Thanksgiving week began with the New York Times noting that “all of
Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in
Iraq.” The debate -- long overdue -- is a serious blow to the war makers
in Washington, but the U.S. war effort will go on for years more unless
the antiwar movement gains sufficient momentum to stop it.
A cliche goes that war is too important to be left to the generals.
But a more relevant assessment is that peace is too vital to be left to
pundits and members of Congress -- people who have overwhelmingly
dismissed the option of swiftly withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
On November 17, a high-profile military booster in Congress
suddenly shattered the conventional wisdom that immediate withdrawal is
unthinkable. “The American public is way ahead of us,” Rep. John Murtha
said in a statement concluding with capitalized words that shook the
nation’s capitalized political elites: “Our military has done everything
that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further
in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.”
Murtha’s statement has broken a spell. But the white magic of the
USA’s militarism remains a massive obstacle to bringing home the U.S.
troops who should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place.
There has been no outbreak of conscience in editorial offices or on
Capitol Hill. Deadly forms of opportunism are still perennial in the
journalistic and political climates that dominate official Washington.
The center of opportunistic gravity may have shifted in a matter of
days, but the most powerful voices in U.S. media and politics are still
heavily weighted toward the view reiterated by President Bush on Sunday:
“An immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq will only strengthen
the terrorists’ hand in Iraq and in the broader war on terror.”
“Immediate withdrawal” may be a misnomer -- Murtha, while calling
for it, has urged complete removal of U.S. troops from Iraq within six
months. But that’s much more forthright than the position taken by Sen.
Russell Feingold, who last summer began to urge full withdrawal by the
end of 2006 -- a position that won a lot of praise from progressives at
the time even though, in effect, it endorsed a continued U.S. war effort
in Iraq for another 16 months. Feingold’s position for a pullout
deadline now looks pro-war compared to what Murtha is advocating.
On Capitol Hill and among the punditocracy, the failure of the Bush
administration to show military progress in Iraq has made the war
politically vulnerable. But that line of critique leaves a somewhat
clear field for the White House to keep claiming (however implausibly)
that U.S. military forces and their Iraqi government allies are turning
the corner and can look forward to Iraqization of the war. Today’s White
House line is akin to the “light at the end of the tunnel” and
Vietnamization talk 35 years ago.
If the Pentagon had been able to subdue the Iraqi population, few
in Congress or on editorial pages would be denouncing the war. As in so
many other respects, this is a way that the domestic U.S. political
dynamics of the war on Iraq are similar to what unfolded during the
Vietnam War. With the underpinnings of war prerogatives unchallenged, a
predictable response is that the war must be fought more effectively.
That’s what the great journalist I. F. Stone was driving at when he
wrote, a few years into the Vietnam War, in mid-February 1968: “It is
time to stand back and look at where we are going. And to take a good
look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily
overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest
against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If
it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert
and Edward] and organizations like ADA [the liberal Americans for
Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they
were a few years ago.”
In the United States, while the lies behind the Iraq war become
evermore obvious and victory seems increasingly unreachable, much of the
opposition to the war has focused on the death and suffering among U.S.
soldiers. That emphasis has a sharp political edge at home, but it can
also cut another way -- defining the war as primarily deplorable because
of what it is doing to Americans. One danger is that a process of
withdrawing some U.S. troops could be accompanied by even more use of
U.S. air power that terrorizes and kills with escalating bombardment (as
happened in Vietnam for several years after President Nixon announced
his “Guam Doctrine” of Vietnamization in mid-1969). An effective antiwar
movement must challenge the jingo-narcissism that defines the war as a
problem mainly to the extent that it harms Americans.
Countless pundits and politicians continue to decry the Bush
administration’s failure to come up with an effective strategy in Iraq.
But the war has not gone wrong. It was always wrong. And the basic
problem with the current U.S. war effort is that it exists.
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Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com