My good friend and esteemed colleague Juan Cole and I continue to disagree about whether the appropriate thing to call for now is the speedy withdrawal of all US (and UK) forces from Iraq, or the speedy withdrawal of only the US and UK ground troops.
In this post Friday, Juan called for withdrawing all the ground troops but leaving “a couple of air bases” in the Tel Afar region, “along with some Special Ops forces”. The stated goal there was to “forestall” the outbreak of an all-out civil war.
I disagreed.
Juan then wrote here yesterday:
My good friend Helena Cobban offers her own critique of my position on the need for some way of forestalling massive conventional civil war in Iraq in the aftermath of an Anglo-American withdrawal of ground troops.
She asks where a plan like mine has succeeded. I answer, Kosovo.
The following quotation comes from “Serbia loses another one”, the description of the Kosovo war of spring 1999 given in the IISS’s Strategic Survey 1999/2000:
In summary, therefore, Milosevic was persuaded he had to accept Western terms by a combination of diplomatic moves that isolated his regime, and the threat of a ground offensive. The air campaign by itself did not win the war; its use in combination with preparations for a ground offensive and clever diplomatic work achieved this feat.(pp.108-109)
Juan also wrote there:
Cobban mischaracterizes my plan insofar as what I propose is giving the new Iraqi army close air support of a sort that would allow it to face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone. There are now about 3000 Iraqi army troops that could and would fight in such a battle, and US air support would ensure decisive victories.
3,000 Iraqi army troops– even if they could be mustered and led effectively– is nowhere near what would be needed to ” face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone”. (Even if this were indeed the main threat that the US military and its local clients faced inside Iraq, which I highly doubt.)
In the case of Kosovo, the potential ground troop threat that helped persuade Milosevic to change his mind was one of a massive offensive by excellently trained, equipped, and led NATO ground troops. As we know, there are no units in the “Iraqi ground forces” that come anywhere close to fitting this description… Not least, because of the continuing, very acute problems with unit cohesion and loyalty inside those units.
If there were a “conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone”, then perhaps– just perhaps– “close air support” could be used to some effect.
But even then, not decisively… Think of the Israeli Air Force giving “close air support” to the IDF ground troops besieging Beirut in the summer of 1982. Even with that combination of punishing weaponry, the Israelis were unable to crush the PLO and its allied forces by using purely military power. At the end, because of tough fight put up by the Palestinian and Lebanese resisters, the length of time it took the Israeli ground forces to advance in street-by-street fighting, and the uproar the whole affair started causing in the whole of the Sunni world– the Israelis were forced to negotiate an exit for the PLO forces. That exit left them scattered– but it left their leadership basically intact and ready to open another front, another day…
But I doubt very much if the main “threat” to the pro-US order in Iraq would come from forces pursuing anything like a “conventional military attack”. In which case, the use of American “close air support” would be even messier yet, and politically even more damaging.
Also, as I noted in a comment I posted here this morning, the messy geopolitical outcome that now exists in Kosovo, six years after that NATO military “victory”, is definitely not the kind of outcome we would consider even faintly acceptable in Iraq. Indeed, if translated into an Iraqi context, the kind of chronic political irresolution, uncertainty, and gangsterism that mark today’s Kosovo would augur the continuation of major turmoil inside Iraq’s much more heavily armed confines.
Juan also wrote:
I don’t want to be thin-skinned, but I have to object to the ad-hominem approach of both Cobban and Achcar … in asking about my credentials to propose such plans. First of all, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, who headed the Department of Defense during and after the Iraq War, supposedly have such credentials…. Second, my thinking on these things generally tracks with that of scholars such as Barry Posen at MIT’s Security Studies Program, with which I have an affiliation, by the way. Third, the details of how the US military would accomplish a task would of course be left to the military people, who are experts in their own world; but over-arching goals can usefully be suggested by civilian analysts. Finally, I’m not exactly innocent of military history.
Okay, Juan, I apologise if I understated your familiarity with the principles of strategic analysis.
I do, however, still have to ask the question I asked earlier about how– after a total withdrawal of US-UK ground troops from southern Iraq– you would propose that the “couple of air bases” he proposes that the US keep somewhere in the Tel Afar area would get resupplied… (Who was it that said that armchair strategicsts like to talk about “grand strategy” but serious analysts always look first at logistics?)
Finally, some people have suggested that, since Juan and I agree on so many things, maybe we should not write so much about our remaining points of disagreement. I believe, however, that the main point on which we disagree is a very important one: namely, whether the US has some sort of “moral duty” not to “abandon” Iraq and pull all our troops out at this point, even if– as we both, I think, now agree– the troop presence has been pretty bad for the Iraqi people up until now.
It was in response to this claimed “moral duty” of the US that Juan fashioned the “two bases plus Special Ops forces” plan that he unveiled on Friday.
I note firstly, that Juan’s argument on the “moral duty” business is almost exactly the same as President Bush’s…. Essentially, “We cannot pull our troops out now, because a bloodbath would follow.”
I disagree. We do not know whether a bloodbath would follow. Post-withdrawal bloodbaths predicted with great confidence by numerous occupying and colonial powers in the past did not occur. (Most recently, Lebanon, May 2000.)
But we do know that the presence of the US occupation force in Iraq over the past 30 months has led to considerably more civil strife and lethal internal conflict than existed inside the country at the time of our entry in March 2003 (and indeed, for several years prior to that.)
So we cannot argue that the presence of US forces has been a stabilizing factor for Iraqis. Far from it.
Juan Cole may well agree with that statement. (Though I doubt that George Bush would.) But Juan then goes on to say that, because Iraq is so fractured and vulnerable to further strife, then the US should stick around to prevent escalation and if possible to mend it.
Like, we should invite a fox to stick around and “mend” and “secure” a half-ravaged hen-house– simply because we hold that same fox responsible for already having done most of that ravaging in the past?
I doubt it.
This version of what’s sometimes called “the Pottery Barn rule” always seemed to me to to be based on a deep lie.
Anyway, if readers want to see what my own plan is– as laid out in full here on JWN back on July 6, here it is: My 9-point plan “How to Exit from Iraq”.
(By the way, for more on the dangers of Kosovo, read #3 there.)
And if you want to see more of my argument why we need a pullout of US troops that is total, speedy, and generous, read this July 21 column in the CSM.