An opinion poll conducted in early February by the Washington-based Pew Research Center found that 53% of US voters surveyed agreed that the US "should bring its troops home as soon as possible". This sentiment explains why the leading Democratic Party presidential hopefuls are trying to convince voters they have a plan to end the US war in Iraq.
Democratic Party front-runner Senator Hilary Clinton calls for the number of US troops in Iraq to be capped at the January 1, 2007, level of 140,000. She also has a plan for a "phased redeployment of US troops out of Iraq" by assigning US military forces to "training and supporting" Washington's puppet Iraqi security forces, "protecting US military personnel and infrastructure" and participating in "targeted counter-terrorism activities" — all of which, President George Bush could say, is what US troops are already doing in Iraq.
At a February 18 press conference, Clinton said that if her proposed "Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act" was approved by Congress, Bush "should be able to complete a redeployment of troops out of Iraq" by the January 2009 end of his term.
Senator Barack Obama, Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic nomination, "is framing his candidacy to appeal to Democrats who have long opposed the war", but "until recently he was not among his party's most outspoken voices against it", the January 26 New York Times reported. "He campaigned strongly against the war in his bid for the Senate in 2004, but when he arrived in Washington he waited 11 months to deliver a major speech on Iraq …
"In a Senate debate on Iraq last June, Obama voted to oppose an amendment seeking to set a specific timetable for withdrawing American troops. His current position on a withdrawal mirrors the conclusions of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a specific time frame for troops to leave Iraq."
But, the NYT noted, "only after he opened a presidential exploratory committee did he introduce legislation to withdraw American combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008", as was proposed by the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a 10-person bipartisan panel headed by former secretary of state James Baker that was formed in March 2006 by the then-Republican-dominated Congress.
Baker report
In its December 6 report, the ISG assessed that the situation facing the US forces in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating", noting that attacks "against US, Coalition and Iraqi security forces are persistent and growing". It argued that, "Current US policy is not working … Making no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost."
The report recommended that Washington "significantly increase the number of US military personnel, including combat troops, imbedded in and supporting Iraqi Army units. As these actions proceed, US combat forces could begin to move out of Iraq."
It did not propose a timetable for this, but suggested that, if its recommended strategy was implemented, Bush could anticipate declaring that all US "combat brigades" could be withdrawn by the second quarter of 2008 — even if most of their soldiers remained "imbedded" in Iraqi Army units.
The US establishment media presented this as a proposal for a staged withdrawal of all US troops by March 31, 2008, which is also how Obama deceptively presents his plan.
At the time of the release of the ISG's report, Richard Haass, the president of the New York-based Council on foreign Relations (CFR), the leading US foreign-policy think tank, described its assessment of the Iraq war as "refreshingly honest". He endorsed its recommended strategy as the "best chance that exists for making progress" in the war.
Haass is a key figure in the US foreign-policy establishment. Prior to becoming CFR president in July 2003, he was director of policy planning for the US State Department. In the late 1980s, he was the special assistant to President Bush senior and the US National Security Council's senior director for near east and south Asian affairs.
In his 1999 book, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World, Haass argued the case for the foreign-policy approach that the Bush administration has sought to apply through its "regime change" invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq.
Haass wrote: "Force can create a context in which political change is more likely, but without extraordinary intelligence and more than a little good fortune, force by itself is unlikely to bring about specific political changes. The only way to increase the likelihood of such change is through highly intrusive forms of intervention, such as nation-building, which involves first eliminating all opposition and then engaging in an occupation that allows for substantial engineering of another society."
Such a "nation-building" occupation, Haass stressed, would require "defeating and disarming any local opposition and establishing a political authority that enjoys a monopoly or near-monopoly of control over the legitimate use of force". It therefore would require, Haass concluded, a US-led occupation of "imperial proportions and possibly of endless duration".
Bush's troop surge
The Bush administration's decision to reject the ISG's key strategy recommendations and opt instead for a "surge" in the size of the US occupation force, with new military offensives against Iraqi resistance forces in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar, has been met with considerable criticism from ruling-class policy analysts.
Haass, for example, told a January 17 hearing of the Senate foreign relations committee: "We should expunge such words as 'success' and 'victory' from our vocabulary. Ambitious goals are beyond reach given the nature of Iraqi society and the number of people there prepared to kill [US troops]."
He argued that the chief drawback of a "surge in US forces is that if — as seems most likely — it cannot alter the fundamental dynamics of Iraq, calls will mount at home for a [rapid] US military withdrawal", making it "more difficult to sustain the US presence for the long run".
Endorsing the ISG strategy proposals, Haass warned that a "rapid withdrawal of US forces would … increase the costs to US foreign policy more generally… terrorists would be emboldened, countries such as Iran, North Korea and Venezuela would be more prone to act assertively, and friends would be more likely to decrease their dependence on the United States".
However, Haass also warned that the current scale of the US war effort in Iraq "is simply absorbing too many resources. The military commitment there leaves the United States with little to apply elsewhere" and if things continued to go badly it might create an "Iraq syndrome" that will "constrain the ability of this country to be as active in the world as it needs to be".
Weakening of US imperial power
On February 7, the CFR released a policy report that repeated Haass's warnings about the long-term risks to US imperial power that will result from the surge strategy's failure.
The report, written by CFR Middle East expert Steven Simon, argued that the "implosion of domestic support for the war will compel the disengagement of US forces; it is now just a matter of time. Better to withdraw in a coherent and at least somewhat volitional act than withdraw later in a hectic response to public opposition to the war in the United States or to a series of unexpectedly sharp reverses on the ground in Iraq."
Noting that the mainstream Iraqi "nationalist insurgents — so-called to differentiate them from the jihadi component of the insurgency — have insisted that their precondition for negotiating with the Iraqi government or the United States is a timetable for the disengagement of American troops", Simon recommended Washington present such a timetable and seek UN-sponsored negotiations with the "nationalist insurgents".
He argued for gradually "withdrawing the bulk of American forces from Iraq within 12-18 months (that is to say over the course of calendar year 2008)", while "strengthening the US military position elsewhere in the [Persian Gulf] region". He also advocated that Washington seek to maintain long-term military control over Baghdad airport and the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area that houses the US embassy and the puppet Iraqi government.
Perhaps mindful of the final US defeat in Vietnam in 1975, Simon proposed that Washington seek agreement from its European allies for a rapid and large-scale NATO intervention after the US withdrawal, should Iraqi insurgents launch an offensive that threatens to overrun the Green Zone.
If Washington implements such a "disengagement" strategy, Simon argued, "it will not have lost everything. Rather, the United States will have preserved the opportunity to recover vital assets that its campaign in Iraq has imperiled: diplomatic initiative, global reputation, and the well-being and political utility of its ground forces".
In a February 7 interview with CFR consulting editor Bernard Gwertzman, Simon said the US "has accomplished all it's likely to accomplish in Iraq … Nothing more is going to be achieved, and every day we stay in Iraq, the higher the price we pay for what we've already achieved."
Simon stressed that his policy report didn't advocate an end to US political domination of Iraq. "It's important to recognise the report doesn't talk about any sort of complete, across-the-board disengagement from Iraq. American interests will remain heavily involved in Iraq. We're just talking about military disengagement" because "we have reached the point of radically diminishing returns from our military investment".
Asked on February 14 by the Kuwait News Agency how his plan could possibly make its way into US government policy, Simon said that many things can happen in the next six months to demonstrate that the situation in Iraq is not just "really bad" but "catastrophic" for the US. "In such an event, think tank studies like his could be viewed by the US Congress as a model for extricating the United States from Iraq, he said."