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TechnoratiWhat Do You Mean "If" Iraq's Parliament Asks Us to Leave?
People laugh when I tell them that my favorite way out of the Iraq quagmire is to offer a bribe of $100,000,000.00 (one hundred million dollars) to every member of the Iraqi parliament. Perhaps a few of these duly elected public servants might decide that they wanted to become hugely wealthy overnight -- not to imply that that they might be greedy enough or corrupt enough to take a bribe, just to wonder whether they may have learned about the glories of democracy from the example of some of our own fine legislators, such as "Duke" Cunningham and Tom DeLay. What would we be bribing them to do? To ask the coalition forces, politely and diplomatically, to go home.
You may recall that L. Paul Bremer, the former U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, said on May 13, 2004, "If the provisional government asks us to leave we will leave … obviously we don't stay in countries where we're not welcome." This is the same Mr. Bremer who said, "We're going to be on the ground in Iraq … for years. We're going to be running a colony almost." But that is another story.
Let us examine the advantages of the bribery method: The total amount of money this would cost is equal to a few weeks' worth of continued war, so the savings would be enormous. We would all be put out of our misery — all except the troops who were killed or damaged, their friends and families, and an unknown number of Iraqis. The news media would have a story so compelling that it could compete, at least for a few hours, with reports about famed young women and their wacky companions — not to imply that anyone in the media prizes the ratings they score from recounting tawdry tales more than they cherish their journalistic integrity. Anti-war activists would at last have the peace we have so desperately sought, plus plenty of bragging rights and a bit of good karma as well. The troops would come home. Americans of every political persuasion could park this whole embarrassing Iraq nightmare in the forgotten recesses of our collective memory and go on with our lives, except of course during times when we experience bouts of the blowback that is almost certain to come our way.
Everyone in Washington would save face — not to imply that anyone in Washington would permit additional death and destruction to continue for the sake of their ability to save face, or to enhance the re-election prospects of themselves and their party, or to increase their personal power, or to stockpile campaign contributions, or for any other motive that might be characterized as ignoble. Surely our well-intentioned and virtuous politicians would have had those troops home yesterday if it weren't for … for what, exactly? If the Iraqi parliament were to ask us to leave, Washington officials would no longer be burdened with the task of inventing plausible answers to such pesky questions.
Iraqis would get their country back, at least what is left of it, plus massive doses of compensation. The United States can never fully make up for what was done to them, but we can vastly improve the lives of those Iraqis who managed to survive. We would be an immoral nation if we failed to do that, and everyone knows how deeply congress cares about morality.
This scheme may not be perfect, but it covers more of the variables than any other plan I know. It may be untested and purely hypothetical, but that never stopped the neocons so why should it stop others?
Now we learn that this may not be so hypothetical after all. Not the bribery part, which is of course beneath the dignity of the good people in Washington and Baghdad, but the part about their asking us to evacuate the premises sooner rather than later. More than half of the members of Iraq's parliament, one hundred and forty-four of them to be exact, just signed a draft law calling for a timetable for troop withdrawal, a cap on the number of armed forces in the country, and a constraint on the Iraqi government's ability to seek renewal of the United Nations authorization for the occupation.
Let's be clear about what has happened. The coalition forces brought democracy, or some warped semblance thereof, to Iraq. The Iraqi people then elected legislators who as individuals have been contentious and as a group have been dysfunctional. Until now. They have finally become so incensed that they are willing to put aside their squabbling long enough to take steps toward ridding themselves of the foreign boots on their soil.
And most of our mainstream media have ignored this story or buried it on page 12. .
After you recover from thinking through the implications of that, read about Afghanistan's government taking preliminary steps toward ridding their country of infidel invaders, a story that was even more underreported.
Both of these wars are lost. The only question now is whether the United States will control the end game and wind them down in a smart way or whether we will suffer the consequences of staying the stupid course.
Pat Gerber (ppaattgg ([at]) yahoo ([dot]) com) is a San Francisco editor, cartoonist, and peace activist.
8 Comments so far
Show AllSince this article appeared, I have been asked whether I believe that anyone has been bribed or whether I was kidding.
The answer is that I do not believe that any bribes have been made for a variety of reasons, among them that the people who are in a position to actually do that strike me as having no interest in seeing the war come to a conclusion more quickly than it is now.
Pat Gerber
It's a good thing that we don't live in a democracy, or we'd be eating surrender monkey turds already. Over and over, in Iraq, Afghanistan, the USA, Venezuela Bush has demonstrated his total contempt for the very idea of people's self-determination. For him, democracy is about elections you can steal. Remember his "We had our accountability moment in November" crap?
I agree with you, MaxCat. I realized, thinking about it that this chaos wasn't unintended consequences, it was expected, and part of the program. What clued me in was Chalmers Johnson's article about the American Empire. What a sad tragic statement about how low we've sunk. What is being done to other people in our name. What is emerging about racist attitudes about people who were kind and gentle before we started in on them. I read about all the Americans going to Iraq before we invaded them and writing about their experiences. And then we started killing the Iraqis. And I ask, would we behave differently in their place? And if our invaders showed as little concern for American lives as we do for theirs, how would we treat any soldiers we could capture? Consider how they treated Jessica Lynch. They saved her life. They gave the last of their medicines to her. She has a memory of an Iraqi nurse singing and crooning to comfort her because thanks to our sanctions, there were no pain meds to give her. They put her in an ambulance to return her and the Americans shot at it. So then we staged a "rescue" for the benefit of American TV viewers and tore up their hospital. Oh yeah, we're real heroes.
I was born and raised an American citizen. I was taught in school to be proud of my country. I have 13 nationalities in me. But now in my heart I am an Iraqi and I am grieving for them. For all the parents whose children have been murdered or dismembered by American soldiers or bombs, for the unholy terror of their lives we have unleashed on them. For our predatory intentions to steal their only asset, and that this hell will not stop until we get what we want. What have we become? What does that make us?
I know that most Americans are blithely unaware of all this, because they don't want to be. But ALL our leaders are, and only one has made a serious sincere attempt to stop it. The rest are only pretending. Dennis Kucinich has my vote. The rest can go to hell.
I think it's about time that the entire country stop insisting in one form or another that bush should have done things this way, or that if he would change, or shouldn't he have known.
Face it people they (bushco) knew that everthing in Iraq would happen just the way it happened and just the way it is happening today. They wanted this mess all along. It is what they needed in order to "stay the course". It keeps the miltary industrial complex thriving, it keeps the American people afraid, it keeps all the little people in congress under their thumb, it keeps the corporations happy, (big oil is especially happy, just look at their profits).
If you step back and take a look at how easy it would have been to do things differently in order to achieve some positive results you can only come to one conclusion. This mess was intentional.
No conspiracy here folks, this was planned to last a very long time.
Amusing, isn't it, how the Bushites are now trying their damndest to blame the Iraqis for the situation caused by the Bushite invasion and occupation of Iraq? Bush and his gang of sociopaths don't seem to get the lesson: invade and occupy a country and the people will never stop trying to get rid of you, never stop trying to kill as many of your soldiers as they can, which they have a perfect right to do.
Just as amusing are the people who say, and there seem to be more of them lately, that if the invasion had been done properly and competently, these problems wouldn't exist. That totally avoids the fact that the invasion and occupation were wrong, on any grounds. And frankly I doubt very much that the Iraqis would decide to stop killing American troops just because there would have been so many more of them.
No matter what the U.S. does, it will be hated and feared in the Mideast long after we are all gone. We can thank crazy little Georgie for that, and I fondly hope that someday he pays the price for it. In the meantime, I suspect that if we simply pull out, and offer financial support and reparations, the Iraqis will wipe out the small al Qaeda element in their country and proceed to find, one way or another, a stable system of governing themselves. And then we in the U.S. might be able to get on with finding a stable way to govern ourselves, one that sends the psychopaths back under their rocks, and invites rational, sane, reasonable people back into the light of day and brings light back into government.
We will get out as soon as we get rid of WMDs, oops.. l mean Saddamn, l mean Al Queda, l mean the Baathist, l mean the lranians, l mean the Shia, l mean the Sunnis, l mean the bad Kurds, l mean ....... Oh F--K It just kill ém all let Allah sort it out and suck out all the oil. lf the world don´t like it send the UN back to Switzerland sell the building to Trump and turn it into Conds and retail space.
I also think it's funny when Bush or some other player says, if Iraq people don't live up to the benchmarks, we'll leave as we can't babysit the situation forever. What an idle promise, as the Iraq people have wanted the US occupiers out all along.
Didn't Bremer fly that bribe money into Iraq on pallets in USAF C-130 cargo planes? Where did it all ($8 billion officially acknowledged as "missing") go? Halliburton? The Iraq war is a money-laundering operation for Cheney's rich backers and pals - our tax money goes in, Halliburton et al take it out.