Iraq/Afghanistan: A Promise Kept, A Promise Deferred

President Obama wants credit for keeping his promise to end the war
in Iraq. Some credit is due: the President reaffirmed his commitment to
withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, as required by
the agreement between the U.S. and Iraq. But only partial credit is due,
because the war-ending task is very far from complete.

The Iraq
war is not over. This is not a left-wing critique. The consensus account
of mainstream U.S. print media is that the 50,000 U.S. troops who
remain have been "rebranded" from "combat" brigades to advise-and-assist
brigades. The unfailingly pro-war Washington Post editorial board wrote yesterday:

For
one thing, combat won't really end on Sept. 1. Fifty thousand U.S.
troops will remain in Iraq, and their duties will include
counterterrorism work as well as continuing to train and assist Iraqi
forces....

Moreover, the United States government is
still "meddling" in Iraq's internal political affairs, to use the term
our media uses when countries we don't like do it. U.S. officials are
still trying to determine who will be in the Iraqi government and who
should not. This is a key factor in the current political impasse in
Baghdad, a fact which is generally omitted in mainstream press accounts
that bemoan the failure of Iraqi politicians to form a government. It's
true that there is a failure on the part of Iraqi politicians, but they
have enablers in their failure: the outside powers, including the U.S.,
Iran, and other countries, which are lobbying furiously for a government
to their liking, and working to block any government that they don't
like. The impasse between the Iraqi politicians is also an impasse
between the outside powers, fighting a proxy political war for influence
in Iraq.

This week, Antony Blinken, Vice-President Biden's national security adviser, told the New York Times
that Prime Minister Maliki's State of Law coalition and Ayad Allawi's
Iraqiya coalition should be part of "the foundation of the next
government," along with the Kurdish alliance. But the Sadrists,
according to Blinken, should not be included, because

the
United States did not see them as useful members of a new governing
coalition - or, as he put it, the Iraqi government should include
"coalitions that are interested in building a long-term partnership with
the United States."

In his speech last night, President Obama said:

Tonight,
I encourage Iraq's leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to
form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and
accountable to the Iraqi people.

Blinken's more detailed
statement suggests that when President Obama said "inclusive," he meant
"including State of Law, Iraqiya, and the Kurds, but not the Sadrists."

A
major objective of the Bush Administration's war - which, as a Senator,
Joe Biden supported - was to remove Saddam Hussein's government and
replace it with a pro-U.S. government. The Obama Administration,
according to the statement of Biden's aide, is still pursuing the second
half of this objective. But the pursuit of this objective continues the
war, not only because it was a key objective of the war, but also
because it is a politically divisive objective among Iraqis; many Iraqis
don't want to have a "pro-U.S." government, and some of them are
prepared to use violence to prevent that from happening.

If the
fact that some Iraqis are prepared to use violence to prevent their
country from having a "pro-U.S." government seems extreme to you,
reflect for a moment on how extreme it was for the United States to
invade Iraq, defying the United Nations Charter and world opinion and unleashing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, in order to establish a "pro-U.S." government in Iraq.

President
Obama was right to call for an Iraqi government that is "an inclusive
government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi
people." But as of this week, this is not yet actually U.S. policy. If
the Iraqi government is to be representative and accountable to the
Iraqi people, people who do not want to have a "pro-U.S." government
cannot be walled out: continuing to try to exclude them from power is a
recipe for continued violence.

Some may see it as an immutable
fact of life on Earth that the U.S. must try to control the governments
of the broader Middle East, even if the attempt to do so produces
terrible violence.

But the example of Lebanon proves that it is
not so. Today the major political factions in Lebanon - which have a
long history of bitter civil war - live within the confines of a
national political accord in which they share power, an accord that
guarantees that the government will be neither "pro-U.S." nor
"anti-U.S." All the major outside powers which back the major factions
have signed off on this agreement, explicitly or implicitly, including
the U.S. (during the Bush Administration!), Iran, Syria, and Saudi
Arabia.

For the foreseeable future, if Iraq will have peace, that
is what it will almost surely look like: a government that is neither
pro-U.S. nor anti-U.S., but in which pro-U.S. and anti-U.S. factions
share power. So for the U.S. to accept peace in Iraq requires that it
accept for Iraq what it has already accepted for Lebanon.

And this
brings us back to the other thing that Senator Obama promised. He said
he didn't just want to end the war: he wanted to end the mindset that
leads to war.

The belief that we can and must control other
people's governments, that we can and must decide who will participate
in power in other people's countries, is a key component of the mindset
that leads to war. If an effective consensus had not developed in
Washington that the United States could and should decide who would
govern Iraq, the war would never have taken place.

People who say
that the war succeeded because Saddam Hussein was removed from power are
perpetuating the mindset that leads to war. To say that the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead
and the millions displaced, among the many human tragedies produced by
the war, are justified by Saddam Hussein's removal from power is not
simply wrong; more fundamentally, it's not our call. Only the people who
live in a country are morally qualified to make this kind of trade-off
about what sacrifices they think are justified to change (or keep) their
form of government, given the likelihood that they will pay 99% of the
sacrifice. It's obvious that many Iraqis, especially among the millions
who lost family members, would not have chosen to make this trade-off.

And
this question could not be more relevant today, because we are still
pursuing a policy in Afghanistan that is based on the same premise: the
United States government can and must determine who will participate in
power in Afghanistan.

About Afghanistan, the President said in his speech last night,

As
with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited
time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure
their own future. But, as was the case in Iraq, we can't do for
Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves. That's why we're
training Afghan Security Forces and supporting a political resolution to
Afghanistan's problems. And next August, we will begin a transition to
Afghan responsibility. The pace of our troop reductions will be
determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan
will endure. But make no mistake: This transition will begin - because
open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people's.

It's
a good thing that President Obama re-affirmed the beginning of drawdown
next summer; it's a good thing that he affirmed U.S. support for a
political resolution to Afghanistan's problems.

But as with Iraq,
there are key differences between the policy being articulated by the
President in his speech to the American people and the actual policy
being implemented by U.S. officials. The U.S. has done little to promote
a political resolution. The Pentagon is building long-term U.S.
military bases in Afghanistan - something Congress could do something about.
As it was in Iraq, U.S. policy in Afghanistan is still premised on
trying to exclude from power people who are opposed to a long-term U.S.
military presence. The majority of Americans - and the majority of House
Democrats - want a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal from
Afghanistan - not just the beginning, but also the endpoint. But the
White House still refuses to accept, in the case of Afghanistan, that
which it promoted in the case of Iraq: a timetable for full U.S.
military withdrawal.

So how much credit the President should get
for keeping his promise is very much an open question. He is drawing
down from Iraq, and for that he deserves credit. But he has done little
to end the mindset that leads to war, and in response to that, he needs
continued pressure. On October 2, people from across the United States
will go to Washington as
part of the peace contingent of "One Nation Working Together" to demand
that the wars end and that the troops come home: everyone who is able
should make an effort to be there - or to help someone else to go.