We must withdraw

Ken Livingstone

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1219822,00.html

The Guardian (UK)

When you are in a hole, stop digging. That is the maxim
that should now be applied to the war in Iraq. All of my
life I have watched as Britain and America have become
embroiled in conflicts, only to find that a purely
military solution is rarely available. But the situation
in Iraq is turning into something more unpleasant than
anything since the war in Vietnam. The grisly state of
affairs in Iraq is creating pressure for two radically
opposed alternatives. One is to increase the number of
British troops; that is, dig a deeper hole. The other is
to withdraw British and US forces. But the more it goes
on, the clearer it is to me that we must withdraw.

The images of torture by US forces and the worsening
security situation are not short-term aberrations - they
are the outcome of the wrong policy. The core of what is
happening is that without lawful international support,
neither the international community nor the Iraqi
population will regard US and British troops as a
legitimate force.

It is not clear what proportion of Iraqis sympathise
with the current armed resistance to US and British
forces. But the great majority of Iraqis are clearly not
prepared to cooperate in giving information to an
occupying force. Without such intelligence, US and
British forces are unable even to anticipate and prevent
assaults on themselves, let alone defeat those staging
them. What appears as a security problem is, in the end,
political. All attempts to find substitutes for
political legitimacy will not work and will make matters
worse.

The first US attempt to bludgeon its way out of the
problem of political legitimacy was the massive military
action in built-up areas such as Falluja - all guns
blazing but wearing a blindfold. The effect was to drive
wider layers of the population into opposition to the US
presence.

Starting attacks on civilian areas with limited
information, only to curtail or abandon them, was a
policy bound to leave the militants strengthened. In the
Shia south, only a few months were required to transform
Moqtada al-Sadr from a marginal figure into one with
significant minority support.

When information is not forthcoming, the only way to try
to get it is to beat it out of people. That is the logic
that has led to the horrific scenes in Abu Ghraib.
Hiding the torture won’t work and will not ease the
security situation. The truth will just leak on to TV
screens and the internet.

The efforts of the Bush administration to square this
circle through the transfer of some power to an
unelected Iraqi administration on June 30 will fail. The
US will retain real control of security. No Iraqi
administration that does not control the security forces
is "sovereign", nor will it be seen as such. Attacks on
US and British troops will continue. Measures to stop
them will further alienate the population.

The Lib Dems, who opposed the war before it started,
have flirted with the idea for more than a year that
more troops should be sent. I hope they conclude that
there is no military mechanism that can solve this
political problem. Security cannot be achieved until
Iraqis are convinced that they have a legitimate
administration and security forces. Only elections will
deliver this. The most rapid possible timetable for
elections, not the chimera of military solutions, must
be the British policy in Iraq.

While elections are being organised, the UN should take
charge of all foreign security forces in Iraq. The main
political organisations in Iraq would have an entirely
different attitude to a UN-commanded force than the
current US-led one, isolating those engaged in military
actions. This would also have the welcome effect of
widening the Iraqi administration, which ought to be
restructured to take this into account.

In principle, US and British troops could be transferred
to such a UN command. But the US has always refused to
put its troops under UN command. US and British troops
are now compromised in the eyes of the population. The
only way forward is to transfer command of security
operations to the UN and announce the progressive
withdrawal of US and British troops.

The Iraqi administration, working with the UN, would be
responsible for deciding what security measures, what
combination of internal, UN and neutral foreign forces,
it wished to maintain during the transition. This might
well mean temporarily replacing departing British and US
troops with those from members of the Arab League -
which are more likely to be seen as neutral by Iraqis.

This is literally a life-and-death matter for British
soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The policy we are pursuing
cannot succeed and it will remain far worse for everyone
involved, not just the Iraqis, than the earliest
possible withdrawal of British forces from Iraq.

Ken Livingstone is the London mayor

mayor@london.gov.uk