Withdrawal and Withdrawal
07.11.07 - 08:45am
Vietnam, and the escalating civilian casualties occurring now in Afghanistan, are powerful lessons of what will happen if the war party starts to scale back the ground troops without a real commitment to ending the war
A political shift in the United States to supporting an exit from the murderous disaster of the Iraq conflict appears to be under way at last.
When I talk about a political shift I am of course referring to the rulers not the ruled. Public opinion in the US has been running against the war for a long time now, despite the endless propaganda of the Bush-Cheney cabal, and was a key factor in the Democracts’ gains in November’s mid-term elections. Despite the people electing Democrat candidates with the expectation they would end the war, that party chose to hand Bush wheelbarrows of cash to continue the conflict.
Nevertheless, Republican loyalists are slowly but surely starting to turn against the war, while the generals have been signaling for a while that they want their army out before it is completely broken in the sands of the Middle East .
While the antiwar movement is rightly exasperated at the glacial pace of this turn, at least withdrawal is finally making it onto the political agenda.
Now is the time to get really worried.
There is withdrawal and there is withdrawal. Vietnam, and the escalating civilian casualties occurring now in Afghanistan, are powerful lessons of what will happen if the war party starts to scale down the numbers of ground troops without a real commitment to ending the war, as a way of defusing domestic opposition to the US presence in Iraq. As the ground troops are pulled out of the firing line the military steps up the air war, and the number of random deaths inflicted by bombs and missiles grows.
The few reports that do escape Iraq regarding the generally ignored air war that is already going on there paint a terrible picture of slaughter from the skies and if the US pulls its troops back into fortified bases and escalates the bombing this will get worse. The signs are already there in Afghanistan, as the NATO commander, General Dan McNeill, now known as “Bomber McNeill”, changes US strategy and cranks up the civilian deaths.
Reports from the Los Angeles Times claim at least 500 civilian deaths already this year, and the rate is increasing. Tom Engelhardt, of the excellent TomDispatch, cited reports showing increasing bombing in Iraq already, a phenomenon which may get even worse:
Actually, bombs are already being dropped in Iraq in 2007 at almost twice the rate of the previous year. In this sense, the Afghan model is available as an example of things to come, as is the historical model of the Vietnam War in the period in which President Richard Nixon was employing what might now be called the “Gates Plan.” It was then called “Vietnamization.” Nixon was intent on withdrawing all American ground combat troops, while leaving behind tens of thousands of American advisors, who were to continue training the South Vietnamese military, as well as sizable numbers of troops to guard our enormous bases in that country. Not surprisingly, that period saw an unprecedented escalation of the air war over South Vietnam. It was a time of unparalleled (but underreported) brutality, destruction, and carnage in the Vietnamese countryside.
Any similar “Iraqification” plan would surely have an equivalent effect, the gap in manpower being plugged by air power. And the Washington “consensus” Gates hopes for is already forming. The two leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, adhere to it. Both call for “withdrawal” from Iraq, but define withdrawal (as Gates would) as the “redeployment” of U.S. “combat brigades” (possibly less than half the American forces in that country at present).
The danger is that as the Bush/Cheney gang are finally forced to start pulling the ground troops back, yet without a commitment to stopping the assault on the Iraqi population, the antiwar movement will start to fracture and weaken. The basically pro-war Republicans and Democrats, who are concerned about little more than how the coffins of US soldiers affect their own political futures, and are married to the antiwar movement out of expediency rather than principle, will hove off. Even those opposed to the war in principle may start to run out of steam once the more visible aspects are removed from our screens and from news reports.
As the generals step up the air war the antiwar movement must step up its efforts and make sure the people of the US and the UK are aware of what is happening in the Middle East.
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