Indeed, even the rationale offered by Democrats as to why there can be no immediate withdrawal is identical to the Bush administration’s. “We’ve got to be prepared to control a civil war if it starts to spill outside the borders of Iraq,” John Edwards remarked at a Democratic candidates debate in Chicago. “And we have to be prepared for the worst possibility that you never hear anyone talking about, which is the possibility that genocide breaks out.”

For his part, Senator Barack Obama has said that it is necessary to “leave a military presence of as-yet unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqis.” Hillary Rodham Clinton has reaffirmed an earlier comment that the U.S. has “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that require a continued presence there, and that it is necessary to ensure Iraq cannot become “a petri dish” for al-Qaeda insurgents.

“Withdrawal,” writes a prescient Tom Engelhardt, “turns out to be a very partial affair that will leave sizeable numbers of American occupying forces in Iraq for a long period. If anything, the latest versions of ‘withdrawal’ have been used as cudgels to beat upon real withdrawal types.”

It is likely that whatever administration is in place in 2009, the U.S. plans, as it did in Vietnam, to figure out ways to draw down troop levels, without actually getting out of Iraq, while it escalates an even more devastating air war. Indeed, AP reporter Charles Hanley reports that the air war is already intensifying:

Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first six months of 2007, a fivefold increase over the 86 used in the first half of 2006, and three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data. In June, bombs dropped at a rate of more than five a day.

Forty-three percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty, according to an Oxfam report, Baghdad residents can expect up to two hours of electricity per day (in blistering summer heat), and only one in three Iraqis have access to clean water. Twenty-eight percent of Iraqis are malnourished (19 percent pre-invasion). There are 4 million internal and exiled refugees, a figure that is only likely to grow as the U.S. intensifies its bombing runs and escalates its surge attacks. And as Ashley Smith’s article in this issue notes, there were 665,000 excess deaths in the first three years of the occupation; that figure has only kept climbing. Billions of dollars have been looted (by Iraqi collaborators as well as U.S. officials and companies) as Iraq’s infrastructure is reaching a state of complete collapse.

None of these tragic disasters—all of them caused by the United States—are the concern of either political party in the United States. Clinton summed up the opinion of most politicians when she commented, “We are not going to babysit a civil war.” Strange thing to describe the destruction of an entire nation as babysitting. The message is that we made the mess, now you clean it up. Lurking behind these complaints about Iraq’s government is the concern by U.S. officials that it hurry up and sign the lucrative oil law that seeks to open up Iraq’s oil wealth to foreign investors.

Leading Democrats, moreover, are every bit as hawkish when it comes to “fighting terrorism,” “defending Israel,” or going after Iran—that is, the rest of the bipartisan agenda to assert American power.

“Allowing Iran,” Obama said in a statement read aloud to reporters, “a radical theocracy that supports terrorism and openly threatens its neighbors, to acquire nuclear weapons is a risk we cannot take. All nations need to understand that, while Iran’s most explicit and intolerable threats are aimed at Israel, its conduct threatens all of us.” Clinton has made almost identical statements. Obama has sponsored the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which authorizes state and local governments to divest assets from companies that invest over $20 million in Iran’s energy sector.

At the Chicago debate, Obama insisted that as president he would “fight on the right battlefield, and “what that means is getting out of Iraq and refocusing our attention on the war that can be won in Afghanistan.”

Faith in the Democrats is eroding—their “confidence” rating is down to 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973. Therefore, we should emphasize a number of things. First of all, as Cliff Floyd, writing in the August 13 CounterPunch, we should warn against false withdrawal plans:

Anyone who advocates leaving even a “residual force” of American troops in Iraq is actually supporting the continuation of the war, on largely the same terms as it is being waged now. There is no “middle way”.… There is only no war, or more war.

This understanding helps to underscore the point that the unpopularity of the war, and its disastrous course, is not a sufficient condition to get the U.S. out of Iraq. U.S. interests in the region—chiefly control of oil resources—are simply too important. U.S. planners are not ready to accept such a crucial strategic defeat in what is perhaps the most important region to their imperialist interests in the world without a great deal more pressure. The resistance in Iraq has helped keep the issue in the forefront; without it, the United States would not be suffering the crisis of foreign policy that it is now enduring.

What is needed is an understanding that the war isn’t going to end soon, and that it’s going to take a commitment to building a far stronger antiwar movement—on the streets, in the schools, in workplaces, and in the military to build the kind of pressure that will compel Washington to quit Iraq and leave that country to its own people. If U.S. officials seem to be eerily playing out an agenda that echoes the Vietnam War era, then perhaps we should take a page from the history of that antiwar movement and commit ourselves to tapping the mass antiwar sentiment and turning it into more action.