "caliphate", are
likely to occur.
In this vision of the
future, at least one major alternative possibility
(of which there are undoubtedly many, some not yet
imagined by any of us) is completely ignored: US
troops remain for the long term (however drawn
down and dug in) and, as has been the case over
the past four-plus years, the situation continues
to deteriorate. The military solution that General
Petraeus and his commanders are relying on has yet
to create anything other than instability, mayhem,
and death. So, what if it turned out that the
long-term maintenance of some form of US
occupation was, in fact, not protection from, but
the very path to an unimaginable sectarian
bloodbath (as has been the case so far)?
The history of the past four years should
tell us that this scenario is far more plausible
than either of the alternatives now being
presented. In fact, these years seem to offer a
simple, if ignored, lesson: the Iraqis would have
been better off had the US never invaded; or if,
after toppling Saddam Hussein, the US had departed
almost immediately; or if the US had left in the
autumn of 2003 - and so on for all these dismal,
ever more disastrous years.
The fact is
that we humans are generally lousy seers (and,
when it comes to prediction, President Bush, the
top officials of his administration, and his
commanders have proved themselves especially poor
at predicting the future). It's time to set the
future - and so fiction, fantasy, and speculation
- aside. At the heart of the withdrawal debate in
the US should lie an obvious set of truths. As a
start, no matter how continually we war-game the
future, it will never be ours. We will always be
surprised.
While bad things did happen in
Vietnam after America's departure, none of them
could have been called a "bloodbath", while the
bloodbath that was US presence there did indeed
end. Vietnam is now, of course, a peaceful US ally
in the region.
In Iraq, with America's
departure, there could indeed be a near-genocidal
civil war, a partition of the country into three
or 33 parts, and even a brutal regional war - or
there could not. In fact, any of these things - as
the present threatened Turkish invasion of Iraqi
Kurdistan reminds us - could happen while US
troops remain in residence. All this aside, deaths
in Iraq are already approaching staggering levels
without America's departure. After all, if the
Lancet study's estimate of 655,000 "excess deaths"
by mid-2006 is accurate, then imagine what that
number must be an even bloodier year later.
We don't know what the future holds. We do
know what the present holds and that we could do
something about.
The full-scale withdrawal
of US troops from Iraq is an option that should,
at least, be accorded serious attention, rather
than automatic dismissal in the mainstream. Of
course, a lot of this depends on whether you
believe, in the end, that the United States is
part of the problem or part of the solution in
Iraq.
In the imperial mindscape of
Washington, it is impossible to conceive of the US
as not part of the solution to almost any problem
on the planet. But what if, in Iraq, that can't be
so as long as the US remains in occupation of the
country? Then, perhaps it would be worth opting
for the present and taking a gamble on the
unknown, rather than banking on Rumsfeld's endless
"known knowns". Perhaps it's time to bring not
only the word, but the idea of withdrawal in from
the cold.
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.
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