This morning Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks discuss the total lack of a Plan B if the current plan in Iraq is not successful. It is an instructive article and, if you look at it the right way, it helps explain why the Democrats are not united in any effort to end the war in Iraq.
But first we have to realize something. There is now a war in Iraq that will go on for some time whether American troops are stationed in Iraq or not. So, any plan to end the war in Iraq by pulling out American troops is doomed to fail. In fact, American troops make it difficult for the war in Iraq to escalate beyond a certain level, and their redeployment would probably remove a major restraint that has so far limited the scale of the civil war there.
We are going to need to learn a new vocabulary to discuss the potential Plan B’s. One major Plan B is the one espoused by Jack Murtha, and it is being called ‘containment’. There are variations on ‘containment’. One containment strategy would have us pull back to fortified bases within Iraq, others would have us pull back to bases on the periphery of Iraq. But in all containment plans, the objective is to limit the carnage to Iraq. Here is what skeptics of containment are saying.
Other senior military officials are skeptical of containment, fearing that it would be almost impossible to achieve and that a policy of standing back and letting Iraqis kill each other would be morally indefensible and a recruiting boon for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Even proponents of containment warn that it would leave U.S. troops as concentrated targets while limiting their ability to control the situation militarily.
We’d have to check the archives to see since when exactly, but I have been talking about the ‘morally indefensible problematic consequences of total withdrawal since at least last summer. The prospect of America pulling out of Iraq and the seeing Iraq descend into a Beruiti or Serbian type of ethnic cleansing…well…I have not exactly been looking forward to this scenario.
Here is how this scenario is perceived within the higher echelons of the government:
Any substantive administration planning for other contingencies [such as containment] is occurring at the margins of policy, far from key decision-makers. “Planners plan, but I don’t think anyone is saying, ‘Let’s do the partition,’ or ‘Let’s pull back and let Baghdad burn,'” one Pentagon official said. “That would be a tectonic shift. That would be catastrophic failure.”
Now, you can call something a ‘catastrophic failure’, but it doesn’t mean anything unless you can define what you mean by it. Much increased sectarian and civil strife within Iraq is one extremely likely consequence of U.S. withdrawal. The international revulsion at this ensuing spectacle is a second likely consequence. Here’s a third one.
Any containment option is likely to add substantially to the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan and Syria or have been displaced from their homes within Iraq, said Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, who served as director of the State Department’s Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization until October 2005. Humanitarian agencies are already drawing up plans for huge refugee camps inside and around Iraq’s borders, although many are concerned they will only add to the country’s problems.
“When refugees and displaced persons start collecting in camps,” Pascual said, “you get a vulnerable population — and a lot of unemployed men — who are subject to attack, recruitment and internal violence. This is where you often get further radicalization, and the camps themselves become a source of the problem.”
These refugee camps combined with the actual civil war within a failed state of Iraq will both combine to make for a “recruiting boon for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.” That’s a fourth consequence.
Then there is a fifth consequence. This fifth consequence is actually the biggest of all. The fifth consequence will be extremely strained relations with our regional allies. The Turks may invade northern Iraq and make war on the Kurds. Turkey is a member of NATO and an extremely valuable ally. We may not be able to maintain that alliance in the wake of a Turkish invasion of Iraq. The Saudis have already indicated that they will respond to a withdrawal of U.S. troops by funding radical Sunni Islamist terrorist groups to strike at the majority Shi’ite government and militias. (Sy Hersh has indicated that this is already going on in Lebanon). It will be extremely difficult to look the other way while Saudi Arabia funds the very ‘extremist groups’ that we launched the Global War on Terror to defeat. Our strategic alliance with the Saudis will suffer immeasurably.
Our relationships with Jordan and Egypt are extremely important. Both countries have signed peace treaties with Israel, thereby ending the imminent threat of a repeat of the 1973 war. Those relationships are critical for Israel’s security. But it will be very difficult for Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II to watch the Sunnis of Iraq getting slaughtered and driven from their homes and not get involved in some way. The worse things get for the Sunnis in Iraq, the more unpopular the United States will be in Egypt and Jordan. If either leader were to fall to a popular revolution, it is unlikely that their replacement governments would recognize Israel or maintain their close relationship with the United States.
By this point it should be obvious why the foreign policy elite in this country (from both parties) is so reluctant to contemplate a containment policy. The risks are enormous. And I haven’t even discussed Iran, their nuclear intentions, and the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the region. I haven’t discussed the potential to damage to our efforts in Afghanistan, damage to our relations with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman. And I haven’t discussed possible disruption of oil supplies and possible economic depression. Add all of those into the mix.
And, yet, even after you have taken all of these things into consideration, it doesn’t make sense to stay in Iraq if none of these risks can be averted. And they can’t be averted. When people say the invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder in our history, these newly created risks are what they are talking about…even if they are reluctant to spell them out.
The Democrats do not want to take responsibility for unleashing a set of events that leads to these types of catastrophes. And that is why they won’t cut off funding for the war and open themselves up for the criticism that their lack of resolve led to the loss of Egypt or a total rift with Turkey or….
I’ve said this many times. No country has ever had their leaders launch a war under false pretenses, lose that war, and then let those same leaders stick around to deal with the aftermath. Many of the worst consequences of our catastrophic failure in Iraq might be averted if we have new leadership to negotiate with the Turks, the Iranians, the Syrians, the Saudis, the Iraqi factions, our European allies, Japan…etc.
This is another reason the Dems are reluctant to move now. Why pull out this year and leave Cheney and Bush in charge of managing the fallout? That would grossly ramp up the risks of withdrawal.
That is why the Democrats should be pursuing impeachment rather than withdrawal. Because withdrawal is so fraught with complications and risks, we would be irresponsible to leave the management of those risks to the team that created this mess in the first place.
They must be impeached and removed from office. If not, then we must keep fighting in Iraq until inaugural day 2009. That is how the foreign policy elites in this country see things. And they haven’t made their move on impeachment. So it looks like we will be in Iraq until either the American public becomes much more vociferous in their opposition to the war, we suffer serious military setbacks, or a new administration is elected.
