The Washington Post finally broaches a subject that’s been a worry of mine for some time now (I raised it at the start of this year). Once we finally decide, as is inevitable, that it’s time to leave Iraq, our problem becomes: how, exactly?
Amid political arguments in Washington over troop departures, U.S. military commanders on the ground stress the importance of developing a careful and thorough withdrawal plan. Whatever the politicians decide, “it needs to be well-thought-out and it cannot be a strategy that is based on ‘Well, we need to leave,’ ” Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, a top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday from his base near Tikrit.
The Post story reminds us that “history is replete with bad withdrawal outcomes.” “Withdrawal” is a mealy-mouthed synonym for a much less palatable word: retreat. Retreat is the most difficult maneuver for an army to manage. Retreats — even by troops with good morale and superior arms — have a way of turning into routs. We’ve got 150,000 troops and a huge amount of equipment in Iraq. It took ages to deploy them there and they’re not going to be able to leave all at once even if our leaders wanted them to.
Once it’s understood that an army is moving out, all sorts of new risks arise. The smartest military organizations do everything they can to foresee those risks and plan around them.
When I bring up these concerns, I sometimes get an “Are you crazy?” look. What can happen? We’re the United States! The sole hyperpower! Which is of course the logic that mired us in Iraq in the first place.
“We’ve got to be very modest about our predictive capabilities,” a “senior Administration official” tells the Post. Such modesty would have paid infinitely greater dividends before the invasion.
The Post article suggests that the U.S. is spending lots of time wargaming what happens in Iraq after we’re gone. Maybe the Pentagon is also preparing a variety of operational options for getting American forces safely out of Iraq. Let’s cross our fingers. The Bush administration has an almost perfect record of failing to plan for the worst cases.
I’m sure the geniuses in Dick Cheney’s office are thinking, “We’d better not make detailed plans for speedy withdrawal — the worse the plans are, the less chance anyone will use them.” Then, in the awful event that we do face a messy, bloody retreat, you know exactly what the administration line will be, echoing down seven years’ worth of responsibility-shirking: the cry of “no one expected it.”
To me this is an argument not to remain in denial for so long that we literally have no choice but to get out quickly. We still have time to manage a phased withdrawal which is integrated with a political plan. Not clear whether that will be the case in a year when we will no longer be able to sustain our current deployment.
[tags]iraq withdrawal, military planning, iraq war[/tags]
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