Topic: Iraq

But South Korea is.

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Topic: Iraq

So it looks like the withdrawal talk is going mainstream, or at least as mainstream as Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is generally supportive of getting American troops the hell out of Iraq.

Kaplan raises the interesting possibility that Prime Minister al-Jafaari has been thwarting attempts to train an Iraqi security force precisely because the U.S. has said it will stick around until such a force is viable, and he doesn't want us to leave because he fears being toppled by Sunni revanchists. So goes the rumor in Baghdad, anyway, according to Kaplan. In response, he argues, we ought to put the fear into al-Jafaari by giving him a timetable for withdrawal.

Then one of two things will happen. Either the Iraqi security forces will start coming together, in which case we could leave by mid-2007; or else the Iraqi security forces will remain a hopeless disaster, in which case there would be no reason for our troops to stick around because the war would be unwinnable, so we could leave by mid-2007.

I'm amazed by how fast this sort of thinking has been taking hold. Not that it's bad or wrong thinking, but it goes against the platitudes of the 2004 election about staying the course. But I guess everyone wants an exit strategy, and no one wants to prolong this fiasco.

Personally, I think it'd probably be good for us to get the hell out of Iraq. If things go badly enough once we're gone, we can always reinvade and topple the latest government in Baghdad. That's the sort of thing we're good at. In the meantime, the rest of the world, including Iran and North Korea, would have to take note of the fact that we would once again have our whole military available to fling at whoever pisses us off. And while I have no desire to see us at war with either of those countries, it would be good if our enemies at least had to fear that a full-scale invasion as plausible.

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Topic: Iraq

Are we looking to cut and run in Iraq? That's what General George Casey, our commander in Iraq, seems to be saying. I think the administration is floating this as a trial balloon to see how people react. If the response is negative, they can always disown the general's words. If there's not a big blowback, I expect that we'll soon be hearing about plans to ditch the country.

It would fit with our general approach, which has been to pretend everything is going swimmingly and stick to our imaginary timetables as if the prewar fantasies about flowers in the streets had actually come true. We pushed forward with the invasion, the occupation, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the handover of sovereignty, the election. We're pushing hard to get the constitution done on time. Why not declare victory and leave once that's done? Sure, there will still be an insurgency, but "freedom is messy," and it won't be our problem anymore.

The polls show that the majority of Americans are not confident we'll win in Iraq, and a majority now — finally — believe the government intentionally misled the public on Saddam's WMD. There's a certain sentiment that we should see this thing through, but I don't think that feeling is strong enough to create any serious resistance to a pullout, in stages, while the White House keeps saying everything is going according to plan. Democrats will mount half-hearted complaints and scold the president, but they know their constituents never wanted the war in the first place.

And despite the evident awfulness of invading a place, creating total chaos and then leaving it to wallow in miserable violence, I'm not sure our hanging around will do much good either. Stay the course? What course? It's not like we're winning. I worry that what seems like the ethical approach — cleaning up our own mess — may in fact be something like the ethical approach taken by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, where they couldn't see any decent way to ditch the allies to whom we'd promised protection and victory. So we spent an unnecessary six years bombing the hell out of Vietnam and widening the war to Laos and Cambodia and tearing American society apart before finally leaving our allies behind anyway.

So, is it time to cut and run in Iraq? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

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Topic: Iraq

My brother-in-law is a Captain in the Marines, serving in Iraq as a logistics officer. We've been emailing back and forth, and it's been an enlightening experience for me. He's extremely intelligent, forthright and capable. He's also a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and of the Bush administration. I disagree with him, but it's what I think of as the right kind of disagreement: a constructive working through of ideas and principles.

He sent an email complaining of press overreaction to Donald Rumsfeld's comments regarding armor for the troops. I agreed with a lot of what my brother-in-law had to say — he pointed out that it's not a simple on-or-off question, but one that involves tradeoffs: the more armor you add, the slower the vehicles become, and the more fuel, maintenance and spare parts they require, while the money for armor might be better spent on more intelligence or more forward deployment of up-armored combat vehicles ahead of convoys. But he did make one comment that I disagreed with strongly:

But in the end the Secretary is right; we go to war with what we have.

This is my one area of disagreement. You go to war with what you have, because you're a Marine within the chain of command. Donald Rumsfeld, however, is the man in charge of determining what war we go to and what we have when we go. He's second only to the president, and war planning is his responsibility. In the case of this war, we chose the time and we chose the shape of the fight. It's not like troops were massing on our border and he had to go right away, or like we were responding to an attack. We could have invaded a week earlier, a week later, six months later. (This is not to debate whether we made the right political decisions regarding the Security Council, etc., but just a tactical observation: the status quo would almost certainly have held for a few weeks or months). And we could have gone with more troops, or with fewer, or with different configurations of forces. Rumsfeld is largely responsible for how we went, and with what equipment. He's a strong believer in the transformation process, which means smaller, lighter forces — that is, less armor, more mobility. I'm not saying he's wrong to have made that choice — I'm by no means certain that we would have been better off with the kind of giant force we'd built up over the decades to push the Soviets out of Poland — but he was wrong to imply that this was just something that happened, rather than something for which he was responsible.

I do think that Rumsfeld's attachment to the concept of a quick, light, small military blinded him to some very real tactical concerns, particularly the looting that took place just after the invasion (and which was predicted in a detailed State Department report that the Pentagon largely ignored). In that instance, similar to this one, Rumsfeld's response was that it was all up to fate — "Stuff happens" — when in reality, he had a great deal of responsibility for what was happening. Again, I'm not saying that a much larger force would necessarily have been better, but it was possible to plan for the potentiality of widespread looting, and one possible plan would have been to send in a greater number of troops to keep the peace in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. So either Rumsfeld was aware of the possibility of looting but chose not to worry about it — a tactical decision — or he was unaware of the possibility of looting — a failure of military intelligence and planning, for which he is ultimately responsible. Either way, as top man, Rummy should take responsibility: "Yes, that's right, we've decided that there are limits on how much armor we want to use because that keeps our forces faster and lighter, which we think will improve our operational efficiency and win this thing faster, ultimately saving more lives." That would be acceptable to me, although I might then choose to question his decision on tactical grounds. But it's unfair to the troops and the American people for our SecDef to pretend like this war was a big surprise thrust upon him. It wasn't. According to some reports, he was ready to hit Iraq just days after 9/11, and there's no question in my mind that Rumsfeld's Pentagon should have been developing Iraq war plans even before 9/11, simply because there was always the possibility of our needing to fight Saddam's regime. I recognize that back before the war, Rumsfeld couldn't just waltz on over to Congress and demand a whole pile of heavily armored Humvees, but I do think he had greater control over how we went to war than he is letting on.

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