A Sane Exit
McDermott travels to the Middle East looking for a way to get the U.S. out of Iraq

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

“You’re listening to the wrong people.”

It doesn’t sound like much. But it’s a message U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott heard over and over in Amman, Jordan, and plans to repeat to his fellow representatives as they struggle in the coming months with what to do in Iraq.

Betting that the Democrats would take the House in November and be in dire need of real information on the war, McDermott says he got on a plane Nov. 8 and went to Amman for four days of discussions with moderate Iraqi, Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian leaders called together on his behalf.

With a videographer in tow, McDermott recorded the many dialogs, which he excerpted last weekend for an audience at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. He said it the first run of a talk he will give to as many members of Congress — and the public — as will listen in order to help U.S. leaders understand how to get out of Iraq.

Like most Americans, he said, members of Congress get their news from daily papers that depict the Iraq conflict as a sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. But of much the fighting, he said, is about getting both the U.S. and the Iranians out of Iraq.

When provisional government chief Paul Bremer first took over in Iraq, one of the first things he did, McDermott said, was disband the Baathist government and army — a disaster that created 500,000 displaced soldiers. With no way to feed their families, many ended up forming or joining militias that are now funded, in part, by Iran.

Whether by design or not, “We essentially gave the Shiite Iranians control of the country,” McDermott said.

Before the Americans go, they must clear the house of the Iranians, the chief of chief of the Dulaym Tribe said in one videotaped except.

That may not be possible, but, in the short term, the leaders told McDermott, the U.S. needs to pull its soldiers out of Baghdad and use them to close Iraq’s border with Iran, which would stop the flow of Iranian infiltrators and arms.

Leaving the borders open was one of many mistakes made by Bremer that the Iraqis with whom McDermott met, including former ambassadors, government officials, and business people, want reversed. He said they advocate reconstituting Saddam Hussein’s army and restoring the lower-level bureaucracies that took care of schools, roads, and sewage plants under his regime.

That may sound dangerous, but the lower-level teachers and sewage workers of Saddam’s regime weren’t bad people — they had to join the Baath Party to get a job, McDermott said, and are the people the U.S. should have relied on in the first place to keep the government running, as the Allies did with the Nazis after World War II.

The neocon idea was to “destroy everything and they’ll start over somehow and get exactly what they want,” McDermott said.

Instead of sending more troops – a surge he called a “Vietnam escalation” – he said President Bush should be talking to the Iranians and Syrians and calling for a ceasefire.

“This is so much like Vietnam, sometimes it makes my head swim,” McDermott said.