"Out, America out!"

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has a piece on the Iraqi celebrations I mentioned yesterday which are happening in advance of the formal pullout of US troops from their cities which is on schedule to conclude today.

"Out, America, out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

Across town, the virtual absence of American troops and helicopters, the cheerfulness of Iraqis in military uniform, and the cries of joy gave this scarred, bunkered capital a rare carnival-like atmosphere. Iraqi police and army cars were decked with ribbons, balloons, plastic flowers and new flags. A few Baghdadis drove under the sweltering midday sun honking horns as passengers hung out the windows waving flags and yelling euphorically.

In Basra, the sentiment was inscribed on walls with spray paint: "No No Americans." Another graffiti artist instructed: "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty."

Yet, despite the celebrations, as Spencer Ackerman points out, this is a withdrawal in name only.

Milestones don't always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence.

What these Iraqis are celebrating isn't this shadow of withdrawal, it's the idea of returned sovereignty, the concept of withdrawal. If I were Tom Friedman I'd probably write they were celebrating the platonic ideal of an end to their occupation.

Let's not forget that it is an accidental and mismanaged occupation -  one never planned for - which the whole world knows was born from outrageous lies. And that even so, as US officials and officers talked about helping Iraq find its feet again these past six years, they've continually betrayed those promises by looking out for often petty and mean U.S. national interests instead of Iraqis. Neither should we forget that there have been only minor convictions for all the brutality, torture and abuse, and mostly minor sentences even then.

But if Iraqis are celebrating the first flavor of an end to that occupation, they're not celebrating reconstruction or reconcilliation. They're not celebrating peace. Tom Ricks and others are correct that there will be a spiral of upward violence as the U.S. stiffener departs the Iraqi central government's backbone. (Although Ricks is a special case as he pleads that Petraeus and Odierno are geniuses for the Surge even while he argues the Surge didn't work.) There will be some level of civil war in Iraq yet, whether it's between Shia and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Shia money-grabbers in the oil-rich South or a combination of all three.

That's not an argument for extending the occupation, though. It was always an argument for shortening it. Imagine if the U.S. and it's allies had never invaded but an act of God or Alien Space Bats had destroyed Iraq's Saddam-era leadership, devastated the nation's infrastructure, killed thousands and displaced millions anyway. Of course there would have been a multi-sided civil war. Without Saddam's repression keeping a lid on and with those other stresses to society, the fractures and imbalances in Iraq would have split wide open exactly as they did - the only difference being no U.S. occupation to focus a goodly portion of those stresses upon, to magnify and perpetuate them. The same conditions will obtain after the US leaves, whenever that is, and would have obtained at any time in the last six years.

The point, blindingly obvious to jubilant Iraqis celebrating some meagre sovereignty today, is that all of that is their problem, never ours. The Pottery Barn Rule was never "you broke it, you own it". It was always meant to be "you broke it, pay for it, and get the f**k out of our store before you make things worse!"