when we first went into Iraq 5 years ago, some of my lowest level students were absolutely certain that the only reason we were doing do was because of oil, despite anything to the contrary said by the administration or anyone else, including other possibilities raised by their teacher. I thought back to those conversations this morning when I read the following:
What, exactly, did the United States use its military might to accomplish last week? We intervened in a struggle among various Shiite power centers for control of a city where much of Iraq's oil industry -- and thus much of its potential wealth -- is based. We supported a political figure who was trying to weaken another political figure in advance of upcoming elections. We boosted the morale and fervor of the most implacable opponents of continued American occupation.
Does any of this have anything to do with our nation's vital interests? I suppose you could argue that Basra is important because of the oil, but the city is no more under Baghdad's control today than it was two weeks ago.
The words, by Eugene Robinson, appear in this morning's Washington Post and are where I begin.
Robinson's op ed column is entitled McCain's Free Ride and has as its primary focus a concept expressed simply in the final sentence:
He should have to explain why he wants to keep us on George Bush's long, winding path to nowhere.
Now, I am fond of the Beatle's song "The Long and Winding Road," but that song at least had a purpose, and Robinson's intent is to express simply how little we gain by our continued exertions on behalf of a government that cannot yet functions as any more than one political faction or gang operating in opposition to others.
And yet, somehow there are parts of those lyrics by Lennon and McCartney that seem strangely appropriate. For example, the song begins:
The long and winding road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I've seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to your door.
We come back to the same door, to the same place. The song is framed in the sense of an unending love. But our experience in Iraq is of course something else.
Robinson's critique of the Maliki military endeavor against Basra is devastating. He points out how badly it would have failed had not their been intervention by the U.S - airpower - and the British - airpower and artillery. And he reminds us
It was the British military, after all, that had declared its job done in Basra and withdrawn, knowing full well that the city was controlled by gangs and militias, not the central government in Baghdad.
Yet I cannot help but point out that while those gangs and militias were in control, there was little violence in Basra, nor did that city see the regular dumping of headless or murdered bodies as is so common still in Baghdad.
I do urge you to read Robinson's column, in which he also totally dismantles the idea that McCain meant our staying in Iraq would be like our long-term military presence in Korea. There is one sentence near the end that summarizes pithily, as Robinson is wont do, the situation before us. After going through all of the the mess illustrated by the current unsuccessful debacle in Basra, and how the so-called surge has failed miserably in its supposed intent of providing time for political reconciliation and for the Iraqis to "stand up" so the American forces could stand down, Robinson simply says:
All of which illustrates the insanity of the open-ended Iraq war policy that Bush has followed and that McCain vows to perpetuate.
Another stanza from the Beatles' song also seems appropriate:
The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day.
Why leave me standing here?
Let me know the way.
I read the words, I hear the music in my mind, and think of people I know and those I only read about. "Why leave me standing here" reminds me of John Kerry's words to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of how you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake? A terrific public servant I know slightly Kate Hanley, Secretary of the Commonwealth (of Virginia) and former chair of the Fairfax County Board, has a son named Patrick. He had been in Iraq over a year - remember those extended tours. He was seriously injured over the weekend, losing an arm and suffering a head injury (which they hope and believe has not resulted in permanent brain damage. He arrives at Bethesda today. I think of the former student responsible for the MP guards in about a dozen installations in Iraq, and the families of the many whose loss we at least recognize in the IGTNT series, when this administration tries to hide the losses and the injuries.
Robinson warns that if the Democratic primary is going to go on for months, the candidates need to find a way to ensure that McCain does not get a free ride. Not on this long and winding path to nothing but further death and destruction, for Iraqis as well as Americans. I would expand what he says: is the reason that McCain thinks we have to keep troops for a hundred years so that we can enforce those contracts imposed under Paul Bremer that rip off the Iraqi economy, particularly its oil? Were my students right after all, that our only concern was control of Iraqi oil?
Perhaps I am tired because of my age, because of watching in what seems to be helplessness as more people die or have their lives shattered by the deaths of those close to them or by the traumatic injuries they suffer to body, soul, and psyche.
I look around the country and see teachers being laid off in California, gasoline prices continuing to creep up, house prices falling as one impact of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the cost of food skyrocketing, in part because of the ripling of the price of corn (driving in part by corn-based ethanol and in part by the cost of fertilizing and transporting using petroleum based products), and our national budget going ever further into debt while some insist on making destructive tax cuts permanent.
We have traveled a long and winding path or road, and it does bring us back to the same point. We are standing outside, in the rain, confronted with the same issues that we before us more than 5 years ago.
This administration is willing to lie and cheat and steal on behalf of the interests of a small group of people who seek to gain and maintain power at any cost, to enrich themselves. to ensure that they cannot be held accountable. And John McCain is wedded to the same path, having abandoned any so-called principle opposition he may have had in the past - on tax cuts, to the role of the religious right - in his attempts to gain power for himself. To what end, that we spend hundreds of billions more on a war that most in this country do not want?
If my students were right, and this war was largely about oil, then it has failed as badly on those grounds as on any reason actually put forth by this administration 0 the iraqi oil industry is in shambles, and seems unlikely to recover as long as we remain in situ, inflaming the situation by our presence, by our tilt towards one side of a multi-sided internecine conflict.
I am frustrated because words are not enough, but absent words we cannot mobilize the American people. Our Democratic candidates need to be speaking out forcefully, NOW, about how wrong John McCain is. Were both Obama and Clinton (both Clintons, perhaps), to be doing that every day, the media would be forced to give this issue the attention it deserves. John McCain's approach will bankrupt this nation, destroy any possibilities for a resolution without violence in Iraq, even any chance of rebuilding the Iraqi oil industry. And if the path to which McCain seems committed is traveled without opposition, the resulting damages will be catastrophic in too many ways to list.
Sometimes it is so simple
and sometimes that is because there is no other way
End the war NOW.