Against Training

Stephen Biddle makes the point that while withdrawing some troops and leaving many behind to continue training makes a certain amount of political sense as a compromise, it's nonsense on the merits. If you're going to have a whole bunch of troops in the country, you need enough troops to make a difference. Withdrawing tens of thousands of Americans is only going to leave the tens of thousands who remain in a more dangerous and fundamentally untenable position. If we want to withdraw troops -- and we should -- we need to get essentially all the way out.

Defense Department photo by Corporal Samuel D. Corum, US Marine Corps.

Comments

If the ultimate goal is to train a national, non-sectarian Iraqi army which would have a monopoly on the use of force throughout the country, we should just forget about it. That’s a pipe dream; it’s not going to happen for at least a generation.

On the other hand, the approach that the US is following in Anbar, working with the locals to train local forces who guard their own neighborhoods, seems to be having some success. It seems to me that before leaving we ought to at least try some variant of this in other places as well, particularly the Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad.

Posted by RC | July 11, 2007 1:24 PM

Matt's right that once you start withdrawing, the inexorable logic tells you to go the whole hog. However, stating this up front means coming to terms with the fact that the mission has failed. If you still hold out hope that the mission may, somehow, succeed, then you can begin to justify not abandoning it completely.

The point of beginning a withdrawal is that you create a situation where there's an ever-growing gravitational pull to withdraw more and more, while at the same time you erode the necessity to stay in in order to justify the current deployment since you can't or won't admit that it's failed. If you only have 20,000 to 30,000 troops in-country, admitting it's all for nothing is easier than if you have 180,000 in country.

Put another way, starting withdrawal will create a slippery slope, only the good kind. As the size of the deployment goes down, it'll be easier and easier to admit that the mission failed. So if we can't make that admission up front, we create the conditions where we are forced to admit it down the road, with fewer and fewer deployed reasons to be stubborn.

Posted by jimBOB | July 11, 2007 1:26 PM

Question: What's the best way to prevent Exploding Civil War in Iraq, thousands more Iraqis deaths, Middle East Meltdown, $6/gallon gas at home, and a stab-in-the-back Republican victory in '08?

Answer: Nobody has a grip on any of this, except the stab-in-the-back victory, which can be prevented by staying in Iraq, at least for now.

Posted by ferd | July 11, 2007 2:11 PM

Matt, aren't you the one always talking about how a military solution is useless if it doesn't resolve political conflicts? Cuts both ways.

Posted by Senescent | July 11, 2007 2:13 PM

Word.

Posted by chuck | July 11, 2007 4:39 PM

I take back what I said above. Take a look at Matt's post "Looking Forward to Armageddon" below, and the even darker comment from Davis X. Machina.

Machina: "It's rather depressing to contemplate one of the nation's two major political parties is basically a protection racket -- "Nice country you got here. Shame if anything were to 'happen' to it."

Posted by ferd | July 12, 2007 3:41 PM