Barimar soon left America. He left a troubling legacy for the American people. One official filed the following report but found it so grim he decided not to send it. It read:
Week after week and month after month for a long time to come we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare, marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence... It is an extraordinary thing that the... civil administration should have succeeded in such a short time in alienating the whole country
to such an extent(97)...
And so we come to the present (2006). The legitimate freedom fighters and the crazy Fundies and the outraged Evangelicals and the vengeful RAP partisans are all fighting the Megastani Coalition and the hapless ANA. Many still have no water or air conditioning, people are getting blown to bits on both sides, and citizens are still being rounded up and executed by gangs of criminals with no mechanism in place for restraining or punishing them.
Most Americans want Megastan to get out immediately. Most believe Megastani troops provoke more violence
than they prevent,(98) and that the mentality that caused the Megastanis to make so many mistakes was not likely to be able to fix the situation.
By now it seems like every secular, reasonable, moderate leader, and indeed citizen, has been killed or driven out of America, many of them to live in poverty on the streets of Mexico and Canada. It seems there are no good guys left in America. As one despondent woman put it, “One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing, and one-third of us will be
widows.”(99)
The Megastani leadership, which has no stomach for withdrawing in disgrace, continues to make up excuses and tactics as they go along. Things only deteriorate continuously, and there is no reasonable solution on the horizon.
What now?
If we were in this situation, how would we feel? Whom would we blame? What would we want?
William Polk and George McGovern believe that America should set a date and withdraw as soon as possible. The longer we go on, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves and the Iraqi people. As in Vietnam, the question is not whether we will withdraw but when and under what conditions.(100) (Click this last link to read William Polk's plan for ending the war.)
Hopefully we will choose more wisely—and more quickly—than we did in Vietnam.
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Breakdown of Iraqi Responses A majority of Iraqis across the country say they want U.S.-led coalition forces to
leave immediately, according to a new poll conducted by the U.S. State Department.
SOURCE: State Department | The Washington Post - September 27, 2006
Below is an excerpt from Polk’s book, Understanding Iraq, which describes the best way to help the Iraqis take control of their own destiny while minimizing American losses:
“America today has two options in Iraq, stay or leave. ‘Staying the course,’ to use George Bush’s term, is the one his administration has staked out as I write. America is continuing to try to establish security by fighting the insurgents; is continuing to control the oil industry and other major sectors of the Iraqi economy; and is ‘guiding’ most other aspects of government through appointed ‘inspector-generals.’ American corporations continue to dominate the economy. Unemployment remains high because Iraqi businesses cannot compete with cheap imported goods. Then, if the [Iraqi] government acts unacceptably, America (like Britain in the 1930s and 1940s) will probably either replace it or destabilize it so that it cam be manned by ‘friendly’ Iraqis. In this flow of events, trained and equipped by the Americans, the Iraqi army will again assume a power unbalanced by other institutions. Despite or even because of its training, the officer corps will again, as in the 1930s and 1950s, aspire to lead the nation. If it follows the likely pattern, it will rebel against the Americans and their local surrogates; if it does not, Iraqi nationalists, with or without army assistance, will continue to use terrorism because that will be their only available weapon to try to force America to leave.
“At best, ‘staying the course’ can only be a temporary measure as eventually America will have to leave. But during the period it stays, say the next five years, my guess is that another thirty or forty thousand Iraqis will die or be killed while the U.S. armed forces will lose perhaps five thousand dead and twenty thousand seriously wounded. The monetary cost will be hundreds of billions. Consider what the figures mean. Americans were horrified when about thirty-three hundred people were killed in the attack by al-Qaida terrorists on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Iraq has already (at the time of this writing) lost about one hundred thousand during the American invasion and occupation. In absolute terms, that means that virtually every Iraqi has a parent, child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague, or neighbor—or perhaps all of these—among the dead. More than half of the dead were women and children. In relative terms this figure equates to a loss in the very much larger American society of more than a million people...
“In carrying out this policy [“staying the course”] we can be sure of two things: the first is that Iraq will suffer grievously and the society that survives will be wounded, distorted, and far less than now likely to achieve a reasonably free and peaceful future. The second is that domestically American society will be angry, dispirited, and less democratic than today while internationally it will have lost much of the moral force that throughout its history, from the very Declaration of Independence, has been its most valued and most potent asset. In every sense and for both Iraqis and Americans, staying is, as was said of nuclear warfare, simply unacceptable.
“The alternative, leaving Iraq, is not a single policy but presents two quite different varieties of conduct. One is what might be called ‘Vietnamization.’ In Vietnam, America sought to turn the war over [to] the government and army of the South. Neither lasted very long. Since neither existed in post-Saddam Iraq, both a government and an army had to be created to give America the option to effect this policy. As I have written, few observers believe that either could long survive an American withdrawal. The best America might gain, if the process could be drawn out for several years, is a fig leaf to hid defeat; the worst, in a rapid collapse, would be humiliating evacuation, as in Vietnam.
“The better form of ‘getting out,’ the second variety, involves choosing rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed. Thus, initial steps could be merely verbal. America would have first to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses, and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces rather than by an American monopoly. If an American administration could be as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria, when he admitted that the Algerian insurgency had “won” and called for a ‘peace of the brave,’ fighting would quickly die down as it did there and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could elections be meaningful. In this period, Iraq would need a police force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be easier, cheaper, and safer than creating an Iraqi army which in the past destroyed moves toward civil society and probably would do so again, probably indeed paving the way for another Saddam Husain.
“A variety of ‘service’ functions would then have to be organized. Given a chance, Iraq could do them mostly by itself. It would soon again become a rich country and has a talented, well-educated population. Step by step, health care, clean water, sewage, roads, bridges, pipelines, electric grids, housing, etc., could be mainly provided by the Iraqis themselves, as they were in the past. When I visited Baghdad in February 2003 on the eve of the invasion, the Iraqis with whom I talked were proud that they had rebuilt the Tigris bridge and other facilities that had been destroyed in the 1991 war. The can surely do so again.
“In its own best interest, the Iraq government would empower the National Iraq Oil Company (NIOC) to award concessions by bid to a variety of international companies, each of which and NIOC would sell oil on the world market. Contracts for reconstruction paid for by Iraqi money would be awarded under bidding, as they traditionally were... Abrogating current American policies that work against the recovery of Iraqi industry and commerce would spur development since any reasonably intelligent and self-interested government would emphasize getting Iraqi enterprises back into operation and employing Iraqi workers. That process could be speeded up through international loans, commercial agreements and protective measures so that unemployment, now at socially catastrophic levels, would be diminished. Neighborhood participation in running social affairs and providing security are old traditions in Iraqi society and allowing or favoring their reinvigoration would promote the excellent side effect of grassroots political representation. As fighting dies down, reasonable security is achieve and popular institutions revive, the one million Iraqis now living abroad will be encouraged to return home. In the aggregate they are intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated and can make major contributions in all phases of Iraqi life.
“In such a program, inevitably, there will be setback and shortfalls, but they can be partly filled by international organizations. The steps will not be easy; Iraqis will disagree over timing, personnel, and rewards, while giving the process a chance will require American political courage. But, and this is the crucial matter, any other course of action would be far worse for both America and Iraq. The safety and health of American society as well as Iraqi society requires that this policy be implemented intelligently, determinedly, and soon.”
