Features » May 24, 2006

Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy (cont’d)

On April 3, Iraqi men and U.S. soldiers gather at the site of a car bomb explosion in Sadr City, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Al-Khafaji goes so far as to aver: “No serious Iraqi—whether Sunni, Shiite or Kurd—really wants a U.S. withdrawal.” He notes that the only major Shiite leader to demand an immediate end to the occupation is populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The cleric commands the allegiance of the ragtag Mahdi Army, which is suspected of involvement in political assassinations and has proudly enforced the law of the gun, torching liquor stores and imposing “Islamic” dress on women, in southern cities like Basra and Nasiriyya, as well as in parts of the capital. Al-Khafaji says Sadr’s anti-occupation stance should be decoded as follows: “Yes, please leave and give our militias freedom of maneuver!”

Yet the United States seems to be doing very little to stop the civil war that its continued presence is supposed to prevent. The military failed to intervene in the street fighting that followed the Askariyya shrine bombing, for example. Indeed, the military’s predicament is that it cannot intervene, because then it would appear to be taking sides more than the United States has done already.

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When Washington realizes it can no longer stay the course, what will withdrawal look like? Barring complete disaster, it will not resemble the headlong flight conjured by the phrase “cutting and running.” As Jeffrey White, former chief of Middle East military assessments for the Defense Intelligence Agency, puts it: “We want to get out, but not like we got out of Beirut or Saigon.”

From the Pentagon’s perspective, a helter-skelter withdrawal is the option of last resort. According to Wayne White, for the past two years, security concerns have impelled the military to airlift both troops and heavy equipment instead of using rail freight or large road convoys, meaning that the enormous planes built for transcontinental flights are used for in-country travel. But there are simply not enough planes to effect a precipitous pullout. A number of units would be forced to leave the country in land convoys, which could be attacked by either insurgents seeking to press their point or, White suggests, “some very angry people who thought you were going to stay.” While such fighting would be brief, heavy U.S. casualties would be possible. “Phased is the way to go,” White says. “Abrupt is not.”

Since the logistics dictate a phased operation anyway, the cognoscenti have been sketching exit strategies in which the U.S. departure would also help Iraq’s internal divisions to heal. The impulse is admirable, but it may be too late.

In a Financial Times op-ed, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, proposed that “Washington should quietly ask Iraqi leaders to publicly ask the U.S. to leave” and then consult with those leaders on a timetable. Brzezinski believes that many Iraqi politicians would welcome the opportunity to pose to the Iraqi people as self-liberators, and two years ago, before the civil war began, he might have been right.

He also glibly dismisses those who do “not wish to ask the U.S. to leave. They are the ones who would leave when we leave, which says something about the depth of their domestic support.” But at the moment, this category encompasses not just the feckless Chalabi, but also the Shiite religious parties, who won a near majority in the National Assembly in the December 2005 elections, the twin Kurdish parties, and a significant number of Sunni Arabs who U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad “brought back in” to formal politics. There is unlikely to be a unified Iraqi government that would want the United States to leave.

That could lead to the through-the-looking-glass scenario, with Washington bullying the Iraqi government into asking U.S. forces to leave. The United States could threaten to stop training the new Iraqi army or withhold aid money if the militias were not reined in and a timetable not drawn up. In this scenario, the Shiite religious parties—out of fear of losing everything they have gained since the fall of Saddam—might also relinquish the security apparatus and negotiate in good faith with Sunni Arabs and secular nationalists over revisions to the constitution passed in October 2005. The Kurds, fearing Turkish intervention if they did not curtail their ambitions, might abandon their quest to add oil-rich Kirkuk to their northern autonomous zone.

Realities, again, are harder. Sectarian strife has redoubled every group’s determination to possess both a hand in “national” security forces and their own stockpile of arms. The Shiite parties are divided internally over the federalism provisions of the constitution, and their own negotiations could take the form of militia activity. The Kurds have been settling the environs of Kirkuk, and they do not plan to leave. They can assuage Turkey’s concerns by kicking out the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters who are now using northern Iraq as a base for a low-grade insurgency in heavily Kurdish southeastern Turkey. It is outside the scope of U.S. power to tame all the furies unleashed by the invasion.

The U.S. occupation may no longer be the biggest cause of violence in Iraq, but it is still one of the causes, and it cannot be the cure. The one partial blessing the United States can bestow on Iraq is to remove itself from the equation, and chances are it will have to do so unilaterally. No one should pretend, however, that this would be a noble course of action or a panacea for Iraq’s ills. It would only be a very bad decision necessitated by the even worse decisions that were made before.

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• Reader Comments

  http://pepib.convio.net/site/TellAFriend?msgId=1801.0&devId=5561

  Posted by brian28 on May 24, 2006 at 4:23 PM

  “Not one of the retired generals who came forth in mid-April to blast Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s mishandling of the war is calling for a pullout.”
  No, they are not and the most common denominator of those generals is the criticism of Rumsfeld’s cutting the number of troops needed from 500,000 to approximately one quarter that number.

  It matters not whether we should have gone in — we did. It is time for President Bush as Commander in Chief (“The Decider”) to decide on admitting we have been on the wrong course with imposing democracy, ask for assistance from other countries and get a large enough force to secure the cities and the Iraq borders a al Bosnia/Kosovo.

  You don’t stop a riot with a patrol car.

  I have little hope that this will come about. Too little, too late is a pattern here — Katrina, border security at home, illegal immigrants, health care…

  Posted by whattheheck on May 24, 2006 at 6:37 PM

  One of the many falsehoods the left spreads about President Bush is that he had no plan for Iraq: too few troops, no plan for government, no plan for confessional conflict, etc.  But just because the leftists are not smart enough to recognize a plan if it bit them in the ass, that does not mean that there was no plan.  The plan was superb, the results so far have been outstanding, and all the final pieces are just about in place. 

  Consider first what we have accomplished since 09/11.  From a cold start, we convinced Pakistan to support us, went into Afghanistan, routed the Taliban and al-Qa’eda in a matter of weeks, and established a democracy in a very hostile environment, with just a few hundred American and allied casualties, and with minimal damage to the native population and the infrastructure.  And we now have American forces on Iran’s eastern border.

  (For comparison, the old Soviet Union wasted ten years in Afghanistan, killed maybe two million Afghanis, suffered 15,000 fatalities and one-half million casualties [many of them from illnesses], and bankrupted their union, much to everybody’s benefit.)

  Iraq was a harder nut to crack, where Saddam and the Ba’athists were entrenched after several decades in power.  But even so, the major combat by the Coalition was completed in three weeks, a democracy has been established, and Iraqi forces are being created who are actively pursuing the Ba’athist die-hards and the pitiful remainder of al-Qa’eda.  With the single exception of Gulf I (a much more limited exercise), Afghanistan and Iraq have been the least expensive military endeavors in USA history (by more than an order of magnitude), both in casualties and in dollar costs, and the results have been spectacular, compared to, say, the Democrats’ costly misadventures in Korea and Vietnam.  And we now have American forces on Iran’s western border.

  Besides the outstanding results in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have enjoyed several beneficial by-products from our efforts:  Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear and chemical weapons and gave up terrorism, the Syrians are out of Lebanon, and even Egypt and Sa’udi Arabia are gingerly adopting limited democratic forms.  And we now have American forces on Iran’s eastern and western borders.

  With all these clues, now do you see the plan?  Exiting Iraq will be a piece of cake, even easier than Afghanistan and Iraq.  With American forces and their Iraqi allies on the west, and American forces and their Afghani allies on the east, just bomb the hell out of the despised Irani mullahs, and invite the people of Iran to join their neighbors in their own democratic government.  Russia, China, Europe, and the UN have long since made themselves irrelevant to this process, or to anything important, so they are not a consideration.  Enjoy.

  Posted by scorp on May 25, 2006 at 2:00 AM

  > the results so far have been outstanding

  No doubt about it, scorp,Iraq and Afghanistan are wonderful places to live these days. I suggest you move there immediately.

  Posted by marcello09 on May 25, 2006 at 4:21 PM

  It will be a blessing for Iraq when the last American soldier, mercenary, and businessman leave Iraq.  It will not be a “noble course of action” for after invading a country illegally and killing hundreds of thousands in a textbook case of colonialism, we’ve lost the right to even think the word “noble.”  And I agree that it won’t be a “panacea for Iraq’s ills.”  But it will be the first step in the right direction.  And it is easy.  Ask anyone who’s been in Iraq, and I don’t mean the Green Zone.

  I visited my family in southern Iraq for 3 months between December 2005 and March 2006.  I thought I knew what was going on there, but people who have lived their entire lives there don’t know what’s going on.  There are at least 11 militias operating throughout the country.  Iranians have flooded into Iraq, home to the 2 holiest Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala, under the banner of Islamic parties (and maybe one saying “Mission Accomplished”).  Occupation forces are there.  American CIA agents are there.  And Israeli Mossad and military are operating from a heavily guarded base in northern Iraq, (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2070420.html).  And we are training death squads as we did in Vietnam and El Salvador.  Iraqis know that every day may be their last, and while any number of sources may pull the trigger, responsibility lies with the United States.

  The concept of civil war and sectarian strife is well-described by Iraqi Sami Ramadani, a political refugee from Saddam Hussein’s regime and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University:

  “It is not withdrawal that threatens Iraq with civil war, but occupation…The occupation’s sectarian discourse has acquired a hold as powerful as the WMD fiction that prepared the public for war. Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can’t wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically.”

  Toensing describes the “insurgency” as “roughly 20,000 Sunni Arab[s].”  However, no uprising can last without popular support, and three and a half years after Baghdad fell, the legitimate resistance to our illegal occupation is alive and well.  Toensing describes that sectarian violence worsened after the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra in late February, but the reality I saw on the ground didn’t substantiate that.

  The destroyed shrine was for Hassan Askari, descendant of the prophet Mohammed.  In Islam, there is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger; and one holy book he scribed, the Quran.  It is illogical that Sunni and Shia Muslims will target each other’s mosques, defile the prophet, or destroy passages from the Quran.  Yes, hundreds of Iraqis died in the days that followed this particular crime, but who was directly responsible remains a mystery.  In both Baghdad and Basrah, Sunni and Shiite clerics prayed in solidarity.  And where were the occupation forces, whose job it is to effect security? For two days following the bombing, tanks that rolled by twice a day were absent; military planes came instead, and did nothing to stop the violence.  Toensing writes “[t]o be sure, the current conflict is historically rooted in the deposed regime’s repression.”  But the Hassan Askari Shrine remained intact for the 30 years of Saddam Hussein’s rule.

  Many Iraqis want the tanks and planes to leave and electricity and water to stay.  They want employment, security, and a decent quality of life.  As scores of Iraqis die every day, it does not matter if you call it civil war, sectarian strife, or democracy; it is—by design—an American killing field, a smokescreen for stealing oil, and for establishing permanent military bases to defend American business interests.  Bring the troops home, or send your own.

  Dahlia Wasfi, M.D.
  Denver, Colorado USA

  Posted by dahliawasfi on May 25, 2006 at 8:07 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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