By David McReynolds

  After the remarkable beginning of the Iraq War, bitterly opposed by so many millions around the world, the gradual unraveling of the war became clearer. There were no weapons of mass destruction.  Bush changed the rational for the invasion to one of "building democracy". One is curious as to what Bush will say, when he finally has to address the present reality - the war is lost, there will be no democracy, the lives and the money down a black hole.  

For months the Republican line has consisted of three arguments (none of them addressing the issue of weapons of mass destruction). First, "while many can make critiques of past decisions, we must now 'stay the course'". (Ie., it is OK to talk about events in the past - but to challenge the current Bush policy was unpatriotic). Second, "whatever people thought about why we went in, we cannot now 'cut and run'", and the Democrats have not outlined what they propose as an alternative".Third, "if we don't fight the terrorists in Iraq, we will fight them here in our own country".   As it turns out, the Democrats, who, aside from John Murtha, never did have a coherent plan for getting out, didn't need one. Because the US now doesn't have any choice. Recent days, weeks, and months have seen a drum beat of impossibly bad news for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Intelligence estimates reported that the dangers of terrorism here had grown worse because of the war in Iraq.

I think back to the Vietnam War, where at about this time in the war there were decent people who said "yes, but we can't just leave them now after the mess we have created".

Books exposing the Administration have come in waves (most particular, Bob Woodward's  State of Denial, which  was a surprise because his two earlier books on Bush had been so flattering). If one watched the news carefully, Rice, our Secretary of State, had to delay her landing at the Baghdad airport last week because of gunfire on the ground, and then, when she was photographed at a press conference, she was wearing a flak jacket. John Warner returned from his latest trip saying the time is almost up. Polls of Iraqi citizens showed an overwhelming majority want the US to leave, and a slight majority now support the insurgent attacks on US  troops.   I realize many of you follow the news out of Iraq as closely as I do and there will be little new that I can report. But for those who don't have a chance to follow it, the reality is that the only part of Iraq the US controls is the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area in Baghdad, which is where the huge US Embassy is located, where almost all the journalists live, and where the government of Iraq is located. Almost as a fitting cap to the week's news, insurgent mortar shells set off a huge US ammunition dump in Baghdad, lighting up the night sky in ways that Baghdad hadn't seen since the first days of the war.

  The news this week that the respected British journal, Lancet, reported that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war broke out, told us that things are now clearly worse, for the average Iraqi, than during Saddam's time. (This figure includes both the victims of sectarian violence and victims of US and British forces). Bush immediately dismissed the figure - which, given Bush's record for accuracy, is almost a confirmation of the report. John Zogby, who runs the respected Zogby polling firm, said on CNN that he felt the poll had been accurate, it followed all the standard methodology for such polls. Buried in the news was the fact that over 600 contractors had been killed - these are civilians (who earn extremely high wages, and often do many of the same jobs as the poorly paid US armed forces do).   So, whether you are watching Secretary of State Rice holding a press conference in a flak jacket, or trying to absorb the death toll of US and civilians in Iraq, or have heard that James Baker has leaked the fact that the report his is working on will confirm that "victory is no longer an option", we have reached the "end game" for the Iraq War.  

The war is lost, but not yet over. I want to look at some of the problems we face. I think back to the Vietnam War, where at about this time in the war there were decent people who said "yes, but we can't just leave them now after the mess we have created". I remember when I went out to Nyack, New York, to talk with Al Hassler, then Executive Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, to argue that FOR should be calling for the immediate withdrawal of US forces, Hassler said "Yes, but David, after all the chaos the US has created, we can't just leave and abandon these people". I said "Al, the longer we stay, the worse the situation gets - we are the problem".

  We hear the same cry now from people who opposed the war but say "we can't just leave". We can, and we will. We are already watching a civil war in Iraq. The casualties are largely civilians Shia or Sunni killed not by US forces but by the militias on one side of the other. The US has spent over three years trying to deal with the insurgency - if  things have gotten worse instead of better, we need to withdraw.  

  We hear the same cry now from people who opposed the war but say "we can't just leave". We can, and we will.

For those who are too young to remember World War II, one comparison is between the almost useless resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries (I do not discount that resistance - it was courageous but it was almost totally ineffective) to the stunning growth of the insurgency in Iraq. The US has complete control of the air. It has a range of modern weapons, electronic and otherwise. It has guided missiles. Yet day by day the US has been forced to concede provinces in Iraq to the insurgents. We have retreated to the Green zone.   The tragedy is that the civil war will get worse after we leave, and it will continue to be bloody. Civil wars are the worst kind - our own Civil War saw a death toll greater than that of World War 1, 2, and the Korean War combined.  When the British left India it is estimated that a million people died in the terrible communal rioting as Pakistan and India "separated".

What will probably happen is a division of Iraq into Shia and Sunni dominated areas, with the Kurdish area continuing to function almost as a sovereign state. (Almost unnoticed here in the US, the Kurdish part of Iraq has ceased to fly the Iraqi flag). The Shia and Kurdish areas have oil - the Sunnis do not, and may end up the poor man out. There is also a danger that Turkey will launch an attack on the Kurdish area because it has a large Kurdish population of its own and fears that the creation of a Kurdish state on Turkey's border would cause unrest within Turkey.   What will not happen is that the US withdrawal from Iraq will unleash a horde of Islamic terrorists on the US. Al Queda has played a minor role in the Iraq war (it wasn't there at all until the US invasion - Saddam was sharply opposed to the kind of Islamic fundamentalism of Osama bin-Laden). Most of the violence in Iraq is focused on other Iraqis and when the US withdraws, it will continue to be focused there. The Shia and the Sunnis have no interest and no reason to attack the US - though they will continue to target US forces as long as they are in Iraq.  

What really happens after we leave?

  Listening to Bush I am tempted to believe that, alone within the Administration, he may actually believe what he is saying. What he is saying bears no relationship to the reality of Iraq, but I think he believes it. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and others, certainly have seen the writing on the wall and one problem for them is what happens "post war". While the US death toll is minor if compared to Vietnam (58,000 dead as opposed to under 3,000 dead thus far in Iraq), members of Congress, and the general public, will ask what penalty should be imposed on those who led us into this disaster, which has not only cost us in lives, but in treasure. And which, in the end, will leave us without direct control of the oil.   I know that after the Chinese Revolution in 1949 there was a long period in American politics which Republicans kept asking "who lost China" (as if it had belonged to us), and charging the Democrats with treason. The humiliation of the US defeat in Vietnam left a wave of recriminations. But what will happen with the loss of the Iraq War? The Republicans launched it, in violation of the UN Charter. It fits perfectly the definition of a war crime as defined by the Nuremburg Tribunal.

  So I suspect one question, quietly discussed at the highest levels, is "what happens to us after the defeat?"   Particularly if the Democrats take Congress in November, the door is open to investigations not only of the misconduct of the war, but also of the corruption of the various civilian programs in Iraq, which even today, three years after the war began, leave people in Baghdad with less electricity than they had when the war began.   It is worth remembering that "each war seems essential to our security". It was a bitter pill for the Establishment to accept a truce, rather than a victory, in the Korean War. It was a much greater humiliation to watch our Embassy staff  airlifted off the roof of our Embassy in Saigon in 1975.  Yet in both wars the  establishment argued the US "could not dare lose".   Well, what happened? China is today a major world power with which the US does a great deal of business.

Vietnam did not extend its grip to all of Indochina, much less invade the Phillippines, or Hawaii. It, too, is an area of US investment.   In short, after terrible wars (three million Vietnamese lost their lives during the US invasion of that country) the US is not less secure in the Pacific.   Yes, the US will lose direct control of Iraq's oil, and, worse from the US point of view, Iranian influence will extend into the Shia area of Iraq. But oil is a "fungible" commodity, it is worth something only if it is sold, the market for it is international. The effort by some conservatives to "punish" Chavez by refusing to buy oil from Venezuela is, economically, silly - oil is bought and sold like wheat, on the free market, and if US firms don't buy from Chavez, other countries will.   Given the billions of dollars the US has spent on the Iraq war, wouldn't it have made more sense to have settled for what will happen now, three years later - to buy the oil on the free market?

...the positive benefit will be similar to that following the loss of Vietnam - a hesitation to go to war again.

  For those of us who are far from power, and who will not be humiliated by the US defeat, what will be the situation of the US losing a war it should never have started? One dreadful result - which gets worse every day the US remains - is the tens of thousands of wounded. Many of these wounds, which would have been lethal in other wars, will leave men and women missing parts of their brains, missing limbs, doomed to face the years to come paying the real price which should have been paid by the members of the Bush Administration.

  Other than that, the positive benefit will be similar to that following the loss of Vietnam - a hesitation to go to war again. This is one reason I do not believe there will be an "October surprise" with an attack on Iran or Syria.   For those who want to know what should be done, (and which would help to bring the end of the war in a more orderly way) the US should open diplomatic contacts with Syria and Iran. It should revisit the US position on the Palestinian issue, and push Israel toward taking new positions. (Israel itself should open negotiations with Syria aimed at a final border settlement).   One thing which is worth thinking about - the resistance which is going to end the war comes not just from the military insurgency in Iraq, it also comes from the remarkable rebellion of American generals (and now the head of the British armed forces).

Those who talk of 9.11 conspiracies might better consider the fact that the military has certainly been in touch with each other, that the string of generals who have challenged Bush is not an accident. John Murtha's break with Bush was the first major event in breaking the consensus in Congress. Murtha is not a leftist, etc. but rather a fairly typical "Cold War liberal", always close to the Pentagon. Murtha, himself a veteran with distinguished service (unlike almost all the Bush Administration, most of which safely avoided military service), clearly had been speaking for the military when he first spoke out.  

So - don't give up, continue your pressure on members of Congress, continue the vigils, continue reaching out to our men and women in service. Friends in other countries should "open dialogues" with every US Embassy in the world.  The war has been lost. Bush, who clearly had hoped to leave the war as a legacy to the next Administration, is going to see it ended in the next two years. It is ending as I write. For it isn't only the generals who are opposed to the war. The rank and file men and women in our military are going AWOL, are voicing their dissent. The crimes and horrors of this war are nearly over. Most of us have been disheartened by the failure of all our protests to have any impact. I'll close with a quote from the Vietnam War, not long before the US lost it. Discouraged by what seemed our failure to have any effect, I asked the late Paul Goodman what he thought we ought to do. "David, you are doing all the right things - you just have to keep doing them".

(David McReynolds, who lives in Manhattan's Lower East Side, is the former Chair of War Resisters International and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000.  Edge Left may be freely distributed or republished).

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