The Primary Point of the Occupation of Iraq is the Occupation Itself

Over in Iraq special coverage, I'm running a piece by Jeffrey Feldman, who argues that we're about to see a monumental shift in the discourse around Iraq. Here's the nut of it:

The change can be summed up in 4 simple words:

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…

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.

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.

I don't mean to single out Jeffrey Feldman here -- he's a good guy, and a contributor to AlterNet from time to time -- but I want to highlight the piece because it's such a good example of the kind of perfectly rationalist analysis that dominates in progressive America. There's a persistent belief that if opponents of the occupation could only win the "debate" over Iraq on the merits, then a U.S. withdrawal will somehow follow.

There are a number of problems with this idea, not least of which is the fact that to a very significant degree we've already won the debate -- majorities of Americans now say that it is no longer possible for the U.S. to "win" in Iraq (whatever that means) and favor a timetable for pulling troops out -- but the public's views have so far had only minimal impact on the foreign policy elite.

But more than that, the commonly-held rationalist analysis denies a crucially important reality: that for various (and differing) reasons, a significant portion of Washington's strategic class is determined to maintain a "soft" occupation of Iraq for a long time to come, and that means that regardless of how soundly opponents of the occupation thrash whatever the argument du jour for keeping troops in the country may be, there will always be a new and pressing need to maintain U.S. forces in the country. The goalposts will always be perfectly mobile, and they'll keep shifting until something changes structurally.The point of the occupation, at this point, is the occupation itself, and I'm not sure why so many people fail to see that. After all, the U.S.-led "coalition" could, reasonably, claim to have successfully:

• Guaranteed that Iraq does not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons, including those which Donald Rumsfeld said were known to be "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat"
• Deposed the evil dictator (the one we helped to power and supported for three decades), and killed his devil-spawn sons

Yet after both of those previous rationales for keeping U.S. boots on the ground evaporated, there was no widespread call for declaring victory and pulling out. Instead, U.S. forces became necessary to A) keep Iraqis from slaughtering one another wholesale, and, later, B) to keep "al Qaeda in Iraq" in check. Both arguments were, in my view, ridiculous on their face -- "unembedded" journalist Dahr Jamail addressed the first one best when he said: "The bogus idea that if the U.S. leaves things will worsen is both inherently racist and ignorant," and Raed Jarrar and I have argued that only the occupation itself has allowed al Qaeda in Iraq to operate -- but they were accepted by the media and political establishments as legitimate rationales in their time.

And the dance continues to this day. Last month, the military declared that it had defeated al Qaeda in Iraq, yet no new calls for withdrawal followed the announcement.