Polk Puts Iraq Cost at $6 Trillion

[davidswanson]

Live blogging (read from bottom up)

11:31 Woolsey said she knows Bush will veto any bill that ends the occupation. She asks Polk if Congress should only pass what it knows is right, even knowing it will be vetoed. For the first time all day the room breaks out into applause, loud applause. Polk replied "There's your answer." But then Woolsey characterized her proposal as trying to do something they can't actually make happen, failing to grasp that if Congress refuses to pass any bill to continue the occupation, Bush has to end it. ((Congress will end the occupation, if it ends it, with an announcement of no more bills, not with a bill.))

11:29 Woolsey is back. Only she and Lee are here now. She says she was in a hearing where Ambassador Holbrook was sounding a very similar theme to Polk.

11:26 Polk says the Iraqis, including the Kurds and the Shia have a will to hold together as one nation.

11:22 Ellison asked about a regional peace conference. Polk said it should be organized by an independent body, not the US, and would depend on the US first giving assurance that it intends to leave.

11:12 Cohen says a police trainer from Tennessee who has been in Iraq says that the Iraqi security dept has different sectarian groups on different floors of a building, and security personnel are afraid to go to other floors or ride the elevator. He also asks about how to keep Iran from getting nukes. Polk recommends a hearing on Iran "like this one" right away, apparently not noticing that there is no media here except me and C-Span. Polk says Iranians are terrified of the United States.

11:09 We're back to Cohen. He and Lee and Ellison are only Members remaining. Cohen asks if a democracy can be created in Iraq. Polk says it was very difficult here in the US, and that it will always be difficult, and is impossible for one nation to impose on another. Says he used to live in Baghdad and found it relatively harmonious and happy but was not what Americans would have liked. But Polk thinks his and McGovern's plan would create a satisfactory level of public participation.

11:00 Rep Jackson-Lee speaking. Polk speaking of damage to troops, including "degredation of their spirit" by the cruel sadistic acts they engage in. Also stresses need to educate the public to avoid another war - namely in Iran. Again, he asks Congress Members to educate the public, ((although 73% of public wants out of Iraq. If Congress Members would only LISTEN to the public we'd be better off than with them trying to talk to us IMHO.))

10:55 Rep Lee asks about list of actions to convince Iraqis we intend to leave, including stoping base construction and stopping efforts to sieze oil. She introduced a bill that said this - got it into legislation 6 times. The President has signed into law bills that include these provisions 3 times. Does the public know this? And how can we hold the administration accountable? Polk says the public does not know. Polk suggests subpoenaing people, as if numerous subpoenas have not already been refused! Polk pretends we don't already know bases are being built and an oil-theft law being pushed. Lee replies that his suggestion is an important one and she will present it to the chairs of the appropriate committees. ((Yep, that oughta do it. Sheesh. Lee is well aware subpoenas are not being respected with impeachment having been taken off the table. I wish General Odom were here, because he would have spoken up for impeachment.))

10:53: Ellison asks if there's calm in Ramadi and if so if the "surge" gets any credit. Polk says there are always areas of calm and were in Vietnam. And when you put all your forces in one place there's calm until the moment you leave. We paid people to open shops in a market for a photo op. Then everything closed down again right away. Tribesmen will take money to do things. You can rent people, but you can't buy them.

10:46: Ellison asks about impact of Blackwater and whether Iraq can do anything about Blackwater. Also asks about civil suit against CACI and others. Polk replies that Blackwater is mercenaries, which are illegal under international law. Polk said Blackwater and other groups like it have been loose cannons. A law was passed to exempt them all from litigation for what they do. Ellison: exempted from criminal liability too, right? Polk: yes, from all litigation. The Iraq govt., what there is of it, has asked for them to be thrown out of the country. If our puppet govt. is opposed to Bwater, you can imagine what the rest of the country of Iraq think. It'd be very interesting to know how much money Blackwater has provided to its Congressional supporters. If you spend 2 days per week on raising money and 2 more on constituent activities, you have very little time left for anything else. My publisher refused to send every Congress Member a copy of my book even if I paid for it, because nobody would read it. They made me write a 2.5 page summary. They said it was too long. They said 1 page max. because young staffers have the job of informing Congress Members of things.
((None of this sounds like the Rep I know best: Kucinich. Rep Shiela Jackson Lee just walked in.))

10:41 Steve Cohen speaking. Says some members not here because they're busy raising money as always. Then Cohen goes on to claim that Democrats can't do anything without 60 votes in the Senate. ((THIS IS NOT TRUE.))

10:36 Polk says that only 30% of public opposed Vietnam war at critical point, a majority now opposes occupation of Iraq, and we're down to 17% who support public. If the figures I cited, the costs of the Iraq war, it's worth your colleagues' time to come here. They did turn out for Petraeus. The cost to the Amnerican economy may be as much as $6 trillion. ((He said this again quite clearly)). Polk blames Congress Members fornot showing up today, but also blames media for not covering his and Senator McGovern's book. He also says he recently watched CBS News, that Edward R. Murrow was a good friend of his, and that Murrow would probably be rolling in his grave if he'd seen it.

10:33 Waters says some Democrats claim their constituents want them to back the president, and Republicans don't have the guts to cross the president. ((She mispronounces Petraeus but doesn't quite get to "BetrayUs")). We're at a cross roads. We need to decide whether we're going to break with some of the leadership and act in ways that are going to cause a lot of problems around here, or are we going to keep backsliding and making compromises and sending messages to the American people that we're trying to do something when we're really not. ((Tell it, sister!))

10:29: Waters thanking Polk. Hinchey leaving. Waters says that what she and Lee and Woolsey are trying to do is what Polk proposes ("redeploy") ((not Polk's word)). Waters says they are also looking into the missing weapons issue, which Polk also raised. The media will nto have us on its Sunday shows, it will not have us on to debate, it will not cover our bills. One TV station told her that liberals are expected to be against the war, so there's no need to cover them. ((Waters is dead right to point out that Congress Members can and occasionally do say the right things, but the corporate media won't pass it along.)) Waters just thanked the bloggers who are here (AFAIK that'd be me) and blamed "the corporate media."

10:26 Lee introducing Waters. Rep Keith Ellison is also here now.

10:24 Polk lays out 5 key steps as found in his earlier book. Excerpted from below:

The first step is to replace our military force, with a “multinational stability force.” It should not be imposed upon Iraq but should be employed by the Iraqis. This force should not try to fight the insurgents but to create and maintain an acceptable degree of stability.

Stability will not be perfect. The key word is acceptable.

But the history of insurgencies teaches us that once the major irritant – the foreign occupation – is removed, the natives themselves will demand and achieve order. What happens is simple and obvious: when the general population feels that enough of its objectives have been accomplished, it stops supporting the insurgency; when that happens the fighters, the actual insurgents, lose their legitimacy and their support. As Mao Tse-tung put it in his 1937 study of guerrilla warfare, the “fish” lose the “sea” that sustained them. The insurgency then dies, often very quickly.

So the multinational national stability force is intended to help bridge the gap between the withdrawal of the Americans and the coalescence of the Iraqis.

This task, of course, is harder today than it would have been two years ago and will be much harder two years from now. But we believe it should be achievable in an acceptable fashion in about two years at a cost of about $6 billion – or about 2 percent of what we will spend if we stay there.

¬ The second step is the creation of a national police force. The danger is that it will be little more than a hit squad for the majority to be used against the minority. That is what Iraqis believe the one we have created now is. That is what your mission of inquiry also found.

To avoid the danger of it being used for violent, sectarian purposes, it must be counter-balanced. This can be achieved in part by the multinational stabilization force but also by what is traditional in Iraq -- neighborhood, village and tribal home guards.

¬ Third we should stop encouraging the growth of an Iraqi army on which we have already spent about 19 billion dollars.

Until Iraq rebuilds its civilian institutions, an army is a danger to all Iraqis. Iraqi armies, even long before Saddam Hussein, have been the seedbed of
dictators and the cause of national disruption.

We should redirect the billions of dollars we are spending to create an army into creating what Iraq really needs, something like our Corps of Engineers to help rebuild the country. Only if jobs are created can the devastating level of unemployment be reduced.

¬ The Fourth step is a series of actions to convince the Iraqis that we really are leaving their country. To do this,

 We should immediately stop work on military bases – which the Iraqis believe proves that we intend to stay;

 We should stop using and paying the armies of mercenaries – now the second largest military force in the country. They are the “loose canon” of Iraq – out of all control and supervision. They are a major threat to American national interests and reputation;

 We should avoid actions that suggest that we intend to hang on to the one significant national economic resource of Iraq, its oil;

 We should turn the vast and expensive Green Zone over to the Iraq government, and replace it with a far more modest American embassy; and

 We should close the vast prisons we have created. They now hold some 25,000 Iraqis who must either be released or tried.

¬ Fifth, we should offer all the help we can muster to the growth of civic institutions, professional societies and grassroots organizations.

This is a far more complex and long-term process than the previous steps.

You might compare it to reeducation after surgery: without it, Iraqi society will never recover from the trauma of the war and occupation.

But, this is a field in which we have not only much experience but also many talented people and existing organizations. We can encourage our great foundations, universities and professional societies to interface with existing and competent Iraqi educational, public health and development authorities.

10:17 Polk argues, as he has very well for many months, against staying or simply leaving, but for leaving while taking many steps to help Iraqis rebuild and recover.

10:12 Polk is criticizing Congress for not educating the public, although only the best few Congress Members are here, and anything they say has to get through the media filter. Polk cites the example of Senator Fullbright as a case of someone courageously standing up against war and benefitting from doing so. Polk wants Congress to demand to know what is going on and claims Congress has the power to insist on that (although Congress clearly does not while impeachment is off the table).



10:05 Polk draws lessons from Vietnam, Westmoreland, Tet Offensive, and faulty picture painted by Petraeus. Polk says counterinsurgency rarely if ever works, and that massive force in Iraq is not working. "No insurgency in modern times has been defeated by foreigners because in an age of politically conscious people, which is the age we live in, people refuse to be ruled by foreigners."

9:55 Rep Waters here. Dr. Polk begun. Room filling some - no corporate media AFAIK. Assuming I did not mishear, Polk puts cost at $6 trillion, and says if we do not withdraw there will likely be terrorist attacks in the US.

9:53: Rep Clark, who better represents New Yorkers than Hinchey right now, is perfectly saying we are misguided if we blame the Iraqi government that we have set up.

9:51: Rep. Hinchey is accusing Bush Admin. of generating fear and of using falsified information to launch the war (yet he won't sign onto impeachment or introduce it).

9:46: Rep. Yvette Clark also here. I didn't recognize her (but I applaud her for standing for impeachment, as do all the members here except Diane Watson and Maurice Hinchey (what's with that??). Steve Cohen gave brief opening remarks. Now Watson is. Meanwhile Tim Carpenter of PDA is here and also does nto know who #80 might be. Code Pinkers are straggling in too. Rev Yearwood just got here. A dozen more peace activists just got here. Watson is blaming the Iraqis - UGH :-((( But she's blaming Bush for claiming he's training Iraqis, suggesting he isn't really doing so.



9:40 Rep. Barbara Lee praising Woolsey for starting Congressional debate to end the occupation. Says ending the occupation is key to our national security. ((Obviously true but rarely said in this room (The Cannon Caucus Room in the Cannon House Office Building).)) Iraq an dits neighbors will not work out a peace plan as long as US maintains an indefinite occupation. Lee says there are "approximately 79-80 Members" on the letter to Bush. WHO'S # 80??

9:35 Rep. Woolsey opening it up with welcome. "Congress has the power of the purse. We must pass a bill requiring that all war spending be used for one purpose only: safe and orderly withdrawal of all troops and contractors." Glad she said withdrawal instead of "redeployment." Ooops, she just said reployment. Glad she said all troops and contractors. It's a shame she said "We must pass a bill" since EVERYONE KNOWS any bill like that will be vetoed, and what Congress must do, either now or after that veto or senate failure, is announce that there will be no more bills. Rep. Woolsey is introducing Dr. William Polk, who of course published a terrific plan to end the occupation together with former Senator George McGovern, but who now has a new book.

9:34 C-Span is taping for Book TV, which plans to air in a couple of weeks. Reps Diane Wilson and Maurice Hinchey are here. There are 18 people in the audience including me. Two Virginia PDAers are passing out flyers about an upcoming PDA fundraiser with Rep. Barbara Lee.

9:28 Reps Lynn Woolsey, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee here.

9:25 a.m. Polk, I'm reminded, is a descendent of a president of the same name whom Congressman Abraham Lincoln accused of launching an aggressive war based on lies.

9:24 a.m. Same room as Petraeus hearing, but I'm permitted to use laptop. In fact I'm permitted to stretch out on a row of seats since there is no media here and the place is almost empty.

______


PREPARED MATERIALS

______

In-Depth Statement and Policy Analysis of Dr. William Polk about Iraq before the U.S. Congress - September 19, 2007

Eight months ago, on January 12 of this year former Senator George McGovern, Congressman John Murtha, General William Odom and I appeared before you here in this room on Capitol Hill. At that time we warned that the situation in Iraq, bad as it then was, would get worse. We four urged that we get out of Iraq with all deliberate speed.

In the eight months since we last appeared before you ….

 An additional 746 brave American soldiers have been killed;
 about three times that number have been visibly wounded;
 perhaps ten times that number have been “invisibly” wounded including those who have suffered concussions that will debilitate them as long as they live; and
 another $80 plus billion dollars have been wasted.

All this expenditure of blood and money has given us an Iraq which is more vicious, more hostile to America, less willing to follow our lead and more prone to support violent actions against us now in Iraq and surely in the future all over the world.

Our advice was drowned out by others. You were told to be patient, to avoid any precipitate actions, to stay the course, to vote more money and to sanction a surge in the number of troops America has sent to Iraq.

To at least some of us, these were echoes of Vietnam. Yes, the American public was told, the situation was bad, but another “surge” and more money would do the trick if we only “stayed the course.” There were “measurable” successes so there was reason to hope. Indeed, there was light at the end of the tunnel. But, as we learned, the light at the end of that tunnel in Vietnam proved to be the headlamp of an on-coming express, the Tet offensive!

For the last four years we have been told not to listen to the echoes of Vietnam. It was a different war, long ago, and far away; it was not analogous to Iraq, so we must not use it as a yardstick to evaluate Iraq.

Now President Bush tells us that Iraq is analogous: But in his August 22 speech, he rewrote the history of Vietnam to justify staying the course. If we don’t he said, we would watch the horrors of the Vietnamese “killing fields.” Leave aside the stunning fact that Mr. Bush and his speech writers did not apparently know that the “killing fields” were not in Vietnam but in Cambodia, a country with which Vietnam fought a war, let us focus on just two of his central arguments:

 First, he argued we should have “stayed the course.” In fact, we did. For 4 years after the Tet offensive had showed that we could not win. During those 4 years, while we slowly pulled back, we lost an additional 21,000 young soldiers and

 second, even when we had half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, we were not able to prevent the social revolution that was reshaping the country. When we left, a massive and painful readjustment was inevitable. However, today Vietnam is a peaceful, progressive country and, surprisingly, is friendly to the United States.

The President is right. Vietnam does offer lessons we should have learned, but they are not the lessons he thinks we need to learn. Let me tell you of my own efforts to learn them.

Vietnam was not the first insurgency or guerrilla war I witnessed, but I began to study it in 1962. I was then a member of the Policy Planning Council which opened to me all of the thousands of intelligence and reports coming into our government. When the National War College – now the Defense University – heard of my study they asked me to share with the “best and the brightest” Navy captains, army, marine corps and air force colonels where I had learned. This is the gist of what I told them:
Guerrilla war is made up of three parts that fall roughly in a sequence and could be weighted in impact.

The first component is politics. The insurgents have to establish their claim to speak for their nations. Not only in Vietnam but everywhere such wars have been fought – from our own revolution to Ireland, Algeria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Afghanistan – they do this by opposing the foreigners who rule them. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh so embodied the nationalist cause that President Eisenhower thought he could have won a landslide victory of 80% of a free vote even in South Vietnam.

The second component is administration. The insurgents have to destroy the ability of the government to affect its rule. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong systematically murdered officials and even school teachers, health workers and agricultural officials to the point that the South Vietnamese government virtually ceased to function.

We see the same in Iraq today. As you know, the investigation carried out by the mission headed by General James Jones showed that the police force we created for Iraq is so dysfunctional that it should be abolished and the General Accountability Office reported just in the last few days what we have long known that the Iraqi regime is hardly functioning. Indeed, only 7 of 18 provinces are even nominally under the control of the Iraq government. Incidentally, this was the experience of the Russians in Afghanistan: their chosen government functioned only in the shadow of Russian tanks and aircraft.

These two parts of insurgency, political legitimacy and administrative effeteness, amounted to about 95% of the total war effort in Vietnam. So even before America sent its first large troop contingent to Vietnam, we had grasped the short end of the lever. What happened from about 1963 to 1973, the fighting, was only for the last 5%.

So I told my 1963 War College audience that we had lost the war.

They were no more receptive to this logic that many of our senior officers are today.

So we plunged ahead, “surging” from a few thousand when I spoke to half a million; we used every trick and every weapon we had. But despite glowing press handouts – coining such phrases as we hear again today, “more time was needed,” “We must stay the course,” “We were near success,” “the South Vietnamese government was taking charge,” and “there was light at the end of the tunnel,”; things did not improve.

To convince us that it had improved, President Lyndon Johnson brought back our military commander, General William Westmoreland, to reassure the Congress and the American people. He cut a fine figure with his medals and stars, was popular with the press, and what he said was very reassuring. With charts, graphs and other lecture room paraphernalia, he advised us that the Viet Cong were on the run, their soldiers were sick and discouraged, their numbers had fallen by about 15%, they were “almost starving to death” and about half of their main forces were “no longer combat effective.” Victory, he said, “lies within our grasp and “the enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.” We were entering the phase of just mopping op the defeated remnants of the Viet Cong. He overawed the Congress and the public but unfortunately the Viet Cong were not listening. It was only two months later that they struck Saigon in the Tet offensive.

Today, I don’t see anything quite like the Tet offensive in Iraq, but I also do not see anything like the war General David Petraeus so graphically portrayed.

What is really happening in Iraq is very different from the sound bytes and photo-ops that pass for news and analysis.

The bottom line is that force, even massive force, is not working. It never does. In fact it manufactures enemies because the relatives, neighbors and friends of the victims seek vengeance and the place to get it is in the resistance.

So the numbers of insurgents grow and as some are killed or imprisoned, others take their place. The war goes on. Force does not work.
General Petraeus admits that and offers us another way to fight the war, through counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency sounds impressive, even mysterious, but it is not new. We tried it in Vietnam and it did not work for us; it didn’t work for the Russians in Afghanistan either. We both tried the whole range of techniques. In Vietnam we put virtually the entire population -- about 7 of 10 Vietnamese in some 6,800 barbed wire-encircled strategic hamlets, assassinated or imprisoned thousands of suspected guerrillas, obliterated whole areas with a massive bombing and defoliating campaign, etc. In short we used the whole range of counterinsurgency techniques. What was the result? Listen to what the editors of the Pentagon Papers said about it in Vietnam: "Our “program was, in short, an attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counterinsurgency into operational reality. The objective was political though the means to its realization were a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures…The long history of these efforts were marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally.”

But we often act as though what we see today in Iraq is unique. When reporters and officials draw analogies, like President Bush did, they are often wrong.

So now General Petraeus, with much fanfare, tells us that counterinsurgency is the answer in Iraq. But even he admits that it is not the central issue. What he says, and I quote, is that

“Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.”

If this is true, and I agree that it is, can we do it? The short answer is no, we cannot. No insurgency in modern times has been defeated by foreigners because, in our age of politically conscious people, natives refuse to be ruled by foreigners. Thus, in Iraq today, 8 in 10 Iraqis want America out and believe it is legitimate to attack our soldiers to get us to leave.

What about just arming our local allies? Should we not just create an Iraqi army as we did in Vietnam? And let it do the fighting – and the dying.
In comparison to Iraq, South Vietnam had a world class army; many military men, speaking privately, today describe the Iraqi army as a bad joke. Neither army wanted to do what armies are supposed to do, fight. And both armies, to be generous, are lax in what they do with the arms we give them:

Putting in more arms, as we should also have learned in Vietnam only better equips the insurgents who seize them or buy them. In Vietnam, it was first France and then America -- not Russia or China -- that armed the guerrillas.

When I first went to Vietnam in 1963, one could buy even an American tank on the Saigon black market. The Viet Cong stopped using Russian equipment because American arms were easily available. We furnished, by way of our local allies, the bullets that killed our troops.

In Iraq today, as the press recently reported, we have imported huge numbers of Russian AK 47 assault rifles to arm the police and army. Now we have learned that 190 thousand weapons have simply disappeared. General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping the Iraqi Security forces before taking overall command, but he does not know (or so he told Congress) what happened to them.

* * *

Our great American satirist, Ambrose Bierce, once joshed that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

We spent a long time in this school: We Americans have made nearly 200 wars, but the Roper-National Geographic 2006 survey showed that we have not been good students. After four years of the Iraq war, six out of ten Americans between 18 and 24 could not even locate Iraq on a map – almost none could they tell who lives there, what language the Iraqis use or what religion they follow. The numbers are a bit better for Germany or France but far worse for Afghanistan or Somalia.

As H.G. Wells warned us, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” If he were alive today, he would see that we are skating close to the edge of economic, political and foreign policy disasters.

Even in colleges and universities throughout America, I find astonishing ignorance on these issues. Do they matter? Yes, Thomas Jefferson told us, because “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” he said, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

Speaking for myself, I admit that we teachers have let the nation down.

* * *

Clearly we need all the help we can get. But, Congress is not stepping up to its Constitutional duties to lead the nation and to avoid the worst that was inherent in this disastrous venture and to work intelligently, constructively and effectively toward a much better and far safer future. To be fair, at least some of the blame is yours. In a democracy like ours, you, our Congressional leaders, must also be our teachers.

Demanding yourselves to know the facts, guiding us, your constituents, to understand them and then enacting wise legislation is surely why we elect you.

These actions do not come from looking back at the polls; they come from leadership.

When I was in military training I was taught that leadership comes from the front, not from behind. That maxim is also directed at you, the Congress: If you do not lead the public to understand what you are privileged and entitled to learn as members of this great institution, our country is in grave danger.

But, I am constantly told that Members of the Congress do not take the responsibility of teaching, of guiding, of leading their constituents. As you know, respect for the Congress has hit an all-time low with about 4 in each five voters saying that they disapprove of the performance of this Congress.

Unfortunately, few citizens realize how difficult it is for the members of Congress to stand up against the President on National Security matters, even amidst an unpopular war and occupation. But you should take some heart from the fact that when Senator Fulbright stood up on Vietnam, he became a major world figure. So there are compensations for courage. I hope you will find them.


You have kindly afforded me time today to discuss what you can – and should – do. I will try to be brief.

First, I urge you to go back to your constituencies and help them find the facts. If they live in a dream world, hoping for miracles, relying on clever gimmicks, listening only to sound-bytes and being out of touch with reality, they will surely be overwhelmed, as the whole country was after Vietnam, by a wave of disillusionment.

Such a wave of disillusionment would be a major psychological setback for our country and perhaps especially for you as, mistakenly blaming you, they may vote you out of office.

So we teachers – you and I -- should be pro-active, taking action to help our fellow citizens come to grips with reality and move toward sensible, hard-headed actions. That is, to act just as your constituents would if they faced a serious danger to health. And that is exactly what we Americans now face, a serious danger to our nation’s health.

Second, I urge you to demand to know what really is happening. You are a newly empowered majority in this Congress. You need to be much tougher in rooting out the truth. Digging out the facts and sorting through misinformation is hard for reporters, but you, as members of Congress, have the power to demand the facts and the experience to evaluate them. We rely on you to do so.

Third, you must think ahead about what we can do. The “buck” really does stop with you. It was the Congress that forced the Johnson and Nixon administrations to come to grips with the reality of the Vietnam War; today, this task is up to you. You have the constitutional right and obligation to do it.
* * *
So let us turn to the most dangerous and most urgent task. It is deciding what to do about Iraq.

Today, our country is faced with three options among which you must choose. They are:

¬ stay the course,
¬ cut and run or
¬ help the Iraqis to solve the terrible problems they face.

Let me briefly analyze these options:

* * *

The first option is to stay the course. Everyone, even those who pushed us into this war and General Petraeus more recently, now agree that using massive fire power and sending more troops to Iraq has not worked. The “surge” is not a coherent strategy. It is a tactic. It has been destructive of our national purpose and has tarnished our national image.

In Vietnam, in fact, we “stayed the course” for nearly 16 years. We lost 58,226 American soldiers dead and were responsible for the deaths of about 1 ½ million Vietnamese. At the end, we withdrew in a humiliating fashion. The scene of Americans literally beating back our Vietnamese allies from a helicopter while we took off to safety from an embassy roof was the image of America seen round the world.

We do not have any strategy that offers us a way to avoid that humiliating end to our Iraqi venture.

Thus, what we are told is a statesmanlike, prudent, rational and conservative policy, giving our efforts more time, will only make certain that, as in Vietnam, when we are finally forced out, we will face not “victory” but humiliation.

* * *

The Second option is what the President and his supporters have called “cut and run.”

Rightly, everyone worries what will happen if we do.

But, let us be clear: a precipitate withdrawal will not, as some self-proclaimed experts have said, create chaos –Iraq is already chaotic. – but it will leave Iraq in chaos.

Our 150,000 troops and massive military power have not stopped the daily mayhem. Even our expensive and much publicized fortified Green Zone is almost daily bombarded. About 3 million Iraqis have already fled their homes. Over 2 million have even fled their country.

Iraq today is like Afghanistan was under the Russian occupation: a non-functioning society without a home.

Every day that the occupation continues will make recovery more difficult.

Is recovery possible?

During the American Revolution, one of our early statesmen, James Otis, sounding like President Bush, warned that if the British left, “America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion.”

As we know, it didn’t quite happen like that. In America as in other guerrilla wars, once the foreign intruder was gone, the natives began to sort out their own affairs. This is what happened in Ireland, Algeria, Yugoslavia, Kenya and elsewhere. Natives could do what foreigners were totally incapable of doing – they and they alone could stop the insurgency.

Of course, social and political reconstruction does not happen overnight and is not automatic; moreover it often involves great suffering. We should do everything we possibly can to avoid this.

Some have argued that the way to do this in Iraq is to divide the country.

They are dreadfully wrong.

If Americans tried to do this, hatred for America would grow even more bitter. Iraqis do not want to split up their country. Hundreds of thousands more people would be ripped out of their homes, schools, jobs, and neighborhoods because the population, particularly in the cities, even after these dreadful years of violence, is mixed.

Worse, we would have created in Iraq a new Balkans which could be the seedbed of future wars.

If we cut and run, the Iraqis themselves may create such a colossal tragedy.

We should try to help them avoid it.

So, what can we do? The short answer is act intelligently. What does acting intelligently involve? That takes us to our Third Option.

* * *

Our Third Option is to get out of Iraq on an orderly schedule sufficiently rapidly to convince the Iraqis that they must pick up the pieces and implement a carefully constructed program that will help them to do so.

This is the operational plan embodied in H.R. 508 introduced last January by many of you here, many elements of which were laid out by former Senator George McGovern and me in Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. (published by Simon & Schuster in October 2006.)

Still the only available plan, this legislation lays out in detail how to accomplish withdrawal with the least possible damage to American interests and to the Iraqi people; it contains cost estimates, a timetable and evaluation of success in a fully integrated and mutually supporting series of actions that, taken together, could save thousands of American lives and American taxpayers upwards of $350 billion.

This is not just speculation and I am not an armchair theorist: for 4 years I was in charge of planning American policy for the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. I have written several of the basic US national policy papers and participated in writing many more. I know what planning requires and have put what I have learned into the effort on Iraq. What I have done is not perfect. No plan ever is. But this plan has sensible, cost-effective and productive elements that interact to provide a framework for a future with which we and the Iraqis can live in safety and even in prosperity.

So what does the plan call for? Here I can outline only a few points. H.R. 508 is readily available on-line and full prose rationale for it is available in our book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.

But in short, consider just five key steps:

¬ The first step is to replace our military force, with a “multinational stability force.” It should not be imposed upon Iraq but should be employed by the Iraqis. This force should not try to fight the insurgents but to create and maintain an acceptable degree of stability.

Stability will not be perfect. The key word is acceptable.

But the history of insurgencies teaches us that once the major irritant – the foreign occupation – is removed, the natives themselves will demand and achieve order. What happens is simple and obvious: when the general population feels that enough of its objectives have been accomplished, it stops supporting the insurgency; when that happens the fighters, the actual insurgents, lose their legitimacy and their support. As Mao Tse-tung put it in his 1937 study of guerrilla warfare, the “fish” lose the “sea” that sustained them. The insurgency then dies, often very quickly.

So the multinational national stability force is intended to help bridge the gap between the withdrawal of the Americans and the coalescence of the Iraqis.

This task, of course, is harder today than it would have been two years ago and will be much harder two years from now. But we believe it should be achievable in an acceptable fashion in about two years at a cost of about $6 billion – or about 2 percent of what we will spend if we stay there.


¬ The second step is the creation of a national police force. The danger is that it will be little more than a hit squad for the majority to be used against the minority. That is what Iraqis believe the one we have created now is. That is what your mission of inquiry also found.

To avoid the danger of it being used for violent, sectarian purposes, it must be counter-balanced. This can be achieved in part by the multinational stabilization force but also by what is traditional in Iraq -- neighborhood, village and tribal home guards.


¬ Third we should stop encouraging the growth of an Iraqi army on which we have already spent about 19 billion dollars.

Until Iraq rebuilds its civilian institutions, an army is a danger to all Iraqis. Iraqi armies, even long before Saddam Hussein, have been the seedbed of
dictators and the cause of national disruption.

We should redirect the billions of dollars we are spending to create an army into creating what Iraq really needs, something like our Corps of Engineers to help rebuild the country. Only if jobs are created can the devastating level of unemployment be reduced.

¬ The Fourth step is a series of actions to convince the Iraqis that we really are leaving their country. To do this,

 We should immediately stop work on military bases – which the Iraqis believe proves that we intend to stay;


 We should stop using and paying the armies of mercenaries – now the second largest military force in the country. They are the “loose canon” of Iraq – out of all control and supervision. They are a major threat to American national interests and reputation;

 We should avoid actions that suggest that we intend to hang on to the one significant national economic resource of Iraq, its oil;

 We should turn the vast and expensive Green Zone over to the Iraq government, and replace it with a far more modest American embassy; and

 We should close the vast prisons we have created. They now hold some 25,000 Iraqis who must either be released or tried.

¬ Fifth, we should offer all the help we can muster to the growth of civic institutions, professional societies and grassroots organizations.

This is a far more complex and long-term process than the previous steps.

You might compare it to reeducation after surgery: without it, Iraqi society will never recover from the trauma of the war and occupation.

But, this is a field in which we have not only much experience but also many talented people and existing organizations. We can encourage our great foundations, universities and professional societies to interface with existing and competent Iraqi educational, public health and development authorities.

There are several other elements in our plan which will reinforce these basic actions. They are spelled out in detail in H.R. 508 and our related book, but these, we believe, will go far toward stabilizing Iraq and beginning the necessary work toward recovery.

In monetary costs, the whole program we have set forth might cost roughly $12-14 billion.

Implementing the program would save

 the lives of perhaps a thousand or more Americans and far more in incapacitated or walking wounded;
 about $350 billion in direct costs,
 perhaps $1 trillion in indirect costs,
 it would staunch the hemorrhaging of respect and good will for America throughout the world and
 finally, it would do far more than any police measures to reduce the danger of terrorism.

Failure to implement the program will cause tragic losses across the board to our country. The American public has told you it wants you to act! Waiting is not action. Delay will be costly and painful.

 You have seen what happened since Senator McGovern, Congressman Murtha, General Odom and I appeared before you last January.

 If you do not act, by the time of the next election, the 736 American soldiers killed in the last 8 months will be followed by at least that many more and the 60 or so billion dollars wasted will be followed by 3 or 4 times that amount. We are likely to suffer terrorist attacks here at home and to lose even more of the good will and respect we have labored so hard for so many years to garner. And you can be sure that the American public will be angry and disillusioned.

* * *

You in Congress are America’s first – and last – line of defense.

America’s future is in your hands. The buck stops with you.

So I end by echoing our great statesman-educator, Thomas Jefferson: “let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

Thank you.

# # #


About the Author:
William R. Polk taught Middle Eastern history and politics and Arabic at Harvard until 1961 when he became a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State, responsible for the Middle East and North Africa. In 1965 he became professor of history and founding director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Birth of America, Understanding Iraq, The United States and the Arab World, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (with former Senator George McGovern), Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs, and The Elusive Peace, among many other books.


VIOLENT POLITICS
A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, & Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq
HarperCollins Publishers
Hardcover; $23.95
On Sale: September 18, 2007
ISBN: 0061236196
ISBN 13: 9780061236198

[groovedaddy]

1. 6 Trillion? Now that's what I call a royal screwing

left to our children and their children - on and on. it's a crime

[leftchick]

2. thank you so very much David

this is must know news!