[Vision2020] Pullout Not 'Apocalyptic'

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (July 18, 2007) Spokesman Review -

Wayne White, a former deputy director of Near East division of the State
Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau

"White [Wayne White, a former deputy director of Near East division of the
State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau], speaking at a recent
symposium on Iraq, addressed the possibility of unpalatable withdrawal
consequences by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's famous statement about
democracy. 'I posit that withdrawal from Iraq is the worst possible option,
except for all the others.'"

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Pullout not 'apocalyptic' 
Expert: Iraq scenario 'ugly,' likely to divide country
Inside
Senators pull all-nighter to debate troop withdrawal amendment/A3

Karen Deyoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post
July 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - If U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future,
three developments would be likely to unfold. Majority Shiites would drive
Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq
would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would
solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq
would effectively become three separate nations.

That was the conclusion reached in recent "war games" exercises conducted
for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. "I honestly
don't think it will be apocalyptic," said Anderson, who has served in Iraq
and now works for a major defense contractor. But "it will be ugly."

In making the case for a continued U.S. troop presence, President Bush has
offered far more dire forecasts, arguing that al-Qaida or Iran - or both -
would take over Iraq after a "precipitous withdrawal" of U.S. forces.
Al-Qaida, he said recently, would "be able to recruit better and raise more
money from which to launch their objectives" of attacking the U.S. homeland.
War opponents in Congress counter that Bush's talk about al-Qaida is
overblown fear-mongering and that nothing could be worse than the present
situation.

Increasingly, the Washington debate over when U.S. forces should leave is
centering on what would happen once they do. The U.S. military, aware of
this political battlefield, has been quietly exploring scenarios of a
reduced troop presence, performing role-playing exercises and studying
historical parallels. Would the Iraqi government find its way, or would the
country divide along sectarian lines? Would al-Qaida take over? Would Iran?
Would U.S. security improve or deteriorate? Does the answer depend on when,
how and how many U.S. troops depart?

Some military officers contend that, regardless of whether Iraq breaks apart
or outside actors seek to take over after a U.S. pullout, ever greater
carnage is inevitable. 

"The water-cooler chat I hear most often . is that there is going to be an
outbreak of violence when we leave that makes the (current) instability look
like a church picnic," said an officer who has served in Iraq.

However, just as few envisioned the long Iraq war, now in its fifth year, or
the many setbacks along the way, there are no firm conclusions regarding the
consequences of a reduction in U.S. troops. A senior administration official
closely involved in Iraq policy imagines a vast internecine slaughter as
Iraq descends into chaos but cautions that it is impossible to know the
outcome. "We've got to be very modest about our predictive capabilities,"
the official said.

In April of last year, the Army and Joint Forces Command sponsored a war
game called Unified Quest 2007 at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. It
assumed the partition of an "Iraq-like" country, said one player, retired
Army Col. Richard Sinnreich, with U.S. troops moving quickly out of the
capital to redeploy in the far north and south. "We have obligations to the
Kurds and the Kuwaitis, and they also offer the most stable and secure
locations from which to continue," he said.

"Even then, the end-of-game assessment wasn't very favorable" to the United
States, he said.

Anderson, the retired Marine, has conducted nearly a dozen Iraq-related war
games for the military over the past two years, many premised on a U.S.
combat pullout by a set date - leaving only advisers and support units - and
concluded that partition would result. The games also predicted that Iran
would intervene on one side of a Shiite civil war and would become bogged
down in southern Iraq.

T.X. Hammes, another retired Marine colonel, said that an extended Iranian
presence in Iraq could lead to increased intervention by Saudi Arabia and
other Sunni states on the other side. 

"If that happens," Hammes said, "I worry that the Iranians come to the
conclusion they have to do something to undercut . the Saudis." Their best
strategy, he said, "would be to stimulate insurgency among the Shiites in
Saudi Arabia."

In a secret war game conducted in December at an office building near the
Pentagon, more than 20 participants from the military, the CIA, the State
Department and the private sector spent three days examining what might
unfold if the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group were implemented.

One question involved how Syria and Iran might respond to the U.S.
diplomatic outreach proposed by the bipartisan group, headed by former
Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H.
Hamilton, D-Ind. The gamers concluded that Iran would be difficult to engage
because its divided government is incapable of delivering on its promises.
Role-players representing Syria did engage with the U.S. diplomats, but
linked helping out in Baghdad to a lessening of U.S. pressure in Lebanon.

The bottom line, one participant said, was "pretty much what we are seeing"
since the Bush administration began intermittent talks with Damascus and
Tehran: not much progress or tangible results.

Amid political arguments in Washington over troop departures, U.S. military
commanders on the ground stress the importance of developing a careful and
thorough withdrawal plan. Whatever the politicians decide, "it needs to be
well-thought-out and it cannot be a strategy that is based on 'Well, we need
to leave,' " Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, a top U.S. commander in Iraq,
said Friday from his base near Tikrit.

War supporters and opponents in Washington disagree on the lessons of the
departure most deeply imprinted on the American psyche: the U.S. exit from
Vietnam. "I saw it once before, a long time ago," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,
a Vietnam veteran and presidential candidate, said last week of an early
Iraq withdrawal. "I saw a defeated military, and I saw how long it took a
military that was defeated to recover."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., also a White House hopeful, finds a
different message in the Vietnam retreat. Saying that Baghdad would become
"Saigon revisited," he warned that "we will be lifting American personnel
off the roofs of buildings in the Green Zone if we do not change policy, and
pretty drastically."

What is perhaps most striking about the military's simulations is that its
post-drawdown scenarios focus on civil war and regional intervention and
upheaval rather than the establishment of an al-Qaida sanctuary in Iraq.

For Bush, however, that is the primary risk of withdrawal. "It would mean
surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaida," he said in a news conference
last week. "It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific
scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in
Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan." If U.S. troops leave too
soon, Bush said, they would probably "have to return at some later date to
confront an enemy that is even more dangerous."

Withdrawal would also "confuse and frighten friends and allies in the region
and embolden Syria and especially Iran, which would then exert its influence
throughout the Middle East," the president said.

Bush is not alone in his description of the al-Qaida threat should the
United States leave Iraq too soon. "There's not a doubt in my mind that
Osama bin Laden's one goal is to take over the Kingdom of the Two Mosques
(Saudi Arabia) and re-establish the caliphate" that ended with the Ottoman
Empire, said a former senior military official now at a Washington think
tank. "It would be very easy for them to set up camps and run them in Anbar
and Najaf" provinces in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence analysts, however, have a somewhat different view of
al-Qaida's presence in Iraq, noting that the local branch takes its
inspiration but not its orders from bin Laden. Its enemies - the
overwhelming majority of whom are Iraqis - reside in Baghdad and
Shiite-majority areas of Iraq, not in Saudi Arabia or the United States.
While intelligence officials have described the Sunni insurgent group
calling itself al-Qaida in Iraq as an "accelerant" for violence, they have
cited domestic sectarian divisions as the main impediment to peace.

In a report released this week, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies warned that al-Qaida is "only one part"
of a spectrum of Sunni extremist groups and is far from the largest or most
active. Military officials have said in background briefings that al-Qaida
is responsible for about 15 percent of the attacks, Cordesman said, although
the group is "highly effective" and probably does "the most damage in
pushing Iraq towards civil war." But its activities "must be kept in careful
perspective, and it does not dominate the Sunni insurgency," he said.

Moderate lawmakers such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., have concluded
that a unified Iraqi government is not on the near horizon and have called
for redeployment, change of mission and a phased drawdown of U.S. forces.
Far from protecting U.S. interests, Lugar said in a recent speech, the
continuation of Bush's policy poses "extreme risks for U.S. national
security."

Critics of complete withdrawal often charge that "those advocating (it) just
don't understand the serious consequences of doing so," said Wayne White, a
former deputy director of Near East division of the State Department's
Intelligence and Research Bureau. "Unfortunately, most of us old Middle East
hands understand all too well some of the consequences."

White is among many Middle East experts who think that the United States
should leave Iraq sooner rather than later, but differ on when, how and what
would happen next. Most agree that either an al-Qaida or Iranian takeover
would be unlikely, and say that Washington should step up its regional
diplomacy, putting more pressure on regional actors such as Saudi Arabia to
take responsibility for what is happening in their back yards.

Many regional experts within and outside the administration note that while
there is a range of truly awful possibilities, it is impossible to predict
what will happen in Iraq - with or without U.S. troops.

"Say the Shiites drive the Sunnis into Anbar," one expert said of Anderson's
war-game scenario. "Well, what does that really mean? How many tens of
thousands of people are going to get killed before all the surviving Sunnis
are in Anbar?" He questioned whether that result would prove acceptable to a
pro-withdrawal U.S. public.

White, speaking at a recent symposium on Iraq, addressed the possibility of
unpalatable withdrawal consequences by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's
famous statement about democracy. "I posit that withdrawal from Iraq is the
worst possible option, except for all the others."

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)