Withdrawal Symptoms posted by Richard Seymour

Every few months, it seems to me, we hear new rumours of a 'coalition' withdrawal from Iraq underway, or afoot, or projected a year into the future. We hear that the occupation will start rolling back troops at around this or that date, after this milestone, upon reaching that benchmark, when the Independent Sovereign Government of Iraq asks us to, and so on.

Latest rumour is that troops intend to pull out by 2007. Of course, the US has instantly denied that this is the case. Every single time such rumours have emerged, they have been officially slapped down. Back in November, it was revealed that Gen. George Casey had proposed a withdrawal plan for the US beginning in early 2006. However: "Top Pentagon officials have repeatedly discussed some of those milestones: Iraqi troops must demonstrate that they can handle security without U.S. help; the country's political process must be strong; and reconstruction and economic conditions must show signs of stability." And these, it must be said, are such nebulous 'milestones' that it will be clearly a political judgment when and if they are met: who gets to make that judgment? Evidently not the Independent Sovereign Iraqi Government.

There have been calls from a number of high profile officials for a withdrawal, but the US political class is clearly not ready to countenance this since it would clearly resemble a harsh defeat at the moment. Nevertheless, these rumours are not emerging from the Void: some senior governmental and political figures are clearly keen on keeping the idea that there is such a plan afloat in the public imagination. One suspects that in large part this has to do with growing American support for an immediate withdrawal in an election year.

There is, of course, an entirely different possibility. It was only two months ago that Jack Straw himself was announcing that withdrawal would begin in a few months, and he was echoed approvingly by a top US General. This is in fact very close to what Straw said in early 2005. Today, it is reported that the British Army feels able to withdraw 5,000 troops from the South. Although, even here, the strong stipulation has always been that there is no timetable. Similarly, a leaked document last year suggested that the US intended to 'draw down' some of its forces in 2006, leaving 66,000 troops there. The immediate qualification was that this was a mere possibility, and that no decision had been taken. And yet, despite all the obfuscation and temporising, I think we can chalk this up as a small but significant victory for the antiwar movement and to the resistance, both armed and unarmed, in Iraq. The British government does not want to leave Basra when the local population are turning hostile. It certainly doesn't want to exit Maysan if there is any chance that the folks there will continue to refuse to be pliable subjects of client-state rule. The US certainly doesn't want to leave Iraq a friend of Iran, an ally of Syria, with an anti-US electorate who demand that the state does something about unemployment, poverty, healthcare and so on. Certainly not when the Marines are gathering intelligence about ways to precipitate a crisis in Iran as a preamble to potential invasion. Particularly not when they've recently removed most of their troops from the care and protection of their favourite desert dictatorship.

There have been a number of false notes sounded on this issue. One has been the phoney debate over whether or not 'we' should stick around and 'help' the Iraqis to form a new society. This debate is conducted between right-wing, openly racist apologists for US imperialism and right-wing, covertly racist apologists for US imperialism. It is, as such, meaningless hogwash. Another is the blizzard of suggestions that the US really doesn't want to be in Iraq, has no interest in remaining, the costs are too high and so on. If you think about this for more than five seconds, it reveals itself as ahistorical garbage. Bluntly: how many lives and how many billions was the US prepared to squander on its ultimate defeat in Vietnam? If the US has not an interest in remaining in Iraq, why does it remain in Iraq? Particularly when the costs to the US Treasury and in terms of public support have already been very high? Particularly when all the available evidence suggests that it is the presence of troops and their activities that is generating resistance activity? Well...