The significance of what Iraqi President Talabani has said — that British troops could leave Iraq by the end of 2006 — is that he has set a target date which nobody else has done. Neither Britain nor the United States, who have the largest number of forces in Iraq, have ever stated clearly when a troop pullout would begin. Instead, they have consistently pointed out that setting a specific date for a troop withdrawal would be a huge tip-off to the insurgents. They have consistently maintained that they would stay in Iraq for only as long as the Iraqi government wanted them and that they would not leave until the job was finished. That task could, of course, take years which is why Talabani’s words, which introduce a date and one which is fairly soon, are so important.
Up until September, Blair stated that no arbitrary date had been set for a pullout and up until last month British Army chief of staff, Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, Britain’s top soldier, called it foolhardy to set a date for UK troops to pull out. Now Jackson says Talabani’s timetable is well within the realm of possibility.
Jackson’s about-face comes with a report in The Observer that suggests detailed plans pertaining to troop withdrawal are being drawn up by UK, US and Iraqi officials and will be presented to the Iraqi Parliament next month. It quotes military sources as saying the document would lay out a detailed exit “road map” by multinational forces. British Defense Secretary John Reid has denied there was any such plan but the newspaper has stuck to its story, suggesting that Britain had already “privately” informed Japan of its plans to begin withdrawing from southern Iraq as early as next May.
In the United States, it is almost certain that Bush would jump at the first opportunity to get out of Iraq, so damaging has the war been to his presidency. The news from Iraq is largely bad. Fifty-seven percent of the US public say Bush “deliberately misled” the nation about the reasons for war in Iraq. The prewar intelligence fiascoes, coupled with the mounting death toll, makes Bush’s almost daily attempts to persuade Americans that the war is still worth fighting are becoming increasingly difficult.
Bush never anticipated the depth or the difficulty of the challenge the United States and its allies would face in postwar Iraq. It is therefore with certainty that Bush seeks a way out, and a speedy one. Talabani’s warning, though, comes to mind — that an immediate withdrawal of US-led forces would be a catastrophe for Iraq and would lead to civil war with dangerous consequences for the entire Middle East. It is to be wondered whether the present conditions in Iraq in which thousands of Iraqis have been killed by insurgents should not be labeled a civil war and a catastrophe.
Can conditions in Iraq in fact get any worse if the coalition withdraws? As suicide bombs going off night and day across the country despite the presence of US and British troops, the answer is that with every massacre, sometimes it appears the situation can only improve.
