Time to Go
I'VE HEARD OLD antiwar activists say that sleigh bells make them think of napalm. Specifically, the 12 days of terror runs against population centers in North Vietnam known as Nixon's 1972 Christmas bombings. In 30 years, it's possible Thanksgiving will remind people of our long war with Iraq (1991 - ?) in much the same way. Operation Desert Storm saw the USAF playfully obliterate retreating Iraqi forces on the highway from Kuwait to Basra, which one U.S. pilot famously described as a "turkey shoot." Then there was George W. Bush's surprise visit to Iraq last Thanksgiving, a stunt the media just gobbled up. And it was Turkey, don't forget, that threw a yam into Rumsfeld's initial war plan.
Understandably, a lot of people are having a hard time accepting this. It hurts to be driven out of another country where the enemy fights in sandals made from rubber tires. And so the calls for feeding the dragon are getting louder. Last Monday, the Washington Post reported that generals were requesting another extension of tours, as well as the speedy deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division and a brigade from the 82nd Airborne. The next day the New York Times demanded between 20,000 and 40,000 more troops "right away" to quell the insurgency.
The specter of a Christmas escalation was raised alongside Thanksgiving paeans to the troops already there, a time-honored ritual uncomplicated by the CBS clip of a U.S. soldier calmly committing murder in a Fallujah mosque. Deep down we all know what's happening in Iraq, but we don't want to actually see our heroes acting like that-not now, not 35 years ago, and definitely not on tv before Thanksgiving. Much easier to digest is make-believe like the following, apparently written with a straight face by syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg as he passed the cranberry sauce:
Rich Lowry [editor of the National Review] received a note from the father of a Marine fighting in Fallujah. In it the proud father recounted [that] many residents of that besieged town left bedding for the Marines and soldiers, along with notes thanking them for liberating their town from the terrorists and inviting them to sleep in their homes if necessary.
Every day, I receive wonderful, uplifting, heart-wrenching e-mails from Marines and soldiers or their families with similar stories of Iraqis' expressing their gratitude and relief that the Americans are doing the hard work of democracy and decency... I also receive-or read on obscure Internet sites-astounding tales of courage and sacrifice by America's Finest.
I wish I knew what "obscure Internet sites" people like Goldberg get their wonderful, uplifting news from. Online these days, I keep running into reports of U.S. artillery slamming into hospitals and U.S. snipers targeting children. Officials claim these reports are insurgency propaganda, and some of it probably is. But not enough. Opening another window on liberated Fallujah, the UK Independent's Kim Sengupta reported on Nov. 24 the words of Dr. Ali Abbas, who was working in a clinic as it came under U.S. attack, killing five patients.
"Afterwards myself and other members of staff went from house to house when we could to help people who had been hurt," Abbas told Sengupta. "One of the things we noticed the most were the numbers of people killed by American snipers. They were not just men but women and some children as well. The youngest one I saw was a four-year-old boy. Almost all these people had been shot in the head, chest or neck."
Among the few instances of civilian death in Fallujah admitted to by U.S. authorities is the killing of a family of seven, including a three-month-old baby. The distant relatives will get some cash. Perhaps it was their home in which Goldberg's mysterious Marine was offered refuge.
The gruesome details of Fallujah and elsewhere are important this holiday season because they give lie to the newly ascendant "humanitarian defense" of the occupation, an argument that will increase in volume and echo in direct proportion to the growing calls for withdrawal.
The new template for the ethical defense of the occupation was pressed last month by NYU law professor and former Green Zoner Noah Feldman, whose What We Owe Iraq is set to play a kinder, gentler version of the pre-invasion role played by Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm. Regardless of what you thought about the decision to invade, argues Feldman, the U.S. has a moral obligation to stay and act as the "trustee" of Iraq's democratic promise until such time as the natives can receive the precious cargo, whenever that may be.
Further down the food chain are pro-occupation liberals like Nicholas Kristof, who in his Nov. 27 Times column-titled, yes, "Saving the Iraqi Children"-attempted to shame advocates of withdrawal by arguing that the current humanitarian crisis in Iraq, although America's fault, would only worsen if America departed. Central Iraq would become another "Somalia" in the absence of U.S. troops, as opposed to the Orange County it resembles now.
Like Feldman, Kristof assumes to know better than Iraqis what is best for Iraq; that an American presence can forestall civil war forever, if civil war is in fact Iraq's fate; that the occupation still has a shred of legitimacy; that reconstruction can occur under a U.S. presence without insurgents blowing up collaborationist police stations and government offices-to say nothing of the long and soft veins of Iraq's oil infrastructure. Most shocking, this position assumes something decent can come out of an occupation whose chain of command terminates at the desks of the men blithely responsible for Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.
The biggest problem with the humanitarian defense of U.S. involvement in Iraq is that we've heard it all before. In the run-up to war it was said that only by taking out Saddam Hussein could the sanctions be lifted, thereby removing the vice-grip on the most vulnerable Iraqis. With even Madeleine Albright admitting that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of half a million children, the argument contained a tempting humanitarian logic. Yet most opponents of the sanctions nonetheless opposed the invasion, almost to a one. Why? Not because they were hypocrites or members of Saddam's Fan Club, but because they justifiably did not trust the intentions or methods of the United States-and the Bush administration in particular-when it came to other people's oil-rich countries. It also didn't take a Ph.D in Middle Eastern studies to recognize the risk of civil war. Plus, there was that whole international law thing. But most important, the assumption that Iraqis would fare better after a U.S. invasion was always a shaky one. A U.S. assault would mean the bombing of cities, more destroyed water purification plants, more bombed hospitals and more depleted uranium dust swirling in the sand. War is never a ladybug picnic, and you couldn't swing a bag of grain in the run-up to the war without hitting dire predictions about the humanitarian fallout of an invasion. University of Cincinnati sociologist Steven L. Carlton-Ford, a specialist in the relationship between child mortality and conflict, estimated that between 22,000 andÊ44,000 children under five would die in the first year as a direct and indirect consequence of war. If the mortality numbers reported last month in the Lancet are anywhere near correct, the Carlton-Ford estimate was far too conservative.
Now we are to believe that this brutal, illegitimate and bitterly resented occupation is the glue mercifully holding Iraq together, and that an even worse hell awaits our departure. Maybe it is, and maybe it does. This is a moral risk those pushing for withdrawal must accept. But given all we know, and given the hell we've already unleashed, I can't think of another chance still worth taking.