The Timely Exit
By Doug Saunders

Call it the battle of the escape plans. Since the revelation of the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities, the question is no longer how to 'win' in Iraq but how to get out, and those offering answers are as far apart as can be.

In the post-Vietnam years, I was once told, a team of American researchers analyzed every sentence spoken on prime-time network television. What they concluded may have said something about the United States in those days: The most commonly spoken phrase, by a good margin, was: "Let's get out of here."
This week, those researchers might make a similar discovery if they were to study American political speeches, think-tank reports and cable-news interviews. For there has been a dramatic shift in tone during the past few weeks, as Iraq has become unmanageable and America's world role has shifted from being a potential force of hope to being a source of shame and horror.
"Let's get out of here." It has not yet been uttered by Donald Rumsfeld or George W. Bush, and they are certainly not going to use any such phrase until after the Nov. 2 presidential elections.
But the best minds in Washington's bureaucracies, think tanks and campaign offices have shifted their energies to escape plans. In even the most hawkish and conservative circles, the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities have cemented the growing sense that the mission has been irreparably blown.
"The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost." Those words were written this week not by a leftist or a Democrat, but by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of the more stalwart neoconservatives in Washington and two of the voices that were most assertively optimistic last year about the potential outcome of the Iraq war.
The question surrounding Iraq today is not how to "win" or how to use it as a foundation for a Greater Middle East transformation, but simply how to get out.
But how do you get out of a place like Iraq? What does it mean to get out? This is a subject of heated debate, almost as intense as the one in 2002 over whether to go into Iraq in the first place. It has divided Washington, and Baghdad, into a number of factions. The battle of the escape plans has barely begun, but it is already ugly and fractious.
I have spent the week talking to proponents of various plans, and to scholars and experts who spend their time in Iraq, and one conclusion is clear: Stop thinking about the fall of Saigon.
Our visions of an end to the Iraq imbroglio, whatever our political perspective, have been scrambled by two pervasive tropes: The image of Americans streaming to the roof of their embassy for a humiliating and final helicopter-borne escape, and the word "quagmire."
Iraq is not Vietnam -- at least, it will not end like Vietnam. Almost all observers agree that the Americans are not defeated, or stuck, in a military sense. While almost half of Iraqis now say they support the anti-American insurgents, there is no major constituency supporting a return to Baathist rule. Likewise, there is no impending need for Americans to escape, despite videos of beheadings. In fact, as we shall see, there are good reasons why nobody should support an immediate U.S. withdrawal.
Some observers are instead beginning to think not of Saigon but of Manila. The American withdrawal from the Philippines was not so much a military retreat -- the United States maintained power there until the 1940s, and military bases until the 1990s -- as an acknowledgment of political failure.
President William McKinley had optimistically proclaimed in 1898 that the United States would bring about "benevolent assimilation" in which the "arbitrary rule" of dictators would be replaced by the "mild sway of justice and right."
Two decades later, the initial goals had failed. The Americans, welcomed at first, were being denounced as aggressors and battered by increasingly violent insurgents. And the United States had lost its moral berth, after news leaked out that its soldiers had engaged in torture.
The debate this month could be compared to the one a century ago, when it became apparent that the political mission in the farthest corner of Asia was not going to live up to its glowing promise.
The question is: How do we get out of here without making things worse for ourselves, or for Iraq? Those offering answers have fallen into a number of steadfast camps.
The scorched earthists
The most obvious approach would be to remove all the Americans, their 138,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of bureaucrats and contractors, as quickly as possible.
An immediate evacuation of Iraq is frequently proposed by anti-war activists, as well as some conservative Republicans and some moderates who feel that the United States has no reason to spend money and young lives on a failed mission that embarrasses the country.
A number of scholarly voices have joined this chorus, arguing that an immediate withdrawal is the only option that would prevent things from getting even worse.
"We have to recognize the fact that over a year we have measurably poisoned the well and worsened the situation in Iraq, such that what might have been possible last April, May, June or July may not be possible this May, June or July," says Rashid Khalidi, who as director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University is one of the more respected Middle East scholars in the United States.
"The options are bad, worse and much worse," Mr. Khalidi told reporters this week. "The U.S. is going to leave Iraq. . . . The only question is when do the troops leave. . . . The entire rationale for this whole adventure has to be jettisoned in order to save something."
That's a pretty good summary of the case for an immediate pullout.
But such a scorched-earth plan is not supported by most of Mr. Bush's opponents in the Congress, including politicians to the anti-war left of the Democratic Party. The option generally exists so far on the fringes of the left and the right that it is rarely discussed.
There are good reasons why many compassionate liberals do not want the troops to leave Iraq. For sure, there is a mounting public hatred of U.S. troops in Iraq: Asked last month, 57 per cent of Iraqis said they wanted coalition troops to "leave immediately," compared with 36 per cent who wanted them to "stay in Iraq for a longer period."
But that same survey indicated something else: Asked what would happen if coalition troops left immediately, 53 per cent said they would feel less safe and only 28 per cent would feel more safe.
"If the American soldiers were removed, there would be a massive security collapse," says Thabit Abdullah, a respected Iraqi historian at Toronto's York University who has just returned from a month-long tour of Iraq.
"There's been a quick transformation occurring from a population that was generally in support of the American presence to one that's rapidly being transformed to believing the U.S. presence an obstacle. . . . But their removal would be such a terrible disaster, and one the Iraqis would hold the Americans solely responsible for. They have been getting angrier about weak security. It started with the looting on April 9 last year and has got worse -- the Americans need to provide the security for Iraqis to establish their own institutions."
Mr. Abdullah's observations mesh with those of most people, from across the political spectrum, who have spent time in Iraq. It is the great dilemma of this occupation: It has turned the Iraqis dramatically against the U.S. soldiers (from a position of overwhelming support a year ago), while at the same time making them entirely dependent on the kind of security that they believe only the United States, for now, can provide.
The intensifiers
But if withdrawing U.S. troops is not the answer, what about dramatically increasing their numbers? This argument has a surprising number of supporters in Washington, including some outspoken anti-war liberals.
These people blame Iraq's mess on the long-held conviction of Mr. Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, that the monolithic armies of yesteryear should be replaced by small, elite, fast-responding units. That theory received its first major test in Iraq. It was a huge success during the combat last year -- and, in the view of many, a terrible failure during the occupation.
Another important argument for a greater troop strength: It might make true democracy possible much sooner.
This is the intriguing argument made by Mr. Kagan and Mr. Kristol, the neoconservative intellectuals. They argue that full and legitimate Iraqi elections should be held as early as September. (The existing plan would have a United Nations interim government hold power until elections in 2005.)
They list a number of good reasons for this short, sharp transition. For one thing, it would draw the attention of Iraqis away from the Americans and their activities, and make them realize that the insurgency and terrorism are aimed at Iraqi democrats too. "The insurgents would be anti-democratic rather than anti-American," they write in a paper to appear in a forthcoming issue of The Weekly Standard.
Similarly, they argue, American military actions would be seen not just as an effort "to suppress rebellious Iraqi movements, but as a vital support for the elections process, and for democracy."
But this would come at a cost: "In addition to setting a new date for elections, the administration would have to do a couple of other things. It would have to increase, substantially, the number of troops in Iraq in order to create a more secure environment for elections."
Several observers feel that this debate between the troops-outists and the more-troopists is a distraction from the real issues.
Anthony Cordesman, a former State Department guru and a well-connected conservative intelligence analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has concluded: "No military solution can now work."
He feels that Mr. Rumsfeld's message this week -- that he would "stay the course" and keep aggressively fighting rebel forces in the south and around Baghdad -- is a dangerous and naive distraction from the much more important issues at hand: "As the U.S. learned in Vietnam, tactical military victory without political victory is largely irrelevant."
The political victory, he says, is farther off than ever. Not only did the abuses at Abu Ghraib demolish U.S. credibility, but Mr. Bush's announcement that he would reverse U.S. policy and side completely with Ariel Sharon in his war against the Palestinian refugees has had an effect comparable to a major military defeat for the United States.
"Far too many U.S. officials are still in a state of denial as to the political realities in the Middle East," he says. "They do not see just how much the perceived U.S. tilt toward Israel and Sharon alienates Iraqis and Arabs in general."
Troop numbers, he says, are irrelevant.
 

The Americanizers

The retreat plan that seems most popular with the Bush administration goes like this: Keep troops in place, while shifting the political responsibility to the UN. Aim to get everyone out by the end of 2005, save some strategic bases and an embassy -- but make every effort to make the country's institutions as similar to America's as possible.
During his surprise visit to Baghdad on Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld lectured the troops at length about the philosophies of Abraham Lincoln. He outlined the reading he had been doing on the Civil War president, and offered some lessons: "As Abraham Lincoln said," he said, "the United States is the last best hope of humankind. . . . It's not going to be an easy path from a repressive dictatorship to a stable, prosperous, successful country that respects all of the various religious and ethnic groups, that's at peace with its neighbours, that understands what human rights are. That's not an easy path. . . . And you're going to say it was worth it."
From the beginning, the White House's mission to Americanize Iraq has exceeded any other goals, including the delivery of peace and stability. When they began their jobs in 2001, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld were handed detailed escape plans, drafted by Bill Clinton and Al Gore for their own planned invasions of Iraq.
Those plans were thrown out wholesale, according to White House observers such as journalist Bob Woodward. Instead, a plan was put in place to Americanize Iraq, without much regard for anything else.
Visitors are often shocked by the scope. Mr. Abdullah, the historian, says he visited several local universities that were being rebuilt, and discovered that instead of trying to purchase books, hire staff and increase enrolment levels, the American authorities were engaged in a campaign to turn them into private, profit-making institutions that charged tuition fees that only the very wealthy could afford.
In Iraq's southern marsh areas, he found Iraqi engineers who had mapped the marshes and drawn up detailed plans for their reflooding -- only to find that the U.S. government had brought in its own firms to repeat their work, ignoring their experience. This, he said, was a pattern repeated everywhere.
"This, then, is not a very good solution -- you don't see the country moving toward greater self-governance, but you're seeing it move to greater reliance on the Americans. It's like 1921, when the British left but maintained 'advisers' at all levels -- it meant that they had to maintain a permanent presence."
The Iraqifiers
In the late 1960s, the word "Vietnamization" became a promise and a curse. Vietnam, the theory went, would be turned over to the Vietnamese, leaving it to their fate and absolving America of its mistakes. The threat was that thousands of American lives might prove to have been wasted in order to oversee a transition to anti-American communism.
Iraqification is now the order of the day. The risks are similar: It is entirely possible, by the middle of next year, that the United States might have spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives to have tens of thousands of soldiers posted overseas as guardians of a democratically elected, anti-American Islamist government.
Yet the smartest observers say this is the best possible option. As a New York Times headline put it last week: "For Iraqis to win, the U.S. must lose."
Or as Mr. Cordesman says, "The U.S. should not abandon Iraq, but rather abandon the effort to create an Iraq in its own image."
He proposes "a major shift from trying to maintain U.S. influence and leverage in a post-sovereignty period to a policy where the U.S. makes every effort to turn as much of the political, aid and security effort over to Iraqis as soon as possible, and focuses on supporting the UN in creating the best compromises possible in creating Iraqi political legitimacy."
This is not quite as dismal an option as it may seem to some in Washington. In fact, in one of those strange twists of fate, Iraqification might well prove the most effective path to Americanization. With the occupation ended, Iraq could fall into chaos -- that is, unless the Iraqis decide to draw upon that most useful resource, American troops and money.
"What we need to do," Mr. Cordesman says, "is reduce the U.S. embassy plan to create the smallest staff practical . . . with the clear message to the Iraqis that not only are they going to be in charge, but non-performance means no U.S. money and no continuation of U.S. troops and support."
In other words, the retreat itself could be a more potent weapon than any actual occupation: The U.S. money and soldiers would no longer support a hated occupation by detested people. Instead, they would be begged for -- as useful tools and resources for a transformation that most Iraqis still believe will lead to a far better life than they have seen in recent generations.
Doug Saunders writes on foreign affairs for The Globe and Mail.
10 big mistakes
Over the past year, observers say, the U.S. has made a series of grave mistakes that have led to the current crisis. They:
1. Failed to maintain spending, increase number of troops, shift them into policing mode and train them in Arabic to protect neighbourhoods and infrastructure. Instead, they reduced numbers and kept them in aggressor mode, making them the main source of fear rather than a source of security.
2. Failed to protect key government buildings, power stations, water-supply facilities, museums, universities, etc. to prevent looting and destruction of infrastructure.
3. Instead of guaranteeing them employment, left hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers, police officers, government workers without a role in society after their institutions were disbanded. They formed the current insurgency.
4. Made privatization of business a higher priority than establishment of infrastructure and democracy, creating a the sense that country was being robbed. At the same time, they gave key contracts to government-connected U.S. companies whose employees rejected Iraqis.
5. During a period of 45-per-cent unemployment, hired tens of thousands of workers from India and Bangladesh because unemployed Iraqis were not trusted.
6. Failed to shut down Iraq's prison system. Instead, they changed their leadership and maintained Saddam Hussein's torture techniques. Never established rule of law; more than 90 per cent of prisoners have not been charged with a crime.
7. Failed to create a free press; maintained a government-run media.
8. Appointed ideological cronies rather than well-known domestic Iraqis to Governing Council, giving it the appearance of a puppet regime.
9. Acted too quickly to open markets to foreign investment, before Iraqi investor class could get on its feet.
10. Did not encourage foreign investment where it was needed (cellphone contracts, for instance, went to dubious Iraqi firms when foreign companies would have provided better service).
 

U.S. citizen-soldiers terrified, overwhelmed by chaotic Iraqi prison Scene inside notorious Abu Ghraib jail
Red Cross says, one of complete disorder

On the highway into Baghdad, it is impossible to miss: a stark enclosure of concrete walls, more than five metres high, topped with razor wire and guarded by rifle-bearing U.S. soldiers standing atop imposing watchtowers.
The scene behind the walls of Abu Ghraib prison, according to leaked reports and news-media interviews with former officials, is one of almost constant chaos. One small and secretive corner of the prison provided the scenes of torture and sexual humiliation that have galvanized the world this month. But the whole facility is a scene of complete disorder, according to journalists' interviews with present and former guards and a classified report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that was leaked to the news media yesterday.
Inside, at least 3,800 prisoners mill about, most of them living in large tents that hold 25 men, sleeping on mats. The five female prisoners are kept indoors, each getting her own small cell with barred doors.
The vast majority of the prisoners are "security internees," picked up by U.S. forces. Though not charged with any crimes, they are considered potential threats to the military. They are interrogated, often harshly, but they are not considered sources of valuable information. Those prisoners, including former Baath Party members who gave information leading to the capture of Saddam Hussein, are kept at smaller, specialized facilities elsewhere in Iraq.
It was last September that a group of U.S. counterterrorism experts concluded that the less-important inmates of Abu Ghraib should be exploited for their intelligence value -- a decision that led to the abuses. They wrote, in a report to the U.S. Army, that although the prison should provide "a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence . . . it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."
The 113-hectare prison is divided into three districts: Camp Ganci, which can hold 4,800 prisoners; Camp Vigilant, with room for 600 more, and the "hard site," a concrete-block building that houses 203 inmates considered most valuable for intelligence purposes, or most the dangerous. It was here that the acts of torture and humiliation occurred.
According to former guards, about 400 or 500 of the Abu Ghraib prisoners have been formally charged with crimes. It is the largest of 14 U.S.-operated prisons in Iraq, which have an estimated combined inmate population of about 8,000.
The prisoners are guarded by soldiers from the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade. Many of the Americans are citizen-soldiers, members of the army reserves or the National Guard who were chosen for this task because they work as prison guards or police officers in their civilian lives.
One of the former guards, Sergeant Adam Mead of Guildsboro, Pa., said in a television interview yesterday that he had been in charge of processing new inmates, and quickly found himself overwhelmed.
"We would say, 'Look, we don't have the room for them. We can't support them. We don't have the showers. We don't have the latrines. We don't have the food, and we don't have the guards and the enclosures to make it safe,' '' he told a Fox News reporter. "They would routinely say, 'You are going to take them anyway.' So instead of having 500 in a pen, you would have 700, and you still have the same number of guards."
Former guards say the inmates were a mix of petty criminals, protesters, bystanders, members of the organized opposition and foreign fighters. Adolescents were thrown in with adults; some guards complained that the youngsters were being beaten and sexually abused.
Frequently, the guards say, violence would break out, with rock-throwing incidents on an almost daily basis. The Red Cross report listed incidents in which live ammunition was fired from guard towers into rioting crowds.
Sgt. Mead said the experience, for relatively untrained soldiers like himself, was terrifying. "They may be your friend today, and the next minute, they are trying to gut you. You are bringing in insurgents. You are bringing in criminals, murderers. . . . You have to have to establish some kind of sway over them."
At one corner of the prison is the interrogation centre, a small collection of cells containing a plastic table, chairs, an eyebolt for shackling prisoners to the floor and a pane of one-way glass.
This centre is run by two other chains of command, which are supposed to work in parallel with the Military Police Brigade.
One is the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, responsible for "interrogation and debriefing" of prisoners. The other is the CIA and its subcontractors which provided interrogation and translating services, often with lightly trained Americans who lacked sufficient security clearance.
Soldiers have said that most guards assumed the Military Intelligence Brigade, led by Colonel Thomas Pappas, was in charge of the prison. Yesterday, the U.S. Army announced that it would divide the prison's command into separate security, interrogation and garrison commands. However, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested in congressional testimony that it should simply be shut down.
A trail of abuse
Oct.-Dec., 2003: What a U.S. Army report later described as "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" occur at Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq.
Nov. 5, 2003: Army Provost Marshall Donald Ryder files a review of the prison system in Iraq. It concludes that while some procedures are flawed, there are no "inappropriate confinement practices."
Mid-Jan., 2004: A soldier tells superiors of prison abuses. Pentagon officials and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are informed. The army begins a major investigation and later appoints Major-General Antonio Taguba to head it.
Jan. 21, 2004: CNN reports that sources have revealed details of abuse, including the location of the suspected crimes, and says U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with near-naked Iraqi prisoners. Feb. 4, 2004: President George W. Bush remarks that "Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms."
March 3, 2004: Gen. Taguba's report is given to his superiors.
March 30, 2004: Six military personnel are charged with criminal offences.
April 28, 2004: CBS broadcasts several photographs showing abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
 

'This has disgraced America . . . '

Shame and humiliation, indignity and loss of face -- these emotions have a power in the Middle East that is often compared to that of nuclear weapons. Lengthy wars are fought for personal dignity. The worst forms of torture involve sexual shame. The mere mention of public indignity can provoke lifelong conflicts.
As such, the photos at Abu Ghraib prison are more than just a source of shame to U.S. soldiers and their leaders. The images of naked men being dragged on leashes by women, sexually humiliated and degraded are the worst sort of weapons in the war of ideas, Arab observers say. In this view, the photo scandal has been the equivalent of a major tactical defeat for the United States.
"Nudity is not allowed -- it's a conservative society. . . . So the idea of rape, of men or women, and the idea of sexual contact is really not accepted. It's really a culture of shame whenever it comes to sexual contact," said Raghida Dergham, senior diplomatic correspondent with the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.

"I think this has disgraced America, if you will, in the minds of Iraqis and some Arabs. . . . I think there will be many people who will probably join the resistance."

The images manage to combine everything that is considered most shameful in all Arab cultures: the display of naked flesh; the use of dogs and dog-like treatment in human company; the removal of space between people and forced contact, grovelling and prostration; physical and intimate touching by strangers; nudity and sexual exposure before other men; homosexual contact; the humiliation of men in front of women; filth; enslavement.
While most of these things are or have been considered at least somewhat shameful in most cultures, they are considered unspeakable offences in most Arab societies. One of the photographed prisoners told reporters in Iraq this week that he will never be able to move back to his hometown because of the shame.
Indeed, many of the victims say they are expressing stark disbelief that anyone would ask them to do such things.
"The interpreter told us to strip," Hayder Sabbar Abd, who had been in favour of the U.S. invasion of Iraq until his time in Abu Ghraib, told The New York Times this week. "We told him, 'You are Egyptian, you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims, we cannot do that.' When we refused to take off our clothes they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade."
The effect on Arabs of such humiliations seems to have been well known to the military-intelligence interrogation teams that allegedly ordered the sexual and physical abuse at Abu Ghraib. Some of them were reportedly trained at the U.S. Army interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where interrogation instructor John Giersdorf boasted in 2002 that his job "is just a hair's breadth away from being an illegal specialty under the Geneva Convention."
A Wall Street Journal reporter who was granted a rare visit to the facility noted that recruits are taught 30 interrogation techniques, many of them based on shame and humiliation.
The trainees are taught "to prey on a prisoner's ethnic stereotypes, sexual urges and religious prejudices, his fear for his family's safety or his resentment of his fellows," the reporter wrote after reading their training manual.
Yesterday, military officials in Iraq announced that they would be outlawing as many as 10 of those techniques, some of which were presumably being employed during the incidents photographed at Abu Ghraib.
Nudity and sexual shame have long been considered the most powerful forms of torture in the Arab world.
Victims of Saddam Hussein's extensive torture regime, which included a major facility at Abu Ghraib, have reported that the acts that left the deepest scars included being stripped naked and forced to stand in a cell jammed with other naked men for long periods, or being stripped and forced to sit on a bottle.
But if U.S. interrogators believed that they could extract information more efficiently by emulating Mr. Hussein's shame-based techniques, they failed to realized the devastating effect these techniques would have on the Arab world. Throughout the Middle East this week, the photos have turned even former supporters of the U.S. occupation against the military.
"Arabs are even more offended when the issue has to do with nudity and sexuality," Shibley Telhami, a professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. "The bottom line here is these are pictures of utter humiliation which will give most Arabs a permanent sense that the situation in Iraq is one of occupation."
Last year, Prof. Telhami wrote a much-discussed article titled "History and Humiliation," in which he argued that the U.S. has failed to consider the powerful issues of self-respect involved in the occupation of Iraq.
"Today, militancy in the Middle East is fuelled not by the military prospects of Iraq or any other state but [by] a pervasive sense of humiliation and helplessness in the region," he wrote.
Shame is such a powerful and misunderstood motive in Arab military and diplomatic affairs that former U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger once confessed that it had caused him to misunderstand the motive for the Egyptian war against Israel in 1973.
"Our definition of rationality did not take seriously into account the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect," Prof. Telhami quoted him as saying.