Risks of staying

Glenn Greenwald has written yet another superb piece that not only challenges the wisdom behind the apparent dangers of withdrawing from Iraq, but what motivates those who maintain this argument.

Conventional wisdom has led to the acceptance that withdrawing from Iraq would lead to even worse bloodshed that we are witnessing now. The peculiar thing about this position is that it has been, by and large, brought to us by the same people who were wrong about every aspect of the war (pre and post invasion). These are the same people who pre invasion, warned us of the dangers of not invading, while insisting that the setback would be minimal.

It is abundantly evident that these pundits have ulterior motives.

Here are just a handful of quotes:

But these same pundits who dole out lectures about how Seriousness requires an acknowledgment of risks focus — just as they did when advocating the invasion — on only one side of the risk ledger. These Serious War Pundits studiously ignore the risks of keeping 150,000 troops in the middle of that region under the control of George Bush and Dick Cheney. There is virtually no discussion of the risks of that course of action.

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The most glaring of these risks is the prospect of military conflict with Iran — the by-product not of some deliberative democratic debate over whether to go to war with that country, but rather a natural outgrowth of our occupation of Iraq.

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Lt. General William Odom argues that the risks of leaving are being exaggerated by withdrawal opponents as a rank fear-mongering device to scare people out of supporting withdrawal — in exactly the same way these same advocates exaggerated the “threat” posed by Saddam in order to scare people into supporting the war.

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One of the most under-discussed facts with regard to Iraq is that the very people who conceived of the invasion and who are the architects of our current military strategy have always believed, and still believe, that we must go to war with Iran. Our current strategy in Iraq was designed and, to a large degree, implemented with that goal in mind.

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What they seek — by their own acknowledgment — is a conflict with Iran and Syria, and they want to stay in Iraq because that is how that goal can be achieved. Joe Lieberman published an Op-Ed at the end of last year declaring that America’s real enemy in this “war” is Iran. Charles Krauthammer and John Podhoretz last year both proclaimed — excitedly — that U.S. war with Iran was inevitable, and that (according to Krauthammer) it would be less than a year away.

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But what if, as appears clearly to be the case, that is not really the goal of the people in charge of what we are doing in Iraq? What if the real goal in staying, as seems to be the case, is to maximize the possibility of war in the Greater Middle East? And/or what if, as Avedon Carol persuasively argues, the real goal is to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq, such that we are never really going to leave, because we don’t actually want to leave?

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But willful recklessness is no excuse. Purposely shutting one’s eyes to the likely consequences of the course one advocates does not exonerate anyone from responsibility for those consequences. And the severe risks of staying Iraq — beyond the guaranteed loss of thousands of more lives and billions and billions of dollars — have simply been erased from our current debate.

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And there in lies the rub. When these people insist we support the troops, what they really mean is that we should support their war. Ignoring the fact that the US military is overstretched already, their position is that so long as the US has a military presence in Iraq, the likelihood of an armed confrontation with Iran and Syria is increased.

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