Cut and Run? You Bet.
By Lt. Gen. William E. Odom

Why America must get out of Iraq now.

Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? That is the key question about the war in Iraq today. American public opinion is now decidedly against the war. From liberal New England, where citizens pass town-hall resolutions calling for withdrawal, to the conservative South and West, where more than half of “red state” citizens oppose the war, Americans want out. That sentiment is understandable.

The prewar dream of a liberal Iraqi democracy friendly to the United States is no longer credible. No Iraqi leader with enough power and legitimacy to control the country will be pro-American. Still, U.S. President George W. Bush says the United States must stay the course. Why? Let’s consider his administration’s most popular arguments for not leaving Iraq.

If we leave, there will be a civil war.
In reality, a civil war in Iraq began just weeks after U.S. forces toppled Saddam. Any close observer could see that then; today, only the blind deny it. Even President Bush, who is normally impervious to uncomfortable facts, recently admitted that Iraq has peered into the abyss of civil war. He ought to look a little closer. Iraqis are fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That’s civil war.

Withdrawal will encourage the terrorists.
True, but that is the price we are doomed to pay. Our continued occupation of Iraq also encourages the killers—precisely because our invasion made Iraq safe for them. Our occupation also left the surviving Baathists with one choice: Surrender, or ally with al Qaeda. They chose the latter. Staying the course will not change this fact. Pulling out will most likely result in Sunni groups’ turning against al Qaeda and its sympathizers, driving them out of Iraq entirely.

Before U.S. forces stand down, Iraqi security forces must stand up.
The problem in Iraq is not military competency; it is political consolidation. Iraq has a large officer corps with plenty of combat experience from the Iran-Iraq war. Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia fights well today without U.S. advisors, as do Kurdish pesh merga units. The problem is loyalty. To whom can officers and troops afford to give their loyalty? The political camps in Iraq are still shifting. So every Iraqi soldier and officer today risks choosing the wrong side. As a result, most choose to retain as much latitude as possible to switch allegiances. All the U.S. military trainers in the world cannot remove that reality. But political consolidation will. It should by now be clear that political power can only be established via Iraqi guns and civil war, not through elections or U.S. colonialism by ventriloquism.

Setting a withdrawal deadline will damage the morale of U.S. troops.
Hiding behind the argument of troop morale shows no willingness to accept the responsibilities of command. The truth is, most wars would stop early if soldiers had the choice of whether or not to continue. This is certainly true in Iraq, where a withdrawal is likely to raise morale among U.S. forces. A recent Zogby poll suggests that most U.S. troops would welcome an early withdrawal deadline. But the strategic question of how to extract the United States from the Iraq disaster is not a matter to be decided by soldiers. Carl von Clausewitz spoke of two kinds of courage: first, bravery in the face of mortal danger; second, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for command decisions. The former is expected of the troops. The latter must be demanded of high-level commanders, including the president.

Withdrawal would undermine U.S. credibility in the world.
Were the United States a middling power, this case might hold some water. But for the world’s only superpower, it’s patently phony. A rapid reversal of our present course in Iraq would improve U.S. credibility around the world. The same argument was made against withdrawal from Vietnam. It was proved wrong then and it would be proved wrong today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world’s opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop in American history. The United States now garners as much international esteem as Russia. Withdrawing and admitting our mistake would reverse this trend. Very few countries have that kind of corrective capacity. I served as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during Richard Nixon’s Watergate crisis. When Nixon resigned, several Soviet officials who had previously expressed disdain for the United States told me they were astonished. One diplomat said, “Only your country is powerful enough to do this. It would destroy my country.”

Two facts, however painful, must be recognized, or we will remain perilously confused in Iraq. First, invading Iraq was not in the interests of the United States. It was in the interests of Iran and al Qaeda. For Iran, it avenged a grudge against Saddam for his invasion of the country in 1980. For al Qaeda, it made it easier to kill Americans. Second, the war has paralyzed the United States in the world diplomatically and strategically. Although relations with Europe show signs of marginal improvement, the trans-Atlantic alliance still may not survive the war. Only with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against terror. Getting out of Iraq is the precondition for any improvement.

In fact, getting out now may be our only chance to set things right in Iraq. For starters, if we withdraw, European politicians would be more likely to cooperate with us in a strategy for stabilizing the greater Middle East. Following a withdrawal, all the countries bordering Iraq would likely respond favorably to an offer to help stabilize the situation. The most important of these would be Iran. It dislikes al Qaeda as much as we do. It wants regional stability as much as we do. It wants to produce more oil and gas and sell it. If its leaders really want nuclear weapons, we cannot stop them. But we can engage them.

None of these prospects is possible unless we stop moving deeper into the “big sandy” of Iraq. America must withdraw now.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. ... ry_id=3430

I find this article to be well-reasoned, and I find myself agreeing completely. It's also interesting to note that the author was the head of the NSA under Reagan and is a Senior Fellow at conservative think tank Hudson Institute.

If America and the UK cut and run now, Iraq is even more eternally fucked than it already it is. You think there's a civil war in Iraq now? You're right, there is. But you ain't seen nothing yet.

What's the difference between eternally fucked and more eternally fucked?

And thanks for shitting all over my thread, guys.

Figure of speech. I mean that there is still a sliver of hope that Iraq can come good. We're not at the stage where we can conclusively say that Iraq is actually eternally fucked. But if America and the UK cut and run right now, we can virtually guarantee the death toll in Iraq doubling in the matter of months. If the Shias seize complete control, a Sunni or Kurd genocide is not implausible, and that's blood on our hands.

It's only blood on the hands of those who commit the crime.

The Iraqis have proven themselves incapable of democracy, their religion and racism will prevent near-term peace. There is no reason we should stay there if they don't want us there and it's futile anyway. Our army should pull back to the Kurdish north (where the sane people are), let the Religion of Peaceâ„¢ sort it out in the southern areas. We can then do some peacekeeping when it's all done and over with. That approach is what the UN is using in Sudan, why not Iraq too?

I can't honestly say I know for sure what's going on in Iraq right now, one side will tell you about all the great progress that’s being made, and "I'll say well that's good to hear", then the other side says it's a civil war, and I say "well that sucks" So I’m mostly confused, but I think the truth of the situation is some where in the middle.
One thing I do believe, is right now, Iraq is crap shoot; it could go either way, a stable peaceful something, or bloody civil war. But one thing that worries me is that no matter how good things are on the ground Iraq could still blow up when we leave. We could stay there a few more years everything will seem peaceful and stable then after we're gone it could still devolve into civil war. I just look to recent history. Look what happened in Yugoslavia, as soon as the communist government fell, people that had been living next to each other peacefully started killing each other pretty quickly.
As I understand the situation in Iraq now it's pretty stable in the Shi’a South and Kurdish North, most of the violence is happening in the Sunni areas. Now I don't think the Kurds and Shi’as are playing nice for purely enlighten reasons, I think they’re probably just biding they’re time 'till we leave. Take the Kurds, they haven't given up on the idea of Kurdish state, a real country, they have just put that on hold for now. Then the Shi’as a few them clerics would love an Iranian style Islamic Republic. Then there is one thing both groups have in common, the Sunnis, both groups would probably like to take their pound of flesh out of the Sunnis for what they had to put up with under Saddam. I think the revenge factor is what the Sunnis are afraid of, and a big part of what fuels the insurgency. Terrorist groups like al Qaeda thrive on chaos, and they pry on the fears of people to get recruits and maintain that chaos. Now they will use the US being there as their main justification for what they're doing, but if they really want us to leave then alls they would need to do is sit down and play nice for a while and we would leave. When the U.S. leaves that justification would be gone, but the fear would still be there, the fear of retribution, an Islamic state Shi’ite style, Kurdish independence, if the Kurds left that would give the Shi’as an even bigger majority. (Also a Kurdish state wouldn’t go over well in the region because Turkey, Iran and Syria would be afraid their Kurds would get ideas.) All of these things give Iraq a pretty grim out look, but like I said in the beginning, I really don’t know what’s going on there and it could end either way.
As to the article above, I think it’s pretty well thought out and reasonable, but I think he tends to have a pie in the sky view of a few things particularly towards the end. While I think having Iraq’s neighbors take a role in stabilizing the country sounds good, whose to say they won’t try to remake Iraq in their image, pretty much like we are trying to do. One thing I do agree with, is no matter what happens the U.S. will survive and pretty strongly and this more than anything could show people why Democracy is a good idea, we can fuck up pretty bad, take some pretty hard hits but we still remain a strong nation.

Of course they're incapable of democracy, they've done nothing to earn it. Even a 20 year old shades-go-down had that worked out. Should have thought of that before ya'll decided to "spread freedom". Now live with it.

And I must disagree that it is blood only on the hands of the perpetrators. None of this would have been an issue if Iraq hadn't been invaded in the first place. There's a very obvious link the chain of causation here. If it were to happen 10 years after the pullout, I'd agree with you, but in the immediate aftermath of a pullout, there's little doubt in my mind that we are responsible.

That the perpetrators are responsible for their own bloodshed goes without saying.

I think that part of the point of the article was that this is an inevitability, ultimately the only way that Iraq is going to reach any sort of stability (regardless of who ends up on top), and that it would be better if we not be in the middle of it when the figurative bomb goes off.

I'm a little interested in who published this. Could I get a link? I wanna know what rag gave this guy the time of day.

Now you guys are just about as anti-war and anti-Iraq as anyone I know. Do any of you honestly believe this? Do any of you agree with the majority of his points?

Gosh, I sure don't and I don't think most American's do. This is painting with a wide paintbrush in this piece.

Don't have a cite for the publisher, but Lt. General William E. Odom, former head of teh NSA under Reagan, would seem to carry some credibility, at least more than a 20-something Marine reservist and his band of "most American's".

You think we should cut and run? You don't see through a lot of this like you see through a lot of what Bush says?

I didn't say I agreed with all of it, but you acted like this was written by Cindy Sheehan. I pointed out that it deserves more consideration than that.

I'm also not convinced that you read it, just to voice my completely uneducated guess.

I didn't say I disagreed with all of it either. However, there are some things in it that are so far from true. Like southern states and conservatives being against the war. We're not. We're against the way the war is being fought.

Why on earth is the prewar dream of democracy no longer credible? Because we have no patience?

Withdrawal WILL indeed encourage terrorists. Somalia. Moqadishu.

Setting an all out withdrawal deadline WOULD damage the morale of the troops. Furthermore, an all out pullout would send Iraq into total chaos. And if that happens, you'll further the downward decline within our troops. All those lives lost, all that work, all that money down the fucking drain.

His comparisons to Vietnam are completely of the mark as well. Nor should it be a reason to withdraw. The reason it was "illegal" and why people don't like us in the first place is due to a number of nations on the security counsel that were in bed with Saddam. It's apples and oranges, and we shouldn't let popular opinion drive the direction of what we're doing over there. When it comes to this, I say fuck Europe.



Let's say this is true. If that is the case, then fuck Europe. Fuck them for sitting idly by, just because American's are in Iraq. That is sick. That quote is an indictment against Europe. Not us.

Don't you mean the, several months into the war after the first reason for going no longer held water, dream for democracy?

I read this as: "Europeans will only deal with us when they can revel in our failure." Not exactly a very enticing reason to try to act more cooperatively, no? I understand what he's saying here, but it would seem that humility and taking responsibility for missteps would be beneficial. I don't think we should throw up our hands and give up because we think we should fail in order to regain something or other.

There's one thing the cut and run crowd isn't seeing. Right now, our presence is pretty much keeping the status quo. We don't have the ability to do what is needed to achieve peace, but we have enough presence to keep things from deteriorating further from a couple attacks a day. The important thing to remember, is that right now, most of the attacks are cowardly IED's, ambushes, and suicide bombers. The dispersion is 50/50 in targeting civilians, or armed personel whether they be Iraqi or US.

The second we leave, they no longer need to use these tactics. Hit and miss IED's will be gone in exchange for real, totally indiscriminate warfare. The AK's will come out of the closet, they will start mortaring indescriminately, attacking infrastructure...

Man, it'll take on a whole new shade of darkness in Iraq if we leave.

That would suck.

Jim Beam on the rocks, barkeep.

The link is in my original post at the bottom. The magazine is called Foreign Policy.

And I do agree with the majority of his points. The paintbrush is not nearly as wide as you make it out to be.

Some of General Odom's credentials.

I see the link. Interesting site.

I laid out and better explained a few of the issues I have with it. Perhaps you could defend the article and the criticism I've drawn.

I believe LW just got royally owned.

It's funny isn't it... you see an article that goes against your beliefs and your first reaction is to see if there's room for an ad hominem attack.

Why anyone even takes you seriously on this forum just astounds me sometimes. This has nothing to do with conservative or liberal points of view. Just loony and not loony.

And on this specific point about troop withdrawal, I happen to hold the same position as you. Doesn't mean I agree though.