A sudden US pullout from Iraq is wrong, writes Rasha Saad While acknowledging the US quagmire in Iraq, which enters its fourth year next month, pundits dismiss the option of a sudden American withdrawal as unwise. They argue that the Arabs, the Iraqi parties, and even militants in Iran, all fear an abrupt American pullout because it would mean an immediate collapse of the Baghdad regime followed by absolute pandemonium. In the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat, Abdel-Rahman Al-Rashed wrote that withdrawing from Iraq will not constitute a solution and can only complicate and destabilise matters further. In Will the Americans withdraw? Al-Rashed said Iraq was a country at the heart of an international conflict over oil resources, in addition to the conflict with Iran over political influence. Add to that is the fact that chaotic Iraq will become the seat of international terrorist operations, Shia and Sunni alike. Al-Rashed wrote that even if Democrats in the US win next year's elections they will not find withdrawal an option. "The statements made during the American elections are mere promises dictated by the public climate that rejects defeat and favours withdrawal. Supreme interests will command a different perspective from the next president, whether he comes from the Democrat camp or if the presidency were to remain in Republican hands." Al-Rashed advises that any incoming president will need to lay down a plan for a gradual departure, and also help Iraqis create a UN- protected comprehensive political regime. "The bloody state in Iraq will prevail so long as no Iraqi solutions exist under which the various parties can converge under the ceiling of a new political system, a government and a parliament," Al-Rashed concludes. Also in Asharq Al-Awsat, Hussein Shobokshi described America as "drowning in the problems of Iraq and its sects, continuing its political and administrative failures in running the war and in the post-war stage." Shobokshi wrote that the US administration was bearing the brunt of public anger in America and was facing increasing demands for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Furthermore, the American administration has supported the governments of Ibrahim Al-Jaafari and Nuri Al-Maliki without confronting the misuse of power on both their parts. This, as Shobokshi sees it, has undoubtedly contributed to the fuelling of the sectarian crisis. However, Shobokshi does not consider the US to be the only occupier in Iraq; he believes Iran is playing a similar role. Shobokshi wrote: "Many would consider it strange to describe the Iranian presence in Iraq as occupation, however all the characteristics of conventional and non-conventional occupation applies to the Iranian situation in Iraq." In Shobokshi's article What about the Iranian occupation ? he said there are over 30,000 Iranians that belong to the Revolutionary Guards and intelligence services on the ground, in addition to those that work are under the umbrella of aid organisations or scientific hawzas, plus thousands of Iranians who were given Iraqi citizenship and placed in sensitive and influential positions. Shobokshi warned that there are entire geographic regions in Iraq that are under complete Iranian influence, where Iran is the decision-maker, and that a number of political and strategic decisions are made only by Iranian coordination and instruction. "Iran is exactly the same as the US with its occupying presence in Iraq, and the request that it ends the occupation must also affect it. The region can no longer deal with the state of denial and the deliberate overlooking of what is happening in Iraq. Yes, there is a deliberate Iranian occupation of Iraq and what is left to be done now is to take action to put an end to this matter." In the London-based, pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, Roger Owen points out "the ignorance of the Americans and British about Iraq and its continuing consequences." Owen referred to a recent article published in the London Review of Books and written by Charles Tripp who recalls a Downing Street meeting held in November 2002 between Tony Blair, his then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and six academics with knowledge of Iraq and the Middle East. To their surprise, Tripp wrote, the prime minister seemed "wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society" while Straw appeared to imagine that a post- Saddam Hussein Iraq could be conceptualised as a "transitional society" along the lines of post- Soviet Russia. Owen said there are various ways of accounting for such a display of ignorance. Owen wrote that in the unlikely event that the same kind of meeting with President Bush and Vice- President Cheney had taken place at the White House in the run up to the Iraq war, one could speak without a doubt of a conscious ignorance designed to pre-empt any difficult questions as to how hard it was going to be to rebuild the country's political institutions once the invasion was complete. But in Britain, Owen said, although ignorance may have served much the same purpose, it would seem to me more than likely that there were other factors at work as well. "The first is the kind of racism which, out of laziness and an unwillingness to care, prefers to see the peoples and institutions of markedly different societies as an undifferentiated mass and so not really worth bothering to get to know better," Owen wrote. Views about religion must also play a part, argues Owen, although just how this worked out as a mechanism for promoting a disinterest in Iraqi society is more difficult to discern, at least in the case of Blair and Bush. "One could argue that they saw the Iraqis as Muslims and that this was all they needed to know." Owen also insists that if Blair and Bush secretly harboured these thoughts they were quickly disabused when, as things began to go wrong for them in Iraq, they were soon head-over-heals in an attempt to manage Iraqi religious sectarianism, a task which all too soon overwhelmed them. "Management of the situation as it appeared in the centre of Iraq proved much more difficult as countless books and articles about the failures of American policy now reveal. What occurred was a classic version of the imperial dilemma."
