Getting Out of Iraq: The Democratic Solution

Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place to derive a  political strategy to end the American involvement in Iraq. The solution may lie with the Iraqis themselves.

As the tunnel of the Iraq war grows increasingly longer, with no light at the end yet appearing, the search to find a realistic plan for disengagement continues. The current stories about the massive U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, and the urgent efforts on the part of the Bush administration to secure favourable terms for the oil industry from the Iraqi government underscore the naivete of assuming that there will be a discontinuation of this misbegotten mission anytime soon. There is too much political capital invested in this war, and the proponents are otherwise oblivious to America's other capital losses in terms of personnel and treasury.

The current strategies for achieving  disengagement appear to centre on the mobilization of America's political will against the war in a fashion that will force the key political actors to scale back the mission and ultimately withdraw. There are two general ways that this sought to be achieved. The first stresses the deception, arrogance, and incompetence, fueled by right-wing ideology, with which this war was commenced and waged. Its simple message is that the war was wrong, continues to be wrong and we can't make it right. The rejoinder to this inevitably is Colin Powell's Pottery Barn principle. The adherents of this principle state that to withdraw completely would mean chaos and disaster, with the American intervention that destroyed the old order being the proximate cause of the country's new plight.

The other way that seeks to marshal public opinion against the war is to concentrate on the lack of progress that the Iraqi government has made in establishing civil society and governing themselves. Essentially, this strategy is calculated to engender the belief that Iraq is a mess and the inhabitants are more interested in pursuing civil war than establishing a working country. If so, why invest any more American material and lives? While it's kind of a "They don't deserve us" spin (particularly for Republicans), there is usually a few elements borrowed from the first persuasion technique, namely, that the occupation strategy made the country ungovernable. Adherents of this second way hope to use benchmarks or objective determinants of what progress is being made to convince America that further efforts are futile. As we have seen, getting agreement on when, what and how progress should be shown has largely been illusory.

It might be time to place more emphasis on the the will of the Iraqi people rather than the will of the American people. The President's most recent formulation of the war objective was to bring democracy to Iraq. More than 4 years after the invasion, it seems appropriate that the Iraqis determine how long American forces should stay. An appropriate position for Iraq war opponents might be that a referendum in Iraq  should determine the pace of the American withdrawal. Iraqis themselves should determine if they want the troops to stay. If they vote to have them withdraw, then the United States should respect their wishes. If they are not competent to make that decision, what was this war about? As numerous opinion polls seem to show, the referendum result would likely be to withdraw the troops now.

Such a course of action would  also remove from the post-war debate the kind of turgid and misinformed rants that we experienced post-Vietnam, that the war would have been won but for anti-war political action. It might put the current administration and war proponents in a neat little box, if they oppose such a referendum. They would then be attempting to extol the competence of an Iraqi government, ostensibly exercising sovereignty on behalf of a people who can't even be given the right to decide whether a foreign power should occupy their country.

A Democratic candidate for President might wish to consider a promise to require such a referendum upon taking office, at the same time reserving the right to act on the results in a way that is in keeping with the safety of American troops.