[NYTr] Bush - The Hunt Is On for "Least Worst Options"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian - Jul 28, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2136677,00.html

Bush now must lay out the least worst options for Iraq

The surge is not working, yet full-scale withdrawal would be protracted
and bloody. The search is on for a compromise

Martin Kettle

In the pre-Iraq years, attitudes to war on both sides of the Atlantic
were commonly framed by one of two radically opposed mythic experiences.
A supportable war was the sort embodied in Britain's defiance of Hitler
in 1940, whose lesson was that the right people would win if they stood
firm against evil. An unsupportable war was encapsulated in America's
rout in Saigon in 1975, whose lesson was that conflicts were more
complicated in practice.

When George Bush decided to invade Iraq, he offered Americans a rerun of
a 1940-style war, with himself in the role of Winston Churchill and Tony
Blair as his transatlantic cheerleader. Today, as Bush's surge strategy
- the deployment six months ago of a further five combat brigades -
struggles to produce the promised dividends, Iraq has flipped into the
alternative frame. It is widely assumed that the conflict is heading
inexorably to a 1975-style nemesis.

But is this really true? Do these potent precedents illuminate the only
possible alternatives? At the very least, such questions must be
examined. The US is better at doing this than Britain, since our role is
in any case reduced and detailed public discussion of Iraq options rare.
One problem is that much of the discussion in 2007 is a continuation of
the argument about what ought to have been done in 2003. Defenders of
the surge may no longer talk about creating a democratic Iraq that will
transform the region; but they still talk about staying the course and
doing what it takes to achieve some vaguer benign goal. Opponents go to
the other end of the spectrum, however, and say that the best thing is
for the US and its allies to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible,
frequently without regard to the practicalities or wider consequences.

In their different ways, both surgers and withdrawers need to have their
assumptions more critically examined in the light of today's realities.
The White House's recent claim that the surge is developing
satisfactorily is mocked by the very modest security advances and the
almost total absence of political advances. As General Wesley Clark said
last week, the US would have had to triple the number of troops on the
ground to have the effect that the administration seeks as its goal. But
it does not follow that outright withdrawal is therefore the only
alternative worth considering. Or that it is politically popular: only
36% of Americans want all the troops removed from Iraq, while support
for the war has actually increased in the latest US polls.

Withdrawal may sound straightforward, but it isn't. Although the popular
image of the end of the Vietnam war is of a sudden disorderly helicopter
evacuation from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the reality is
that the process took more than four years. It took the Soviet Union
nine months to pull 120,000 troops out of Afghanistan in the early 1980s
- and those two countries shared a land border. One recent estimate for
extricating the more than 200,000 US troops, contractors and foreign
workers now in Iraq is that the whole process would take at least a year.

And that is just the human dimension. The US also has an enormous amount
of stuff in Iraq, including around 1,900 heavy tanks, 43,000 other
military vehicles and more than 700 aircraft, mainly helicopters. Then
there are the houses, messes, fitness centres, hospitals, swimming
pools, office complexes, power plants, kit and supplies that the
Americans brought with them - one current military inventory lists 2.7m
candy bars and 1.6m cans of soft drink. It is all scattered across 15
large and 60 smaller bases, 28 supply depots and other sites. At four
bases, there are toxic stockpiles of hazardous materials. A full
withdrawal of people and kit would take an estimated 20 months.

Getting it all out would be no picnic, especially if airfield runways
are under mortar attack and roads to the south are mined. Abandoning and
disabling it may well be the only practicable course. The prospect of
the US having to fight its way out of Iraq is a very real one. And even
if the retreating Americans could withdraw in good order, the local
death toll would be likely to rise as competing factions battled to fill
the vacuum. Withdrawal may be the right long-term policy option for the
US - but it will be a very bloody and traumatic business, in whatever
way it is accomplished.

That is why there is in Washington increasing examination of other
strategies. It is some years since the words "third way" were heard in
the land, but that is the title of an investigation into partial
withdrawal options now being carried out by the US House of
Representatives armed services committee. American newspapers and
magazines have also carried detailed and thoughtful articles on these
subjects - including last week's Time magazine.

Partial withdrawal sounds beguiling, centrist and moderate. Yet you only
have to look at what these third way strategies might mean on the ground
to see that they are not as attractive as they sound. Stephen Biddle,
from the Council on Foreign Relations, identified four partial
withdrawal options - all of which would reduce US numbers by half - in
his evidence to the congressional committee: withdrawal towards training
and support of the Iraqis, withdrawal to guarding Iraq's borders,
withdrawal into a focused mission on counter-terrorism, and withdrawal
into Kurdistan.

The Kurdistan option is eloquently expounded by Peter Galbraith in the
current New York Review of Books, but Biddle himself is not optimistic
about any of the four choices. He thinks they are all self-defeating and
unsustainable. "Partial withdrawal would not end American casualties,"
he says. "But it would make it even less likely that the lives we do
lose would be lost for any purpose, or in exchange for any improvement
in the future of Iraq."

If that is so, then the choice may after all be between the extreme
alternatives of sustained military commitment and total withdrawal. But
only because one of these is the elusive least worst option, not because
it is a good or wise policy. There is an overwhelming case for the
Pentagon and the White House to set out the full and true contingency
options. It would be reassuring if Gordon Brown were to take such a
message to Bush at Camp David this weekend. And even more surprising if
Bush was to listen. Bush started this war on the basis of inadequate
planning. It looks as if he will end it in the same way too.