Opponents of setting a deadline for the withdrawal of major United States and Coalition combat forces from Iraq typically use some or all of the following arguments :
- setting a deadline tells our enemies how long they need to hang on for victory - or, as neo-conservative William Kristol declares in an outraged tone every Sunday on ‘Fox News Sunday’ during the panel discussion: America’s “surrender day”;
- we will have handed al-Qaida, who consider Iraq the major front in the war on America, total victory;
- the al-Qaida terrorists will “follow” us home and we’ll be fighting them on our own streets instead of in Baghdad;
- if we think the chaos and slaughter in Iraq is bad now, wait until we withdraw;
- the meltdown in Iraq that’s sure to follow the withdrawal of US forces will engulf the Middle East in regional strife that we will be powerless to contain;
- the US will lose its credibility and the world will no longer believe we have the stomach for war (that’s one of Vice-President Cheney’s favourites – he of the “other priorities” when he had an opportunity to serve during the Vietnam War);
- the sacrifice of the troops who have fought and died or been seriously wounded will have been in vain;
- we have a responsibility as the nation that invaded and occupied Iraq to see the mission through and leave Iraq, if not a shining beacon of democracy in the Mid-East, at least stable and functioning as a state.
To these points in turn I would respond thus:
- setting a deadline above all else tells the world that we have no territorial designs on Iraq or on its resources, that there is a limit to our willingness to have our soldiers fight and die waiting for Iraq’s politicians to make the hard decisions that will make the country governable and able to function as a state, and that only Iraqis can solve their differences and come together as a nation; I would argue also that a phased, unhurried and orderly withdrawal from a country where we do not belong, that we should never have invaded in the first place, and which we have insisted all along we would not occupy indefinitely, is only “surrender” in the minds of ideologically blinded, muddleheaded political flacks such as Bill Kristol – oh, and the president and vice-president;
- our invasion of Muslim Iraq with our largely Christian armed forces has furthered al-Qaida’s aims and objectives in a way that few other actions by the US could have matched – so much so, that Osama bin Laden (OBL) must have thought his birthday had come early; it has bogged down and worn out the ground force component of our armed forces, divided us from traditional allies, inflamed anti-American passions among Muslims throughout the Middle-East and stimulated recruitment for al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups; the last thing al-Qaida wants us to do is leave Iraq, thus they try to goad us into staying by pretending that they will have driven us out – a line that resonates with Bush/Cheney and the GOP base;
- the “follow us home” line which we hear so often from right-wing pundits, Bush, Cheney and even some, like Senator Joe Lieberman who I used to think had a brain, is hardly worthy of response given its absurdity; they never actually explain how that would happen (would they charter a plane or six, maybe? hijack a ship and wade ashore on Myrtle Beach, perhaps? persuade some hapless State Department consular officer somewhere to issue non-immigrant visas to them en masse?) or show any recognition that al-Qaida-in-Iraq is a franchise of the main OBL-led organization, is rooted in Iraq itself and will have its hands full fighting for survival after we leave in a country which is 80% Shiite and Kurdish and where even the Sunni minority doesn’t buy into al-Qaida’s evil brand of extremist, fundamentalist Islamic fascism;
- the violence in Iraq may, indeed, get worse before it gets better once we depart Iraq, but that may happen anyway whether we leave in a year or five years; in any event, I go back to the argument that it must be for Iraqis to decide their future and that the presence of American military occupiers is as much a catalyst for violence as a positive force to quell it;
- as for the possibility that the chaos will engulf the Middle-East, all the more reason for us to plan now for such a scenario by engaging our allies in the region as well as in Europe and reaching out diplomatically to Iran and Syria, neither of whom have any national interest in a regional conflict, to contain and limit the conflagration if it occurs;
- the old canard about the world believing we don’t have the stomach for sustaining a war if we quit Iraq is a figment of Cheney’s fevered imagination; we will be engaged in Afghanistan for many years to come (if the people there don’t rise up against us for killing so many civilians in air strikes or in undisciplined panic attacks by our troops) if anyone wants proof of our staying power; as for our credibility, we will have regained much in the eyes of the world if we withdraw from Iraq since almost nobody thought it made sense to go there in the first place;
- I happen to hold the belief that the sacrifices of the members of our armed forces whenever and wherever it has been made, have never been in vain or wasted when we, as a nation, set them a mission that we thought was in the national interest; sometimes our country has been wrong or misguided, but the faithful and dedicated service of our servicemen and women will never be forgotten and will never have been wasted.
Finally, if we break it, it’ll be ours to fix – to paraphrase then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s pre-invasion warning to Bush. This is by far the most compelling reason to stay in Iraq until some sort of stability and order can be imposed. After all, our actions precipitated the chaos that followed the overthrow of the established order, introduced terrorist groups into the country, the car bombings, the sectarian murder and mayhem. How can we just up and leave? Even I, a certified member of the 30% Club who bitterly opposed the madness of an Iraq invasion from the beginning, have a problem with that one. Isn’t it our responsibility to see this thing through even if it takes five or ten years for the sakes of the people of Iraq?
I can only reiterate my belief that it is in the long term interests of Iraq and its people that we leave as soon as possible. Al-Qaida has stoked the violence in Iraq but once they are deprived of the unifying element of a foreign occupier, I believe the people – Sunnis as well as Shiite and Kurds - will turn on them and destroy them. Only if the Shiite politicians in Baghdad myopically fail to share power and the nation’s oil wealth with the Sunni minority will the latter be tempted into an unholy alliance with al-Qaida.
The US and its coalition of the lukewarm-willing have overthrown a tyrant and afforded the Iraqis an opportunity for a new beginning. Major US ground forces should stay no more than another year. Beyond that, we should leave dedicated anti-terrorist forces, trainers and air/naval assets to assist the Iraqi armed forces and provide whatever other economic, diplomatic and other help we can to a friendly government. It is past time, however, for Iraqis themselves to determine Iraq’s future without the security blanket of the US Army and Marine Corps.
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