It’s time to talk seriously about a timetable for withdrawing our troops from Iraq.
The administration’s abysmal failure to articulate to the American people a clear case for our presence in Iraq, together with an overarching strategy and an acceptable plan for withdrawal, has prompted comparison of our continued presence in Iraq to our experience in Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, the mere mention of Vietnam sends pundits and politicians to the barricades on all sides of the issue. Unfortunately, in that noise and chatter, we may be losing sight of one of the enduring lessons of our experience in Vietnam.
By 1969, the United States may well have been winning the war militarily, but we were failing to win either politically or on the homefront. A few years later, we disengaged in disarray, both militarily and politically, and left the Vietnamese people dangling – one of the more shameful episodes in our recent history.
We face a similar challenge in Iraq, but the cost of failure today may well be much greater than in Vietnam.
While there are as many differences as similarities in the two conflicts, one area of similarity is public and political support. The key to such support in Iraq is an overarching strategy and plan, open to public debate and clearly understood by the American people.
Here’s the tough part: In order to work, such a plan needs to have a timetable with troop levels tied to it. Clearly, any plan does not mean an immediate withdrawal of troops in the next six months, or even within a year. The withdrawal process could stretch over a number of years. The key is to put out markers that are understood and achievable.
Given this, there are a number of reasons – three compelling ones follow – for the administration to immediately establish a concise and measurable multiyear plan for Iraq, including troop levels and a disengagement schedule.
Doing so could weaken the insurgency. The oft-repeated argument is that any published plan, along with the timetable, would help the insurgents, and that they would simply go to ground and wait us out. This assumes, of course, that the insurgency is a united and centrally controlled effort, which we know is not the case. Although the disaffected Sunni Baathists and foreign jihadists make up the two most significant insurgent elements, there is no evidence that they are coordinating their operations. To the contrary, there are good indicators that the Iraqi insurgents regard Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s jihadists as extremists.
So, without central command and control, who is going to tell the insurgents to lay low, and make it stick? Certainly that is not what the foreign jihadists are there for – they want to fight Americans.
If you assume, however, that a number of insurgents would go to ground, it does not follow that coalition forces would stop hunting them. Perhaps more importantly, such action by the insurgents would give Iraqi and U.S. forces some breathing space to recruit, train, organize and equip the local police and Iraqi military units – not much of an advantage to the insurgents.
The political effect of a schedule in Iraq, particularly on the Sunnis, would be significant because the Sunnis are bearing the brunt of the insurgency. It stands to reason that the Sunnis would see a timetable as an incentive to become more involved in the political process and separate themselves further from al-Zarqawi and the foreign jihadists.
There is growing evidence that the Iraqis increasingly resent, and are even fighting, the foreign jihadists. This will further isolate the growing al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, as few Iraqis want to see their country host to al-Qaeda’s fight against the West.
On the other hand, with no public plan from America, no details other than to stay the course, there remains the common feeling on Arab Street that the U.S. will be there forever – because many believe what we really want is oil. This is difficult to refute when we refuse to talk about a timetable for withdrawal.
Creating a plan and a timetable would protect ourselves from ourselves; that is, from the pressures of expedient politics, which would most likely translate as a premature, knee-jerk withdrawal from Iraq, as we did in Vietnam.
Do we want sound and publicly understood policy to drive our strategy in Iraq for the next five years, or shall we leave it to the whims of politics, fueled by an upcoming election?
As we approach mid-term elections, the pressures on both Congress and the administration will increase, with the possibility that their subsequent actions could look more like Vietnam in the early ’70s than we’d like.
So we have reached the seemingly counterintuitive point where, in order to give us the greatest flexibility to execute a plan, both politically and militarily, we must put out a withdrawal schedule.
With public support for Iraq continuing to drop, we cannot afford to leave strategy and policy vulnerable to political expediency.
For a reminder of the pitfalls of such a situation, we need only to look back to the early ’70s and, having done that, say “never again.”
Tony Koren is a former Special Forces officer, Vietnam veteran, partner with NorthStone Group in Louisville and military analyst for NBC News.
