Ripples of Retreat
Dark predictions for a post-withdrawal world.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The present Washington parlor game is to argue over the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.
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In fact, the military of the United States has never abandoned an entire theater of operations in its history.
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In truth, this country has never quite experienced anything like the French collapse in 1940 or its precipitous withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, or the implosion of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, much less the more rapid backpedaling of entire German army groups in 1944 on both the Western and Eastern fronts.
What would be the consequences of such a novel experience? Who knows? But the Left is probably correct — cf. the July 8 editorial in the New York Times — that we could probably redeploy without significant casualties. And it is likewise prescient to anticipate that mass killings in Iraq would probably follow — if not a Cambodia-like holocaust, at least something akin to the gruesome fate of the Harkis, those Algerians loyal to France, but left behind to be disemboweled after the French flight across the Mediterranean.
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What would the effect be of all this televised carnage and chaos on the United States? Antiwar critics would turn on a dime — disclaiming their prior assertions that our presence ipso facto had been the chief cause of the violence in Iraq. Instead, when the mass beheadings of female reformers and serial shootings of “collaborators” appeared on our screens, American and European leftists would almost immediately blame our fickleness for the carnage.
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A second effect would be a sort of psychological devastation of the U.S. military, particularly the army.
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In other words, an exhausted American public and a defeated U.S. military would not for some time be either willing or capable to face another enemy...
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Militaries that are beaten and flee take decades to reconstitute and regroup. Command, the mood of the rank-and-file, an army’s self perception — all that is recast in the shadow of recrimination, no more capable of quick resurgence than a boxer recapturing the championship after a surprised, terrible beating.
Indeed, even after the five-year withdrawal from Vietnam, the American military took twenty years to regain its own confidence.
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In fact, “redeployment” is a euphemism for flight from the battlefield. And we should no more expect an al Qaeda that won in Iraq to stop from pressing on to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia than we should imagine that a defeated U.S. military could rally and hold the line in the Gulf.
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In essence, the American military would be reconstituted for a generation — and recognized as such by our enemies — as a two-pronged force of air and sea power. The army at best would stay capable of fighting non-existent conventional wars but acknowledged as incapable of putting down increasingly frequent insurgencies. If Vietnam, Beirut, or Mogadishu left doubt as to the seriousness of American guarantees, Iraq would confirm that it is a dangerous thing to ally oneself with an American government and military. Aside from realignment in the Middle East, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines would have to make the necessary “readjustments.”
The “surge” would be our high-water mark, a sort of 21st-century Pickett’s charge, after which skilled retreat, consolidation, holding the line, and redeployment would be the accepted mission of American arms.
It is not easy securing Iraq, but if we decide to quit and “redeploy,” Americans should at least accept that the effort to stabilize Iraq was a crushing military defeat, that our generation established a precedent of withdrawing an entire army group from combat operations on the battlefield, and that the consequences will be better known even to our enemies than they are to us.
Pertinent Links:
1) Ripples of Retreat
Friday, July 20, 2007
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