Helena+Cobban,+Just+World+News,+dimensions+of+US+pullout

Helena Cobban, Just World News, June 22, 2005
=US/Iraq: dimensions of the pullback to come=

It is now becoming increasingly clear that the US position in Iraq is, quite literally, unwinnable. (This is the case despite the absence of any defintive statement from the US command authorities regarding what it would be that would actually constitute a US "victory" there.) We therefore all need to pay close attention to the implications and the possible modalities of the US defeat that will be unfolding there over the months and years ahead.

One of the first things to bear in mind is that, whereas the US has shown in the past that it is capable of being a (relatively) generous, gracious, and far-sighted winner, these are qualities that it has notably not shown when faced with defeat. In Cuba, in 1962, the invasion that President Kennedy launched at the Bay of Pigs was repulsed by the island's Cuban defenders-- and the US has consistently, through every single change of administration in Washington ever since, continued to try to punish Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for having done that. In Vietnam, in 1975, the nationalist forces were also able-- after a long and difficult struggle-- to force the last remaining US forces to quit Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in a very humiliating form of disorganized scramble. And for 20 years after that, the US continued to try to punish the Vietnamese people for having inflicted that defeat on them...

I am not saying here that the anti-US forces in Iraq will necessarily be able to inflict that same kind of "decisive" defeat on the US forces there-- though I wouldn't rule that out completely. What I am saying is that if the US is forced to withdraw forces from Iraq in some form of disorder, as now seems extremely likely, then we should expect that withdrawal to be accompanied ("covered") by the US taking some extremely vindictive actions against the country. These would have two aims:

1. to "punish" the Iraqi people for having failed to rally round the American plan for their country, and 2. to "send a message" to everyone else around the world that the cost of challenging US power around the world will still-- even though the US may have been forced to suffer a defeat in Iraq-- continue to be high.

Moreover, if past practice is anything to go by, the US authorities might plan to continue these acts of "punishment"-- as in the case of Cuba or Vietnam-- for many years or even decades after the moment of the defeat itself. For US strategists, such policies are couched in the broad terms of retaining or regaining the "credibility" of the "US strategic posture" in the world.

A lot will depend, of course, on the precise manner in which the US defeat continues to unfold.


 * Will it happen over a timeline of months or of years?
 * Will it be marked by one or more relatively "cataclysmic" events on the ground, or will it be more of a steady erosion of the US position inside the country?
 * Will US strategic planners have the time (and get the orders from above) to plan for the truly massive operation of staging an orderly withdrawal of the scores of thousands of US troops from Iraq, or not?
 * Will the withdrawal--or, in a famous euphemism from the 1980s, the "redployment offshore"-- be negotiated in any way with any Iraqi (or mainly Iraqi) armed movements that will then take their place?
 * Might hawks within the US administration seek to "cover" the withdrawal by launching a further military operation elsewhere, as a way of distracting domestic American opinion from the humiliation of withdrawal from Iraq? (In 1983, remember, the US invaded Grenada precisely as a way to distract US attention from the withdrawal from Lebanon.)
 * Might Washington seek to limit the erosion in its position in Iraq by undertaking a partial withdrawal (concentration) of its forces in a small number of areas like Kurdistan, Baghdad airport, or some portion of the south-- and what would the effects of such an internal concentration of forces be?

Regarding a partial pullback, one option that is not open to the US in Iraq is the "Afghanistan option", whereby the great bulk of the US forces would be pulled back inside the capital city (as opposed to inside the airport), leaving the rest of the country to be ruled by local warlords; and sending out to the other parts of the country only intermittent deployments of US "Special Forces" to carry out punishment operations on a hit-and-run basis.

This is not an option in Iraq because the capital there is actually one of the "hottest" zones for the US troops. In addition, the relationship between the capital and the rest of the country is very different in Iraq than in Afghanistan; and Iraq has a much more developed social-political system than Afghanistan-- one in which, except in Kurdistan, there are no local "warlords" as such to hand over to...

I expect, however, that somewhere in the Pentagon, military planners are already considering some combination of the above three "partial pullback" options? To do so would be, broadly, to follow the strategic precedent established in Vietnam and elsewhere. If Pentagon planners are indeed considering such an option for Iraq, this would require them to continue to support separatist political currents throughout the country…

Pursuing a partial pullback option would not, of course, even start to resolve the many huge political and military challenges facing the US in Iraq. It might, at most, simply buy Washington a little more time before further extremely difficult decisions need to be made. And in the meantime, the additional suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people through application of a policy of, effectively, splitting their country even more definitively into different zones of control, could well be enormous.

Are the people in the Bush administration anywhere near ready yet to consider a total withdrawal from Iraq? I don’t think so. But the deterioration in the American position in Iraq over the past 15 months has already been so rapid that by the end of this year they might indeed be ready to consider this.

Members of the US-based peace movement have to be prepared to participate in the national discussion over these issues with clear, persuasive, and broad-ranging arguments. We have to be able to argue quite clearly that the US must undertake a speedy and total withdrawal of its forces from Iraq-- even though we are also quite clearheaded in our understanding that this withdrawal constitutes a large-scale setback for the US strategic posture as it is currently generally understood by the ruling circles (in both parties) in the United States to be.

A total US withdrawal from Iraq requires not just a thorough rethinking of US strategic goals in the area between western China and the eastern Mediterranean-- but beyond that, it also requires a fundamental re-evaluation of the relationship between the US citizenry and the other peoples of the world. It was, after all, imperial-scale American arrogance that, in blatant disregard of both the available evidence and all international norms, got the US troops into Iraq in the first place. Therefore, if further similar cataclysms are to be avoided in the future, it is this arrogant self-regard that has to be ended. The people best placed to bring this about (though certainly, many others can help) are members of the international peace movement who are also part of the US citizenry.

The months ahead thus form a period of great opportunity for those of us in the US peace movement. But this will also be-- as noted above-- a period of great challenge. Whether the US pullback in Iraq is partial or total, no-one should expect it to be (from the American side) either gracious or smooth. We can definitely expect the present powers-that-be in Washington to attempt to “punish” the forces in Iraq judged to have forced the US into a retreat—even if these attempts are highly destabilizing to the international system, including to global oil markets. Large-scale, extremely serious, Washington-sponsored sabotage of Iraq's already badly battered oil-production facilities—as a way of denying these facilities to nationalist Iraqis for many years to come—cannot be ruled out.

Is there anything that those of us who wish to see a speedy US withdrawal from Iraq can do to prevent Washington from undertaking such vindictive, harmful, and ultimately self-defeating actions? I think there is. Primarily, we must redouble our efforts within the US system to persuade American voters and political leaders of these three key things:

1. that the US troops must withdraw from Iraq both speedily and fully; 2. that it is in everyone's interests, including that of the US, that Washington pursue a fair-minded and generous policy, rather than a policy of mean-spirited "punishment", towards Iraq after the US withdrawal; and 3. that pursuing a policy of unilateralist arrogance in world affairs is dangerous to the true interests of the US citizenry, whereas participating in world affairs on a basis of human equality, and the mutuality of everyone's interests, and the reciprocity of rights and commitments, offers us all a much better and more secure place in the world.

We’ll be having our next congressional elections in the US in November 2006. I think we'll have the opportunity to change the political direction inside the country significantly before then.


 * Posted by Helena at juni 22, 2005 10:33 EM

From: http://justworldnews.org/archives/001307.html**