The Daily Background

I was discussing the situation in Iraq with a friend recently, and the question of whether or not to get out of Iraq inevitably came up. Equally inevitably, the Republican theory (embraced by many moderate Democrats as well) about troop withdrawal came up.

The theory basically says that if US troops leave Iraq, begin to leave Iraq, or if a date is set for them to have left Iraq by, then violence will get worse, and once US troops are gone, then violence will overflow into the rest of the region, totally screwing up US interests in the whole area. This is pretty much the conventional wisdom about withdrawal at this point.

It reminds me of the same conventional wisdom that existed about Vietnam. Once the US got into Vietnam, the primary argument against withdrawal (despite mounting casualties and increasing evidence that a US military presence was not helping anyone) was that if US troops leave Vietnam, begin to leave Vietnam, or if a date is set for them to have left Vietnam by, then communists will win, and once US troops are gone, then communism will overflow into the rest of the region, totally screwing up US interests in the whole area.

Despite that conventional wisdom, US forces were eventually withdrawn from Vietnam, and guess what? Communism hasn’t spread over the rest of the world, and now the US and Asia are hardly enemies today. Most of all the cheap stuff Americans love to buy is from that part of the world.

There were people back in the late sixties and early seventies that were convinced that if the US withdrew from Vietnam, all hell would break lose in what we then regarded as perhaps the most critical region in the world. Right now, there are an awful lot of people who, similarly, are convinced that if the US were to withdraw from Iraq, all hell would break lose in what we now regard as perhaps the most critical region in the world.

Are you getting the parallels I’m drawing here?

I’m not saying that I know exactly what would happen if US forces were to withdraw from Iraq, because I don’t. But I don’t think that these people who promote this Republican theory (and as I said earlier, this includes some Democrats), necessarily know what’s going to happen either. That’s exactly my point: nobody knows, and there’s only one way to know what would happen.

When Americans turned out in unusually high numbers last November to vote in a non-presidential election, they sent an unexpectedly strong signal to those in Washington. Republicans were kicked out of control of both the House and Senate, and exit polls consistently showed that voters wanted to start withdrawing some or all troops from Iraq. The President sent tens of thousands more troops to Iraq instead. It was the exact polar opposite of what Americans wanted, and polls now show that large majorities of the public do not expect the so-called “troop surge” to be successful in substantially decreasing the level of violence in Iraq.

Meanwhile, public support of withdrawal has mounted. At this point, nobody is advocating what is so often called by Republicans “a precipitous withdrawal,” or “cutting and running.” What is being advocated however, by a growing number of Democrats is the beginning of a draw down of US troops in favor of a regional peacekeeping force and increased political, social, and economic aid.

If the Bush Administration were to withdraw one tenth of the forces in Iraq (equal to a withdrawal of say, 15,000 soldiers) and spend even one tenth the amount of resources and money that is being spent on military operations in Iraq on economic, social and political aid instead, I think we would be seeing substantial results in the form of reduced violence. Will we? I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out.

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