Ending the War in 2009

There is a gaping hole in the major peace proposals from Baker-Hamilton to Feingold-Reid to Clinton and Obama. All the discussion is about withdrawing combat troops while leaving thousands of American troops as trainers and advisers to these feuding sectarian and dysfunctional Iraqi security forces. This is not a recipe for ending the war, but for turning it into a low-visibility, lower-casualty conflict like Afghanistan.

Partial troop reducaions may diminish public attention during the election year - that will be partly up to us - but are unlikely to alter the course of the war. It is hard to imagine fewer American troops, embedded as trainers and secret commandos, succeeding militarily where 162,000 could not.

So what’s the answer? In the debate on Capitol Hill, I favor setting a withdrawal deadline, which is the only way to begin the shift away from a military model to a conflict resolution model. But a deadline is not enough. I interviewed former CIA director John Deutch about a rational exit plan, and he stressed two essentials: [1] that the US has to decide to withdraw, which it has not, and [2] he stressed diplomacy with Iran, which he called the only country that could cause trouble during our withdrawal. He was implying negotiations with Iran to obtain what Richard Nixon once called a “decent interval” for the US to leave Vietnam.

We should call for a shift from warmaking to peacemaking through a diplomatic offensive, declaring a firm intention to withdraw all American troops and bases on a one-year timetable, which would create an immediate incentive for engagement on the part of Iran, Syria, the Arab League, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese, the UN. No one has an interest in joining the US in the occupation; everyone has a interest in minimizing a power vacuum as we leave. The issues to be resolved will be humanitarian assistance to 3-4 million refugees, economic reconstruction, and protection of all Iraqis from unrestrained vendettas. America should offer to assist by appointing a peace envoy and offering billions in reconstruction. The horrific damage cannot be undone but can be contained and mitigated.

Of course our government is following the absolute opposite course from that proposed by Deutch, and even has drawn up contingency plans for a possible escalation to Iran. Many of the neo-conservatives continue to push, as in Vietnam, for escalation as the solution to quagmire.

It is here that the force of public opinion really matters in the coming year, and election year when public opinion becomes most important to decision-makers.

I find that the peace movement has been misunderstood and underestimated these past five years.

This is partly because we are governed by past image of peace movements as strictly outside protests in the streets as during Vietnam. But those were times of deep exclusion, when many could not vote and were structurally outside the institutions. The image of a defiant draft-card burner or bleeding demonstrator remains in our heads when in reality the typical resister today is an outraged blogger.

Not that we haven’t been in the streets. On nine occasions, more than 100,000 people have assembled, several times in numbers closer to 500,000.

Nearly 200 city councils and legislatures have voted to oppose the war.

Public opinion came to view Iraq as a mistake more rapidly that the public did during Vietnam, according to Gallup surveys.

Cindy Sheehan and other military families have neutralized the old claims that the peace movement is against the troops.

Howard Dean shocked the Democratic Party when he became the Eugene McCarthy of 2003.

Michael Moore shocked everyone when his Farenheit set unprecedented box office records in 2004.

Robert Greeenwald’s videos and YouTube spots reach hundreds of thousands of people.

Fifty thousand people listen to Amy Goodman’s and Juan Gonzales “war and peace report” every morning in LA.

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