WASHINGTON, D.C. — Room 122 of the Cannon
House Office Building. It’s small — it’s not a
hearing room — and about as far away from the Capitol itself
as it’s possible to be and still be in a House office. No
surprise, then, that this is the room U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey,
D-Calif., was permitted to use by the House Republican leadership
for her “informal hearing” Thursday, Sept. 15, on exit
strategies to get our troops out of Iraq. Into this bandbox Woolsey’s staff have
shoehorned an L-shaped head table with space for five witnesses and
five members of Congress, with Woolsey herself at the crux. Another
half-dozen congressmen may be seated along the front wall, behind
the first five. Two dozen folding chairs are set up for audience
and press. A few TV camera crews — one is from C-Span —
are tucked into the back corner. Standing room in the doorway, and
out into the hall, brings the total capacity of the room to perhaps
65. It’s enough. “Official”
Washington — meaning the Republicans and the Democratic
leadership both — is pointedly paying no attention. For the
mainstream media, too, Hurricane Katrina is the only story, despite the
fact that a dozen bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday, resulting in
more than 160 dead and 600 casualties, made it the bloodiest day in
the Iraqi capital since we invaded in March 2003. So two questions are paramount. First, how
many congressmen will show up and lend their names to the cause of
ending — in some form or fashion — our occupation of
Iraq? And second, between the witnesses and the politicians who do
show, will a consensus form about what the exit strategy should be? The answer to the first question, by my count,
is just 30, most of whom come and go throughout the four-hour
session, greeting each other’s arrivals with a nod or the
special handshake of a small tribe in a hostile land. They are, in
the main, the progressive names you know if you follow politics
— Barbara Lee, Barney Frank, Marty Meehan, Dennis Kucinich. And John Conyers, the Detroit congressman, who
wonders out loud whether it does any good for the like-minded to
meet each other this way and whether it might not be a better
strategy — for getting the public’s attention, and
Washington’s, too — “to begin impeachment
proceedings against the 43rd president of the United
States.”
The biggest “name” in Congress to
attend is a Republican, U.S. Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina.
He’s the only Republican to come. When he hits the door, a place is
made for
him immediately at the head table and Woolsey
announces that the proceedings are now
“bipartisan.”
Jones, a cheerleader for the war in 2003 who
now says he was wrong, earned national headlines when he
co-sponsored the introduction of House Resolution 55, which calls
on the Bush administration to announce a plan for withdrawal by the
end of 2005 and to start pulling troops out no later than Oct. 1,
2006. The resolution, Jones says briefly, doesn’t spell out a specific
exit strategy. It simply asks that there be one — “that
there be a fourth quarter,” after which we can declare victory
and come home. For Congress not to debate the subject officially, he
adds, is “cheating the people.” Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who’s
at the witness table, salutes Jones as “a profile in
courage” for speaking out and taking the heat from his fellow
Republicans. “He has become a dear friend and a
brother,” Cleland says.
This from the real star of the day. Cleland
testifies from his wheelchair. An Army captain, he lost both legs
and half of his right arm in Vietnam, and he reads his testimony
from a tall stack of paper — 20 words or so to a page —
by carefully removing each page with his left hand. Despite his
military service and sacrifice, Cleland was unseated in the 2002
election by a Republican campaign that questioned his commitment to
protecting America.
Cleland’s message, in his testimony and
in booming commentary throughout, is quite simple: Iraq is Vietnam
all over again, “a no-win, no-end war” that was based
on a “false pretext” and is doomed to fail. “Stay the course?” he asks at one
point. “The course is to get more young Americans
killed.”
How bad is it in Iraq? It’s
awful, and it’s getting worse, not better, in the opinion of
every witness and politician who speaks. That’s hardly a
surprise, given the setting — except that the witnesses
include a former commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command,
Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar, and diplomat David Mack, who served
in the Middle East and as Near Eastern affairs chief in the State
Department during the Reagan years. Hoar calls Iraq “the
wrong war at the wrong time, waged with extraordinary incompetence
by the civilian leadership” of the current Bush
administration. Mack calls it “a quagmire.”
Indicative of the disaster: Gasoline lines in
Iraq are hours long, despite the country’s great oil
resources, according to Annas Shallal, an Iraqi-American peace
activist and a Sunni Muslim. Electricity availability is at an all-time low,
in addition to clean water, health care, security, the economy and
every other thing Iraqis care about. They care least, he said,
about what a new constitution will say. The most damning testimony, though, comes from
the Congressional Research Service. Dr. Kenneth Katzman, the
research service’s senior Middle East specialist, says that
the Department of Defense is reporting that 187,000 Iraqi troops
and police have been trained to take over security in the country
so far. Military commanders in Iraq said in June that 40,000 Iraqis
are prepared to do so, with U.S. support. Congressmen who’ve
been to Iraq recently say that they’ve been told by our
commanders that the real number is between 5,000 and 10,000. Katzman goes on to drily report that Iraq is
not stabilizing and that the Sunni insurgency is growing in
response to continuing attacks on Sunni cities (Tall Afar,
Fallujah) by troops who are mainly Shiite and Kurds, backed by U.S.
air power. Little has been done to bring the Sunnis into
a governing coalition, Katzman testifies, and they are more and
more alienated from the political process, not to mention sick of
being targeted and killed by a Shi’a-controlled government
that seemingly — to them — is bent on exacting revenge
for the Saddam Hussein years. There’s agreement all around that our
worst mistake was disbanding the Iraqi Army after the invasion,
sending 500,000 mostly Sunni soldiers home with their weapons and
their grievances. A few fought back immediately. Two-and-a-half
years later, more and more of them are joining the fighting. That’s where we are. The witnesses are
divided as to whether, if we start withdrawing soon, things will
improve (Shallal), stay the same (Cleland) or get worse (Hoar,
Mack, Tufts University Professor Antonia Chayes, a former
undersecretary of the Air Force). All agree, however, that what
we’re doing now is fueling the insurgency, not stopping it. So, to get out, they say: Step 1: Stop attacking. “Search-and-destroy ops must end,” Hoar says.
Chayes agrees: “You can’t save Iraq by burning it to
the ground.” Our troops should pull back and limit themselves
to security operations and training Iraqi forces only. Stop trying
to “crush” the opposition, says Shallah, and start
thinking about “defusing it.”
Step 2: Declare that we’ll leave. The Iraqis suspect that we plan to stay, establish
permanent military bases (in cahoots with the government
we’re propping up), and control oil and reconstruction
revenues. We must declare, in the clearest possible terms, that we
will not establish any bases, Hoar believes. Mack thinks a
“sense-of-Congress resolution” to that effect would be
well-received by the world and the American public. (There is one
— House Concurrent Resolution 197, with just 48 co-sponsors.)
Step 3: Get a high-level mediator. Maybe Jimmy Carter. If not him, somebody
who’s not an American. Chayes emphasizes that this would be
about “small steps” at first, not a big public summit
process that, for the time being, would be certain to fail. Step 4: Bring Jordan in: Washington Congressman Jim McDermott pitches the idea of a
peace summit in Amman. Mack calls for a “contact group”
that would include Iran, Syria and the other Arab nations. The main
idea: The U.S. must move to the background and have other nations
replace us as the process of trying to establish a stable Iraqi
government continues. One million Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, are in
Jordan now, refugees from the war. Jordan’s King Abdullah could
represent them and address the Sunnis’ distrust, the
witnesses agree. Step 5: Start international reconstruction: The U.S., Mack argues, should transfer control of
the billions of dollars earmarked for Iraq reconstruction projects
to an international body, under the aegis of the United Nations or
some other multilateral group not of our making. Think they’d
waste the money? It’s all wasted now — half on
security, the other half on things Halliburton builds that the
insurgents promptly blow up. Step 6: Start international peacekeeping: Whether on a timetable or not, establish a process by
which U.S. troops withdraw as Iraqi training goals are met (or, if
there’s a timetable, as they come due); the point is to
demonstrate to the international community that their presence is
required and that the security situation is good enough to permit
their entry. Step 7: Don’t expect success. Democracy in Iraq? It’s not possible
anymore, if it ever was. Just try to avoid a
“failed-state” outcome. Shallal, who says most Iraqis welcomed our
troops in 2003 and expected conditions to improve, now are so angry
that only our total withdrawal will suffice to defuse the
insurgency and allow a stable government — maybe — to
emerge. That view is shared by some congressmen who sit in, though
not all of them. But the majority view seems to be that our
troops should stay for security purposes but stop bombing and
killing Iraqi citizens, insurgents or not. The more we kill, the
more insurgents we create and the more we risk destabilizing the
entire Middle East, which is Mack’s worry. The main thing, finally, is Cleland’s
point: The country needs to hear that our Iraq policy is a failure
and that an exit strategy of some kind is required from the
president, not just “stay the course.”
Then, he argues, we can turn our attention to
where it belongs, on rebuilding the Gulf Coast and renewing the
fight against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the guys who attacked
us in the first place. Says Cleland: “It is time to seek
whatever international support we can get, and turn Iraq over to
the Iraqis. . . . The war in Iraq does not have to drag on forever.
It is not too late to learn from our own history. “Why do I urge this course of action for
our nation now?” he concludes. “Because I have seen
this movie before. I know how it ends.”
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2005.
