[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Why it's time to bring American troops home - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Why it's time to bring American troops home

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  November 22, 2005 | The Boston Globe

HAVING COME recently from Iraq, I find myself reluctantly agreeing with 
Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania. American troops have become 
''a catalyst for violence," and therefore more part of the problem than 
the solution.

I used to believe that, no matter what one thought of the war, Americans 
had to stay to keep Iraq from disintegration and civil war. If I thought 
the United States could prevent either, I would say stay the course. But 
I believe now that we no longer control events in Iraq and that in the 
end we cannot hold the country together.

Nor can we prevent civil war, which is already gathering in the shadows, 
as evidenced by bombed mosques, secret torture chambers, and the victims 
of death squads found in the desert. Only the Iraqis themselves can come 
up with the necessary compromises and accommodations to keep Iraq whole.

I now believe, as former defense secretary Melvin Laird recently wrote: 
''Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal 
would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up 
to the insurgency."

Perhaps there was a chance right after Baghdad fell that things might 
turn out otherwise, but a combination of incompetence and 
ideology-driven blunders has lost that chance. America's reputation for 
torture has also hurt our efforts.

The Iraqi state is a Humpty Dumpty that is beyond the ability of the 
United States to put together again. Only Iraqis can do that, and the 
presence of American forces may actually be a disincentive to ethnic and 
sectarian compromise.

Victory on the battlefield, of the type President Bush keeps insisting 
upon, is beyond our grasp. Military commanders on the ground know that 
they are not defeating the insurgency and that they can only keep it 
disrupted until, hopefully, Iraqis can manage their own defense.

An American officer in Baghdad told me: ''There is less incentive for 
Iraqis to fight the insurgency if the Americans will do it for them." 
Too many Iraqi soldiers are seen -- and see themselves -- as puppet 
troops -- ''not good Muslims," and doing it only for the money, as some 
Iraqi soldiers said to Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid.

As it is now, insurgents can make a good case that nationalism and pride 
demand fighting the foreign occupiers. The hard truth is that more and 
more Iraqis are joining up with Al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Take 
American and other foreign troops out, and the nationalist element to 
the insurgency sinks.

Iraq today is ''a black hole," as France's antiterrorism judge, 
Jean-Louis Brugiere, said, sucking in impressionable youths from all 
over the Muslim world and radicalizing them. Donald Rumsfeld is said to 
have asked if we were creating terrorists faster than we can destroy 
them. The answer is yes. The Iraq war is harming us in the greater 
struggle against Islamic extremism and making the United States less secure.

There will still remain the antagonism between Kurds, Shi'ites, and 
Sunnis, but young men from abroad, recruited to kill Americans, will be 
less motivated to come to Iraq to fight Shi'ites and Kurds. Iraq may yet 
split into three or more parts, and that will be very destabilizing to 
the region. But the point is we can't prevent it. Only Iraqis can.

But wouldn't a US pullout allow Al Qaeda to crow that it had forced the 
last superpower out as the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan? 
Probably, but with an election next month and a new Iraqi government up 
and running by next spring, we can declare victory and go home, as 
Senator George Aiken once suggested we do in Vietnam.

The United States could continue to help Iraq reconstruct and train its 
armed forces. America would remain involved but behind the scenes. 
Taking foreign troops out of the field would not be a wholesale retreat, 
as it was for the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Melvin Laird might not agree with Murtha's timetable. The lesson of 
Vietnam, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, was that ''the voices of the 
'cut-and-run' crowd ultimately prevailed, and our allies were betrayed 
after all our work to set them on their feet." But the war in Iraq is 
not sustainable in this country, any more than the Vietnam War was in 
Laird's time. The longer we wait the harder the eventual pullout will be 
and the greater the betrayal of those who grew to depend on us. That's 
what we learned in Vietnam.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/22/why_its_time_to_bring_american_troops_home/
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