On the other side, Obama’s campaign pledge to have combat troops out in sixteen months has become an article of faith that can be converted into a stick. “We have no reason to think Obama’s backed off his campaign promises on a timeline to end the war,” Eli Pariser of Moveon.org told the Times soon after the inauguration. Medea Benjamin, of Code Pink, wrote in USA Today, “The American people want our troops out. The best reflection of this is that they elected Barack Obama to lead us out of Iraq….The presence of U.S. troops ensures ongoing violence by attracting armed opposition and postpones the day of reckoning among Iraqi factions.”
Two things should be clear by now. The first is that American troops, while never popular among Iraqis, have lately been the only force that could reduce violence enough to give Iraqi factions a chance to meet their day of political reckoning. The winter provincial elections, which took place almost without violence, were the first in which Iraqis were able to vote for normal things—services, security, clean government—instead of for identity-group power in a zero-sum death struggle. The second is that no one can be sure whether or not Iraq will plunge back into apocalyptic levels of violence, and that, after so many years of killing in Iraq and foolishness in Washington, nothing that can be called victory is possible. To speak of winning is obscene—which is perhaps one reason why General David Petraeus and most other rational officers refuse to use the word. The views of ideologues on both sides have never had anything to do with the realities in Iraq. There’s no reason why that should change under a new administration, as America finally begins to withdraw.
Most Americans have no political stake in Iraq’s success or failure. They are simply tired of the war. To hear about American soldiers and Marines still dying in Iraq is almost an embarrassment to fellow citizens back home, who have long since stopped thinking about it. A Marine Corps major recently sent me eight long letters that he had written home from Ramadi, where he was stationed in 2005. “I thought that you might find them interesting if only as primary source testimonial from a bleary part of the front,” he wrote. “Enjoy if that is possible and thank you for paying attention. Very few have.” Of course, this is the fate of soldiers who come home from every war, even ones that are short and end in a clear victory: no one at home really wants to hear about it. After finishing his First World War novel Three Soldiers, a couple of years after the armistice, John Dos Passos learned that publishers were already wary of war fiction, and he had a very hard time finding one who would publish his. Public indifference, tinged with shame, is much greater in the case of a long, ambiguous, unnecessary war like Iraq. Are we still over there? Why can’t we just leave and let them sort it out? After six years of war, this is the overwhelming and entirely understandable feeling among Americans.
We will leave, one way or another. Barack Obama has made this clear: he wants to turn the country’s attention and effort away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan. And the government of Iraq has also expressed its view—in the form of a status of forces agreement that was painfully negotiated in the last days of the Bush administration and will be put to Iraq’s voters in a referendum later this year—that it wants American troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011. It’s possible that, when the time comes, another Iraqi government will want to renegotiate the agreement and keep some residual American force around longer. If Obama sticks to his campaign promise, and combat and support units are all out within sixteen months, we’ll be down to that residual force by the middle of 2010. If, on the other hand, the reported preference of Generals Petraeus and Ray Odierno for a twenty-three-month timeline becomes administration policy, the bulk of withdrawals will stretch on through the end of next year. In any case, the direction of America in Iraq is clear: we are heading for the exits.
How we leave still matters very much, because the war is neither Charles Krauthammer’s all-but-certain victory nor Medea Benjamin’s unmitigated catastrophe. The outcome still hangs in the balance, and the outcome still matters to us. Most of what happens in Iraq is now out of our control—that’s been true to some degree all along—but we still hold the default position of being able to prevent the worst without guaranteeing the good. For this reason, what one should hope from the president is that he will not leave Iraq with the same indifference to facts and nuances that characterized his predecessor’s invading it. He should be as pragmatic about the war as his admirers say he is about everything else. Though there will be many other things, Afghanistan among them, that will demand his powers of focus, Obama should not stop paying attention to Iraq. The last thing he should seek there is vindication.
In a recent discussion on washingtonpost.com, military analyst Stephen Biddle argued that U.S. forces are now carrying out the function of peacekeeping in Iraq, not counterinsurgency or counterterrorism, and he compared this role to the one we played in the Balkans in the 1990s:
We began with a large peacekeeping force, but within four years of the ceasefires in Bosnia and Kosovo those peacekeeping forces had been reduced by about half without reigniting the warfare. And today our forces in both countries are just a fraction of what they once were. If we apply that logic to Iraq, it doesn’t call for a ‘permanent surge’—but it does suggest that a continued sizeable presence for several more years could help stabilize a situation that, by analogy to other comparable cases elsewhere, one might worry could be prone to renewed violence otherwise. Elsewhere I’ve argued that a good drawdown timeline (again by analogy to the Balkans) might be a 50 percent cut by 2011; obviously there are now a number of constraints—e.g. the status of forces agreement—that complicate the question of how long we should stay with how many forces. Iraq is a sovereign nation—if they ask us to leave we should and must. But if we have the flexibility to do it, my own view is that stability would be served by a slower drawdown rather than a faster one. |
Iraq will be lucky if it becomes as stable as Bosnia or Kosovo. And the fact that America was invader, occupier, and counterinsurgent before it became peacekeeper further complicates the analogy. But it’s a useful reminder of the critical role we now play, the delicacy of the current truce, and the folly of leaving strictly on our terms rather than Iraq’s. We should withdraw as slowly as domestic political pressure, military requirements elsewhere, and Iraqi opinion allow. Local realities, and the fingertip feel that comes with hard experience, will count for more than policies formed on the basis of a new strategic vision. A brewing tribal feud in Anbar could be more important than an intergovernmental policy review. It will be particularly important for Obama to be willing to hear from his commanders in Iraq bad news that could intrude on his best-laid plans—to learn that Diyala or Mosul remains too volatile for a scheduled withdrawal, for example, but will take another six months or year, with American combat units still close to Iraqi population centers.
Those units, stationed in patrol bases and assigned the mission of securing civilians, were the necessary, though not sufficient, condition for most of Iraq to become stable over the past two years. According to Thomas Ricks’s new book, The Gamble, Petraeus and his staff went into Baghdad in early 2007 with grim expectations for the success of the surge. They wanted above all to buy themselves time; what followed was unpredictable in advance but understandable and to an extent controllable as it unfolded. The same will be true of this next stage of the war, which will see the end of large-scale American military involvement in Iraq. We don’t know what will follow an American departure from Iraqi cities (it didn’t go very well when we tried in the past), but we should buy ourselves as much understanding and control as possible.
During the campaign, Obama was sometimes asked about the potential for genocide in the wake of American departure. Having made genocide in Darfur and even Congo a moral issue, he could hardly dismiss its prospect in Iraq, and so Obama replied that he would order American forces to intervene and stop it if genocide broke out. In the past two years, a number of things have happened to make such a catastrophe less likely: the Iraqi army has become a more unifying and professional national force; sectarian cleansing during the civil war has already separated most Sunni and Shia in fortified enclaves; and traditional Sunni power brokers have begun to accept that there’s no going back to the status quo ante. Violence is more likely to occur between Arabs and Kurds and among Shia and Sunni factions, which for various reasons would be unlikely to lead to killings on a genocidal scale.
But if the worst happens, an American return to the cities after withdrawals begin would be very difficult in both political and practical terms. Once our forces leave, first to large bases and then across the border, it would be almost impossible for them to go back in, because the American people would oppose the huge risks that a renewed intervention would place on troops at such a late stage of the war. And large-scale massacres could not be stopped by forces already well outside the ethnic and sectarian enclaves where the killings might take place. To be in a position to intervene, we would have to still be patched onto the shredded fabric of Iraqi society, with all the early-warning intelligence and tactical advantages that come with it. We wouldn’t be able to stop genocide from a forward operating base in the desert or the highway to Kuwait. Obama’s campaign answer always had the feel of a politician with strong moral views about genocide and no appetite to get more deeply involved in Iraq. The best way to prevent Iraq from returning to chaos is to leave slowly.
The strategic reasons for keeping Iraq stable and continuing to strengthen its national government seem clear enough. Here are half a dozen: al Qaeda, oil, regional security, Iranian influence, humanitarian concern, and America’s reputation in the Arab-Muslim world. The moral responsibility we bear for Iraq’s destruction and our strategic interest in putting it back together both point in the same direction. Even as we wind down our military presence, we should remain involved politically and diplomatically, both in Baghdad and through such instruments as the provincial reconstruction teams that are helping to rebuild governments and economies around the country. Having wasted colossal amounts of money in Iraq, the United States shouldn’t try to balance the books in Iraq by shortchanging important development efforts that, now that there’s a reasonable level of security, stand a chance of showing some success.
Another way to preserve our interests and discharge our responsibilities is by making a much greater effort than the previous administration to solve the huge problem of displaced Iraqis—numbering in the millions—both inside Iraq and in neighboring countries. One aspect of a solution is for the United States to be as generous to Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers trying to come here as Sweden has been, or as the United States was at the end of the Vietnam War. (After abandoning thousands of Vietnamese allies in the chaotic evacuation, the Ford administration reversed course and rewrote or ignored immigration rules, resettling 130,000 Vietnamese here by the end of 1975.) The bureaucratic obstacles with which the Bush administration prevented more than a trickle of Iraqis from entering the country is one of the lasting shames of the war. The fact that this stinginess extended to Iraqis who risked their lives by working with American troops and officials in Iraq makes the disgrace complete.
Our true Iraqi allies—not the politicians living in the safety of the Green Zone, but the interpreters, drivers, contractors, and office workers who make the dangerous commute from home to work and back every day—number in the tens of thousands. Thus far, those who have gained entry to the United States number in the hundreds. Recently, bipartisan pressure from Congress, as well as statements by Ryan Crocker, the most recent American ambassador in Baghdad, have pushed the doors open a little wider. Iraqis no longer have to become refugees outside their country before they can apply for resettlement to the United States; processing has begun at the American embassy in Baghdad. But the obstacles remain daunting.
Those Iraqis who worked for Americans will probably never be able to live without fear in their own country; whatever the general security of the country, if their jobs become known they will be marked for death and helpless to defend themselves. And if Iraq ever does become a place where they can live openly and freely, it will surely need their professional skills and their liberal views. When the British withdrew from downtown Basra to the air base outside the city, they failed to make arrangements to protect their Iraqi employees, and almost immediately local militias began a killing spree. (This tragedy and the outrage it provoked helped push the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to begin an airlift of qualified Iraqis to the United Kingdom.) Multiply the numbers by a factor of fifty or a hundred and you can imagine the scale of the disaster if America begins to close its bases and head for the borders without ensuring the safety of its Iraqi friends.
The simplest way to avert a tragedy and uphold our obligations is to conduct an airlift, like the British and the Danes before them, before large-scale withdrawals begin. This solution is sometimes called “the Guam option,” because it would involve flying qualified Iraqis and their families to Guam, where the United States still has large facilities that date back to the Vietnam era, and where they can be processed and vetted in a place where both they and Americans on the mainland remain safe. In 1996, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kurdistan and intervened in a Kurdish civil war, the United States conducted exactly this operation, called “Pacific Safe Haven,” managing to fly seven thousand Kurds out of danger and, eventually, to America. It was a model that could be replicated today, though in admittedly more complicated circumstances. Organizations like the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank with extensive ties to the Obama administration, and the List Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to resettle America’s Iraqi allies here, have endorsed the Guam option and spelled out in detail what it would require.
There would be a cost, both in dollars and in publicity. It’s easy to imagine all the reasons why Obama wouldn’t want to initiate such a dramatic and potentially risky operation. It would attract a great deal of attention, even if it were to be done as quietly as possible, just when Obama is trying to shift the country’s focus away from Iraq to the other war. It would stir up outrage among anti-immigrant groups. (It would also win the support of veterans, religious organizations, and Republicans and Democrats of conscience.) The Guam option would make these Iraqis very much the Obama administration’s problem.
Even if the new president refuses to pursue such a bold plan, he should understand that the fate of Iraqis who met us halfway in their own country will be the ultimate test for whether America leaves more responsibly than it came. They are a kind of inescapable reminder that, much as we wish our part in the war were over, much as we might wish it had never happened at all, America will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a long time to come.
This essay will be appearing in a forthcoming Dissent/Penn Press collection edited by Michael Walzer and Nicolaus Mills, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq. The comes out in September. For more information, click here.
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