Why are we still debating the wisdom of a timetable to withdraw
from Iraq, when a meeting of Iraqi leaders in Cairo a few days
ago
– attended by Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi’ites, including president
Jalal Talabani himself – called for precisely that?
Why are we still debating the wisdom of a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, when a meeting of Iraqi leaders in Cairo a few days ago – attended by Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi’ites, including president Jalal Talabani himself – called for precisely that?
Maybe they recognize, better than President Bush and Vice President Cheney do, that what their people need now is to be weaned from dependency on foreigners. Iraqis have become security queens, a concept welfare-bashing Republicans should be able to grasp.
Maybe they realize, as Democratic representative and Vietnam vet John Murtha realizes, that Americans have become the catalysts of violence, not safeguardians against it.
Then again, maybe this war is no longer about liberating Iraq, nor about giving its long-tormented citizens democracy, freedom, or even sovereignty. When Bush says we won’t leave until that job is done, maybe he’s really talking about something else: the war on terror, always his strongest suit.
The tenuous connection between the two wars has gotten hopelessly muddled. When Afghanistan was shoved aside and Saddam Hussein pressed into service as a stand-in for terror, an enemy that we still haven’t figured out how to fight, Iraq became a front, in both senses of the word. To support a war, people needed a version they could recognize, with borders and a definable goal line to cross for victory. The problem is, this conflict has neither.
It not just mismanagement that keeps pushing the goal line away. Bush’s definition of the war on terror, “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” sounds more and more like a strategy for perpetual surrogate conflict in which Iraq just happened to draw the short global straw.
If we aren’t careful – this may be the unstated fear of Murtha and others – we will come to resemble Palestinian and Israeli extremists, each side needing the other to justify its presence. Peace becomes the common enemy.
And as long as our presence looks permanent – resembling the grasp for military bases and oil the world suspects it to be – there will be no incentive for Iraqis themselves to step forward and fight on their own.
What John Murtha recognized – followed a few days later by the Iraqi leaders in Cairo – is that setting a timetable to withdraw loosens that Gordian knot. It is as integral a part of handing over full sovereignty – if that’s what Bush and the neo-cons really want – as setting timetables for elections.
The thing that is “deeply irresponsible” – to borrow Bush’s description of his critics – is the “dishonest and reprehensible” – to borrow Cheney’s – manipulation of the evidence to assert the existence of pre-war WMD and an al Qaeda connection to Iraq that led to this mess in the first place.
In two weeks, on Dec. 10, we’ll celebrate a grim milestone: our 1,000th day in Iraq, during which only 22 passed without an American fatality. The G.I. death toll has passed 2,100, and that’s not to mention the hundreds of coalition soldiers, and many thousands more Iraqi, dead.
What better time than this Thanksgiving to take stock and make the hard choices.
Two years ago it was possible for the president to swoop into Baghdad unannounced for a turkey dinner with the troops. When that will again be possible is anyone’s guess. But lost in the hubbub of the president’s visit was the death hours earlier of Sgt. Timothy J. Sweet.
Sweet’s parents, Tom and Liz, eventually became so disenchanted with the war that they hung banners with pictures of their son in front of their homes in Bismark, North Dakota and Frederick, Maryland, saying: “George W. Bush sent our son back from Iraq in a body bag.”
Liz Sweet has since joined Gold Star Families for Peace, the organization founded by Cindy Sheehan, and now actively works to end the war as soon as possible so that other sons and daughters don’t return home the same way.
The White House argues that a timetable undercuts the prospects for success, but cannot guarantee that future deaths won’t be in vain.
Murtha’s argument, shared by Iraq’s president, carves out a pragmatic middle ground: that only a timetable can effectively pass the responsibility for defending liberty to the Iraqis themselves. From that point forward, the debate over who has died in vain, or not, shifts to where it should have been all along.
John Yewell is a columnist for the FreeLance and a Hollister resident. E-mail him at [email protected].
