Why Withdrawal Is Unmentionable

The report of James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group has already become a benchmark for Iraq policy, dominating the print and electronic media for several days after its release, and generating excited commentary by all manner of leadership types from Washington to London to Baghdad. Even if most of the commentary continues to be negative, we can nevertheless look forward to highly publicized policy changes in the near future that rely for their justification on this report, or on one of the several others recently released, or on those currently being prepared by the Pentagon, the White House, and the National Security Council.

This is not, however, good news for those of us who want the U.S. to end its war of conquest in Iraq. Quite the contrary: The ISG report is not an "exit strategy;" it is a new plan for achieving the Bush administration's imperial goals in the Middle East.

The ISG report stands out among the present flurry of re-evaluations as the sole evaluation of the war by a group not beholden to the President; as the only report containing an unadorned negative evaluation of the current situation (vividly captured in the oft-quoted phrase "dire and deteriorating"); and as the only public document with unremitting criticism of the Bush administration's conduct of the war.

It is this very negativity that brings into focus the severely constrained nature of the debate now underway in Washington -- most importantly, the fact that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (immediate or otherwise) is simply not going to be part of the discussion. Besides explicitly stating that withdrawal is a terrible idea -- "our leaving would make [the situation] worse" -- the Baker report is built around the idea that the United States will remain in Iraq for a very long time.

To put it bluntly, the ISG is not calling on the Bush administration to abandon its goal of creating a client regime that was supposed to be the key to establishing the U.S. as the dominant power in the Middle East. Quite the contrary. As its report states: "We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq." If you ignore the text sprinkled with sugar-coated words like "representative government," the report essentially demands that the Iraqi government pursue policies shaped to serve "America's interest and values in the years ahead."

Don't be fooled by this often quoted passage from the report: "By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." The ebullient interpretations of this statement by the media have been misleading in three different ways.

First, the combat brigades mentioned in this passage represent far less than half of all the troops in Iraq. The military police, the air force, the troops that move the equipment, those assigned to the Green Zone, the soldiers that order, store, and move supplies, medical personnel, intelligence personnel, and so on, are not combat personnel; and they add up to considerably more than 70,000 of the approximately 140,000 troops in Iraq at the moment. They will all have to stay -- as well as actual combat forces to protect them and to protect the new American advisors who are going to flood into the Iraqi army -- because the Iraqi army has none of these units and isn't going to develop them for several years, if ever.

Second, the ISG wants those "withdrawn" American troops "redeployed," either inside or outside Iraq. In all likelihood, this will mean that at least some of them will be stationed in the five permanent bases inside Iraq that the Bush administration has already spent billions constructing, and which are small American towns, replete with fast food restaurants, bus lines, and recreation facilities. There is no other place to put these redeployed troops in the region, except bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, none of which are really suited to, or perhaps eager to, host a large influx of American troops (guaranteed to be locally unpopular and a magnet for terrorist attacks).