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Now
The tragedy unleashed by the U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq defies description. According to the most
recent findings of the Lancet medical journal, the number
of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the U.S. invasion
is more than 650,000. "Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee
crisis in the world," according to Refugee International:
nearly two million Iraqis have fled the country entirely, while
at least another 500,000 are internally displaced. Basic foods
and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis because
of massive inflation. "A gallon of gasoline cost as little
as 4 cents in November. Now, after the International Monetary
Fund pushed the Oil Ministry to cut its subsidies, the official
price is about 67 cents," the New York Times notes.
"The spike has come as a shock to Iraqis, who make only
about $150 a month on average-if they have jobs," an important
proviso, since unemployment is roughly 6070 percent nationally.
October 2006 proved to be the
bloodiest month of the entire occupation, with more than six
thousand civilians killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands
of additional U.S. troops have been sent since August with the
claim they would restore order and stability in the city, but
instead only sparked more violence. United Nations special investigator
Manfred Nowak notes that torture "is totally out of hand"
in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people say it is
worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."
The number of U.S soldiers dead is now more than 2,900, with
more than 21,000 wounded, many severely.
The underlying trend is clear:
each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis.
Rather than stemming civil war or sectarian conflict, the occupation
is spurring it. Rather than being a source of stability, the
occupation is the major source of instability and chaos.
All of the reasons being offered
for why the United States cannot withdraw troops from Iraq are
false. The reality is, the troops are staying in Iraq for much
different reasons than the ones being touted by political elites
and a still subservient establishment press. They are staying
to save face for a U.S. political elite that cares nothing for
the lives of Iraqis or U.S. soldiers; to pursue the futile goal
of turning Iraq into a reliable client state strategically located
near the major energy resources and shipping routes of the Middle
East, home to two-thirds of world oil reserves, and Western and
Central Asia; to serve as a base for the projection of U.S. military
power in the region, particularly in the growing conflict between
the United States and Iran; and to maintain the legitimacy of
U.S. imperialism, which needs the pretext of a global war on
terror to justify further military intervention, expanded military
budgets, concentration of executive power, and restrictions on civil liberties. The
U.S. military did not invade and occupy Iraq to spread democracy,
check the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rebuild the
country, or stop civil war. In fact, the troops remain in Iraq
today to deny self-determination and genuine democracy to the
Iraqi people, who have made it abundantly clear, whether they
are Shiite or Sunni, that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq
immediately; feel less safe as a result of the occupation; think
the occupation is spurring not suppressing sectarian strife;
and support armed attacks on occupying troops and Iraqi security
forces, who are seen not as independent but as collaborating
with the occupation.
It is not only the Iraqi people
who oppose the occupation of their country and want to see the
troops leave. A clear majority of people in the United States
have expressed the same sentiment in major opinion polls and
in the mid-term Congressional elections, which swing both houses
of Congress and the majority of state governorships to the Democrats,
in a clear vote against the imperial arrogance of Bush's "stay
the course" approach to the disaster in Iraq. The public
did not vote for more money for the Pentagon (as incoming Senate
majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada immediately promised, announcing
a plan to give $75 billion more to the Pentagon), for more "oversight"
of the war (the main Democratic Party buzzword these days), or
for more troops (as Texas Democrat Representative Silvestre Reyes,
the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has demanded),
but to begin bringing the troops home. A clear majority of active-duty
U.S. troops want the same thing, as a much-ignored Zogby International
poll found in early 2005, with 72 percent saying they wanted
to be out of Iraq by the end of 2006.
But Bush's response to the
groundswell of opposition to the war, which has led not only
to his setbacks in the midterm elections but to even further
erosion in his already abysmal approval ratings (with approval
of his handling of the war reaching a new low of 27 percent),
is to insist that the sun still revolves around the earth. "Absolutely,
we're winning," Bush told reporters. "I know there's
a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's
going to be some kind of graceful exit from Iraq," Bush
said. "This business about a graceful exit just simply has
no realism to it whatsoever," he added. "We're going
to stay in Iraq to get the job done." In a similar vein,
Vice President Cheney said, "I know what the President thinks.
I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exist strategy.We're
looking for victory."
After the midterm elections
Bush was forced to jettison his deeply unpopular defense secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, but nominated in his place someone who is unlikely
to oversee any fundamental shift in U.S. strategy. Robert Gates,
an old CIA hand, is a dedicated Cold Warrior who advocated, among
other enlightened policies, the bombing of the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua for daring to challenge the corrupt order of death
squad dictatorships in Latin America. Bush also dropped UN ambassador
John Bolton, a man who embodies everything that the world hates
about U.S. foreign policy today.
Perhaps most significantly,
though, in the face of the failures in Iraq, Congress resorted
to the old strategy of bringing in the "wise men" to
repackage a failing war, convening the Iraq Study Group (ISG),
with Bush family fixer James Baker III, former Indiana representative
Lee Hamilton, and other foreign policy establishment figures
with little or no knowledge of Iraq. The commission was never
going to advocate any radical reversal of U.S. policy in Iraq,
but even so, Bush has hedged his bets from the outset, setting
up two different internal military review committees to make
suggestions to the White House about the next steps in Iraq (much
as he had overseen a separate intelligence operation to create
the evidence that would be used to sell the invasion in the first
place). Indeed, when the report's findings were made public on
December 6, Bush immediately distanced himself from its highly
limited recommendations. As the New YorkSun noted,
"Barely 24 hours old, the bipartisan report has been placed
on a high shelf to gather dust, its principle function having
been to take the heat off the president for a time while allowing
him to gather his resolve to press on" with the same course
as before. Bush immediately rejected the report's call to negotiate
with Iran and Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported:
"A senior administration official said the White House doesn't
feel bound by the report and is unlikely to implement many of
its recommendations, especially regarding calls for diplomatic
outreach to U.S. foes Syria and Iran." In addition, "The
White House has rejected mounting calls for a course correction
in Iraq, insisting it would maintain the current number of U.S.
military personnel in Iraq indefinitely."
But even if the Bush administration
sought to immediately implement every recommendation of the Iraq
Study Group report, it would only be a recipe for more death,
displacement, and despair. The ISG report explicitly rejects
setting any deadline or timetable for withdrawal, asserts the
need for a "considerable military presence in the region,
with our still significant force in Iraq and with our powerful
air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar,
as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan" for years
to come, and basically repackages the Bush Doctrine of "as
the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," that is "Iraqization"
of the conflict, much as "Vietnamization" was presented
as the solution in Vietnam.
It is worth briefly reviewing the various options now being considered
by the Bush administration, none of which offers any real alternative:
Sending
in more troops in the short term
The idea that sending in more
troops would provide stability and improve the situation in Iraq
ignores the fact that the U.S. is the main source of violence
and instability. More troops breed both more opposition and more
sectarian violence. Observes Michael Schwartz, "Instead
of entering a violent city and restoring order, [U.S. forces]
enter a relatively peaceful city and create violence. The accurate
portrait of this situationis that the most hostile anti-American
cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi have generally been reasonably
peaceful when U.S. troops are not there." Even the ISG
notes that Operation Together Forward II, which redeployed thousands
of U.S. troops to Baghdad in August 2006, achieved the opposite
of its stated goal: "Violence in Baghdad-already at high
levels-jumped more than 43 percent between the summer and October
2006." Schwartz also explains the way in which the higher
presence of U.S. combat troops exacerbates sectarian violence:
American patrols in Shia neighborhoods
immobilize the local defenses and make the community vulnerable
to jihadist attack; while American invasions of Sunni
communities are even more damaging. They not only immobilize
the local defense forces, but almost always involve the introduction
of Iraqi Army units, made up mainly of Shia soldiers (since the
army being stood up by the Americans is largely a Shia one).
What results is violence in the form of battles between a Shia
military (as well as militia-infiltrated Shia police forces)
and Sunni resistance fighters defending their communities. These
attacks generate immense bitterness among Sunni, who see them
as part of a Shia attempt to use the American military to conquer
and pacify Sunni cities. The result is a wealth of new jihadists
anxious to retaliate by sacrificing their lives in terrorist
or death-squad-style attacks on Shia communities-which, in their
turn, energize the Shia death squads in an escalating cycle of
brutalizing violence.
The U.S, in addition, cannot add more troops without straining
an already badly overtaxed military and relying on greater use
of backdoor draft measures that are provoking more opposition
at home and within the military to the occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, another failing occupation.
We'll stand down as they stand up
The idea that training Iraqi
troops can be improved, a major recommendation of the ISG report,
suggests that there's a technical solution that the U.S. faces
in Iraq. But the root of resistance to U.S occupation is political.
As long as the U.S. remains an occupying power, the police and
military will continue to be seen as collaborators and illegitimate.
Resistance groups in Iraq, meanwhile, face no such training problems,
and are carrying out increasingly sophisticated operations, including
direct military battles with U.S. troops, because their fighters
are politically motivated and have a defined goal that has widespread
support.
Engage
Iran and Syria
The idea behind this strategy,
another major thrust of the ISG report, is that the root of resistance
to U.S. occupation in Iraq is foreign, rather than indigenous-much
as we were told that the popular resistance of the Vietnamese
to U.S. state terrorism was directed by Moscow and Beijing. In
this delusional worldview, Iran and Syria, and groups such as
al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, are the sources of violence in Iraq.
This baseless theory then leads to the equally baseless idea
that the U.S. will somehow stabilize Iraq through talks with
two governments it is committed to overthrowing. As the Financial
Times observes, there is little reason to think Bush "would
be willing to follow advice that contradicts his deeply held
belief that the U.S. should not talk toIran and Syria" because
doing so would "reward bad behavior." Bush has repeatedly
said that a precondition for talking to Iran is a suspension
of the country's legal nuclear enrichment program, something
that Iran has no reason to agree to in advance of negotiations.
At any rate, even if talks do take place, Iran and Syria are
not the masters of events in Iraq, which are driven by the internal
politics and the dynamics of the U.S. occupation.
Gradual
withdrawal
Proposals for gradual withdrawal
with no timetable are a recipe for pursuing an infinitely receding
horizon. The idea behind gradual withdrawal was put accurately,
if cynically, by Donald Rumsfeld in a secret leaked memo, written
November 6, just a few days before his resignation: "Recast
the U.S. military mission and U.S. goals (how we talk about them)-go
minimalist." In other words, change the rhetoric while lowering
expectations, but pursue the same goals. "Announce that
whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing
so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust
and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"
Redeployment
A frequent buzzword in discussions
of the occupation of Iraq today, especially among Democrats,
is redeployment. On November 14, 2006, Senator Russ Feingold,
the Wisconsin Democrat considered to be at the extreme left end
of the party's elected officials, introduced a bill "requiring
U.S. forces to redeploy from Iraq by July 1, 2007." But
the plan itself calls for keeping troops in Iraq. "My legislation
would allow for a minimal level of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq
for targeted counterterrorism activities, training of Iraqi security
forces, and the protection of U.S. infrastructure and personnel."
In other words, redeployment envisions U.S. bases, U.S. troops,
and U.S. occupation, while merely shifting some personnel to
other military bases in the region-where they can be quickly
mobilized to strike when necessary-and most likely shifting to
greater reliance on air power in Iraq and in the region to pursue
U.S. imperial objectives.
Partition
One plan that the ISG did not
recommend, and which Bush has also criticized, but which remains
a real possibility as the crisis in Iraq unfolds, is partition.
The deteriorating situation on the ground has encouraged some
analysts and politicians-including incoming Democrat Joseph Biden,
the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair-to call
for the breakup of Iraq into three independent countries or three
relatively autonomous territories within a loosely federated
state. Such a division of Iraq, however, could only be accomplished
by massive ethnic cleansing. The largest urban concentration
of Kurds in Iraq is not in the northern zone that would likely
make up a future Kurdish enclave or state, but in Baghdad. Most
cities described by reporters as "Sunni strongholds"
or "Shiite townships" have mixed populations with significant
minorities of Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen, Kurds, or Assyrians. In
addition, any predominantly Sunni state in central and western
Iraq that emerged from a tripartite division of the country would
be significantly impoverished compared to its oil-rich southern
and northern neighbors.
The iron
fist
Another option-one with a long
history in Iraq and the Middle East-remains support for a new
"iron fist." Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor
of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of
Advanced International Studies, suggests that "A junta of
military modernizers might be the only hope of a country whose
democratic culture is weak, whose politicians are either corrupt
or incapable," a narrative that is gaining much more popularity
in the establishment press and among pundits and politicians
seeking an explanation for the disaster in Iraq that avoids looking
at its real roots. This is a refurbishing of an old idea-a Saddam-style
regime without Saddam-that became impossible as soon as the Bremer
administration in Iraq dismantled the army and the Baath party,
the only political and administrative basis on which such a dictatorship
could have been established.
Expansion
Despite the ISG's recommendations
of direct talks with Iran and Syria, and the caution of Robert
Gates and others about the pitfalls of pursuing Iran militarily,
the threat of the U.S. expanding the war in Iraq remains very
real. In summer 2006, Washington sponsored the disastrous and
bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon, hoping to gain some tactical
advantage in the region and hence in Iraq. The gamble failed
miserably, but some feel another such gamble is necessary. As
Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker, "many in
the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with
Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. 'It's a case of "failure
forward,"' a Pentagon consultant said. 'They believe that
by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq-like
doubling your bet.'"
Whatever Bush's new plan for
Iraq may be, a major clash of expectations is likely to come
about as the Democrats fail to pose any real challenge to the
war. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed "bipartisanship"
the moment the results were announced, adding that impeachment
of Bush was "off the table." Pelosi and the new Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid also said they would take off the
table the greatest power the Democrats have in Congress, the
ability to cut off funds for prolonging the occupation. As Alexander
Cockburn wrote in the Nation: "It'sthe role of elections
in properly run western democracies to remind people that things
won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You
can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers
expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done."
Out now
Indeed, the one option that
remains truly off the table in Iraq is the only sensible one:
complete and unconditional immediate withdrawal, followed by
reparations to the Iraqi people for the massive harm the occupation-and
before that the sanctions, the Gulf and Iran-Iran Wars, and years
of supporting the dictatorship-have caused. According to the
New York Times, "In the cacophony of competing plans
about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite
the Democrats' victoryin an election viewed as a referendum on
the war, the idea of rapid American troop withdrawal is fast
receding as a viable option."
The debate today in Washington
remains one largely over tactics, not strategy or principles.
In fact, the one debate over principles that is taking place
is a racist one: more and more "experts" now question
whether Bush's folly was in thinking he could bring democracy
to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition
of democracy," are from a "sick society," a "broken
society." In a much-lauded speech, Barack Obama, the great
hope of the Democrats, couched his criticism of the Bush administration's
policy by saying there should be "No more coddling"
of the Iraqi government: the United States "is not going
to hold together this country indefinitely," he explained,
adding that "we should be more modest in our belief that
we can impose democracy." Richard Perle, former chair of
the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, one of
the main neoconservative enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq,
in explaining why things had gone so contrary to his glorious
predictions, now says he "underestimated the depravity"
of the Iraqis. And the ISG report chides that "the Iraqi
people and their leaders have been slow to demonstrate their
capacity or will to act," and therefore the U.S. "must
not make an open-ended commitment" to them. In other words,
blame the victim. As Sharon Smith wrote on CounterPunch, "Within
a few short weeks, the Washington 'consensus' has rewritten the
history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq-as if Iraqis invited the
U.S. to invade their sovereign nation in 2003 and now have failed
to live up to their end of the bargain."
As the crisis in Iraq unfolds,
we can expect these arguments to gain even wider traction, providing
more cover for the real U.S. objectives in the Middle East.
The tragedy unfolding in Iraq
is still far from over. In Act I of the tragedy, we were told
that Washington would invade Iraq, quickly topple the dictatorship,
install a stable client government, and then-having radically
changed the balance of power in the Middle East-march on from
Baghdad to confront the regimes of Iran and Syria. With that
dream in tatters, the United States commenced Act II: the manipulation
of sectarian divisions in Iraq to form a Shiite and Kurdish coalition
government that would isolate the Sunnis (though it would seek
to co-opt as much of their political leadership as possible)
and serve the intended client role, if less effectively than
Washington had hoped, allowing the U.S. to gain at least some
foothold in Iraq and claim victory. By mid-2006, the failures
of this strategy could no longer be ignored, however. Having
invaded Iraq intending to weaken Iran and Syria, to strengthen
its position and that of Israel and its Arab allies in the region,
the United States instead achieved the opposite. (Of course,
all of this ignores the many stages of the tragedy authored by
the United States before the March 2003 invasion, through its
support of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein, its nefarious
role in the Iran-Iraq War and then the 1991 Gulf War, and the
more than twelve years of sanctions and bombing that followed.)
Acts I and II in the tragedy
of the Iraq occupation have now come to a close. But Act III
has only just begun. All the signs suggest that the endgame in
Iraq is likely to be long and very bloody. Iraq and the Middle
East are so strategically important to the United States that
neither party is willing to withdraw and admit defeat; such an
outcome would be more disastrous for the United States than its
defeat in Vietnam.
But there is one factor in the Iraq tragedy that we should not
discount. The question of how long this war lasts, whether it
will expand to Iran and Syria, whether more troops will be sent
to needlessly kill and be killed for profit and power, does not
only depend on the decisions and internal conflicts of the ruling
class. It also depends on the level of public opposition in Iraq,
at home, and within the military itself. Groups like Iraq Veterans
Against the War are already playing a leading role in the struggle
to end the occupation. But we are still only at the beginning
of organizing the kind of opposition we need to affect the course
of the war decisively.
The U.S. war against Vietnam
was lost by 1968, if not sooner, but continued for years after,
with millions of lives lost as a consequence. We cannot allow
a repeat of that tragic history. The Vietnam War, though, also
has another lesson to teach us: that when people speak out and
organize, they can deter even the most powerful and reckless
government. The war against the people of Indochina would certainly
have lasted even longer-and might have spread even farther-had
concerted opposition at home and internationally not forced the
United States to retreat. That is a lesson we badly need to relearn-and
put into practice-today.
Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of
Withdrawal, just published in an updated paperback edition, with
a foreword by Howard Zinn, in the American Empire Project (Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt). He is on the editorial boards of Haymarket
Books and International Socialist Review. This article appears
in the JanuaryFebruary issue of the ISR.
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