Both
political parties in Washington seem determined
not to end the US occupation of Iraq until they
are convinced the other party will get blamed
for the consequences. It is charmless political
theater and grotesque public policy. The occupation
cannot end too soon.
President
George W. Bush’s “surge” has not made Iraq safer
for anyone, not by anyone’s numbers. In the first
seven weeks of the escalation, according to Pentagon
statistics available through the Brookings Institution’s
Iraq Index, 116 US and other occupying soldiers
were killed, as opposed to 113 in the seven weeks
beforehand. There were more guerrilla attacks
in April 2007 than in any previous April of the
war, and the dip in such incidents since January
follows a seasonal pattern observable since 2004.
Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen slightly,
from 3,380 in the two months before the “surge”
to 3,090 in the two months afterward. Most of
the drop occurs in the Pentagon’s category of
“sectarian violence,” probably reflecting the
decision of Shi‘i militias linked to Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki’s government to suspend their
activities while US troops intensify theirs.
In every month since January, by the Index’s
estimate, an additional 90,000 Iraqis have been
made refugees by the fighting.
Bush
has reacted to the bad news by trying on the
blame-the-Iraqis sandwich board for size. The
White House styles itself upset by the Maliki
government’s languor in meeting such “benchmarks”
as the adoption of a corporate-friendly oil law
and the partial reversal of the aggressive debaathification
overseen by former US proconsul L. Paul Bremer.
In May, the White House began to hint that it
might allow Congress to treat unmet benchmarks
as reasons to remove “combat brigades” from Baghdad.
The
most powerful Congressional Democrats have long
since decided that blaming the Iraqis is the
best fit for them, since, their Bush-bashing
revelry aside, they still cannot bring themselves
to denounce the premise of the Iraq caper itself.
But, annoyingly, war-weary citizens keep demanding
that the lawmakers act on their loudly proclaimed
anti-Iraq war convictions.
The
Democrats’ first gambit was to cajole and coerce
their Out of Iraq Caucus into voting for a supplemental
military appropriations bill that included a
discretionary timeline for US withdrawal. Their
argument to the skeptical was, in effect, that
providing more money for the war is a more direct
strategy for ending the war than defunding it.
During the heated debate over this circumlocutory
legislation, Democratic enforcer Rep. David Obey
of Wisconsin harangued a Marine mother as an
“idiot liberal” who thought he had a “magic wand
in his pocket,” because she ventured to suggest
the gambit would fail.
Bush,
indeed, vetoed the bill as promised because of
the sort-of timetable. He had called the Democrats’
bluff on their bet about who would be seen as
not “supporting the troops” if extra funds were
not sent their way. The Democrats’ purported
position is that supporting the troops is bringing
them home, and Republicans retorted, as they
had before, that the logical course for those
so convinced would be refusing to pass the supplemental
at all. So the stage was set for the war appropriations
bill to pass without strings the president cannot
pull.
If
the US occupation is to end, regardless of who
sits in the Oval Office, it will be necessary
to have the debate—once and for all—about whether
keeping US soldiers in Iraq can possibly bring
that country closer to peace. The answer is no,
both because occupation breeds resistance and
because the US is backing one side in a civil
war. Very regrettably, however, it appears that
Iraqi ingratitude and incompetence will eventually
be the official explanations for why the US has
no choice but to leave. That deception will be
as perilous for the future of US foreign policy
as the lies told to justify this cataclysm of
a war.
