As those who’ve read Michael Crowley’s shrewd article on Barack Obama and Iraq, it’s far from clear that an Obama administration would, in fact, act expeditiously to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. It might, but then again it might not, and I actually suspect it’s something of a Schrodinger’s Cat situation where the candidate himself knows he best not think too hard about the question lest he end up alienating someone. But barring some dramatic change in the regional situation, we really ought to move expeditiously to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. How to get it done? Nick Beaudrot recommends supporting challengers who’ve embraced the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq:

It’s important to elect as may Democrats as possible who believe that they were sent to Washington to end the war, so that there’s sufficient pressure on the Democratic President that we don’t end up with some sort of semi-withdrawal where we’re still conducting some sort of significant mission in Iraq come 2010 or 2012.

Well I certainly hope that works. On the other hand, if congressional Democrats weren’t willing to force partisan enemy George W. Bush’s hand, it’s hard to imagine any kind of Democratic congress, no matter how bolstered with fresh liberal blood, forcing the hand of a President Obama who’d get more benefit of the doubt on this stuff. Realistically, whatever levers exist will probably have to act more directly on the White House. And, no, I’m not sure what the answer is.

I will say that the legitimate strategic arguments aside, there’s a perfectly good cynical argument for leaving, namely that if you run and win an electoral mandate to say “Bush screwed this up and we should leave” and then we leave and then the situation looks like a mess, that’s on Bush as per the election results. But if you stay and kinda sorta leave but really keep a lot of folks around and say “I have a better plan for Iraq” and then the situation looks like a mess, that’s on you as per your claims to have a smart plan for Iraq. Now I certainly hope the next president will consider substance as well as politics, but inevitably he (or she) will consider politics as well as substance, so anyone who thinks leaving is strategically correct had probably best be able to muster a political argument as well.

Rumors of war are flying around, as folks say the Georgian government is preparing an assault on Abkhazia on the assumption that “the Georgians expect the Russian troops currently in Abkhazia to stand down when the invasion begins.” This is a reminder that, at a minimum, any thought of bringing Georgia into NATO should be made contingent on some kind of stable resolution of the issues in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

You don’t make absolute security guarantees to a country in Georgia’s position unless there’s some overwhelming strategic rationale for doing so — just to be nice or make the point that we don’t approve of Vladimir Putin isn’t a good enough reason to get mixed up in these particular separatist conflicts.

One of several respects in which I think our dialogue on Iraq has gone astray is that “Iran is causing problems in Iraq” has come to be coded as a kind of right-wing talking point. The extent to which it’s true is contested, but the general sense is that insofar as it’s true this makes the hawkish stance on Iraq more persuasive. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Bush and McCain have committed us to strategic objectives in the Persian Gulf region that include having a hostile relationship with Iran, and creating an Iraqi state that will be an ally of the United States in our regional policies. This isn’t really an acceptable outcome for Iran. America doesn’t want an Iranian-allied Iraq, but an Iranian-allied Canada would be unacceptable on a whole more profound level. In response to this dynamic, I think it would be coherent to say that we should basically just leave Iraq and not worry too much about it. It would also be coherent to say that we should make a stronger effort at a diplomatic rapprochement with Iran that would make our goals in Iraq compatible. But neither of those are options available to the hawks. Given that, the main alternative would be to deny that Iran is actually capable of frustrating our objectives in Iraq.

But according to the administration, they are capable of doing so — they’re behind all sorts of malfeasance that, we’re told, is responsible for our casualty trends heading in the wrong direction. At the same time, accepting even the most alarmist accounts of Iranian involvement in Iraq, the Iranians are investing many fewer resources in Iraq than is, say, the United States. And though the U.S.A. has more resources to expend, the Iraqi theater is also much more significant to Iran than it is to the United States. Maybe it’s really true that the surge was working (or at least that Iran thought it was working) and so Iran turned the faucet up a bit more and now suddenly it’s not working. That would seem to augur very poorly for the future of our mission there since surely the Iranians aren’t at a point of maximum commitment yet, and we’re actually past our maximum point currently and attempting to de-surge our forces to a more sustainable level.

SecDef Robert Gates admits that U.S. military deaths are back on the upswing in Iraq. McClatchy reports that “April has been the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since September, with 44 troops killed, compared to 39 in March and 29 in February.” Spencer Ackerman offers analysis:

To make a calmer, more substantive point about what we’re seeing in Iraq. The rhythm of any protracted war goes something like this: you do stuff; the enemy responds; you adjust; so does he; and on and on until a point of decision is reached. An Air Force colonel named John Boyd once coined a useful (if jargony) term for this: The OODA Loop, where “OODA” stands for “Observation / Orientation / Decision / Action.” Boyd reasoned that the initiative in war goes to he who can achieve a faster OODA Loop than his enemy, and who can disrupt his enemy’s Loop.

At the risk of saying something disputable, from 2003 to mid-2007, the insurgencies in Iraq had faster OODA Loops than the U.S. did. That’s not to say that there weren’t discrete tactical successes: there were, and lots of them. But those developments are coterminous with the concept of the Loop — you adjust and inflict pain on the enemy; but the enemy does so faster and more powerfully. Once Operation Phantom Thunder began in the late spring of 2007, lots of people on the right and on the fake-left declared, without using Boyd’s term, that Petraeus and Odierno had finally broken the enemy’s Loop.

Spencer thinks instead that it was merely disrupted but “the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed.” I’m not 100 percent happy with that characterization (more on why later), but I think it does capture the important point that in war a successful tactical shift is no guarantee of strategic victory since other players get to change tactics as well. A broader point I would make is that one thing I was reminded of while researching and writing Heads in the Sand is exactly how many times we’ve won the war in Iraq.

Today we’re celebrating “Mission Accomplished” day but that was only one of several occasions on which war skeptics were thought to have been decisively refuted. A similar attitude pervaded the mainstream in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein, then again to a lesser extent when the occupation was declared officially over and Iyad Allawi put in charge, and then again to a huge extent during the “Arab Spring”, and then to a lesser extent when Ibrahim Jafari was forced out of office in favor of Nouri al-Maliki, and now again to a greater extent as a result of the “surge”-related decline in violence.

In every instance, though, the optimists have ultimately proven wrong because the United States has continued to pursue basically unachievable strategic goals in Iraq. Sometimes when the situation gets desperate, the U.S. government has proven capable of shifting our posture in order to better-accommodate Iraqi realities (see, e.g., Bush giving in to Ayatollah Sistani’s demand for elections) but instead of building on these successes by opting for strategic retrenchment, success tends to breed a new round of self-defeating hubris.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jason T. Bailey

Robert Kaplan does an interesting Current on Colombia noting that “Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought — and is winning — a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights. Nuri al Maliki and Hamid Karzai could learn from him.” I think the first two sentences here are persuasive, the final one less so. I’d say rather that we could learn a lot about Iraq based on how fitful and difficult progress has been in Colombia.

Suppose Spanish-language skill were as widespread in the United States as Arabic-language skill is. And suppose there were a large religious difference between Americans and Colombians. And suppose that Colombia contained a large, linguistically and ethnically distinct minority group that had been waging an armed struggle on-and-off for decades for its independence. Map a sectarian division among Colombia’s Spanish-speaking Catholics onto the situation. And have it be that U.S. policy is widely blamed for first 12 years of severe economic deprivation and then for creating the current situation of chaos.

Well, that’d be a lot tougher. And yet for all the advantages we have in Colombia (to say nothing of the fact that the relatively small burden on the U.S. economy and military makes it much more reasonable to consider a long-term engagement) the situation has hardly been unproblematic over the years and it’s not truly clear that it’ll work. Rather than giving us confidence, in short, that we can make Iraq succeed, I think a consideration of Colombia should give us pause.

Some contemporaneous coverage from CNN five years ago:

“Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it,” said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968. [...] The landing came just hours before Bush is to tell the nation that major combat operations in Iraq have ended. The speech will be delivered from the carrier’s flight deck at 9 p.m. EDT.

The picture-perfect landing, covered live on television, marked the latest effort by the White House to showcase Bush as commander in chief. The president’s address about the success in Iraq comes as Bush’s domestic agenda is under renewed fire by Democrats, especially by a flock of White House hopefuls.

Since that time, thousands of Americans have died, who knows how many more have been wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, and millions of Iraqis have been killed or displaced. Naturally, current policy calls for us to stay in Iraq, possibly fighting for decades in the hopes that peace eventually breaks out on terms that allow us to establish a permanent military presence there. Makes sense to me.