Mr. Moderate

Four days ago I wrote this comparison of the Vietnam War with the current Iraq War:

In the Vietnam War, we were fighting only one insurgency, parented by the North Vietnamese. And in Vietnam, we did not have Catholic and Bhuddist militias battling it out with each other and the US forces. In Iraq, we have at least four distinct insurgencies, plus at least one active terrorist organization and dozens of sectarian militias, all seeking to kill Americans and each other on a daily basis. The parents of the insurgencies are: the former Baathist leadership of Iraq, the Syrian government, the Iranian government, and the government of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government plays its role by supplying Imams trained in its Wahabbi version of Sunni Islam, each of whom comes with readily-available cash to fund militant activities by people who will agree to follow their lead. Both the Syrians and the Iranians are running traditional proxy wars similar to that run by the North Vietnamese government. And the former Iraqi Baathists have billions of dollars left over from the massive looting conducted by Saddam Hussein before he was deposed as President. That massive amount of money allows them to run their own insurgency without a separate “safe haven” nation to operate out of.

Furthermore, the Iraqi people do not want the American and British troops to remain in Iraq. That is the strong result of every public opinion poll ever taken. The only differences of opinion among the Iraqi people are exactly when the troops need to get out of Iraq. Well, from a BBC report, a former British commander is of the opinion that now is the time for an exit:

Insurgents in Iraq are right to try to force US troops out of the country, a former British army commander has said.

Gen Sir Michael Rose also told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that the US and the UK must “admit defeat” and stop fighting “a hopeless war” in Iraq.

Iraqi insurgents would not give in, he said. “I don’t excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting.”

Sir Michael has written a book drawing similarities between the tactics of insurgents and George Washington’s men in America’s War of Independence.

He told Newsnight: “As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said ‘if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms’.

“The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way.”

He said it was time to bring troops home.

“It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved.”

This meant the UK government would have to admit defeat, he added.

“The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened,” the ex-Bosnia UN chief said.

“The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened.

“The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq.”

Now, it should be noted that there is one large segment of Iraq where the US troops are welcome. That is in the Kurdish areas. And, since the Turks do not wish to see an independent Kurdish area arise out of the ashes of Iraq, it will be necessary for the US to keep troops in the Kurdish areas for the foreseeable future. But that is not an issue with the Kurds, who have welcomed their American liberators since the time of the First Gulf War.

It will most likely also be necessary to continue to protect Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and/or Jordan from any military threat arising out of our abandonment of the current insurgency war in Iraq. But presumably those countries would be given the option of either consenting to the redeployment of US military forces to areas within their borders or else they would state that they do not desire any such help, and in that case the Americans are justified in leaving them to their own defense.

Now is the time to begin a transition away from the war in the streets that the US troops have been engaged in. That is not the sort of war that the US troops are trained to execute. Instead, like the Vietnam War before it, the US troops can’t tell friend from foe, and so the US troops are responsible for the deaths of more innocents than enemies. Calling those deaths “collateral damage” does not really mask the fact that those are human beings who would have been alive but for the US military activity.

The only way to fight terrorists is when the population-at-large views them as criminals and willingly reports on suspicious activities. When the population-at-large views the terrorists as “freedom fighters,” then the very people whom our military forces are allegedly there to save are part of the terror conspiracy our forces are fighting. And that is why the Iraq War is now lost: the sympathies of the public-at-large are with the terrorists and not with the broadly-despised US military. And that is the point which Gen. Rose makes, above.

So again, it is necessary for the US forces to continue to protect the Kurds, as they have done since the First Gulf War. And it is necessary to offer any desired protections to allied nations which border Iraq, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. But beyond redeploying as might be needed to effect those protective shields, the US military needs to exit the Iraq conflict and allow the Iraqi people to confront their own internal violence in whatever way they deem necessary. Once things settle down, the United States can consider what further moves might be in the best interests of our own nation and our desire for security in that region of the world.