David
McReynolds
LEFT LETTERS
2006 October 13
Iraq,
the End Game
After
the remarkable beginning of the Iraq War, bitterly opposed by so many
millions around the world, the gradual unraveling of the war became
clearer. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Bush changed the
rational for the invasion to one of "building democracy".
One is curious as to what Bush will say, when he finally has to
addressthe present reality - the war is lost, there will be no
democracy, the lives and the money down a black hole.
For
months the Republican line has consisted of three arguements (none of
them addressing the issue of weapons of mass destruction). First,
"while many can make critiques of past decisions, we must now
'stay the course'". (Ie., it is OK to talk about events in the
past - but to challenge the current Bush policy was unpatriotic).
Second, "whatever people thought about why we went in, we cannot
now 'cut and run'", and the Democrats have not outlined what
they propose as an alternative". Third, "if we don't fight
the terrorists in Iraq, we will fight them here in our own
country".
As it turns out, the Democrats, who, aside from
John Murtha, never did have a coherent plan for getting out, didn't
need one. Because the US now doesn't have any choice. Recent days,
weeks, and months have seen a drum beat of impossibly bad news for
the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Intelligence estimates reported
that the dangers of terrorism here had grown worse because of the war
in Iraq. Books exposing the Administration have come in waves (most
particular, Bob Woodward's State of Denial, which was a surprise
because his two earlier books on Bush had been so flattering). If one
watched the news carefully, Rice, our Secretary of State, had to
delay her landing at the Baghdad airport last week because of gunfire
on the ground, and then, when she was photographed at a press
conference, she was wearing a flak jacket. John Warner returned from
his latest trip saying the time is almost up. Polls of Iraqi citizens
showed an overwhelming majority want the US to leave, and a slight
majority now support the insurgent attacks on US troops.
I
realize many of you follow the news out of Iraq as closely as I do
and there will be little new that I can report. But for those who
don't have a chance to follow it, the reality is that the only part
of Iraq the US controls is the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area
in Baghdad, which is where the huge US Embassy is located, where
almost all the journalists live, and where the government of Iraq is
located. Almost as a fitting cap to the week's news, insurgent mortar
shells set off a huge US ammunition dump in Baghdad, lighting up the
night sky in ways that Baghdad hadn't seen since the first days of
the war.
The news this week that the respected British
journal, Lancet, reported that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since
the war broke out, told us that things are now clearly worse, for the
average Irqai, than during Saddam's time. (This figure includes both
the victims of sectarian violence and victims of US and British
forces). Bush immediately dismissed the figure - which, given Bush's
record for accuracy, is almost a confirmation of the report. John
Zogby, who runs the respected Zogby polling firm, said on CNN that he
felt the poll had been accurate, it followed all the standard
methodolgy for such polls. Buried in the news was the fact that over
600 contractors had been killed - these are civilians (who earn
extremely high wages, and often do many of the same jobs as the
poorly paid US armed forces do).
So, whether you are watching
Secretary of State Rice holding a press conference in a flak jacket,
or trying to absorb the death toll of US and civilians in Iraq, or
have heard that James Baker has leaked the fact that the report his
is working on will confirm that "victory is no longer an
option", we have reached the "end game" for the Iraq
War.
The war is lost, but not yet over. I want to look at some
of the problems we face. I think back to the Vietnam War, where at
about this time in the war there were decent people who said "yes,
but we can't just leave them now after the mess we have created".
I remember when I went out to Nyack, New York, to talk with Al
Hassler, then Executive Secretary of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, to argue that FOR should be calling for the immediate
withdrawal of US forces, Hassler said "Yes, but David, after all
the chaos the US has created, we can't just leave and abandon these
people". I said "Al, the longer we stay, the worse the
situation gets - we are the problem".
We hear the same
cry now from people who opposed the war but say "we can't just
leave". We can, and we will. We are already watching a civil war
in Iraq. The casualties are largely civilians Shia or Sunni killed
not by US forces but by the militias on one side of the other. The US
has spent over three years trying to deal with the insurgency - if
things have gotten worse instead of better, we need to withdraw.
For
those who are too young to remember World War II, one comparison is
between the almost useless resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries
(I do not discount that resistance - it was courageous but it was
almost totally ineffective) to the stunning growth of the insurgency
in Iraq. The US has complete control of the air. It has a range of
modern weapons, electronic and otherwise. It has guided missiles. Yet
day by day the US has been forced to concede provinces in Iraq to the
insurgents. We have retreated to the Green zone.
The tragedy
is that the civil war will get worse after we leave, and it will
continue to be bloody. Civil wars are the worst kind - our own Civil
War saw a death toll greater than that of World War 1, 2, and the
Korean War combined. When the British left India it is estimated that
a million people died in the terrible communal rioting as Pakistan
and India "separated". What will probably happen is a
division of Iraq into Shia and Sunni dominated areas, with the
Kurdish area continuing to function almost as a sovereign state.
(Almost unnoticed here in the US, the Kurdish part of Iraq has ceased
to fly the Iraqi flag). The Shia and Kurdish areas have oil - the
Sunnis do not, and may end up the poor man out. There is also a
danger that Turkey will launch an attack on the Kurdish area because
it has a large Kurdish population of its own and fears that the
creation of a Kurdish state on Turkey's border would cause unrest
within Turkey.
What will not happen is that the US withdrawal
from Iraq will unleash a horde of Islamic terrorists on the US. Al
Queda has played a minor role in the Iraq war (it wasn't there at all
until the US invasion - Saddam was sharply opposed to the kind of
Islamic fundamentalism of Osama bin-Laden). Most of the violence in
Iraq is focused on other Iraqis and when the US withdraws, it will
continue to be focused there. The Shia and the Sunnis have no
interest and no reason to attack the US - though they will continue
to target US forces as long as they are in Iraq.
What really
happens after we leave?
Listening to Bush I am tempted to
believe that, alone within the Administration, he may actually
believe what he is saying. What he is saying bears no relationship to
the reality of Iraq, but I think he believes it. Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Rice, and others, certainly have seen the writing on the wall and one
problem for them is what happens "post war". While the US
death toll is minor if compared to Vietnam (58,000 dead as opposed to
under 3,000 dead thus far in Iraq), members of Congress, and the
general public, will ask what penalty should be imposed on those who
led us into this disaster, which has not only cost us in lives, but
in treasure. And which, in the end, will leave us without direct
control of the oil.
I know that after the Chinese Revolution
in 1949 there was a long period in American politics which
Republicans kept asking "who lost China" (as if it had
belonged to us), and charging the Democrats with treason. The
humiliation of the US defeat in Vietnam left a wave of
recriminations. But what will happen with the loss of the Iraq War?
The Republicans launched it, in violation of the UN Charter. It fits
perfectly the definition of a war crime as defined by the Nuremburg
Tribunal.
So I suspect one question, quietly discussed at the
highest levels, is "what happens to us after the defeat?"
Particularly if the Democrats take Congress in November, the
door is open to investigations not only of the misconduct of the war,
but also of the corruption of the various civilian programs in Iraq,
which even today, three years after the war began, leave people in
Baghdad with less electricity than they had when the war began.
It
is worth remembering that "each war seems essential to our
security". It was a bitter pill for the Establishment to accept
a truce, rather than a victory, in the Korean War. It was a much
greater humiliation to watch our Embassy staff airlifted off the roof
of our Embassy in Saigon in 1975. Yet in both wars the establishment
argued the US "could not dare lose".
Well, what
happened? China is today a major world power with which the US does a
great deal of business. Vietnam did not extend its grip to all of
Indochina, much less invade the Phillippines, or Hawaii. It, too, is
an area of US investment.
In short, after terrible wars (three
million Vietnamese lost their lives during the US invasion of that
country) the US is not less secure in the Pacific.
Yes, the
US will lose direct control of Iraq's oil, and, worse from the US
point of view, Iranian influence will extend into the Shia area of
Iraq. But oil is a "fungible" commodity, it is worth
something only if it is sold, the market for it is international. The
effort by some conservatives to "punish" Chavez by refusing
to buy oil from Venezuela is, economically, silly - oil is bought and
sold like wheat, on the free market, and if US firms don't buy from
Chavez, other countries will.
Given the billions of dollars
the US has spent on the Iraq war, wouldn't it have made more sense to
have settled for what will happen now, three years later - to buy the
oil on the free market?
For those of us who are far from
power, and who will not be humiliated by the US defeat, what will be
the situation of the US losing a war it should never have started?
One dreadful result - which gets worse every day the US remains - is
the tens of thousands of wounded. Many of these wounds, which would
have been lethal in other wars, will leave men and women missing
parts of their brains, missing limbs, doomed to face the years to
come paying the real price which should have been paid by the members
of the Bush Administration.
Other than that, the positive
benefit will be similar to that following the loss of Vietnam - a
hesitation to go to war again. This is one reason I do not believe
there will be an "October surprise" with an attack on Iran
or Syria.
For those who want to know what should be done, (and
which would help to bring the end of the war in a more orderly way)
the US should open diplomatic contacts with Syria and Iran. It should
revisit the US position on the Palestinian issue, and push Israel
toward taking new positions. (Israel itself should open negotiations
with Syria aimed at a final border settlement).
One thing
which is worth thinking about - the resistance which is going to end
the war comes not just from the military insurgency in Iraq, it also
comes from the remarkable rebellion of American generals (and now the
head of the British armed forces). Those who talk of 9.11
conspiracies might better consider the fact that the military has
certainly been in touch with each other, that the string of generals
who have challenged Bush is not an accident. John Murtha's break with
Bush was the first major event in breaking the consensus in Congress.
Murtha is not a leftist, etc. but rather a fairly typical "Cold
War liberal", always close to the Pentagon. Murtha, himself a
veteran with distinguished service (unlike almost all the Bush
Administration, most of which safely avoided military service),
clearly had been speaking for the military when he first spoke
out.
So - don't give up, continue your pressure on members of
Congress, continue the vigils, continue reaching out to our men and
women in service. Friends in other countries should "open
dialogues" with every US Embassy in the world. The war has been
lost. Bush, who clearly had hoped to leave the war as a legacy to the
next Administration, is going to see it ended in the next two years.
It is ending as I write. For it isn't only the generals who are
opposed to the war. The rank and file men and women in our military
are going AWOL, are voicing their dissent. The crimes and horrors of
this war are nearly over. Most of us have been disheartened by the
failure of all our protests to have any impact. I'll close with a
quote from the Vietnam War, not long before the US lost it.
Discouraged by what seemed our failure to have any effect, I asked
the late Paul Goodman what he thought we ought to do. "David,
you are doing all the right things - you just have to keep doing
them".
David
was Socialist Party nominee (write-in) for Congress, 1958. Peace &
Freedom Party nominee for Congress, 1968. Socialist Party nominee for
President, 1980 and the Green Party candidate for Senate in New York
in 2004. National Co-Chair, Socialist Party, two terms. National
Committeeman, Socialist Party. Arrested over a dozen times for
participation in peace, civil rights, and labor demonstrations.