- Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:50:03 -0800
- From: Agence Global <rights@agenceglobal.com>
-
- The Necessary Withdrawal
- by Juan Cole
-
- The passage by the Iraqi Parliament in late November of the
US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) adds credibility and
urgency to President-elect Obama's pledge to get US troops out of
Iraq by the midpoint of his first term. Bush's costly and illegal
war has been a drain on the economy to the tune of a trillion
dollars if hidden costs are included, a sum likely to triple in
coming decades as the public pays for the care of injured
veterans. The war has left tens of thousands of military personnel
wounded, suffering from brain trauma or dead. The toll on Iraqis
has been monumental. It cannot end too soon.
-
- The general Iraqi hostility to the presence of foreign troops
was apparent in the process whereby the SOFA was enacted. The
fierce debates that it provoked signaled that there are only two
major factions in Iraqi
- politics: those who want the United States out within a couple
of years and those who want the United States out now.
-
- The Washington debate on withdrawal, in contrast, has been
peculiarly removed from reality since the early days of the
presidential campaign.
- Such opponents of withdrawal as John McCain called it an act
of "surrender," a waving of a white flag. (To whom would we have
been
- surrendering?) The US military would have to stay in Iraq
forever, they implied, because it would be too embarrassing to
leave. They demanded "victory" but carefully avoided defining what
they meant by the word. They warned that parts of Iraq, or even
the entire country, would become an Al Qaeda base were the United
States to depart. Even as they spoke, Shiite militias were
systematically cleansing about half the Sunni Arab population from
the capital and a Shiite prime minister was gathering military
power into his hands. The Republican visions of Osama bin Laden
occupying Saddam's palaces were paranoid fantasies.
-
- The Bush administration initially pressed on Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki a SOFA text that all but formally reduced Iraq to a
colony. The United States would control Iraq's air and water,
would arrest and detain Iraqis at will and without the requirement
of due process, would decide unilaterally what was a terrorist
threat within the country and how to deal with it, and would
initiate military action unilaterally. Its troops and private
security contractors would enjoy complete immunity from Iraqi law.
There was no timetable for US withdrawal. A year or two earlier,
an Iraqi government might have had to just go along with it.
-
- Maliki had long argued that he would not need US troops past
2009. Only in March and April 2008 did he prove, however, that he
had won control of the increasingly well-trained and professional
Iraqi military in ways that might allow him greater independence
from the United States. Despite American advice to the contrary,
he moved militarily against his main internal rival, the Shiite
Mahdi Army, in Basra, Amara and Sadr City last spring. With that
success under his belt, the prime minister had gained the
confidence to push back against the Bush/Cheney imperium.
-
- Despite his new role as commander-in-chief of a more confident
Iraqi military, Maliki needs the support of other Shiite notables
and parties to remain in power. His Islamic Dawa Party is
relatively small. He depends on the support of Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, who strongly
opposed any SOFA that infringed on Iraq's sovereignty. Maliki is
also increasingly closely allied with the Islamic Supreme Council
of Iraq, the leading Shiite party in the Iraqi Parliament, which
has close links to Iran. Both ISCI and its patrons in Tehran
wanted to see a timetable established for US troop withdrawals
from Iraq. Not only is Iran threatened by the massive US troop
presence on its borders but the occupation of Muslim countries by
a non-Muslim military is anathema to the Islamic Republic. One of
the grievances Ayatollah Khomeini had voiced as he made the
Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s was that US troops based
in Iran enjoyed immunity from Iranian law.
-
- In the end, by dint of hard bargaining and brinkmanship,
Maliki secured a very different sort of agreement from the
lame-duck Bush. As of January 1, the US military will have to get
permission from Iraqi authorities for military operations.
Off-duty, off-base US troops who commit crimes might theoretically
be liable to prosecution before an Iraqi judge. Civilian security
contractors will be under Iraqi law. US combat troops will
withdraw from all Iraqi cities to bases by the end of June, ending
their unilateral neighborhood patrols. By 2011, they will be out
of the country altogether, and the Iraqi government can advance
the deadline by a simple request. Some US commanders may engage in
foot-dragging in meeting these deadlines, setting the stage for
conflicts between Washington and Baghdad.
- But with Obama and Maliki committed to the withdrawal of US
combat troops, it is clear that Bush's hopes for long-term bases
have been dashed.
-
- Perhaps never before in history has an invader that won a
crushing military victory, and that continued to occupy its prize,
voluntarily accepted such humiliating terms from the vanquished.
It is difficult to discern how Bush's agreement differs from the
"surrender" Democrats were accused of advocating when they put
forward a similar timetable for complete withdrawal.
-
- Even with all these concessions, the agreement only got 54
percent of Parliament's 275 potential votes, barely an absolute
majority, precisely because so many Iraqi political forces found
the idea of formally authorizing the further presence of US
soldiers on Iraqi soil so distasteful. Powerful Shiite
fundamentalist parties such as the Sadr movement and the Fadhila
(Virtue) Party rejected it altogether, and the latter boycotted
the vote. The Sunni Arab representatives held their noses while
mostly voting for it but required that a national referendum be
held on the pact. (It is scheduled for July and is not assured of
passage.) In the aftermath of negotiations, the Shiite clerical
establishment expressed concerns that the agreement infringed too
much on Iraq's sovereignty.
-
- Even though the SOFA allows for an extension of the 2011
deadline by mutual consent, the Obama administration would be
unwise to keep US troops in Iraq beyond it. As the drawdown
proceeds, the smaller numbers left behind will become increasingly
vulnerable to attack, and a plurality of Iraqis clearly still
means them harm. Sistani is increasingly impatient with the
foreign occupation, and an explicit fatwa, or legal ruling, from
him forbidding the continued presence of US soldiers could set 15
million Iraqi Shiites virulently against those remaining.
-
- There are powerful reasons for which the United States should
mount an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. The first and most
important is that the Iraqis want it. In an opinion poll of 2,228
randomly selected Iraqis done last February for the BBC and other
clients by D3 Systems and KA Research,
- 72 percent somewhat or strongly opposed the continued presence
of foreign troops in the country, and nearly 40 percent wanted US
troops out immediately. The proportion of the public that believed
attacks on coalition forces are acceptable stood at 42 percent
last winter.
-
- The US occupation of Iraq has profoundly harmed its image in
the Muslim world, and the only hope of mending relations with Arab
peoples in particular is for a complete US withdrawal. Public
opinion matters because an angry populace becomes a recruitment
pool for violent groups.
- Iraq-inspired terrorism has hit Madrid, London, Amman, Jeddah
and Glasgow, among other cities. Bush's crusade, far from making
the NATO countries and their allies safer, has turned them into
serial targets of angry young men who view the West as genocidal
toward Sunni Muslims.
-
- The potential benefits of a withdrawal outweigh the risks.
Maliki had earlier been unwilling to come to terms with the Sunni
Arabs, knowing that he could always call down US bombs on them if
they defied him. With the prospect of a less robust US role
looming, the prime minister has suddenly discovered the art of
compromise. He acquiesced in the popular referendum on the SOFA
demanded by Sunni parties because he needed the vote for it to
express a cross-sectarian national consensus.
-
- Likewise, the Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," local militias
fostered by the American military, had often expressed a profound
hostility toward the Maliki government, pledging to take it on
after they had finished off "Al Qaeda in Iraq," the radical
fundamentalists who seldom actually called themselves that and
against whom the Awakening Councils had turned. This fall, as part
of the preparations for a reduced US role, the Maliki government
took over the responsibility of paying the salaries of around
50,000 Awakening Council fighters in Baghdad, tying their fate to
that of the prime minister. Maliki wants to decommission most of
them, a move they are resisting. The relationship is not solely
negative, however. Maliki at one point attempted to bring some of
their representatives into his cabinet, and they are likely to
have a place in provincial administration after the upcoming
provincial elections.
-
- Iraq has been embroiled in at least four low-intensity civil
conflicts in recent years. In the south, the Shiite militias and
the new Iraqi security forces have been jockeying for power.
Following Maliki's Basra and Amara campaigns, the Iraqi military
has emerged on top and has forced the militias to stand down, at
least for now. In the center of the country, the Sunni Arab
population fought the US military presence (with the Awakening
Councils' defeat of the radical fundamentalists in Anbar province
and Baghdad, that war has wound down). The Sunni Arab resistance
groups have also been fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi state.
They have, however, lost Baghdad, and those in Anbar seem resigned
to the new situation. Resistance continues in the ethnically mixed
Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces. Finally, behind the
scenes there has been Arab-on-Kurd violence in the north, as the
two ethnic communities struggle for control of cities like
Khanaqin and Kirkuk.
-
- It should be noted that Baghdad was ethnically cleansed of
nearly a million Sunni Arabs in 2006-07 under the nose of US
troops while the troop escalation, or "surge," was being
implemented. Shiite militiamen invaded neighborhoods at night or
sent threatening letters to Sunni heads of households, or killed
one member of a clan as a warning to the others.
- American soldiers were helpless to intervene. This sort of
micro-level political and demographic struggle is likely to
continue for some time in Iraq, but it will unfold whether US
troops are there or not.
-
- The two big remaining security problems -- continued Sunni
Arab resistance to the new order in Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh
provinces, and the Kurdish-Arab wrangling over Kirkuk and other
disputed territories -- can only be resolved politically, not by
military force. The struggles in Iraq, like those in Lebanon since
1975, are kaleidoscopic, characterized by shifting alliances and
serial feuds. The main supporters of the US presence in northern
Iraq are the Kurds. If US troops come into ever greater conflict
with Maliki, could they really afford to fight their best ally,
the Kurdish paramilitary peshmerga? Yet how could they decline to
support the elected prime minister? There is also the danger of
Turkey, Washington's NATO ally, being drawn into a Kurdish-Arab
struggle on Baghdad's side. US troops would be in an impossible
situation if they were expected to intervene militarily in such a
complex struggle.
-
- Barack Obama could help make sure that the troop withdrawal
goes smoothly by engaging in the sort of hands-on, intelligent and
far-seeing diplomacy the previous administration was either
uninterested in or incapable of. He should seek a concrete plan
for the disposition of Kirkuk before the United States loses all
leverage in Iraq. It might be possible, for instance, to partition
the province so that the Kurdish population can join the Kurdistan
Regional Government and the Turkmen and Arabs can have their own
province and remain in Iraq proper. The city of Kirkuk could also
be partitioned or could have a dual role. (The city of Chandigargh
in India is the capital of both Punjab and Haryana provinces,
after all.) The oil wealth of Kirkuk is already divided between
the federal government and the KRG by a formula that gives 17
percent to Kurdistan. A territorial compromise can also be
reached, but high-level and tough diplomacy will be required.
-
- The other historic compromise that still needs to be made is
between the Shiite-dominated government and the Sunni Arabs. Al
Qaeda in Iraq are a rapidly diminishing factor; not only would the
Iraqi Shiites and Kurds not put up with them but the Iraqi Sunni
Arabs have largely rejected them. The idea that Al Qaeda in Iraq
could hope to hold significant territory or use it as a base for
external attacks is a fantasy. Nor would Shiite Iran, secular
Turkey or monarchical Jordan stand for it. The Iraqi Sunnis are
largely Iraqi or Arab nationalists who mainly want to avoid being
marginalized and impoverished in the new Iraq. President Obama, in
conjunction with Iraq's neighbors, should continue to work with
the Iraqi government to find practical means of national
reconciliation.
-
- The United States invaded a country that had not attacked it,
dissolved its army and much of its government, threw it into
chaos, and set in train events that probably have led to the
deaths of as many as a million Iraqis and have left more than 4
million displaced. It is a burned-out hulk of a country, full of
widows and orphans, of the unemployed and the marginalized, still
infested with militias and suffering daily bombings and
assassinations. The United States kicked off an ethno-religious
free-for-all that could still tear the country apart.
-
- Barack Obama bears no responsibility for these policies, but
as president he inherits the responsibility to do everything he
can to allow Iraq to go forward without further calamities and to
repair, through reparations or aid, as much of the damage as
possible. The key question is whether the Obama administration
will have the wisdom and concentration to broker overarching deals
in Iraq proactively as it prepares to depart that country, rather
than being purely reactive.
-
-
- [G2K member] Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of
History at the University of Michigan and author of Engaging the
Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan), forthcoming in March.
-
- Copyright ©2008 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global
Here is one counter-argument, for you to evaluate, arguing against
withdrawal:
- Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:02:02 +0000
- From: Orrin Schwab <orrinschwab@hotmail.com>
-
- Juan Cole makes an impassioned case for the total withdrawal
of American troops. The country is as he says-
-
- "It is a burned-out hulk of a country, full of widows and
orphans, of the unemployed and the marginalized, still infested
with militias and suffering daily bombings and assassinations. The
United States kicked off an ethno-religious free-for-all that
could still tear the country apart."
-
- This is precisely the argument that the Bush administration
and major public policy organizations have made about Iraq. Iraq
is too fragile to leave.
-
- Current political conditions in Iraq are very serious, as the
New York Times reports today: "...The American mantra has been
that Iraq remains “fragile” — to use the words of Ambassador Ryan
C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus. On the political front that
seems especially true. The one source of political unity recently
has been frustration with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who
has been making arrests and using tribes in the provinces to set
up personal power bases. His rivals, conscious of Iraq’s long
history of dictatorship, are crying foul. “Maliki is monopolizing
all the political, security and economic decisions,” said Omar
Abdul Sattar, a Sunni member of Parliament. He listed political
parties that he said were turning against the prime minister,
including a powerful Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council of
Iraq, which is fighting Mr. Maliki’s drive to centralize power in
Baghdad and pushing to give more to the provinces — where the
party has important power bases, particularly in the south. “It’s
simply the story of the transformation from a democratic prime
minister into a dictator,” he said."
-
- Alissa Rubin, Iraq Unsettled by Political Power Plays, NYT,
December 26, 2008, p.1
-
- www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/world/middleeast/26baghdad.html
-
- If Iraq is a burnt out hulk endanger of renewed full scale
sectarian war, then the United States shouldn't leave Iraq, it
should stay.
-
-
- Orrin Schwab
- Aurora, Illinois
-
- And here is another opinion from a distinguished
diplomat-scholar:
-
- Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:20:36 EST
- From: DrDavidelong@cs.com
-
- Juan Cole makes an altogether reasonable and rational argument
for expeditious withdrawal. I totally agree with his overall
theses. But I suppose too many years in diplomatic politics has
made me more cynical than he. Though I certainly hope for peace in
the valleys of the Tirgis and Euphrates once we leave, I would not
bet on it.
-
- Beginning in early 2004, I have often asserted in this forum
my view that the US had lost the ability to influence political
events in Iraq and that only the Iraqis will determine their
political future once we are gone no matter what shape we leave
the country in. I said then and have not changed my mind that the
only reasonable course the US could take was damage control: to
seek the most propitious time for withdrawal, announce to the
Iraqis they had that interim period to pull up their socks and
create a genuine consensus in support of a viable social contract
(or
- three) or else keep on killing each other. Then if the country
did indeed go up in flames, we could pass all the blame on to them
despite the fact that it was we who created the condidtions for
tearing assunder a unition that the British had wrought after WW
I. Certainly the US could stay longer and even keep a porous cap
on the level of violance as it so valiantly has during the
"surge." But it cannot determine what will happen once we leave.
-
- And on that happy note, let me wish everyone kul sana wa inta
tayyib.
-
-
- David Long
-