William Rivers Pitt has responded to my post yesterday "William Rivers Pitt Falls Into War Party’s Trap."
Like a social worker sending an abusive husband back into the home of the battered wife to "fix the problem he made," Pitt asserts:
I agree wholeheartedly that we have no right to control the lives of the Iraqi people. But we invaded their country, smashed their infrastructure, killed 198,000 of their civilians, toppled their government, opened their borders to extremists who kill not for the good of the Iraqi people but to win a political/religious argument with the United States, and yes there is a big difference, we did all these things and more, and so the argument about whether we have the right to do anything is a horse that has already left the barn.
What a break for the War Party! All they have to do is invade a country and do enough damage, and then everyone will say we can’t leave. Is it possible that was the plan all along?
Most Iraqis want the US to leave now. Every survey has shown that, and the only Iraqis clamoring for us to stay are the politicians who are in the US’ pockets. Yet Mr. Pitt says that we should ignore the will of the battered Iraqis and continue to try to "fix" their problems.
Actually, upon closer examination we see that Mr. Pitt is not so concerned with the poor Iraqis:
Like it or lump it, but the world economy is addicted to Mideast oil. An immediate U.S. withdrawal could precipitate a total collapse of the oil industry there, causing a global oil shock. That chaos could spread to Saudi Arabia, where the regime is not on the most stable of ground. If the House of Saud were to fall, all that oil could fall into the hands of Wahabbist extremists, and at that point, chaos would be given a whole new definition. The best-case scenario for an immediate withdrawal has Iraq becoming a Shia fundamentalist state allied with Iran on top of all that oil, a scenario that frightens anyone with a long-term foreign policy and economic outlook.
In addition, Mr. Pitt totally misses my point about the Vietnam antiwar movement. I said: "During the Vietnam War, many in the Antiwar Movement argued against immediate, unconditional US withdrawal for exactly the same reason, that it would create chaos. Cries of ‘Negotiations Now’ competed with the principled ‘Out Now’ stance of committed antiwar activists"
Mr. Pitt responds:
While there are a number of comparable points between this war and that one, I would disagree with the premise that this situation exactly mirrors Vietnam. It doesn’t, for many reasons.
Those who argued that an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam would cause chaos were thinking in a Cold War domino-theory mindset, i.e. Communist forces would roll up South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, etc. This thinking does not apply here, and is in fact reflected in a Bizarro-World kind of way by Bush administration policy: With Vietnam, we were worried about the destabilization of regional governments; With Iraq, the destabilization of regional governments is one of the primary goals.
I was not comparing Vietnam and Iraq, but rather comparing the weak-willed, pre-neocon, antiwar types who insisted that we had to continue dictating to the Vietnamese people (and now the Iraqi people), instead of just leaving them to themselves. In his response, Mr. Pitt reveals that he has quite a bit of dictation for other peoples as well.