The Phony Peace
August 20, 2010
On Thursday, the White House announced the withdrawal of the last U.S. “combat” troops from Iraq, ostensibly concluding one of the darker chapters in American arms. Although U.S. leaders in 2003 claimed that history would ultimately vindicate the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation, it does not appear that tomorrow’s high school history textbooks will be quite so charitable. In retrospect, the best that can be said in defense of U.S. policy toward Iraq is that we’ll never know for sure what havoc Saddam Hussein might have wreaked on the U.S. or our allies if left to his own devices. The facts of the Iraq War have consistently disappointed its advocates by failing to live up to the good-versus-evil romance of World War II, in which we were the good guys.
Despite the White House’s attempt this week to “declare victory and leave,” the departure of U.S. troops is illusory. By the White House’s own estimate, some 50,000 troops will remain in country—more than any “coalition” nation force level at the height of deployment. An untold number of private security contractors (better known as mercenaries or soldiers of fortune) will also remain. Neither the average Iraqi nor the average American taxpayer will detect a change in the wind. The Iraqi government, a creation of U.S. occupation forces, cannot survive in its current incarnation without a substantial U.S. military presence. It remains to be seen how the White House will spin American casualties suffered in Iraq next week and beyond.
One of President Obama’s principal rhetorical flourishes in the 2008 campaign emphasized that the Bush administration, by invading Iraq, had siphoned American troops away from the “real” war in Afghanistan, where “al-Qaeda” was allegedly based, and where initial successes had quickly evaporated due to neglect. However, when Gen. Stanley McChrystal sought 40,000 additional U.S. troops to augment his Afghanistan force—a modest request by the standards of the Iraq theatre—President Obama equivocated. He sent fewer troops than requested and then sacked McChrystal after the latter appeared in an entertaining but perhaps ill-advised feature article in Rolling Stone, in which he lambasted the White House for, at bottom, not sending him more troops.
Strip away the exquisite varnish of his speeches, and Obama has plainly failed to deliver on his main foreign policy objectives as stated in the 2008 campaign: close Guantanamo, negotiate with Iran, and get out of Iraq. Caught between the Scylla of public opinion and the charybdis of the defense industry, he must ply a narrow channel, supporting increases in our already crippling defense budget while reining in troop numbers. Nobody should be deceived, therefore, by this week’s theatrical and well-publicized withdrawal from Iraq. We continue to hemorrhage money there, much of which ends up with a handful of American corporations, where it is used to buy influence in congressional appropriations matters. Rinse and repeat. If ever a World War II comparison were apt, this is a Phony Peace.
