Stuck In Baghdad? Yeah, Right

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2005.

It is no longer justifiable for reasonable people to support the war in Iraq, if it ever was. At this point, "staying the course" is neither logically nor morally defensible.

Believing in the war's ever-shifting goals and in the competence and motivation of those tasked to accomplish them is no longer a matter of ideology or party affiliation. When it comes to facts on the ground, we have reached a moment of clear division between the "reality-based community" and those willing to accept the storyline of the day from proven liars in the White House and the Pentagon.

We're almost back to the days of the "Five O'Clock Follies," when the military told a frankly disbelieving press corps that everything was going swimmingly in Vietnam. Now, top commanders testify to Congress that we have little hope of "winning" in Iraq, and then go on the cable news show circuit and say that just the opposite is true.

With such a stark disconnect, it's no longer possible to tolerate differences about whether the war should be seen through to its questionable end.

We're not stuck in Iraq for the reasons the foreign policy elite in Washington would have us believe. We're not stuck there by history, or by the threat of the country devolving into civil war (although that's a troubling reality we need to face). We're stuck in Iraq because we have a leadership that wants to be "stuck" there, and a strategic class that lives in a bubble formed of its own endlessly repeated blather about "Vietnam syndromes" and "failed states" and "Powell doctrines." And we're stuck because making Iraq into an example of U.S. dominance and undoing the taint of Vietnam, or "finishing what we started" during the first Gulf War remain the goals of other constituents in Bush's foreign policy world.

But most of all, we're stuck in Iraq because the burden of fighting the war has fallen disproportionally on rural, small-town America -- on the poor and the middle class -- while the benefits of a wide-open, ultra-liberal Iraqi economy and access to what may be the world's largest oil reserves are still on course to line the pockets of the administration's backers. And as long as they have the cover of pro-war Democrats and the shelter of their liberal media conspiracy theories, it's a lot easier for them to pretend things aren't as bad as they obviously are in Iraq, and "stuck" we will remain.

As Antonia Juhasz wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

The Bush administration has succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control of the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The Bush economic agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi self-determination.

Is it worth the loss of American blood and treasure to "stay the course" in the hope that Iraq will become safe for foreign investors, or should we get out as soon as we can without making matters much worse than they are today? Keep in mind that Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News that "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."

The argument that we can't "cut and run" is as seductive as it is illogical: we broke Iraq, and now we have to put it back together. It's a moral argument that the public can't ignore, and, worst of all, it's a crutch for the Democratic establishment to keep the "get out of Iraq" position of its supporters at arm's length.

But it has three fatal problems. First, it assumes that the only way we can hope to influence the outcome in Iraq is through military occupation. Second, it ignores the Catch-22 that's plagued the Iraq adventure from the beginning: the fact that the occupation itself -- our military presence in yet another Muslim country -- is the primary source of instability. Finally, it assumes that we can learn from our mistakes and change our policies in Iraq -- that we can do the job better.

All of these are faith-based arguments, and we have to reject them. We would be well served to remember that U.S. troops remained in the Philippines for 94 years after we "liberated" them from the Spanish, and they remain today in Japan 61 years after its surrender and in Korea 52 years after the ceasefire that ended that "police action."

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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