Rick Perlstein on leaving
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
This week's Village Voice has a disappointing article by Rick Perlstein titled "Last Copter Out of Baghdad" (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0402/perlstein.php). Rick is the author of the much-acclaimed "Before the Storm" that argues that the Goldwaterite movement of the 1960s was ultimately more important than the radical movement. Rick interviewed both me and Henwood, who was a rightist in his freshman year at Yale. I was in the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, mainly out of a desire to scandalize liberals, a consistent aspect of my political profile.
Rick believes that Bush is ready to wash his hands of the
Iraqi mess out of a desire to secure a second term, in the same fashion that
Nixon decided to pull out of
Secretly, and behind
the back of the South Vietnamese government, Nixon's emissary, Henry Kissinger,
negotiated a face-saving exit with the enemy, one that let the enemy keep
troops in
Because, according to Rick, the war is
going so badly in
Rick cites Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton White House official
who was betrayed by Christopher Hitchens: "It
could be that by setting these artificial deadlines and abdicating a good deal
of responsibility that the Bush administration simply accelerates the
centrifugal forces within
Violent factions
across the country appear to be gearing up for . . . something. After the
capture of Saddam Hussein, a call from clerics to their followers to refrain
from attacking one another held for a few days; then assailants in a passing
car opened fire on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad—drive-by sectarian warfare. Now
Sunnis are arming themselves in militias, a counterbalance, they say, to the
"Mahdi Army" of Shiite cleric and
occupation critic Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr. They promise to turn their new forces, part of a
"Clear Victory Movement," against the Americans unless Sunnis get
sufficient power in the post-war settlement.
Meanwhile, the Bush
administration has bowed to pressure to keep the Kurdish region
semi-autonomous—for fear that any other decision would set off a Kurdish
uprising—and Kurds now talk of annexing oil-rich Kirkuk.
That angers the Turks—raising the possibility of a regional conflict—and sets a
precedent for dividing
These prospects lead him to opine "As in
Ostensibly addressing all of the demons of the left, including Ramsey Clark and the WWP especially, Rick concludes his article with a challenge:
War opponents might be
tempted to take heart: If President Bush wants to end an ugly and wasteful war
in order to get elected, let him.
They might want to
heed the example of Richard Nixon. Little more than one month after he won his
1972 re-election, he initiated the most savage bombing campaign in the history
of the war—in the history of warfare. It was a little shock and awe at
Christmastime. He was still convinced
Well, the antiwar movement, authority-questioning GI's and
the Vietnamese resistance were powerful enough to
persuade Nixon to remove ground troops, but it was not powerful enough to stop
the bombing. So would Rick have argued for a continuing
ground troop occupation of