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Mon, 12 Dec 2005 13:03:27 -0800

[AggressiveProgressives] POV: 10 ways to argue about the war

in iraq

 

 

 

 

> POV: 10 ways to argue about the war in iraq

> ========================================

>

> http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x & pid=41214

> Tomgram:

> Michael Schwartz, Ten Ways to Argue about the War

>

 

 

 

> What a couple of weeks in Iraq (and at home): Withdrawal was

suddenly on everyone's lips, while tragedy and absurdity were piling

up like some vast, serial car wreck of event and emotion. Before a

massed audience of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, our President

announced a new war goal beyond finding weapons of mass destruction,

bringing freedom to Iraqis, or liberating the whole of the Middle

East; something more modest this time -- " complete victory " -- over

whomever. In the meantime, ten Marines died in a trap near Fallujah.

Remember Fallujah? The city we literally destroyed in order to save it

and then didn't quite get around to rebuilding as the Sunni Triangle's

first safe haven from insurgency and terrorism? Now, it's a danger

zone again and still significantly in rubble. In these same weeks, the

use of white phosphorus, a fierce burning agent, back in November 2004

to force rebels in Fallujah out of their defenses suddenly became a

global news story and a scandal (though its use was actually known at

the time); the Europeans began demanding explanations from the Bush

administration for the kidnapping, transport, and secret imprisonment

of suspected terrorists on their territory; a torture

chamber/detention center run by the Interior Ministry but connected to

the militia of the leading Shiite religious party in the Iraqi

government was uncovered by American troops; it was evidently part of

a long known-about " ghost network " of such centers linked to

government and party-sponsored (and possibly U.S. backed or trained)

death squads intent on intimidating or cleansing the Sunni

neighborhoods of Iraq's cities. Ever more American war planes were

reportedly taking to Iraqi skies and more American bombs falling on

Iraq's towns and cities. Saddam reappeared in court, his hair dyed

black, complaining and carrying a Koran like the good religious man he

surely isn't; and it was revealed that, in the process of bringing

freedom to Iraqis, a Pentagon-hired " business intelligence " firm had

done its darnedest to turn a burgeoning Iraqi free press into a

paid-for press. This was done in the struggle to conquer what is known

in the trade as Iraq's " information battlespace. " Not only that, but

the story took us a full, ridiculous spin of the dial back to the

earliest moments of our conquest of Iraq. At that time, administration

officials arrived in Baghdad so filled with hubris that it didn't

occur to them to bring along anyone who knew anything about Iraq, no

less actual translators. In the case of our newspaper caper, clearly a

psyops-for-dummies operation, some of the paid-for stories were

written by American servicemen and then translated into Arabic. These

must have been truly convincing accounts! (Imagine the opposite: Iraqi

soldiers in camps in the U.S. hired to write articles translated into

English to help win the war for American " information battlespace. " )

And believe me, that's only a bit of the week or two that was.

>

> The President spoke of " progress " in Iraq, but who could

possibly believe him at this point? A majority of Americans clearly no

longer do, but a minority -- about 36% according to the polls -- seem

to be hanging in there, though perhaps with difficulty, like worried

Republican Congressman from Georgia, Phil Gingrey. While fretting

about re-election, he was nonetheless quoted in the Washington Post,

saying, " The light is there at the end of the tunnel. People need to

see it. " Again, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. In what

follows, Michael Schwartz takes the arguments that remain for war

supporters and that still can confound antiwar people and answers them

one by one. Tom

>

> Arguing about the War

> The Top Ten Reasons for Staying in (Leaving) Iraq

> By Michael Schwartz

>

> I often receive emails -- pro and con -- about my postings on

the war in Iraq, and I try to respond to any substantive questions or

critiques offered. But when I received an email recently entitled " 10

Questions " in response to a Tomdispatch commentary detailing the

arguments for immediate withdrawal, I must admit my heart sank -- the

questions were familiar, but the answers were complex and I was in no

mood to spend the time needed to respond properly.

>

> After a couple of days, however, I began to warm to the idea of

writing short but pointed responses to these common criticisms of

antiwar positions because, I realized, they are the bread and butter

of daily Iraq discourse in our country. When the war comes up in the

media or in casual conversation, these are the issues that are raised

by those who think we have to " stay the course " -- and among those who

oppose the war, these are the lurking, unspoken questions that haunt

our discussions. So here are my best brief answers to these key issues

in the crucial, ongoing debate over Iraq.

>

> " I read your article on withdrawal of American troops, " my

correspondent began, " and questioned the lack of discussion of the

following… " (His comments are in bold.)

>

> 1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections,

water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear! Water and energy

delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S.

invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies),

highways, and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the

elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual

sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real

choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish

political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary

promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable

for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on

this promise (apparently under pressure from the US). They have also

proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises

about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that

reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shia)

are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shia

Iraqis now are about 70% in favor of U.S. withdrawal.

>

> 2. Nothing was mentioned about Iraqis who want the U.S. to

remain (especially the Kurds and the majority of Iraqi women). Among

the three principal ethno-religious groups in Iraq, the Sunnis (about

a fifth of the population) are almost unanimous in their opposition to

the American presence, while around 70% of the Shia (themselves about

60% of the population) want the U.S. to withdraw. Hence, even before

we consider the Kurds, the majority of Iraqis are in favor of a

full-scale American departure " as soon as possible. " It is true that

the Kurds (about 20% of the population) favor the U.S. remaining.

However, they have their own militias and many of them do not want

significant numbers of American troops in their territory. (The U.S.

presence there is small-scale at the moment.) What they desire is a

U.S. occupation for someone else, not themselves. I think we can

safely say that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of

U.S. troops.

>

> I know of no study indicating that Iraqi women favor the U.S.

presence. Perhaps you are referring to the fact that large numbers of

women in Iraq are upset and angry over the erosion of their rights

since the fall of Saddam. I know some commentators claim that the U.S.

presence is insurance against further erosion of those rights, but

everything I have read indicates that a significant number of Iraqi

women (like all Iraqis) blame the Bush administration for these

policies. After all, the Americans installed in power (and continue to

support) the political forces spearheading anti-woman policies in the

country. Polling data do not indicate that any sizable group of Sunni

or Shia women support a continued U.S. presence.

>

> 3. Nothing was mentioned about the benefits of the U.S. military

gaining valuable experience and knowledge daily. Certainly, the U.S.

gains military and political " experience " from the war, as from any

war, but at the expense of many deaths (2,127) and injuries (at least

15,704) to American soldiers. Beyond these publicly listed casualty

figures lie the endless ways in which the lives of our soldiers are

permanently damaged: On November 26, for example, the New York Times

reported on a recent army study indicating that 17% of all personnel

sent to Iraq have " serious symptoms of depression, anxiety or

post-traumatic stress disorder. " Since about a million American troops

have now seen service in Iraq, approximately 170,000 have gained the

" experience " of having a severe mental problem. Moreover, the war

experience in Iraq has proved so demoralizing to the military that

many of the best soldiers are leaving at the end of their tours,

instead of staying on in active or reserve status. This is undermining

the viability of the military, long term.

> U.S. casualties, of course, have been dwarfed by the damage done

to the Iraqi people. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Iraqi civilians are

dying each year -- and multitudes are injured. We are wrecking the

country's infrastructure.

>

> Certainly there is a better way to gain experience than this.

>

> 4. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of a strong

democracy in the Middle East. We can all agree that a strong democracy

in the Middle East would have huge benefits for Iraq and for its

neighbors as well as for the rest of the world. If I thought that our

actions there were actually helping to bring this about, perhaps I

might also believe that the benefits of an active democracy outweighed

at least some of the many problems we have been creating. But from the

beginning, the talk of democracy was a hollow mantra, just one of a

group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush

administration's desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and

economics. The U.S. government has never actually relinquished

sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

>

> 5. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of oil

reserves. Though the Bush Administration denies it, many observers

agree with you that access to Iraqi oil was a major motivation for the

war. But we need to understand the nature of this motivation. Even

before the invasion, when UN sanctions were still in place against

Saddam Hussein's regime, American oil companies could (and, in many

cases, did) buy Iraqi oil at market price. The issue was never

" access " to Iraqi oil in the sense of simply being able to buy it. The

Bush administration was thinking about other kinds of energy access,

including controlling the heartland of the word's main future oil

supplies and giving American oil companies privileged access to Iraqi

oil reserves. (See, for example, the recent report by the Global

Policy Forum). It's my contention that such privileged " access " for

U.S. oil companies would not actually help the American people. The

oil majors, after all, have a long history of exploiting Americans

hardly less ruthlessly than they exploit the peoples of other

countries, when they can make a larger profit by doing so. (The latest

incident in their long and deplorable record involved the massive

price increases they instituted at American pumps almost immediately

after hurricane Katrina hit.) Moreover, such privileged access would

have deprived the Iraqis of their right to use the oil to their own

benefit -- something they desperately need now that the Saddam Hussein

regime, twelve years of brutal sanctions, and the current war have

gutted the country.

>

> The best approach for us (but not necessarily for the American

oil companies) would be to buy our oil on the open market, put our

research money into conservation and renewable fuels instead of

military adventures, and avoid trying to get " control " of something

that doesn't belong to us.

>

> 6. Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would

like to achieve. I assume that, when you refer to " fundamentalist

Muslims, " you are referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and

those who attacked the World Trade Center, the London tube, and the

Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree with this identification of

the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with all fundamentalist

Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who bombed the

Oklahoma City Federal Building as " fundamentalist Christians " and then

implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all

fundamentalist Christians yearn to achieve.

>

> Second, I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow

withdrawal will allow the terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and

impose a horrible regime on an Iraq, bent on attacking its neighbors

and the United States. A large part of my commentary in favor of

withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I

made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush

administration actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening the

terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the U.S.

stays, the more the Islamic terrorists there are likely to gain

strength; the sooner the U.S. leaves, the more quickly the resistance

will subside, and -- with it -- support for terrorism. The

administration's Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a

nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy.

>

> 7. Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S.

evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5 years).

I think we need to disentangle two different events involving the

(forced) American departure from Southeast Asia. First, there was

Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath

would follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly

deaths there after the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country,

some for the United States. But whatever these figures may have been,

they were dwarfed by the incredible bloodbath that the U.S. created by

being in Vietnam in the first place. Reputable sources suggest that

millions of Vietnamese died (and countless others were permanently

wounded) during the war years. We must conclude, therefore, that in

Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline in the

levels of violence, and -- sometime afterward -- an end to the havoc

and destruction; not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the

United States has had plenty of " credibility " in Vietnam.

>

> Second, there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have

resulted in a million or more deaths. This was also, however, a

complex consequence of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, not a

result of our departure. Cambodia had a stable, neutral government

until the Nixon administration launched massive secret bombings

against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the regime,

and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of the

murderous Khmer Rouge. If the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965

or 1968, that holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.

>

> The situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the U.S.

withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the

violence will subside quickly and that peace and stability in the

region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer the U.S. stays --

further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing

neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is

that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.

>

> 8. Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it

retreats. Don't forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama Bin Laden.

" Cut and Run. " Here we agree. If the U.S. withdraws, this " retreat "

will undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an

administration threatens to use military power to force another

country to submit to its demands (and may also, as after Vietnam, make

Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad to fight

presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important

implications that derive from this observation.

>

> The first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most

crystalline case making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were

much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than now

that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our

military. In fact, the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to

strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically and in the

Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century. (See

my recent article on this at Tomdispatch.) In other words -- from your

point of view -- the longer the Bush administration stays and

flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of

military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.

>

> From my point of view -- and this is the second implication I

want to point out -- the undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the

few good things that has resulted from the war in Iraq. I do not

believe that anything positive is likely to come from American

military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration (and

the Clinton, earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used

military power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be

much better off, I believe, with the multi-polar world that many

Americans advocate (and this administration loathes the very thought

of), in which no single state (including the U.S.) could impose itself

on others without at least the support of a great many others. We

would be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped

spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and

started spending some of that money on things that would actually

improve the welfare of our people.

>

> 9. Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea, and the

former Yugoslavia. Should we get out of those? Where was the pre-war

planning to get out of all those locations. Did Lincoln have a pre-war

plan to leave the South? I agree that some wars, some interventions,

and some occupations can be positive things (without evaluating the

particulars of the examples you offer). That does not mean that all,

or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation, and

destruction of Iraq is neither justified, nor moral.

>

> 10. Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by

fundamentalist Muslims. How do we change their attitudes? This query

rests on two premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration

and was part of the package of lies and intelligence manipulations

that it used to hustle Congress and the American people into war --

the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorists who attacked

the United States on September 11, 2001 had anything in common or any

ties whatsoever. They didn't and the truth is that 9/11, important as

it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any

discussion of the war there -- or at least that was certainly true

until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to

recreate Iraq as the " central theater in the war on terror. "

>

> The second premise is one held by many Americans -- that the

only way to change the attitudes of those who are fighting the U.S.

involves " whipping their ass, " which rests on another commonly held

opinion -- that " these people only understand force. " Attitudes are

never changed in this way. Every serious scholar who studies terrorism

agrees on this essential point: Terrorism arises from the misery that

many people are forced to live in or in close proximity to. It is

misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives from complaints

people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations they

experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and

about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.

>

> The best way to transform such attitudes, built as they are on

hopelessness, would be to take a fraction (a fraction!!) of the money

we are now spending on the war in Iraq and on our military and invest

it in the lives of others. One example: a panel of expert development

economists just delivered a report to the UN saying that for $50

billion annually we could bring the income of the poorest people in

the world up to a level that would largely eradicate the famines and

mass starvation currently spreading from one continent to another.

That project, if enacted, would do more to reduce terrorism than all

the " anti-terrorist " activities of our government, including the

entire official defense budget (about $400 billion a year), the $200

billion for the war in Iraq, and the $80 or so billion for the

Department of Homeland Security. Put another way, if the U.S. withdrew

from Iraq, it could fund an entire program to alleviate global

suffering with but a modest portion of the money it saved, and start

to reduce terrorism instead of increasing it.

>

> Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of

the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University,

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 internet sites, including

Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in

Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include

Radical Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the

Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is

Ms42

 

> Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz

>

>

>

 

 

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