U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver, came back from his recent trip to Iraq declaring a conversion worthy of St. Paul on the road to Damascus (Viewpoint, 8-26). But this is not good news for either our troops or the people of Iraq.
Formerly a war critic – Baird had voted against authorizing the Iraq war and still believes that the invasion of Iraq “may be one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation” – he now has seen the light and opposes withdrawal from Iraq.
He says that his trip to Iraq convinced him that “the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better,” and “our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.”
It would be great if that were the case, but unfortunately Baird has mistaken a snow job for the real thing.
Baird did not see the full reality of Iraq on his trip. By all accounts, the brief and tightly controlled codels (short for congressional delegations) are shown only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration want them to see, which includes Potemkin village-like displays of security progress and soldiers who plead with them not to let war have been in vain.
“Spin city” is how Rep. James Moran, D-Va., described his recent trip to Baghdad as part of a congressional delegation.
“The Iraqis and the Americans were all singing from the same song sheet, and it was deliberately manipulated,” he told The Washington Post on Aug. 31.
One U.S. soldier, Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, who was ordered to pay Iraqi shopkeepers to open their stores for these congressional visits, told The Washington Post Sept. 4, “Personally, I think it’s a false representation. But what can I say? I’m just doing my job and don’t ask questions.”
The reality is that the Bush administration spin job that its “surge” strategy is bringing about real and lasting progress in Iraq has been directly challenged by nearly every recent official report on the “surge” and even by those who would know better than Baird: the growing chorus of active-duty soldiers who were clearly not on Baird’s codel meet-and-greet list.
An Aug. 19 New York Times op-ed by seven U.S. soldiers with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division writing from Iraq at the end of a tough 15-month combat tour charged that upbeat official reports on Iraq amounted to “misleading rhetoric” and warned against pursuing “incompatible policies to absurd ends.”
The notion that somehow we can make this mess better if we only give it more time and that Iraq will explode into violent mayhem if we leave are both also at odds with the realities in Iraq.
First, the U.S. military presence is the problem, not the solution. It is the toxic fuel that inflames the insurgency and civil war.
As long as we are there, Sunni extremists will try to provoke the Shiites in order to undermine the U.S. occupation and al-Qaida will try to exploit the violence for its own ends.
History has shown that Iraqis will always resist foreign occupation. We simply cannot make things better by staying.
Second, there will be no genocide or terrorist safe haven in Iraq after we leave. Iraq after U.S. withdrawal will look very much like Iraq today: a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war fought along the seams of its Sunni and Shiite Arab zones, each ruled by rival militias and gangs.
Iraq’s Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, and in fact, in this Darwinian context, al-Qaida would likely be destroyed as local Sunni militias assert their control.
The chance to make anything better can only begin with U.S. withdrawal and must include an international and regional effort to ensure stability in Iraq, leading to a United Nations-sponsored peace conference of all Iraqi factions to form a new Iraq. None of this can happen until the U.S. declares its intention to leave.
Our courageous men and women in uniform who have sacrificed so much, and the people of Iraq who are in a living hell beyond description, deserve far better than Baird’s “spin city” revelations. It’s time for Baird to convert back to reality.
Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East studies and international politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. He lives in Brian Baird’s 3rd Congressional District.
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