We've now been at war intermittently with Iraq for almost 20 years, and with Afghanistan for 30. It adds up to nearly half a century of experience, all bad.
Yet an expanding crew of Washington-based opiners is calling for President Obama to extend the misery, urging the administration to alter its plans -- negotiated in the last months of the George W. Bush administration -- for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. Pulling out on schedule, they argue, would virtually assure civil violence and ethnic bloodletting in Iraq.
According to these doomsayers, our withdrawal as scheduled would encourage Shiite militias to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs would increase -- bringing more violence. And the group Al Qaeda in Iraq would move to fill any power void with its own destructive agenda.
So far, the administration and the military say they still hope to pull out on schedule. But last month, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. military has drawn up contingency plans for delaying the agreed-upon withdrawal of all combat troops from the country in August. And national security writer Tom Ricks reported on Foreign Policy's website that the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. Ray Odierno, has officially requested that a combat brigade remain in the troubled northern city of Kirkuk after the deadline.
Meanwhile, a chorus of the usual pundits -- "warrior journalists," as Tom Hayden calls them -- are singing ever-louder warnings that the greatest of all dangers would be premature withdrawal. Ricks, for instance, recommended in the New York Times that the Obama administration should "find a way" to keep a "relatively small, tailored force" of 30,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq "for many years to come." (Those numbers, oddly enough, bring to mind the 34,000 U.S. troops that, according to Ricks in his 2006 bestseller, "Fiasco," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz projected as the future U.S. garrison in Iraq in the weeks before the invasion of 2003.)
