The noted Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has now written in the US Jewish newspaper Forward that:
- The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.
Van Creveld– whose work I have followed, and admired (with some caveats) for more than 20 years now– points out that in Vietnam, at least the retreating US forces had the option of leaving most of their heavy gear behind, with the nominally indepedent Army of the Republic of (south) Vietnam, the ARVN. It then took a couple of further years before that equipment fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese, with the definitive collapse of the ARVN in 1975.
He notes that today, the situation is different. Firstly, there is no opposing government with which the modalities of this withdrawal can be negotiated. In addition, he notes that that the weapons now being used by the US inside Iraq:
- are so few and so expensive that even the world’s largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.
Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.
As in the nine-point exit plan that I spelled out on July 7, Van Creveld wrote that the retreating US forces will have to be withdrawn through the south of Iraq:
- Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.
Van Creveld does write, however, that a “complete” withdrawal “is not an option”:
- A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as “the Great Satan.” Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs’ clutches.
A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets’ nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah’s name.
The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.
But though he writes that a complete withdrawal “is not an option”, from the wording he uses, it’s not clear whether he would foresees that some of the residual force he’s writing about would be stationed inside Iraq, or not. Most likely, not, since he writes specifically about a “withdrawal from Iraq”, not a retrechment/redeployment of forces inside the country. The residual force he has in mind would therefore, it seems, most likely be stationed just “over the horizon” from Iraq– with components most likely dispersed among Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the in-Gulf US Navy presence.
In my book, a sizeable residual force would still be a force for quite unwarranted US intervention in the region. We should aim for its dismantling, too– as part of the much broader re-ordering of US relations with the rest of the world that will be needed in order to build a world marked by real human equality.
Nevertheless, Van Creveld’s plan seems to go significantly further than, for example, Juan Cole’s plan of leaving a significant US residual force inside Iraq. It is great to have this clear-eyed strategic realist and very experienced military historian writing that what I have been advocating for a while now has indeed become a necessity.
Van Creveld concludes, quite pointedly:
- Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.
Well said!
Van Creveld, I should note, is no raving lefty anti-American. He’s a very sober historian whose tag-line there at the the Forward tells us that, “He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army’s required reading list for officers.
And I forgot to tell you the title of his article there. It is this: Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War.