What About the Iraqis?

Until we understand that we can’t believe^-or love until we stop killing, then the pursuit of disarmament, justice and peace is a melodrama of contradiction and futility. (Philip Berrigan)

George McGovern and William R. Polk have written a 142-page book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (Simon and Schuster Paperback, 2006). The book calls for a withdrawal to be completed over approximately seven months with a subsequent massive reconstruction effort led by Iraqis and largely funded by the United States (at a far cheaper cost than maintaining war and occupation). But staying in Iraq is not an option, and the plan for withdrawal (chapter 5) makes sense only in the historical context of the preceding chapters, “What is Iraq, and Who Are the Iraqis?”, “The Effects on Iraq of the American Invasion and the Occupation,” and “Damage Report: The Impact on America of the Iraq War.”

There is much bitterness against America in Iraq; too many people have lost children, parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends in what they believe to have been an unjust war and a repressive occupation. (Out of Iraq, p. 91)

The 2003 American-British attack was far more destructive than the 1991 invasion by the first Bush administration. “Shock and awe” aptly summarizes its meaning. Some 37,000 air sorties by the U.S. Air Force dropped 13,000 cluster munitions that exploded into two million cluster bombs, wiping out whole areas. At least ten thousand civilians — including about three thousand children — were killed in the first twenty-one days of fighting. The war was not one of surgical strikes but of human suffering and mutilated bodies.

By April 2003 in Mosul, Fallujah, Baghdad and other cities peaceful demonstrators marched for basic demands — food, water, electricity. But fearful, unprepared, and ill-informed American soldiers opened fire on them. Moreover, Iraq had enough angry people, with enough training and with access to weapons and explosives without foreign assistance, to mount a resistance. So the killing of fifteen protesters_. in Fallujah triggered the first serious attack on American forces. That was the beginning of the Iraqi insurgence.

The American response was to fall back on purely military action at nearly the scale of shock and awe. Terror from the air using two-thousand-pound bombs and missiles followed by AC-130 Spectre gunships using depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as Fallujah became a “free-fire” zone. One news report quoted a marine sergeant as saying he saw his colleagues kill thirty civilians at one check-point in a single day. “We’re committing genocide,” he said. More than half the deaths were women and children. (See chapter 3, “Effects on Iraq of the American Invasion and Occupation,” Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, by McGovern and Polk.)

By the end of 2003 Shias joined with Sunnis, and Shia religious leaders privately warned the American authorities that while they appreciated the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an American presence in Iraq of more than a few months was not acceptable to their followers. Hussein al-Shahristani had escaped from prison in 1991 and spent years abroad working against Saddam. When he returned to Iraq after the invasion in 2003 he set up a private charity to help families harmed by the war and called for a national program of social and economic reconstruction administered and implemented by the Iraqi people.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, directed by the American Viceroy, Paul Bremer, was deeply unpopular, especially after the devastating attempt to create a “gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics.” What was left of the Iraqi economy was flattened and manipulated by war profiteers under the slogan of “creative destruction.” The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the laissez-faire shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country instead created 67% unemployment, a crisis that was a major factor in fueling a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. (For a complete analysis of how the “shock and awe” post-invasion reconstruction efforts fueled the resistance of the Iraqis even as they’ve funneled billions of dollars into the pockets of well-connected U.S. companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, see Iraq, Inc: A Profitable Occupation, by Pratap Chatterjee, Seven Stories Press, 2004 and “Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia,” by Naomi Klein, Harper’s Magazine, September 2004, pp. 43-53.)

When the Shia religious leader Sharistani, the leading candidate for Prime Minister after the “American” Constitution of 2004, refused to meet with Bremer and other officials of the deeply unpopular Coalition, he was passed over after the direct intervention of President Bush:

It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq. I don’t expect a yes man. But at least I want someone who will be grateful ... We’ve got to be certain the new PM won’t ask us to leave the day after sovereignty. (Out of Iraq, p. 60)

Then, despite Iraqi opposition to him for his long relationship to the CIA, Bremer chose Iyad al-Allawi, who promised to emphasize “security” for American interests.

By the end of 2004 there was a big jump in attacks in the Sunni-dominated western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, and intelligence reports suggested plans for major uprisings in other Sunni cities such as Baiji, Tikrit, and Mosul. A new acronym entered the military patois, IED, for “improvised explosive device.” These shells proved to be one of the most lethal weapons in the hands of the insurgents. Warfare between insurgents or guerillas and regular troops lowers the moral standards of both. Intimidation of civilian populations by both sides ensues. American soldiers, despite their diverse origins, have little sympathy for or rapport with other people so that Iraqis are “ragheads,” “hajis,” and “sand niggers.” Confrontations with and fear of an increasingly violent people whose language, culture, and politics they do not understand and who hate them for being there is surely a recipe to bring out the worst in our soldiers. A young religion student who had been inducted into the army told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, “Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvees and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They’d keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people’s heads.” Later Herbert’s informant was assigned to Abu Ghraib prison where, he said, the violence could only be described as “sickening ... some inmates were beaten nearly to death.” Among the more than 4,400 American troops who have gone AWOL, at least some must have shared the feelings of this young theology student. (Out of Iraq, p. 83)

As though the physical damage were not enough, the Iraq wars have also made victims of American soldiers, many of whom witnessed people getting killed or wounded. The large numbers of mental and physical disabilities requiring life-time healthcare and disability payments is one of the unseen costs of the Iraqi war. More profoundly, all war is brutalizing and guerilla warfare is particularly degrading. As Martin Luther King, Jr. warned about an earlier war, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.” (Out of Iraq, p. 74)

America did this to Iraq. We divided Iraqis. We set them at war with each other. The least we can do is stop killing them and leave Iraq. (Nir Rosen)

For a detailed report of how American strategy move from “shock and awe” to “divide and conquer” by encouraging sectarian strife and multiple civil wars, see, “Anatomy of A Civil War: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos,” by Nir Rosen, The Boston Review, Nov-Dec 2006, pp. 7-21.

When Moqtada al Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who has benefited from the frustrations and desires of the dispossessed, and his Mandi Army rose up against the Americans twice in 2004, many Sunnis offered enthusiastic support for his rebellion. Moqtada asked the nationalist forces in Iraq to help him pressure the Americans to schedule their withdrawal. He called for the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to cooperate in what he called “the national project for scheduling the withdrawal of the occupation of Iraq.” (Rosen, “Anatomy of A Civil War,” p. 10

Americans pursuing counter-insurgency and asymmetrical warfare had become one more militia, more high tech and lethal, among the many; watching the sectarian and tribal strife occasionally intervening, and in the end, only making things worse. (Rosen, “Anatomy of A Civil War,” p. 8) Following the collapse of Iraqi security forces during the Shia and Sunni uprisings of April 2004, the Pentagon switched to using Iraqi militias against the various insurgencies. Death squads, torture practices, political assassinations, denial of rights to prisoners and indiscriminate destruction of innocent people demonstrate a strong line of continuity connecting El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the U.S.A. Cheney and Rumsfeld called these “complementary forces” in the counter-insurgency war 

The El Salvadoran Option

The-federal overseer of the effort was Steven Casteel, a veteran of Latin America’s dirty wars. While either wholly created or given aid by the Pentagon, the militias are publicly portrayed as an Iraqi initiative. This gives the appearance of Iraqis taking over the fight while giving the United States plausible deniability of any torture, illegal imprisonment, or death squad killings. (For a complete report of the “fractualization” of the sectarian wars, and how the national struggles between sects are being replicated on smaller and smaller levels in other cities, towns and villages, see “Iraq, Militias and Civil War: The Pentagon Is Using Militias in Sectarian Battles,” by A.K. Gupta, Z Magazine, December 2006, pp. 27-34.)

Staying in Iraq is not an option. Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan For Withdrawal Now, by McGovern and Polk, eventually gets around in chapter 5 to presenting a startlingly detailed program for troop withdrawal and Iraqi reconstruction. These ways out of war are also “blueprinted” in the October 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Critics of American withdrawal predict a reign of terror on a vast scale, but the American invasion and occupation has already produced a reign of terror on a vast scale.

Spending on Iraq needs to be directed to a managed exit rebuilding of Iraq, providing basic services, and a stabilization force, all of which may diminish the various insurgencies and terrorist activities more than any present plans. The clearest vehicle comes from the Congressional Progressive Caucus (with whom McGovern and Polk have consulted) in the form of the McGovern Bill, introduced by Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. The bill is often inaccurately described as a cut-off in funds, but in reality it doesn’t end funding for the war; rather it redirects funding for exiting and stabilizing Iraq. Polk describes it as spending $3 to save $97, and argues that the “buck” does not stop with the President, but stops with the constitutionally mandated “power-of-the-purse” in the Congress.

(I will present the McGovern-Polk plan in a forthcoming issue of the CPF newsletter.)

David Graham
Dave is a member of CPF and a Korean War Veteran

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