Reply #18: Michael Schwartz: Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense

[understandinglife]

American withdrawal is therefore the cornerstone of any strategy that wants to maximize the hope of avoiding civil war. It would, at one and the same moment, remove the major source of Iraqi civilian deaths -- and remove the primary flash point that leads to the car bombings. It would certainly mean as well the withdrawal of Shia and Kurdish troops from Sunni cities -- the key to Zarqawi's ability to convince (some) Sunnis that the Shia are willing pawns of the occupation and so their eternal enemies.

The clock is ticking however. With each new American attack, more Sunnis are convinced that their hope for liberation lies with Zarqawi's strategy. And with each new terrorist attack, Shia anger -- already at a high level, given the degrading nature of the American occupation and two years of American-style "reconstruction" -- is likely to become ever more focused on the Sunni community that appears to be harboring the terrorists. Recently there have been growing signs of violent Shia retaliation. If the terrorist attacks continue unabated, then increasing numbers of Shia may adopt an attitude complementary to Zarqawi's -- blaming the entire Sunni community for the terrorist attacks. If this occurs, Zarqawi will have succeeded in his personal goal of "dragging them into the arena of sectarian war," and a raging civil war may truly develop.

Zarqawi's plan will be in danger of collapsing, however, if the U.S. withdraws.

American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get -- for the U.S. and for the Iraqis.

From Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense by Michael Schwartz
on September 22, 2005

Link:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=23549

As Tom Engelhardt notes:

Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today's catastrophic tinderbox:

First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed.

Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush's nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi "reconstruction" that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country.

Finally, let's not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own "liberation."

As noted in the OP, the course of action is obvious and an immediate announcement of the intention to completely withdraw ALL American and British citizens, military or otherwise, followed by a logistically sound extraction and other internationally supported measures represent the actions most likely to dampen civil war.

The sooner Iraqi citizens have only themselves to confront and the sooner they know the international community is willing to assist them in having that confrontation be at the negotiation table, all parties represented, the sooner a sense of hope can begin to replace the daily doses of death and despair inflicted on them by Bush, Blair and the neoconsters.


Peace.