The paranoid withdrawal fantasy
Why Iraq is not Cambodia, Mr. President. Plus: Britney's challenge, the Who's real magic, and lesbian bathroom sex.
By Camille Paglia
Read more: George W. Bush, Camille Paglia, Politics, Lesbians, Cambodia, Britney Spears, Opinion
Oct. 10, 2007 | Dear Camille:
To end the Vietnam War fiasco, the U.S. did exactly what you are calling for in this Iraq fiasco: Get out now! We did get out in Nam and immediately, and nearly 3 million innocent souls were slaughtered by Pol Pot.
Question: Are you not even a bit concerned that another "killing fields" situation will occur, as will surely come to pass this time in much larger numbers?
Frank Baldino
New Haven, Conn.
Withdrawing U.S. troops and equipment from Iraq will be a complicated and dangerous process that will take many months. But it should be launched on a massive scale immediately. Iraq's fate needs to be decided by Iraqis, whose quarreling ancient tribes and factions have little motivation to compromise as long as the U.S. military is planted there to keep the peace. A democratic Iraq would be desirable in the best of all possible worlds, but it may be a desert mirage -- not worth the loss of thousands of American lives or the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars desperately needed for U.S. social services and infrastructure.
If there are parallels between Cambodia in the 1970s and Iraq now (as President Bush asserted to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August), they simply prove the folly of current U.S. policy in the Middle East. We will never know how many horrific deaths can be traced to the ruthless dictator Pol Pot (it could have been half the number you cite), but they were not always due to "slaughter" per se. Hundreds of thousands of peasants died from starvation and untreated illness in Pol Pot's madly unrealistic plan to turn Cambodia virtually overnight into an agrarian communist utopia.
But the destabilization of Southeast Asia was in fact the result of Western colonialism and intervention in the region by France and then (with all the best intentions) by the U.S., leading to the First and Second Indochina Wars. Cambodia's leader, Prince Sihanouk, who had warned that the U.S. could not win in Vietnam, was ousted in a 1970 coup that had American approval and perhaps covert support. A month later, the U.S. invaded Cambodia to clean out North Vietnamese guerrilla bases -- an incursion that sparked protests on American campuses, including Kent State University, where four students died after being fired on by the National Guard.
American bombing of eastern Cambodia had been going on since the prior year, killing Cambodian civilians and inciting a refugee problem that would disorder the entire country. Thus U.S. actions strengthened Pol Pot's revolutionary movement by driving former Cambodian opponents (such as Sihanouk supporters) to him and by facilitating an alliance between his embryonic Khmer Rouge and Communist North Vietnamese insurgents. Pol Pot seized control of Cambodia in 1975, after the U.S. exit from Vietnam, and was deposed three years later by a Vietnamese invasion. After 17 more years of waging guerrilla war, he was arrested but died while awaiting trial.
Thus President Bush's allusion to Cambodia was grossly simplistic. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has itself caused a massive and underreported refugee problem. America's removal of the aging dictator Saddam Hussein (whose regime was in economic decline because of U.N. sanctions), followed by the disbandment of the Iraqi military, played right into the hands of Iraq's volatile, meddling, next-door rival Iran, which now aspires to regional dominance. Our ally Turkey, a nation with a long, tough history, is also likely to respond harshly to any attempt by its Kurdish minority to break away and join the Kurds of northern Iraq in forming an independent Kurdistan. How would the U.S. respond to a Kurdish bid for freedom?
Whatever its rationale for the invasion of Iraq (arguments rage over the relative weight of Israel, oil, Halliburton, al-Qaida or none of the above), the Bush-Cheney administration seems to have been blinded by its own naive idealism, provincialism and abject ignorance of history. The continued American presence in Iraq is not a solution but an obstruction to regional cooperation. Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't want Iran gobbling up its neighbors. But the shrewd Saudis, rolling in riches, have no incentive to take responsibility so long as the U.S. goes on playing policeman and footing the bill.
Iraq is ringed with nations more economically and politically developed than Cambodia ever was in the 1970s. Geography and climate also play a role: Insurgents in the Middle East don't have thick canopies of tropical forests to hide under. Yes, there will be civil disturbances and loss of life when American forces exit Iraq -- whether now or 10 years from now. But order will gradually be reasserted from within, even if Iraq itself (originally a British fabrication) fragments. Only the Iraqis, not American soldiers with their barriers of language and culture, can identify and expel any rogue al-Qaida intruders in their midst.
The idea that millions of Iraqis would be slaughtered in a new Holocaust is a paranoid fantasy promulgated by the Bush administration to manipulate popular emotion in the U.S., where knowledge of world geography and history has shrunk decade by decade, thanks to our mediocre public education and our shallow, timid and increasingly frivolous mainstream media.
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