'Troops Leave, Violence Drops': How Four Words from Basra Could Shift Iraq Debate

The change can be summed up in 4 simple words:

troops leave, violence drops

As the deafening hubbub of propaganda drowns out every attempt to talk real policy change on Iraq, this simple descriptive formula--troops leave, violence drops--cuts through it all.

And here's why it is so powerful…

A Simple Logic: Up And Down, In And Out

Often, the most far reaching changes in political debates are not caused by governments, per se, but by the emergence of new way of seeing an issue, and a new way of talking about that.

Cindy Sheehan's one-woman protest against President Bush was one of those moments. By shifting the debate on the war to the her own feelings as a grieving mom, Shehan instantly change the way every American saw and talked about the issue. Suddenly, Iraq was about the pain of America's families, and popular support for the policy dissipated.

Similarly, when President Bush launched his surge, the way Americans saw and talked about Iraq again shifted again. In an instant, Americans--including our elected officials--once again accepted the logic of waiting for success.

The British pullout from Basra, and the subsequent logic of violence dropping as a result of that pullout, will change the debate again by reimposing a simple logic of up and down, in and out. To see that logic at work, take a look at this description of the British pullout that appeared recently in the International Harald Tribune:

Attacks against British and Iraqi forces have plunged by 90 percent in southern Iraq since London withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, the commander of British forces there said Thursday.

The presence of British forces in downtown Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, was the single largest instigator of violence, Maj. Gen. Graham Binns told reporters Thursday on a visit to Baghdad's Green Zone.

"We thought, 'If 90 percent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?'" Binns said.

Britain's 5,000 troops moved out of a former Saddam Hussein palace at Basra's heart in early September, setting up a garrison at an airport on the city's edge. Since that pullback, there's been a "remarkable and dramatic drop in attacks," Binns said.

(full article here)

The up-and-down-in-and-out logic of this description is more powerful than any protest argument about the war to date, and has an almost unlimited potential to sweep through both the broadcast media and face-to-face conversations that make up American political debate.

Displacing Bush's Phony Physics

The power of this new logic--our troops leave, violence drops--comes through the fundamental way it shifts the ground of the debate.

Since the surge began, the Bush administration has been able to block the idea of troop withdrawal by keeping the debate on this basic, albeit phony foreign policy physics:

Bush's Phony Physics: violence fills a vacuum

In other words, American troops needed to be present in large numbers in Iraq because the absence of U.S. forces would lead to a rapid explosion of violence. In fact, there was never any evidence for this logic, but that did not matter. The power of Bush's logic of violence did not come through its truth, but through its repetition in the media.

The ability of the Basra story to displace Bush's foreign policy physics comes in large part from the simple way this new story can be told in numbers:

5,000 soldiers leave

90% drop in violence

On a much more profound and far-reaching level, however, it is the way the British pullout imposes a new logic pragmatism on the entire Iraq discussion that allows these statistics to connect strongly with Americans' sense of right and wrong, good and bad.

Rather than pulling troops out for ideological purposes (e.g., because it was, by itself, right or wrong), the British military left Basra because based on what they were seeing on the ground--that the majority of violence was directed at the occupying troops--it seemed the best way to bring about a drop in hostilities.