The "Iraqization" Scam
By Anthony Gregory*
April 20, 2004
From: http://www.independent.org/tii/news/040420Gregory.html
In the wake of the embarrassing Shiite uprising and Fallujah
catastrophe, George W. Bush said at his April 13 press conference that
the United States must use “decisive force” in Iraq, and yet he also
maintained his promise to hand over power on June 30, as initially
planned by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing
Council.
This might seem like a bit of a contradiction—with Bush intensifying
his war rhetoric, yet staying committed to the handover plan. There is
no irony, however, because the “handover” plan does not involve the
United States pulling out. About 100,000 U.S. troops will remain in
Iraq after the so-called handover, and the coalition will still assert
its influence from the U.S. embassy.
Those Americans who want the United States to pull out of Iraq
completely—including many who supported the war but see no point in
staying there now—have little to look forward to. With such a large
U.S. military presence in Iraq and with such strong ties to the Iraqi
governing council, Americans will continue to be targets of a swelling
anti-U.S. resentment and violent insurgency. The huge cost to American
taxpayers for maintaining a neo-imperialist satellite in Mesopotamia
will definitely continue. And with the coalition and governing council
not even preparing to have elections before or shortly after the
handover date, the Iraqi people will probably feel as powerless over
the new governing regime as they do now under U.S. occupation and did
under Saddam’s rule.
Thus, the growing solidarity between Shiites and Sunnis in their
opposition to what they see as U.S. hegemony will likely continue, and
the hatred against the United States in the Middle East, which breeds
terrorists, will flourish. Just as the number of Americans who have
died after Bush triumphantly stood in front of the now-famous “Mission
Accomplished” banner exceeds by several times the U.S. death count of
140 before the war “ended,” the number of American fatalities after
the Iraqi handover may make the current death toll seem like a drop in
the bucket.
The Bush Administration has no intention of allowing the kind of Iraqi
self-rule and self-determination invoked by the president in his
speeches over the last year and a half. The fear is that pulling out
may prove that the Iraq experiment was a failure, as the country
descends into chaos and war. But even after Richard Nixon lost more
than twenty thousand troops in his incremental attempts at
“Vietnamization,” the United States eventually pulled out only to see
South Vietnam fall to communism anyway. Some folks, nostalgic for the
Cold War, say that if the United States had pressed on, it could have
defeated the Viet Cong. Few Americans, though, believe that the
sacrifice of another fifty thousand of America’s young would have been
worth victory over the communists in that single arena, considering
that Communist Vietnam ending up posing no real threat to America.
Vietnamization took years and was messy, and “Iraqization”—a term one
might imagine invoked by our verbally inventive president—will also be
far from a quick and clean process. Remembering the body-bags from the
futile last years of Vietnam, few Americans today want to see tens of
thousands of their sons and daughters die in an Iraqization scheme
that will almost certainly fail to free Iraq from the kind of brutal
oppression or chaotic war that constitute the norm, and not the
exception, to life in the Middle East and much of the world.
And yet, President Bush has not lost his resolve to send more troops
to Iraq, his lip service to Iraqi sovereignty notwithstanding. In the
end, short of bringing the troops home, there is little hope in
stopping the carnage in Iraq emerging from a conflict between a
grumbling occupying force of American soldiers, who want to come home,
and a resentful occupied Iraqi population who would likewise prefer to
see their occupiers leave.
As time goes on, and many more Americans continue to die in Iraq for
reasons that increasingly seem unpersuasive to the public, the troops
will come home. The only question that remains is how long this war,
which now only survives by its own inertia, will continue to consume
human lives. The United States can cut its losses now or we can
maintain a war with no clear and just purpose, no victory in sight,
and no realistic chance of reducing terrorism or bringing freedom to
Iraq.
*Anthony Gregory is a policy research intern at The Independent
Institute, in Oakland, Calif.
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