Sure, we're getting out of Iraq, but when? how? what excuse?

1. U.S. Tanks Will Roll out of Iraq on a Road Paved with Excuses -- by Robert Fisk/Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)

"Great news from America!" the cashier at my local Beirut bookshop shouted at me the other morning, raising her thumbs in the air. "Things will be better after these elections?" Alas, I said. Alas, no. Things are going to get worse in the Middle East even if, in two years' time, the U.S. is blessed with a Democrat (and democratic) president.

For the disastrous philosophers behind the bloodbath in Iraq are now washing their hands of the whole mess and crying "Not Us!" with the same enthusiasm as the Lebanese lady in my book shop, while the "experts" on the mainstream U.S. East Coast press are preparing the ground for our Iraqi retreat -- by blaming it all on those greedy, blood-lusting, anarchic, depraved, uncompromising Iraqis.

I must say Richard Perle's version of a mea culpa did take my breath away. Here was the ex-chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee -- he who once said, "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform" -- admitting he "underestimated the depravity" in Iraq. He holds the president responsible, of course, acknowledging only that -- and here, dear reader, swallow hard -- "I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said: 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies ... ' "

Maybe I find this self-righteous, odious mea culpa all the more objectionable because the same miserable man was shouting abuse down a radio line to me in Baghdad a couple of years ago, condemning me for claiming that the U.S. was losing its war in Iraq and claiming that I was "a supporter of the maintenance of the Baathist regime." That lie, I might add, was particularly malicious as I was reporting Saddam's mass rapes and mass hangings at Abu Ghraib prison when Perle and his cohorts were silent about Saddam's wickedness and when their chum Donald Rumsfeld was cheerfully shaking the monster's hand in Baghdad in an attempt to reopen the U.S. embassy there.

Not that Perle isn't in good company. Kenneth Adelman, the Pentagon neocon who also beat the drums for war, has been telling Vanity Fair that "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead. As for Adelman's mate David Frumm, well he's decided that President Bush just "did not absorb the ideas" behind the speeches Frumm wrote for him. But this, I'm afraid, is not the worst to come from those who encouraged us to invade Iraq and start a war that has cost the lives of 600,000 civilians.

For a new phenomenon is creeping into the pages of The New York Times and those other great organs of state in the U.S. For those journalists who supported the war, it's not enough to bash Bush. No, they've got a new flag to fly: The Iraqis don't deserve us. David Brooks -- he who once told us that neocons such as Perle had nothing to do with the president's decision to invade Iraq -- has been ransacking his way through Elie Kedourie's 1970 essay on the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s. And what has he discovered? That "the British tried to encourage responsible leadership to no avail," quoting a British officer at the time as concluding that Iraqi Shiites "have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own."

But the Brooks article in The New York Times was also frightening. Iraq, he now informs us, is suffering "a complete social integration" and "American blunders" were exacerbated "by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise, even in the face of self-immolation." Iraq, Brooks has decided, is "teetering on the edge of futility" and if U.S. troops cannot restore order, "it will be time to effectively end Iraq," diffusing authority down to "the clan, the tribe or sect" which -- wait for it -- are "the only communities which are viable."

Nor should you believe that the Brooks article represents a lone voice.

Here is Ralph Peters, a USA Today writer and retired U.S. Army officer. He had supported the invasion because, he says, he was "convinced that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and intellectually stagnant that we (sic) had to risk intervention -- or face generations of terrorism and tumult." For all Washington's errors, Peters boasts, "we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy."

But those pesky Iraqis, it now seems, "preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption." Peters' conclusion? "Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it." As a result, "it's their tragedy, not ours. Iraq was the Arab world's last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future ..." Incredibly, Peters finishes by believing that "if the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries" because Iraq will have "consumed" "terrorists" and the United States will "still be the greatest power on Earth."

It's not the shamefulness of all this -- do none of these men have any shame? -- but the racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilization make them unworthy of our further attention. At no point does anyone question whether the fact that the U.S. is "the greatest power on Earth" might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the United States, who were sanctioned by the United Nations at a cost of a half a million children's lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them.

Many Arabs, as I've written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom -- freedom from us.

But you get the point. We are preparing our get-out excuses. The Iraqis don't deserve us. Screw them. That's the grit we're laying down on the desert floor to help our tanks out of Iraq.

(Robert Fisk writes from the Middle East for The Independent of Britain.)


2. Why Stop the Great Satan? He's Driving Himself to Hell
Tehran can sit back and watch its tormentors sweat. But the US and Britain must start from diplomatic ground zero
By Simon Jenkins/The Guardian

For axis of evil, read axis of hope. The frantic scrabbling for an exit strategy from Iraq now consuming Washington and London has passed all bounds of irony. Help from Syria and Iran? Surely these were the monsters that George Bush and Tony Blair were going to crush, back in 2003? Surely the purpose of the Iraq adventure was to topple these terrorism-sponsoring, women-suppressing, militia-funding fundamentalists in favour of stability, prosperity and western democracy? Can the exit from Iraq really be through Tehran and Damascus? Was that in the plan?

I remember asking a western intelligence officer in Baghdad, six months after the American invasion, what he would advise the Iranians to do. "Wait," he said with a smile. Iran has done just that. If I were Tehran I would still wait. I would sit back, fold my arms and watch my tormentors sweat. I would watch the panic in Washington and London as body bags pile up, generals mutter mutiny, alliances fall apart and electors cut and run.

As Blair's emissary, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, comes to me cap in hand, I would pour him tea and roar with laughter. I would ask him to repeat to my face the insults and bile his American taskmasters hurl at me daily. I would say with Shylock: "Hath a dog money? Is it possible a cur can lend three thousand ducats? Fair Sir, you spat on me Wednesday last; you spurned me such a day; you called me dog; and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much moneys?"

As we approach the beginning of the end in Iraq there will be much throat-clearing and breast-beating before reality replaces denial. For the moment, denial still rules. In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans - but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, "What we should now do in Iraq ... " are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.

From all available reports, Iraq south of the Kurdistan border is beyond central authority, a patchwork of ganglands, sheikhdoms and lawlessness. Anbar province and most of the Sunni triangle is controlled by independent Sunni militias. The only safe movement for outsiders is by helicopter at night. Baghdad is like Beirut in 1983, with nightly massacres, roadblocks everywhere and mixed neighbourhoods emptying into safe ones. As yesterday's awful kidnapping shows, even a uniform is a death certificate. As for the cities of the south, control depends on which Shia militia has been able to seize the local police station.

The Iraqi army, such as it is, cannot be deployed outside its local area and is therefore useless for counter-insurgency. There is no central police force. There is no public administration. The Maliki government barely rules the Green Zone in which it is entombed. American troops guard it as they might an outpost of the French Legion in the Sahara. There is no point in patrolling a landscape one cannot control. It merely alienates the population and turns soldiers into targets.

To talk of a collapse into civil war if "we leave" Iraq is to completely misread the chaos into which that country has descended under our rule. It implies a model of order wholly absent on the ground. Foreign soldiers can stay in their bases, but they will no more "prevent civil war" than they can "import democracy". They are relevant only as target practice for insurgents and recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida. The occupation of Iraq has passed from brutality to mere idiocy.

It is possible that a shrewd proconsul, such as America's Zelmay Khalilzad, might induce the warring factions to agree a provisional boundary between their spheres of influence and assign militias to protect it. But my impression is that Iraq has passed beyond even the power of the centre to impose partition. If civil war means armies invading territory, there is no need for that in Iraq. If it means ethnic massacres and refugees fleeing into enclaves, it is there already and in abundance.

The form of the western retreat from Iraq is already taking shape. If all politics is local, none is more local than the politics of anarchy. Britain is already withdrawing from towns such as Amara and bases in Basra, leaving local militias to fight over the territory left behind and regional leaders to try to discipline them. This cannot begin until the troops leave.

American withdrawal will take the same form in the north and west. The chief cause of British and American casualties at present is incoming commanders going on unnecessary patrols to show they can "kick ass".

Next month's Baker/Hamilton inquiry - surely the strangest way an army has ever negotiated its own retreat - will call for a hastening of such "redeployment" away from centres of population to giant bases in the desert. They can stay there to save face as Iraq's factions and provinces reorder themselves messily in the towns and cities. Units can then slip quietly away to Qatar by the month.

It would clearly help Bush and Blair were such a redeployment to be covered by some international conference. But the idea that Ba'athist, Sunni Damascus and clerical, Shia Tehran would jointly guarantee the safety of a power-sharing regime in Baghdad is beyond credence. They might gain regional kudos by attending such a conference, and even by pretending to rein in their co-religionist militias. But any idea that they will stop sponsoring Hizbullah or stop enriching uranium as part of some deal is bizarre. As for Bush promising to "do something" about Israel and Palestine, he promised that in 2003 to no effect. Yes, these leaders would like good relations with the west, but they can survive without them. The axis of evil has done them no harm.

Bush and Blair are men in a hurry, and such men lose wars. If there is a game plan in Tehran it will be to play Iraq long. Why stop the Great Satan when he is driving himself to hell in a handcart? If London and Washington really want help in this part of the world they must start from diplomatic ground zero. They will have to stop the holier-than-thou name-calling and the pretence that they hold any cards. They will have to realise that this war has lost them all leverage in the region. They can insult and sanction and threaten. But there is nothing left for them to "do" but leave. They are no longer the subject of that mighty verb, only its painful object.


3. Will It Be Up to the Generals to Throw in the Towel?
Lose a War, Lose an Election
By WILLIAM S. LIND/Counterpunch

Lose a war, lose an election. What else should anyone expect, especially when the war is one we never had to fight? Had Spain defeated us in '98, does anyone think T.R. would have been elected in 1900? A logical corollary is, lose two wars, lose two elections. With the war in Afghanistan following that in Iraq down the tube, 2008 may not be a Republican year.

Even better, by 2008 the American people may have figured out that the two parties are really one party, neither wing of which knows or much cares what it is doing. The vehicle for this realization may once again be the war in Iraq. The next two years, rather than seeing us extricate ourselves from the Iraqi swamp, are likely to witness us floundering ever deeper into it.

The lesson of last week's election, in which the Republicans lost both Houses of Congress, will not be lost on either party. Both Republican and Democratic Senators and Congressmen will now agree that the war is a disaster we need to extricate ourselves from. The White House won't admit it, but it has to see the situation the same way. George Bush and Dick Cheney may not, but Bush's brain, Karl Rove, certainly does. The puppet must, in the end, obey the puppeteer.

What, then, will keep us in Iraq? While both parties want to get out, neither has nor will be able to create a consensus on how to get out. Not only will they be unable to generate a consensus between the parties, or between the Executive branch and the Congress, they will not be able to find consensus within either party on how the withdrawal is to be managed. The result will be paralysis and a continuation of the war.

Part of the reason Washington will not be able to agree on a plan for coming home from Iraq is political. Neither party wants to enable the other to blame it in 2008 for "losing Iraq." The Democrats are especially fearful of anything that would seem to make them look "weak on defense."

But a greater part of the reason for fateful indecision will be the very real fact that there are no good options. If we stay in Iraq, the civil war there will intensify, with American troops caught in the middle. Already, all those troops are doing is serving in Operation Provide Targets, with casualty rates that continue to rise.

But if we withdraw, the civil war will intensify all the more rapidly. Unless that civil war is won by someone, someone who can re-create an Iraqi state, Iraq will become a stateless region of permanent chaos, a generator and supplier of the non-state Islamic forces who are our real enemy. That may also happen if the wrong elements win the civil war, extremist Shiites allied with Iran or extremist Sunnis with strong al Qaeda sympathies. The factions who might create a government we could live with are either Baathist or connected with the current Iraqi government, neither of which is likely to come out on top. Eggs, once broken, are hard to unscramble.

In the absence of any good options, politicians of both parties in Washington, not wanting to hold the bag for the inevitable failure, will be able to agree only on a series of half-measures. We will train still more Iraqi troops or police, ignoring that both are mostly militiamen for one or another faction. We will pull our troops back into remote bases, where most already stay, remaining in Iraq while the civil war boils up around us. We will try to get the regional powers to help us out, despite the fact that those who would can't and those who can have no reason to do so. We will steam in circles, scream and shout, hoping desperately for a deus ex machina rescue that is unlikely to appear.

In a reality neither Republicans nor Democrats will dare face, we have only one option left in Iraq. That option is to admit failure and withdraw. We can do it sooner, or, at the cost of more American dead and wounded, we can do it later. Obviously, sooner is better, but that would require a bold decision, which no one in Washington is willing to make.

In World War I, after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, my reporting senior, Kaiser Wilhelm II, wanted an early, compromise peace. Regrettably, he was unwilling to force that policy on his recalcitrant generals.

Today, in Washington, the generals want peace. They could give the politicians of both parties and both relevant branches of government the cover they need to make peace, by going public in favor of an early withdrawal. Unfortunately, that would require a level of moral courage not notably evident in the senior American military. In its absence, the whole American political system will continue to flounder in a sea of half-measures, American troops will continue to die in a lost war, and the crisis of legitimacy of the American state will continue to grow.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)


4. Murtha’s No Lefty, But He’s Right -- by Robert Scheer/TruthDig

Nancy Pelosi is to be congratulated for her backing of John Murtha for the position of House majority leader. To be sure, this was partly payback to a political ally of the speaker-designate. Far more important, however, it was the first installment on a huge debt owed to the voters who swept the Democratic Party into control of both houses of Congress, based primarily on their frustration over the dismal war in Iraq.

Because of his credentials as a highly decorated Marine veteran and stalwart Pentagon supporter, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) was more effective than any other member of Congress in crystallizing the changing American position on Iraq when he dramatically wrote last year, “It is time to bring them home.” Not intimidated by the president’s “cut-and-run” smears, he said what most Americans have come to believe: The war is not “winnable” and it is time—now, not in 10 years—to let Iraqis make their own history and to get American troops out of the line of fire.

By contrast, his opponent for the House leadership position, U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), disagrees with 60 percent of the voters in continuing to support President Bush in this ever-deepening disaster. As recently as Monday, Hoyer continued to hold an allegedly moderate position that is as divorced from reality as the disgraced former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “You can transfer authority to the Iraqis ... but we need to do so in a way, hopefully, that will not create greater carnage,” he told MSNBC-TV.

What gibberish. In fact, as realists from all sides of the political spectrum, including the president’s father, argued before the war started, taking Baghdad was inevitably going to stoke the always smoldering nationalist and religious fires of the Middle East that now engulf Iraq with apocalyptic fury. The toll on Tuesday alone: Scores of scholars were kidnapped from the Education Ministry in a plot reportedly aided by policemen, while 82 others were killed or found dead from clashes, murders and bombings around the country.

What an insult it would be to voters to place a continued cheerleader for the war in the No. 2 spot in the House. To reject the basically conservative Murtha also would be to reject the votes of independents and Republicans who broke with Bush on the war.

“Your courageous leadership ... changed the national debate and helped make Iraq the central issue of this historic election,” Pelosi told Murtha in offering her endorsement. “It was surely a dark day for the Bush administration when you spoke truth to power.”

Yes, and he did so at a time when Hoyer, and all too many Democrats in Congress, still supinely were accepting or supporting the administration’s obsessive insistence that occupying Iraq is the best way to prevent terror attacks. The pro-war wing of the Democratic Party—which, sadly, still includes Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is threatening to blackmail Senate Democrats on the issue—is yet clinging to the neoconservative fantasy of a democratic, Israel-friendly Iraq that can serve indefinitely as a giant base for U.S. troops.

In service to that quixotic quest, they will continue to stubbornly back Bush in his efforts to prolong the war until the end of his term, while pretending to check out the alternatives. Unlike the gruff Murtha, they will quibble about “redeployment” inside Iraq, creating new “benchmarks,” “increased oversight,” and even that old Bush chestnut, “we will stand down as they stand up.”

All of which is just rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic; the U.S. presence is helping nobody in Iraq. Clarity of purpose in getting out of Iraq is all important, which is why the war’s supporters are so desperate to smear forthright critics such as Murtha. Witness Dick Morris joining conservative commentator Sean Hannity in blasting Pelosi for backing Murtha: “He’s a leftist, he’s a cheerleader for MoveOn.org, and she could have chosen a centrist,” Morris said on Fox News. “Instead, she chose the most left guy she could find.”

Ridiculous. Murtha, a leftist? Maybe on Iraq, but his record on everything from abortion to gun control to Pentagon budgets makes him an old-school conservative Democrat in this country, as centrist as they come. Of course, pollster operative Morris knows this full well, because it was precisely why Murtha’s call for withdrawal was such a political earthquake.

Pelosi, in supporting Murtha, rejected the path of opportunism that has so hobbled the Democratic Party in recent decades. If the Democrats fail to keep faith with the voters on the war, they can forget gaining back the White House in 2008, and it would be a rebuke much deserved.

(Robert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a nationally syndicated op-ed column for the San Francisco Chronicle from a left-wing perspective. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and edits the online magazine Truthdig)