A Reckoning Deferred

[struggle4progress]

by MERIP
January 20, 2007
Mid East Report

... At first glance, and at second, the domestic politics of the Iraq war are a paradox. On the one hand, the mere fact of Bush's televised recital of yet another "new way forward," like the Iraq Study Group report now resting in the Oval Office's circular file, shows that the war will never again enjoy public support. A scant 36 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll approve of Bush's escalation, and only 40 percent continue to believe the war is worth fighting at all. The Democrats, too, scuttled to rearrange the priorities for their first "100 hours" in control of Congress when they realized their constituents demand rapid attention to Iraq policy above all else.

Yet Bush rolled out the "surge" proposal anyway. Perhaps more perplexingly, most prominent Democrats are still hiding behind the moribund Iraq Study Group's recommendations and even pleas of Congressional impotence in order to avoid acting on the public's clear desire to de-escalate the war without delay. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts stands nearly alone in asserting that troop level increases require Congressional approval. Few senators in either party savor the "surge" -- conservative Christian standard-bearer Sam Brownback of Kansas spoke against it from Baghdad -- but most Democrats appear content to pass a non-binding disavowal of the president's plan. In the House of Representatives, whose members must keep their ears closer to the ground, Democrats are talking about attaching myriad strings to the funding for the troop increase, perhaps as a prelude to bolder stands. Still, only a vocal minority in Congress has wholeheartedly embraced their newfound power of the purse, for fear of being called miserly when baby-faced Marines in Baquba need body armor or, worse, being held accountable for the heightened violence that could very well afflict Iraq and its environs when the US departs at last. In their anxiousness to hang the Iraq albatross exclusively around Bush's neck, the Democrats resemble the president, whose determination not to withdraw before leaving office quite possibly presages the occasional swipe at the next commander-in-chief for failing to persevere until "victory." Partisan rivalry is trumping the bipartisan duty to end a disastrous war ...

So the Democrats, too, figure they can only sound patriotic if they erase the agency of the US in bringing Iraq to its present impasse. Their blame-the-Iraqis conceit is all the more cynical since they are pointedly not doing everything in their power to extricate American soldiers from their Mesopotamian entanglement. Instead, they are issuing meaningless calls for "phased redeployment" of those soldiers in 4-6 months, safe in the knowledge that Bush will not oblige so long as the legislators also promise to "provide our soldiers every resource they need to fight effectively." The Democrats know, as Bush argued, that "failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States," or at least for its long-time, bipartisan "forward-leaning posture" in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, and they are not eager to hasten the reckoning either. There is no escaping the realities that US withdrawal from Iraq would be a retreat under fire; it would further tarnish the Pentagon's desired image of invincibility; it would be seen as a triumph for radical Islamist insurgency; it would "embolden" Iran and Syria in their defiance of US dictates, and possibly inflate Iranian ambitions in the Gulf; it would sacrifice billions of dollars in sunken costs and abandon four handy "enduring bases." The US would pay all these strategic costs without having installed a predictable, pliable partner regime atop what are likely the world's second-largest petroleum reserves. Iraq, indeed, is not Afghanistan ...

Withdrawal does not absolve the United States of its responsibility to Iraq. In the short term, the US owes asylum to the thousands of Iraqis who have worked for the military, the embassy and American contractors, and it owes years of hefty contributions to the international body that the UN should constitute posthaste to care for Iraqi refugees in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. Washington should also exert great diplomatic energy to restrain Iraq's neighbors from meddling in the Iraqi civil war, though it would be naïve to expect none. But, first and foremost, Congress must restrain the White House from all further escalations in the Persian Gulf, and the public must disabuse Congress of the comforting notion that if it blocks the "surge," it can wash its hands of the war itself.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=11901