Antiwar.com Blog

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.

Remember how everybody just knew that the mother and husband of Chicago judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow had been murdered by white supremacists? If you’ve been following the case in the media over the last week, you likely had no doubt where the guilt lay.

White supremacists are nasty dudes and make great villains. Too bad the actual culprit is just some guy whose malpractice suit was thrown out by the judge. The truth is so boring sometimes.

Not that I’m drawing any parallels to the Hariri assassination or the Yushchenko poisoning, you understand…

I don’t buy the theory that the attack on Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena’s car was an “assassination attempt” by the U.S. for the same reason I don’t buy the Syria-killed-Hariri theories: they make no sense. Killing Hariri would have been a truly suicidal bombing for the Assad regime; assassinating not only a journalist but also a government agent from an allied country would have been a totally unnecessary self-inflicted gash for the Bush administration. What’s truly noteworthy and disturbing about the Sgrena incident is that it wasn’t exceptional. Shooting up civilian vehicles is the status quo in occupied Iraq.

But while we’re talking conspiracy theories, ponder this: what if, God forbid, an anti-Syria journalist in Lebanon dies some time in the near future? What if he or she is killed by some Syrian troops who get a little overzealous about crowd control at a demonstration?

If that happens, you can bet your firstborn child that the belligerati will lay a detailed plot on the desk of Bashar al-Assad. It’s a gimme.

Military news programs secure a public outlet

Pentagon Channel programs cover a wide range of issues, but you’re not likely to see much coverage of controversial military topics such as the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal or the secret military tribunals of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. And that, some media analysts say, could be problematic.

“There’s nothing wrong with the military bringing this onto the base,” said Robert Snyder, director of Rutgers University-Newark’s journalism and media Studies program in New Jersey. “But broadcasting Pentagon programs on a public access cable channel is basically going to be the equivalent of a public relations channel intruding into the public sphere. They shouldn’t be broadcast and published out into the general world as if they were an independent source of journalism.”

One of the most vocal opponents of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, William Rivers Pitt of Truthout, has fallen into the trap set by the War Party.

Pitt declares:

If we haul stakes and leave, we risk having the country collapse permanently into a Balkanized state of civil and religious war that will help to create a terrorist stronghold in the mold of Afghanistan post-1989.

This is the trap the War Party sets every time they invade a country. They create a quagmire, then argue that it will be a disaster if we leave.

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.

But Pitt forgets this important point: the US has no right to control the future of the Iraqi people, at any time. His argument that we can’t let Iraq become a balkanized or unstable government is identical to the neocons’ current argument for staying in Iraq.

Pitt asks to hear feedback from his supporters on what to do to resolve his dilemma:

It truly is a perfect storm Bush and his friends have dropped us into, and there are no easy answers. “Leave now!” is the wrong answer, but so is “Stay!”

Please tell him.

Take Jonathan’s disgusting quiz!