Why immediate withdrawal would be a disaster
Submitted by larry on September 6, 2005 - 6:04pm.
News and Links
Garance over at TAPPED has an excellent writeup on General Clark's speech and Q&A session at the New America Foundation's Terrorism, Security, and America's Purpose conference. Garance writes:
Listening to Clark speaking it was clear that his time as a presidential candidate has left him much savvier about how the American public gets its information -- from headlines, the first paragraphs of newspaper stories, and the first two minutes of the evening news, as he put it -- but that Clark remains, at heart, a military man whose major commitment is to what he thinks is in America's best interests, rather than to partisan politics. It was also clear that the gap between the so-called strategic class and the Democratic base when it comes to the question of withdrawing from Iraq is one that won't vanish any time soon. Clark laid out, in the Q & A session, the best case against immediate withdrawal I've yet heard, and laid it out in nuts-and-bolts operational terms. It's a scenario that those who back immediate withdrawal would do well to consider.
...Given that Clark had a pretty clear-headed view going into the war of what operational realities might be like -- just reread this 2002 USA Today op-ed if you want an example -- it might also be wise to listen to him now.
Read the whole post here.
My post is:
A Bloody Retreat
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/6/20057/42087
Basically, I just posted selections from the article with brief commentary.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/6/20129/55838
and there's another diary there worth paying attention to:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/6/204258/6220
I was also in the gut-level "get our troops out now" camp. Therefore I am all the more grateful to hear General Clark's brief & level-headed explanation of the likely fallout of such a maneuver. I defer to his clear judgement.
Also, my mom - Andzia- you may find her blogging here once in awhile, feels exactly the same way- We want out, we never wanted to be in- but, we trust General Clark to know the right thing to do.
So it's crucial that General Clark's words of wisdom continue to find their way to the public's ear, because we have to do some learning here. There is going to be an incredible movement back towards America's introspection & isolationism in certain ways as a result of Katrina, but even so we must change course & engage with the greater world.
Some of the prominent bloggers seem to not take Wes seriously. First there is Atrios - who says no one is asking people to get out NOW.
Immediate Withdrawal
I have no doubt that Wesley Clark is right when he suggests that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq could be a military catastrophe. But, I think there's a little disconnect about the meaning of "immediate withdrawal." Most people throwing around the phrase don't really think it means "turn tail and RUN RUN RUN AS FAST YOU CAN" out of Iraq. What they mean is we should set a timetable for getting out of Iraq as soon as we reasonably can. Certainly the meaning of the phrase "as soon as we reasonably can" is subject to debate, but I don't really think "getting out as fast as we can even if it means we incur massive casualties on the way out" is what anyone really has in mind.
Then there is Matt Yglesias at Tapped.
IMMEDIACY AND FUTILITY. Two points in response to Garance's post on Wesley Clark and exiting Iraq. The first thing to say is to echo Atrios' point that "immediate withdrawal" from Iraq in the sense that Clark is using the phrase is a strawman. Obviously it would be impractical to withdraw immediately if by "immediately" you mean something like "this afternoon" or "tomorrow morning." The result would just be chaos and get more people killed than keeping them there does.
What people are calling for is the immediate announcement of a withdrawal schedule. The precise details of the schedule would need to be determined in part by military logistics. My preference would be for it also to be pegged to an objective date on the Iraqi political calendar. The forthcoming elections under the new constitution seems like a reasonable marker to me; troops would be leaving because they could turn things over to a legitimate Iraqi political authority.
Beyond that, one of the disadvantages folks who agree with me face is that we're too honest to deny that there's a very good chance that bad things will happen after we leave Iraq. Our point isn't to deny that. It's to deny that things can be made any better by staying. I would like to believe that Clark (or Joe Biden or whomever) has an awesome plan for turning the situation around in Iraq, but he just doesn't. Indeed, by the time of yesterday's conference he'd already dropped one plank from his recent Washington Post op-ed outlining a plan for the country -- a comically impractical scheme to recruit 10,000 Arab-Americans to serve as translators in Mesopotamia. What's left are pseudo-ideas like trying harder to broker a compromise between Iraq's factions. But at the end of the day, compromising is something only Iraqis can do. With a good compromise, they can make it out of this situation alright, with or without the Marines by their side. Without one, all the Marines we have can't save the day.
--Matthew Yglesias
We need to think about how to respond to these people. They are lumping Wes in with Biden and Hillary.
However there was a good response from Garance Franke-Ruta
which you can find on Tapped here.
are world-reknown military strategists? Give me a break. How pompous of them to believe they know more than Clark about Iraq - or anything else for that matter.
Why?
These words unnerved me when Wes first used them in the the discussion a couple weeks ago at the old CCN. I was one of those who was ready to pull out now, that it was too late. Until I saw this phrase. These are the words and this is the speech we need to use every time we talk to the "pull out now" crowd. I just sent this to Bernie Ward at KGO in San Fran. I've been trying to make him understand why not now, and..... why our General for a couple weeks now. Thanks for posting this, Larry.