No US answer to Iraq Conundrum

AMERICA is facing the possibility of defeat in Iraq. The insurgency is as robust and as lethal as ever. Sectarian violence is on the rise, suggesting that civil war is just around the corner. Every day brings its terrible tale of carnage. There seems to be no safety anywhere and certainly not in Baghdad.

Iraq under American occupation is slipping into uncontrollable chaos. This is the gloomy backdrop to the visit to Washington today of Iraq’s new president, Jalal Talabani.

For both Talabani and his host, US President George W. Bush, this is an exceedingly difficult moment. What should America do? Should it leave Iraq, or should it stay? No choice has been more difficult for an American president since the Vietnam War.

For the first time, a leading American politician and potential presidential candidate, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, was brave enough to say (in an interview in this week’s US News and World Report) that “The White House is completely disconnected from reality ... The reality is, we’re losing in Iraq”. Even more dangerous for the “war party” the neo-conservative cabal which pressed for war against Iraq is that it is losing the war in the United States. American opinion is tiring of the war. According to the latest Gallop poll, 57 per cent of Americans think the war is “not worth it”.

Members of Congress report that their constituents are getting restless. As casualties continue to mount, the word from the grassroots is “Enough is enough!”. Army recruitment rates have plunged, as have Bush’s approval ratings, now down to 42 per cent from 51 per cent after the November elections.

In the House of Representatives, a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans is drafting a resolution calling on Bush to present a strategy for getting the United States out of Iraq.

In Brussels this week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to drum up international support for men and funds for the Iraq war, but America’s allies are extremely reluctant to get sucked into the quagmire.

The international coalition has disintegrated. Britain is the only country which still has a substantial fighting force in Iraq, side-by-side with America’s 139,000 troops. At a speech at Harvard University on June 7, a former director of the CIA, John M. Deutch, called for American troops to pull out of Iraq “as soon as possible”.

Echoing proposals made last January by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Deutch said the United States should begin the military withdrawal and let Iraqis make their own political decisions. The opposite point of view was put this week by the right-of-centre British weekly, The Economist which has a large American readership.

“Recent talk of shipping lots of troops home early next year looks wildly unrealistic,” it declared. It quoted “top American officers in Iraq” as saying that the United States should not contemplate making significant troops withdrawals for at least two years, perhaps longer.

The Economist was a supporter of the war and has still not had second thoughts, despite mounting evidence that the war was a catastrophic mistake. It still thinks America should stay the course and advocates sending in more US troops.

Those who argue that America should fight on in Iraq point to the danger of “handing victory to the terrorists”. An American withdrawal would, they allege, encourage extremists to redouble their campaign, not only against America and its interests in various parts of the world, but also against its regional allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.

This is precisely the argument used by those who oppose Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. An Israeli withdrawal, they claim, would hand victory to Hamas and spread the message that terrorism pays.

The opposite and more convincing argument is that Israel’s brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the main cause of anti-Israeli violence and that Israel’s security would best be served by evacuating, rather than colonising occupied Palestinian territory.

In the same way, the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more attacks it will face.

As I wrote long before the war, occupation breeds insurrection. A further argument for getting out is that the continued US occupation of Iraq is turning that country into a training ground for nationalist and Islamic militants from many different countries who, sooner or later, will spread violence elsewhere. As a breeding ground for jihad, Iraq seems set to play the same role as Afghanistan in the 1980s.

There has, as yet, been no candid debate in the mainstream US media, still less in Congress, on the controversial question of America’s war aims. Why did the US make war on Iraq? The official reasons Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and its links with Al Qaida have now been shown to be lies.●

http://www.pakistantimes.net/2005/07/03/oped2.htm