Withdrawal from Iraq would prompt new challenges
By James Kitfield and Brian Friel, National Journal
The Frenchman had it right. Fractious at the best of times, democracies become polarized and paralyzed when mired in unpopular wars. Bombarded with daily images of bloodshed and spent treasure, nations see emotions rise and positions harden. The essential middle ground of political compromise narrows and then disappears altogether.
For the first time in a generation, the American body politic has stumbled into this predicament, lacking the consensus either to sustain a costly war or to plausibly end it.
Consider the increasing isolation of President Bush, who is buying time to stave off congressional Democrats but is most afraid of rising defections in his own party and of the faltering loyalty of the nation's military elite.
When the administration recently floated the new job of "war czar," not only did at least five retired four-star generals turn down a wartime president -- an almost unheard-of vote of no confidence -- but one general dramatically shattered civil-military protocol by publicly excoriating the commander-in-chief's leadership.
"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they are going," retired Marine Corps Gen. John (Jack) Sheehan told The Washington Post.
For their part, congressional Democrats are torn between a desire to politically punish the Bush administration and to force a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, and a fear of overreaching and owning the ugly endgame of a lost war. The party went down that road with Vietnam in the early 1970s and bore the brand of "weak on defense" for decades.
Today, tensions are flaring between the party's liberal base that wants out of Iraq now and Democratic presidential candidates who worry about inheriting the blowback of a precipitous exit.
In the meantime, U.S. military leaders have one eye trained on a determined enemy in Iraq and the other on faltering political support back home, even as the war dangerously saps their forces' strength. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, talks about a conflict waged almost in parallel dimensions, one that runs on Washington time and the other dictated by events in Baghdad.
"The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock," Petraeus said in a televised interview. "So we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps ... put a little more time on the Washington clock."
This, then, is a story about when and how -- not if -- the Washington clock runs down. If Bush is successful, the time on that clock will expire after the November 2008 election, when he passes the Iraq problem to the next president and surrenders his legacy to history. Democrats are determined to make the sands run out on Bush's "surge" strategy much sooner -- the better to begin the long homeward march of U.S. troops on the watch of the president who sent them to Iraq in the first place.
What U.S. military experts know about those discordant timelines, but what many of their fellow Americans seem to hardly grasp, is that regardless of when it occurs, the expiration of the political clock will not be the end. Rather, it will mark the beginning of the most challenging and potentially calamitous phase of the Iraq war.
"There's an old military adage that the most dangerous and hazardous of all military maneuvers is a withdrawal of forces while in contact with the enemy. That's the operation all of us soldiers fear the most," retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former commandant of the Army War College, told National Journal.
Some experts argue that the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq will remove a major irritant and thus facilitate a resolution to the conflict, Scales noted, and others believe that a U.S. pullout could prompt chaos, massive bloodletting, and even genocide.
"And if anyone insists that they know which it will be," he said, "they are lying. The truth is, we don't have enough understanding or insight into the thousands of intangibles to know what forces will drive the dynamic inside Iraq once we begin pulling out."
Running Out the Clock