Iraq: It is the Occupation Stupid

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s brilliant strategist, coined the slogan “It is the economy stupid” during the 1992 presidential election campaign. It focused attention on what preoccupied the American people most and helped Bill Clinton win the election.

The democrats’ recent sweeping victory in the November congressional election was generally attributed to the American people’s rejection of the Iraq war policy and to a desire to put an end to that war.

Yet this seminal event in American politics seems to have failed to define the political debate about the Iraq war.

Similarly, while the much-awaited Baker-Hamilton Report made a sweeping condemnation of the failures of the Iraq war policy and indeed of the Bush administration’s wider foreign policy in the Middle East, it, too, failed to define the Iraq war debate in Washington.

Both these two events failed to define the political debate because they failed to reflect the American people’s mood and ignored the fundamental issue of the Iraq war: The occupation.

The mood of the American people is patently clear. They want an end to the Iraq war. Almost 80% of respondents in an opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, support the two main recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Report: pulling almost all US troops from Iraq by 2008 and engaging in negotiations with Iran and Syria. (Washington Post, December 13).

According to a Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, “Seven in 10 [Americans] say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months” (Wall Street Journal, December 14).

Yet, the new democratic leadership in Congress-not to mention the Bush-Cheney team’s delusional attachment to a military victory -and the Baker-Hamilton Commission show no interest in ending the occupation of Iraq.

The democratic leadership is in fact doing exactly the opposite: supporting President Bush’s inclination to send more troops to Iraq, in other words to do more of the same failed strategy, which, as Bush himself was finally forced to admit, has caused the US to loose the war in Iraq.

The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, who voted against the war in Iraq, has now distanced himself from fellow democrats calling for a timetable to bring the troops home. He told Newsweek magazine that he in fact wanted to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops in a final drive to “dismantle the militias.” (Newsweek, December 5)

The failure of Republicans and democrats alike to endorse the key recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Report to reduce American troops in Iraq and negotiate with Syria and Iran, is partly motivated by a desire not to seem to be pressuring Israel- which is opposed to negotiations with Syria and Iran.

This in turn has emboldened the Israeli leaders to reject peace initiatives from Syria. Israeli Prime Miniser Olmert hid behind President Bush’s obdurate stand: "We must not respond to the Syrian initiative while President Bush, Israel's most important ally, opposes all negotiations with Syria." (Haaretz. December 25. 06)

The Baker-Hamilton Report acknowledges the reality that Bush had steadfastly refused to see, stating that the “situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” But it deliberately downplayed the underlying cause of failure in Iraq-the occupation itself.

The occupation of Iraq is mentioned only three times, twice as a belief by some Iraqis: Once in citing Sheik Harith al-dhari, the head of the Muslim Scholars Association; a second time in warning against resentment among Iraqis who “believe that they are subjects of a repressive American occupation.”

The third time, the word occupation is placed in quotation marks so as to distance the authors of the Report from this belief: “adding more American troops could conceivably worsen those aspects of the security problem that are fed by the view that the U.S. presence is intended to be a long-term “occupation.” “

Ironically that is exactly what the two Co-Chairs of the Report are advocating, a long-term occupation, but at a lower cost and with unashamedly admitted two objectives: greater access to Iraqi oil, and denying the Iraqi government any real sovereignty.

Thus, the Report urges Washington to help the Iraqi government to open Iraqi oil to multinational oil companies: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”

Secondly, James Baker and Lee Hamilton appeared together on Public Television’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer on December 6^th. They made it abundantly clear that their Report was meant to perpetrate the occupation, regardless of what the Iraqis think. Baker said:

“And our report makes clear that we're going to have a substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time. But we ought not to let them [the Iraqi government] think that, by golly, all they've got to do is sit back and not do what they need to do and rely on us.”

In other words, let’s be less than candid with the Iraqi government and make them believe that we might leave, when in fact we have every intention of continuing the occupation for a long time.

And to remove any possibility of misunderstanding about who is in control in Iraq, Hamilton added: “We cannot cede to the Iraqis the power to determine how long American forces stay in Iraq.” (pbs.org, December 6, 2006).

In other words, the elected government of Iraq- the much vaunted symbol of democratic promises fulfilled- will not be permitted to be a truly sovereign government able to determine when the occupation of Iraq will come to an end.

It is after all about the occupation; only occupation is not part of the debate.

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His latest book, Leadership and Democracy, is published in New York