veiled4allah: Iraq: squaring the circle

A lot of the debate over whether the U.S. should withdraw or "stay the course" in Iraq seems to miss a couple of points. Prime among them: we may not have any choice

The reserves are "broken" (see also here), recruiting is plummeting (1, 2, 3, 4, etc), and those who are already in are getting out any way they can (not to mention this way *cough* - and see also these articles about the increasingly broken army: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).

The current troop presence in iraq is unsustainable (emphasis added):

Even more importantly, the human costs to the all-volunteer Army, especially, have been staggering. The Army currently has 17 brigades deployed in Iraq, from an active force of 33 brigades, which should grow to 44 brigades as the result of internal Army restructuring. Most reserve component brigades have already been called up and deployed. The result is that active duty soldiers can expect to be deployed every other year to Iraq for a year long combat tour, unless either the size of the American commitment to Iraq is reduced or the size of the active force is significantly increased. And even maintaining the force at its current size is likely to be challenging. While the active force is meeting its retention objectives, recruiting for the Army and Marine Corps is lagging behind both for the active and the reserve component. Ultimately, if the current combat levels in Iraq continue, this recruiting gap is unlikely to be closed by more financial incentives.

- General Wesley Clark (ret.), April 6, 2005

We are getting toward the end of our capacity. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps are incapable of sustaining the effort. Our recruiting is coming apart. The National Guard is going to unravel. - General Barry McCaffrey (ret.), June 22, 2005

See also 1, 2.

And even the troop levels we have in Iraq now are not enough. If we have to make do with even fewer troops in the future - and we will without a draft - we may simply not be able to do anything effectively.

Another factor overlooked by the "stay the course" proponents is whether in fact the U.S. is the cause of the insurgency or at least a factor making it worse. As the old saying goes, when you're in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. If our presence in Iraq is making things worse, then we need to leave, not continue on to satisfy our national pride.

It's true that by this point, the situation may be so bad in Iraq that even our withdrawal wouldn't fix things. But, as I said above, we may not have any choice. We may be able to stay six months or a year or even two years, but certainly not as long as it would take to genuinely stabilize Iraq (assuming that this is even possible for the U.S. to do as the cause of the problem). It's not going to be any better if we withdraw a year from now instead of today, and it may be even worse. I think we need to accept that whether we leave now or later, we're leaving behind a broken country and it's going to get worse the longer we put it off.

Despite how grim these choices are, some people are trying to come up with a "third way": plans that recognize that the U.S. cannot stay much longer but attempt to respond to the objections against "cutting and running" or the consequences of catastrophic failure in Iraq. They do this by proposing to bring somebody else in to replace the U.S., hopefully somebody that won't be so hated and may be able to accomplish something good.

For two years, Dennis Kucinich has been proposing to replace the U.S. troops with UN peacekeepers, an idea recently taken up by Juan Cole. A similar idea was proposed by Wes Clark (1, 2), to bring in a peacekeeping force composed of troops from Arab or Muslim countries.

These plans may not be practicable - there's no guarantee that any of these countries would want to take over from the U.S. or that they would actually go over better in Iraq - but they are attempts to find a solution that recognizes the reality that we can't continue, while trying to deal with the aftermath of withdrawal in a moral manner. For this reason, I support all such plans and think we ought to give them our best efforts.