Last Straw

Some excerpts from Why Amer­ica needs to be Defeated in Iraq by Mike Whit­ney of Inform­a­tion Clear­ing House:

The argu­ment most com­monly offered by anti­war Amer­ic­ans (who believe we should stay in Iraq) doesn’t defend the legit­im­acy of the inva­sion, but provides the rationale for the ongo­ing occu­pa­tion. The belief that “We can’t just leave them without secur­ity”, cre­ates the logic for stay­ing in Iraq until order can be estab­lished. Unfor­tu­nately, the occu­pa­tion is just another mani­fest­a­tion of the war itself; replete with daily bomb­ings, arrests, tor­ture and the destruc­tion of per­sonal prop­erty. There­fore, sup­port of the occu­pa­tion is a vin­dic­a­tion of the war. The two are inseparable.

Inde­pend­ence is not bestowed by a for­eign nation; the very nature of that rela­tion­ship sug­gests reli­ance on out­side forces. True inde­pend­ence and sov­er­eignty can only be real­ized when for­eign armies are evac­u­ated and indi­gen­ous ele­ments assume the reigns of power. (Bush acknow­ledged this him­self when he ordered Syr­ian troops to leave Lebanon).

There’s no indic­a­tion that the con­duct of the occu­pa­tion will change any­time soon. If any­thing, con­di­tions have only worsened over the passed two years. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion hasn’t shown any will­ing­ness to loosen its grip on power either by inter­na­tion­al­iz­ing the occu­pa­tion or by hand­ing over real con­trol to the newly elec­ted Iraqi gov­ern­ment. This sug­gests that the only hope for an accept­able solu­tion to the suf­fer­ing of the Iraqi people is a US defeat and the sub­sequent with­drawal of troops. Regret­tably, we’re no where near that period yet.

Sup­port for the Bush policy is, by neces­sity, sup­port for the instru­ments of coer­cion that are used to per­petu­ate that occu­pa­tion. In other words, one must be will­ing to sup­port the tor­ture at Abu Ghraib, (which con­tin­ues to this day accord­ing to Amnesty Inter­na­tional) the neo­lib­eral policies (which have privat­ized all of Iraq’s pub­licly owned indus­tries, banks and resources) an American-friendly regime that excludes 20% (Sun­nis) of the pop­u­la­tion and, worst of all, “the return-in full force-of Saddam’s Mukhabarat agents, now pos­ing as agents of the new Iraqi secur­ity and intel­li­gence ser­vices.” (Pepe Esco­bar, Asia Times)

We should also ask ourselves what the long-range implic­a­tions of an Amer­ican vic­tory in Iraq would be. Those who argue that we can­not leave Iraq in a state of chaos don’t real­ize that sta­bil­iz­ing the situ­ation on the ground is tan­tamount to an Amer­ican vic­tory and a vin­dic­a­tion for the policies of aggres­sion. This would be a big­ger dis­aster than the inva­sion itself.

… we look for an Amer­ican defeat in Iraq. Such a defeat would serve as a power­ful deterrent to future unpro­voked con­flicts and would deliver a ser­i­ous blow to the belief that aggres­sion is a viable expres­sion of for­eign policy.