If only we had let Hitler run his course...

You've got to hand it to the administration, neither policy makers nor their mouthpiece president seem exhibit any shame.  To get out there every day an blatantly rewrite history with a straight face takes big-time talent. 

Seriously.  Imagine you're the CEO of a major biotech company and you've convinced your board to let you go ahead with a new pesticide that conventional wisdom considers dangerous and ill-advised.  Predictably, the spray doesn't seem to be working in the field as well as your handlers claimed it would  Not only does the pesticide kill those plants supposedly under its care, but airborne fumes seem to have spawned a race of deadly mutant bees.

The bad press is dragging the company down and the board is furious.  Not to worry though, because you're able to convince them that the reports are imbalanced, that your enemies have conspired to show only the bad news from the spray while neglecting to point out the tremendous success that you swear it's having elsewhere.  In fact, since you commandeered all the resources of the company to pursue keeping the spray on the market, you have been making demonstrable gains.  The dumbfounded board started to call your bluff, but got distracted by news of a pop star's pregnancy and decided to adjourn for the summer. 

Your respite only lasted so long.  By the time the next meeting rolled around, what was already a hefty population of mutant bees has now ballooned  into a global pandemic.  Since no young white girl was kidnapped that week, the board had it's full attention on your mess.  So you do the only logical thing you can do - you tell them that, even though it may take 20 years, the spray is going to work [1].  Then you tell them that if only we had used the spray in Vietnam we would have won the war.

Yes, you say that.  You say that with a completely straight face. 

And then you say it again.

The implication is obvious - the Democrats are going to pull out of Iraq and will therefore be responsible for all the deaths that will likely occur without a US military presence.  And how can Democrats be so heartless as to kill all those innocent people?

I think BooMan [2] said it best:

I don't think the Republicans understand that people who have been watching the war in Iraq for the last four years have been internalizing their grief all along...preparing for the day when all hell breaks loose. The time is long since past when rational people could expect a remission of  the metastasis. One last blast of radiation is not, and has not, solved the problem.

Hell, everyone knows that the only way to win a war is to never start one.  This was not World War II.  Iraq was never a just war and we are not the good guys.  We made a horrible, planet-altering mess in the backyard of our brothers and sisters and people - real people - are dying every day because of it.  And bloody stalemates don't just end in five or ten of fifty years, they go on and on until everyone is dead.  The only way to end it is to break down the status quo.  And in this case, we are the status quo.

Iraq's body count this year may double 2006 numbers [3] as has Iraq's prison population [4].  Meanwhile, since the surge, US deaths are also on the rise [5] and millions of more Iraqi's have been displaced [6] from their homes.  Millions. 

And in the end, the entire analogy is a big lie [7] anyway.  As Matthew Rothschild points out:

"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he's counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.

And he's not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.

Just as he's not counting the 70,000 to 700,000 civilian Iraqis his war has killed, or the one in ten who have been forced to leave their homes.

The fact is, not a single person is calling for a US withdrawal - we are calling for a troop withdrawal.  Demilitarizing our Iraqi presence has been a moral imperative from the beginning.  But the withdrawal of the US is the kind of irresponsible action only a naive, self-serving, and arrogant administration [8] could conceive of.  Given that Bush speaks for just such an administration, I can see why he would say that.  But as usual, just because the "president" said it does not make it true.

Comments

Rosa Schmidt Azadi (not verified)Mon, 2007-09-03 12:56

I dont get it

What exactly do you mean when you distinguish between a "US troop" withdrawal and a "US" withdrawal? Wouldn't "US interests" as represented by our government lose a lot of influence in Iraq if the troops weren't there to enforce their will? And how actually would "the US" stay in Iraq without the troops to protect them? Unless you're referring to the US government having an embassy, normal-sized, in Iraq like other countries and US tourists and students and businessfolk coming to an independent Iraq on the same terms that folks from any other country would come to Iraq?

I mean, who cares if "we" are kicked out of the Middle East? We--meaning you and I--have no need to be in the Middle East. (Well, actually, I live in the Middle East at the moment, but I'm here on legitimate personal and family business, not to take over oil fields or something.)

Would we be expected to go all ballistic and throw our weapons around if someone said "we" were in danger of being kicked out of, umm, let's say, Denmark? China?

I'm serious. Could you explain how you want the US to stay in Iraq, please? Perhaps I misunderstood. Thanks.

 

Jay DaverthMon, 2007-09-03 21:51

Re: I dont get it

When George Bush talks about US withdrawal, he is describing not simply a removal of troops, but rather a complete abandonment Iraq in order to paint an unappealing image of the peace movement.  This is disingenuous and he knows it.  Troops represent only a portion of US efforts, and even then stand as a mere fraction of tactics and strategies under which we may prove beneficial. 

In this way, I take issue with your suggestion that troops are necessary to enforce will.  In fact, I believe this kind of thinking is precisely the reason that things have spun out of control in Iraq.  For one thing, our 'will' is far from altruistic.  We are not there now nor have we ever been there to help the Iraqi people. Our will from the beginning has been to remake Iraq in our own image.  The fact that this has come at the end of a gun barrel has not proven helpful against people with conflicting visions, while our brutal and ill-conceived displacement of more than 1 million Iraqi non-combatants has only increased the influence such people have.

In a more broad sense, I object to the notion that 'enforcement' is necessary in order to promote interest.  We all learned - hopefully at an early age - that people tend to respond poorly to violence. Yet somehow we citizens of the world are all too willing to surrender our security to those who know nothing of human nature.  If they did, they would be a lot smarter in trying to achieve their goals, good or bad.  You want to plunder oil at below market value?   Empower a dictator to sell it to you.  You want to overthrow a dictator?  Teach his people that they do not need to be slaves.  In either case, sending in people with guns seems like the worst possible way to go about it.

 The thing is, people try nonviolence for a week and, when it fails, go straight back to violence which has failed for thousands of years.  Right now we have an insurgency made up of approximately 40+ rival "gangs".  With all the cash and guns that we introduced to the country, they suddenly find themselves funded and organized.  Moreover, we've given them the perfect scapegoat (ourselves) through which to convince exponentially greater support among the population.  The presence of troops has effectively inserted itself as a causal factor.  And such recursion virtually guarantees an exponential degeneration.

As far as what we can actually do besides troops, I could think of a hundred different things just off the top of my head.  The first would be to surrender to and provide active support and ample financing to an independent multi-governmental/NGO partnership dedicated to helping the Iraqi people bring stability to their own country.  Such a group would invariably need to have some means of support in order to aid in security and intelligence investigations towards neutralizing militant Sunni jihadists and helping the Iraqi majority defend itself against attacks.  However, this would resemble policing rather that militarism and would be but one small aspect of an organization which relies on good works and patience to slowly build up support among the population. 

We are going to have spent nearly $1trillion USD on a military presence that has become its own worst enemy.   Just imagine how many schools, hospitals, bridges, power plants, etc. that money can buy.  I defy you to tell me who is going to support some deranged militant against the people responsible for giving them clean, running water and a steady supply of antibiotics.

Michael (not verified)Tue, 2007-08-28 14:24

Re: If only we had let Hitler run his course...

The president could not make a more compelling argument for withdrawal from Iraq than to compare it to Vietnam. In an NPR interview back in June, Christopher Fettweis, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, called Vietnam a "moral disaster" -- because we killed some 1-2 million Vietnamese -- and then added "but it was basically strategically irrelevant." In other words, we killed millions of Vietnamese -- I've heard estimates as high as 5 million -- for no good reason.

Yet, as sympathetic as I am to the sensibilities of those who want immediate withdrawal, I still have trouble with this. We just marked the 60th anniversary of the partition of India where some 1 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were slaughtered after Britain made a hurried departure from India. Fettweis believes that Iraq could easily descend into a chaos like Lebanon, or pre-war Afghanistan. It seems to me that we have an obligation to prevent that if we can.

Of course, Fettweis ultimately puts the blame where it belongs: "the central lesson of this war, in my view should be, not how it was fought, but that it was fought at all."

For a transcript of the interview see http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/41796/ShowThread.aspx [10]

Jay DaverthTue, 2007-08-28 19:02

Re: If only we had let Hitler run his course...

Thanks Michael. I agree, once we made the decision to impose our will on Iraq, we became indelibly responsible for its well-being. To just simply walk away is the height of irresponsibility and will certainly result in chaos and further suffering. However, I do not believe that US military command is the appropriate vessel for an optimistic outcome. I believe the troops can play a desirable role in the reconstruction, but that must occur under the command of a "disinterested" third party. The UN, while rife with its own political implications and pitfalls, is probably the most appropriate body capable of pulling it off. American command, on the other side, is literally saturated with a perception (well deserved) of self-interest and ulterior motives.

Michael (not verified)Wed, 2007-08-29 14:09

Re: If only we had let Hitler run his course...

I fully agree -- in theory. But what "third party" will be willing to take on the job?

Jay DaverthWed, 2007-08-29 16:54

Re: If only we had let Hitler run his course...

lol ... good point, you'd have to be seriously loony to want to adopt this project! The UN is already struggling with it's own bad name in that region, so while their presence would lend some international credibility to the escapade, they might draw just as much local fire as the Americans are currently. NATO is, of course, out of the question. I wonder if the answer is for the international community to create and fund a body of command completely disassociated from any existing country or group. I'm getting a headache just thinking about it!