If the Iranians pride themselves on playing chess while we play checkers, they never could have expected us to walk away from the board.
But that’s our next move in Iraq. President Obama announced on Friday that all of the roughly 40,000 U.S. troops will leave the country by the end of the year. We are thus handing the Iranians a goal they have sought for years — to remove us from Iraq entirely so they can better influence the country for their ends.
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It once seemed that Iraq could be a strategic ally and base for our influence in the Middle East; it now may become both those things for our foremost enemy in the region. The Iranians must think they either are very lucky or — more likely very good. The announcement of our total withdrawal comes just weeks after the revelation of an Iranian plot to execute the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. on our soil. It comes as Iran’s key Arab ally, the Assad regime in Syria, is rocked by a revolt. Just as Tehran’s dangerousness is put in stark relief and as events in Syria threaten to deal it a strategic setback, it gets this windfall.
The Obama administration is talking out of both sides of its mouth on Iraq. On the one hand, it says the total withdrawal is the blessed advent of one of President Obama’s most cherished campaign promises, proof of how committed he’s always been to ending the Iraq War. On the other, it says on background that this is all the Iraqis’ fault, that we wanted to maintain troops on the ground after 2011 but the Iraqis wouldn’t budge. It appears that the first factor played into the second — the administration’s lack of commitment to Iraq was the crucial backdrop to its poor handling of inherently difficult negotiations with the Iraqis.
To continue to maintain troops in Iraq after the expiration of the current deal for our presence at the end of the year, we needed the Iraqis to agree to give our troops immunity. This is obviously always a sensitive issue. And negotiations with the Iraqis over almost anything tend to drag out to the breaking point. None of this should have necessarily deep-sixed a deal, given how many top Iraqi leaders say privately that they want to keep American forces in the country. The Obama administration foolishly insisted that the Iraqi Council of Representatives endorse an immunity deal, a political impossibility. But it’s hard to believe that if the administration truly wanted to make a deal happen it couldn’t have worked something out with enough patience and ingenuity.
Instead, President Obama took to the podium on Friday for a snap announcement of the end of the war. His commanders on the ground wanted to keep more than 20,000 troops in Iraq (the administration had bid this number down to several thousand, perhaps convincing Iraqi political players that cutting a painful deal on immunity wouldn’t have enough of a corresponding upside). Such a force would have enhanced our political leverage in Baghdad, checked Iran’s already considerable influence, ensured against a return of al-Qaeda, and helped keep a lid on Arab–Kurdish tensions in the north. Now, we’ll simply have to hope for the best. Deputy National Security Advisor Dennis McDonough said Iraq is “secure, stable, and self-reliant.” It is none of these things. Its government is still inchoate and it is not capable of defending itself from Iran in the air or on the ground.
Our pullout is a bonanza for Tehran. Its militias were already active in Iraq. Now, it can use Iraq for bases for its proxy forces to spread its tentacles in the rest of the Persian Gulf. Independent ayotollahs in Iraq will have an incentive to keep their heads down. Political decisions of the Iranian-influenced Shiite bloc running the country are sure to begin to tilt more and more Iran’s way. Our diplomatic leverage will diminish, even as maintain our largest embassy in the world in Baghdad. The Iranians will crow in Iraq and throughout the region that they were right that the Americans would eventually leave.
We expended a great deal of blood and treasure to topple Saddam Hussein, and then to establish enough order so that George W. Bush’s successor would only have to consolidate our gains. President Obama is careless enough to risk throwing it all away, and shameless enough to call it success.
This is the gift of the fiscal conservatives who whined about profligate Republicans and right of center populists who swallowed the Chuck Schumer Kool-aid insuring Democrats won Congress in 2006 and Obama the White House in 2008.
I give the editors credit for not trying to hide their position that we should occupy Iraq permanently. It's more honest than than the "too early to leave", "premature" mealy-mouthism spouted by too many politicians bought off by defense lobbyists.
But playing the dead soldiers card is still despicable and easily refuted by asking: Should the U.S. establish permanent military bases in every country on earth where a soldier has lost their life - solely for the purpose of justifying that loss?
Are we permanently occupying South Korea, Japan, Germany? Seems to me our continued presence in these countries has worked out pretty well for them and probably prevented several wars.
What had we 'gained'? Saddam is out of power! Oh, great, replaced by Shariacracy and Christian Exodus/Genocide. And let's not forget those sweet contracts China was granted by Iraq's sovereign Shariacracy for oil rights. Were those the gains?
In my mind we should have not gone in at all, or made Iraq a province in our Empire and extracted the cost of invasion and administration from it's oil wealth that we, as sovereigns, owned.
Anything in between is throwing away blood and treasure for nearly nothing.
I read with due respect the words of the Editors. I'd have to say that while I agree with much of what they say, I also wonder when can our brave young soldiers come home. When can their parents, spouses, kids rest? When have we spent enough in lives and treasure to look harder at the underlying reasons for which we were originally there to begin with?
We went there to rid Iraq of WMD and remove Saddam Hussein, while hoping to establish a pro-Western moderately democratic government. Haven't we done that? We have!
What, however, developed is what any soldier will tell you is called "mission creep". Now our purpose is not Saddam-related nor WMD, but rather a Mideast strategic positioning to offset Iranian influence. Well, if the US really wanted that, it should've iced the Shia leader M. Sadr a long time ago. They didn't . Perhaps they could drop a hellfire from a drone on their way out of town and perhaps accomplish that, for HE is the Iranian's key in Iraq.
So there is a risk that Iran will "take over". Ok - then so be it. If after 10 years Iraq can't stand on its own, if being "Iraqi" is less important than being "Shiaa", then the country doesn't deserve any more American blood nor treasure.
If the US truly expects Iranian hegemony in the adjacent region - then work to remove Syrian leader Assad, who is in effect a puppet of Iranian policy. Strengthen other regimes in the region - Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai, Saudis and especially Israel. Let them deal with it. Enough of American's brave sons and daughters fighting and dying for this cause. It is time for it to end and come home. What makes it look so bad is the politically puerile way in which the President has handled it. But that is typical of the abysmal foreign policy approach of this administration.
Our poor innocent baby soldiers can come home after a year of "occupying" Iraq, then after a leave go on to "occupy" Germany, Japan, South Korea, England, Kuwait, or any of a hundred other countries where US troops are currently deployed for another year.
In exchange, they'll get a salary, training, experience, and four years college paid for after they're done. That's what they signed up for as independent, honorable adults.
If another shooting war breaks out, they might have to shoot, but there are lots of jobs they can take that don't require them to do that if their conscience won't allow them to.
Well said. We should be there for many more decades. WWII - still in Germany, Korean War - still in South Korea. Those maintenance forces and our presence have played extremely important roles since the end of those wars and a similar force in Iraq would do the same.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration did not prepare the country for anything but a withdrawal now or later because they were never explicit that we were actually fighting a proxy war against Iran in Iraq. It was always the elephant in the room, but never presented and convincingly sold to the citizenry. Although domestic and Iraqi politics would have made that difficult, I don't believe it was entirely beyond our reach.
While President Obama gives the impression the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq was a planned event dating back to the Bush administration - although he is taking full credit for it - that is not the case. President Obama is withdrawing all troops from Iraq because his State Department failed in its efforts to negotiate a continuation of the immunity agreement for our military forces in Iraq. Without that agreement, which protects our soldiers from exposure to the Iraqi court system for any alleged wrongdoing, our troops cannot remain there beyond the expiration date of that agreement, which is December of this year.
It has long been the recommendation of military experts and the plan of the Obama administration to allow 18,000 to 20,000 soldiers and others to remain to support the Iraqis as their fledgling democratic government struggles to evolve. The agreement our diplomats were unable to secure with the Iraq government is the same agreement that exists between the U.S. and the governments of each and every country in which our troops are located. Thus, according to military experts, withdrawing from Iraq is not proof of military victory, but rather proof of diplomatic defeat.
@Frank - Straw man argument. Were we "occupying" Korea? Japan? Germany? Are we "occupying" Somalia, or Lebanon? There's a difference between an action where one or two service members were killed and a trillion-dollar war that cost over a thousand American lives, especially one with the geopolitical ramifications so well outlined in this article. Fortunately, enough people know it that your view doesn't gain traction.
I think our president is using the withdrawal from Iraq as a chip in the poker game of politics. He is angry because he can't get the money he wants for his union jobs bill so he is going to pull the plug on spending money in Iraq.
It really could be that simple, remember he believes this is not our country’s war or commitment, this is President Bush’s or the Republican Party’s rice bowl.
Leaving a residual force after years of conflict is in fact how a country achieves military, diplomatic and economic success. We did this effectively in South Korea, Japan and Germany; we utterly failed to do this in South Vietnam. And now it seems we will repeat the mistake we made in 1975, which meant some 60,000 lives were lost to no avail. If Obama's next move is to pull out of Afghanistan and leave that country to the tender mercies of the Taliban, our country's staying-power will be proven to be a joke. Regaining it will be costly.
Are the editors advocating an open ended occupation of iraq ? They seem to be implying this. Iranian influence in a democratic Iraq is inevitable given that 60% of Iraqis are Shias.
This is not a convincing editorial. Any endevour in which success remains so fragile and reversible after nearly nine years of hard effort is an endeavor that is doomed to fail. The Iraq war was never intended to be an endless commitment. Enough already.
Presently,Iraq is NOT any threat to other ME nations nor used to further Islamic terrorism around the world.
Under Iran's influence,that will change. It will be a source of trouble for Kuwait,Saudi Arabia,Jordan,and the other Persian Gulf nations.
THAT is what we will be losing in Iraq.
A disaster from start to finish. National Review owes the late Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, and the others it slandered with its April 7, 2003 cover story "Unpatriotic Conservatives." an apology.
Our invasion and occupation has done nothing but destabilize the region. Bush and Cheney will go down in history as Pariahs.
Most of all the radical NeoCons that promoted this disaster should be read out of polite society.
