Iraq War: Proposals to get out

Apparently taking a few days to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace gave a few people a new focus on the disaster known as the Iraq War.  Or maybe it's dawning on more and more people that there is no good way out for the Americans.  Or if there is, it would involved another 350,000 troops or so there, and the Republican Party that cooked up this mess isn't willing to do what it takes to put those troops there.

All proposals have real weaknesses for exactly that reason: there's no good option.  If we wanted good options, the Bush administration would have had to show some real restraint before invading Iraq.

Change Course in Iraq by Trudy Rubin Philadelphia Inquirer 12/26/04.  Rubin speculates:

Yes, if the White House grasps that it doesn't have unlimited time to put "a stable democracy" in place. That goal would take decades, but U.S. troops can't stay for decades. Most likely, their welcome will wear thin within the next year, even with Shiites.

I'd like to think Iraq and other countries in the Middle East could make a transition to stable democracies on a shorter time-schedule.  But for the US to impose it militarily, her assessment is probably right.  She proposes a four-point withdrawal plan:

Point 1: "Negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the new Iraqi government for drawing down U.S. forces over the next year."  To exit while minimizing negative consequences, setting some kind of deadline like this is probably necessary.

Point 2: "Pay more attention to what Iraqis say about training new security forces. The only Iraqi forces that will fight are those that are motivated to die for their country - and Iraqis know best how to find them. This may require bringing back some Iraqi army units, or incorporating more Kurdish and Shiite militiamen into the national guard."  I think this is a pipe dream.  The Kurdish and Shiite militias are more interested in killing each other, though they might find common cause in killing Arab Sunnis.

Point 3: "Encourage the new Iraqi government - along with Iraq's Arab neighbors and Iran - to hold a regional conference. The aim: to persuade Sunni Arabs that Iraq's Shiite majority doesn't pose a threat."  Good luck.  This notion that other Arab countries will somehow bail the Bush administration out of the mess it has created in Iraq is wishful thinking.  Oh, and this idea would require the administration to quiet the war propaganda against Iran.

Point 4:  "Finally, recognize that the United States cannot remake Iraq in our image. Only when the administration develops realistic goals for Iraq will U.S. troops be able to come home."  Realistic goals would be nice.  An administration that sneers at the "reality-based community" may have a hard time coming up with those.  Actually, remaking Iraq in the Republican Party's ideal of a corrupt crony-capitalist system dominated by an authoritarian party might not that unrealistic.  Assuming civil war can be averted, which would be a major accomplishment in itself.

CommonDreams.org has been rounding up several exit proposals the last few days, including the following.

They can only dream of holidays at home by Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today) USA Today 12/22/04.   Also at CommonDreams.org.

Despite unhappy holidays, nearly all of us who served in WWII were proud, determined and properly armed and equipped to help defeat would-be world conquerors Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Hirohito in Japan.

At age 80, I'd gladly volunteer for such highly moral duty again. But if I were eligible for service in Iraq, I would do all I could to avoid it. I would have done the same during the Vietnam War, as many of the politically connected did.

"Support Our Troops" is a wonderful patriotic slogan. But the best way to support troops thrust by unwise commanders in chief into ill-advised adventures like Vietnam and Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New Year's resolution.

No peace on earth during unjust war by Andrew Greeley Chicago Sun-Times 12/24/04.  Also at CommonDreams.org.

One must support the troops, I am told. I certainly support the troops the best way possible: Bring them home,get them out of a war for which the planning was inadequate, the training nonexistent, the goal obscure, and the equipment and especially the armor for their vehicles inferior. They are brave men and women who believe they are fighting to defend their country and have become sitting ducks for fanatics. Those who die are the victims of the big lie. They believe that they are fighting to prevent another terror attack on the United States. They are not the war criminals. The ''Vulcans,'' as the Bush foreign policy team calls itself, are the criminals, and they ought to face indictment as war criminals.

... It is a war in which there is no possibility of victory -- whether it ends in June 2005 or June 2010, whether there are 2,000 American battle deaths or 50,000, whether there are 10,000 wounded Americans or 500,000, whether those with post-traumatic stress are 10 percent of the returning troops or 30 percent. ...

This time of the year we celebrate ''peace on Earth to men of good will.'' Americans must face the fact that they can no longer claim to be men and women of good will, not as long as they support an unnecessary, foolish, ill-conceived, badly executed and, finally, unwinnable war. If most people in other countries blame the war on Americans, we earned that blame in the November election -- not that there is any serious reason to believe that Sen. John Kerry would have had the courage to end the war. Perhaps if he had changed his mind, as he did about the war in Vietnam, and opposed the Iraqi war, he might have won. Too late now. Too late till 2010 -- or 2020.

If anyone thought Andrew Greeley just wrote Catholic novels, this column is a good example showing that's not so.  He also ends it with a note on the sin of "false witness."

Call it 'peace with honor' and bring our troops home by Ed Murphy Minneapolis Star-Tribune 12/25/04.  Also at CommonDreams.org.

Elections were the next great promise for peace, but does anyone really believe free and fair elections will even take place in January as long promised, let alone result in less violence? Now comes the announcement that troop force will be increased by another 12,000. Are we to believe that this is the final piece of the puzzle that will lead to peace and democracy? ...

One thing is apparent. The trend line in Iraq, as in Vietnam in the '60s, is not for acceptance of American occupation and more stability; just the opposite. And while fighting insurgents door to door or carpet-bombing villages might win battles or give the illusion back home that we are making progress, it is surely a losing strategy for winning the peace.

We can slog through for another decade, or the Bush administration can declare victory and bring our troops home. Call it peace with honor. Whatever the spin, we need to bring our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, dads and moms home, and we need to do it soon.

Families Pay the Price by Bob Herbert New York Times 12/24/04.  Also at CommonDreams.org (different title).

The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.

Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.

One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.

Yes, you must pull out - but also pay for the damage by Naomi Klein Guardian (UK) 12/27/04.  Also at CommonDreams.org.  Her article provides some details I had not seen before on the result of Bush family fixer's mission to get debt forgiveness for Iraq:

And the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of industrialised countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80%, contingent on Iraq's governments adhering to a strict International Monetary Fund austerity programme. According to early drafts, that programme includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatisation), a plan that Iraq's ministry of industry predicts will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms", the IMF also wants to eliminate the programme that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food - the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organisation, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a member - provided it adopts certain "reforms".

She scolds the antiwar movement, for some reason, for not demanding reparations:

But if staying in Iraq is not the solution, neither are easy bumper-sticker calls to pull the troops out and spend the money on schools and hospitals at home. Yes, the troops must leave, but that can be only one plank of a credible and moral antiwar platform. What of Iraq's schools and hospitals - the ones that were supposed to be fixed by Bechtel but never were? Too often, antiwar forces have shied away from speaking about what Americans owe Iraq. Rarely is the word "compensation" spoken, let alone the more loaded "reparations".

This comment of Klein's strikes me as the kind of purist pseudo-politics that drives me up the wall.  What's the point in issuing statements containing morally pure positions about what should happen after the war, when the war is escalating and the Bush administration shows no intention of pulling out?  Her article gives a good description of the disaster that the war is.  But ending up by scolding those who oppose the war for not meeting some ideal purity just sounds silly to me.

This columnist agrees with Trudy Rubin on the timetable, sort of:  Achieving Real Victory Could Take Decades by David Ignatius Washington Post 12/26/04.  But his starry-eyed true-believer version of the war is one reason that this proposals for an early exit are unlikely to be implemented.  Too much of the press is still pumping nonsense like this to their readers and viewers.

For all of America's military might, the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions. What is the nature of the enemy? If the United States is so powerful, why is it having such difficulty in Iraq? What will victory look like, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world? And how long will the conflict take?

Uh, yeah.  Those are all good things to know when you're embarking on a crusade to create democracies through bullets, bombs and torture.  Don't expect any honest answers from the Bush administration.  Ignatius toured around with Gen. John Abizaid, an experience which clearly impressed him.  "If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general," he gushes.  And the general has the answers, as far as Ignatius is concerned:

It was a week that focused attention on gut-level issues, reminiscent of the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago: Why are we in Iraq? What kind of conflict is the United States fighting there? How can we win it? Abizaid offers the best answers to these questions I've heard from any official in the U.S. government. In addition to being the military's top commander in the Middle East, he has an intellectual and emotional feel for the region. He's of Arab ancestry -- his forebears came to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870s -- and he learned to speak Arabic during a stint in Jordan 25 years ago. Like many of the best U.S. Army officers for generations, he's a well-read man who analyzes contemporary issues against the background of history.

I wonder if Ignatius bothered to drill Abizaid on how he could allow systematic torture - criminal and sadistic acts -  to occur under his command.  I'm guessing not.  After, all the general is "a well-read man" who has a good "feel" for the Middle East because his ancestors used to live there a century or so ago.  He couldn't have been at fault for something like that, now could he?

Salafist preachers see themselves as part of a vanguard whose mission is to radicalize other Muslims to overthrow their leaders. Abizaid likens them to Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders. During a gathering of foreign-policy experts in Washington last October, he posed a haunting question: What would you have done in 1890 if you had known the ruin this Bolshevik vanguard would bring? At another point, he urged the audience to think of today's Islamic world, wracked by waves of violence, as akin to Europe in the revolutionary year of 1848. The Arab world's spasms of anarchy and terror, like those in Europe 150 years ago, are part of a process of social change -- in which an old order is crumbling, and a new one is struggling to be born.

It would be nice to think that the general's "feel" for the region and his "well-read" condition enabled him to come up with something more sophisticated than yet another set of bad historical analogies.  But that was good enough for Ignatius.  Yeah, yeah, commies, Muslims, they're all the same.  They're the Bad Guys, we're the Good Guys, and give us all the boondoggle missile programs we want and we'll pretend to protect you from them.

I wonder if Ignatius challenged this wise pronouncement from the Field Marshal of the Imperium Americanum:

America's enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls "Salafist jihadists." That's his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad, who is sometimes called the "Salaf." Osama bin Laden is the best known of the Salafist extremists, but Abizaid argues that the movement is much broader and more diffuse than al Qaeda. It's a loose network of like-minded individuals who use 21st century-technology to spread their vision of a 7th-century paradise.

Actually, I think the jihadists are more interested in restoring the caliphate, which was after Muhammad's time.  This is kind of important, I would say, in understanding their attitude toward Spain, the former Al-Andulus, which was part of the caliphate they want to restore to Muslim rule.

But, hey, who are we to question General Abizaid, field general of the Imperium Americanum?  After all, he's an important general and besides, his ancestors used to live over there somewhere in the 19th century.  Ignatius is riding along with the grand stream of history, and he can't be bothered with petty details like how many decades US troops are supposed to be onthe ground fighting guerrillas on Iraq.  People like Field Marshal Abizaid and visionary journalist Ignatius can't be bothered with the petty details of the thousands of lives sacrificed to achieve the Grand Goals of History:

My travels with Abizaid ended with a stop in Mosul, at the same camp hit by a suicide bomber last week. Mosul is a case study in what America is facing in Iraq, and in the Long War. Over the past year, the city has gone from a model of stability to a new Fallujah, where insurgents have used terror tactics to halt collaboration with U.S. forces. The measure of success here will be the return of normal life. "It won't ever be over completely, where you wake up one morning and the enemy has surrendered," says Abizaid. "But one day you'll wake up and there will be more food, more security, more stability."

To judge from this column, Abizaid filled this guy's head with hokum and a few flaky historical analogies, and Ignatius comes out sounding like Baghdad Bob, Saddam's transparently phony press spokesman during the conventional war.  The Daily Howler is right:  if this press corps didn't exist, you couldn't invent them.