Steve Burns: Out of Iraq in 2011?

UPDATE: Journalist Raed Jarrar has posted a draft of the Bush-Maliki agreement on his blog. You can read Raed's comments here...
Read the text of the draft agreement here...

The US and Iraqi governments have announced an agreement for a complete withdrawal of all US forces by the end of 2011. As part of the withdrawal plan, the agreement also calls for US troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities by June of next year.

What does this mean? Has the main goal of the U.S. peace movement, a complete withdrawal from Iraq, been achieved? The response from national peace organizations has been muted. A survey of the websites of national peace organizations found no commentary (so far) on the agreement.

In July, when the outcome of the negotiations was less certain, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies posted a report on the negotiations in which she called into question the sincerity of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s demand for withdrawal of U.S. troops. She wrote: “…regardless of whether Maliki used the clearer "timetable" or the ambiguous "time horizon" language, what is clear is that a real, complete withdrawal of U.S. troops would likely mean the end of his power. It is unlikely that is really what he wants.”

But has the balance of power shifted since then? The Iraqi army has been increasingly assertive – and increasingly independent of its US mentors – in recent months, and Maliki may no longer feel the need for US military support to maintain his hold on power. If so, he may now see the U.S. as a source of interference in his own efforts to consolidate power. Recently, for example, the U.S. and Iraqi governments have come into conflict about U.S. support for Iraqi “Awakening Councils”, composed of predominantly Sunni former members of the insurgency. Along with payments from the U.S. of $300 a month, the members of these groups were promised jobs in the Iraqi army. But now, the Iraqi government has been targeting their members for arrest, forcing them to disarm, and barring them from the army.

A newly assertive Iraqi army may not need as many Americans kicking down the doors of Iraqi homes and placing sandbags on the heads of the people they find inside – preferring to do the job themselves – but they will certainly want to maintain access to America’s “shock and awe” airpower. So an agreement for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities will be a positive development in some respects (for example, we might see fewer Iraqi taxicabs run over by tanks just for fun) but it also likely means a huge escalation in the use of aerial bombing. And without U.S. troops on the ground to direct the fire, with the Maliki government able to call in airstrikes – unchecked - whenever it deems necessary, we could see the U.S. Air Force turned into even more of a tool for sectarian warfare.

Then there’s the matter of the timetable. December 2011 is more than twice as long as Obama’s proposed 16 month withdrawal timetable, but Obama is only calling for a partial withdrawal that would leave a “residual force” of US troops in Iraq, while the Iraqi government appear to be calling for a complete withdrawal. In any event, this is a much longer withdrawal timetable than the one demanded by a large majority of the Iraqi people, 70% of whom want all U.S. troops out in a year or less.

Will the Bush-Maliki agreement go forward? An AFP report on the agreement states that “The [Iraqi] parliamentary stamp is a crucial legal requirement,” and quotes Iraqi parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani saying “Iraq's lawmakers would never endorse it in its current form.” If the Iraqi parliament refuses to approve a plan that calls for a three-year withdrawal timetable, what happens then? The feverish negotiations between the Bush and Maliki administrations are motivated by the knowledge that U.S. forces remain in Iraq under a year-to-year mandate from the UN Security Council which expires in December and is not likely to be renewed. Failure to come to an agreement by the end of the year means that U.S. troops remain in Iraq without any legal basis for the occupation. Not that international law has ever been an impediment to the U.S. doing what it wants, but this is a complication the U.S. would prefer to avoid, if possible.

Knowing that the clock is ticking on the U.S. occupation, nationalist members of the Iraqi parliament may decide that it’s in their interest to delay ratification until after the U.S. election, to see if they can force a better deal out of the next administration. (As an aside, the same article says that “U.S. lawmakers would not be asked to approve the pact,” showing that while Iraqi lawmakers insist on their right to ratify agreements their government makes with a foreign government, our own Congress doesn’t see a need to act as a similar check on our own imperial President.)

All of this presents a significant challenge to the US peace movement. If the U.S. and Iraqi governments are able to come to an agreement on a complete withdrawal – but not on a timetable to our liking – then our position gets reduced to: “Yes, but.” As in: “Yes, but it’s not happening fast enough.” It may prove to be difficult to motivate people to take to the streets over the difference between a one-year withdrawal plan and a two-year withdrawal plan, especially if U.S. troops have been withdrawn to bases and are experiencing greatly reduced casualty rates.

This recalls President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan, which combined a partial withdrawal of U.S. ground troops with a huge escalation in bombing, and massive transfers of weapons to the South Vietnamese military. There’s no denying that this had a dampening effect on domestic opposition to the war. But there’s a major difference this time around: Vietnamization was bound to fail, because the U.S. was propping up a puppet regime that had no ability to stand on its own. Maliki’s government, with its base among Iraq’s majority Shiite population, is no mere puppet of the U.S.

It now seems clear that Iraq won’t end as Vietnam did, with Americans and their collaborators being plucked from the roof of the U.S. embassy by helicopters. Instead, our occupation of Iraq may end without a clear defeat for the US, but with an outcome that could hardly be considered a victory, either. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had dreams of a strong US ally in the Middle East, giant and permanent U.S. military bases, and a privatized “free market” economy that would be a model to other Middle Eastern states. If Maliki gets his way, the U.S. will have failed to achieve all of these goals, and at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of (U.S.) lives.

Both Iraq war supporters and opponents of the war will try to put their own spin on the outcome, of course. No amount of positive spin is going to make the American people eager to repeat the Iraq experience, but a key question for the peace movement is the extent to which the millions of Americans who marched against the war will see their own actions as resulting in the end of the war. When U.S. forces finally left Vietnam, millions of Americans, mostly young people, felt that their actions had played a role in ending the war. These young people took that sense of confidence in their own ability to effect change into other struggles for social and environmental justice, and many of them still constitute the core of the peace movement today. If our occupation of Iraq ends with an orderly withdrawal resulting from a signed contract between U.S. and Iraqi elites, will the rank and file of today’s peace movement feel they had any role in the outcome? Future struggles for peace and justice depend on the answer to that question.