Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.

Lynch, Marc

Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, George McGovern and William R. Polk. Simon and Schuster 2006.142 pp. with index. $15.00.

Out of Iraq presents an impassioned appeal for a rapid American withdrawal from that tortured country. Written by the eminent historian William Polk and former Democratic senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, this short book promises a "practical plan for withdrawal." While Out of Iraq offers little analysis of the current state of Iraqi politics, few effective projections of the likely impact of an American withdrawal on Iraq or the region, and a fairly impractical plan for withdrawal, it is nevertheless important. Out of Iraq captures the moment when dissatisfaction with the war among Americans went mainstream, crystallizing the despair over a crushing entanglement with no evident end.

Out of Iraq is a cry from the heart by two eminent Americans sickened by what they see as the Bush administration's obstinate pursuit of a horrifically failed policy. It is no accident that the very first page begins with a recitation of the numbers of American, and the uncounted numbers of Iraqis, killed and wounded since the American invasion. Their analysis is as simple as it is devastating: America's presence in Iraq inspires more violence and chaos than it does security, and America's departure is an essential precondition for ending the turmoil. Worse, Iraq is corrupting the soul of American democracy, draining its moral standing and credibility, just as it does its overstretched military. Since the war cannot now be won, "The high costs have all been for naught.... the war has been a terrible and useless waste" (p. xiv). The only question worth asking, they suggest, is how to get out.

Little in Out of Iraq will be unfamiliar to regular readers of left-leaning blogs. It reviews the deceptions and misinformation that have dominated American discourse about Iraq, running quickly through the Bush administration's misleading rhetoric from the first motions towards Iraq until today. It highlights the economic costs of the war, relying on an estimate by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes of ultimate costs exceeding $1 trillion, while laying out the even greater moral costs of torture, occupation and the erosion of the rule of law. Polk offers some historical perspective, avoiding the tendency in some places to blame all of Iraq's problems on Bush. The book presents with brutal honesty the horrific consequences of the sanctions regime of the 1990s, tracing many of today's problems to the social and political degradation of that era. But this is not a book to be judged by its scholarly contributions: Out of Iraq is a political document, aimed clearly at inspiring a Democratic party that the authors lambaste for failing to offer a clear alternative (p. 15).

By simply ignoring or shredding central points of Washington's oddly sheltered discourse, McGovern and Polk point towards some fundamental truths. While withdrawal will be painful, they write, "damage is inevitable, no matter if we stay or leave.... When a driver is on the wrong road and heading for the abyss, 'staying the course' is a bad idea" (pp. 98-99). Well-turned phrases in the book--"changing a misguided course would not ... be a sign of weakness that would encourage our enemies and dishearten our friends; rather it would be a sign of strength and good sense" (p. xv)--will likely be repeated many times in the intense months of political battle to come.

Still, the very virtues of Out of Iraq--its clarity, its passion, its moral compass and above all the growing traction of its arguments--make it potentially dangerous as a guide to action. For all the book's passion, its analysis of today's Iraqi politics is painfully thin, offering little of the texture or complexity of today's Iraq. In its urgency to put forward a strong case for withdrawal, it often skims over very real risks, relying on wishful thinking to smooth over difficult patches: Iraq will remain united because most Iraqis understand that anything else would be worse (p. 33) and so on.

Their greatest blind spot about Iraq is the reality of spiraling sectarian violence, which has dynamics very different from those of the anti-occupation insurgency. Much of their plan rests on the hopeful assumption that "when we withdraw, we will remove a major cause of the insurgency" (p. 99). They may be right that the inflammatory American presence generates more violence than it prevents, but set against this must be the horrific prospect of a full-scale sectarian slaughter as the American troops depart. The authors heroically assume that America's departure will lead the insurgency to lay down its arms, its mission accomplished, rather than triggering a chaotic scramble for power between the armed and dangerous factions. But insurgency and civil war have different dynamics that point to different solutions. Could America really stand by and watch Iraq collapse into a bloody hell on live television as its troops depart? Here McGovern and Polk are coldly fatalistic: "We are as powerless to prevent the turmoil that will happen when we withdraw as we have been to stop the insurgency" (p. 99).

In stark contrast to the administration's repeated dire warnings of an al-Qaeda seizure of Iraq and its oil fields, McGovern and Polk hardly mention al-Qaeda at all. On this level, they are surely the more realistic. No serious military analyst believes that al-Qaeda could seize power over Shia-dominated Iraq and its oil fields, even if it manages to overcome high odds and sustain a hard-bitten emirate in Anbar Province. An al-Qaeda takeover of Iraq is a phantom menace, and McGovern and Polk do well to simply ignore the administration's provocations. They might also have pointed out that America's presence has not prevented the establishment of precisely the "Iraqi Islamic State" that its withdrawal would ostensibly permit. Taking a wider view, they correctly note that "Iraq has become the primary recruiting and training ground" for al-Qaeda (p. 96).

Out of Iraq is particularly good at comparing the costs of staying and leaving. Too often, nightmarish scenarios of a post-American Iraq are juxtaposed with an overly rosy depiction of current reality. While McGovern and Polk go too far in the other direction, minimizing the likely costs of withdrawal and maximining the current costs, they are right to force a direct confrontation between the competing calculations. They effectively argue that "the longer we delay in facing realities, the higher those costs will clearly be" (p. 92). Rather than waiting for the project to collapse in utter failure, better for the United States to leave on its own terms, "in an orderly way, on a reasonable schedule, and in a manner which will prevent further damage to American interests" (p. 97).

Unfortunately, the book does not offer the practical plan for withdrawal promised in the title. Its wish list of foreign peacekeepers, a rapidly trained Iraqi police force (to be accomplished with $1 billion! [p. 102]), and generous reconstruction assistance, along with an American apology and reparations to Iraqi civilians (p. 113), will surely remain nothing more than fantasy. The ferocity of sectarian warfare today renders absurd their repeatedly expressed expectation that an American departure would lead to a rapid decline in violence. Finally, larger questions are skirted. It is not clear whether withdrawal really means redeployment, to Kurdistan or to Gulf bases, or a more far-reaching reduction in America's presence in the region. Nor is it clear how this withdrawal fits into wider regional concerns, such as Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an area the Iraq Study Group, for all its flaws, dealt with much more effectively.

The real importance of McGovern and Polk's short book has been to offer an alternative framing of the choices facing America in Iraq from those found in either the careful calls for regional diplomacy and redeployment of the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report or the president's wildly unpopular and almost certainly doomed choice to instead "surge" tens of thousands of additional American troops into Iraq. The once heretical idea of a rapid American withdrawal has now moved to the center of American politics. Withdrawal gets ever-more support in public-opinion polls and has been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, while both houses of Congress passed a bill containing the (unenforceable) demand for a 2008 departure date. Detailed proposals for a withdrawal are popping up everywhere from The Nation (Juan Cole) to the Council on Foreign Relations (Steven Simon) to MIT's Security Studies program (Barry Posen). Clearly, a sea change has taken place in American politics on the question of Iraq. Out of Iraq may one day be read as a key crystallization of this moment.

Marc Lynch, professor of political science, Williams College