Reports of twin suicide bombings in Samarra and 150 killed inevitably raise the fear of an upsurge of violence in Iraq as the US disengagement from the region accelerates. As Iraq Body Count and others show, the rate of violence today is a fraction of the levels it reached in 2006 and 2007, before the revision of the counter-insurgency strategy under Petraeus, and certainly one shouldn’t assume a pattern from just a few incidents, however horrific. But equally it would be foolish not to at least consider the possibility that the withdrawal of US troops will create space for a military contest of political power in the streets.
The bombings made me think of George W. Bush’s 2007 speech on the impact of the withdrawal from Vietnam, one of the few speeches he made in eight years worth paying attention to. In a long speech in which he quoted critics of the Vietnam war who claimed that the source of violence in Southeast Asia was solely the US presence, Bush replied that “the price of American withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent civilians whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’, and ‘killing fields.’”
Criticism of the speech was widespread. First, people pointed out that it was hardly a ringing endorsement to compare Iraq to Vietnam. (With hindsight, a more sympathetic way of putting this is that the comparison was a gutsy call; certainly hawks have not been keen to make Vietnam analogies most of the time.) Second, they noted that blaming the post-withdrawal violence in Vietnam on the withdrawal ignored the impact US bombing and warfare had on the ravaged societies of Indochina. As Rosa Brooks in the LA Times said, “it's more accurate to attribute their suffering to the prolongation of the war itself, rather than to the U.S. withdrawal as such.”
Both points are valid. The problem is that the blame game doesn’t actually do anything about the violence, it just tells us who’s morally culpable for creating the conditions for it. This might be acceptable when discussing the long gone war in Vietnam, but the withdrawal from Iraq is unfolding right now, and our actions will have dramatic consequences. Whether it was the decision to intervene or the decision to withdraw, the violence of post-US Vietnam happened. And we should expect, or at least prepare for the possibility, that groups will seek to profit through violence in the same way in Iraq. If violence does tick up, it won’t help dead Iraqis’ families to sagely note that it’s all George Bush’s fault. We know that ... go ahead and indict him ... but surely finding a way to minimise the deaths that are yet to happen is the key point.
The fact is that the diminution in violence in Iraq is a product of a highly complex balance of forces, which I certainly don’t fully understand and I’m not sure many other people do, either. Indeed, the prospect of America withdrawing might actually even be both an opportunity for violence for some groups and a reason not to resort to violence for others. Certainly, statements that once the US is gone all the problems of Iraq will vanish are naive, self-serving, and dangerous.
Like it or not, American power plays a central part of this balance of forces. Withdrawing troops is vital for Iraq and for America, but it is guaranteed to have major political consequences, even if we don’t know exactly what they are. It is not a comment on the wisdom or otherwise of withdrawing, and it is not a moral statement about who was to blame for the invasion, to argue that means the administration needs to be exceptionally careful in the way it manages this process. Obama has stated this, and I hope he means it.
Think Of the Children
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