Should the U.S. Stay in Iraq?

Rolls of Honor

By Paul Findley


A U.S. soldier in Baghdad walks in front of a small group of unemployed men carrying posters of Shi’i religious figures as they protest outside the Coalition Provisional Authority June 9 (AFP Photo/Ahmed Al-Rubaye).

ON MY desk, opened at pages H2046-7, is the March 25, 1969 issue of the Congressional Record. On the 121 pages that follow are the names and hometowns of the 31,379 U.S. military personnel who died in Vietnam during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. I requested publication of the names, because I wanted all Americans, especially my colleagues on Capitol Hill, to recognize the war’s enormous human toll. It was part of my endeavor to bring U.S. troops home without delay.

At the time, I was unaware that several years earlier, Robert McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense, privately concluded that the war could not be won. Despite that assessment, he did nothing to end U.S. participation in combat. To the contrary, he echoed Johnson’s public assurances that a light was discernible “at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam, although the defense secretary actually saw no light at all. McNamara did not disclose his early conviction that the war was unwinnable until he wrote his memoirs years after the war ended.

After Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson, the new president rejected calls for an immediate pullout of U.S. troops. Instead he announced Vietnamization, a policy of gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces as recruits from South Vietnam became available to fill the ranks. It was Nixon’s way of getting troops home “with honor.” But combat continued at a high level and so did casualties. When Nixon resigned as president six years later, caskets were still being shipped to America.

Both McNamara and Nixon deserve dark entries in history books for letting U.S. troops die in great numbers after the war was considered lost. By the time all U.S. forces left Vietnam, more than 16,000 additional names were added to the 1969 roll of war dead. At the threshold of their careers, these young lives were snuffed out needlessly, a staggering loss to our society that could have been averted by wise and courageous leadership.

I mention this grim footnote to history, because President Bush declares he is intent on pursuing the U.S.-initiated war on Iraq that every realistic observer must now recognize as hopeless. He should know that the U.S. quest for the hearts and minds of Iraqis, already barely discernable, disappeared completely as soon as the pictures of U.S. barbaric prison torture came into focus. The photographs fueled new anti-American outrage worldwide. In Cairo, it sent Sahar Sobeih, a young professional already upset by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, into deep mourning. Prompted by the deeply felt, sibling-like bond that the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims feel for one another, she lamented: “These are my brothers and sisters.”

Despite what they say in public, President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials must know that the war is now unwinnable. They must summon the wisdom and decency to order an immediate and total end to combat operations. The main mission of our forces from this day forward should be to avoid the death or injury of even one more person, whether American or Iraqi. The most honorable step our military forces can take is to depart completely once a popularly elected Iraqi government is in place.

While a Member of Congress, Abraham Lincoln called war “the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions.” For the sake of Iraq and America, this latest oppression must be lifted. The war on Iraq was wrongly conceived and poorly managed. It will enter history books as a massive folly.

The list of the fallen in Iraq was already too long when the first one died.

Paul Findley, a Member of Congress for 22 years, is the author of They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby and chairman emeritus of the Council for the National Interest. He writes books and articles from his home in Jacksonville, IL and lectures widely on international affairs.

It’s Still a Pig

By John Gee

There is a Jewish story about a man who approaches a rabbi for advice on slaughtering an animal. He is meticulous in his questioning, wanting to know about whether he should use a particular kind of knife, how he could tell whether it was sharp enough, the precise place where he should cut, and so on. The rabbi answers all his questions and then, curious, asks one of his own.

“What animal is it that you intend to slaughter?”

“A pig,” replied the man.

Of course, Jews, like Muslims, are prohibited to eat pork by their religion. The point of this story is that a deed that is wrong remains so, however well it is performed or whatever is said to justify it. That is true of the U.S. war on Iraq. It was not a just and noble mission that has been undermined by clumsy officials, trigger-happy soldiers or brutal prison guards: it was wrong from the start.

The Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq and overthrow its government. The war was never about ending the tyranny of Saddam Hussain: that was a means to a much more ambitious goal. For the neo-conservative ideologues and their co-thinkers who have shaped Bush administration policy, this was meant to be the cornerstone of an attempt to transform the entire region into one in which U.S. and Israeli interests would be guaranteed. The excuses for war came later. Claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links with al-Qaeda were a tool for selling the war to American public opinion and the rest of the world. They were not credible to most people when first advanced and have been totally discredited since. Only those who really wanted to believe could have taken seriously the flimsy evidence produced to support the Bush administration’s claims in the first place.

Most Iraqis were pleased that Saddam Hussain was overthrown; it is the one, unequivocally positive outcome of the conflict. They never believed that the U.S. and its allies went to war for their sake. The 80 percent of the population who are Arab regarded the U.S.-led forces as armies of occupation from the very start; they disagreed only over how to rid their country of them. From this perception, the various militias and resistance groups fighting against the U.S.-led forces have drawn their legitimacy in the eyes of the great majority of Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds.

There is an argument that has been frequently advanced in recent months in support of the U.S. pressing on with its self-appointed mission in Iraq that says that the issues of the veracity of the claims made to justify the war and of whether the war should have been undertaken are no longer important: what matters is that the U.S. should succeed. Otherwise, “terrorism” will be seen to have been victorious in Iraq and “Islamic terrorists” elsewhere will be encouraged.

The problem with that argument is that a pig is still a pig.

Terrorists might indeed draw strength from what they see as an example of a successful anti-U.S. campaign in Iraq. Their gain will be small, however, compared to what they will lose in the long term through a U.S. withdrawal. Violent organizations, terrorist or otherwise, build such legitimacy and support as they have upon popular perceptions of real injustices. Individuals do not give up their lives in the service of such groups because they believe that they are doing evil, but because they think that they are taking a stand for justice. That is what prompts them not only to sacrifice their own lives, but to inflict suffering upon others: many of the most brutal and savage acts in modern history have been committed by people who were convinced that they were acting in a righteous cause. When the injustices perceived by any large number of people are real and grave, the one thing that can be guaranteed is that organizations will rise up to fight against them and individuals will join them for as long as those injustices remain unresolved.

The Bush administration cut a stick for its own back and presented it to al-Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups when it invaded Iraq: here was a cause to rally around; here was a new source of recruits. Cruelty and human rights abuses are the inevitable consequence of one country attempting to impose its will upon another people, and they arouse stronger and stronger opposition inside and outside Iraq with each passing day. That the U.S. carries out its actions while proclaiming that it seeks to promote democracy merely serves to bring that concept into disrepute and to threaten the sincere and dedicated people across the Middle East who have worked courageously for decades to try to make their societies more open, tolerant and respectful of human rights: they are easily misrepresented by enemies as guilty by association.

Whatever the advocates of continuing to the bitter end with the U.S. project in Iraq think they are doing, the result will be more bloodshed and violence—and it will still be a failure.

If it wants to counter terrorism and anti-U.S. feeling, Washington could make a good start by announcing that it is withdrawing unconditionally from Iraq; tell Israel in no uncertain terms that it must leave all the territories it occupied in 1967 and accept the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and banish forever from the corridors of power the ideologues who have played a major role in shaping U.S. policy on the Middle East. This is not giving in to terrorism: it is righting wrongs. The overwhelming majority of people in the Muslim world would recognize that to be so and respond positively.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.