The Time of Withdrawal

[Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal visited the U.S. Army's 21st Combat Support Hospital in Balad, Iraq. It handles American casualties from the Sunni Triangle. Few of the doctors and nurses, he writes, "expected to deal with such a steady stream of casualties more than six months after the fall of Baghdad." At the hospital he interviewed Lt. Col. Kim Keslung, an orthopedic surgeon, who summed up the situation this way:]

"'It was a mistake to discount the Iraqi resistance,' Col. Keslung said, adding, ‘If someone invaded Texas, we'd do the same thing.'" ("In a Tent Hospital, A close-Up View Of Attacks in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2003)

"The U.S.-run government in Iraq has vowed to seek no congressional funding in 2005 to reconstruct that nation if it receives the Bush administration's full $20.3 billion request this fall, raising questions about how it will meet its total spending needs." (Jonathan Weisman, "Iraq Aid Needs, Pledge At Odds," the Washington Post)

Two passages from an ongoing travesty. Let's start with the second of them, which looks to me for all the world like "Read my lips, no new aid." In 2005, if we're still in Iraq and George Bush is still in the White House, Congress will be asked to pony up more money as surely as the sun rises in the east. But the more striking part of that passage is simply the date: 2005. Two years hence, according to L. Paul Bremer's men in Baghdad, we Americans are still going to be "reconstructing" the country. In the Pentagon, according to the latest reports, generals are discussing what our troop levels there will be in 2006.

Imagine such time-scapes and you know a great deal not about what's going to happen, but about the Bush administration's vision of our occupation of Iraq -- which is never to depart.

Lt. Col. Kim Keslung, who won't even leave the base where she works because she knows full well what kinds of things happen to Americans "out there," is a far better historian than our president, our viceroy in Baghdad, our secretary or undersecretary of defense, or the various neocons in the administration and inhabiting the souks of Washington.

She's right. Invade Texas, invade Iran, invade China, invade Albania, invade Lebanon, invade Iraq -- name your place, in fact -- and you better not assume there won't be resistance. Someone always resists. That single sentence sums up the last two centuries of global history.

Empires invariably think that it's they who are bringing civilization and progress in their train and that only the barbarians, the terrorists, the bitter-enders resist for fear of being thrown onto that dust heap of history. But history is, as it turns out, filled to the brim with barbarians, terrorists, and bitter-enders, not to speak of enraged ordinary people who have seen their friends and relatives die, who feel the discomfort – which has only grown more psychologically unbearable over the last century -- of watching well-armed, well-paid foreigners walk with impunity across their lands. They do resist, exactly as Texans would. Afterwards perhaps they fall on each other's throats. Such things are unpredictable.

But in recent centuries, if empire – the Great Powers, the Great Game, Global Domination, the Great Rivalry, the Great Arms Race – has been the Great Theme of history, the less publicized but perhaps more powerful one has been resistance. Resistance everywhere to occupation of any sort. Resistance by forgotten millions (not all of them wonderful human beings). If you need to be convinced of this, just read Jonathan Schell's new book The Unconquerable World.

Sooner or later, regimes of occupation withdraw or collapse. Or both. In our times, it seems, ever sooner. Even the Soviet Union didn't make it past one long human lifetime. Of course, we've never been in a single hyperpower version of an imperial world before. But I think it might be possible to start into the subject of withdrawal from Iraq by saying one thing: There's a great deal of "hype" in that "hyperpower." American power has been distinctly over-hyped. The leaders of other countries have perhaps taken us too much at the Bush administration's overheated estimate of ourselves. Yes, our military can destroy much, quickly and from afar. Yes, we have the economic power to punish in various ways. Yes, you wouldn't want to find yourself in a dark alley or even a cul de sac with this administration in a bad mood. But being powerful and being all-powerful are two quite different things which the utopian dreamers of Bush's Washington have confused utterly – to their ultimate detriment I believe. Yes, militarily, our power is awesome and no other country can come close to matching it in conventional war settings. But it is most powerful withheld. As Iraq shows, once we commit ourselves to action, we are likely to find ourselves strangely overmatched. The irony here is that what an Iraqi military of 400,000 couldn't hope to do, relatively small groups of ill-armed men and women are doing.

Having taken Iraq, eager to nail down its resources, to establish an imperial "democracy" as well as a string of permanent military bases there, and then drive a policy dreamt up inside Washington's Beltway directly through the Middle East, the sole Great Power on this planet, issuing documents on Global Domination till the end of time, without a Great Rival, playing a Great Game with no one, and in an Arms Race of one (but still developing plans for ever higher-tech weaponry for future decades), nonetheless finds itself driven by a modest if growing resistance movement in Iraq. The president of the greatest power on Earth is being forced by events in "5% of Iraq" to call in his advisers for endless meetings, shake up the structure of his administration, hold sudden news conferences, offer new and ever more farfetched explanations of American actions, and backtrack on claims -- all because of Iraqi resistance.

I think one thing is predictable in a world where predicting anything accurately is a low-percentage bet: Sooner or later, the time of withdrawal will be upon us. Some of us would like it to be sooner, not later.

An antiwar movement shut down for months – but still emotionally in place – is now reconstituting itself and one of its demands is already for withdrawal, for an "end to the occupation," for "bringing our troops home." But this demand still has the feel of a slogan without particular resonance or content. Part of the reason for this is quite logical. Everyone knows to the point of despair that we – the antiwar movement, the anti-imperialists -- are not in control. They are and they don't want to leave. "We" will not withdraw from Iraq. They will, or they will feint at it anyway, but only under the pressure of impending catastrophe, literal or electoral. Withdrawal will not be directed by us or according to any plans the experts among us might draw up. Yes, we want this over. Except among military families, however, "bring our troops home" or "end the occupation" are at the moment just feeble slogans, raised to put a little pressure on the administration.

Still, a demand is being made in the face of all those people who claim that we can't "cut and run," that we must "stay the course," that, whatever our thoughts about the war once were, we are all now somehow committed to an Iraqi occupation lest American "credibility" suffer grievous harm -- all statements that would have sounded no less credible, or incredible, nearly four decades ago when they were indeed part of the Vietnam playbook and the language of that era. Right now in the mainstream, with the exception of a few columnists like James Carroll of the Boston Globe and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, and the odd intellectual figure like the economist Jeffrey Sachs, withdrawal is not yet on anyone's agenda. The Democratic candidates, Kucinich aside, are criticizing how we got into the war without suggesting ways to get out any time soon.

But, given ongoing events in Iraq, the idea of withdrawal is already on an inexorable course into the mainstream world. One sign: The administration has begun floating stories about withdrawing some troops next year. As withdrawal comes to seem like an actual alternative, we're going to be challenged on it. And by then, it better be something more than a vague slogan for us. By then, we should have explored the subject as carefully, honestly, and fully as we can.

Just the other day, a friend challenged me to stop ducking the subject. He claimed that in my dispatches I was taking the easy way out. And I think maybe he was right. It's time for us to do our best not just to put withdrawal on the American agenda as a slogan but to give it some thought and content.

Here, then, is my modest attempt to begin to think this out and get a discussion started.

Why we must leave Iraq

The Path of History: It's not only that history – in its last centuries – speaks eloquently against the imperial occupation of any country; a far more circumscribed, recent, and specific history speaks against this occupation as well. So let me start with that:

The United States has long been involved with Iraq and the record doesn't make for pleasant reading. The CIA had a hand in Saddam Hussein's rise and the success of the Baath Party. The Reagan administration supported Saddam during the years of some of his worst crimes because he seemed a reasonable, if somewhat shaky bulwark against the evil Shi'ite regime in Iran. The first Bush administration, having decided not to march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War (during which we slaughtered possibly tens of thousands of Iraqis), despite full command of the skies over Iraq, proceeded to look the other way while Saddam crushed a Shi'ite uprising (itself filled with bloody revenge killings). We let him use his helicopters and other weaponry against the Shi'ite rebels for fear of an Islamic Republic in Baghdad. This resulted in the killing fields whose graves Paul Wolfowitz and others now visit regularly and use as the very explanation for our invasion of Iraq. The first Bush and Clinton administrations then enforced a fierce and unrelenting version of UN-sanctions supposedly against Saddam but crushing to ordinary Iraqis and, though it's seldom mentioned, so destructive to the various Iraqi support systems (electricity, water purification, oil fields etc.) that, under the pressure of war, looting, occupation and resistance these more or less collapsed. The second Bush administration then launched a savage war against Saddam's regime which only lasted a few weeks but again killed many thousands of soldiers and civilians. The killings of civilians have yet to end.

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