Bring the troops home

Progressive, The, Feb, 2005

The United States should pull out of Iraq. Already, the United States has lost more than 1,350 soldiers. Already, about 10,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded, at a rate now of almost 1,000 a month.

That is too high a price for us to pay in American blood.

Then there are the Iraqi civilians who have died. According to Iraqbodycount.net, as of January 5, Bush's war has killed between 15,080 to 17,285 civilians. But that organization compiles statistics only from published reports. According to a study done by public health officials from Johns Hopkins University, the actual total is much higher. Their study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, says at least 100,000 civilians have died, the majority falling victim to U.S. attacks.

Then there is the cost in American dollars. The United States has spent about $160 billion so far on this war, and the yearly price tag is rising toward $100 billion. This is draining our Treasury of much-needed revenue. For instance, the Administration says it can't afford $300 million more for Pell grants--less than 0.5 percent of what it is spending on this war. Poor students can't go to college because Bush went off half-cocked.

The situation in Iraq shows no signs of stabilizing. Quite the contrary. The morbid pace of chaos is increasing. The last six months of 2004 were the deadliest for U.S. troops since Bush launched the war, with 503 U.S. soldiers perishing. And the attacks keep mounting. "The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November," Robert Burns of AP reported. In November 2003, by contrast, the number of attacks was 864.

As a result of Bush's Iraq War, another generation of American soldiers faces the horror of post-traumatic stress disorder. According to The New York Times, more than 100,000 U.S. troops who have served in Iraq are expected to require mental health treatment.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's personnel policies have made things worse, with "stop-loss" orders forcing soldiers and members of the Reserves and National Guard to stay in Iraq months longer than they were promised. Little wonder, then, that more than 5,000 U.S. troops have deserted. (The top general in the Army Reserve, James R. Helmly, in a memo to the Army chief of staff, said the Reserves are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force.")

Meanwhile, the ranks of the insurgents are growing. "The resistance is more than 200,000 people," General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's intelligence service director, told Agence France-Presse. "Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter."

We do not romanticize the insurgents, much less approve of their tactics. We recognize that many of them are hard-core Islamic fundamentalists. But we also recognize that the array of forces does not favor U.S. troops, and that the more brutal the U.S. response, the more the insurgency grows.

All along, Bush and Rumsfeld have low-balled the number of people fighting the U.S. occupation. First, they said there were just a few foreign fighters and Saddam dead-enders. Then they said there were a couple of thousand, which was revised upward to 5,000 and now to 20,000, including part-timers. That is just one-tenth what the Iraqi intelligence director estimates. Our leaders are not leveling with the American people, or with U.S. soldiers and their families.

Bush and Rumsfeld have also suggested that each point along the road was a turning point.

The deaths of Saddam Hussein's brutal sons, Uday and Qusay, were supposed to be a turning point.

The capture of Saddam himself was supposed to be a turning point.

The transfer of power at the end of June was supposed to be a turning point.

Rousting Muqtada al-Sadr out of Najaf was supposed to be a turning point.

Taking back Fallujah was supposed to be a turning point. (The U.S. military destroyed Fallujah in order to save it.)

Now we are told that the elections are a turning point. But the only turning point will be when the U.S. turns around and leaves.

The United States is an occupying power, and no population likes to be occupied, as even Bush himself has acknowledged. What's more, the Bush Administration has bungled the occupation from the start. It did not prevent the wholesale looting of Baghdad ("Stuff happens," said Rumsfeld). It did not provide electricity and clean water in a timely fashion. It laid off hundreds of thousands of people in the army and other areas of the public sector. Under the direction of Paul Bremer, it privatized the economy to serve U.S. corporations. And U.S. soldiers have leveled thousands of homes and detained more than 10,000 Iraqi men without charges.

Things have gotten so bad some Iraqis are telling reporters that life was better for them under Saddam Hussein. What a sad and telling indictment that is!