Fwd: Gen. Odom: Cut and Run? You Bet.

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Cut and Run? You Bet.

 

Why America must get out of Iraq now.

 

By Lt. Gen. William E. Odom

 

05/03/06 " FP " -- - Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? That is

the key question about the war in Iraq today. American public opinion is now

decidedly against the war. From liberal New England, where citizens pass

town-hall resolutions calling for withdrawal, to the conservative South and

West, where more than half of " red state " citizens oppose the war, Americans

want out. That sentiment is understandable.

 

The prewar dream of a liberal Iraqi democracy friendly to the United States

is no longer credible. No Iraqi leader with enough power and legitimacy to

control the country will be pro-American. Still, U.S. President George W.

Bush says the United States must stay the course. Why? Let's consider his

administration's most popular arguments for not leaving Iraq.

 

If we leave, there will be a civil war. In reality, a civil war in Iraq

began just weeks after U.S. forces toppled Saddam. Any close observer could

see that then; today, only the blind deny it. Even President Bush, who is

normally impervious to uncomfortable facts, recently admitted that Iraq has

peered into the abyss of civil war. He ought to look a little closer. Iraqis

are fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans.

That's civil war.

 

Withdrawal will encourage the terrorists. True, but that is the price we are

doomed to pay. Our continued occupation of Iraq also encourages the

killers—precisely because our invasion made Iraq safe for them. Our

occupation also left the surviving Baathists with one choice: Surrender, or

ally with al Qaeda. They chose the latter. Staying the course will not

change this fact. Pulling out will most likely result in Sunni groups'

turning against al Qaeda and its sympathizers, driving them out of Iraq

entirely.

 

Before U.S. forces stand down, Iraqi security forces must stand up. The

problem in Iraq is not military competency; it is political consolidation.

Iraq has a large officer corps with plenty of combat experience from the

Iran-Iraq war. Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia fights well today without

U.S. advisors, as do Kurdish pesh merga units. The problem is loyalty. To

whom can officers and troops afford to give their loyalty? The political

camps in Iraq are still shifting. So every Iraqi soldier and officer today

risks choosing the wrong side. As a result, most choose to retain as much

latitude as possible to switch allegiances. All the U.S. military trainers

in the world cannot remove that reality. But political consolidation will.

It should by now be clear that political power can only be established via

Iraqi guns and civil war, not through elections or U.S. colonialism by

ventriloquism.

Setting a withdrawal deadline will damage the morale of U.S. troops. Hiding

behind the argument of troop morale shows no willingness to accept the

responsibilities of command. The truth is, most wars would stop early if

soldiers had the choice of whether or not to continue. This is certainly

true in Iraq, where a withdrawal is likely to raise morale among U.S.

forces. A recent Zogby poll suggests that most U.S. troops would welcome an

early withdrawal deadline. But the strategic question of how to extract the

United States from the Iraq disaster is not a matter to be decided by

soldiers. Carl von Clausewitz spoke of two kinds of courage: first, bravery

in the face of mortal danger; second, the willingness to accept personal

responsibility for command decisions. The former is expected of the troops.

The latter must be demanded of high-level commanders, including the

president.

 

Withdrawal would undermine U.S. credibility in the world. Were the United

States a middling power, this case might hold some water. But for the

world's only superpower, it's patently phony. A rapid reversal of our

present course in Iraq would improve U.S. credibility around the world. The

same argument was made against withdrawal from Vietnam. It was proved wrong

then and it would be proved wrong today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world's

opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop

in American history. The United States now garners as much international

esteem as Russia. Withdrawing and admitting our mistake would reverse this

trend. Very few countries have that kind of corrective capacity. I served as

a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during Richard Nixon's

Watergate crisis. When Nixon resigned, several Soviet officials who had

previously expressed disdain for the United States told me they were

astonished. One diplomat said, " Only your country is powerful enough to do

this. It would destroy my country. "

 

Two facts, however painful, must be recognized, or we will remain perilously

confused in Iraq. First, invading Iraq was not in the interests of the

United States. It was in the interests of Iran and al Qaeda. For Iran, it

avenged a grudge against Saddam for his invasion of the country in 1980. For

al Qaeda, it made it easier to kill Americans. Second, the war has paralyzed

the United States in the world diplomatically and strategically. Although

relations with Europe show signs of marginal improvement, the trans-Atlantic

alliance still may not survive the war. Only with a rapid withdrawal from

Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like

Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the

diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against

terror. Getting out of Iraq is the precondition for any improvement.

 

In fact, getting out now may be our only chance to set things right in Iraq.

For starters, if we withdraw, European politicians would be more likely to

cooperate with us in a strategy for stabilizing the greater Middle East.

Following a withdrawal, all the countries bordering Iraq would likely

respond favorably to an offer to help stabilize the situation. The most

important of these would be Iran. It dislikes al Qaeda as much as we do. It

wants regional stability as much as we do. It wants to produce more oil and

gas and sell it. If its leaders really want nuclear weapons, we cannot stop

them. But we can engage them.

 

None of these prospects is possible unless we stop moving deeper into the

" big sandy " of Iraq. America must withdraw now.

 

 

Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.) is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and

professor at Yale University. He was director of the National Security

Agency from 1985 to 1988.