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Don't use the word 'withdrawal'
America's adventure in Iraq has been reduced to short-term patch and mend efforts, to keep the country from unravelling
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:38 April 12, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration by Dwynn Trazo/Gulf News
Can you put up with another commentary on American travails in Iraq in these waning months of the Bush administration? Yawn, yawn. But stay with me here. In testimony last week that lasted eight hours before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the top US commander and the US ambassador in Iraq, respectively, made the brief that all is well that ends well there: Iraq's armed forces are moving forward, levels of violence are down, political reconciliation is right on track, albeit slowly, Al Qaida and other insurgent groups have been, if not altogether decimated, considerably weakened and, well, we're staying the course.
In effect, Petraeus and Crocker repeated what they had said in their appearance before the two committees seven months earlier, in some cases word for word. "Iraq is hard, and reconciliation is hard", Crocker had said in September. In his testimony last Tuesday, he said: "Almost everything about Iraq is hard". Except this time around, both men added a touch of West Point gobbledygook when they spoke of "battlefield geometry" and "political-military calculus".
Asked by committee members what conditions he is looking for to begin substantial US troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer, Army General Petraeus responded - much in the manner of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 who defined pornography as "I'll know it when I see it" - he will know them when he sees them.
Dead-end war
It was frustrating for lawmakers (certainly the Democrats among them) to realise that, after five years of slugging it out in Iraq, after 4,000 American deaths there, and after $3 trillion spent on a dead-end war, not only was there no light light at the end of the tunnel, but that there was little they could do to affect policy in the administration's remaining nine months.
The testimony by America's military commander and ambassador in Iraq was predictably meant to be sombre, but if you've been a hardened, not to mention cynical, observer of the Iraq scene these past five years, you couldn't suppress the odd snicker here and there as you sat watching it all on C-Span with your steno notebook on your lap trying to catch that quotable quote by the top US commander and the top US diplomat in Iraq, with the hecklers in the background hollering in unison, "McCain, you're insane".
John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and his party's presumptive presidential nominee, who wants Americans to stay in Iraq for "the next hundred years", brought it on himself. Again, the senator showed how he couldn't tell the difference between Sunni and Shiite from a hole in the wall.
"Do you still view Al Qaida in Iraq as a major threat?" he asked Petraeus. The witness responded by saying that the group was "not as major a threat as it was".
"Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall?"
Unfortunately for McCain, Senator Joe Lieberman was not this time next to him to whisper in his ear that he got the sects and the factions wrong.
And, yes, according to Petraeus and Crocker, there's a new enemy in Iraq. With Saddam Hussain gone, and with sundry insurgents crossing the fence to fight on the side of the Americans, the new foe is now the "special groups", backed by Iran, who, unchecked, represent "the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq".
Again Iran, playing the villain. "Iran has fuelled the violence in a particularly damaging way," said Petraeus, "through its lethal support to the special groups". The recent fighting in Basra, he added, "highlighted the destructive role Iran has played in funding, training, arming and directing the special groups".
Crocker concurred, saying the "special groups" posed a major threat to Iraqi stability. Even the hapless McCain, whose knowledge of the intricacies of Iraqi politics is, to put it charitably, limited, took up the phrase. "We must press ahead", he asserted, "against the Iranian-backed special groups".
105 mentions
According to Dana Milbank, columnist for the Washington Post, who attended the hearings, Iran got 105 mentions with only 85 for Al Qaida.
So now you know: Next time you read about, say, a roadside bomb that kills American soldiers or Iraqi civilians, don't blame unrepentant Baathist die-hards, brutal Al Qaida warriors or angry insurgents, all of whom are now presumably on the run, but the "special groups", or whatever other anodyne phrase is finally chosen for them.
Pathos aside, what it all amounts to is that America's adventure in Iraq has been reduced to short-term patch and mend efforts to keep the country from unravelling before our eyes. Don't look for a grand strategy there. There is none.
The ideological fixation of the neocons, that cabal of overconfident theoreticians in Bush's administration who were behind the war, simply succeeded in making intransigent unilateralism and pre-emptive military action the hallmark of American foreign policy - with disastrous results.
It will now be up to the next administration of President Barack Obama to sort out this mess and work on restoring the respect and the authority that the US had at one time enjoyed as a world leader. And the new president will do it by talking to ("talking to" as in "consulting with"), instead of shouting supremacist slogans at, other peoples who inhabit this fragile planet of ours.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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