Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal
The Iraq War, as Vietnam was, is morally wrong, strategically a disaster and fueled by the notion of American exceptionalism: that America has the might and the ethnocentric right to shape the international community in its own image. The occupation of Iraq must end with the rapid withdrawal of American military forces. The justification for war was deliberately falsified and demonstrated an incompetence of such magnitude as to warrant criminal prosecution of the national-security elites including the president, vice president, secretary of defense and both the current and previous secretaries of state. I do not exclude the Democratic Party from guilt for this war. Most Democratic Senators voted for authorization to use force and, other than Congressperson John Murtha and Senator Russ Feingold, few Democrats have demanded disengagement from Iraq. They have not attempted to cut off funding and nominated Senator John Kerry, a vacillating, calculating, prowar presidential candidate, in 2004. My condemnation of this war is bi-partisan and extends beyond the Bush administration.
The Iraq war was vigorously promoted in 1998, five years before the March 19, 2003 invasion, by the Project for the New American Century in a letter to President Clinton. Among its many authors were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and John Bolton who assumed top-level positions in the Bush administration and orchestrated a war that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department and Congress initially opposed. One of its authors, Francis Fukuyama, recently abandoned neoconservatism, the ideological worldview of the war’s senior advocates, which he now describes as “Leninist”: the effort to control history with power and will.
This was not a war of last resort, with just cause, with right intentions or with proportionality that are requirements of Just War Doctrine. This was an elective war to project American geostrategic dominance in the Persian Gulf, to encircle Iran, to control Iraqi oil and to reestablish western colonialism in Iraq. The British colonized Iraq under a League of Nations mandate following the demise of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, but withdrew its forces in 1927 due to its failure to overcome a sectarian insurgency.
The US must never preemptively invade a nation that is not an imminent threat. John Quincy Adams, one of America’s greatest secretaries of state, warned about going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” particularly if the monster is more bluster than bite. Saddam Hussein did not possess chemical, biological or, unlike Israel, nuclear weapons. After no weapons of mass destruction were found the war aim shifted to spreading liberty and democracy: a convenient ruse to convert a crime into an alleged crusade for democracy over autocracy.
Had Mr. Bush asked the Congress for force authorization to export democracy to Iraq, he never would have received it. Yes democracy is desirable but, except for World War II, no foreign invader has been able to impose it. Democracy must develop from indigenous forces and usually results from modernization as opposed to being a catalyst for modernization. A nation must not wage war to spread democracy in a neo-Wilsonian manner unless the international community supports it. The world opposed this monstrous war with unprecedented prewar protests with millions marching for peace from Hyde Park in London, to Sydney, Rome, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco.
While the Silverman-Robb Commission did not conclude the Bush administration deliberately falsified intelligence, it was prohibited from investigating whether it distorted or, as Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV charged, “twisted” the intelligence. Recently Paul Pillar, a former senior C.I.A. intelligence officer on Iraq, concluded “official intelligence analysis” was ignored, “politicized” and “misused publicly to justify decisions already made.” Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, charged the war “was launched on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception.”
This is an egregious breach of the firewall between intelligence gathering and policymaking. The former is supposed to emanate from independent analysis; then foreign-policy officials decide whether the results require direct action. The Bush administration thirsted for war, cherry-picked intelligence they liked and ignored the rest. The New York Times revealed Mr Bush told Prime Minister Tony Blair at a meeting at the White House on January 31, 2003, that war was “penciled in for March 10” and that an assassination of Saddam Hussein should be considered. Five days later they even recruited the C.I.A., whose director, George Tenet, sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell when he lied to the world in his infamous February 5, 2003 U.N. speech about Saddam’s W.M.D.
The Iraq war, with its torture and killings of defenseless detainees, has disgraced the reputation of the U.S. and created an intense global anti-Americanism that is unprecedented. The U.N. Convention Against Torture condemns, “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The Uniform Code of Military Justice makes “maltreatment” of prisoners a crime. The War Crimes Act of 1986 prohibits any American from inflicting torture, death or inhuman treatment upon a prisoner. The Geneva Conventions also have the force of law in the United States and have been violated. Torture of non-resistant detainees is the reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Camp Nama . The images of beatings, of humans tied to dog leashes, of smiling American soldiers inflicting pain and suffering on nude prisoners piled on pyramids and chained to ceilings and cell doors, has erased the image of imperial benevolence and revealed a hypocritical nation that emulated the same tactics that Saddam used against his own people.
Iraq is worse off than under Saddam. The country is in chaos, civil war between Shi’a and Sunni is beyond the point of reconciliation; the Kurds in the north will never accept a unified Iraq unless given de facto independence with its Pesh Merga militia. The Sunni, in the oil barren center, will resist a Shi’a government that is allied with Iran. There is no unitary government but only a periphery with armed sectarian militias such as the 1,000-strong Mahdi Army.
Fewer Iraqis, than before the invasion, have safe drinking water and have electricity about four hours a day. Iraq oil exports have plummeted due to sabotage and war, and citizens wait up to two days to get gasoline. The United States did not calculate the war’s impact on the civilian population—other than Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion that Americans would be greeted as liberators
So where do we go from here? Toward an immediate disengagement with no more American deaths, no more American wounded, no more Americans kidnapped, no more colonization of Iraq, and no more unconscionable wasting of our nation’s resources with $350 billion already spent on this crusade.
The architects of war against Islam maintain if troops are precipitously withdrawn, the insurgency will intensify. Our presence caused the insurgency and helps recruit new resistance fighters. How would Americans react if it were invaded for no legitimate reason, occupied by a military that did not speak English or Spanish and tortured its citizens? Iraq has become the new Afghanistan, and withdrawal might lessen the intensity of the insurgency.
The architects of illusion claim withdrawal will damage America’s credibility to defeat so-called “global terrorism.” Withdrawal might restore America’s reputation as a constructive force within the international community and improve our relations with the Muslim world that believes America is a racist, anti-Islamic colonizer. Furthermore, Europe might construe disengagement from Iraq as an American acknowledgement that empire has its limits.
The architects of preemptive war insist withdrawal must be deferred until the insurgency has been defeated by Iraqi military and police forces. This fantasy presupposes nation building can be effective. In Vietnam, a U.S. trained and equipped million-person Army of the Republic of Vietnam could not defeat the Vietcong or North Vietnamese. America cannot create an Iraqi army, that would predominately recruit Shi’a and Kurds, to prevail in a remorseless sectarian-communal war. Like the Diem, Ky and Thieu governments in South Vietnam, no Iraqi government has legitimacy to govern, much less defeat an insurgency, while under foreign occupation. Iraq must resolve its own affairs. Yes we should provide assistance for infrastructure repair, education, health care and third-country debt forgiveness but remove its soldiers, avoid permanent military bases and terminate counterinsurgency warfare.
Another argument against withdrawal claims it would dishonour those who have fallen in Iraq. According to Lt. Gen. William Odom, the former director of the National Security Agency, the Iraq War is the “greatest strategic disaster” in U.S. military history. The general believes it is counterintuitive to persist in a strategic disaster just to prove those who died from that disaster did not die in vain. When John Kerry previously exhibited antiwar courage during the Vietnam War, he asked during his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” That question is appropriate in assessing the current quagmire.
Harold Pinter in his remarkable 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Literature proclaimed: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.” Let us hope that America’s withdrawal will begin the process of healing that widowed land, reverse the immoral waste of American lives and resources and lead to fewer unilateral, imperialist interventions into the affairs of other states.