US Occupation-End it on July 1st?

A former US Army General has criticised President George W. Bush's Iraq policy and demanded that the country's forces return from Iraq as rapidly as possible for the sake of American security and economic power alike.


We have failed. The issue is how high the price we are going to pay. Less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later, William E. Odom, who is also a former head of the National Security Agency, told Wall Street Journal.

The longer US troops stay in Iraq, Odom reasoned, the more isolated America will become. That in turn will place increasing strain on international economic and security institutions, he said.

I don't know if the UN, the IMF, the World Bank or NATO can survive this, he commented.

Odom warned that there was no reason to expect that Iraq could soon develop the ingredients for constitutional democracy. The violence of recent months, he said, had exposed Bush's vision of doing it as a dream.

The result of Iraq's elections, he predicted, will resemble theocracy more than liberal democracy. Anyone who is pro-American cannot gain legitimacy, he said.

It will be a highly illiberal democracy, inspired by Islamic culture, extremely hostile to the West and probably quite willing to fund terrorist organisations. The ability of militants to use Iraq for attacks elsewhere, he said, may also increase.

the point is it can't be fixed, it just is such a mess that it will cause pain and despair, both in the US and iraq, and the rest of the world for a long long time.

Peter W. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia and with the United Nations in East Timor. As a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1980s, he uncovered and documented Iraq's "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds. Currently, he is the senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a partner in a firm specializing in international law and negotiation.

How to Get Out of Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith

1.
In the year since the United States Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, things have gone very badly for the United States in Iraq and for its ambition of creating a model democracy that might transform the Middle East. As of today the United States military appears committed to an open-ended stay in a country where, with the exception of the Kurdish north, patience with the foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy.

Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based on a hope that Iraq's bureaucrats and police would simply transfer their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country's administration would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.

I voted no. The US has got to stay until it fixes the mess it caused.

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog or a marsh in Iraq (quagmire's literal meaning); it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: Who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

More and more are, thankfully, choosing the second option. The last month of inflammatory US aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: Waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the US occupation authority are suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next.

And then there are the mutinous members of the US-controlled Iraqi army. Since the latest wave of fighting began, they've been donating their weapons to resistance fighters in the South and refusing to fight in Falluja, saying that they didn't join the army to kill other Iraqis. By late April, Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, was reporting that "about 40 percent walked off the job because of intimidation. And about 10 percent actually worked against us."

And it's not just Iraq's soldiers who have been deserting the occupation. Four ministers of the Iraqi Governing Council have resigned their posts in protest. Half the Iraqis with jobs in the secured "green zone"--as translators, drivers, cleaners--are not showing up for work. And that's better than a couple of weeks ago, when 75 percent of Iraqis employed by the US occupation authority stayed home (that staggering figure comes from Adm. David Nash, who oversees the awarding of reconstruction contracts).