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2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA How never to withdraw
from Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
Think of the top officials of the Bush
administration as magicians when it comes to Iraq.
Their top hats and tails may be worn and their act
fraying, but it doesn't seem to matter. Their
latest "abracadabra", the President's "surge
strategy" of 2007, has still worked like a charm.
They waved their magic wands, paid off and armed a
bunch of former Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda
terrorists (about 80,000 "concerned citizens," as
the President likes to call them), and magically
lowered "violence" in Iraq. Even more
miraculously, they made a country that they had
already turned into a cesspool and a slagheap -
its capital now has a "lake" of sewage so large
that it can be viewed "as a big black spot on
Google
Earth" - almost entirely disappear from view in
the US.
Of course, what they needed to be
effective was that classic adjunct to any
magician's act, the perfect assistant. This has
been a role long held, and still played with
mysterious willingness, by the mainstream media.
There are certainly many reporters in Iraq doing
their jobs as best they can in difficult
circumstances. When it comes to those who make the
media decisions at home, however, they have
practically clamored for the Bush administration
to put them in a coffin-like box and saw it in
half. Thanks to their news choices, Iraq has for
months been whisked deep inside most papers and
into the softest sections of network and cable
news programs. Only one Iraq subject has gotten
significant front-page attention: How much
"success" has the president's surge strategy had?
Before confirmatory polls even arrived,
the media had waved its own magic wand and
declared that Americans had lost interest in Iraq.
Certainly the media people had. The economy - with
its subprime Hadithas and its market Abu Ghraibs -
moved to center stage, yet links between the Bush
administration's two trillion dollar war and a
swooning economy were seldom considered. It
mattered little that a recent Associated
Press/Ipsos poll revealed a majority of Americans
to be convinced that the most reasonable
"stimulus" for the US economy would be withdrawal
from Iraq. A total of 68% of those polled believed
such a move would help the economy.
Anyone
tuning in to the nightly network news can now
regularly go through a typical half-hour focused
on Obamania, the faltering of the Clinton
"machine", the Huckabee/McCain face-off on
Republican Main Street, the latest nose-diving
market, and the latest campus shooting without
running across Iraq at all. Cable TV, radio news,
newspapers - it makes little difference.
The News Coverage Index of the Project for
Excellence in Journalism illustrates that point
clearly. For the week of February 4-10, the
category of "Iraq Homefront" barely squeaked into
tenth place on its chart of the top-ten most
heavily covered stories with 1% of the "newshole".
First place went to "2008 Campaign" at 55%.
"Events in Iraq" - that is, actual coverage of and
from Iraq - didn't make it onto the list. (The
week before, "Events in Iraq" managed to reach #6
with 2% of the newshole.)
True, you can go
to Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, perhaps
the best daily round-up of Iraqi mayhem and
disaster on the Web, and you'll feel as if, like
Alice, you had fallen down a rabbit hole into
another universe. ("Two bombings shook Iraq Sunday
morning. In the Misbah commercial center in the
upscale Shiite Karrada district, a female suicide
bomber detonated a belt bomb, killing 3 persons
and wounding 10 ... About 100 members of the
Awakening Council of Hilla Province have gone on
strike to protest the killing of three of them by
the US military at Jurf al-Sakhr last Sunday, in
what the Pentagon says was an accident ...
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that officials in
Baqubah are warning that as families are returning
to the city, they could be forced right back out
again, owing to sectarian tensions ...") But how
many Americans read Juan Cole every day ... or any
day?
On that media homefront, the Bush
administration has been Houdini-esque. Left
repeatedly locked in chains inside a booth full of
water, George W Bush continues to emerge to
declare that things are going swimmingly in Iraq:
...80,000 local citizens stepped up
and said, we want to help patrol our own
neighborhoods; we're sick and tired of violence
and extremists. I'm not surprised that that
happens. I believe Iraqi moms want the same
thing that American moms want, and that is for
their children to grow up in peace ... The surge
is working. I know some don't want to admit
that, and I understand. But the terrorists
understand the surge is working. Al Qaeda knows
the surge is working ...
Having
pulled the "surge" rabbit out of his hat - even
stealing the very word out of the middle of
"insurgent" - Bush then topped that trick by
making Iraq go away for weeks, if not months, on
end. Talk about success!
Forever and a
Day If you're wondering why in the world
this matters - after all, won't the Democrats get
us out of Iraq in 2009? - then you haven't come to
grips with Bush's greatest magic trick of all.
Though a lame-duck president sporting dismally low
job-approval ratings, he continues to embed the US
in Iraq, while framing the issue of what to do
there in such a way that any thought of a quick
withdrawal has ... poof! ... fled the scene.
Admittedly, somewhere between 57% and 64%
of Americans, according to Rasmussen Reports, want
all US troops out of Iraq within a year. We're not
talking here about just the "combat troops" which
both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem
prepared to withdraw at a relatively stately pace.
(Obama has suggested a 16-month schedule for
removing them; Clinton has only indicated that she
would start withdrawing some of them within 60
days of coming into office.) Combat troops,
however, represent perhaps half of all US military
personnel in Iraq - and Republicans are already
attacking even their withdrawal as
cut-and-run-ism, if not outright treason.
Americans may not have noticed, but the
policy that a large majority of them want is no
longer part of polite discussion in Washington or
on the campaign trail. The spectrum of opinion in
the capital, among presidential candidates, and in
the mainstream media ranges from Senator McCain's
claim that even setting a date for withdrawal
would be a sure recipe for "genocide" - and that's
the responsible right - to those who want to
depart, but not completely and not very quickly
either. The party of "withdrawal" would still
leave American troops behind for various
activities. These would include the "training" of
the Iraqi military. (No one ever asks why one side
in Iraq needs endless years of "training" and
"advice", while the other sides simply fight on
fiercely.) In addition, troops might be left to
guard our monstrous new embassy in Baghdad, or as
an al-Qaeda-oriented strike force, or even to
protect American security contractors like
Blackwater.
Hard as it is for the audience
to separate the mechanics of a magician's trickery
from the illusion he creates, it's worth a try.
Before the surge began in February 2007, as five
combat brigades were dispatched mainly to Baghdad,
there were perhaps 130,000 American forces in Iraq
(as well as a large contingent of private security
contractors - hired guns - running into the tens
of thousands). The surge raised that military
figure to more than 160,000.
The Bush
administration's latest plans are to send home the
five combat brigades, but not all the support
troops that arrived with them, by the end of July.
This will still leave troop levels above those of
February 2007. At that point, as Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates suggested only last week, the
administration is likely to "pause" for at least
one to three months to assess the situation. In
other words, when Americans enter their polling
places this November 4, there will probably still
be more troops in Iraq than at the beginning of
2007.
TIME Magazine typically put the
matter this way:
The pause, which could last up to
several months, would be designed to ensure that
the smaller U.S. footprint in Iraq doesn't
embolden insurgents to reignite the civil war
that ripped the country apart in 2006 and the
first half of 2007.
That smaller
footprint, however, will be marginally larger than
the one that preceded the surge. So consider this
a year-long draw-up, not a drawdown. In the
meantime, though the mainstream media has hardly
noticed, the Pentagon has been digging in. In the
last year, it has continued to upgrade its massive
bases in Iraq to the tune of billions of dollars.
It has also brought in extra air power for an "air
surge" that has barely been reported on here - and
nobody in Washington or on the campaign trail, in
the Oval Office or the Democratic Party, has been
talking about drawing down that air surge, even
though there has recently been a spate of
incidents in which Iraqi civilians, and some of
those "concerned citizens" backing American forces
have died from US air strikes.
The Bush
administration is also quietly negotiating a
Status of Forces Agreement with the weak Iraqi
government inside Baghdad's Green Zone. It will
legally entrench American forces on those
mega-bases for years to come. In a recent op-ed in
the Washington Post, Gates and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice denied that the administration
was trying to bind a future president to Bush's
Iraq policies. ("In short, nothing to be
negotiated in the coming months will tie the hands
of the next commander in chief, whomever he or she
may be.") This, however, is obviously not the
case. The agreement is also being carefully
constructed to skirt the status of a "treaty", so
that it will not have to be submitted to the
Senate for ratification. All of this, in the grand
tradition of Vice President Cheney, might be
thought of as the Bush administration's
embunkerment policy in Iraq.
In the surge
year, when administration officials and top
commanders speculated about withdrawal, they
increasingly emphasized the Herculean task
involved and the need to take the necessary time
to carefully remove every last piece of military
equipment in-country. "You're talking about not
just US soldiers, but millions of tons of
contractor equipment that belongs to the United
States government, and a variety of other things,"
Gates told Pentagon reporters last July. "This is
a massive logistical undertaking whenever it takes
place."
As TIME Magazine's Michael Duffy
described it, included would be "a good portion of
the entire US inventory of tanks, helicopters,
armored personnel carriers, trucks and humvees ...
They are spread across 15 bases, 38 supply depots,
18 fuel-supply centers and 10 ammo dumps," not to
speak of "dining halls, office buildings, vending
machines, furniture, mobile latrines, computers,
paper clips and acres of living quarters." Some
top military commanders claimed that it would take
up to 20 months just to get part of the American
force out. More recently, it has been suggested
that it would take "as many as 75 days" for each
combat brigade and all its equipment to depart -
and this would, of course, be done one brigade at
a time.
When it comes to withdrawal, the
highest priority now seems to be frugality in
saving all US property. In other words, as the
Bush administration continues to dig in, each of
its acts makes leaving ever more complicated.
If the subject at hand weren't so grim,
this would be hilarious. An analogy might lie in
an old joke: A boy murders his father and mother
and then, arrested and brought to court, throws
himself on the mercy of the judge as an orphan.
The administration that rashly invaded
Iraq, used it as a laboratory for any cockamamie
scheme that came to mind, and threw
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