Bring the Troops Home

Bring the Troops Home
By Michael Rothschild

The United States should pull out of Iraq. Already, the United States has lost more than 1,350 soldiers. Already, about 10,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded, at a rate now of almost 1,000 a month.

That is too high a price for us to pay in American blood.

Then there are the Iraqi civilians who have died. According to Iraqbodycount.net, as of January 5, Bush’s war has killed between 15,080 to 17,285 civilians. But that organization compiles statistics only from published reports. According to a study done by public health officials from Johns Hopkins University, the actual total is much higher. Their study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, says at least 100,000 civilians have died, the majority falling victim to U.S. attacks.

Then there is the cost in American dollars. The United States has spent about $160 billion so far on this war, and the yearly price tag is rising toward $100 billion. This is draining our Treasury of much-needed revenue. For instance, the Administration says it can’t afford $300 million more for Pell grantsless than 0.5 percent of what it is spending on this war. Poor students can’t go to college because Bush went off half-cocked.

     The situation in Iraq shows no signs of stabilizing. Quite the contrary. The morbid pace of chaos is increasing. The last six months of 2004 were the deadliest for U.S. troops since Bush launched the war, with 503 U.S. soldiers perishing. And the attacks keep mounting. The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November, Robert Burns of AP reported. In November 2003, by contrast, the number of attacks was 864.

As a result of Bush’s Iraq War, another generation of American soldiers faces the horror of post-traumatic stress disorder. According to The New York Times, more than 100,000 U.S. troops who have served in Iraq are expected to require mental health treatment.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s personnel policies have made things worse, with stop-loss orders forcing soldiers and members of the Reserves and National Guard to stay in Iraq months longer than they were promised. Little wonder, then, that more than 5,000 U.S. troops have deserted. (The top general in the Army Reserve, James R. Helmly, in a memo to the Army chief of staff, said the Reserves are rapidly degenerating into a broken force.)

Meanwhile, the ranks of the insurgents are growing. The resistance is more than 200,000 people, General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq’s intelligence service director, told Agence France-Presse. Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter.

We do not romanticize the insurgents, much less approve of their tactics. We recognize that many of them are hard-core Islamic fundamentalists. But we also recognize that the array of forces does not favor U.S. troops, and that the more brutal the U.S. response, the more the insurgency grows.

All along, Bush and Rumsfeld have low-balled the number of people fighting the U.S. occupation. First, they said there were just a few foreign fighters and Saddam dead-enders. Then they said there were a couple of thousand, which was revised upward to 5,000 and now to 20,000, including part-timers. That is just one-tenth what the Iraqi intelligence director estimates. Our leaders are not leveling with the American people, or with U.S. soldiers and their families.

Bush and Rumsfeld have also suggested that each point along the road was a turning point.

The deaths of Saddam Hussein’s brutal sons, Uday and Qusay, were supposed to be a turning point.

The capture of Saddam himself was supposed to be a turning point.

The transfer of power at the end of June was supposed to be a turning point.

Rousting Muqtada al-Sadr out of Najaf was supposed to be a turning point.

Taking back Fallujah was supposed to be a turning point. (The U.S. military destroyed Fallujah in order to save it.)

Now we are told that the elections are a turning point. But the only turning point will be when the U.S. turns around and leaves.

The United States is an occupying power, and no population likes to be occupied, as even Bush himself has acknowledged. What’s more, the Bush Administration has bungled the occupation from the start. It did not prevent the wholesale looting of Baghdad (Stuff happens, said Rumsfeld). It did not provide electricity and clean water in a timely fashion. It laid off hundreds of thousands of people in the army and other areas of the public sector. Under the direction of Paul Bremer, it privatized the economy to serve U.S. corporations. And U.S. soldiers have leveled thousands of homes and detained more than 10,000 Iraqi men without charges.

Things have gotten so bad some Iraqis are telling reporters that life was better for them under Saddam Hussein. What a sad and telling indictment that is!

Bush says he has liberated the people of Iraq, but the vast majority considers the U.S. presence as an army of occupation, not liberation. Last spring, in a poll of more than 3,000 Iraqis for USA Today, 71 percent said the U.S. soldiers were occupiers and 57 percent said that U.S. troops should leave immediately. Most alarmingly, more than 50 percent said that, in some circumstances, attacks on U.S. troops were justified.

As the British learned in Iraq eight decades ago, and as the French learned in Algeria five decades ago, so the Americans must learn in Iraq that an occupied people will eventually oust the occupiers. The alternative, ultimately, is mass slaughter.

It is time to face facts. The invasion was illegal and foolish in the first place. And the occupation has failed.

Better to grasp that now, and leave, than to stay and get mired all the more. By remaining in Iraq, the United States will end up sacrificing more of its soldiers and more Iraqi civilians in a hopeless cause. At some point, the United States will be forced out. Go now before more blood flows.

In a December Washington Post-ABC News poll, 56 percent of Americans concluded that, given the costs, the war was not worth the price. (The same poll showed that 58 percent of Americans supported keeping the U.S. troops there until civil order is restored, however. And that’s understandable. It’s deeply unsatisfying to see the shambles Bush has made and not try to fix it. But the United States is incapable of fixing it, as more and more Americans will realize over time.)

Up until 1965, 1,864 U.S. soldiers had died in Vietnam. But because LBJ refused to change course, he ended up being responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands more U.S. soldiers and more than a million Vietnamese. How many more U.S. soldiers, how many more Iraqi civilians, must die before Americans insist that U.S. troops come home?

The objections to leaving are not persuasive. First, we are told that if we leave, there may be a civil war in Iraq. But there is essentially a civil war going on right now. And the CIA predicts that by staying in Iraq, the United States may precipitate an all-out civil war. So why should we stay to prevent a civil war when we are in the process of creating one?

Second, we are told that if we leave, we will be helping Al Qaeda. It is very unlikely Al Qaeda will take over Iraq. The Shiites are in the majority, and Al Qaeda is a Sunni-based movement. What’s more, Bush is helping Al Qaeda by staying in Iraq. The pictures of Abu Ghraib and the images of the U.S. leveling of Fallujah run on an endless loop on Arab and Muslim TV around the world. Every time there is a new atrocitylike the U.S. soldier shooting the wounded, unarmed Iraqi in a mosque, or the U.S. bombing of a residential home with a 500-pound bombthis provides additional footage for the next bin Laden video. The occupation is inflaming hatred against the United States among a new generation of Arabs and Muslims. Some of the more violent will join up with Al Qaeda, which is now 18,000 strong, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Third, some people say we have a moral obligation to clean up our mess in Iraq. But there are some messes that the mess-maker is incapable of cleaning up. Iraq is one of them. The pyromaniac does not make a very good firefighter. And Bush is a pyromaniac.

The departure of the United States entails risks, as Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann acknowledged in a piece for The New York Review of Books. A breakup of the country can by no means be ruled out. Although an elected Iraqi government would be in a strong position to ask other countries, especially in the Muslim world, to provide the forces needed by the U.N., it may find those countries unwilling to risk their soldiers’ lives. Conflict over a new constitution could lead to a civil war, or to foreign interventions, say, by Iran helping the Iraqi Shiite clerics, or by Turkey trying to prevent Kurdish secession.

But we believe the United States has neither the right nor the capacity to contribute to a solution. As Hoffmann writes: Preventing a bloody disintegration of Iraq, and preventing a takeover of Iraq by Islamic extremist terrorists if new Iraqi security forces prove to be inadequate, should be left to international diplomacy by the U.N. and regional organizations, as well as to international peacemaking forces provided by them and by individual countries.

The United States never belonged in Iraq. And it does not belong there today. Any hope that it could somehow win in Iraq has long since faded. Bush should therefore set a date for departure in 2005 and stick to it.

The United Nations, in the meantime, has the option of putting together a real multinational peacekeeping force. Other Arab or Muslim nations could also contribute to it. Or the Iraqi people themselves will have to solve their own problems.

But the United States has no role to play. It will do more harm than good by staying.

Bring the troops home.