Dave at the Glittering Eye is making a very contrarian and I think an interestingly wrong case for staying in Iraq --- leaving would be more expensive than staying. I think he is wrong on several grounds including conflating one time costs with recurring expenses, conveiently looking at favorable to his argument time frames (2007 estimates regarding Phil Carter and post-invastion costs to 9/30/03) and estimates of the probability of significant armed resistance to a planned, announced and systemic withdrawal. I want to address the last one on basic incentive grounds.
Most of the groups that have been shooting at US forces in the past five years in Iraq can be roughly aligned into three factions; native-born Sunni Arabs who are some combination of revanchists, Ba'athists, nationalists, and local political actors, members/followers of the Sadrists currents and foreign jihadists. These three groups probably make up 90% to 95% of all shooters at US forces, and the first two groups of native born Iraqis make up 90% to 95% of these three groups. We have numerous examples of good Sadrist command and control where major fixed pieced urban battles can be turned on and off within hours of the word coming down from halfway across the country to do so, and we have seen the tribal networks of the CLCs and the Awakening movements exercise effective local control of their fighters as well. There are not too many freelancers who can survive for long if they don't have tacit support of their allies and co-belligerents.
And what has been one of the unifying threads between Sunni Arab insurgent groups that are transforming themselves into sanctioned CLCs so as to fight only a 1.5 front war instead of a 3 front war that they were facing in 2007 and the Sadrist currents?
They both want the US out as they think they can get better deals with the removal of a major veto player from the equation. And a good part of that deal is the division of spoils and reduction of the influence of the Dawa/SIIC axis in Iraqi formal or informal politics.
So in a scenario that Dave is promoting --- a planned, orderly withdrawal of heavy US combat units would local Sunni Arab or Sadrist commanders want to fight an expensive set piece battle that minimizes their advantages and maximizes US firepower advantages that are unconstrained by future COIN considerations when they will have already won one of their primary objectives?
I don't see the incentive here to waste men, waste munitions and waste money when there is a high probability of needing those men, arms and money for future fights. This same logic applied to the muhajadeen response to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Soviets were relatively unmolested as the muj were preparing to fight their local enemies of the Soviet backed government. I think that the cost of withdrawal under current conditions are signifcantly less than the costs that Dave is arguing as the probability of heavy resistance by either Sunni Arab forces or Sadrists units that would be observing withdrawing American units is very low.
No. I'm saying the recurring expenses are not being eliminated (since enough troops would be redeployed to Afghanistan to eat up any savings in recurring costs) and the one-time costs are being added on top of those costs.
ReplyDeleteI'm also not saying that our withdrawal will be under fire. I'm saying that Pat Lang, who has forgotten more about Iraq than either you or I will ever know, says that our withdrawal will be under fire.
ReplyDeleteI really cannot believe that supposed lefties and liberals are making a case for an extended presence in Iraq. It's almost laughable. You don't need to do that, you know, unless this is all just an exercise to assuage your own conscience; that the reality of extended US force presence is fixed and now you must find a way to convince yourself that this is necessary, because protesting it and calling it what it is, doesn't seem to be working.
ReplyDeleteThe Establishment has already conferred and we will be in Iraq for quite sometime. We're not leaving all those billion dollar bases, are we?
You really don't need to help them rationalize this giant imperial misprision. What you really appear to be doing is rationalizing long term deployment within your own mind about the indisputable fact that US forces will not be withdrawn for a very long time. You can talk about withdrawal "under fire" and wail at how dreadful that will be, as though occupation under fire is perfectly fine. The pretense of threat, just as we saw prior to the invasion, will be used to justify whatever needs justification. That narrative is sealed in the minds of the establishment press and punditocracy, which will continue to try to seal into the minds of the American public, and needs little assurance from putative opponents of the war.
Such backward walking on the issue of the Iraq occupation by so-called liberals is one of the more erie things demarcating this inglorious period of American history. Just stop it.