How withdrawal came in from the cold
Sunday, 12 August 2007
Tom Engelhardt
WITHDRAWAL is now so mainstream. Recently, debate about it led to a sleep-in protest in the Senate and, this week, it's hit the cover of TIME Magazine, of which there's no mainer-stream around. The TIME cover couldn't be more graphic. The word "IRAQ" is in giant type, the "I," "R," and "Q" all black, and a helicopter is carting off a stars-and-stripes "A" to reveal the phrase, "What will happen when we leave." (Mind you, some military blogs now claim that the helicopter in silhouette is actually an old Soviet Mi-24 Hind; if so, maybe the designer had the embattled Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in mind.)
Still, is there anyplace in the news where you can't find the word "withdrawal," or its pals "exit," "pull out," and "leaving" right now? Here are just a few recent headlines featuring the word that has come in from the cold: "Most Americans want Congress to make withdrawal decision, according to poll"; "The Logistics of Exiting Iraq"; "U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a massive undertaking"; "Americans Want Withdrawal, Deadline in Iraq"; "Washington's House Democrats join in calling for Iraq troop withdrawal"; "Withdrawal fallout could lead to chaos"; "Exit strategies"; "Iraq warns against early US withdrawal"; and so on ad infinitum.
Think of that as "progress" -- as in our Baghdad commander General David Petraeus' upcoming mid-September "Progress Report" to Congress. After all, it wasn't so long ago that no one (except obscure sites on the Internet) was talking about withdrawing American forces from Iraq.
Here's the odd thing, though: "Withdrawal," as an idea, has been undergoing a transformation in full public view. In the world of the Washington Consensus and in the mainstream press, it has been edging ever closer to what normally might be thought of as "non-withdrawal" (just as happened in the Vietnam era). In fact, you can search far and wide for reports on "withdrawal" plans that suggest a full-scale American withdrawal from Iraq and, most of the time, find nothing amid the pelting rain of withdrawal words.
As imagined these last months, withdrawal turns out to be a very partial affair that will leave sizeable numbers of American occupation forces in Iraq for a long period. If anything, the latest versions of "withdrawal" have been used as cudgels to beat upon real withdrawal types.
The President, Vice President, top administration officials and spokespeople, and the increasingly gung-ho team of commanders in Iraq -- most of whom haven't, in recent years, been able to deliver on a single prediction, or even pressure the Iraqis into achieving one major administration-set "benchmark" -- have nonetheless managed to take possession of the future. They now claim to know what it holds better than the rest of us and are turning that "knowledge" against any suggestion of genuine withdrawal.
Worst of all, we've already been through this in the Vietnam era, but since no one seems to remember, no lessons are drawn.
In recent months, General David Petraeus, our "surge" commander in Iraq, has popularised a double or triple clock image: ""We're racing against the clock, certainly. We're racing against the Washington clock, the London clock, a variety of other timepieces up there, and we've got to figure out how to speed up the Baghdad clock." In fact, he and his commanders have done just that, resetting the "Baghdad clock" for future time.
There's a history of the future to consider here. In the late 1950s, when nuclear weapons made war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union inconceivable, the Pentagon and associated think-tanks found themselves forced to enter the realm of the future -- and so of fiction -- to "fight" their wars. They began, in strategist Herman Kahn's famous phrase, to "think the unthinkable" and so entered the realm of science fiction, the fantasy scenario, and the war game.
In those decades, possessing the future was of genuine significance to the Pentagon. It led to a culture in which weapons systems were planned out long years, sometimes decades, in advance and so the wars they were to fight had to be imagined as well. Today, Baghdad 2025 is becoming ever more real for the Pentagon as Baghdad 2007 descends into ever greater chaos.
As a corollary, the more the present seems out of control, the stronger the urge to plant a flag in the future. In the case of Iraq, where control is almost completely lacking, we see this in a major way. When General Petraeus first arrived to oversee the surge, he and his commanders spoke cautiously about the future, but as their desperation has grown, their comments have become increasingly bold and their claims to predictive powers have expanded accordingly.
Just the other day, General Walter Gaskins, in charge of U.S. forces in al-Anbar Province, even appropriated a predictive phrase whose dangers are well known. He said: "There's still a lot of work left to do in Al Anbar [Province]. Al Qaeda in Iraq is still trying to make its presence felt, but I believe we have turned the corner." He added that "another couple of years" would nonetheless be needed to get the local Iraqi forces up to speed. "Although we are making progress, I will always caution and always say that you cannot buy, nor can you fast forward experience."
When it comes to withdrawal, however, the military commanders have been doing just that -- "fast-forwarding experience" -- and reporting back to the rest of us on the results. Recently, for instance, Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post reviewed a host of elaborate Iraq war games conducted for the Pentagon, including one which found that "if US combat forces are withdrawn" -- note that those are only the "combat brigades," not all U.S. forces -- Iraq would be partitioned, Sunnis driven from ethnically mixed areas in and around Baghdad into al-Anbar Province, and "Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups."
These days, along with such grim military predictions go hair-raising suggestions about what even a partial U.S. withdrawal under pressure might entail. Here's a typical comment attributed by DeYoung and Ricks to an "officer who has served in Iraq": "[T]here is going to be an outbreak of violence when we leave that makes the [current] instability look like a church picnic."
This is already coin of the realm for an administration which, until well into 2006, refused to admit that major sectarian violence existed in Iraq, no less that the country was headed for civil-war levels of it. That changed in a major way this year. Now, the administration has embraced sectarian violence as the future American critics are hustling it toward and is flogging that future for all it's worth.
Early in July, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker began to issue grim warnings about just such a future, should the U.S. withdraw. As the New York Times reported, "[T]he U.S. ambassador and the Iraqi foreign minister are warning that the departure of American troops could lead to sharply increased violence, the deaths of thousands of people and a regional conflict that could draw in Iraq's neighbors."
Ever since, such predictions have only ramped up. In his July 12 press conference, President Bush quickly picked up on the ambassador's predictions, heightened them further, and wove together many of the themes that would thereafter come out of Iraq as the "advice" of his commanders. He said:
"I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous."
A version of this (lacking the al-Qaeda twist) quickly became part of what passes for common wisdom among experts and pundits in this country -- as in the Michael Duffy story that went with the TIME withdrawal cover. Should we draw-down, no less withdraw, precipitously, the result, suggested Duffy, is likely to be violence at levels impossible to calculate but conceivably just short of genocidal. As Marine Corps commander James Conway put it recently in words similar to the President's, "My concern is if we prematurely move, we're going to be going back."
This mood was caught perfectly in a question nationally syndicated right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt posed to General Petraeus: "Some have warned that a genocide of sorts, or absolute terms, would follow a precipitous withdrawal of coalition forces. Do you agree that that is a possibility.... and a significant one?" To which Petraeus responded, "[O]ne would certainly expect that sectarian violence would resume at a very high level.... That's not to say there's not still some going on right now…"
In the meantime, the Bush administration, its ambassador in Baghdad, and its commanders were hard at work trying to push any full-scale assessment of the President's "surge" plan -- promised for September -- and the plan itself ever further into the future. This was part of a larger campaign for "more time." In press conferences, teleconferences to Washington, briefings for Congress, leaks to the press, and media appearances of all sorts, they appealed for time, time, time. (Nowhere in the media, by the way, have the reporters who benefit from this flood of official and semi-official commentary suggested that it might be part of a concerted propaganda campaign.)
Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who oversees day-to-day operations in Iraq, typically claimed that the September deadline was "too early" for any real assessment of "progress" and suggested November as the date of choice. Under pressure, he half-retracted his comments the next day, assuring Congress that there would indeed be a September Progress Report. He added: "My reference to November was simply suggesting that as we go forward beyond September, we will gain more understanding of trends."
General Petraeus took a similar tack in that Hugh Hewitt interview: "Well, I have always said that we will have a sense by [September] of basically, of how things are going, have we been able to achieve progress on the ground, where have their been shortfalls.... But that's all it is going to be." In essence, the once-definitive September report was already being downgraded to a "snapshot" of an ongoing operation.
While Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace even hinted that U.S. troop numbers in Iraq might rise in the near future, the horizon for the surge plan to end began to be pushed toward summer 2008. Yochi Dreazen and Greg Jaffe reported in the Wall Street Journal ("Gap Widens over Iraq Approach"): "Despite growing calls from lawmakers for drastic change in Iraq, senior U.S. military officials on the ground say they believe the current [surge] strategy should be maintained into next year -- and already have mapped out additional phases for doing so through January." They indicated that this was part of a Bush administration "gamble" -- think campaign -- "that Congress will be unable or unwilling to force a drawdown and that the military will have a free hand to keep the added troops in place well into next year."
There was a drumbeat of commentary by various commanders pushing the plan deeper into the future. Maj. Gen. Richard Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, typically said: "It's going to take through [this] summer, into the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle space [south of Baghdad], and it's going to take me into next spring and summer to generate this sustained security presence." To be continued
(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters).
TomDispatch
WITHDRAWAL is now so mainstream. Recently, debate about it led to a sleep-in protest in the Senate and, this week, it's hit the cover of TIME Magazine, of which there's no mainer-stream around. The TIME cover couldn't be more graphic. The word "IRAQ" is in giant type, the "I," "R," and "Q" all black, and a helicopter is carting off a stars-and-stripes "A" to reveal the phrase, "What will happen when we leave." (Mind you, some military blogs now claim that the helicopter in silhouette is actually an old Soviet Mi-24 Hind; if so, maybe the designer had the embattled Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in mind.)
Still, is there anyplace in the news where you can't find the word "withdrawal," or its pals "exit," "pull out," and "leaving" right now? Here are just a few recent headlines featuring the word that has come in from the cold: "Most Americans want Congress to make withdrawal decision, according to poll"; "The Logistics of Exiting Iraq"; "U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a massive undertaking"; "Americans Want Withdrawal, Deadline in Iraq"; "Washington's House Democrats join in calling for Iraq troop withdrawal"; "Withdrawal fallout could lead to chaos"; "Exit strategies"; "Iraq warns against early US withdrawal"; and so on ad infinitum.
Think of that as "progress" -- as in our Baghdad commander General David Petraeus' upcoming mid-September "Progress Report" to Congress. After all, it wasn't so long ago that no one (except obscure sites on the Internet) was talking about withdrawing American forces from Iraq.
Here's the odd thing, though: "Withdrawal," as an idea, has been undergoing a transformation in full public view. In the world of the Washington Consensus and in the mainstream press, it has been edging ever closer to what normally might be thought of as "non-withdrawal" (just as happened in the Vietnam era). In fact, you can search far and wide for reports on "withdrawal" plans that suggest a full-scale American withdrawal from Iraq and, most of the time, find nothing amid the pelting rain of withdrawal words.
As imagined these last months, withdrawal turns out to be a very partial affair that will leave sizeable numbers of American occupation forces in Iraq for a long period. If anything, the latest versions of "withdrawal" have been used as cudgels to beat upon real withdrawal types.
The President, Vice President, top administration officials and spokespeople, and the increasingly gung-ho team of commanders in Iraq -- most of whom haven't, in recent years, been able to deliver on a single prediction, or even pressure the Iraqis into achieving one major administration-set "benchmark" -- have nonetheless managed to take possession of the future. They now claim to know what it holds better than the rest of us and are turning that "knowledge" against any suggestion of genuine withdrawal.
Worst of all, we've already been through this in the Vietnam era, but since no one seems to remember, no lessons are drawn.
In recent months, General David Petraeus, our "surge" commander in Iraq, has popularised a double or triple clock image: ""We're racing against the clock, certainly. We're racing against the Washington clock, the London clock, a variety of other timepieces up there, and we've got to figure out how to speed up the Baghdad clock." In fact, he and his commanders have done just that, resetting the "Baghdad clock" for future time.
There's a history of the future to consider here. In the late 1950s, when nuclear weapons made war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union inconceivable, the Pentagon and associated think-tanks found themselves forced to enter the realm of the future -- and so of fiction -- to "fight" their wars. They began, in strategist Herman Kahn's famous phrase, to "think the unthinkable" and so entered the realm of science fiction, the fantasy scenario, and the war game.
In those decades, possessing the future was of genuine significance to the Pentagon. It led to a culture in which weapons systems were planned out long years, sometimes decades, in advance and so the wars they were to fight had to be imagined as well. Today, Baghdad 2025 is becoming ever more real for the Pentagon as Baghdad 2007 descends into ever greater chaos.
As a corollary, the more the present seems out of control, the stronger the urge to plant a flag in the future. In the case of Iraq, where control is almost completely lacking, we see this in a major way. When General Petraeus first arrived to oversee the surge, he and his commanders spoke cautiously about the future, but as their desperation has grown, their comments have become increasingly bold and their claims to predictive powers have expanded accordingly.
Just the other day, General Walter Gaskins, in charge of U.S. forces in al-Anbar Province, even appropriated a predictive phrase whose dangers are well known. He said: "There's still a lot of work left to do in Al Anbar [Province]. Al Qaeda in Iraq is still trying to make its presence felt, but I believe we have turned the corner." He added that "another couple of years" would nonetheless be needed to get the local Iraqi forces up to speed. "Although we are making progress, I will always caution and always say that you cannot buy, nor can you fast forward experience."
When it comes to withdrawal, however, the military commanders have been doing just that -- "fast-forwarding experience" -- and reporting back to the rest of us on the results. Recently, for instance, Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post reviewed a host of elaborate Iraq war games conducted for the Pentagon, including one which found that "if US combat forces are withdrawn" -- note that those are only the "combat brigades," not all U.S. forces -- Iraq would be partitioned, Sunnis driven from ethnically mixed areas in and around Baghdad into al-Anbar Province, and "Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups."
These days, along with such grim military predictions go hair-raising suggestions about what even a partial U.S. withdrawal under pressure might entail. Here's a typical comment attributed by DeYoung and Ricks to an "officer who has served in Iraq": "[T]here is going to be an outbreak of violence when we leave that makes the [current] instability look like a church picnic."
This is already coin of the realm for an administration which, until well into 2006, refused to admit that major sectarian violence existed in Iraq, no less that the country was headed for civil-war levels of it. That changed in a major way this year. Now, the administration has embraced sectarian violence as the future American critics are hustling it toward and is flogging that future for all it's worth.
Early in July, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker began to issue grim warnings about just such a future, should the U.S. withdraw. As the New York Times reported, "[T]he U.S. ambassador and the Iraqi foreign minister are warning that the departure of American troops could lead to sharply increased violence, the deaths of thousands of people and a regional conflict that could draw in Iraq's neighbors."
Ever since, such predictions have only ramped up. In his July 12 press conference, President Bush quickly picked up on the ambassador's predictions, heightened them further, and wove together many of the themes that would thereafter come out of Iraq as the "advice" of his commanders. He said:
"I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous."
A version of this (lacking the al-Qaeda twist) quickly became part of what passes for common wisdom among experts and pundits in this country -- as in the Michael Duffy story that went with the TIME withdrawal cover. Should we draw-down, no less withdraw, precipitously, the result, suggested Duffy, is likely to be violence at levels impossible to calculate but conceivably just short of genocidal. As Marine Corps commander James Conway put it recently in words similar to the President's, "My concern is if we prematurely move, we're going to be going back."
This mood was caught perfectly in a question nationally syndicated right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt posed to General Petraeus: "Some have warned that a genocide of sorts, or absolute terms, would follow a precipitous withdrawal of coalition forces. Do you agree that that is a possibility.... and a significant one?" To which Petraeus responded, "[O]ne would certainly expect that sectarian violence would resume at a very high level.... That's not to say there's not still some going on right now…"
In the meantime, the Bush administration, its ambassador in Baghdad, and its commanders were hard at work trying to push any full-scale assessment of the President's "surge" plan -- promised for September -- and the plan itself ever further into the future. This was part of a larger campaign for "more time." In press conferences, teleconferences to Washington, briefings for Congress, leaks to the press, and media appearances of all sorts, they appealed for time, time, time. (Nowhere in the media, by the way, have the reporters who benefit from this flood of official and semi-official commentary suggested that it might be part of a concerted propaganda campaign.)
Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who oversees day-to-day operations in Iraq, typically claimed that the September deadline was "too early" for any real assessment of "progress" and suggested November as the date of choice. Under pressure, he half-retracted his comments the next day, assuring Congress that there would indeed be a September Progress Report. He added: "My reference to November was simply suggesting that as we go forward beyond September, we will gain more understanding of trends."
General Petraeus took a similar tack in that Hugh Hewitt interview: "Well, I have always said that we will have a sense by [September] of basically, of how things are going, have we been able to achieve progress on the ground, where have their been shortfalls.... But that's all it is going to be." In essence, the once-definitive September report was already being downgraded to a "snapshot" of an ongoing operation.
While Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace even hinted that U.S. troop numbers in Iraq might rise in the near future, the horizon for the surge plan to end began to be pushed toward summer 2008. Yochi Dreazen and Greg Jaffe reported in the Wall Street Journal ("Gap Widens over Iraq Approach"): "Despite growing calls from lawmakers for drastic change in Iraq, senior U.S. military officials on the ground say they believe the current [surge] strategy should be maintained into next year -- and already have mapped out additional phases for doing so through January." They indicated that this was part of a Bush administration "gamble" -- think campaign -- "that Congress will be unable or unwilling to force a drawdown and that the military will have a free hand to keep the added troops in place well into next year."
There was a drumbeat of commentary by various commanders pushing the plan deeper into the future. Maj. Gen. Richard Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, typically said: "It's going to take through [this] summer, into the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle space [south of Baghdad], and it's going to take me into next spring and summer to generate this sustained security presence." To be continued
(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters).
TomDispatch