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Need Iraq Suffer More If We Pull Out?
By Johann Hari
The Independent UK
Monday 27 August 2007
As it bleeds into its fifth year, the Iraq war is excelling only in savagery
and surrealism. We now have an American President publicly citing the similarities
to Vietnam as a reason why the US must not withdraw - and he is merrily quoting
Graham Greene's anti-war masterpiece The Quiet American in his defence. Far
from thinking anything has gone wrong, he declares: "The Iraqi people owe
the American people a great debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America.
They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough
in Iraq."
Meanwhile, the Iraqi psyche is so wrecked by the 7/7 blasting on to their streets
24/7 that my Iraqi friends report mass hysteria gnawing into the survivors.
After a small string of attacks by badgers - you know, the little furry creatures
- in Basra, so many people were convinced this was a new weapon of war that
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer had to announce publicly: "We
can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the
area."
The last excuse the remaining defenders of the war can scrape together is -
yes, but it'll be even worse if we leave. As David Petraeus, the commander of
US forces, says: "If you don't like Darfur, you're going to hate Baghdad
[after a US withdrawal]."
But buried in all the self-serving propaganda about staying the course, there
is a dilemma for those of us genuinely worried about the Iraqi people. What
if a genocide begins to unfold in a broken Iraq after the withdrawal of international
troops? There are harbingers of it already. The jihadi suicide-massacres of
the Yezidis in Northern Iraq last week is only one signal. I have been startled
by how viciously even my democratic, liberal Iraqi friends now talk about the
other side in sweeping, annihilatory language. Almost every institution of the
Iraqi state - the police, army, even the hospitals - are now divided into Shia
and Sunni wings which detest each other. There is a real and hefty risk that
this will metastasise into an attempt to physically eliminate each other.
Just as dark is the risk of the neighbouring countries invading Iraq after
a simple US withdrawal, with the Saudis marching in to defend the Sunnis, the
Iranians invading to protect the Shias, and the Turks invading to prevent the
creation of a separate Kurdistan in the North. This would create a Congo-on-the-Tigris.
But is this a case for keeping the US forces there? A recent, much-discussed-in-DC
article in The New York Times by Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon
and Kenneth Pollack said so. They argued that "the surge" of 21,000
troops into Iraq is finally working, and creating momentum away from sectarian
violence.
If this were true, it would be important - but their own institution's figures
show it is the opposite of the truth. It makes no sense to compare statistics
on violence in Iraq month-to-month, because the violence fluctuates seasonally
(as it does in most cities in the world). For reliable figures, you have to
compare this July to last July.
And what do you find in the Brookings statistics? The number of Iraqi military
personnel and police killed are up 23 per cent. People dying in multiple-fatality
bombings is up 19 per cent. US troop fatalities are up 80 per cent. The size
of the insurgency is up 250 per cent. Attacks on oil and gas pipelines are up
75 per cent. Hours of electricity available per day are down 14 per cent. Far
from creating the space for political compromise among Iraqis, this has led
to Sunnis and secularists marching angrily out of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's
government. This is success? This is momentum?
The US troops cannot be an agent of anything positive in Iraq, after using
chemical weapons in cities, after using torture routinely, after overseeing
the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis. Today, 78 per cent of Iraqis say the US presence
"is doing more harm than good" and that they should leave. This is
hardly surprising: Jeff Englehart, formerly a US soldier in Iraq, said recently:
"The general attitude was: a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi."
But how do they get out without leaving behind something even more hellish?
To grope for a solution, we must first be honest and clear about the Bush administration's
motives.
It is currently trying to force the Iraqi parliament, as its top priority,
to pass an oil law that would hand two-thirds of Iraq's oil fields to their
friends and paymasters in Big Oil. Ordinary Iraqis see this new plan as crude
looting of their wealth, with 63 per cent appalled in a recent poll. Yet the
US is suppressing resistance: they leaned on the Ministry of the Interior to
use Saddam-era laws to ban the oil worker's trade unions, which have been democratically,
peacefully fighting the law.
Only massive public pressure will change this course. So what should we demand
they do? Former presidential candidate George McGovern, who fought heroically
against the Vietnam War, has worked on a detailed way to leave Iraq that doesn't
also leave behind a holocaust. It is mapped out in his book Out of Iraq.
McGovern's plan begins with a simple, stark apology from the US, Britain and
other invaders for the catastrophe we have wrought - the opposite of Bush's
deranged demands for thanks. There must then be a commitment to dismantle all
permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, and to allow Iraqis to own their country's
oil - with royalties paid equally to every citizen, in a regular cheque, like
they do in Alaska.
The US then needs to convene a regional conference, at which it pledges to
pay full-whack for an international stabilisation force to police Iraq, manned
exclusively by Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan.
These countries will need all sorts of financial inducements to send troops.
Tough. Pay them. McGovern calculates that even at top-rate, this would cost
$5.5bn - just 3 per cent of keeping the US forces there for the next two years.
Once the police are fellow-Muslims, the often-murderous insurgents will be much
more isolated. Al-Qa'ida's tiny presence (estimated by US generals to be fewer
than 500 fighters, rendering Bush's claims they will take over the country absurd)
will be even more despised. Only troops like this could have the legitimacy
needed to stop a genocide.
It's not a perfect plan. People will still die in the fall-out. But it is less
lethal than any other option I can see. The present course is too horrific to
maintain. In Baghdad today, people have stopped eating fish from the rivers
Tigris and Euphrates. The reason? So many dead bodies are being dumped there
every day - and being munched by the fish - that Iraqis began to fear they would
contract diseases associated with cannibalism. That's the score-card so far:
to reduce Iraqis from the horror of Saddamism to physically consuming themselves.
Now what was the President saying about gratitude?
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j.hari@independent.co.uk
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