January 5, 2009
Foreign Policy In Focus, Alternet, Common Dreams
Demonstrators make their voices heard during a rally at Firdos square in Baghdad November 21, 2008. (REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz)
In discussing his plans for the Iraq War during the presidential campaign, one group that Barack Obama seldom, if ever, mentioned as supporting his proposed policy was the Iraqi people.
Obama’s campaign website, which differs only slightly from his transition website, lays out very clearly what he sees as problematic with the Iraq War. It highlights U.S. casualties — without mentioning the hundreds of thousands (some studies estimate over one million) of Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of the invasion and occupation — and the exorbitant financial cost of the war, while arguing from a strategic perspective that the diversion of troops and resources to Iraq “continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan.”
Not only is Iraqi opinion completely ignored, but Obama’s website actually blames the victim — a popular line with both Democrats and Republicans — by stating that “the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people.” How Iraqis are supposed to take control of their destiny with 146,000 U.S. troops — and an even larger number of U.S. contractors — in their country is apparently not a relevant question.
Failure to mention Iraqi opinion during the campaign, however, wasn’t due to a lack of knowledge about what they think. In fact, since the war began, the Iraqis have been extensively polled and the results are telling. Below is a sampling of these poll results, each compared with the president-elect’s proposed policy for the Iraq War.
1) A March 2008 poll by Opinion Business Research found that 70% of Iraqis wanted foreign troops to leave. Of that group, 65% said they wanted the troops to leave “immediately or as soon as possible,” and another 13% responded “within six months.” Such sentiment has remained fairly consistent since shortly after the U.S. invasion. In April 2004, for example, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that 57% of Iraqis wanted the U.S. and British forces to “leave immediately.”
Obama has repeatedly pledged to “responsibly end the war in Iraq,” convincing many of his supporters who didn’t dig beneath the campaign rhetoric that he was the “peace candidate.” Obama’s plan from the beginning, however, has consisted of withdrawing only the “combat brigades” over a 16-month period and leaving behind a “residual force in Iraq [that] would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces.”
Those skeptical of voting – at least for either major party – are invariably confronted with some version of the “lesser of two evils” argument. It’s usually the last line of defense for Democrats, after they concede that their party has a long way to go on many of the issues that matter most to Americans. Indeed, whether it’s the economy, health care or the war, polls show that the policies of both parties are considerably to the right of public opinion, and have been so for a long time. This disconnect between the will of the people and their so-called representatives is evidence of a failing democracy.
“If you don’t vote, then you can’t complain.” So goes a refrain that is reflexively regurgitated to anyone who questions the efficacy of voting. Generally it’s accompanied by a smug look, indicating that in their eyes you’re hopelessly out of touch with reality. But after cutting through the hype, are elections really worth the enormous amount of attention, energy and money they consume?
In October, Erik Prince, the 39-year-old CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, a leading private security company operating in Iraq, went into damage-control mode. Blackwater employees in Baghdad’s Nisour Square had killed 17 Iraqi civilians the previous month, causing an uproar and the suspension of official diplomatic convoys throughout the country for four days. Making the rounds with the media and testifying before Congress, Prince repeatedly said that his employees are not mercenaries, as critics contend. Citing the definition of a mercenary as “a professional soldier working for a foreign government,” Prince told the House Oversight Committee that in contrast, Blackwater’s employees are “Americans working for America, protecting Americans.”
Manhattan’s cosmopolitan atmosphere has a way of making people forget what life is like for the rest of America. Coffee shops, book stores and night life are all tailored to meet the needs of even the most niche-oriented individual. But back on the mainland, a different, more monolithic — and at times scary — culture seems to prevail, as we discovered on a recent get-away to the Jersey Shore.
