| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"PagCal" |
| Date: |
03 Jan 2005 04:21:10 AM |
| Object: |
It's Time To Leave Iraq |
If there's a counter argument, I'd like to hear it.
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washingtonpost.com
A Way Out of Iraq
By William Raspberry
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A13
Is it time for America to leave Iraq?
It's not a rhetorical question, but one that goes deeply into our
notions of who we are and how we wish to be seen -- militarily,
diplomatically, politically and morally.
I wrote recently (and disapprovingly) of the views of Yaron Brook,
president of the Ayn Rand Institute, who thought America's problem in
Iraq is too much squeamishness -- a moral cowardice that prevents us
from going after insurgents and the Iraqis (including family members)
who give them sanctuary.
One sentence from that column contained this thought of mine:
"Even those of us who thought President Bush made a hideous moral and
military blunder in launching the war are largely sympathetic to the way
he is conducting the aftermath -- not because it is particularly
successful but because we can't think of anything better."
Well, a number of people surveying the wreckage of our Iraq policy think
the better option is simply to leave.
One of the more articulate expressions of that view is an article by
Naomi Klein in the Jan. 10 issue of the Nation magazine. Her point of
departure is the so-called Pottery Barn rule invoked by Secretary of
State Colin Powell in his prewar advice to President Bush: "You break
it, you own it."
Klein acknowledges that we've broken Iraq, but she argues that our
continued presence there doesn't fix anything and only makes it worse.
We don't need to "own" the country, she says, only acknowledge the
breakage, pay for it and leave.
Just leave. It sounds so simple -- so evocative of the advice Vermont
Sen. George Aiken offered another president presiding over a quagmire
called Vietnam: Just declare victory and go home.
Why not now? Politically, it would require a concession -- confession?
-- that the whole thing was a mistake. President Bush seems incapable of
reaching or articulating such a conclusion -- unless forced to do so by
a public outcry reminiscent of the Vietnam era and a diminishing ability
to attract young people into the armed forces. More than 1,300 American
troops have died in this war. What would walking away do to their
families and to military morale?
What would we say to the British, the Australians and the others in the
coalition who have suffered political damage and lost lives in support
of our war? What friend or foe could ever again take seriously an
American commitment? Even Israel might start to doubt our reliability.
What of the moral considerations? Our walking away, with or without a
declaration of victory, would be a death sentence to those Iraqis who
worked with us in furtherance of our announced mission to deliver
democracy to Iraq.
And what, finally, of the "you break it, you own it" imperative (which
Pottery Barn says is not its policy)?
We can argue all day that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant whose defeat and
humiliation should evoke no sympathy from us. But he did have a
functioning country. There was a government in place. People went to
work and to the market and to school in relative safety. Can anyone
really believe that the U.S.-spawned anarchy has left the Iraqi people
better off? We broke it. Do we have the moral right to walk away with
the shards scattered across the floor?
Do these rejoinders demolish the argument for just leaving?
Klein doesn't think so. Our continuing presence, she argues, is a magnet
for violence against the Iraqis, and our plans for elections seem
calculated to spark "the civil war needed to justify an ongoing presence
for US troops."
Our "staying the course" doesn't begin to fix what we broke, but rather
continues the breakage.
Is it time for us to walk away?
A surprising number of readers of this column think it is. And two have
independently come up with a pretext for doing so right away. Walter
Gordon in Delaware and Christina Warren in California both argue for
sending either all or a substantial portion of our Iraq-based troops and
resources to the tsunami-devastated region around the Indian Ocean.
It would get us out of Iraq and, given that the stricken area is largely
Muslim, might go a long way toward defeating the notion that we are
anti-Islam.
willrasp@washpost.com
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| User: "Defendario" |
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| Title: Re: It's Time To Leave Iraq |
03 Jan 2005 06:53:30 PM |
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PagCal wrote:
If there's a counter argument, I'd like to hear it.
---
Me too. :-)
<CRICKETS>
willrasp@washpost.com
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| User: "PagCal" |
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| Title: Re: It's Time To Leave Iraq |
03 Jan 2005 04:25:55 AM |
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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050110&s=klein
lookout by Naomi Klein
You Break It, You Pay For It
[from the January 10, 2005 issue]
So it turns out Pottery Barn doesn't even have a rule that says, "You
break it, you own it." According to a company spokesperson, "in the rare
instance that something is broken in the store, it's written off as a
loss." Yet the nonexistent policy of a store selling $80 corkscrews
continues to wield more influence in the United States than the Geneva
Conventions and the US Army's Law of Land Warfare combined. As Bob
Woodward has noted, Colin Powell invoked "the Pottery Barn rule" before
the invasion, while John Kerry pledged his allegiance to it during the
first presidential debate. And the imaginary rule is still the favored
blunt instrument with which to whack anyone who dares to suggest that
the time has come to withdraw troops from Iraq: Sure the war is a
disaster, the argument goes, but we can't stop now--you break it, you
own it.
Though not invoking the chain store by name, Nicholas Kristof laid out
this argument in a recent New York Times column. "Our mistaken invasion
has left millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be
inhumane to abandon them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some
hope that Iraqis will come to enjoy security and better lives, but if we
pull out we will be condemning Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and
starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children over
the next decade."
Let's start with the idea that the United States is helping to provide
security. On the contrary, the presence of US troops is provoking
violence on a daily basis. The truth is that as long as the troops
remain, the country's entire security apparatus--occupation forces as
well as Iraqi soldiers and police officers--will be exclusively
dedicated to fending off resistance attacks, leaving a security vacuum
when it comes to protecting regular Iraqis. If the troops pulled out,
Iraqis would still face insecurity, but they would be able to devote
their local security resources to regaining control over their cities
and neighborhoods.
As for preventing "anarchy," the US plan to bring elections to Iraq
seems designed to spark a civil war--the civil war needed to justify an
ongoing presence for US troops no matter who wins the elections. It was
always clear that the Shiite majority, which has been calling for
immediate elections for more than a year, was never going to accept any
delay in the election timetable. And it was equally clear that by
destroying Falluja in the name of preparing the city for elections, much
of the Sunni leadership would be forced to call for an election boycott.
When Kristof asserts that US forces should stay in Iraq to save
"hundreds of thousands of children" from starvation, it's hard to
imagine what he has in mind. Hunger in Iraq is not merely the
humanitarian fallout of a war--it is the direct result of the US
decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a country that was
already sickened and weakened by twelve years of sanctions. Paul
Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis,
and his primary accomplishment--for which he was just awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom--was to oversee a "reconstruction" process
that systematically stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to
foreign firms, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 67 percent. And
the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of
industrialized countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its
plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the
Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80 percent,
contingent on Iraq's future governments adhering to a strict
International Monetary Fund austerity program. According to early
drafts, that program includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises"
(read: privatization), a plan that Iraq's Ministry of Industry predicts
will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of
"free-market reforms," the IMF also wants to eliminate the program that
provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food--the only barrier to
starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to
eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organization,
which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a
member--provided it adopts certain "reforms."
So let's be absolutely clear: The United States, having broken Iraq, is
not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the
country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and
Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions,
followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as
possible. This is what famed Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing
before his 1977 assassination by the military junta, described as
"planned misery." And the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the
more misery it will plan.
But if staying in Iraq is not the solution, neither are easy
bumper-sticker calls to pull the troops out and spend the money on
schools and hospitals at home. Yes, the troops must leave, but that can
be only one plank of a credible and moral antiwar platform. What of the
schools and hospitals in Iraq--the ones that were supposed to be fixed
by Bechtel but never were? Too often, antiwar forces have shied away
from speaking about what Americans owe Iraq. Rarely is the word
"compensation" spoken, let alone the more loaded "reparations."
Antiwar forces have also failed to offer concrete support for the
political demands coming out of Iraq. For instance, when the Iraqi
National Assembly forcefully condemned the Paris Club deal for forcing
the Iraqi people to pay Saddam's "odious" debts and robbing them of
their economic sovereignty, the antiwar movement was virtually silent,
save the dogged but undersupported Jubilee Iraq. And while US soldiers
aren't protecting Iraqis from starvation, the food rations certainly
are--so why isn't safeguarding this desperately needed program one of
our central demands?
The failure to develop a credible platform beyond "troops out" may be
one reason the antiwar movement remains stalled, even as opposition to
the war deepens. Because the Pottery Barn rulers do have a point:
Breaking a country should have consequences for the breakers. Owning the
broken country should not be one of them, but how about paying for the
repairs?
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