Cut and Run

Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best

interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region…Our military has done everything asked of them, the US cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home. (John Murtha)

Pulling out of Iraq was not a politically correct thing until recently. One of the reasons that John Kerry lost his bid for the White House was his proclamation to pull the American army out of Iraq and seek a peaceful solution. Majority of the Democrat congressmen and senators including John Kerry had voted for the war and were placed in embarrassing position later on to declare army withdrawal from Iraq.

But after Murtha’s call for pulling out of Iraq, political analysts are falling over each other suggesting the virtues of bringing the troops home. So much so, some details of planning of the army command for a gradual pull-out have started seeing the light of print in spite of extreme secrecy that the administration has clamped on all its policies and plans. Even the president and the vice president were not vitriolic in their comments against Murtha’s call although they wouldn’t accept it and stuck to their original (although somewhat subtly modified) position of doing what it takes to fight terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. In fact, both of them were respectful of Murtha’s sincerity, patriotism and his war record.

John Murtha is a Democratic Representative from Pennsylvania. He is 73 years old. He “joined the Marines for the Korean War, came back to go to college on the GI Bill of Rights and joined the Marines again for Vietnam. He is a retired Colonel in the Reserves, a citizen soldier who stayed close to the armed services in life and in Congress, where for 30 years he has been on committees having to do with defense,” (Murtha’s Finest Moment, Yahoo!News).

According to Yahoo News quoted above, Murtha said, “I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the war…And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices); being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.”

There already existed a broad-base of the people in the US who had questioned the advisability of Iraq invasion but they were shouted down by the hawks who wanted to topple down Saddam Hussein at all costs. Removal of Saddam had been the order of the top most priority to them and they naively believed that every thing would be hunky dory once the tyrant’s head was put in the basket. Cooler consideration and assessment however pointed in the opposite direction. No matter how despicable and undesirable Saddam was, he was a secular ruler who had muzzled the religious radical elements from causing a civil war in Iraq. President Bush Sr. had this insight when he restrained from toppling Saddam in the first Gulf War.

Consequently the anti-war elements had lost to the hawks and the US rushed to attack Iraq. Naively, the president proclaimed a thumbs-up “Mission Accomplished” after the downfall of Baghdad. The real war, however, began after the US occupation of Iraq. When it became apparent to the majority of the Americans that the US was fighting a kind of “endless” war against a “faceless” enemy, they started asking difficult questions about the conduct of war, which the administration had evaded so far. Cindy Sheehan’s protest was a small expression of the larger dissatisfaction that Americans felt about the war. Scooter Libby’s indictment and Karl Rove’s probable implication in some shady practices further eroded the credibility of President Bush’s administration. His popularity ratings started plummeting.

The clamor to “cut and run” became louder. The opponents of war are more and more convinced that the situation in Iraq is more similar to Vietnam than different from it. And it is equally “un-winnable” and unrewarding. They claim that Iraq war has increased the potential for world-wide terrorism than reducing it. Iraq was not a terrorist country before the war and there were no al-Qaeda bases, overt or covert, in Iraq; now it has become a fertile breeding ground for terrorism. If the Iraq war is indeed increasing terrorism, what is the purpose of fighting it, they question. And there is no ready answer for such questions.

The hawks’ position is eloquently described by Melvin R. Laird who was the defense secretary in President Nixon’s administration and one of the architects of the gradual pull-out from Vietnam, as follows: “Our troops are not fighting there only to preserve the right of Iraqis to vote. They are fighting to preserve modern culture, Western democracy, the global economy, and all else that is threatened by the spread of barbarism in the name of religion. That is the message and the mission. It is not politically correct nor is it comforting. But it is the truth…” (Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005).

Americans heard this truth for quite some time but it doesn’t seem to matter much to them now. What is more important is a definite plan for drawdown of American troops in Iraq ending with complete pull-out. They argue that the war in Iraq is over and what our troops are doing there now is the task of “nation building.” This task belongs to the Iraqis; they should take over from the American army and do it themselves.

There is an implicit risk in such a hasty action. President Bush has described it in so many of his public speeches. In one of them recently, he said, “They (insurgents) want to break our will in Iraq, so that we leave and they can turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven for terror, a place where they can plot and plan against America and freedom-loving countries around the world.” He has said it so many times that it has lost its efficacy particularly when the faith of the American people in his administration has greatly eroded recently. Murtha’s pleas for pull-out have grasped their attention. Mutha said that Bush simply “went about it the wrong way…We cannot prevail in this war as it is going today. We either have to mobilize or we have to get out..”

Murtha’s proclamation seems to be taking effect on the administration as well. Although she didn’t give ant timetable for gradual pull-out from Iraq, Condoleeza Rice’s latest statement is much less aggressive than in the past. She said, “The president has said that as soon as Iraqi forces are ready, we want to see a reduction in our own forces. And I think those days are going to be coming fairly soon when Iraqis are going to be more and more capable of carrying out the functions to secure their own future. I do not think that American forces need to be there in the numbers that they are now…for very much longer, because Iraqis are stepping up.”

This is a prelude reminiscent of the retreat from Vietnam.