About Those Predictions If We Leave

These are the supposed consequences of a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Let us take a page from John Murtha’s book and ask why we should believe these dire predictions offered by Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Perle, Frum, Kristol, & Co. Have these people been right about anything since September 2002—or, for that matter, since August 2001, when they chose to ignore all kinds of warnings about impending attacks on the US?

WMD. Nuclear capacity, mushroom clouds. Al Qaeda connection. And so on: you know the list. These people have never come close to the truth about Iraq, so why do we take them seriously now?

Because that was then and this is now. Why should we worry about the past when we’ve got important work to do in the present?

How many times have you seen an anti-war Democrat silenced by the following rhetorical questions? Don’t we have some responsibility to the Iraqis (and the region) now that we’re there? Wasn’t Colin Powell correct to say, “you break it, you own it”? How can we just pick up and leave? Don’t we have to stay until the job is done?

The logic seems to be that the past has nothing to do with the present. It goes like this. Yes, well, we were wrong about the rationale for invasion back then, but that mistake has nothing to do with the choices we have to make in the here and now. Yes, the occupation was bungled, but that mistake is already over, and has nothing to do with our strategic options today. We must now “succeed” in Iraq—we must have “victory.”

Let us test the logic and consider the predictions.

Do we have some responsibility to the Iraqi people, now that we have broken their country? Absolutely. Can we own it? Absolutely not. Can we fix it? Absolutely not. Only a genuinely multinational peace-keeping force sponsored by the UN or NATO can prevent continued civil war and genocidal violence.

As General Douglas Lute (he’s now the “czar” of the war, he’s formerly the logistical chief of CentCom) pointed out in 2005, the American occupation is the cause of the insurgency and its result, the internecine warfare of the sects and the militias. Once the expulsion of American troops became the consensual purpose of the insurgents, the sects, and the militias—not to mention the majority of non-combatant Iraqis—the original “mission,” however defined, was doomed.

Can a counter-insurgency strategy “succeed,” allowing for “victory” in Iraq? Yes, but only if we have ten years and at least 120,000 troops in Baghdad alone. This is not my arithmetic—it’s the math done by General David Petraeus, who supervised the composition of the military’s new counter-insurgency manual. You need that much time and that many troops to defeat the typical insurgency: 20 to 50 counter-insurgents per 1,000 indigenous people are required over ten to twelve years.

There is no way the American people or the US Congress will allow a ten-year occupation. And there are only three ways to muster the required numbers. First, break the military’s “one in three” rule, which stipulates that for every unit in combat, two others are training or resting. This is already happening, of course, but it can’t be sustained for long.

Second, enlarge the military. This, too, is already underway, but it can’t help the situation until about 2011. Third, train more Iraqi security forces. If there is a new strategy at work in the so-called surge, this is it. But it can’t work because the loyalties of Iraqis are so divided—except when they contemplate the presence of the American military in their midst. Only then do they come together, in opposition to the occupation.

So let us get realistic. Victory in Iraq just is withdrawal of combat troops because only that signifies the relinquishment of the imperial hubris that put us there. Only that signifies our return to multilateral sanity as represented and enforced by the United Nations as well as hundreds of NGOs.

Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia professor of history, explained our current predicament on May 18, 1968, in the New York Times Magazine, when “only” 20,000 Americans had died in Vietnam: “To absorb the sense of guilt and failure Americans will take away from Vietnam is unquestionably a tax on our maturity. But the experience may be turned to some use if we can define more articulately than we have ever done the realistic limits of our national aspirations. It is essential for us to do so precisely because we are by far the world’s strongest power. For the rest of the world it would be reassuring to know that our aspirations are, after all, really limited. It might even be reassuring for ourselves.”

In the spirit of Hofstadter’s intervention, I’ll insist that the past has everything to do with the present in three related senses. First, the “mistakes” of the past were driven by the same ideological urgency that now regulates the utterance and the policies of the administration. Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Perle, Frum, Kristol, & Co., have never backed off from their original commitment to the radical agenda of pre-emptive war and regime change, no matter the evidence or the obstacles. They now rant about Al Qaeda in Iraq, in a strangely atavistic rendition of post-9/11 rhetoric, but the offensive character of their ideas remains.

Second, the stalemate in Korea and the defeat in Vietnam had enormously beneficial effects on the conduct of both foreign policy and domestic politics. The Korean War forced us to rethink our relationships with both China and Japan—to accept, for example, the limits of our military power in East Asia. And if there is such a thing as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” it was, and is, a good thing. For it reminds us that the Peasant Wars of the 20th century—this is the title of Eric Wolf’s great book—could not be won by imperially constituted military power, no matter how large or skilled or concentrated; and so it reminds us that political engagement with our enemies, whoever they might be, is the indispensable condition of legitimate world power.

One of the great ironies—or idiocies—of the Cold War is that Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon understood this chastening effect better than Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the architects of the disaster in Vietnam. The end of the war in Vietnam demonstrated what the Korean War could have taught us much earlier. Notice that the zealots were liberal Democrats, not conservative Republicans: the Left was, and is, complicit, in the making of the modern American empire.

And the domestic effects of this ending in Asia were just as salutary. The consent of the conscripted was forever after inscribed in our political culture (even the culture of the military, where hierarchy is supposed to thrive) and the “all-volunteer army” became the most progressive and important social program in America—it became the mystery train bound for education and social mobility for poor kids from the Bronx to South Central, with stops in Appalachia and south Texas.

Third, the past is usable as an antidote to the extremities of the present. The alternative to the Bush administration’s radicalism resides in the principles of 20th-century American diplomacy. The theory and the practice were never quite in synch, to be sure, but the multilateral, developmental assumptions of that century in US foreign policy are worth revisiting—and reinstating.

The principles and assumptions were quite simple, even though they represented a break from the colonial past. They went like this. (1) All nations, all peoples, even the poorest, deserved sovereign status. (2) Every barrier to trade, investment, and movement of people was a threat to world peace because the establishment of exclusive “spheres of influence,” as per the European colonial model, limited the transfer of technology and thus inhibited economic growth and development; trade war was the inevitable result, and trade war led directly to real war. (3) Multilateral, trans-national institutions were the key to preserving the sovereignty of all nations, all peoples, and to enacting a more “open door” world by dismantling the inherited colonial model. (4) All nations, all peoples, were approximations of each other. No one was exempt from the laws and consequences of history: civilizations were not mutually exclusive, and neither race nor religion were their defining characteristic. Development was accessible to all.

These principles are now at risk because the Bush administration has decided that a “war on terror” is the best way to restore presidential power at home and to reinstate American power abroad. The weird notion of a “clash of civilizations” drives this bizarre initiative; Paul Berman and Samuel P. Huntington here converge on a truly, literally, idiotic agenda. The intersection of foreign and domestic policy—or rather the collapse of the distinction—could not be better illustrated. But then neither could the intersection of so-called Left and Right—or rather the collapse of the distinction—be better demonstrated.

And now let us consider the predictions of chaos, civil war, regional strife, Iranian hegemony, terrorists emboldened, and so on. These predictions were originally made by the opponents of the war, and have all come true. So our question must become, why aren’t we following their lead and demanding phased redeployment of American troops? Why has the burden of proof shifted to the opponents of this war, when it is clear that the Bush administration is, as usual, unable to verify its claims?

I don’t have an answer, except to say that the opponents of the war don’t yet know how many people are with them. But then demonstrations don’t much matter precisely because everybody understands that the overwhelming majority of the American people are with them. We’re all sailors at Kronstadt, wondering if the Bolsheviks really mean it.