One measure of how utterly sluggish the debate is over Iraq: the breathlessness with which the media reported Senator John Warner’s proposal for the withdrawal, in September, of 5,000 American troops. That, the good senator said, would send a clear signal to the Iraqi government that the United States has not written it a blank check, that it really must deliver on its promise of movement towards reconciliation.
Five thousand of the 160,000 we currently have in Iraq? After the fruitless months of coaxing, cajoling, threatening and, lately, table-pounding, that will make a tolerable molehill out of the avalanche-prone mountain we’ve been trying in vain to climb? That is a wink, not a proposal; it uses a three-cent stamp to deliver an express letter. Return to sender.
Then what now? Soon, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will be delivering their report in Washington. Presumably, they will say that the surge is working and deserves more time, but that we need to press the Iraqis harder toward the essential political reconciliation.
We’ve heard most of that already, most notably in the National Intelligence Estimate published just last week. Its principal findings: “[T]he level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high; Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled; AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks; and to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively.”
And now there’s a concerted effort to blame much of the mess on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who apparently richly deserves his failing grades and may soon find himself dismissed from class. But the chorus of disapproval has become so intense that one wonders: Is this perhaps our exit strategy?
Blame the disaster on the Iraqis and then quit; we gave them every chance, we gave them lives and money and time, we gave them advice and pep talks and freedom, and they have been too petty, too vengeful, too lazy, too spineless to build on all we’ve given them. So we’re out of there. Bye bye, Iraq.
There are two problems with that speculation. The first is that President Bush does not appear to be searching for a way out. Instead, he is searching for a rationale for staying in.
His latest piece of deceptive irrelevance is his comparison of Iraq and Vietnam. We left behind an awful mess in Vietnam, the president reminds us; we dare not do that again.
The sober response is that the Vietnam mess would have been no greater had we left there much, much sooner. Had we left, for example, when Lyndon Johnson realized — as he said in his taped conversations with McGeorge Bundy and Senator Richard Russell on May 27, 1964, a year before our large-scale buildup in Vietnam began — that the war was “pointless.” He called it “the biggest damn mess I ever saw” and lamented, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out.” And we didn’t get out, not for 11 more years.
The second problem is that when we finally do say goodbye to Iraq, we evidently will do so sotto voce, a whispered farewell as we “redeploy” our troops and continue to pray for a miracle.
Why is that? Because, say the wise ones, there is no ready way to quit. There are all those men and women of the armed forces, there are as many as a hundred thousand more civilians on contract, it’s exceedingly difficult to remove them safely. And then there’s all the equipment; we can hardly be expected to leave the equipment behind, to be appropriated by the troublemakers.
The equipment issue is real enough, but it would be helpful to know how much new equipment will be shipped into Iraq in the next year or two, or over the entire course of what may well turn into an endless occupation. The destruction of our billions of dollars worth of equipment as part of our withdrawal would be an awesomely unpleasant sight, but it might well be far less expensive than the resupply that continuing the war will require.
The direct costs of the war have so far come to nearly a half-trillion dollars, 10 times the Pentagon’s pre-war estimate. Add the long term and indirect costs, says Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, and $2 trillion is a conservative estimate.
So more and more analysts are telling us that we have to stay because we do not know how to leave — as if we’ve known these past four years how to stay. Stay in this misbegotten and mismanaged war and pray for a miracle.
Perhaps Maliki — Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion all in one — will encounter the Wizard of Oz and suddenly be blessed with heart, courage and brain. The Wicked Witch of Wyoming may mellow, the Decider may abandon his fixation with victory and opt, at last, for truth. But none of these is likely.
Shi’ite and Sunni will not decide that Gandhi was right after all. The tar pits of Iraq will not become oases.
As Charles Ferguson’s remarkable new documentary “No End in Sight” makes clear, Bush et al. had no plan for the morning after, and much of the ensuing disaster stems directly from that unforgivable omission. Quitting well also requires planning.
The Bush administration has 509 days left; the Democrats would do well immediately to begin planning in precise detail how to leave Iraq as safely and as decently as possible, starting 510 days from now (assuming they win). That’s a message both the Iraqi government and the American people will notice.
True, it is we who broke it — but we are not the ones who can fix it. Only the Iraqis can do that, and they won’t, if at all, until we leave.
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Dr. Ron Paul said it first: "Just come Home" Leaving Iraq to its own people is infinitely less disastrous then any kind of nebulously indefinite occupation. All the other American presidential candidates dither because their ideas and mentality are based on polls rather than integrity.
In all of this thoughtful article, the word "we" has been used in only one sense: "We, the American people". I would have expected that at times the article would give some Jewish insight or perspective - that the word "we" would at least once mean: "We, the Jewish community". In the Forward, for example, I have read articles about baseball heroes. Obviously, the angle is always Jewish baseball heroes; i.e. the Forward assumes that its reading public wants to hear about some aspect of the Jewish experience. Why is the American involvement in Iraq analyzed in the Forward without mentioning any aspect whatsoever of the Jewish world? To get an American view of such events, I read the New York Times or the Washington Post. I read the Forward to get some insight on the impact of events and ideas on Jews. I would expect to read in the Forward that the term "we" still refers to Jews as a community with a distinctive experience.
In 1956 Vietnam, having rid itself of the French, was about to hold nationwide elections. Ho Chi Minh would have won. The Americans could see him only as a client of the USSR and its then ally, Mao's China-- not as a nationalist who took help where he could find it. Part of the Cold War rubric was that people never freely elect a communist government. This "law" had to be upheld at all costs. Hence America's creeping intervention in former Indochina. The elections were cancelled, a corrupt and tyrannical regime in Saigon was supported and Vietnam plunged into almost 20 years of civil war, during which more bombs were dropped on it than the USA had used in World War Two. Laos and Cambodia were engulfed in the conflict and Pol Pot's rise facilitated. All this "esclated" from an initial cautious insertion of military "advisers" by Eisenhower. Three following presidents tried to scale it back only to step it up, on the kill-or-cure principle. All failed. The withdrawal and "Vietnamisation" by Nixon and Kissinger finally precipitated the victory Ho would have had by the ballot box in 1956. The feared "domino effect" of Ho's success, turning the rest of SE Asia communist, was another watchword of the day. It never occurred. Instead the USSR and China moved towards capitalism, no thanks to JFK, LBJ or Nixon. Iraq in 2001 had been under UN sanctions for ten years. Its army had been broken in the First Gulf War. The Baathist regime had been effectively deprived of Kurdistan and was no longer acting aggressively towards other countries. It was not a serious sponsor of terrorism. Despite all the talk of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, and how "everyone" believed he had them, international inspection procedures had yielded no findings and were not being seriously impeded. Mossad (inter alia) opposed invading Iraq and overthrowing him, foreseeing that Iran-- potentially a more serious danger to Israel than ruined Iraq-- would fill the power space in the region. However, a post-Gorbachev maxim of America's victorious Cold Warriors was that "democratic states don't fight each other". Therefore Iraq had to be democratised to trigger a benign domino effect and defang the Islamic jihadis. The opposite has happened. Iraqis elected a more theocratic and sectarian parliament than Saddam's brutally modernising, secular state; other Muslim countries have followed suit where elections have occurred, and the neocons have started talking about how Iraq needs a strongman. Since World War Two, the USA has conducted foreign policy by apothegms and universalist assumptions which don't pan out. These have derived from the idea that it is the USA's "manifest destiny" to guide the entire planet towards a Nirvana of liberal democracy, "fundamental human rights", freedom for the Fortune 500 to set up shop everywhere and so forth. The "propositional nation" is maing an idiot of itself in Irsq, baffled and beaten by a handful of leaderless insurgents, because it has become drunk on rhetoric and rules of thumb. Meanwhile countries with more traditional, selfish and robust notions of where they are going, such as Japan, China, India and Russia, are preparing to close the era of American predominance.
One of the best critical observations I have read yet. It's a shame that none of the Democratoc candidates, with the exception of Kucinch, is calling for an immediate withdrawal. Wishful thinking on my part suggests that the other candidates are playing it close to the middle in order to win the nomination. Then again Bush can decide, as Fein indicates, that the Iraqi governmnet has failed to meet its own benchmarks, and he will withdraw a good percentage of our troops before the elections. It won't be the first time our politicians will use the war as a political football. That in itself should be considered a crime.