How Will We Know When It’s Time to Leave Iraq?
Sometime before Camp Victory is besieged, not by militias and terror squads, but by t-shirt shops and juicy bars:
Inside the club Thursday night, U.S. soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division ogled young Iraqi women who appeared to be prostitutes gyrating to Arabic pop music. A singer crooned soulfully through scratchy speakers to the raucous, pulsating beat — an action that Islamic extremists have deemed punishable by beheading.
Twenty minutes later, several drunk men coaxed an American soldier to dance. He awkwardly shuffled his feet, wearing night-vision equipment and a radio, joining the women and boisterous young men in an Arabic chain dance around tables covered with empty beer bottles. [Washington Post]
If you think scenes like this are bad for our image in Korea, just imagine how it will go over in Iraq … true or not. Not that I suspect the command is tolerating this — these soldiers’ actions violate about a thousand general orders and will probably cost them stripes — but this kind of scene has real potential to provoke a backlash, just as al Qaeda terrorists’ pre-afterlife indulgences hurt them. Iraq’s society will liberalize much faster without G.I.’s introducing nationalism and religion into the question.
Yet with violence in Iraq now at just a fraction of 2006 levels, an 18-month withdrawal that leaves behind a robust residual force seems plausible today, with the obvious caveat for adjusting to local conditions. It would have been madness when Barack Obama first began calling for it, but that was then, and conditions have transformed dramatically since then. Now it’s doubtful that the Obama timetable, once fully adjusted to the realities on the ground, will differ much in practice from a hypothetical McCain timetable. Similarly, Obama’s residual force seems about as likely to stay in Iraq for 100 years as McCain’s. The withdrawals won’t really pick up until after this fall’s elections, which means that our forces will leave behind a government with strong popular backing and an increasingly self-reliant army, which we will continue to arm and train. Rising oil production and a recovering economy mean that Iraq will cease to depend on America, and within a few years, its poorly equipped but battle hardened troops will be more than capable of deterring any conventional attack from the neighbors.
“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. — T.E. Lawrence
Then there is the historical precedent that local government forces tend to do surprisingly after the departure of foreign forces, at least until they’re invaded by a stronger outside force (South Vietnam) or lose their main source of funding (South Vietnam and post-Soviet Afghanistan). Why? In part, because the departure of foreign forces does have the positive effect of removing the nationalist causus belli, and in part because the armies that are left behind know that they are all that stands in the way of the enemy. We may well be approaching the point where the benefits of staying will be outweighed by the benefits of going.
The rest will be up to the Iraqis, and must be. But if they continue their path toward an open society and economy, the next ten years could be a time of unprecedented economic and cultural bloom that could make Iraq the heart and hub of the entire region. Our society has judged it worth the cost of so many more lives to transform Japan and South Korea into what they have become. If we have helped catalyze Iraq’s evolution toward something like the UAE on a much larger scale, shouldn’t we judge it worth the terrible cost to have transformed such a wretched and genocidal place into a prosperous and benign one?
Sounds like you’re warming up to the prospect of a withdrawal in the near future.
“We may well be approaching the point where the benefits of staying will be outweighed by the benefits of going.”
We actually agree on something regarding the US military occupation of Iraq. Hell hath frozen over.
Well, my opposition to our long-term presence in South Korea should have been a hint, but yes, I think a withdrawal within 18 months is now looking plausible, in part because of the “non-combat” residual force, consisting of non-combat advisors and non-combat Special Forces, who will conduct non-combat special ops against terrorists. Let’s watch how things go after the Iraqi election. There’s reason to be optimistic, primarily because Iraqis looked into the abyss and have rejected the extremists’ visions.
So if in five years, Iraq is prosperous, reasonably free, at peace with its neighbors, and no longer requires a major U.S. military commitment to either occupy or contain it, would you agree that the war advanced the interests of America, Iraq, and the world?
Oh, definitely. And if Iraq is economically and politically unstable with continued sectarian violence, or worse, ruled by an Islamic regime, would you judge the invasion or the withdrawal a mistake? Your position is really a win-win situation. If Iraq succeeds, you can shout out, “I was right!” but if Iraq founders, you can blame it on the pullout.
I wonder if “just cause” for war/military intervention abroad are not over-stated. Ultimately, the “just effect” of the intervention/occupation matters more. The Vietnam War still casts a long shadow less because of the lack of rationale for intervention (dominoes, Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” and American misperception of some Communist monolith bent of world domination) and more because the US lost. The public turned against the war in the wake of the mounting casualties and the realization that the war was “unwinnable.” The fall of Saigon in 1975 and the US “betrayal” of South Vietnamese matter less in the American consciousness than the belief that the war was a “waste” of precious blood and resources.
The US intervention in Korea in 1950 was packaged as “just” with great care by the Truman administration, that nascent, still-paper-organization called the UN and anti-Communism as its banner. That may have been helpful in winning public support at first–a fortuitous development that would not happened if not for the Soviet boycott–but the US would have gone in alone with or without the UN or some earlier form of the coalition of the willing. That “unwinnable” war turned public opinion in the US against Truman and the Democrats, with Eisenhower being elected in late-1952.
At the time, especially toward the latter phase of the war, the US intervention was largely see as a “wast.” By the spring of 1953, 70% of Americans supported an armistice with the present division of Korea, whereas only 30% supported such an ambiguous end in June 1951 (and 54% in June 1952). Korea is seen today as a success mostly because of the success of the South Korea as a modern nation state and far less because of the circumstances under which the US took military action in a largely unknown land–a land in which it had professed repeatedly that it had no strategic interest.
“So if in five years, Iraq is prosperous, reasonably free, at peace with its neighbors, and no longer requires a major U.S. military commitment to either occupy or contain it, would you agree that the war advanced the interests of America, Iraq, and the world? “
I would like to qualify my response. I would judge the invasion to have advanced the interests of the US after weighing our costs versus benefits. I am not in a position to do this for Iraq. Only the Iraqis can weigh their costs versus benefits and determine whether they are better off.