Mother Jones on leaving Iraq

U.S. Out How?: The moral dilemma of leaving Iraq

The link above is to a report on the dilemma of leaving, or not leaving Iraq. I must admit Mother Jones does not form a part of my regular reading. However, this is an excellent report with dozens of interviews with key thinkers and insiders across the political spectrum. I haven’t had a chance to read them all yet. But I will and suggest all those with an interest in Iraq do the same.

From the interview with T.X. Hammes:

MJ: Do you think there was a specific turning point in this war, where things started going downhill?

TXH: Invading. The invasion was dumb. The turning point was when we went in to this place. If you were to study the entire world and pick a place where it would be hard to install a democracy, I don’t think you could have done better than Iraq. It’s on religious fault lines, it’s on cultural fault lines, it has a no-longer-functioning middle class that’s been repressed for years. The Iraqis mostly talk about justice rather than freedom. We keep pushing freedom, but what they want is justice. The incompetence of the Bush administration has been pretty stunning. What we’ve got to do now is some very serious planning within the U.S. government and with the regional powers about how we minimize the damage.

MJ: It seems like the most important piece of this is not the logistics, but the strategic planning.

TXH: I don’t care if we leave all our stuff there. What I do care about is that we come out leaving some kind of semblance of stability in the region. That’s going to be very tricky. But I can’t find any serious indicators that the administration is planning that or discussing it.

MJ: Do you think if we were to leave, the civil war would burn itself out in a decade or so?

TXH: A decade is a long time. It’s going to be at least a decade, and then the question is how many get killed and does it spill over.

MJ: It seems like any talk about withdrawal or mitigating strategies is seen as defeatist.

TXH: Yes, it is. And it’s a standard Bush administration response to any criticism—declare the guy to be supporting the enemy and ignore your own blunders and blame everything on them.

MJ: What have you thought about the efforts of congressional Democrats to end the war?

TXH: It’s been a lot of posturing. It’s really about the election. It’s not about stopping the war.

From the interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski:

MJ: What do you say to those in some of the think tanks and on the ground with the military who say Iran and to some degree Syria have played such actively, deliberately destabilizing roles in Iraq, that find it insulting to go to the players they think are playing a destabilizing role in Iraq to ask them to play nice?

ZB: I think most of the people who make that argument are the neocons who insisted that we go into Iraq in the first place and made a case based on false assumptions. The one thing we do know is that Iran was helpful to us in Afghanistan. Now why was it helpful? Because it was afraid that violence within Afghanistan would spread to Iran. Iran obviously has no interest in helping us succeed in our occupation of Iraq, but Iran has no interest in Iraq exploding because its explosion would spill over into Iran, which has a variety of ethnic and religious conflicts, potential conflicts. Exactly the same is true of Syria. It is also true of Turkey. It is even true of Saudi Arabia, so actually as long as we stay there, none of these states have any incentive to be helpful. Once they know we are going to be leaving, each of them for different reasons has very specific reasons why it will wish to be helpful. Because otherwise it will become volatile.