Time for us to go
It’s taken me a while to reach this point, but I’ve stopped
wrestling with myself: I’m with Congressman John Murtha. It’s time to start
leaving Iraq.
We shouldn’t have attacked Iraq.
Many of us knew that, and argued against the war plan. Once in, though, there
didn’t seem a logical way to leave. How could we abandon the Iraqis?
Frankly, we abandoned them the moment the Senate
irresponsibly gave the Bush warriors the green light. Now, we have to move, as
quickly as we can, to stop the pain.
I was impressed by Murtha’s pull-out stand, to be sure, but
I was still conflicted. My turning point: An NPR interview with retired Lieutenant
General and former National Security Agency director William Odom, aired
December 2 on Morning Edition.
The United States
is “sitting on a powder keg,” said Odom. “By staying in there, we make the
situation worse.”
If we leave, asked NPR’s Steve Inskeep, won’t Iraq
dissolve into chaos?
“You will have chaos no matter if we pull out now or we pull
out eight or 10 years from now,” said Odom.
The war, insisted Odom, was a terrible mistake from the
outset: “From a strategic viewpoint,” he said, “it was not in our interest to
invade. It was in Al Qaeda’s interest for us to invade, because it made Iraq
safe for Al Qaeda. It was in Iran’s interest for us to invade Iraq, because
overthrowing Saddam was something they fought for eight years to do and failed.”
“Once we crossed the boundary,” said Odom, “we were doing
the work of our enemies.”
Al Qaeda is despised by many Iraqis, he said, and if we
leave, it will be “run out of the country.” Kurds, Shiites, and Iranians: all
hate Al Qaeda, said Odom. “The Bathist party detested Al Qaeda until we invaded
and they found them convenient partners in the insurgency.”
“Staying in keeps us in there training these terrorists,
giving them opportunities to attack us,” said Odom. And after they learn, he
said, they can go to other countries and commit terrorist attacks.
There’ll be no democracy in Iraq,
Odom insisted, no matter how long we stay. “That was a misguided goal when we
went in,” he said. “It doesn’t become more sensible because it’s asserted with
more vigor today.”
Instead, he said, Iraq
will have either “a Sunni-Bathist-secular tyranny” or a “Shiite-IslamicRepublic tyranny.”
Odom predicts that if we leave soon, car bombings and other
terrorist tactics will decline, replaced with “militia versus militia” fighting,
“as you’ve seen in Lebanon
and other kinds of places.”
“You’re saying just let it happen?” asked Inskeep.
“We don’t have an option,” said Odom. “That’s going to
happen if we stay another 10 years. We have caused things to move on a
particular track that we cannot reverse.”
“The first rule when you try to get out of a hole,” said
Odom, “is to stop digging. We are digging vigorously.”
Ours will not be a pretty exit. Undoubtedly, as Odom predicts, there is pain and suffering ahead
for Iraqis, as there was under Saddam Hussein. And undoubtedly, 30 years from
now, critics will say that we abandoned the Iraqis, that we could have won the
war, that if we had stayed and fought rather than cut and run, the Iraqis —
and much of the Middle East — would be living in
democracy. Clearly, Odom doesn’t believe that.
But it’s probably moot; we won’t be leaving Iraq.
Not under the Bush administration. Even more depressing than Odom’s interview
is Seymour Hersh’s article in the December 5 New Yorker. Hersh quotes an unnamed Pentagon adviser who says Bush
“is not going to back off,” regardless of pressure from Congress and the
public. “This is bigger than domestic politics,” the source told Hersh.
A former senior administration official “spoke extensively
about the connection between the president’s religious faith and his view of
the war in Iraq,”
wrote Hersh. Bush, said the official, has said that God put him in office to
fight terrorism, and that his re-election was “another manifestation of divine
purpose.”
That is a terrifying delusion. And here’s more: Hersh says
the president will indeed start pulling some US troops out of Iraq:
ground troops. They’ll be replaced by air troops, according to Hersh’s sources
in the Pentagon.
That would reduce the number of American casualties. But it
would increase the number of civilian casualties. And Iraqis would determine
the targets, writes Hersh, leaving the door wide open for warring factions to
call in air strikes not only on insurgents but on one another.
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.
