Bush’s project in Iraq: Is the end nigh?

Yesterday, I was back on the street corner again with our local weekly
peace presence, after having been out of town the previous Thursday.  Yesterday,
too, we shifted our timing as we always do when the clocks change: in winter
we vigil from 4:30 through 5:30 p.m., and in summer we do it from 5 through
6.  So yesterday’s vigil was the first one under the summer time rules.
 Many of the drivers who come through our busy intersection outside
the Federal Office Building there on a regular basis– those who came between
5:30 and 6– hadn’t seen us for six months.

It’s been an interesting experience, standing there throughout the years,
seeing the seasons turn.

We got a fabulous response!  People were honk-honk-honking for peace
constantly and repetitively throughout our whole hour there.  (One of
the nice things about this action is that at this intersection, traffic from
only one of the four approach roads is allowed to pass through it at any
one time. So all the drivers coming in from the other three directions have
to sit at the lights there and wait their turn.  As they do so, they
can hear the honks coming from other drivers, and this often spurs them to
join in.  It becomes a particular form of a public “conversation”–
and most importantly, people who are there who are against the war can reconfirm
that they are indeed not alone in their feelings.)

I would say that throughout 2006 so far, the amount of anti-war honking
has increased in an almost linear way, week by week.

On several occasions throughout the past couple of years, my friend and
co-vigiller Heather has said to me, “Helena, I can’t believe we’re still
here.  Don’t tell me we’ll still be here this time next year!”  And
I’ve always said to her, “Heather, expect to be here for the very long haul.”
 Heather wasn’t there yesterday.  But as I peered into every car
that passed trying to establish eye contact and see who all these people
were who were honking for us, I suddenly thought, “Hey, maybe we won’t
have to be here this time next year.  Maybe the Bushies really can
be persuaded to pull all the troops out of Iraq before April 2007.”  And
since then, this feeling has started to take a stronger hold of me.

I’ll note later on that even if this proves to be the case, there are
many other aspects of the administration’s militarism that we still need
to be very concerned about.  Not least among them, the prospect that
they might seek to “cover” a chaotic military collapse in Iraq, politically,
by launching an opportunistic military attack against Iran….  As
in, the way the Reagan folks– who of course included both Cheysfeld and
Rumney– “covered” their withdrawal from Lebanon by invading Grenada, back
in 1983.)

But first, I want to pull together all the pieces of evidence I currently
have that indicate that the end-point of the US project in Iraq might be
closer at hand than I had previously thought.

1.  US opinion has been swinging consistently against
the war this year. And this is not simply the evidence from
my expreiences on the street corner.  If you look at the AP/Ipsos opinion-poll
figures here
, you’ll see that the the public’s judgments on the Bushites’ handling
of the Iraq issue run as follows:

Disapprove (%) 
Approve (%)
Early Jan ’06
58
39
Early Feb ’06
60
38
Early Mar ’06
58
39
Early Apr ’06
63
35

Compare those figures with, for example, the early-January
of 2005 figures of 54 percent disapprove/ 44 percent approve.

2.  Throughout 2004 and 2005, the US public was continuously being
promised that there were political ‘watershed events’ ahead in Iraq that would
make the US invasion and occupation of the country all look (relatively) worthwhile.
 Those events included the “handover of sovereignty” (!) in 2004; the
holding of the January ’05 election; the August ’05 “completion” of the Iraqi
constitution; the Iraq-wide referendum on the same; and then the holding
of the “definitive” election for a “permanent” Iraqi government in December
2006.  Those pronmises, and indeed the staging of all of those events
more or less as promised, kept a non-trivial chunk of US opinion on board
the administration’s project in Iraq.  (Regardless of the effect of these
events on opinion in Iraq, which for the Bushites’ purposes is almost an
irrelevant consideration.)

American people sincerely wanted to believe that something good could
come out of the whole venture in Iraq– and the Bushies were promising them
that these good things were “just ahead”.

But since December15, 2005 they’ve run out of politically stage-managed rabbits
to pull out of their magician’s hat.  Indeed, they haven’t even been
able to “win” the formation of an Iraqi government as a result of the December
election.  (Of course, as I’ve argued elsewhere recently, they could
have gotten an Iraqi government formed if they’d been prepared to go
with the Iraqi people’s duly decided choice. But they haven’t been ready
to do that, because “the people’s choice”, Ibrahim Jaafari, is not their
chosen puppet.  And furthermore, he has also committed himself to seeking
a firm timetable for a — presumably complete– US troop withdrawal, which
they don’t like.)

The US-caused (or at the very least, US-aggravated) “impasse” in the formation
of an Iraqi government accountable to the elected parliament there has caused
great hardships for the Iraqi people.  But it has also caused great
political problems for the Bush administration, who now have literally
no more political rabbits to pull out of their Iraqi hat.

3.  Based on my close following of both the events in Iraq and the Bush
administration’s record there over the past three years, I conclude the following:
(a) they still really don’t have a clue about what’s going on there– apart
from whatever it is that their legions of bought-and-paid-for lackeys choose
to tell them, and (b) at the political level they have no plan, workable
or otherwise, for how to get of the mess they’re in.  Let’s hope, at
the very least, that the military has some workable plans for peaceable force
extraction?

4.  There are mid-term elections coming up here in November.  To
try to stabilize the politically disastrous record of its Iraq project as
much as possible before then, the Bushies will need to have some non-trivial
“victory event” sometime before the end of September.  Ideally, from
their point of view, this should include the very visible return home of
a significant chunk of the soldiery currently deployed there– maybe 50,000
of them at a minimum.  “Welcome home” parades in major US cities, etc,
etc.  (But maybe they should not use the “Mission Accomplished”
banner and the flight-suit thing again.)

Even that might not do it– in terms of allowing the Republicans to win their
goal of keeping control over both Houses of Congress in November.  (Let’s
hope not!)  But of course, if they do pull a large chunk of the soldiery
out of Iraq before a reliably pro-US administration has been installed,
then the likelihood that such an administration could ever be installed there
will plummet to near-zero, and the likelihood of a really serious debacle
befalling the depleted forces that remain will also rise.  (It’s
a strange fact of the current US deployment in Iraq that the vast majority
of those troops have now been pulled back into performing purely “force
protection” tasks– i.e., guarding their own enclaves and supply-lines.)

…Anyway, based on the above confluence of what has been happening politically
inside Iraq with what has been happening politically inside the US– that
is why I now think it’s possible to conclude that the end of the US troop
presence in Iraq may well be nigh.  Okay, that there is now, 
say, a 60% chance that all US troops will be out of Iraq by this time next
year.

Let’s check back in at that point and see how this prediction holds up, okay?

But if it does happen… if all our efforts out there on the street corners
of the real communities of the world, here in the more global arena of the
blogosphere, and everybody’s antiwar efforts from all around the world,
should show some real fruit… what then?  Do we declare victory and
go home?

No, of course not.  Firstly, as I mentioned above, we will need to redouble
our efforts to make sure that any withdrawal from Iraq (whether partial or
total) is not accompanied at the same time by any aggressive US military
adventure elsewhere.

Secondly, we really need to open up a serious discussion inside the US (and
outside it) on how we want to see the US’s relationship with the rest
of the world developing as the US project inside Iraq winds down… Do
we US citizens really still think of ourselves as constituting an “indispensable
nation”, as Madeleine Albright used to say, or as one that has any kind of
“manifest destiny” to regulate the affairs of the rest of the world (as the
Bushies– and also many Democratic pols– have long aspired to do)?

And thirdly, we need to start having a much deeper kind of discussion on
what kind of a world it really is that we all– US citizens and that 96%
of humanity that makes up “the rest of the world”– seek to build over the
decades ahead.  Surely, it should be one that moves away decisively
from any toleration of warmaking or investment in the instruments of war;
that is truly committed to lifting up the conditions in which the world’s
poorest and most marginalized communities live, and giving those people full
voice in the regulation of the world’s affairs; and that seeks to erase both
the gross economic equalities that exist and the use of any economic or other
unfair advantage for purposes of coercion and social control?

So yes, we should keep all these longer-term goals in mind as we proceed.
 But meantime, I have to tell you, yesterday for the first time, mixed
in with the smell of the sweet spring blossoms over the road, I could also
for the first time in this long struggle against the Bushite project in Iraq
catch the faint scent of victory ahead.

22 thoughts on “Bush’s project in Iraq: Is the end nigh?”

  1. And furthermore, he has also committed himself to seeking a firm timetable for a — presumably complete– US troop withdrawal . . .
    Has this been confirmed by Jaafari, or someone speaking for him? The only support I have seen for this is from the Sadrists.

  3. Helena
    I dont think that we should allow young Mr Bush to walk away from his mess without leaving his credit card behind the bar.
    Having destroyed a civil society and its infrastructure gratuitously, decency demands that the coalition funds reconstruction.
    Embargoing Iraq like the Palestinian Authority is not an option.
    Freezing them out of the global financial system like happened to Vietnam is not an option.
    Juan Cole’s concept of leaving with honour demands that the people who worked with the coalition in good faith are offered passage out for themselves and their families, and that the people who remain are offered access to a $100 Billion Reconstruction Fund administered by some credibly neutral organisation independent of the Bretton Woods agencies.
    Leaving with honour is important. If the US has to sneak away with their tails between their legs then they will need to go and invade Venezuela or Georgia just to get even.
    Let them drive out past their Generals taking the salute and be presented with flowers just like the Russians driving out of Afghanistan.
    Let them rationalise that they are “Lions led by Donkeys” and go home and vote.

  4. Frank, I still have problems with the term “honor/honour”, and am not sure that Juan means the same by it as you.
    What I have argued for consistently is that the withdrawal be not only speedy and total but also “generous”, which I think captures what you’re urging here… and I prefer that term to “honor.”
    But frankly– as with getting the securocrats OUT of the driving seat in Pretoria in 1994– it is probably worth quite a lot to the Iraqis to get the US out of their country a.s.a.p. without necessarily having them pay every last cent of the bar bill there… Just so long as they are constrained from sowing even more chaos as they leave…

  7. As a muslim living in Lebanon…well…I was pro BUSH because we were forced to believe that the US was going to solve the centuries long oppression of the SHIA.
    Now though…things have taken a turn for the worse….Walid Jumblatt being courted by Condi and Kissinger…Hezbollah being labeled (once again, ho hum..that’s what you get for BEATING Israel) as the worst threat to Lebanon’s internal security, wha? THEY liberated us from a VERY, VERY violent oppression by the 51st US state. And they did it without bombing school buses. Say wha?
    My thinking is that this was the plan Ms. Helena all along. Do you really think a pull out is going to make matters better? Come on now honey….I’ve got some land in the Sheb’a if you are interested.
    I do love your blog though…at least it tries to be honest. Hard to do nowdays.

  8. I wonder whether the next political “watershed event” coming in Iraq won’t be Saddam’s trial and I bet it would be put on stage just in time to influence the US elections (that is if the events don’t turn to the worse earlier, as one could fear).
    Personnally, I don’t think that the actual US government will ever withdraw from Iraq. I think that
    1) Their goal is to keep permanent bases in Iraq, in order to control the region strategically.
    2) They will try to retreat in permanent bases in the desert.
    3) They think it will be possible to withdraw some troops and keep the casualties (of US troops) at a much lower level, one acceptable for the US, if they don’t mingle in the conflicts between Iraqi.
    4) Then comes Saddam’s trial just in time for the elections which they hope to win again.
    That is their best scenario, the one they hope to implement.. However they may not be able to implement it, as Helena writes. The violence may spiral in Iraq cities, which will put a bad face on the way they managed the Iraq war. The US citizen will finally question the decision made to invade Iraq and ask for a withdrawal. Let’s hope that this time the Rep will loose part of their political power, enough to get a change in Iraq, aka a withdrawal. This would be a first step, but only a first step, since now that the US is in Iraq, it will be difficult to get a total withdrawal.

  10. “I wonder how many millions dead the target planners are predicting?”
    Frank, thanks for ruining my day as well. All this talk about the dangers of letting nuclear weapons get into the hands of madmen, and who are the only people in the world today actively making plans to attack another country with nuclear weapons?

  11. Frank,
    It doesn’t seem that one can be too pessimistic about the Bush administration. For someone who keeps talking about saving the Middle East, Bush doesn’t seem very familiar with the region. I don’t think he displayed much interest in foreign affairs while governor.
    I was surprised Hersh passed Patrick Clawson off as an “Iran expert”. During the 1990’s Clawson work for WINEP looking for justifications for the genocidal sanctions against Iraq. I suppose at that time he was an “Iraq sanctions” expert. Maybe tommorrow he will become a “Syria regime-change” expert.

  13. I wouldn’t read so much into a military contingency plan. They’ve got bunker-busting nukes, so of course they’re going to present the president with an option to use them. But crossing the nuclear line would shock the political center even in the U.S. The backlash might even cancel out the popularity boost a president would otherwise expect from any military action.

  15. David
    I do wish the article read like a contingency plan.
    The author of the article is too reputable to allow himself to be used just to scare the Iranians.
    I suspect that serious consideration is being given to the use of Nuclear Weapons against hardened targets in Iran.
    What you get from other websites is the list of the 400 likely targets and quite a few are in cities.
    I wonder if the senior officers who are getting worried are the ones who have read the debate over the firebombing of Dresden and whether the Chief of Bomber Command should have been tried for a war crime.

  16. “crossing the nuclear line would shock the political center even in the U.S.”
    What political center?

  17. That man was Arthur Harris, an ex-Rhodesian who ran Churchill’s bombing campaign in Iraq before going on to the diabolical and useless area-bombing of Germany. He was a true monster of the 20th century, right up there with the worst of them.

  18. “…leaving with honour demands that the people who worked with the coalition in good faith are offered passage out for themselves and their families…”
    The terms honour and good faith cannot properly be associated with those who collaborate in the violent foreign invasion, domination, deconstruction, and attempted transformation of their country into a compliant client.
    The U.S. certainly owes reparations to the Iraqi people (and they will be selling snow cones in hell before we see that happen). Let the collaborators who assisted in the destruction of the Iraq slink out of the country like the hyenas they are.

  19. Hizbollah does the Lebanese no favors by making all Lebanon hostage to its policies…foreign policy, internal security and border patrol is best left to the national government and not outsourced to a private militia with an agenda fashioned in Teheran.

  20. Hersh adds to the mountain of proof of AIPAC/Israel undue influence over US policy.
    AIPAC and its fellow travelers in the US do not “control” our foreign policy for the Near East. If they did, AIPAC would have pushed the “send bombs and US troops to die” button long ago. “Control” is a semantic red-herring. When “influence” becomes all-pervasive it is the equivalent of control.
    AIPAC and its fellow travelers, as documented in the acclaimed Mearsheimer-Walt study of the power of influence of the Israel Lobby and its multitude of government-insiders, exert enormous influence – even decisive at times – over the internal processes in Congress and the Executive by which key decisions are made and implemented. This is common knowledge. And this is the story behind the story of the rant to attack peaceful Iran.(If you don’t think “peaceful” is right, tell me how many countries Iran attacked in the last 100 years. No, sorry, Lebanon is wrong – that was Israel on the attack which ultimately cost hundreds of US Marine deaths).
    AIPAC and Israel’s drive to sacrifice more US lives, treasure and security to advance Israel’s (and only Israel’s) agenda for what may be bluntly regarded as “a Jewish-dominated but not terribly democratic Near East” is in high gear. The usual collection of AIPAC-sympathetic think tank suits, columnists, bloggers, and blog commentators are working overtime to create a public atmosphere that transforms the insanity of an aggression against Iraq into “business as usual”. And for those of you who think “Jewish-dominated” is out of school, do you argue that AIPAC/Israel are religiously neutral in their politics or that AIPAC/Israel would promote an Arab/Islamic dominated Near East? Make your case, then!
    In this yet another revealing posting by Helena Cobban, we see the hand of AIPAC/Israel rallying on for the expenditure of US blood/treasure/security for Israeli control of the Middle East, i.e.:
    (1) Helena: “Ever since I first arrived in Washington DC in 1982, there have been ardently pro-Israel lobbyists and alleged “experts” arguing that Iran (and also, in those days, Iraq) was “two to five years” away from having nuclear weapons…”
    (2) Hersh quotes one high-ranking diplomat in Vienna as saying: “This is much more than a nuclear issue….“That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
    (3) “It is evident, however, that there are a lot of people in and around the Bush administration who have been busy talking up the possibility. Sy Hersh has only talked to a few of them. But there are a lot of them out there!” [Ref: Mearsheimer-Walt study of the Israeli Lobby.]
    (4) Helena: “But the trouble is that this kind of completely irresponsible, belligerent, and escalatory talk can itself have many dangerous effects. It might spur Iran into taking risky moves on the grounds of “preemption” or even that old Bush administration standby “prevention” of the US attack.”
    Hence, Helena, your call: “Enough! Stop the war talk! Stop the preparations for war! This is pure madness!”
    Sadly, Helena, the record is clear that “madness” is not the threshold standard to save US lives and treasure as the price for AIPAC/Israeli geo-political profit. The threshold standard – as the Iraq madness has proven – is “Can US money and lives be paid to advance the AIPAC/Israel agenda?”
    The Cold War (and common sense) proved 100% that “Deterrence” is a predictable and reliable policy instrument of peace. Yet, in the context of the reported AIPAC/Israeli drumbeat to attack peaceful Iran, the AIPAC/Israel fellow-travelers on our soil reject deterrence as a policy. The prelude to this rejection is what I call the “Pearl Harbor” postulation, as put forth by WarrenW in this site:
    “It’s just a matter of time before a serious confrontation between the US and Iran becomes reality.”
    “Serious confrontations” are the stuff of serious non-military diplomacy. State department fare. Was Pearl Harbor a “serious confrontation”?
    Yet, the AIPAC/Israel attack agenda echoes in WarrenW’s continuation: “Israel, in particular, cannot afford a strategy of “Deterrence” with regard to nuclear weapons due to its inherent fragility.”
    Hello? Dissonance? I thought the American issue – for us, here, now – was “Can the US benefit from a strategy of deterrence?”. WarrenW equates Israel’s predatory interests in using our blood and treasure with our very obvious interests in NOT using our blood and treasure. Wrong math, Warren.
    I agree, Helena, that to attack Iran is insane – but it is also the core thesis of the exposed AIPAC/Israel extreme influence in our land.
    I thought we paid money for oil, you know that old-fashioned idea of buying it. But, part and parcel of the AIPAC/Israel thesis is that it’s OK to steal oil (or oil revenues), as long as it’s stolen for Israel – like stealing the West Bank lands. Proof that larceny passes the means test to advance Israel is not sui generis to the West Bank and the helpless Palestinians…. just consider WarrenW’s unblushing prescription: “The only long term solution is to deprive these destructive [Middle East] leaders of their oil revenue.” From their own oil, to boot! Somewhat like the long term policy of Israel “depriving” the Palestinians of their own water.
    Hm, ok, get past calling me “anti-semitic” (which motivational accusation you could never prove and would be irrelevant to the AIPAC/ Israel issue in the Iran context anyway) and tell me how attacking Iran is in our 100% American national interest. Get it? 100% American!

  21. “Hizbollah does the Lebanese no favors by making all Lebanon hostage to its policies…foreign policy, internal security and border patrol is best left to the national government and not outsourced to a private militia with an agenda fashioned in Teheran.”
    Huh? And pray tell, how do they do that? Last time I checked, they were pretty much restraining themselves in the face of violent threats fromt he genocidalist Walid Jumblatt…
    Hezbollah must, like all other parties in Lebanon, work within a context of ‘law’ (if you could call the sectarian government and policies that in the first place). If they were imposing their will on citizens don’t you think the bars here would be closed by now? Kind of like Hamas is banning belly dancing in Palestine?
    I think you like the CARTOON version of Hezbollah. No one here is a prisoner of anything except massive goverment corruption and failure to dialogue.
    The Hersh bit was interesting but hey…my friend who works for ARAMCO has been sending me high level reports for nearly a year now that openly discuss an attack on Iran by the US war machine. It isn’t news to me. Nor Iran.
    The only thing that is new about it is that now it is being aired on national TV.

  22. pray tell, who patrols the international border with Israel, the Lebanese Army or Hezbolla’s private militia?…and who decides whether to launch rockets across this border, Lebanon’s Minister of Defense or Sheik Nasrallah?…and is it healthy to let a foreign government (Iran) be the puppetmaster that pulls strings that could have very serious consequences for ALL Lebanese?

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