Cut and Run – To TRIUMPH!
“Triumph” overstates, but William Odom argues that “cutting and running” from Iraq is the essential first step to salvaging any of America’s worthwhile goals in the Middle East.
I have this nagging sense that I should beneath Odom’s bracing rhetoric the same “involve the international community” rhetoric I find pointless in Greg Djerreijian and Fareed Zakaria et al. Maybe it’s just Odom’s frankly tragic sense of life that is momentarily winning me over:
THE UNITED STATES upset the regional balance in the Middle East when it invaded Iraq. Restoring it requires bold initiatives, but “cutting and running” must precede them all. Only a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops — within six months and with no preconditions — can break the paralysis that now enfeebles our diplomacy. And the greatest obstacles to cutting and running are the psychological inhibitions of our leaders and the public.
Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president’s conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; creating democracy there; preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; making Israel more secure; not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain; and others.
But reality can no longer be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent bloody sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq. All of these things and more became unavoidable the day that U.S. forces invaded.
These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can’t be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.
The rest is at the link.
Comment by Nell —
November 1, 2006 @ 10:19 am
All of these things and more became unavoidable the day that U.S. forces invaded.
That’s the part Zakaria and Djerejian won’t accept. Odom’s been advocating withdrawal since at least April 2004, a bit of brutal honesty that put him pretty high on my list.
Comment by Nell —
November 1, 2006 @ 10:32 am
We’ve got a real Zeno’s paradox thang goin’ on in Iraq. Apparently it’s never going to be in a state of chaos/civil war. But it’s going to get very, very close without arriving:
A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos
Comment by Jim Henley —
November 1, 2006 @ 10:54 am
Sort of like Wile E. Coyote edges toward the canyon floor!
Comment by sean —
November 1, 2006 @ 9:50 pm
Could anyone plausibly dispute any of the following points?
1. Things are bad, very bad, in Iraq and will be that way so long as the U.S. has a presence there.
2. Things will be bad, very bad, in Iraq if the U.S. leaves, but it won’t get much press coverage in any publication that any of us can read.
3. Most people in the Mideast (except the Israelis) don’t like Americans, never have and never will. Nothing we can do can change that, just as nothing the Jews could do will eliminate or even much reduce anti-Semitism.
4. Given the foregoing, Mideast policy disputes are kind of pointless.
Comment by Doug M. —
November 2, 2006 @ 4:22 am
I took Odom’s Security class at Yale. We still exchange Christmas cards. I met a lot of smart people there, but he impressed me as one of the smartest.
Odom looks and talks like a good ol’ boy, subset cracker — he comes from somewhere near the tree line in eastern Tennessee. He could be some hillbilly rocking on a porch while the still drips moonshine… except for the faint glitter of posthuman hyperintelligence in his eyes.
He’s really, really smart. Math smart, tech smart, and people smart too. I would never try to pull one over on General Odom.
And there is a touch of hillbilly in his character. I mean this in a good way. I remember how he chuckled when discussing that odd provision in the Tennessee Constitution, guaranteeing the people the right to overthrow their government… for a former three-star general and head of the NSA, there’s a funny streak of libertarian. Not Hayek or the Cato Institute, mind you. More the Appalachian, stay-off-my-land-stranger variety. I would say Odom has a firm intuitive grasp of the fact that all politics is local, and nobody wants an outsider — never mind a foreigner — telling them what to do.
Odom’s been repeating the same message for going on three years now. Note that he was dubious about Iraq from the beginning, then switched to being harshly critical within the first year. I think the dubious came from “this is really a long shot, but as a former general and Republican I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt”; the harshness came when he (quickly) realized what a bunch of frigging idiots these people were.
About the only thing I’d critique in the article is this part:
“Third, the U.S. must informally cooperate with Iran in areas of shared interests. Nothing else could so improve our position in the Middle East. The price for success will include dropping U.S. resistance to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. This will be as distasteful for U.S. leaders as cutting and running, but it is no less essential. That’s because we do share vital common interests with Iran. We both want to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban (Iran hates both). We both want stability in Iraq (Iran will have influence over the Shiite Iraqi south regardless of what we do, but neither Washington nor Tehran want chaos). And we can help each other when it comes to oil: Iran needs our technology to produce more oil, and we simply need more oil.
“Accepting Iran’s nuclear weapons is a small price to pay for the likely benefits. Moreover, its nuclear program will proceed whether we like it or not. Accepting it might well soften Iran’s support for Hezbollah, and it will definitely undercut Russia’s pernicious influence with Tehran.”
On this one, I think Odom may be a bit /optimistic/ — he’s assuming Iran’s leaders are more or less rational, when in fact they seem to be about as obnoxiously bugfuck as our own leadership. Also, while I don’t much like Putin either, I catch a whiff of leftover Cold War Russophobia there.
Still, it’s a minor point. On the whole I think he’s dead right.
Doug M.
Comment by Alex —
November 2, 2006 @ 8:53 am
Doug-
Ahmadinejad may be irrational, but he’s a public figurehead who has only as much power as the unelected guys allow him to have.
Comment by Ruthless —
November 2, 2006 @ 11:29 am
Wasn’t it Powell’s “You break it. You bought it.” dictum that was the cutting and running cry in reverse that got us into this briar patch in the first place?
Comment by Doug M. —
November 2, 2006 @ 11:58 am
Alex, that’s true. But the unelected guys aren’t exactly paragons of coolly rational decisionmaking either.
BTW, did I mention that Odom was head of the NSA? Well, he was.
He’s sort of a Cryptonomicon character. But real!
Doug M.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
November 2, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
I don’t know how much of a figurehead Ahmadinejad really is — he came in on a real populist groundswell, which gave him a popular mandate the rest of the clerical mandarinate lacks. Iran’s economy has been doing horribly since he came to power, so it’s possible that his populist appeal has faded. But it’s also plausible that his US-baiting has been popular, too, and I don’t know how the two factors balance.
So I find it at least plausible that the unelected leadership is hesitant to provoke a showdown with the one guy who can really claim popular legitimacy — in reality things a conflict might not go as well for them as the org charts say they should.
Though Doug’s comment that A. doesn’t seem that rational really worries me. I had been kind of hoping that at least our adversaries would do the smart thing, because you get the biggest catastrophes (eg, WWI) when both sides are doing the dumb thing.
Comment by Jackmormon —
November 2, 2006 @ 1:46 pm
I get the impression that Ahmadinejad is trying to redefine–or at least push against the boundaries of the definition of–the role of the presidency in Iran. The BBC published this cool interactive guide to the Iranian political system: lots of weird leveraging opportunities in there. I keep hearing stories about A. trying to stack various councils with his people, or various Army institutions proclaiming personal loyalty, that make me think that A. has been fairly effective at the internal bureaucratic games.
Comment by Gary Farber —
November 2, 2006 @ 10:54 pm
“I have this nagging sense that I should beneath Odom’s bracing rhetoric the same ‘involve the international community’ rhetoric I find pointless in Greg Djerreijian and Fareed Zakaria et al.”
Possibly you might want to take another swing at this sentence?
(Apparently everyone else understood it, and it’s just me who doesn’t?)
Neel: “So I find it at least plausible that the unelected leadership is hesitant to provoke a showdown with the one guy who can really claim popular legitimacy — in reality things a conflict might not go as well for them as the org charts say they should.”
I’m extremely skeptical of that; I see no signs whatever that the Supreme Leader’s legitimacy is in any serious question in Iran (not, to be sure, that I have a sekrit spy network there; but if anyone has any actual evidence to point to to indicate otherwise, I’d like to see it).
If for some reason the Supreme Leader wanted to remove Ahmadinejad, I certainly can imagine that there might be some grumbling, but what can you, specifically, cite, Neel, to indicate that there would be more serious resistance that would actually challenge the rule of the Supreme Leader?
Comment by Nell —
November 3, 2006 @ 10:42 am
Gary: Insert ‘detect’ between ’should’ and ‘beneath’.
Comment by Hesiod —
November 3, 2006 @ 11:48 am
In Arizona, the Libertarian is helping George W. Bush.
Comment by Bill Woolsey —
November 4, 2006 @ 10:03 am
I am a bit puzzled by Doug M.’s critique of Odom’s statements regarding Iran.
Are you really saying that the Iranian regime is crazy so the U.S. must stop them from having the ability to make nuclear weapons?
Or is it that the Iranian regime is crazy so they won’t be interested in helping us leave a Shia dominated government in control of Iraq? (That they will instead prefer anti-Sunni bloodbaths and perhaps are itching for a fight with Turkey and/or Saudi Arabia, or whoever else the pessimists claim with intervene on the side of the Sunnis if the U.S. leaves?)
Iran is ruled by the same people who wanted a deal with the U.S. after 9-11.
Comment by Avram —
November 4, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
I understand that Ahmadinejad is also popular among the Revolutionary Guard (of which he used to be a member during the Iran-Iraq War).
Comment by Doug M. —
November 4, 2006 @ 2:52 pm
Bill Woolsey –
Fallacy of the excluded middle. It’s not an either/or.
Note that (as other posters have been pointing out) the current regime is not a monolith.
Doug M.
Comment by Bill Woolsey —
November 5, 2006 @ 8:02 am
Well, Doug M. You could have simply said, “both.” You believe that the U.S. must keep Iran from having nuclear weapons and you also believe that the Iranian regime would prefer a bloodbath in Iraq and is itching for war with Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
Why would you think that I thought your could have but one of those views?
My view is that the Iranian President is being used as a convenient boogyman by the neo-cons who are want war with Iran A.S.A.P. They are depending on most people being ignorant of Iranian politics.
AS for trying to appeal to internal Iranian politics… the conservative Iranians are going to revolt against their Pope because he isn’t conservative enough and won’t let them nuke Jerusalem or something…..
Just stick to hoping most Americans don’t have a clue.