[Peace-discuss] Wait till you hear my plan...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I think Alex Cockburn is right when he says, "Sheehan's Out
Now call should be the bright-line test for any antiwar
spokesperson." These "plans" all seem to fail it.  --CGE]

 Iraq: No Exit?
 Robert Dreyfuss
 September 15, 2005

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., leads rump Democratic hearings
today on the quagmire in Iraq and whether or not the United
States can extricate itself. Testifying will be luminaries
such as Gen. Joe Hoar, a former commander of the U.S. Central
Command, which has responsibility for the region; David Mack,
a retired U.S. ambassador with wide service in the Middle East
and Iraq; ex-Senator Max Cleland; and others. Woolsey hopes
that the hearings will help prompt the Bush administration to
start thinking about how to get out of Iraq and to “discuss
strategies to achieve military disengagement while still
playing a constructive role in the rebuilding of Iraqi society.”

So far, surprisingly, very little concrete thinking has
emerged from Washington, D.C., think tanks on anything related
to getting out: not for a negotiated settlement of the war in
Iraq, not for how to implement a unilateral withdrawal, not
for how to set a date and get out—in other words, not for
much. Calls to the august Council on Foreign Relations, the
Brookings Institution, and other establishment centers of what
purports to be “realist” thinking reveal that lots of
professional worry warts are blackly pessimistic about the
future of Iraq, but literally no one at the main tanks -— at
least, that I can find -— has put forward a credible strategy
for ending the war.

And it isn’t because politicians aren’t getting antsy. They
are. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there,"
Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on ABC's This Week . "I
think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East.
And the longer we stay there, I think the further
destabilization will occur." As I’ve reported in this space
before, politicians on both sides of the aisle have expressed
similar sentiments, and many others, behind the scenes, are in
quiet agreement. But Congress isn’t a think tank, and we can’t
look to that body to come up a detailed plan. Still, political
pressure can develop in Congress: Woolsey’s hearings are a
critical start, at least, to raising the issue to a higher
profile on Capitol Hill, and Democrats and a few GOPers are
expected at her hearings today.

So far, exit plans are coming from elsewhere, including
TomPaine.com.

Tom Hayden, the longtime activist and former state senator in
California, has been circulating a detailed plan, which he
encapsulated for the Los Angeles Times last month. His plan
has three basic steps: first, the United States should
announce that it has no plans for U.S. bases in Iraq and
announce a goal of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Second,
the United States should ask the United Nations to take the
lead in overseeing disengagement and reconstruction. And
third, President Bush should appoint a peace envoy for the
region who could open peace talks with the groups in Iraq
opposed to the U.S. occupation, including the resistance.

Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies, writing in
Yes! magazine this week, provides a somewhat more detailed
plan: end U.S. offensive operations, pass a congressional
resolution affirming U.S. commitment to a withdrawal that
clarifies that the United States has no interest in
controlling Iraq oil nor stabling permanent bases, make
reparations, hand over the reconstruction of Iraq to Iraqis,
and start talks with the resistance to find a
political-diplomatic solution to the violence.

An even more detailed roadmap is Gareth Porter's essay in the
most recent issue of Middle East Policy . In “The Third Option
in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy,” Porter, a scholar and
author, present a carefully reasoned argument for including
the Sunnis in the political process, negotiating with the
insurgents, beginning what he calls a “rolling mutual
disengagement” in cities and provinces and halting the death
spiral of decentralization. Earlier plans have been put forth
by other organizations, including the Project on Defense
Alternatives in Boston.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who is a leader of the Democrats’
win-in-Iraq wing, may -— just may —- be starting to the light.
In a Washington Post op-ed  Wednesday, Biden calls on Bush to
“fundamentally change course inside Iraq.” The most important
part of Biden’s piece -— and something that might even be
considered radical —- is the fact that he says: “The Bush
administration should support postponing the constitutional
referendum until after elections.” So, Biden thinks that the
whole constitution needs to be junked, to accommodate the
Sunnis. It’s a small crack, admittedly, in the wall of
Biden-Hillary-Lieberman-DLC support for victory in Iraq, but
it’s a crack nonetheless. The awful constitution is a formula
for civil war; junking it outright opens the door to talks
with the Sunnis which, in the best of all possible worlds,
could be expanded to include Iraqi insurgent groups, including
Baathists.

Meanwhile, the bad news: At a forum Wednesday at the U.S.
Institute for Peace, I asked a panel of Iraq-Iran experts
about getting out of Iraq, and their response was as if I’d
asked if they’d consider signing up for Al Qaeda. Not one on
the panel thought that an exit from Iraq was a good idea. Ken
Pollack, the former CIA officer whose book, The Gathering
Storm , did more to convince Democrats and liberals to support
Bush’s war in 2003 than any other single piece of writing,
said: “If we pull up stakes, we’re going to have the civil war
that we are all talking about. Walking away from the problem
is not the right answer.” Geoffrey Kemp, another panelist,
representing the Kissinger-realist crowd, said bluntly: “The
United States won’t leave Iraq under this president. There
will be no precipitate pullout before 2008.” And that was the
pathetic and unoriginal consensus at the so-called Institute
for Peace: Stay the course, but maybe do some things differently.

[Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria,
Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues.
He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing
writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The
American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling
Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry
Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.]

<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050915/iraq_no_exit.php>