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July 11, 2006

Iraq: The Next Step

Iraq is an odd situation right now. We're generally in agreement that the situation isn't good. But when it comes to what to do next, suggestions on what to do next tend to draw a lot more fire than support.

Pulling out runs into several significant obstacles: the Iraqis don't want us to leave yet, if we do leave now we may be condemning the country to chaos, and many Americans viscerally dislike the idea of leaving without victory.

The Iraqi people themselves are divided on whether or not U.S. forces should leave. Some have joined insurgent groups to push the U.S. out, and for each who joins an insurgent group there are probably at least 100 more who would like the U.S. to leave but aren't willing to fight to push them out. Many other Iraqis fear their own police and the militias and count on American forces to protect them from those threats. The Iraqi government wants us out eventually, but not too soon. That position is probably the median position in Iraq: the U.S. needs to leave once the Iraqi government is ready to protect the people of Iraq, but not before then.

The United States obviously bears responsibility for removing the institutions that were governing Iraq prior to the invasion, and therefore the chaos that currently engulfs Iraq is our fault. Pulling out and leaving the Iraqis to a mess we helped to create seems like a solution only insofar as it means that we don't have to see reports of Americans being killed in Iraq on a regular basis. The level of violence seen in Iraq right now might seem a fond memory if we were to pull out and the various factions were given free rein to fight for control of the country. Whether you supported the initial invasion or not, abandoning Iraq to such a fate is probably not something you want to see happen either.

There are good and bad reasons to oppose pulling out of Iraq if it will create the impression of the United States being driven from Iraq. On the one hand, opposing a pullout simply because it will mean those lives we've already lost will have been lost in vain fails to consider the fact those lives are now sunk costs. We cannot bring any of our casualties back to life, while the longer we stay in Iraq, the more deaths we will endure. Staying simply to make the previous deaths mean something is a recipe for never leaving. We all create our own meaning for our lives, it is not something provided for us by others. If we fail utterly in Iraq, I will not consider the deaths of my fellow soldiers a waste. A tragedy, but not a waste, for they went to Iraq and gave their lives for the rest of us, because they believed that it was the right thing to do. Calling their lives wasted is to dishonor their sacrifice. On the other hand, pulling out of Iraq will be seen as an encouragement to our enemies. We know that al Qaeda considered our retreat from Somalia as evidence of our weakness, and no matter how good the reasons we have for leaving, we can't ignore the fact that a pullout from Iraq before the Iraqis are ready for us to leave will once again confirm the belief of our enemies that we are a soft target. This is, of course, a self-inflicted wound, since the war in Iraq was a war of choice, but it is a factor to be considered as we ponder our next step. If it is feasible to leave on our own terms, that would be the preferred solution from a strategic perspective.

There are numerous options for what we could do next in Iraq, but I will restrict this discussion to three possibilities: leave as quickly as possible, continue to develop Iraqi institutions until they are ready for us to leave, or escalate our commitment in Iraq and attempt to destroy the insurgency and restore security ourselves. I will not address political questions at this time, either, as my focus is on what I believe is the best course of action, not whether or not that course of action can be accomplished politically. If my prescription is not politically feasible, then I'll discuss what compromises probably could be made, but that is a discussion for another time.

Pulling out now runs up against the three problems I listed above, as well as some more mundane logistical and tactical issues. Since I've already covered the other issues, let's look at the more practical issues a pullout would entail. Normally, our forces leave Iraq by first moving to Kuwait and then flying to the United States. If we decide to pull all of our forces out of Iraq, they would either have to move all of their equipment south to Kuwait in order to return it to the U.S., or abandon millions of dollars worth of equipment. Given how much the war has already cost, abandoning the equipment seems fiscally unwise, and it would also provide a major propaganda coup to our enemies, so that's not a good answer. Therefore we'd have to gather all of our forces, probably going from north to south, and evacuate the country in stages. This would not be a simple matter of putting together convoys and driving south. The level of violence in Iraq would probably grow significantly worse once it was clear we were leaving, as power groups began jockeying for position and as terrorist groups sought to present the impression that we were withdrawing under great pressure from their forces. There are few more difficult military operations than a withdrawal while in contact, and that's when you're fighting a conventional battle with relatively clean lines. Extricating ourselves from the middle of cities could lead to fighting that would make Mogadishu look like a walk in the park. While there is no way to know how many civilians were killed during the battle of Mogadishu, an American force trying to leave Baghdad under fire would likely cause many more. Unless the enemy were to decide to simply allow the American forces to leave Iraq, a pullout would not be a simple operation. From a practical standpoint, pulling out is a lot harder than it sounds. From a moral standpoint, I think it would be unconscionable to pull out and leave the Iraqis to their own devices right now.

Trying to defeat the insurgency would be equally difficult. It would require the commitment of the lion's share of American ground forces for at least a year, quite possibly more. Our current strategy has been to disrupt insurgent cells when they gain too much power in a particular area by going in and rooting them out in house-to-house fighting. But because we don't want to be too tough on the local population, we allow people to leave the area as the fighting as it goes on, and so the enemy slowly evacuates his forces as the fighting goes on, finds another place to base his forces, and the cycle begins again. Breaking that cycle would require us to put a hard cordon around each target, to take the city in brutal fighting, and to cordon off the people attempting to leave so they couldn't go to another city unless it was absolutely clear they were not insurgents. We would then have to leave forces to hold that city while we repeated the operation in the next stronghold, to ensure that we wouldn't have to pay for the same ground twice. Since one of the hearts of the insurgency is in Baghdad, this strategy would mean prolonged urban warfare in a large city: high casualties and vast amounts of collateral damage. While such a campaign is militarily possible, the degree of hatred it would rouse against the U.S. would render Iraq a truly occupied country, meaning we would need to leave a strong occupying force behind for some time as we once again rebuilt Iraq's institutions and infrastructure. It would be incredibly expensive, as putting that number of soldiers into Iraq and providing them with the logistical support they would require would be prohibitive. This option would be somewhat akin to the old Vietnam saw of destroying the village in order to save it, and is morally even less feasible than pulling out of Iraq.

Option three is the one nobody likes, but it may be the best of a bad lot. If we are to leave Iraq better than we found it, we will have to help the Iraqi government create an army and police force capable of maintaining order. That's a slow process. Iraqi culture is not accustomed to the kind of operations they ought to be able to perform. As one example, it is very common for Iraqi units to inform their American counterparts that they have all the fuel and ammunition they need for a particular operation even though they do not, because to admit they do not would mean a loss of face in their culture. Overcoming that cultural bias is painful and frustrating for American forces, and it will not happen overnight. Iraq's police force appears to be rife with corruption and worse, problems that will likely require even more time to overcome than simpler issues like convincing Iraqi leaders to conduct precombat inspections and to admit when they're wrong. Building capable units in Iraq is not an impossible task. Their army is making great strides, and having identified the problems with their police force, the U.S. and Iraqi governments can now move to begin fixing those issues. But it is going to take time, and in the interim we are going to end up with U.S. soldiers and Marines doing multiple tours in Iraq, we will see the casualty lists continue to mount, and we can never be certain that frustrated or psychopathic individuals won't commit atrocities. These issues make our continued presence in Iraq extremely difficult, because our progress is very incremental while our failures seem to loom large. Our presence will continue to decline under this plan, however, and it offers the only hope I see of creating some of the institutions Iraq will need to stand on its own after we leave.

Staying the course isn't the kind of answer I'd guess many people are looking for. But I'm directly involved in some of the missions the Army is undertaking to make this course succeed in the long term, and I believe that we are making progress. It's not nearly as fast as I would like, but doing this seems like the best of a bad batch of answers.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.