Troops Out Now

Frank Mendez is an Army reservist from New Jersey. After being stationed in Iraq for months, he returned home for a 13-day leave at the beginning of October. He spent his 23rd birthday with friends and family, protesting the occupation of Iraq outside his state senators' offices. Mendez and his friends carried a banner that read "God Bless America--Bring the Troops Home Now."

Mohammed--as he called himself in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle--is not much older than Frank Mendez. He was a construction worker before the war, but like most Iraqis, he is now unemployed. After United States troops fired on demonstrators in the Iraqi city of Fallujah last April, Mohammed and several of his friends formed a loose guerrilla group and began attacking American convoys that passed by their village outside Ramadi.

When Frank Mendez returns to Iraq, one of these men may kill the other--which is crazy, since they agree on something very fundamental: U.S. troops should leave Iraq. Yet while two men on the front lines of Bush's war can agree on this point, most pundits, presidential candidates, and even many antiwar activists hesitate to raise the slogan "Troops out now!"

The most common argument against an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq is that there would be "chaos" if the U.S. military left. But there is chaos in Iraq now and the U.S. is responsible. What else can one call the shooting of families at checkpoints, or the "friendly fire" incident in which U.S. troops killed eight Iraqi policemen in September? If it is rebuilding the Iraqis need, it is not the privatized, crony-capitalist kind the U.S. has to offer, with bloated contracts going to a few U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, while construction workers like Mohammed remain unemployed.

The basis of the "chaos" argument--although few will admit it--is the idea that the Iraqi people are not capable of governing themselves. Their brains have been so addled by dictatorship, the argument goes, that they cannot be trusted to understand such a radical concept as democracy. Funny--the East German government during the Cold War was certainly as repressive and dictatorial a police state as Saddam Hussein's. But no one argued that the East Germans needed 130,000 US troops to patiently guide them to a new world of privately-owned newspapers and hanging chads.

Anyone who thinks that an invading army can bring democracy should check their notes from high school civics class. The only people who have a right to decide Iraq's fate are the Iraqis. And the vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out. U.S. officials have made up all kinds of stories to explain the continued attacks on our soldiers: the attackers are "Ba'ath party remnants," "foreign fighters," or Al Qaeda. Their latest catchphrase is "the Sunni triangle"--Sunni Muslims are responsible for the resistance, because they don't want to lose the privileged position they had under Saddam. But 15 to 20 attacks per day on U.S. forces are not the work of "remnants." And this hypothesis does little to explain the actions of the 10,000 Shia Muslims who protested the U.S. in Baghdad last week, after U.S. troops shot two Iraqis outside a prayer center.

It is the conduct of the U.S. occupying forces, not loyalty to a dictator, that is fueling the resistance in Iraq. "First we were so happy because we thought [the Americans] would get rid of Saddam and leave immediately," Mohammed, the Iraqi guerrilla fighter, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Then they showed their real face. They started killing our relatives and friends and our brothers, and of course we had to start to give it back."

Already, the brutal pattern of escalation is visible in news reports. Last week, U.S. soldiers uprooted groves of date palm, lemon, and orange trees in what The Independent (U.K.) describes as "a new policy of collective punishment" against farmers who failed to provide information about anti-American guerillas in the area.

Echoes of Vietnam abound. The U.S. could not win a war in a country where everyone saw American troops as occupiers. In Vietnam--a country of far less material and strategic importance to America than Iraq--the U.S. government was willing to sacrifice 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian lives before it admitted defeat. If the U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam earlier, many lives could have been spared. The fundamental principle of the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles of the 1960s--the right of nations to self-determination--needs to be reaffirmed today. On Oct. 25, antiwar protesters will travel to Washington to send a clear message: the U.S. must get out of Iraq now.