Here’s my column in the CSM of Thursday, October 12.
The title is Bush created a mess in Iraq. Here’s how to clean it up. The subtitle is: It’s time to pull our troops out of Iraq – and to hold our leaders accountable.
So now you can go read the whole thing and tell me (courteously) what you think.
36 thoughts on “CSM column calls for US pullout from Iraq, accountability”
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Helena and Shirin
Invading places is very similar to shooting people, or sending an unwise email.
No point in wishing you hadn’t. you have to deal with the results.
If you havent read Alastair Horne “A Savage War of Peace” you should. You find out what happens when the President suddenly changes policy and says “We are leaving”
Here’s a link to the fate of the locally recruited troops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harki
The French had easy options, they just had to move their troops and colons across the Mediterranean.
The questions that need to be answered are:
Where do the troops go,and what are the consequences over the next ten years?
Helena
I think you should have included the Europeans in the participants in the peace conference.
We are the ones who have to live with the long term consequences of upsetting our neighbours and radicalising some of the young people who live here.
To illustrate; If the bombs on the Tube (Metro) in London last year had gone off on a Saturday instead of a weekday they would have got me. I travel the Picadilly line to Russel Square on the way to class at SOAS.
There are a lot of people in Madrid who will share a similar sentiment.
“Invading places is very similar to shooting people, or sending an unwise email.”
What a disgusting trivialization of an unimaginable human catastrophe.
“No point in wishing you hadn’t. you have to deal with the results.”
What typical American narcissistic bullshit. YOU, the aggressors have to deal with the results? You don’t have to deal with the results at all, but the victims of your aggression sure as hell do, and no matter what you do they will be dealing with the results for generations after you have forgotten all about it.
“If you havent read Alastair Horne “A Savage War of Peace” you should. You find out what happens when the President suddenly changes policy and says “We are leaving” ”
More mental masturbation. The reality of what happens when you don’t leave Iraq is right in front of us. What part of that don’t you get?
“Here’s a link to the fate of the locally recruited troops.”
Why should I give a damn about the fate of a few thousands of collaborators?
Look, I am sick of people sitting around pleasuring themselves intellectually about what will happen if when it is clear that every single day that you stay there the situation gets worse. Just get out. Get the HELL out and leave Iraq for Iraqis to deal with for good or for ill. You are doing nothing good there – nothing whatsoever. Go away, and go away now.
PS You are also apparently completely ignoring that polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of those who are living in the full horror of day to day life in American liberated Iraq(and who understand Iraq and Iraqis far, far better than you do – that is, Iraqis in Iraq – want the Americans to leave, and that the number is increasing not decreasing over time. Those who are most keenly aware of the reality that is Iraq under liberation – i.e. those who have the greatest short and long term stake in the situation, and are in the best position to know and understand it – and who understand Iraq from the inside out, realize that the American presence is not only doing nothing to protect them, but is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.” (According to a recent PIPA poll)
Further, the majority of Iraqis find that the so-called “government” has no real significance as long as the Americans are there (I disagree – it has great P.R. significance for the Bush administration), and that American withdrawal is likely to reduce factional conflict rather than increase it (duhhhh – virtually everything the Americans have done has served, whether by design or not, to create factionalism and foment and exacerbate intra-Iraqi conflict).
It seems the preceptions and wishes of the Iraqi people mean nothing at all to you and your fellow intellectuals, who are apparently enjoying the hell out of sitting in your leather chairs in your book-lined studies mentally masturbating over what whill happen if the Americans withdraw while Iraqis bleed and die and watch their country be torn apart in front of their eyes.
Shirin
thank you for your reasoned and constructive criticism.
If you read Robert Fisk he describes the massacre of a million Armenians after the British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915.
Would you give a damn about the fate of that kind of number of people?
“If you read Robert Fisk he describes the massacre of a million Armenians after the British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915.”
Actually I thought the chapter on the Armenians was the weakest part of Fisk’s book. Because he only relied on Armenian sources, I suppose in Lebanon, and we only get the Armenian point of view. He tells us for example that Armenians were the majority population of Antakya/Antioch. Hard to believe – they were 8% of the town’s population.
A million Armenians dead; all that means is a large number. They kept less figures in the First World War than even the US in Iraq.
Anyway that figure is now being approached in Iraq, as Helena reminded us in her previous post, and will certainly be passed before the Iraq war is over.
Do you give a damn about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been massacred in the past 3 1/2 years by the Americans or as a direct or indirect result of Americans’ presence there? Do you give a damn about the fate of the additional hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who will be killed by the Americans or as a direct or indirect result of their continued presence there? Do you give a damn about the millions of Iraqis whose lives, homes, and properties have been destroyed by the Americans or as a direct or indirect result of their presence, and the further tens of millions whose lifes and homes and properties will surely be destroyed as long as the Americans remain there? Do you give a damn about the fate of an entire country that is being destroyed as a result of the American presence?
How many more millions of Iraqis’ lives are you willing to sacrifice while you and your fellow intellectual masturbators go on and on about the unknowable? How many more generations children are you willing to doom to lives of physical and mental malformation by keeping the Americans there based on speculation about the unknowable? And how long are you going to look patronizingly down from your European intellectual tower on what Iraqis on the ground in Iraq have to say about their reality and what they are convinced should happen?
Lots and lots of reasoned and reasonable thoughts posted on rthe internet and in letters to the editor of major papers, but util the American people acknowledge that we are being led by a dysfunctional human being, who has proclaimed that he is doing what God wishes and who now demonizes Bill Clinton as the source of all his problems, this dysfunctional being we will continue to wallow in the blood and tears of others whom we have never met and against whom we have no quarrel.
GWB administration is our “Madness of King George”.
If you read Robert Fisk he describes the massacre of a million Armenians after the British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915.
I suppose the British should also have stayed in India, and Kenya, and Palestine (what fun that would have been!), and the French should have stayed in Indochina as well as Algeria, and the Belgians should have stayed in the Congo . . .
Frank raises an issue that can reasonably be said to be of concern– the fate of the many collaborators the US has been working with after the withdrawal. The leaders of smart national liberation groups have of course always been attentive to this issue, aware of the need to find a policy that (1) absolutely prevents them from regrouping as a pro-colonialist or otherwise harmful Fifth Column inside the country after liberation, (2) somehow defuses the anger that many liberation supporters feel toward the collaborators in their midst, who have caused them great harm, and (3) reintegrates the collabs into society and mends the national fabric that their past actions have torn.
Primarily, I see this challenge as one for the leaders of the national movement concerned. It is quite often raised as a sort of faux-humanitarian issue by leaders of the colonial venture itself. But they are the ones who suborned these collaborators and caused their problems in the first place, so they’re not credible people to find a solution for the collabs’ subsequent problems. Okay, i know there are also the Chalabis, who you can say were the ones who suborned the Americans. I spend not a nanosecond (okay, my Quaker heart spends perhaps one nanosecond) worrying about the fate of Ahmed Chalabi when the Americans leave. He and his cronies will all most certainly be on the helicopters, off to Zurich to consult with the bankers who’ve been looking after their ill-gotten gains for thus long.
One final note here. Before Barak pulled the IDF out of Lebanon in 2000, Israeli apologists spent months “agonizing” very publicly about “Well, we’d leave tomorrow but what would happen to all those brave Lebanese ‘patriots’ who have been working so closely with us all these years…” and raised huge fears about a massacre of their SLA lackeys after withdrawal. After withdrawal, guess how many SLA-ers were massacred? Not a single one. Hizbullah was disciplined and visionary enough to ensure that.
The same discipline and vision may not be present among the liberation forces in Iraq (in good part, because of the horrendous ‘divide-and-rule’ policies pursued by the Americans all this time.) But we honestly do not know whether feared bloodbaths will occur or not, and there are things the US and other parties can do to lessen that likelihood. What we do know is that if the US troops stay, the situation of Iraqis can be expected to continue on its current, increasingly lethal path…
The whole notion that Frank raised about the fate of collaborators ala Algeria, in Iraq is complete nonsense.
The problem for the Algerian pro-French individuals was that they fought agianst there own fellow-citizens to keep French foreign influence over Algeria.
There are no Iraqis fighting to keep the US in Iraq.
The lens of the unjust horrors that US criminality has visited upon the Iraqi population (and the 1/2 million + dead Iraqis) IS THE PROPER LENS THROUGH WHICH TO SEE THE VIOLENT US/ISRAELI CRIMINALITY THAT HAS BEEN VISITED UPON THE PALESTINIAN POPULATION FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS NOW.
Connect the dots – it’s easy = stop dispossesion and depopulation and killing in both places – give sanity a chance.
Thank you Helena,much appreciated.
just a couple of information points.
Gallipoli was a seaborne landing in Turkey with the objective of capturing the forts along the dardanelles straits and opening the route to the Ukraine.
It is a particularly poignant military screwup, with remarkableanalogies to Iraq as a result of squandered early opportunities and political interference from home. It is particularly sad for we Irish because the Dublin Fusiliers and Munster Fusiliers took 90% casualties trying to get ashore from the River Clyde at Cape Helles.
The British gave up in the end because they needed the troops elsewhere. Once they were gone some say the Turks gave orders for the destruction of the Armenians who might have collaborated with the Russians.
It had nothing to do with colonialism.
The Kurds might feel awfully alone if the US pulled out. Interesting to see who would attack them first. Turkey, Iran or the Iraqis.
The US amabassador’s telegram recently made no bones about the fate of the local hires if they got found out. The casualty figures among the interpreters tend to indicate that their life expectancy after pullout might be low.
An even more subtle effect will be the flight of the professionals. Whatever they do they will be seen as people who worked with the government because that is part of what professinals do. The recent campaign of assasinations of Univerity professors points in this direction.
How you rebuild a country without the middle class professionals?
“There are no Iraqis fighting to keep the US in Iraq.”
That is not precisely true. There are Iraqis – or “Iraqis” who see themselves as benefitting personally from the American presence (the crook Ahmad Chalabi, and the arch opportunist mafioso Jalal Talibani, for example), and who can be said to be fighting to keep the US in Iraq. Such people are, quite frankly, quite dispensible, and Iraq would be far better off without them and their followers, militias, etc. There are also militias and death squads that were set up, funded, trained by, and that operate at the behest and under the direction of the Americans. They are also dispensible and Iraq is better off without them.
And then there are the poor unfortunate slobs who, out of desperation to provide for their families, have taken jobs with the Americans, or joined the “New Iraqi Army”™. Does Frank suggest that in order to protect these people from possible retribution, the current deadly debacle should continue?
“There are no Iraqis fighting to keep the US in Iraq.”
That is not precisely true. There are Iraqis – or “Iraqis” who see themselves as benefitting personally from the American presence (the crook Ahmad Chalabi, and the arch opportunist mafioso Jalal Talibani, for example), and who can be said to be fighting to keep the US in Iraq. Such people are, quite frankly, quite dispensible, and Iraq would be far better off without them and their followers, militias, etc. There are also militias and death squads that were set up, funded, trained by, and that operate at the behest and under the direction of the Americans. They are also dispensible and Iraq is better off without them.
And then there are the poor unfortunate slobs who, out of desperation to provide for their families, have taken jobs with the Americans, or joined the “New Iraqi Army”™. Does Frank suggest that in order to protect these people from possible retribution, the current deadly debacle should continue?
Gallipoli was a seaborne landing in Turkey with the objective of capturing the forts along the dardanelles straits . . . It had nothing to do with colonialism.
I take it you don’t know what happened to Ottoman territories taken by the Allies in WW1.
Both the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, with Constantinople, were at first slated to go to Russia, which might have gotten them if it hadn’t been knocked out early and made a separate peace.
Plan B was to ‘internationalize’ the straits, which probably would have meant an Anglo-French mandate, with more or less token participation by the other victorious powers. That fell through when Ataturk rallied his people, saving what is now Turkey from complete dismemberment.
Had the Brits won at Gallipoli, Turkey probably would have been dismembered completely and the pieces incorporated into the postwar mandate system. So, I must disagree that Gallipoli ‘had nothing to do with colonialism’.
frank: the middle class professionals in Iraq are 95% gone already.
“and no matter what you do they will be dealing with the results for generations after you have forgotten all about it.”- from Shirin
Unfortunately, most Americans have never even thought of anything to forget about the Iraqi people. But you are right that the Iraqis will be dealing with this for a long, long, long time.
I am of the opinion that it will be a bloodbath when the US leaves, and the longer we wait to do, the worse the bloodbath will be.
I am of the opinion that there is NOTHING that can be done to change this outcome, which was one of the main reasons we never should have started a war up in the first place.
I am also of the opinion that *IF* this type of violence was visiting on the USA, we would be in even more chaos and violence than we have ever seen in Iraq – just because Americans are so violent and so dumb.
And this war goes way deeper than saying “it was Bush’s fault” – he could not have done it without the support of the Democrats, most of Congress and the majority of American people – which shows you that they don’t care who they kill.
More evidence of that last fact in Clinton’s appearance on FAUX news bragging about how he would have bombed more if the right wingers had not tied his hands with the Monica nonsense, etc. No indication that his bombing killed innocents, made the world and the USA less safe, and achieved nothing of value.
No awareness at all.
No ability to recognize other possible alternatives to violence either.
This, of course, works out great for the military-media-industrial complex. They are always making more money.
“And then there are the poor unfortunate slobs who, out of desperation to provide for their families, have taken jobs with the Americans, or joined the “New Iraqi Army”™. Does Frank suggest that in order to protect these people from possible retribution, the current deadly debacle should continue?” – Shirin.
Probably. Though I think the “retribution” issue is less important in Iraq. In Vietnam/Algeria etc, you had real client-collaborators, whereas in Iraq, as you point out, there’s just a lot of ‘poor unfortunates’.
And I think Frank is angling towards what you sugggest. It’s that old friend – welfare imperialism. We’re compelled to do it for their benefit.
“The Kurds might feel awfully alone if the US pulled out.”
Well, now THERE’s a valid reason to stay the course and keep wreaking incalculable carnage throughout the country – gotta keep the Kurds company, doncha know! What’s more important that that, after all?
“Interesting to see who would attack them first. Turkey, Iran or the Iraqis.”
Evidently you are unaware that the Turks have been attacking the Kurds and at an increasing rate since the invasion started.
Evidently you are also unaware that many of the problems the Kurds are facing – and they are facing a lot of problems despite the lovely, rosy picture portrayed by the propagandists – are directly due to the corrupt and despotic warlords/mafiosi Talibani and Barzani. In fact, aside from economic issues, it is the repressive rule they are under that seems to concern Kurds the most.
“The US amabassador’s telegram recently made no bones about the fate of the local hires if they got found out.”
Yet another great reason to stay the course. After all, the fate of the few thousand “local hires” is far, far, far more important than the other tens of millions of people, and is certainly worth destroying the whole country for.
“The casualty figures among the interpreters tend to indicate that their life expectancy after pullout might be low.”
And the life expectancy of the average Iraqi is sure looking good these days.
“An even more subtle effect will be the flight of the professionals. Whatever they do they will be seen as people who worked with the government because that is part of what professinals do. The recent campaign of assasinations of Univerity professors points in this direction.”
Apparently you are unaware of the fact that the country has been bleeding professionals since 2003. The majority of professionals and intellectuals have already fled the country thanks directly to the U.S.
“How you rebuild a country without the middle class professionals?”
A better question is how do you rebuild a country by dropping one ton bombs out of airplanes? How do you rebuild it by making it so dangerous to leave the house that fewer and fewer people are going to work, or school. How do you rebuild it by – oh, forget it. We are not even on the same planet.
America, to its eternal shame, has never come to terms with exactly why a dislexic dwarf chimpanzee with seriously unresolved manhood issues could stampede the country into a transparently needless invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, though, seems to have nonchalantly put his finger on the issue with the cavalier summary: “We had to hit somebody.”
Simple atavistic vengeance. No matter against whom or for whatever tendentious, trumped-up rationale. “Somebody” — in fact, anybody — would do. It wouldn’t cost anything, or so Paul Wolfowitz assured us, and we would feel oh-so-much better about things when we avenged our humiliating haplessness on 9/11/2001. “Sombody” would have to pay, and whether they had anything to do with 9/11 or not made not the slightest bit of difference.
Yet as a Vietnamese once told another rabid and reckless American bent on “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” the Vietnamese had always lived “there” and always would. Americans, however, didn’t live “there” and would one day depart. “At first,” the Vietnamese said,” you will find Vietnam like a tasty cake, but soon you will get very sick from eating it. If you really want to be in Vietnam so much, you should wait until your next life. Perhaps then, you will be reborn Vietnamese.”
As for the compradore class of quisling colonial collaborators, first we air-and-sea-lifted the converted-by-the-French Vietnamese Catholics from Hanoi to Saigon and set them up in power there in 1954. Much later, we evacuated the lower-level of them from our Saigon embassy rooftop via helicopter in 1975 and set them up in Westminster, California. (The richest of them, of course, had long since departed first class to join their children safely studying at American universities.) I always got a kick out of the Southern California local Vietnamese newscasters with their heavy, rasping North Vietnamese accents. Anyway, as Zbigniew Brezinski said not long ago, “the people who say they want us in Iraq, will more than likely leave with us when we go” (with the richest of them already departed first class, naturally). Perhaps we will next hear of “Little Baghdad” in Laughlin, Nevada. Your American tax dollars and dead GIs at work.
America has not even begun to address the reasons why it has done — and continues to do — such terrible things to the Iraqi people. Perhaps America simply doesn’t have the stomach for the necessary introspection. After all, “we had to hit somebody.”
David Tomlin: Thanks for that. It does support the argument that the Armenians were killed to avoid them siding with the Russians.
I see a lot of people seem to think I favour keeping foreign troops in Iraq. Actually I don’t.
What I am doing is identifying factors which influence the choice among available options for executing the withdrawal.
Getting out isn’t quite as simple as laying a few kilos of PE on the ammunition dump, rolling up the sleeping bag and running like blazes for the tailgate of the Herc.
Rather like Wes Clarke described about this time last year a withdrawal in contact is a tactically difficult operation. He should know. He had to plan for things like that as SACEUR.
Shirin blithely writes off thousands of dead, with all the nonchalance of Napoleon. They only killed 6000 in Sebrenica and the memory will live with the UN troops who did nothing.
I agree with Helena (and the Chief of the General Staff it seems) that you need to get them out.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6046332.stm
The detail is the difficult bit.
It is just that you have to identify how you do things to either avoid some of your people getting left behind or the kind of slaughter Helena describes in Rwanda taking place.
You also have to figure out what equipment to leave behind so someone else can come and replace the middle classes who have fled. Otherwise the electricity, water and phones don’t work and you get cholera epidemics break out.
America, to its eternal shame, has never come to terms with exactly why a dislexic dwarf chimpanzee with seriously unresolved manhood issues could stampede the country into a transparently needless invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Michael, I think you’re a bit confused. Iraq invaded Iran, not the other way around, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was not in power then.
Frank, I am quite disappointed to see you resorting to ad hominem attacks, particularly one so sadly misplaced. It is really quite unworthy of you to stoop to this form of argumentation.
For your information, I do not write off anything at all. I merely have a sense of proportion, and unlike you appear to, I do not consider the lives of one relatively small subset of Iraqis more worthy of saving than those of Iraqis in general. In fact, if anyone is blithely and nonchalantly writing off the slaughter of thousands (in this case hundreds of thousands) of Iraqis, it is, by all appearances, you. If this is not the case, then you need to find new arguments. You are the one who appears to be blithely and nonchalantly writing off the ongoing monthly slaughter of thousands of Iraqis in favour of mere speculation over the possible deaths of a much smaller number of collaborators and “local hires – deaths that may or may not take place.
You also appear to be more concerned over the purely speculative fate of a few thousands of collaborators and “local hires” than the clear reality that continuing this debacle for even one more day only brings greater and greater catastrophe to millions and millions of Iraqis, and that the longer it continues the more catastrophic, widespread, and long-lasting will be the results. You appear to have far greater concern for the lives of the few thousands of “local hires” a few hundreds of whom may or may not be under threat of death in the aftermath of an American withdrawal than for the tens or hundreds of thousands of non-“local hires” who are being and will continue to be slaughtered while you and your fellow intellectualizers take your time speculating about the unknown and unknowable results of withdrawal – results which, by the way, will have little or no effect on you. And you seem to have given far less weight to the lives of millions and millions of Iraqi children who are being subjected to unrelenting mental and physical trauma the effects of which become increasingly irreversible the longer this goes on. And of course, there is the fact that the longer this goes on, and the worse it gets the more Iraqi children and youth are being deprived of education, which not only permanently affects their lives and the lives of their children, but has an enormously negative effect on an Iraqi society that once proudly claimed one of the highest literacy rates (and one of the lowest differentials between male and female literacy rates) in the region.
You also make certain assumptions that have little or no basis in reality. In your zeal to protect the lives of the collaborators and the poor slobs who in their desperation have taken jobs serving the occupation, you assume that the presence of the Americans is making them safe – a patently false assumption. The Americans do nothing to protect anyone but themselves.
Your fondness for citing the doomsday excuse for not withdrawing promptly and rapidly contains the demonstrably ridiculous assumption that the Americans are protecting Iraqis and reducing the violence when the exact opposite is the case. In fact, virtually everything the Americans have done in Iraq has itself been violent, and has served to create and exacerbate intra-Iraqi tensions and the violence that accompanies them, as well as all other forms of violence and criminality. The reality is that Americans have not only failed utterly in their duty to protect Iraqis and their property, they have actively, if not deliberately, turned Iraq into the most dangerous country on earth. Polls indicate that the great majority of Iraqis realize this, and understand that with the Americans gone it is more likely than not that tensions will ease and violence will be reduced. What part of this is difficult for you to understand?
Your assumption that there will be a “bloodbath” if the Americans leave ignores the fact that it has been a constantly worsening bloodbath from the moment the Americans perpetrated the whole thing by dropping the first bomb. At the very least the absence of the Americans will mean that the part of the bloodbath directly caused by them will cease, and that will be a great relief and result in a significant saving of lives. So will cease also the part of the bloodbath that results from the direct, legitimate resistance to their presence and their actions – another significant saving of lives. This, unlike what you and your fellow doomsday advocates are doing, is not speculation, but the result of the application of logic in combination with known fact. Whether or not there would be a corresponding increase in violence from other sources IS speculation, but it is unlikely that the situation will get worse overall, and at least somewhat more likely that it will get better. There is also historical evidence that Iraqis, left to their own devices, are more than capable of working things out over time.
So, Irish Frank, my advice to you is that rather than accusing others of blithely and nonchalantly writing off thousands of deaths, you look to your own attitudes. Unless you have expressed yourself very badly here, they warrant close examination.
I agree American taxpayers shouldn’t begrudge our collaborators a ticket out and refugee status in the U.S., even if they weren’t promised that as part of the deal, and they knew there was a chance they were backing the wrong horse. Beyond that I’m afraid I don’t understand what Frank is getting at.
Shirin, David
Thank you for your contributions. I think we might agree that part of the evacuation plan needs to consider the local hires, collabs, whatever you want to call them. What the decision is, lets leave it for now.
This is all relevant to Helena’s original article calling for a peace conference because we are starting to talk about the agenda.
Lets look at the classic failed evacuation of a foreign army from a foreign capital. Not Napoleon from Russia but the British from Kabul in 1842.
http://www.britishbattles.com/first-afghan-war/kabul-gandamak.htm
If you havent read the story of one man reaching safety and a few prisoners taken for ransom with everybody else dead it is worth a read. Keep the picture of Gandamak at dawn in your mind, because every soldier in Iraq probably does.
Lets look at timescales, doubtless we all can say 30 days. Probably can’t do it less time than that, because it takes time to set up the fuel dumps along the routes out so you dont have a massive traffic jam of vehicles without fuel.
But there is a whole lot of equipment that will take longer to load. Do you abandon it to be pillaged by looters, do you hand it over to someone else and send them a bill, or do you put a few pounds of PE under it and blow it?
Will people be able to arrange a truce during the evacuation or will it be a withdrawal in contact?
Where will people withdraw to? Kuwait? Turkey?, Jordan? Iran? Saudi Arabia? How many vehicles per hour can pass down these roads?
Do you provide evacuation for the 20,000 “Private contractors?” Difficult that one. They were serving soldiers, (some are even on sabbatical ) and their presence is essential to keep the major companies in place. I think we agreed we arent going to write people off so we have to decide this one.
If the contractors go you have a lot of civilians to bring out too. Do you bring their local hires?
Will the companies ever want to go back? How much information do they need to hand over to their sucessors? What does this do to the long term rebuilding of Iraq?
What weapons do you leave behind? Tanks?, Helicopters? Who do you leave them with?
These are all real decisions to make as you talk about withdrawal.
There is an open invitation to be General for a day and to address these issues and problems. If you know the answer to them all do please call somone. Like Juan Cole, I don’t.
I think it is probably correct that the US had to hit somebody, like a poster here argues. The trigger was indeed 9/11, and an exquisite case of blowback that the hijackers end up causing the alleged direct or indirect death of more than 600.000 Iraqis. I wonder if wherever they are with their celestial virgins they are bothered by these consequences.
Shirin, I applaud your embracing of my “intellectual onanism” observation. I do prefer onanism to your “intellectual masturbation” expression. It is a bit softer, and as a devout Moslem you probably know that the supreme Ayatolla has just reminded moslems to refrain from masturbation during the holy month of Ramadan. To be sure you should refrain from using the word for now.
If you havent read the story of one man reaching safety and a few prisoners taken for ransom with everybody else dead it is worth a read.
As it happens I have read a long and quite interesting on-line account of the Anglo-Afghan Wars. I just tried to find it and failed. I fear it’s no longer available.
The lesson would seem to be that the Brits should have recognized earlier that their position was untenable. They could have chosen to withdraw on their own timetable instead of waiting until they were forced out.
Lets look at timescales, doubtless we all can say 30 days.
People better acquainted with such matters than I have suggested 90 days as optimal.
The political issue is whether we want to continue using the U.S. military to influence political events in Iraq. Once that is no longer the case, the SecDef can advise the military that their mission is now to withdraw in good order. Implementation, with all of its details, will be up to the professionals.
It is highly desirable that the SecDef not be the present incumbent. I am for replacing him as soon as possible.
But there is a whole lot of equipment that will take longer to load. Do you abandon it to be pillaged by looters, do you hand it over to someone else and send them a bill, or do you put a few pounds of PE under it and blow it?
If there is any equipment to be left behind I would expect it to be given or sold to the Iraqi government. To do otherwise would suggest a lack of trust in our new allies.
Some equipment of peculiar intelligence value might be secretly destroyed, though I expect such equipment would be a priority for evacuation.
This is a political question, but not one I expect to be the subject of public controversy.
Will people be able to arrange a truce during the evacuation or will it be a withdrawal in contact?
I don’t know. Good if they can, tough if they can’t. What’s your point?
Where will people withdraw to? Kuwait? Turkey?, Jordan? Iran? Saudi Arabia?
I’m not in favor of keeping any U.S. troops permanently stationed in the Middle East.
Do you provide evacuation for the 20,000 “Private contractors?”
Why not?
I think most of them have their own vehicles, so mostly it wouldn’t be necessary to divert military transportation for the purpose. But certainly they are part of the team. I would expect the military to co-ordinate evacuation planning with them, and perhaps provide security or transportation on occasions when it’s necessary.
These are all real decisions to make as you talk about withdrawal.
Why?
I would say that most of these questions (particularly the ones I’ve omitted quoting) are of little or no concern for grass-roots political activists.
There is an open invitation to be General for a day . . .
I decline the invitation, for reasons I hope are by now clear.
David
Thanks. You are the first person I have seen say this out loud.
I’m not in favor of keeping any U.S. troops permanently stationed in the Middle East.
Now this is an interesting idea to kick around the next two years.
The U.S. strategy for the Middle East was ‘over the horizon’ until the Gulf War. I see no reason it cannot be again.
I would prefer giving up our ‘imperial responsibilities’ altogether, but that’s not about to happen soon.
“I agree American taxpayers shouldn’t begrudge our collaborators a ticket out and refugee status in the U.S., even if they weren’t promised that as part of the deal”
Certainly, the higher the cost borne by the American taxpayers, the better. It was their failure to properly oversee their political representatives that caused the whole mess, after all. And now there are so many Yanks queuing up all over the web to claim they never supported the invasion, let’s not forget the percentages in favour in 2002 and 2003 – up to the 80s, iirc.
Shame there’s no way to make Americans pay proper reparations (though I believe the Yanks even welched on the reparations they agreed to pay the Vietnamese victims of their previous most egregious occasion of gung ho ignorant militarism).
I just want to note, re the discussion above about “middle class professionals” leaving Iraq, with or without a US withdrawal, that the posters there seem to have some kind of unstated assumption that “middle class professionals”– who, we might all agree, are people who will make an important contribution to the reconstruction the country so badly needs– would not have been supporters to some degree of, and perhaps even working all along with, the anti-US forces there. I think that’s a completely ungrounded assumption. I suggest, too, that after the US leaves and a degree of stability is restored to the country (inshallah!), that many or most of the Iraqi professionals who have left over the past three years of mayhem will flock back home to help in the postwar rebuilding. Like Faiza and her family, for example– and scores of thousands more Iraqis like them.
In general, I think this argument about fears of “middle class flight” in the event of a US pullout is ill-informed and very misleading
Helena
Thanks for that. I base my opinion about middle class flight on what happened in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Riverbend’s last post.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
I’ve said goodbye this last month to more people than I can count. Some of the ‘goodbyes’ were hurried and furtive- the sort you say at night to the neighbor who got a death threat and is leaving at the break of dawn, quietly.
………
I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else?
I am in the throes of reading Ali Ansari’s updated edition of “Iran, Islam and Democracy”,
to try and understand the future direction that country, and by implication its client in Iraq will take.
President Khatami is quoted as talking about Capital Flight and the Emigration of the Professionals as being two of the biggest problems they have.
In Kosovo I see the return of the young professionals who went overseas, now that the level of violence has dropped to an acceptable level, and KFOR no longer has to escort the villagers to the supermarket in convoy.
However I did see a statistic that 90% of doctors fled when the Serbs were on their way. I wonder how many went back?
I think Lebanon and Palestine might give an indication as to whether the Middle Classes return. I notice the families on the plane to Amman who are returning rom the US and Europe for a short holiday to see the cousins they left behind. It is one of the HR issues that go into a reconstruction plan.
I will bow to your greater experience and knowledge of the area.
Faiza is a civil engineer, her son Raed is an architect, Khaled is an engineer. Those are vital skills.
Riverbend is just the kind of articulate, technically competent programmer that I could use in a reconstruction situation. If she doesnt feel safe enough to venture out, and gets discriminated against because of her sex then people like her will stay away and live somewhere where they get paid more, and can bring up children without the possibility of getting killed by a car bomb or an airstrike.
I suspect the time it takes to resolve the fighting has a lot to do with the return as does the financing of the reconstruction. If people have been ten years away then I doubt if they would go back. If the economics is gridlock or the country is affected in some way by sanctions on Iran then there is no point in going back.
Your point is well made and it is something that needs to get sorted out at the peace conference.
Helena
Thanks for that. I base my opinion about middle class flight on what happened in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Riverbend’s last post.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
I’ve said goodbye this last month to more people than I can count. Some of the ‘goodbyes’ were hurried and furtive- the sort you say at night to the neighbor who got a death threat and is leaving at the break of dawn, quietly.
………
I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else?
I am in the throes of reading Ali Ansari’s updated edition of “Iran, Islam and Democracy”,
to try and understand the future direction that country, and by implication its client in Iraq will take.
President Khatami is quoted as talking about Capital Flight and the Emigration of the Professionals as being two of the biggest problems they have.
In Kosovo I see the return of the young professionals who went overseas, now that the level of violence has dropped to an acceptable level, and KFOR no longer has to escort the villagers to the supermarket in convoy.
However I did see a statistic that 90% of doctors fled when the Serbs were on their way. I wonder how many went back?
I think Lebanon and Palestine might give an indication as to whether the Middle Classes return. I notice the families on the plane to Amman who are returning rom the US and Europe for a short holiday to see the cousins they left behind. It is one of the HR issues that go into a reconstruction plan.
I will bow to your greater experience and knowledge of the area.
Faiza is a civil engineer, her son Raed is an architect, Khaled is an engineer. Those are vital skills.
Riverbend is just the kind of articulate, technically competent programmer that I could use in a reconstruction situation. If she doesnt feel safe enough to venture out, and gets discriminated against because of her sex then people like her will stay away and live somewhere where they get paid more, and can bring up children without the possibility of getting killed by a car bomb or an airstrike.
I suspect the time it takes to resolve the fighting has a lot to do with the return as does the financing of the reconstruction. If people have been ten years away then I doubt if they would go back. If the economics is gridlock or the country is affected in some way by sanctions on Iran then there is no point in going back.
Your point is well made and it is something that needs to get sorted out at the peace conference.
About the assumption that skilled middle-class people don’t support the anti-US insurgency, I think too that the experience of Lebanon and Palestine is relevant. Both Hamas and Hizbullah have made a point of both integrating skilled people (doctors, teachers, engineers, etc) into their ranks and supporting the development of these skills among their supporters through various scholarship programs, etc. I remember former UNIFIL advisor Timur Goksel telling me how surprised he was, the first time he went with a UNIFIL group to negotiate with Hizbullah, to discover that the Hizbullah negotiators he met were all settled,highly educated, middle-class professional people. And he’d been expecting a bunch of wild-eyed radicals!
There seems to be an unexamined assumption among many westerners that for non-westerners, to be pro-western is the only way to be “modern” or “developed.” Far from it! In fact, you might say today that for non-westerners, to be unthinkingly, coweringly pro-‘western’ is to follow a path that is very well-trodden and at this point largely discredited…
Helena
I agree with what you are saying. You don’t need to be prowestern to be developed.
I think where I am coming from is based on this document from the UN.
http://www.unpan.org/egovernment5.asp
My concern about the middle classes comes from the experience of meeting people in some of the countries who want to do development within this framework. It is easy enough to meet professionals who have read and buy into the analysis and aims of this document.
What you find however is that these people often aren’t backed up by sufficient numbers with basic literacy and computer literacy to do mass implementation.
I remember one minister telling me that he had found two people in his ministry who knew how to use a PC when he took over.
Simply training people in transportable skills just generates the Sub Saharan doctors problem. If you train people to Western (I wish there was a better word) standards they do tend to go and practice in California.
I am distressed by what is going on in Iraq because of the gap that is opening up between them and the rest of the region that may be impossible to close. (dont worry, the killing and destruction distresses me too)
We are told that oil producing countries need to diversify away from reliance on oil to stimulate industry in other sectors. But this is a race among all the countries of the area to attract industry.
If you read the eGovernment document you may find the description of the divides instructive. They talk about the preponderance of websites being in English even though 90% of the world don’t have english as their first language.
So it is difficult to achieve the benefits of eLearning and eHealth and eCommerce if you arent familiar with the querty keyboard and can’t search on Google for information because you dont understand what search terms to use.
Your comment about Hizb Allah sponsoring their people to master the skills necessary to make society work is great news. Is there anyone in Iraq doing the same?
I saw Libya mentioned in the press during the week as signing up to Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Laptop for Every Child” initiative. I wonder when Iraq will be added to the list.
I agree with you about a generous settlement for Iraq after the pullout. Perhaps some of the issues I have mentioned might form part of it.
Helena
You may find two or three of the articles linked from Joshua Landis site worth commenting on.
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/
Last man left standing is president of Iraq.