The above forcefully makes the point that the casualty counts are similar in similar situations in the two countries and the two wars. The big difference is the disproportionate burden being shared by a much smaller group of people:
So, the question is, as it has been since the insurgency got serious: send in more troops to make the burden lighter, or bring them home? And if you come down on the side of sending more troops, you have to realistically factor in that a draft may be inevitable if that road is taken.
I come down on the side of bringing them home. An editorial in Barron’s, of all places, back in September (you can see the dating by the reference to the Presidential candidates), said it best:
I maintain, and have long maintained, that the Administration and the US as a whole aren’t taking the Iraq war as a serious threat to national security. Most people vaguely support the idea, I guess based on the election results, but only if it doesn’t interfere with their tax cuts make Wall Street nervous.
I believe that you should only go to war in cases of clear and present threats to national security and then you should mobilize the national resources to remove the threat as rapidly as possible, if such removal is possible at all.
“Limited war” is to me an oxymoron. All we have done in Iraq is remove an admittedly bad government and are in the process of replacing it with a puppet, meantime in the process we ruined a large fraction of the infrastructure which we can’t rebuild expeditiously because people object to us as occupiers.
So, based on a single battle (well, two separate battles for Fallujah that were months appart) you are hypothesizing a similarity between Iraq and Vietnam? Or…well, what exactly ARE you saying?
Well, bringing them home at this point isn’t really an option. Sending in more is not really necessary, though I think the military needs to do something to fix their logistics and rotation system at this point…especially with reguards to the National Guards units. I’d say though at this point the military needs to concentrate on insuring as safe an election as possible, step up efforts to get the Iraqi army back on its feet, and continue to keep up the pressure on the insurgents. Since this situation ISN’T like Vietnam, keeping up the pressure will eventually have the effect of breaking the insurgency…at least down to a lower level or background noise. And Iraqi election and the reformation of the Iraqi military will go a long way to helping that situation come about.
I can’t tell you how happy I am that YOUR vote doesn’t count for anything on this. Cut and run? Its to cry. WE created that situation and you want to tuck tail and bolt leaving the Iraqi’s to fact the music? Basically opening the door for the religious fanatics to take over a la Iran…and basically stepping aside to allow the moderates in the country to pose for gunfire for some revolutionary counsels ‘justice’? Great.
I didn’t want this war in Iraq. I think it was stupid and wasteful. However…we got it now. To cut and run is to basically say its cool for Iraq (and perhaps other countries in the region) to be thrown into the fire. Think the insurgency has been bad? It ain’t NUFF compared to what will happen if the US tucks tail and bolts now. Or perhaps you are thinking that the US could pull out and put this mess on the UN?? Its to laugh. Even IF they agreed to take over our mess (something I find HIGHLY unlikely without assurance the US military will stay but under UN control), what do you suppose they could do differently than what we are doing? You think that the white and blue of the UN is going to have some kind of magic soothing effect? lol.
Simple question: do you think it’s fair for a trooper to serve three rotations in a combat zone? If not, do you have a solution to this problem, given current manpower constraints, that doesn’t involve a draft?
Coming up with hypotheticals about what might happen in Iraq if we leave doesn’t solve the problem. Our involvement did indeed create a mess. You have no way of knowing if our leaving will result in anything worse than what would happen if we stay.
Therefore, you have to deal with the present reality.
I obliquely answered this question in my post where I said “though I think the military needs to do something to fix their logistics and rotation system at this point…especially with reguards to the National Guards units.” Is it fair? Of course its not fair. Its a major screw up that the military didn’t have its logistics in order BEFORE the invasion so that this wouldn’t be a problem, so that fresh troops were earmarked for rotation to Iraq. I think the military is NOW getting a handle on this, but we probably won’t see an substantial results for 6 more months or so IMO.
Mainly I think this is unfair for the National Guard units stationed in Iraq. The regular units its certainly a burden, but as long as their enlistment isn’t up (this is of course another point I’ll try and address) you pretty much go where the military says to go and do what it says to do…right way, wrong way, military (or Navy way I as I learned it) way. However, defering enlistment expiration is another thing thats been unfair. Its certainly understandable that the military wants to hold on to veterans in theater…but again, this is a failure of proper logistics planning IMO.
Well, see thats where you are wrong. A monkey, blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other can figure out that if the US pulls out at this point the country will collapse into a vicious multisided civil war…whether or not it spreads to engulf other parts of the region is less known of course. It might…it might not. Personally I think it WILL drag in powers like Iran and perhaps Saudi (Shi’ite vs Sunni, with slaughter on both sides…ya, it could draw in more than just Iraq).
But the collapse and destruction of whats left of Iraq in a civil war? Its not a hypothetical…its reality. Hell, there is no guarentee that if the US STAYS the country might not collapse into full blow civil war. If we leave its a certainty. So, you can try and pretend its a ‘hypotetical’ all you like and then base your ‘I vote for cutting our losses.’ on such happy thoughts…but to take a page from your Vietnam analogy, remember what happened THERE when the US pulled out. It will be worse in Iraq.
Blame “the military” if you want to but “the military” didn’t force itself into a war, heedles of all other worldwide military commitments and without sufficient time to make reasonable accomodations to the increased burdens.
Right, if “the army you have” isn’t sufficient, you fix that problem before you go into an optional war, or you’re dooming them.
The parallels to the lessons of Vietnam, unlearned by those who participated in neither it nor the domestic debate about it, have been obvious all along, and are becoming more extensive, not less.
xtisme, the current approach, staying “until the job is done” whatever that means, is not necessarily better than a partitioning. Even that can be done without a civil war if we, and they, accept it. The current approach is to prop up a corrupt puppet with little popular support in Allawi and hope for the war to be domesticated, exactly as we did with Thieu and “Vietnamization”. That futile approach killed some twenty thousand more Americans and several times that many Vietnamese - except that then we didn’t have the lessons of history availab.e
There is nothing positive the occupation can possibly achieve toward security, elections, reconstruction, whatever. Their presence (combined with their inevitably incompetent actions) is the cause of the insurgency and violence. The reason they should pull out is not to “cut their losses” or to “cut and run”; it is the solution to the current chaos.
Although, due to their not leaving earlier, the situation HAS developed to a point where the outcome is not very clear any more. Terrorists openly killing innocent Iraqis in broad daylight? I blame the occupation for causing the situation to deteriorate to such a point, and now, for possibly having given those terrorists the definitive upper hand. (Obviously, I don’t blame the occupation for the killings themselves.)
The chances for civil war will be less after the occupiers leave. For two reasons: because it MAY reduce insurgent violence (e.g. against election workers or police officers); and because it would give Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia more opportunities to step in and help prevent civil war (none of those countries wants chaos in Iraq).
Plenty more at source. Of course, for reasons that should be rather obvious no historical conparison of two different events in different times and geographical location is bound to hold true across the line. But still, there’s no getting away from the fact that in both of these events, the US’s policy overall approach was – and is, in Iraq’s case – misguided at best, sheer duplicitous folly at worst.
But hey, don’t like the Vietnam analogy? How about we use those evil French and their futile struggle to hold on to Algiers by force?
All three scenarios have more in common than not. And ultimatedly, I predict that the end result in Iraq will be the same as in the other two. Only a matter of time and bodybags.
xtisme, you can try with all your might to take this into hypotheticals about what might happen; be my guest. The present reality is that the volunteer troops we have are being made to bear a disproportionate burden. The fact is that the country fell into disorder as a direct result of the invasion. Stating that our leaving would cause disorder is, therefore, absurd on its face.
As you can see from Frankenstein Monster’s post, you could just as easily come up with a hypothetical in which things get better because we leave.
Thus, the question once again comes down to the present reality: we are putting an unfair burden on those who volunteered to defend this country. Not Iraq, this country, right here. After the elections, will there be any reason to keep them there, especially given the strains highlighted in the Slate article?
Ignoring that last sentence (which I quoted for completeness) this sounds rather better than Vietnam. Although I don’t know how far they made election preparations then.
Does it “sound rather better than Vietnam”? In South Vietnam, the United States leaders had to deal with a situation where, on the one hand, their commitment to democracy through free and fair elections was fundamental to their purported reason for being there in the first place; and, on the other hand, they could never allow free and fair elections because such would not only topple the U.S.-backed regime but almost certainly would bring a Communist government to power. See a parallel here?
Well, Brain Glutton, I seriously doubt the US would stand in the way of elections in this case. It would be an enormous blow to the propaganda about this war; democratization is the only rationale they have left, after all. And if a decision to cancel the elections leads to civil war, oh man, the consequences would just be unbelievable.
No, they have to have those elections. And they are the best hope for getting our butts out of there.
Thanks for the post, BG, I always enjoy being educated on history.
Still, there seems to be a very good chance of an occupation-hostile government getting elected in Iraq; and I’m not reading that much credible news about the occupation leaders trying to undermine the elections.
Oh, really? And if the new Islamic government’s first action were to repudiate all contracts with Halliburton and other American and British corporations made by the CA government and the interim Iraq government – and kick all foreigners out of Iraqi oil facilities – would Bush accept that?
There were no important resources in Vietnam; the war was all about ideology, prestige, and geopolitics. This is a little different.
Frankenstein Monster bring up an interesting point which highlights the dilemma the US is currently faced with. If the Shia win the upcoming elections (ostensibly to write a new constitution) and solidify their position as the political voice of Iraq, what is the US going to do if the Iraqi’s want us to leave? Was not one reason why Iraq was such an attractive “target” was the expectation that the US would maintain a permanent military presence in the region (in the form of bases like we have in Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.)?
Even if the elections somehow go off without any major problems, if the Iraqis want us to leave, what will we do? Would we still somehow maintain a permanent military presence (in the form of bases) in the country? If so, I can’t see how this would have a long-run stabilizing influence on the country if the elections go as expected (Shia coming to power with the expectation that the US eventually leaves).
In some respects, the situation in Iraq is worse than Vietnam. In Vietnam, the US wasn’t trying to maintain a permanent military presence there. In other words, from a policy perspective we had a face-saving “out.” With respect to the policy in Iraq (as it stands now), there is no face-saving “out”. At least with respect to much of what is put forth in the neo-con vision of the Middle East in the PNAC.
No, but you’re forgetting Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The USG has been trying since practically day one to figure out a way to go around him, but I think they’ve just about given up. Any outcome that doesn’t give his allies major power is going to be seen as illegitimate. Its taken a while, but I think the Admin has finally allowed that message to sink in. Even I can’t fathom Bush being that thick-headed.
Given that, they will try to cut a deal with him about all those things you mentioned. We’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out.