I guess we've reached the point where your guess is as good as mine, Julio. I agree with much of what you say, but we still seem to have a different perception of how necessary the occupation is to US economic and security interests, and how determined the Bush administration is to maintain it. I think the long occupation, on balance, is harming those interests, and we sometimes forget that the Bushites never planned on one. They thought they'd be out long ago. The purpose of the invasion was to "shock and awe" the Iraqis and the rest of the world, quickly install a stable client regime (under Chalabi), and then withdraw its relatively thin forces, which weren't equipped to fight a serious insurgency.
They badly miscalculated, as Scowcroft and the other savants predicted. Now all the political factions are floundering around for a graceful exit strategy. I think both the Republicans and the Democratic leadership are hoping the December elections in Iraq will split the Sunnis and isolate the armed resistance, and that the insurgency will be contained long enough for the US to withdraw the main body of its forces from the country. They may be hoping against hope, but I don't think they will have the alternative of pouring good money after bad, as you suggest. Raising US troop strength to match the growing insurgency is simply not in the cards given the state of American public opinion. Even Rumsfeld has floated the idea of a drawdown. The pace of a withdrawal, not withdrawal itself, is what I think separates the two parties. MG -------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Julio Huato" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2005 10:54 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Progressive Democrats of America Marv, The points you raise are well taken. I'm just thinking aloud here.
I'm not expecting anything like a full withdrawal by the Bush admin for the reasons you state but I do think it'll have to at least make a gesture at withdrawing some troops (a "drawdown") in order to blunt the mounting criticism of the war which is threatening the Republican control of Congress.
I'm not sure. The noises in Capitol Hill, the fears of some Republicans vis the midterm elections, suggest something like this. But I wonder. Militarily, as Cheney and Rumsfeld say, it'd be disastrous. It'd weaken the occupying force and embolden the insurgency. And I heard Blair has a plan to pull the British contingent. They are not in the Sunni Triangle, but it's another blow to the plan as a whole. If the U.S. is going to withdraw a significant portion of the troops, then they may as well just pull them out completely. A thinner yet dragging occupation is to invite an even worse humiliation.
I don't think the Bush administration - as you suggest and as is often supposed on the left - is faithfully representing US ruling class opinion and interests in this adventure.
I should have been clearer. I wrote that the consequences would be entirely adverse to Bush's interests and those of his "(ruling-class) constituents." My point was not that the ruling-class constituents to which Bush caters are the whole, or a representative sample, of the class. Actually, I totally agree with you on this. But the rich people Bush caters to are, indeed, *part* of the ruling class. It's a fact that a significant portion of the U.S. ruling class is not particularly enlightened and their overriding agenda is to "starve the beast," cut taxes on capital income, dismantle social programs, etc. According to a Pew study on the main constituencies of the two parties, these people tend to be very militaristic as well.
You'll recall a substantial part of the US ruling class was opposed to the invasion from the beginning. Veterans of the Bush senior and Clinton administrations saw it as the reckless project of ideologues, and an even larger part of the ruling class has since become convinced the Scowcrofts and Brzezinskis were right. Iraq has, like Vietnam, become a quagmire which has weakened rather than strengthened the US's overall international position and led to a growing loss of confidence in US institutions at home. These concerns outweigh the temporary "loss of face" and weakened influence the US might experience as a result of a withdrawal. American policymakers and politicians had to weigh the same considerations in Vietnam - when Third World revolutions backed by powerful nation states like the USSR and China posed a greater strategic threat to US interests than militant Islam does today - and it still sued for peace in the Paris negotiations with the Vietnamese. Getting out of Iraq will be easier because it will be able to negotiate the modalities of a withdrawal with a "sovereign" Iraqi government seen, unlike the North Vietnamese and NLF, as an ally - even if the Iraq delegation is necessarily broadened to include representatives of the armed resistance. So a defeat could be disguised more easily.
Yes, the Scowcrofts were opposed to the invasion. But that doesn't mean that they favor the withdrawal now. Why not? Because losing Iraq is almost equivalent to the public emasculation of the U.S. military. If the lessons of Vietnam were not clear, Iraq's should be. And they are all afraid of that. Powell articulated this in the so-called Pottery-Barn rule. It scares the hell out of everybody in the establishment, including the Biddens, the Schumers, and the Clintons. I mean, from our perspective, it just goes to show how cheap, how ultimately sterile, a form of power military might is. It's based on fear and that can only go so far. It's not even comparable to, say, the carrot of the profit motive. In today's world, there's little in the use or threat of military force to entice people to act constructively. For those interested in a re-birth of the workers' movement and socialism, this is great news. But the U.S. ruling class doesn't want military might to completely lose its dissuasive powers. In fact, the danger of losing such powers is what holds back the Democrats in congress and makes Edwards include "face-saving" provisions in his plan. The loss of face is the loss of U.S. power in very concrete terms. When 9/11 happened, I thought that the boom of the 1990s had internationalized the U.S. capital so much (total trade as a share of GDP almost doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s and an increasing share of the revenues of large U.S. companies depended on foreign operations) that the enlightened, pragmatic segment of the ruling class would be strengthened. Then, I thought, they would never let the neo-cons lose. They had to value -- I thought -- a stable global economic environment. They had to favor upholding a system of international law -- and the invasion of Iraq was obviously erosive of such order. Even in a international level legal playing field, with enforcement powers, the U.S. would have a clear advantage over most others because of its pre-existing wealth and technological lead. Yet that would provide enough legitimacy for another juicy round of capitalist "globalization," once a few corporate evildoers were punished and the excesses of the Internet bubble were forgotten. But I was dead wrong. Those people shut up. My guess is that what persuaded them not to stand in the way of Bush's march on Iraq, even if they had strong reservations against it, was the economic situation, the recession/jobless recovery plus the worsening international financial position of the U.S. The neo-cons played on their fear that the U.S. purely economic competitive edge was not as robust as the 1990s made them believe. That and the notion that the U.S. *had to* respond militarily to the terrorist attacks and show everyone who's boss. The neo-cons made the argument very forcefully that, when looking at the whole of the post-WW2 trends, all the U.S. had was a narrowing window of opportunity granted by its overwhelming military "superiority." Technology is not easily "excludable," etc. Well, so much for that "superiority." Iraq has shown its limits. With his adventure, Bush has destroyed much of the magic of the U.S. military (I know, nukes have not been used yet) and left the country in much worse financial shape than it was in 2000 as the economy headed into the recession. But that doesn't mean that the ruling class will be pleased by what I called above the public emasculation of U.S. military power. They are in a bind similarly to that of Long Term Capital, and they believe that if they just leverage their portfolio and play Russian roulette a bit more, maybe they'll be able to pull it off. Even though the evidence of *relative* economic decline in the U.S. (vis-a-vis the emerging powers in Asia and, perhaps, Mercosur) is mixed, we need to look at the Iraqi quagmire in that context. Maybe the neo-cons are "right," in a historically perverse way. Apparently, there's convergence (as Marx anticipated in his preface to Capital I), slow and all, but convergence. And the entrepreneurially insecure faction of the U.S. ruling class views the window shutting on their noses and they are tempted to view its military force (the world be damned) as their only "negotiating" device. After me, the deluge. Julio
