DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Premature withdrawal in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Hubris? We're bigger than that!
We've now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently
at war in Afghanistan for 30 years. Think of it as nearly half a century of
experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?
That in Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, we
Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and
so much better. And in Iraq, we seemed to have decided that enough was enough
and we should simply depart. Yet the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay
in Iraq are growing louder by the week.
The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us. After all, who would
leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they've done best in recent
years: cut one another's throats?
Modesty in Washington? Humility? The ability to draw new lessons from long-term
experience? None of the above is evidently appropriate for “the indispensable
nation”, as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once called the United
States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to "see further into
the future". None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when
Washington's weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history
and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go
anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things
have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.
An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners is now calling for the Barack
Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the
George W Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from
Iraq by the end of 2011. They seem to have taken Albright's belief in American
foresight - even prophesy - to heart and so are basing their arguments on their
ability to divine the future.
The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present,
Iraq's future prospects are terrifying, making leaving, if not inconceivable,
then as massively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and
bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed) as
invading in the first place. Without the US military on hand, we're told, the
Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major
civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed
their country in 2005-2006 when, by the way, the US military was present in
force.
The various partial winners of Iraq's much delayed March 7 election will, we
were assured beforehand, jockey for power for months trying to cobble together
a functioning national government. During that period, violence, it's said,
will surely escalate, potentially endangering the marginal gains made thanks to
the US military "surge" of 2007. The possibilities remain endless and,
according to these doomsayers, none of them are encouraging: Shi'ite militias
could use our withdrawal to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian
interference in Iraqi affairs is likely to increase and violently so, while
al-Qaeda could move into any post-election power void with its own destructive
agenda.
The warrior-pundits occupy the future
Such predictions are now dribbling out of the world of punditry and into the
world of news reporting where the future threatens to become fact long before
it makes it onto the scene. Already it's reported that the anxious US commander
in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, "citing the prospects for political instability
and increased violence", is talking about "plan Bs" to delay the agreed on
withdrawal of all "combat troops" from the country this August. He has, Ricks
reported on Foreign Policy's website, officially requested that a combat
brigade remain in or near the troubled northern city of Kirkuk after the
deadline.
As 2009 ended, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was suggesting that new
negotiations might extend the US position into the post-2011 years. ("I
wouldn't be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis
that continue a train, equip and advise beyond the end of 2011.") Central
Command chief General David Petraeus agrees. More recently, Gates added that a
"pretty considerable deterioration" in the country's security situation might
lead to a delay in withdrawal plans (and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
has agreed that this is a possibility).
Vice President Joe Biden is already talking about relabeling "combat troops"
not sent home in August because, as he put it in an interview with Helene
Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times, "We're not leaving behind cooks
and quartermasters." The bulk of the troops remaining, he insisted, "will still
be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys."
And a chorus of the usual suspects, Washington's warrior-pundits and "warrior
journalists" (as Tom Hayden calls them), are singing ever-louder versions of a
song warning of that greatest of all dangers: premature withdrawal. Ricks, for
instance, recommended in the Times that, having scuttled the "grandiose
original vision" of the George W Bush invasion, the Obama administration should
still "find a way" to keep a "relatively small, tailored force" of
30,000-50,000 troops in Iraq "for many years to come". (Those numbers, oddly
enough, bring to mind the 34,000 US troops that, according to Ricks in his 2006
bestseller Fiasco, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz projected
as the future US garrison in Iraq in the weeks before the invasion of 2003.)
Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion, is now wary of removing "the
cast" - his metaphor for the US military presence - on the "broken arm" of Iraq
too soon since states that have "undergone a major inter-communal civil war
have a terrifying rate of recidivism". For Kimberley and Frederick Kagan,
drumbeaters extraordinaires, writing for the Wall Street Journal, the US must
start discussing "a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011",
especially since that country will not be able to defend itself by then.
Why, you might well ask, must we stay in Iraq, given our abysmal record there?
Well, say these experts, we are the only force all Iraqis now accept, however
grudgingly. We are, according to Pollack, the "peacemakers, the lev[ee] holding
back violence ... Iraq's security blanket, and .. the broker of political deals
... we enforce the rules." According to Ricks, we are the only "honest brokers"
around. According to the Kagans, we were the "guarantor" of the recent
elections and have a kind of "continuing leverage" not available to any other
group in that country, "should we choose to use it".
Today, Iraq is admittedly a mess. On our watch, the country crashed and burned.
No one claims that we've put it back together. Multi-billions of dollars in
reconstruction funds later, the US has been incapable of delivering the
simplest things like reliable electricity or potable water to significant parts
of the country. Now, the future sits empty and threatening before us. So much
time in which so many things could happen, and all of them horrifying, all
calling out for us to remain because they just can't be trusted, they just
don't deliver.
The Sally Fields of American foreign policy
Talk about blaming the victim. An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner
party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the
patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture and then insists on
staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible
has to oversee the clean-up process.
What's remained in all this, remarkably enough, is our confidence in ourselves,
our admiration for us, our - well, why not say it? - narcissism. Nothing we've
done so far stops us from staring into that pool and being struck by what a
kindly, helpful face stares back at us. Think of those gathering officials,
pundits, journalists and military figures seemingly eager to imagine the worst
and so put the brakes on a full-scale American withdrawal as the Sally Fields
of foreign policy. ("I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you
like me!")
When you have an administration that has made backpedaling its modus operandi,
this rising chorus in Washington and perhaps among the military in Iraq could
prove formidable in an election year (here, not there). What makes their
arguments particularly potent is the fact that they base them almost entirely
on things that have yet to happen, that may, in fact, never happen. After all,
humans have such a lousy track record as predictors of the future. History
regularly surprises us, and yet their dismal tune about that future turns out
to be an effective cudgel with which to beat those in favor of getting all US
troops out by the end of 2011.
Few remember anymore, but we went through a version of this 40 years ago in
Vietnam. There, too, Americans were repeatedly told that the US couldn't
withdraw because, if we left, the enemy would launch a "bloodbath" in South
Vietnam. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable
official speeches and accounts. It became so real that sometimes it seemed to
put the actual, ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam in the shade, and for years it
provided a winning explanation for why any departure would have to be
interminably and indefinitely delayed. The only problem was: when the last
American took that last helicopter out, the bloodbath didn't happen.
In Iraq, only one thing is really known: after our invasion and with US and
allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did
descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath. It
happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.
But why should the historical record - the only thing we can, in part, rely on
- be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged
access to an otherwise unknown future? In the year to come, based on what we're
seeing now, such arguments may intensify. Terrible prophesies about Iraq's
future without us may multiply. And make no mistake, terrible things could
indeed happen in Iraq. They could happen while we are there. They could happen
with us gone. But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine
- even in Iraq.
In the meantime, it's worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy
the future. It belongs to no one.
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