Iraq War: Tom Engelhardt on withdrawal

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

I haven't written too much here about options for ending American participation in the Iraq War. That's mainly because it's unlikely in the extreme that the Bush administration will attempt to extricate US troops from Iraq.  But Tom Engelhardt has a good article up about the immediate withdrawal option: Withdraw on the Agenda TomDispatch.com 06/21/05; also available at CommonDreams.org 06/22/05.

A similar situation played itself out in Vietnam back when nightmarish visions of what might happen if we withdrew ("the bloodbath") became so much a part of public debate that the bloodbath actually taking place in Vietnam was sometimes overshadowed by it. Prediction is a risky business. Terrible things might indeed happen if we withdrew totally from Iraq, or they might not; or they might -- but not turn out to be the ones we've been dreaming about; or perhaps if we committed to departure in a serious way, the situation would actually ease. We don't know. That's the nature of the future. All we know at the moment, based on the last two years, is what is likely to happen if we stay -- which is more and worse of the very nightmares we fear if we leave.

The most essential problem in such thinking is the belief that, if we just hang in there long enough, the United States will be capable of solving the Iraqi crisis. That is inconceivable, since the U.S. presence is now planted firmly at the heart of the crisis to be solved.

I was somewhat surprised to see Engelhardt suggest that opposition to the Vietnam War did not involve soldiers and veterans in any significant degree until the early 1970s. In fact, veterans were a key part of the antiwar movement of those days from the start.

But otherwise, this piece is a very good discussion of the withdrawal option. And he makes some careful comparisons of the evolution of public opinion on the Iraq War to that which occurred in relation to the Vietnam War.

We've already seen quite a few studies and evaluations of what went wrong in Iraq. Hopefully some of them will provide useful lessons that will actually be applied if the US gets into a similar situation in the future. We can always hope.

But whatever chance there may have been early in the war that the result could be a straightforwardly good thing for the United States is long gone. The choice now is among various bad outcomes. And, as Engelhardt points out in the passage I just quoted, it's very difficult in advance to know how bad the outcome of various choices may be.