[Peace-discuss] Wallerstein on the war

Mon Aug 22 14:46:43 CDT 2005

[Frank Rich made essentially the same argument in a NYT piece
a week ago Sunday, and he was criticized (I think, quite
properly) by Norman Solomon, as follows.  --CGE]

  Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over
  By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
  Posted on August 16, 2005, Printed on August 22, 2005
  http://www.alternet.org/story/24144/

On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich
under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is
Over." The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the
Bush administration's lies and miscalculations for the Iraq
war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now
blowing toward dangerous conclusions.

Comparing today's war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush
with those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist
writes: "On March 31, 1968, as LBJ's ratings plummeted
further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing
our long extrication from that quagmire." And Rich extends his
Vietnam analogy: "What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not
victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but
an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March
1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam."

But Rich does not linger over the actual meaning of the "plan
for retreat" and the "long extrication" -- which meant five
more years of massive U.S. military assaults in Vietnam,
followed by two more years of military aid to the Saigon
government while fighting continued. The death toll during
that period in Vietnam? Tens of thousands of Americans,
perhaps a million Vietnamese people. That "extrication" was
more than merely "long."

Rich's narrative does not just skitter past five years of
horrific carnage inflicted by the U.S. government in Vietnam
-- and elsewhere in Indochina -- after the spring of 1968. His
storyline is also, in its own way, a complacent message that
stands in sharp contrast to the real situation we now face: a
U.S. war on Iraq that may persist for a terribly long time.
For the Americans still in Iraq, and for the Iraqis still
caught in the crossfire of the occupation, the experiences
ahead will hardly be compatible with reassuring forecasts made
by pundits in the summer of 2005.

Mocking President Bush's assertion on Aug. 11 that "no
decision has been made yet" about withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq, Rich concludes: "The country has already made the
decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there."

But of course Americans are not outta there. And President
Bush reasserted last Thursday that withdrawal of U.S. troops
is contingent on the U.S.-allied Iraqi forces achieving
standards of performance and self-sufficiency that are little
more than mirages.

Yes, eventually, U.S. troops may leave Iraq. But, in the
summer of 2005, for commentators to declare the withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Washington's latest imperial war to be a
virtual fait accompli makes about as much sense as it would
have in the spring of 1968.

Even after the commander in chief gives an order to begin
systematic withdrawal of U.S. troops -- and we're very far
from such a presidential order today -- there is likely to be
continuation of massive U.S. military actions in Iraq. And
even an actual sharp reduction of American troop levels on the
ground hardly ensures a drop-off of Pentagon-inflicted
violence. During the three years after July 1969, when
President Nixon announced that the burden of fighting
Communist forces would shift to Washington's South Vietnamese
ally, the White House cut U.S. troop levels in Vietnam by more
than 85 percent. During that same period, the tonnage rate of
U.S. bombs falling on Vietnam actually increased.

Today, while the U.S. warfare in Iraq continues unabated, the
message that "we're outta there" is pernicious. It looks past
the ongoing need to demand complete U.S. withdrawal (if "we're
outta there," why bother to protest?) and stands aloof from
the very real political battles that will be fought to
determine just how long or short the bloody "extrication"
process will last.

We're not "outta there" -- until an antiwar movement in the
United States can grow strong enough to make the demand stick.
And we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book "War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For
information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:38:26 -0500
>From: "Lisa Chason" <chason at shout.net>  
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Wallerstein on the war  
>To: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>>
>>Commentary No. 167, August 15, 2005
>>
>>  "The U.S. Has Lost the Iraq War"
>>
>>  by Immanuel Wallerstein
>>                http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm
>> ...