September 22, 2005
Not long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent that the United States was part of the problem,
not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American
military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every
passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There's no
reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be
any less destabilizing than the last.
Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration
helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly
heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created
a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would
devolve in quick-time into today's catastrophic tinderbox: First, there
was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of
force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they
were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the
stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was
creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon
followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush's nearest and
dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those
no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi
"reconstruction" that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the
country. Finally, let's not forget their deepest urge of all, which was
to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of
our planet and not depart.
This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency
that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward
their own "liberation."
It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush
administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few
bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top
officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this
was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered
subjects of the period, the Pentagon's determination to build huge, and
hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time
"enduring camps") in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases,
encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have
never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless
future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their
present plans to "withdraw" or "draw down" our Iraqi presence.
On all the points above, matters simply continue down their hideous path. The bases
are still being built; the looting of Iraq, which never ended, has now
extended in an open-armed way to the Iraqis under our tutelage. Just
this week, Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent
reported that the Iraqi defense ministry is missing more than $1
billion, certainly one of the larger thefts in history, contracted out
in a familiarly no-bid way for arms purchases from Poland and Pakistan.
These arms were, of course, for the new Iraqi military on which the
administration is counting so heavily, and the money is now simply
gone. As for a policy of force, the U.S. military, which has just
conducted an assault on the largely Turkmen city of Tal Afar, causing,
it seems, great damage, is threatening to repeat such operations
(modeled in a modest way on the destruction of Falluja last November)
in urban areas elsewhere. ("'You will see
the same thing [as at Tal Afar] down along the Euphrates Valley to push
back out and restore Iraqi control to the area around Qaim,' Gen.
George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said in an
interview in Baghdad.") This is, of course, the American version of the
infamous Roman Carthaginian solution, meant to bring the Sunni
resistance to an intimidated halt. (Don't count on that.) And in the
process, of course, more Americans died, 12 of them in recent days, sending the total of American dead over the 1,900 levee.
The results can be observed from Baghdad to Basra in the Shiite south
where the Brits are now in some trouble. Juan Cole at his Informed
Comment website (the single must-visit Iraq stop on the Internet)
reported recently on the security situation
("sinking like the Titanic" in his phrase) in Baghdad where whole
neighborhoods seem to have fallen into the hands of insurgents or
Zarqawi followers. We're not talking here about Tal Afar, or Mosul, but
about the Iraqi capital itself which "our" government inside the Green
Zone simply does not control. What more do we need to know about how
desperate the situation is. Should you want a sense of what that
situation feels like up close and personal, check out Baghdad Burning
by Riverbend, the remarkable young woman blogger who has just come back
on-line after a two-month hiatus, a "vacation" daily lacking in
electricity, water, and the other amenities of life in a modern city.
But let's look on the bright side. A year ago, withdrawal was a subject
that simply couldn't be brought up in a serious way in the mainstream
American world. Now, it's a word everyone is bandying about. In the
wake of Katrina, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll,
"52% of people interviewed called for an immediate withdrawal, even if
that means abandoning President Bush's goal of restoring stability to
that country." (A Gallup poll reported that "66 percent of respondents
favored the immediate withdrawal of some or all of the U.S. troops in
Iraq, a 10 percentage point jump in two weeks.") In this, they are far
ahead of the politicians they've elected, whether Democrats or
Republicans.
Below, Michael Schwartz makes the case, both simple and sophisticated,
for withdrawing quickly from Iraq, but more than that for stopping
thinking of ourselves as part of the solution –- a bulwark, for
instance, against an onrushing civil war -- rather than part of the
problem. With the antiwar demonstration in Washington DC this weekend,
this is a moment to consider just what kinds of pressure for what kinds
of solutions we want to bring to bear on this stumbling, if still
utterly recalcitrant administration. Tom
Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense
By Michael Schwartz
That we are in a military quagmire in Iraq has become a fact of life
among Americans of all political persuasions. Though Administration
officials still sometimes speak of troop reductions in early 2006, and
some top military men clearly no longer endorse "staying the course,"
the muted voices of reason within the military and the State Department
still talk in terms of a three-to-five year drawdown of forces followed
by the "sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps
50,000 soldiers," to be housed in the huge permanent bases
the U.S. is continuing to construct and upgrade in Iraq. In addition,
Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force Chief of Staff, recently told New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt that U.S. air power would be flying combat missions inside Iraq "more of less indefinitely."
Many in the anti-war movement, despite the high-intensity moments generated by Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan's demand that President Bush at least meet with her "before another mother's son dies in Iraq,"
also seem increasingly resigned to a long-term military engagement with
Iraq. While most continue to advocate the "immediate withdrawal" of
American troops, such calls are uttered with little sense of hope. In
fact, there appears to be a growing feeling that any form of
"immediate" withdrawal will prove a thoroughly unsatisfactory option,
destined only to intensify the present chaos in Iraq, trigger a civil
war, and/or unleash a round of ethnic violence that could escalate to
levels of near-genocidal mass murder. Instead, ever more critics
of Bush's Iraqi adventure are proposing "phased" withdrawal scenarios
that could keep American troops at the ready for years to prevent the
Iraqi pressure cooker from blowing its top.
Many of these cautious withdrawal scenarios are advocated by staunch opponents of the war. I am thinking, in particular, of Juan Cole, the most widely respected antiwar voice, and Robert Dreyfuss, a thoughtful critic of the war who publishes regularly at the independent website Tompaine.com as well as in the Nation and Mother Jones.
Both have offered forceful warnings against a hasty American
withdrawal, advocating instead that U.S. forces be pulled out in stages
and only as the threat of civil war recedes. Dreyfuss expresses the
thinking of many antiwar activists thusly:
"They worry that if the United States withdraws from
Iraq, the result will be an all-out civil war among three major ethnic
and religious blocs. (It's facile to argue that Iraq is already wracked
by civil war; yes, there is widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war
against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis
and Shiites. But it hasn't reached anything like civil war proportions
yet, and it might: Things could get far, far worse.) Maybe it's too
late for the United States to be able to do anything to prevent the
outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict. But because there is so
much at stake, it's worth a try."
Cole captures the same logic in a phrase: "All it would take would be
for Sunni Arab guerrillas to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Sistani. And,
boom"
And they are right. Black Wednesday,
September 14, with its 12 Baghdad car bombs, killing at least 160
Iraqis, and wounding upward of 600, offered a flash of civil-war-level
violence. Ordinarily, Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence accounts, on average, for
fewer than 100 civilian deaths a week. This was true even during the
car-bomb offensive just after the January elections. If a Black
Wednesday occurred every week, the death toll from such violence might
reach 15,000 per year, and we could start talking about a real civil
war. So things could indeed get much worse.
But where Dreyfuss and Cole are mistaken is in concluding that U.S.
forces can be part of an effort "to prevent the outbreak of such a
catastrophic civil conflict." Despite the plausible logic of this
argument, the U.S. presence doesn't deter, but contributes to, a
thickening civil-war-like atmosphere in Iraq. It is always a dicey
matter to project the present into the future, though that never
stopped anybody from doing so. The future, by definition, is unknown
and so open to the unexpected. Nonetheless, it is far more reasonable,
based on what we now know, to assume that if the U.S. were to leave
Iraq quickly, the level of violence would be reduced, possibly
drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key reasons:
1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;
2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;
3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;
4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.
American Violence in Iraq
In listing the problems faced by Iraqis ("widespread terrorism, a
guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes
between Sunnis and Shiites."), Dreyfuss is succumbing to the reportage
of the mainstream press, which rarely mentions the immense toll that
American forces are taking every day inside Iraq.
In fact, the best estimate is that the occupation has been killing
about 40,000 Iraqi civilians each year. These figures were first
published a year ago in a path-breaking, yet largely neglected, study
published in the British medical journal the Lancet
by a mixed team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Iraqi
universities; but careful vetting of war reports indicates that
something close to these rates seems to have been maintained ever
since. That helps explain why even the distinctly limited numbers
collected by U.S. and Iraqi official sources (when released at all)
almost always report that American (or other) occupation forces account for
at least two-thirds of all civilian deaths in military actions, with an
unknown proportion of the remainder due to the actions of the Iraqi
government, not the resistance.
There are four main ways American forces in Iraq accomplish such mayhem.
First, there are the hundreds of checkpoints around Baghdad and in
other contested cities, sites of numerous violent incidents. Because of
the danger created by the threat of suicide bombers, those guarding the
checkpoints are ordered to fire at suspicious activity. The following
account of the death of Reuters reporter Waleed Khaled, offered by Major-General Rick Lynch
based on an official U.S. Army investigation, makes clear why even the
most savvy Iraqi is risking his or her life approaching a checkpoint:
"Lynch said soldiers reacted when they saw the car
traveling 'forward at a high rate of speed. That particular car looked
like cars that we have seen in the past used as suicide bombs. It
wasn't a new car, it was an older model car... And there were two local
nationals inside the car. Our soldiers took appropriate measures. We
mourn the loss of life of all humans... But our soldiers are trained to
respond in those situations. Put yourself in the place of the soldiers,
knowing that the insurgents, who have been known to use suicide bombs,
suicide car bombs, suicide vests, to attack innocent civilians, will
always have an attack and then respond to that attack when the first
responders come forward. So our soldiers took appropriate action on
that particular case.'"
With some 600 checkpoints in Baghdad alone, and as many as 100 cars
approaching each checkpoint during a non-curfew daylight hour, there
are upwards of 250,000 chances each day for an Iraqi driver to fail to
slow down soon enough, or, distracted, fail to see the checkpoint in
time, or do something to make jumpy soldiers jump. If only one out of
40,000 drivers makes this mistake that still would produce perhaps 6
lethal incidents a day -- in which case about 2,000 Iraqis would meet
Waleed Khaled's fate each year, although without the benefit of news
coverage and a U.S. Army investigation, however perfunctory. (Note
that, at this point, we have just about no way of knowing in any of the
death situations discussed here and below how many Iraqis are dying, so
these are the crudest of figures.)
Second, American troops are constantly patrolling contested areas in
Iraqi cities under instructions to use "overwhelming force" in
firefights with actual or suspected resistance fighters. If they
encounter sustained resistance, the rules of engagement call for
demolishing buildings occupied by snipers, and treating all inhabitants
of such buildings as the enemy. Among the several hundred patrols or
more each day around Iraq, it appears that about one in ten result in
lethal firefights. Even if fewer than half of these firefights produce
a single collateral civilian death, this tiny percentage would yield
perhaps 15 deaths on an average day or close to 5,000 civilian deaths a
year.
A third staple of the occupation is entering houses in search of
suspected insurgents, either because they have been identified by
informants, or as part of house-to-house searches after IED or other
guerrilla attacks. U.S. statistics indicate that no fewer than 75% of
all entered houses do not contain an insurgent, but the army rules of
engagement require that soldiers enter without knocking and by crashing
through doors in order to retain the element of surprise, and thus
prevent either an ambush or an escape by suspects. Lethal force is used
at the first sign of resistance or attempted escape --to preempt
attacks with weapons that suspected insurgents might have hidden
nearby. (The army argues that, while more humane treatment might create
less anger among the tens of thousands of non-resistant families whose
homes are invaded, such restraint would also expose the soldiers to
many more casualties from the occasional resistance fighter. Military philosophy
in this and other settings is to protect the lives of American soldiers
"even if those methods do not always win the hearts and minds of the
Iraqi populace.")
With several hundred such missions undertaken each day, and such
patrols entering as many as a dozen houses on a patrol, American troops
enter something like 2,000 Iraqi homes on an ordinary day. If only one
of every one hundred entries results in violence, and far less than
half end in a dead civilian, these home invasions can still account for
10 or so deaths per day, or another 3,500 per year.
Fourth and finally, we come to American air power. When American
patrols, large or small, encounter violent resistance, their rules of
engagement call for the use of overwhelming fire power to eliminate the
enemy. Where their immediate response fails to destroy the enemy, an
air assault is often ordered, with either gunships or bombers. Air
assaults are also ordered against suspected insurgent "safe houses."
Although they are rarely reported, such air assaults are the most
terrifying and ferocious forms of American violence. Virtually all of
these strikes occur in highly populated areas, sometimes destroying
whole houses, or even whole groups of houses, and (where the
inhabitants haven't fled) they sometimes kill whole families in the
process. The New York Times
recently reported such an attack in the border city of Husaybah, which
"destroyed three houses in an area that has experienced intense
fighting." Unlike most such news items, this one also contained an
Iraqi Interior Ministry report of casualties. Based on local hospital
reports, the Ministry claimed that the air strikes "had killed more
than 40 civilians, mostly members of an extended family who had sought
shelter from the bombings." (American officials, as is their general
practice, said they "knew of no civilian casualties.")
American officials
do concede that they average about "50 close air support and armed
reconnaissance missions every day." These occur at all of the familiar
urban hotspots: Baghdad, Falluja, Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, Samarra, as
well as numerous smaller towns. If only one in five of these missions
produces civilian casualties, and if the average death toll is only
four instead of 40, then 15,000 Iraqi civilians die every year from
U.S. air attacks.
The depressing total of these very rough calculations is over 25,000
civilian deaths each year, more than five times the number caused by
car bombs and other Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. (And remember, we're not
even figuring in major American military campaigns against the
insurgency.) To add to the levels of mayhem, keep in mind that, at any
given moment, the U.S. military keeps perhaps another 12,000-15,000
Iraqis locked in its prisons, holding areas and interrogation centers.
Numbers like this, or even lower versions of the same, explain why in a
country with a population of only 25 million, so many Iraqis see the
Americans as the main source of the daily violence they endure, and why
60% regularly tell even American-sponsored pollsters that they want an
American withdrawal immediately, if not sooner. This also explains why
the primary condition for a cease fire set by the Association of Muslim Scholars
(AMS, the political arm of the Sunni resistance) was an American "troop
pullout from most urban areas and an end to military checkpoints and
raids." AMS leader Isam al-Rawi explained:
"The Americans and British must leave all residential
areas…This is very sensitive for our feelings. When they retreat to
military bases outside the major cities, the Iraqis will no longer be
meeting military tanks and trucks in the streets and highways, and they
will no longer be afraid their homes will be invaded at night."
Iraqi-on-Iraqi Violence
The prospect of a civil war is, of course, horrendous, but the ongoing
American violence is massive enough that it would take several Bloody
Wednesdays every week to match it. This, of course, is a possibility,
but a more reasonable guess would be that, in a trade-off between the
end of U.S. violence and an escalation in the civil war, the result
would actually be a decline in civilian casualties in Iraq.
But a quick U.S. withdrawal would be less likely to produce a civil war
than leaving American troops in place as a barrier against such a
development. The killing and imprisonment policies of the occupation
itself are the main generating and sustaining force for the rising
levels of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. The sooner the occupation ends, the
sooner Iraqi civil violence is likely to begin to subside.
To grasp this point, it is necessary to understand that there are -- broadly speaking -- two tendencies
within the Sunni resistance against the U.S. occupation. While they
share the goal of expelling the Americans, their strategies and tactics
are fundamentally different. One tendency, which many Iraqis designate
the "nationalist resistance," seeks in the short run to expel the
Americans from their local communities by attacking American patrols
and checkpoints with roadside explosives and hit-and-run attacks. An
operation is a success when it ties down American troops and therefore
prevents them from manning checkpoints, marching through neighborhoods,
or conducting house-to-house searches. While their attacks often kill
innocent bystanders, they do not usually purposely target civilians,
and often condemn those who do, calling them terrorists and outlaws.
The other tendency, designated the "jihadists" by many Iraqis, fights
to weaken the resolve of the Americans and of Iraqis who, by their
definition, help the occupation. For the jihadists, an operation is a
success when it inflicts either a huge toll in casualties or scores a
propaganda victory against the occupation or its supporters. Their
tactics are designed to intimidate and demoralize their opposition.
They therefore try to mount spectacular attacks on U.S. forces, the
Iraqi military and police, Iraqi government officials, and also Iraqi
civilians they feel are aiding the Americans, attempting to intimidate
them away from voting in elections, participating in local government,
or joining the police force or the new Iraqi military.
Beyond this immediate terrorist purpose, the leadership of the jihadists, most notably Abu Musab al Zarqawi,
seeks sooner or later to create a mega-state among all Sunni Arabs in
the Middle East. Zarqawi and others of his persuasion believe that
Shiite Muslims are the main barrier to such a state and that, in the
long run, they must be defeated. They therefore focus their terrorist
attacks on the Shia, who, they believe, support the American-installed
Iraqi government (rather than on the Kurds, who support that government
far more avidly than any Shia group). In this way, the jihadist
leadership hopes simultaneously to undermine Shia support for the
American-sponsored government and to weaken the Shia in what they
consider to be a larger, longer term confrontation.
Numerically, the jihadists represent a tiny minority of resistance
fighters in Iraq (certainly no more than 10%). The vast majority
(probably well over 90%) of the 70 or so attacks each day are conducted
by the nationalist resistance. But the jihadists are responsible for
the high-profile car bombings and the spectacular attacks against Shia
mosques and other "soft targets." These account for the vast majority
of all the civilian casualties inflicted by the resistance.
Given this situation, how might a speedy American withdrawal affect the
levels of Iraqi-generated violence? Most obviously, it would eliminate
the presently predominant form of Iraqi violence -- the 65 or so
guerrilla attacks against American forces every day, (though many
guerrilla units might redirect their attention to the Iraqi army,
insofar as it chose to conduct American-type patrols in disputed
neighborhoods). And it would also obviously eliminate the jihadist
attacks against American troops and bases.
But those fearful of civil war worry that the American absence would
remove the main deterrent to terrorist attacks and simply free-up
jihadist resources from anti-American operations to unleash further
mayhem. The full jihadist effort could then be concentrated on
attacking the Shia.
Violence after an American Departure
What this assumption ignores, however, is a simple (though not obvious)
fact: The terrorist offensive against the Shia is largely a consequence
of American brutality in Iraq. Despite Abu Musab al Zarqawi's oft
repeated desire to launch a holy war against the Shia, his success in
doing so is directly linked to a continuing U.S. presence. His primary
appeal in Iraq, after all, rests on the claim that the occupation is
"being aided by their allies from Shia." Moreover, because, he claims,
"the Shia sect has always spearheaded any war against Islam and Muslims
throughout history," he insists that they can never be brought into a
movement to oppose the occupation and therefore have to be treated like
the enemy. It is this appeal that, in Sunni areas, has allowed him to
recruit supporters for his anti-Shia campaign.
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win, the definitive book on suicide terrorism, spoke for virtually all terrorism experts, when he made this very point to the American Conservative magazine,
asserting that every suicide bombing campaign "is driven by the
presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as
their homeland. The [American ] operation in Iraq has stimulated
suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life."
Thus, while Zarqawi is seeking a holy war against the Shia, the real
question -- as Pape puts it -- is whether "anybody listens to him." In
other words, his success depends on his ability to recruit new martyrs
(inside and outside Iraq) to undertake suicide missions. This
recruitment, in turn, depends upon two factors: the level of mayhem the
occupation creates, which generates the anger that creates his
volunteers; and the credibility of his claims that the Shia are allies
of the Americans.
On both accounts, the military occupation of the country, by its very
presence and its actions, continually pours more gasoline on an already
burning fire, and cannot help but continue to do so as long as it
attempts to pacify the resistance. After all, the daily mayhem in
Baghdad and other cities, and the spectacular American assaults on
cities like Falluja and Tal Afar, are broadcast across Iraq and the
entire Muslim world (even if they are often largely ignored in the
American media). These increase support for both the nationalist
guerrillas and the jihadist terrorists.
In addition, under the strain of an exhausted army and a fractured
budget, the Bush administration is seeking to "Iraqify" the occupation
by replacing American troops
with Iraqis. In 2004, after Sunni police and military units melted
under fire or defected to the guerrillas, the U.S. began relying more
heavily on Shia recruits (as well as Kurdish militiamen, or Pesh Merga)
in their battles with the Sunni resistance. The brutality of the
American military plan for pacifying the country, now being enacted by
ever more Shia and Kurdish soldiers, has convinced increasing numbers
of Sunnis that Zarqawi's claims about the Shia are all too correct, and
so has allowed him to recruit increasing numbers of willing martyrs,
both in Iraq and in neighboring countries.
Just before Bloody Wednesday, at Tal Afar, Shia
(as well as Pesh Merga) soldiers were given frontline responsibility
for lethal house-to-house searches, spearheading the wholesale
destruction of individual homes, many with residents still inside, and
whole neighborhoods. It was no surprise, therefore, when, a few days
later, Zarqawi
declared that Bloody Wednesday was the beginning of the "battle to
avenge the Sunni people of Tal Afar," and also the beginning of a "full
scale war on Shiites around Iraq, without mercy." Here again, American
action exacerbated rather than suppressed internal Iraqi friction.
This constant and escalating provocation only swells the reservoir
of willing martyrs and increases the plausibility of Zarqawi's claim
that the sole route to "liberation" involves direct attacks on Shia
citizens.
On the other hand, history indicates that once the provocation of
foreign troops is removed, the reservoir tends to quickly drain.
Terrorism expert Robert Pape reports that, in recent history, it is
almost unknown for suicide bombings to continue after the withdrawal of
the occupying power:
"Many people worry that once a large number of suicide
terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The
history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the
occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the
terrorists, they often stop--and often on a dime."
American withdrawal is therefore the cornerstone of any strategy that
wants to maximize the hope of avoiding civil war. It would, at one and
the same moment, remove the major source of Iraqi civilian deaths --
and remove the primary flash point that leads to the car bombings. It
would certainly mean as well the withdrawal of Shia and Kurdish troops
from Sunni cities -- the key to Zarqawi's ability to convince (some)
Sunnis that the Shia are willing pawns of the occupation and so their
eternal enemies.
The clock is ticking however. With each new American attack, more
Sunnis are convinced that their hope for liberation lies with Zarqawi's
strategy. And with each new terrorist attack, Shia anger -- already at
a high level, given the degrading nature of the American occupation and
two years of American-style "reconstruction" -- is likely to become
ever more focused on the Sunni community that appears to be harboring
the terrorists. Recently there have been growing signs of violent Shia
retaliation. If the terrorist attacks continue unabated, then
increasing numbers of Shia may adopt an attitude complementary to
Zarqawi's -- blaming the entire Sunni community for the terrorist
attacks. If this occurs, Zarqawi will have succeeded in his personal
goal of "dragging them into the arena of sectarian war," and a raging
civil war may truly develop.
Zarqawi's plan will be in danger of collapsing, however, if the U.S. withdraws.
American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq,
awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous
possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may
not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out
clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian
casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil
war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is
likely to get -- for the U.S. and for the Iraqis.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook has written extensively on popular protest and
insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work
on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous sites, including
Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print at
Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.
Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz
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