Last week I read a front-page story in The New York Times reporting that U.S. guards employed by a private security company fired into a car carrying four Iraqi people in Baghdad. The driver and a woman in the front seat were killed, while another woman and a child in the back seat survived this unprovoked shooting.
Coming on the heels of the Sept. 16 episode where guards of Blackwater USA, a private security company (i.e. a privatized mercenary army) fired on innocent Iraqis, leaving 17 dead and 27 wounded, this latest incident is sure to raise to a higher pitch the public outcry in the United States as well as Iraq against these unconscionable atrocities and private security firms.
While the killers and their employers should be prosecuted to the maximum and while the privatized armies should be disbanded, these unprovoked attacks and resulting carnage should raise once again the need to end the occupation immediately.
The occupation is the problem
For in the last analysis, the occupation is the immediate problem. Everything else — unprovoked killings of innocent Iraqis, torture, sectarian civil war, the deaths of American men and women in the springtime of their lives, the mounting loss of the treasure of the Iraqi and American people — either follows in the train of or is greatly aggravated by the nearly five-year occupation of a dignified people and country.
Much like other imperial occupations in the previous century, the U.S. occupation is both a root and an immediate cause of the present civil strife in Iraq. Any hope of a democratic and nonsectarian Iraq and ending the bloodshed requires the full withdrawal of American troops and presence in Iraq and the region.
This won’t guarantee a positive outcome for Iraq, but it is a necessary condition for that possibility. As international relations theorist Stanley Hoffman wrote three years ago in the New York Review of Books, once an end to the occupation is announced and the troops begin to leave, a new political dynamic internally and externally will begin to take hold. Space will be created for a broad range of domestic, regional and international forces and institutions — and especially an empowered United Nations — to make available massive economic, social and technical resources to rebuild the devastated country as well as to pressure for the political reconciliation of competing forces and to stabilize a fragile state.
Participants in the region and elsewhere will seek advantage in this process to be sure (how could it be otherwise given Iraq’s size, location and oil resources?), but the idea promoted by Bush that its neighbors have an interest in Iraq descending into chaos is not only wrong, but also a smokescreen to establish facts on the ground for a long-term U.S. military and political presence in Iraq.
Presidential politics
Additional coverage:
PA Radio #45: Ending the Iraq War and the Struggle for the 2008 Elections
While the desire of millions of Americans is to wind up the occupation, only presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson and probably John Edwards express the view that the occupation is the problem and are insisting on a speedy termination.
The other Democratic candidates oppose the surge and support a timed withdrawal, but don’t identify the occupation itself as aggravating every tension and division in Iraq.
Especially troubling is the posture of Hillary Clinton, who has gravitated in a much more hawkish direction on Iraq, Iran, Cuba and other foreign policy issues after seemingly beginning to adjust her positions to growing peace sentiments last spring. Her posture can’t help but raise the concern of many of her early supporters and other Democratic voters who haven’t yet made up their minds as to who to vote for in the upcoming presidential primaries.
What’s behind her political calculus is anybody’s guess. Does it suggest a more long-term mindset that, if she becomes president in 2009, would resist the people’s strong desire to exit Iraq promptly and establish a new, peace-promoting foreign policy? Or is it a temporary tactical maneuver, prompted by her and her advisers’ assessment that she has a commanding lead over her rivals for the Democratic nomination and thus has to now turn and speak to the broader electorate that, they believe, is more conservative than Democratic primary voters?
If it indicates a long-term mindset, then a Clinton White House would have to feel the pressure of an aroused people and Congress to end the occupation root and branch. If, on the other hand, it is simply a tactical ploy, it is an ill-advised and counterproductive one.
Looking for political leadership
Perhaps it can be argued that in the era when right-wing extremism was politically and ideologically dominant, there were some tactical grounds for Democratic candidates to cleave to the right in order to gain electoral advantage and broaden their base among voters. But that era is passing and a new era is gaining ground, signified most dramatically by the outcome of the 2006 elections and the new landscape of struggle that issued from it.
In this new era, millions are looking for political leadership that not only insists on a definitive break from a quarter century of right-wing extremism, neoliberalism and capitalist globalization, but also envisions a society enshrining social and economic justice, committed to racial, ethnic and gender equality, and living in peace.
As for the front-running Republican presidential candidates, they are all militarists of the worst sort and none have shown any desire to leave Iraq anytime soon. McCain has made the vigorous prosecution of the occupation the signature issue in his faltering campaign, while Romney and Thompson spread their imperialist wings and Giuliani stakes his candidacy on his ability to win the “war against international terrorism.”
With the Oct. 27 regional peace demonstrations just days away, with Congress preparing to discuss war appropriation bills in January, and with the Democratic primaries on the horizon, it is imperative that millions speak out to say that the problem in Iraq is the occupation itself and the solution is to end it immediately.
Sam Webb (swebb@cpusa.org) is national chair of the Communist Party USA.