Electronic Iraq — The Logic of Withdrawal: An Interview with Anthony Arnove
Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Electronic Iraq — The Logic of Withdrawal: An Interview with Anthony ArnoveThe Logic of Withdrawal: An Interview with Anthony Arnove
Jeff Severns Guntzel, Electronic Iraq, 3 July 2006
In Anthony Arnove’s new book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, he argues for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S.-led occupying forces from Iraq, a divisive issue even among those who were unified in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq. In an interview with eIraq, Arnove discusses his withdrawal scenario and the challenge of reversing U.S. policy in Iraq and the world.
Read an excerpt from the book here.
EI: Your book borrows its title from Howard Zinn’s 1967 book “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.” You also borrow that book’s author, with Zinn providing a foreword and afterword.
AA: My book was inspired by Zinn’s. I was struck by the parallels between the arguments that Zinn was making in 1967 and the arguments I felt needed to be made within the antiwar movement today. I was struck by the number of people I encountered who had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but had come to feel that now that the United States had occupied the country it couldn’t leave, that somehow an occupation that flowed directly from the invasion they had opposed could bring about a democratic future in Iraq–that it could lead to the rebuilding of that country or prevent a civil war from breaking out.
I went back and reread Howard’s book and was really moved by the power of his argument: the only sensible solution to the unjust invasion in Vietnam was to call for immediate and unconditional withdrawal. He was countering arguments among liberals in the late 1960s that are similar to the ones we are hearing today. Many liberals felt “out now” wasn’t a reasonable demand, that the antiwar movement had to be pushing for some different form of intervention or a phased withdrawal.
Looking back now, Howard’s argument was remarkably prescient. A heavy price was paid for the majority of the antiwar movement not adopting that position at an earlier time. Eventually the antiwar movement did take an “out now” position, but that happened later, in part as a result of the force of events in Vietnam: the Tet Offensive of 1968, the intensity of the Vietnamese resistance to the war, and the mounting death toll of Vietnamese and of U.S. soldiers. By 1967, it was clear that the United States was being defeated in Vietnam–that they could not impose their will on the Vietnamese people. But rather than retreat, the U.S. intensified the war against Vietnam and actually expanded the war to Laos and Cambodia. As a consequence, millions of people in Indochina died. To this day people are still suffering the consequences of that invasion, which left a horrible toxic legacy in the form of dioxin poisoning from the use of millions of gallons of Agent Orange in populated areas.
EI: The Iraq-Vietnam comparisons started before the invasion itself. But in a way, that critique is too simplistic. In what ways is Iraq not like Vietnam and what unique challenges does the war in Iraq present to those who want to end it?
AA: First of all, much more is at stake in Iraq today for the planners of U.S. empire than was at stake in Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That’s a sobering thought. It means we as an antiwar movement will have to be more forceful and more organized and more creative if we’re going to compel the U.S. to abandon its aim of establishing a client state in Iraq, a country which has the world’s second largest oil reserves and sits in a region with two thirds of the world’s oil reserves, as well as most of the world’s natural gas.
Also, we have to keep in mind that the U.S. government claimed that the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and the establishment of democracy in Iraq would be part of a wave of democratization throughout the entire Middle East and beyond. A reversal in Iraq would not just be a reversal of U.S. objectives in that country, but a major blow to the legitimacy of U.S. power in the Middle East, which would effect the ability of the U.S. to project its power militarily, politically, and economically in countries around the world. We already see the U.S. having much greater difficulty asserting its power in Latin America and Iran.
So we have to realize what’s at stake for the planners and defenders of empire in creating at least the appearance of victory in Iraq, at the cost of continued occupation and bloodshed.
Another way Iraq differs from Vietnam is that in Vietnam the U.S. was confronted by a traditional national liberation movement–a united front of the Vietnamese. It was highly organized, highly centralized, and could build on a model of successful national liberation movements that had fought against British, French, and other colonial powers.
The resistance in Iraq is of a different character. There is no national liberation front; there is no united front. Instead, there is a far more decentralized, fragmented, divided opposition. There are increasing sectarian divisions within the Iraqi population. There is a fundamentalist and reactionary current that’s gained ground within Iraq, which complicates the relationship between the U.S. antiwar movement and the Iraqi opposition to the occupation. There are people engaged in sectarian violence and terrorist attacks that have nothing to do with the goal of achieving national liberation as we would define it. That complicates the situation. But we should no lose sight of the fact that the Iraqi resistance is not just Sunni, or foreign based, or terrorist, as Washington claims. Most Iraqis oppose this occupation and are engaged in legitimate struggle for self-determination that we should support.
Another difference between Iraq and Vietnam is that today the United States is operating in the context of a more multipolar world order. Vietnam occurred in the context of the Cold War and a bipolar world order that stabilized those conflicts to a certain degree because of the threat of mutually assured destruction–the counterbalance to U.S. power that came from the Soviet empire. Today, the United States faces different challenges as an imperial power and is seeking to preserve its status as the sole superpower, which means it needs to prevent the emergence of any rival economic or military power in the world–China in particular. Establishing hegemony in the Middle East is a vital goal because many of the economic and military rivals of the United States are far more dependent on the energy resources of that region.
EI: Let’s talk about your withdrawal scenario. What does it look like?
AA: I recently spoke with a veteran who served in Iraq and is now organizing with Iraq Veterans Against the War (http://www.ivaw.net/). He had a very effective answer to your question. He said withdrawal is not a strategy, it’s an executive order. If the military was given the order to quit Iraq, they could get out of Iraq in a very quick and orderly fashion. The real challenge is compelling the government to see that it has to withdraw. That is going to be very difficult.
But it’s important to stress that those of us in the antiwar movement who are calling for immediate withdrawal aren’t saying that we should abandon the Iraqi people. We’re saying that this occupation has had horrible consequences for the Iraqi people and we oppose it from a position of solidarity with them.
So in calling for withdrawal, I think that we should also be calling for reparations for the suffering that’s been caused by our intervention. Not just the invasion and occupation, but before that the more than twelve years of sanctions that devastated the population while doing nothing to harm the political elite–and before that the 1991 Gulf War, which left a terrible toxic legacy in Iraq much like the U.S. left in Vietnam. And earlier still, there were all the years that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during the worst of his crimes–crimes that later were used to justify the toppling of his regime.
We should also be calling for an end to the economic occupation of Iraq. The U.S. has put in place a series of economic regulations that benefit international corporations, not the Iraqi people, allowing for 100 percent foreign ownership of every aspect of Iraq’s economy except for oil, which will effectively be under foreign control.
The economic occupation has gone hand in hand with the establishment of long-term military bases in Iraq, which should be shut down. The U.S. wants to use Iraq as a staging ground for interventions in other countries in the Middle East–possibly Syria, possibly Iran. Remember that the U.S. recently had to give up bases in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
So it’s not enough to say we want the troops to come home now. We want reparations. We want an end to the economic occupation and end to the military bases, as well. The United States is building in Baghdad today its largest embassy in the world–obviously so that the U.S. can control and influence the character of the Iraqi government for years to come.
EI: The earliest and most public articulation of a withdrawal scenario so far has come from Congressman Jack Murtha, who calls for a “redeployment” to “Kuwait or to the surrounding area.” Murtha further calls for “a quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines” to be “deployed to the region.”
Murtha’s position mirrors quite closely the nearly 25-year-old Carter Doctrine, which states that “It is U.S. strategy to … defend our vital interests in the region as a whole by … building up our own capabilities to project force into the region while maintaining a credible presence there … including U.S. force projection into the region.” In your book, you quote Michael Klare calling the war in Iraq “the natural extension of the Carter Doctrine.” If that is true, does Murtha’s withdrawal strategy suggest any meaningful change in U.S. policy towards Iraq and the Middle East?
AA: The antiwar movement needs to be clear in differentiating its position from that of Murtha’s. On one hand, I think it’s problematic that the Democratic Party and the Republicans both have done so much to distance themselves from Murtha’s strategy, which has the appearance of a withdrawal strategy. On the other hand, Murtha’s position is not a withdrawal strategy and is not a principled opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Murtha is putting forward a strategy of redeployment that emphasizes air power, as opposed to boots on the ground, and reflects the views of top military brass in the U.S. who feel that the war is being lost and that there needs to be a shift in tactics. He is essentially suggesting that the U.S. shift tactics in pursuit of the same aim of being the regional hegemonic power. Murtha’s position is far short of the position we should be adopting in the antiwar movement.
And it does flow from the Carter Doctrine and what Michael Klare describes quite accurately as the “globalization of the Carter Doctrine”–by which he means the U.S. is not only going to intervene militarily to control the energy resources of the Middle East, but increasingly in other parts of the world, as it is already doing. Today the U.S. imports as much of its oil from Africa as it does from the Middle East. I think it’s no accident that we are seeing increasing military cooperation with a number of African, including new training exercises and increasing military spending. The U.S. has control of African energy resources in mind. We need to see Iraq in that global picture.
EI: In the the U.S. Congress, we have seen the surfacing of a debate over withdrawal, where not too long ago the word was barely mentioned. What do you make of this development?
AA: We are seeing the emergence of recognition among some in Congress, in the military, in the establishment media, and even in the business class that things are going very badly in Iraq. There’s also recognition among some sections of the Democratic Party that the war is increasingly unpopular. Bush’s approval ratings are the lowest since Nixon during Watergate. Polls show more and more people opposing the war, and I think there is some maneuvering that is now taking place to take political advantage of that situation.
The problem is that a lot of these proposals are too little too late, and fall short of what we really need to be demanding. It’s important to recognize that the September 30th goal and the end of 2006 goal have both come up in the context of a midterm election in which some Democrats are looking to gain a tactical advantage and take back the House and the Senate from the Republicans.
The interesting thing will be to see what happens when September 30th passes and when the end of 2006 passes and U.S. troops are still in Iraq. The Bush administration has said that it is not their decision to withdraw; that it will be up to the next president. If you go back to the Vietnam War, the war was traded back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. A top aid to Tony Blair said recently that their optimistic scenario was that British troops would leave Iraq in the year 2010.
EI: Immediate withdrawal does not enjoy universal support in the antiwar movement. Many people who opposed the war are not comfortable calling for an immediate and unconditional end to the occupation that followed. How do you explain this apparent contradiction?
AA: I think it comes from something very real, which is a fear of what would happen to the Iraqi people if the U.S. left. There is a genuine concern for the Iraqis–a fear that the likelihood of civil war would increase, that reactionary and fundamentalist currents would gain the upper hand, that we would be abandoning the Iraqi people after having caused them so much suffering.
But I think it also grows out of a number of misconceptions. First, the U.S. is increasing the likelihood of civil war, not decreasing it, through its presence. Already in Iraq there is a low-level civil war breaking out. The U.S. has used divide and rule strategies, introduced a supply of arms into Iraq, supported Shi’ite militias that have carried out horrible sectarian attacks and fueled Sunni and Shi’ite conflict in Iraq, and has completely distorted every aspect of Iraqi society through the occupation.
Another misconception is that this occupation, which is causing so much suffering for the Iraqi people, could somehow become a more enlightened occupation. There is no good way to occupy a country. It’s a fundamentally unjust and inherently problematic pursuit. The occupation that has caused so much suffering in Iraq cannot become the cure–it’s the source of the problem.
Tied to this misconception is the notion that only the enlightened Western powers, only the so-called civilized countries can bring about positive change in Iraq and the Middle East. This is an unfortunate retread of a very old idea used by the French to justify their occupations and interventions in Africa–the idea of the “civilizing mission.” The British used a similar idea to justify their colonial occupations in Africa and India–the “white man’s burden.”
We’ve seen a revival of these ideas, of a kind of humanitarian imperialism, or democratic imperialism, or civilizing imperialism, often articulated by liberals, that says the way to promote human rights in the world, the way to promote women’s rights or democratic rights, the way to promote the rights of minorities and to help people who are living under dictatorships is through military intervention, particularly military intervention by the United States, the world’s sole superpower.
Unfortunately, elements of the antiwar movement have absorbed aspects of this thinking, or at least are not challenging it. We should be challenging the underlying assumptions of that school of thought instead of confusing the rhetoric that’s used to justify imperialist intervention with its real aims. The U.S. government doesn’t care about the spread of democracy or human rights in the world. They care about access to markets, control of energy resources, the suppression of movements that are considered “destabilizing,” the suppression of regimes that are out of their control, and the creation of a stable framework for their military bases, for their corporations. The language of human rights and women’s rights is a cover–we shouldn’t get confused about that. We need to develop a more consciously anti-imperialist politics within the antiwar movement that questions the broader framework of U.S. empire and the so-called war on terror.
I think we also have to challenge some of the Islamaphobia that has been encouraged by our government as a way of creating a new framework for justifying interventions after the end of the Cold War. Instead of the communist of threat, we’re increasingly being sold the Islamic threat: the threat of Islamic terrorism, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.
The irony, of course, is that the U.S. has long supported reactionary Islamic currents in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world as a counterweight to nationalist, secular, and socialist currents. Zarqawi was trained in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. backed Muslim insurgency against the Russians. Osama bin Laden has his origins in that same operation. The U.S. encouraged the rise of fundamentalist currents in Iraq through the years of sanctions-induced poverty and destitution and again through their invasion of Iraq.
EI: As you’ve been out promoting the book, have you perceived any shift in attitude towards your vision of immediate withdrawal?
AA: I think more people are open to the argument for immediate withdrawal. I’m encouraged. The number of Iraq war veterans who have been making the call for immediate withdrawal has been very important. Iraq Veterans Against War calls for immediate withdrawal, reparations for the Iraqi people, and for taking care of the veterans of this war and other U.S. wars. I think it’s very important that the voice of veterans is heard more often, and I think it helps build support for the logic of withdrawal.
I also think people have been influenced by the fact that so many active duty troops in Iraq now see the logic of withdrawal. Zogby did a poll that was published in Military Times showing that 72 percent of active duty troops in Iraq would like to withdraw within a year and 29 percent would like to withdraw immediately, much more than the number of the troops that believe U.S. troops should stay until the “mission is accomplished.”
That’s a significant development, given all the pressure on soldiers not to question the mission and just to follow orders. And it reveals the contradictions between being told they would be greeted as liberators and the fact that they’re being greeted as occupiers. More than 2,500 of them are dead, they haven’t discovered weapons of mass destruction, and they haven’t brought democracy to Iraq. The troops have seen first hand the gap between the lies that were used to sell this war and the reality.
Moreover, as the occupation has continued, people have seen how each of the so-called turning points that this administration has declared have turned out to be nothing of the sort. We were told that the violent opposition to the occupation would end once Saddam Hussein was captured. They said once we have elections, then once we have a constitution, then once we have a stable government, and now they’re saying that with the assassination of Zarqawi the country will turn a corner. After each of these “turning points,” the situation has only deteriorated. I think more people are seeing that as long as the U.S. stays in Iraq, the situation will only continue to get worse.