Opinion
Troops should pull out of Iraq, now
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Also by Christopher Dols:
- Michael Moore sells out (October 19, 2004)
- Troops should pull out of Iraq, now (September 30, 2004)
- Fight for your right to choose (September 16, 2004)
- Kerry as bad as Bush; vote Nader! (September 1, 2004)
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In the run up to November, liberals have started leaning into Bush for his failed occupation of Iraq. From exposing the human cost of the war to the budget cuts in education, many criticisms in the campus and national press have been on point. But the proposed solutions, such as greater UN involvement and electing Kerry, aren’t solutions at all. Alternatively, we should bring all the troops home now.
The starting point for democracy is self-determination. Before the right to vote, freedom of assembly, or the rest of the perks, democracy first and foremost requires the ruled to determine the type of rule. To plagiarize some smart, dead guys: it is government of, by and for the people.
Self-determination is a pretty well defined term. Common definitions include “without compulsion” and “independence.” Put forward by such radical texts as Merriam-Webster, this understanding of sovereignty undermines every argument for establishing democracy in Iraq through military occupation. That is, 140,000 troops and their guns, representing the United States government (i.e. not Iraq), cannot uphold Iraqi democracy, no matter how polite they are.
“But civil war will erupt! An undemocratic, Islamic regime will emerge!” exclaim Bush and Kerry supporters in unison. But we can’t put conditions on self-determination. That would be like supporting my right to vote — as long as it’s not for Nader (another article for another week). The fear that an oppressive regime would emerge is legitimate, but history shows that such regimes survive because of the role of the United States, not in spite of it. Iraq’s history is a great example for two reasons. It shows the true course of American foreign policy and its rampant hypocrisy.
In 1963, the CIA engineered the Ba’ath Party’s rise to power in Iraq and supplied the new leaders with lists of political activists who were to be the first victims of the Ba’athist terror. The U.S. backing continued through the Reagan administration, which is where the story gets good. While formally neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. aided both sides at different times of the war. In 1987, when it looked like Iran was winning the war, the U.S. provided Saddam Hussein with 70 shipments of E. coli, botulism, and anthrax among other biological agents. And remember Saddam’s 1988 gassing of his own people? The gassing not only killed Kurds, it also ruined crops in Northern Iraq. What the Bush supporters, so quick to bring up these crimes, don’t tell you is that Bush (the first) increased agricultural credits for Saddam in 1989, making up for the crop loss. Some punishment! More recently, it was the UN-imposed sanctions that reduced Iraq to such poverty made surviving was difficult enough, let alone organizing against Saddam’s regime. According to the UN’s own estimates over a million people died as a direct result of the sanctions.
Would a civil war break out in Iraq? I don’t know. What I do know is that there is currently an all-out war in Iraq between the occupation forces and the civilian resistance. About 70 attacks occur each day against occupation forces; over 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. Ending the occupation halts this violence — this much we know. Speculation about a potential civil war cannot justify today’s reality of mass violence and widespread death.
Furthermore, the civil war bogeyman that continues to justify the occupation is no different from the weapons of mass destruction or the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Just as there is no evidence of this link or such weapons, there is no compelling evidence for a coming civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. If anything, there is strong evidence to the contrary. When the U.S. was attempting to subdue the Sunni city of Falluja in April, Sabah Saddam, a Shiite truck driver delivering food aid to the city, said it best, “Sunni, Shia, that doesn’t matter anymore. These were artificial distinctions. The people in Falluja are starving. They are Iraqis and they need our help.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t rational arguments about self-determination that convinced the American military to withdraw from Vietnam. It was the Vietnamese resistance against the American troops, and the ensuing resistance by the troops against their officers. According to conservative estimates 25 percent of ranking officers killed in Vietnam were killed by their own troops. One colonel even had a $10,000 bounty placed on his head by his own men. Such resistance, if renewed, will be the death of American imperialism, and that should be our goal.
Chris Dols (cdols@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.
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Self-determination requires voting. If we pull out now, there will be no vote, only an Islamofascist takeover.
Shmoo Ethics
In the old cartoon "L'il Abner" there was a creature called a Shmoo, who ran around begging to be eaten by people. Dols would have made a great shmoo, except that he insists that our goal is to be eaten by Islamic fundamentalists instead of humans.
Would a vote in Iraq allow our genocidal enemies to come to power? Tsk, tsk, we're not supposed to ask such irrelevant questions. The only important part is that they vote, not whether we survive the result. Besides, it's all our fault that Saddam survived so long. We funded him in an attempt to (*gasp*) defend American security.
Dols simply inverts the entire purpose of our foreign policy. Our government didn't liberate Iraq out some scummy altruistic desire to help our former enemies. (At least I hope not. George Bush has been more than a bit vague on that point.) Instead, we liberated Iraq to help our own interests - by eliminating one obvious threat, and by showing other people in the middle east that freedom is a viable alternative to Islamic fundamentalism and socialistic nationalism. If we succeed in Iraq, its freedom will be a mortal threat to other dictatorships in the region. We should be selfishly happy when that happens.
It's too bad that Nader isn't in the debates to make Kerry answer this question.
The invasion of Iraq wasn't the best of ideas. Let's get that up front now. However, leaving Iraq now would be the height of irresponsibility. Going in was a mistake, but it's a mistake we made and we are responsible for what we did. If we leave now and create a power vacuum, hundreds of thousands at the very least would die. It's like the choice between bombing Hiroshima and invading the Home Islands: Neither option is pleasant and nuclear bombs are horrible, but ultimately, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with the fewest possible deaths. The way to end the situation in Iraq with the fewest possible deaths in the end now that we're already there is to stay on until the country is stable enough to carry out it's own security. If we began a withdrawal today, it would take months to pull all our troops and equipment out anyway, and they'd be retreating under increasing attacks from insurgents as personnel trickled out of the country. The last ones would likely get no more ceremonious an exit than the helicopter lift off of the embassy roof in Saigon in the last days of the Vietnam War. Invading may have been short sighted, but running at this juncture would be even more so.
Woodrow Major
Protest Warrior, Murray State University
Rogue 9, Protest Warrior forums
um yea, you aughtta think this thru a little more, if we leave and iraq goes into a civil war, not only will the surrounding countries come in and take over, but also the deaths will probably go up into the millions instead of thousands, so we are actually saving lives, not to mention that in most places the living standard is going up
Probably not. When you get right down to it, the civil war you're talking about is already underway. I'll point you to the December 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, an article called "If America Left Iraq." Very interesting.