Withdrawing from Iraq (Part II): Considering Options

``Yet another option to consider could be to move out of Iraq (probably within striking distance) and manage the operation through increased CIA operations``

And yet another option to consider could be to surround author`s house, drag his mother and sister in the street, rape them in open, and shoot a bullet through their heads - all in front of esteemed author. What this would do is to lessen one colony of homicidal maniacs from this world and give them a taste of the killings they propose on others, under the intellectual guise of sterile words like ``operations``.

Re: # 5
Did anyone say they can’t talk?

kulharee...
when idiots can talk for america, why can`t a non-arab for iraq...?

Great. Two non-American non-Arab world renowned scholars are now going to talk about Iraqi occupation.

Re: # 1

masadi...

Thanks for another lucid, thoughtful post. I am convinced, and I believe history is on my side, that only Iraqis can solve Iraq`s problems. The U.S. should never have invaded Iraq - that should be abundantly clear to even the most obtuse. The U.S. ought to get the hell out - NOW. Not tomorrow, but right now, today. Military, CIA scum, Halliburton employees disguised as ``advisors`` - all of them.

mirmir

Mujtaba Hamid:

``Based on these estimates, there are about 2,000 qualified Iraqi troops, as compared to the 500,000 regulars that Saddam had actively deployed to keep things under control.``

ABC News has consistently reported that there only 700 Iraqi troops capable of independent action.

For an in-depth analysis of the ``withdrawal movement`` click on the following URL (I`ve included a few excerpts to pique your interest):

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL03Ak01.html

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
How (not) to withdraw from Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

``But in private conversations American officials are beginning to acknowledge that a judgment about when withdrawals can begin ... `` (``withdrawals`` being, of course, something less than ``withdrawal``). By the fifth paragraph (just after the jump to an inside page), anonymous ``White House aides`` are saying that the president ``will begin examining the timing of a draw-down after he sees the outcome of the December 15 election in Iraq``.

“So in five paragraphs and a headline, you have pullout, withdrawal, withdrawals, draw-down ... and by then you`ve already met a plethora of pluralized sources as well - not just those ``White House officials``, but even vaguer ``American officials``, and lest even that give away too much, ``several officials``. They`re soon joined by a roiling mass of other obscurely less-then-identified beings (``current and former White House officials``, ``one former aide with close ties to the National Security Council``, ``senior officers``, plain old ``officers``, and ``senior Pentagon civilians and officers``). And if that isn`t murky enough for you, just throw in the ``ifs`` that go with any story of this sort and tend to negate even the best proposed plan:
[O]fficials in the Bush White House were already actively reviewing possible plans under which 40,000 to 50,000 troops or more could be recalled next year if ``a plausible case could be made`` that a significant number of Iraqi battalions could hold their own.
Here, for instance, are typical phrases from correspondent Rosiland Jordan`s withdrawal story on NBC national news last Sunday: ``The debate is focusing on how many and when ... that depends on how quiet the situation is ... if conditions on the ground allow it ... provided the situation on the ground improves.``

“In the eye of its own strange storm, the administration is finally starting to put policy back into the hands of those who pass for ``realists``, as journalist Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service has been pointing out recently. For instance, the astute and Machiavellian neo-con Zalmay Khalilzad, our former ambassador to Afghanistan and present-day ambassador to the Green Zone of Iraq, has just been given permission to negotiate with the Iranians for help in Iraq and is, according to Newsweek, beginning to put American funds where they might actually matter - into bribes to Sunni officials.

In the meantime - just a little straw in the gale - Rice recently met for the first time in who knows how long for a chat with her former mentor, the elder Bush`s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. (If daddy`s men are ever actually called back in, then you`ll know for sure that the White House is in humiliating ``withdrawal`` mode.)”

“In draw-down terms, the plan seems to go something like this: while withdrawal was making it onto the public agenda, our actual force in Iraq has risen in recent months from approximately 138,000 to about 160,000. So the first ``withdrawals`` (plural) the administration will be able to announce after the December 15 election - about 20,000 troops - will simply get us back to the levels that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his planners always meant us to be at.

General George Casey, US commander in Iraq, and others have been letting the news ooze out for a while (despite rumors of presidential slap-downs for doing so) that, if all goes half-well, we will perhaps withdraw another 40,000 troops (the figures vary depending upon the leak) in 2006, leaving us with just under 100,000 troops there. In 2007 ... well, who knows, but the process, it`s clear, is meant to be more or less unending, and, mind you, that`s according to the Pentagon`s ``moderately optimistic`` scenario. (Seymour Hersh claims that the administration`s ``most ambitious`` plans call for all troops designated ``combat``, which is not all troops, to be withdrawn by the summer of 2008.) “

It is amazing how chowk is publishing pro US article after pro US article while deliberately ignorning the rest even though they might be higher in literary merit- Nevertheless, the U.S has repeated war after war after war, post world war 2 and every place it has gone, using the excuse of human rights, freedom and democracy as legitimating slogans, it has created immense human suffering, destroyed ecologies, infrastructure and social institutions.

It truly amazes me, and as a human being, saddens me, how this author casually glances over the Iraqi dead by saying they will keep dying regardless of whether the U.S. moves out or not, while being overly concerned about different chess hands the US can play, in this ``business-like`` game of life and death. The cause of the surge in Iraqi deaths was the US invasion, take the cause away and their deaths are bound to go down unless the US fuels a civil war because it has destroyed social institutions and played one group against the other. The only solution to this mess that the US elite have created in the world (not only Iraq) is for the US to stop interfering all around the world, and get the hell out of everyone`s economic, political and military affairs- after that happens the rest of the world can prosper and get rid of the colonial nation state system, designed by them for maximum resource theft, as they play one against the other. The nation state system was a farce, designed by the colonials to bureaucratize and institutionalize within the world system their age old strategy of ``divide and rule``. Good day to you all.