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VDH: Ripples of Retreat
What would be the consequences of such a novel experience? Who knows? But the Left is probably correct cf. the July 8 editorial in the New York Times that we could probably redeploy without significant casualties. And it is likewise prescient to anticipate that mass killings in Iraq would probably follow if not a Cambodia-like holocaust, at least something akin to the gruesome fate of the Harkis, those Algerians loyal to France, but left behind to be disemboweled after the French flight across the Mediterranean.It is easier to envision post-democratic Iraq as a tripartite badlands: a shaky Kurdistan living under the fear of alternate invasion from either oil-hungry Turkey or an ascendant Iran; a Sunni Anbar serving, like Waziristan or Somalia, as a terrorist haven, effused with Wahhabi money and Sharia courts; and an Arab Shiite rump state of Iran, residing in safety under an Iranian nuclear umbrella, that would be the convenient jumping off point for Shiite insurgents in the Gulf States. The sorting out of populations into these various enclaves would be messy and bloody, if not like the Pakistani partition of 1947, at least akin to what we saw in the Balkans during the 1990s. What would the effect be of all this televised carnage and chaos on the United States? Anti-war critics would turn on a dime disclaiming their prior assertions that our presence ipso facto had been the chief cause of the violence in Iraq. Instead, when the mass beheadings of female reformers and serial shootings of collaborators appeared on our screens, American and European leftists would almost immediately blame our fickleness for the carnage. . . . Just as our resolve and stubbornness are now alleged to have resulted in the deaths of thousands, so our irresoluteness would soon be cited for the murders of tens of thousands. A second effect would be a sort of psychological devastation of the U.S. military, particularly the army. . . . Militaries that are beaten and flee take decades to reconstitute and regroup. Command, the mood of the rank-and-file, an armys self perception all that is recast in the shadow of recrimination, no more capable of quick resurgence than a boxer recapturing the championship after a surprised, terrible beating. Indeed, even after the five-year withdrawal from Vietnam, the American military took twenty years to regain its own confidence. If we blame a Jimmy Carter for the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the unchecked Cambodian genocide during 1977-79, or the communist infiltration of Central America, he can at least claim he was a mere epiphenomenon of the times that a war-weary American public and a demoralized military were in no shape to engage in another disastrous foreign adventure. . . . And if we worry that our new President in 2008 will have to worry about thousands of soldiers still in Iraq, we should worry even more that he will immediately be challenged by all sorts of enemies emboldened by the nature of our flight from Iraq. In fact, redeployment is a euphemism for flight from the battlefield. And we should no more expect an al Qaeda that won in Iraq to stop from pressing on to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia than we should imagine that a defeated U.S. military could rally and hold the line in the Gulf. Would the IEDs, the suicide bombers, the Internet videos of beheadings, the explosions in schools and mosques cease because they now would have to relocate across the border into Kuwait or Saudi Arabia? . . . If Vietnam, Beirut, or Mogadishu left doubt as to the seriousness of American guarantees, Iraq would confirm that it is a dangerous thing to ally oneself with an American government and military. Aside from realignment in the Middle East, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines would have to make the necessary readjustments. The surge would be our high-water mark, a sort of 21st-century Picketts charge, after which skilled retreat, consolidation, holding the line, and redeployment would be the accepted mission of American arms. It is not easy securing Iraq, but if we decide to quit and redeploy, Americans should at least accept that the effort to stabilize Iraq was a crushing military defeat, that our generation established a precedent of withdrawing an entire army group from combat operations on the battlefield, and that the consequences will be better known even to our enemies than they are to us. Posted by: Mike 2007-07-20 |
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