One of Barack Obama’s best lines of the campaign was the one about us needing to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting into Iraq. It’s short, to the point and true. But the campaign is over now, and in less than seven weeks Obama is going to be in charge. He’s making the right statements, and there are hopeful signs, but getting us out of Iraq is going to be bloody and expensive; and it’s going to require a lot more courage and fortitude than getting in ever did.
Iraq is a mess, a giant basket case of a country with sharp internal divisions and heavily armed militias underlying them. The central government is nominally legitimate, but it’s also dominated by only one of the three main factions, the Shiites. (Who themselves are no monolithic bloc.) In the north the Kurds have been very clear that they want little to do with their bumptious cousins to the south. If it weren’t for the twin obstacles of our objection and a threatened Turkish invasion they might have declared independence already. In and around Baghdad, the Sunnis exist in a kind of low violence detente with the Shiite government, but whether they are on the path to genuine reconciliation or merely biding their time until American forces depart is an open question. It has been the Sunnis, after all, who traditionally dominated the country.
Into this maw steps Barack Obama, newly minted choice of the American people, who won the nomination and the election promising to end the Iraq War. Or, at least, American involvement in it. The question isn’t whether or not he wants to get us out; the real question is whether or not he has the iron will it’s going to take to get us out while the war itself continues.
There is a very good chance that as we begin to remove ourselves the factions which have for the moment allowed the violence to lull (though by no means cease) will go back to each other’s throats with gusto. Once we’re on our way out the use of American troops and American planes as the daily tools of government enforcement will decrease. It would be nice if Iraqi forces could seamlessly replace ours, but that seems unlikely, especially at first. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
When that happens, and it’s very likely that it will at some point between January 20th and the day we finally get out, the pressure to postpone or delay will be enormous. The armchair generals, and some of the real ones, will wail that if we just stay to get this or that Iraqi unit up to snuff, or wait one more Friedman Unit until we’ve pacified this province or another, things will be better once we’re finished. There are far too many people (government officials, think tankers, professional pundits in every medium) who see the Iraq War as a bungled war, a disaster brought about by the poor execution of Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush Administration incompetents, instead of the doomed project it always was. They will howl long and loud (it’s what they’re best at) that delay can be the correct course of action, that with the right people in charge a better outcome is now possible.
They will come in the guise of responsibility, of saying that there is still hope and that we owe it to someone (the Iraqis, our dead, ourselves) to finish the job right. Statistics will be quoted, historical examples dredged up, changes in the level of violence (up or down) will be cited, all in the service of staying. This must be resisted at all costs. It leads only to a longer war and all that means is more blood spilled, more limbs lost, more lives destroyed, on all sides.
As President, Obama will be at the center of this. He is going to feel the pressure, possibly from his own subordinates; he is going to read the casualty reports; he is going to have to bear the burden of responsibility for not throwing new lives after lost ones. But he’s sharp; sharp enough to realize that if he sets as his Iraq goal anything other than our exit then it will become his war, not Bush the Younger’s. That isn’t something he wants, especially as he’s busy laying his hands all over Afghanistan.
Obama has no reason, practical or political, not to get us out with all haste, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy; the opposite is far more likely. Americans are going to die, Iraqis are going to die, huge sums of money will be stolen and or lost and all the while there will be a steady invective of opposition; letting go of this war is going to be very difficult. It will require far more determination, conviction and courage that getting in ever did; then the costs were imaginary, now they are real.
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[...] a bit longer in certain places, you know, if the Iraqis want us to. This is precisely the kind of malingering attitude that remains the only real threat to our long needed exit from Iraq. American foot dragging has [...]