President Obama likes to talk about how we needed to leave Iraq and how it was time for the Iraqis to do things for themselves. He has obviously been having some trouble with this argument lately, but he has continued to make it. What he has not explained, however, is why it was necessary for the U.S. to leave Iraq, and why Iraq could be expected to develop a functioning government/democracy in less than ten years, when we are still in South Korea after 60 years, and it took South Korea almost 35 years, from the end of the Korean War, to establish a durable and lasting democratic government.
At the end of the Korean War, South Korea was poorer than North Korea. It had no experience with democratic government, and all of Korea had been occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945.
It was not until the end of 1987 that a stable democratic government was established in South Korea. Look at South Korea now. It is a thriving democracy. They make cars, cellphones and flat screen TVs. South Korea’s per capita GDP is 27th in the world. At $30,493, it is ahead of Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and lots of others. The Economist recently a review a week ago of a book called The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.
Obviously, we stayed in South Korea because of the fear that the crazy people running North Korea might invade again. But by being there, did we help the South Koreans secure the government they have today – and that took them almost 35 years to get? I don’t know, but it didn’t hurt. And it very probably have helped.
The same could have been said for Iraq, but we didn’t stay. President Obama says two things. First, we couldn’t stay because we couldn’t reach agreement with the Iraqis to stay. Plus they didn’t want us to stay. Second, it wouldn’t have helped even if we had stayed.
I have talked about both of these points before, especially the first, but I think it is useful to revisit them. I realize that President Obama doesn’t think it is possible to disagree with him on these points. On the first point, for example, he has said, “That entire analysis is bogus and wrong.” But some people do disagree with him, and it’s worth putting the other side out there, so people can decide for themselves.
1.
Let’s look at the question of whether we could have stayed in Iraq. First, here is an excerpt from an article in The New York Times of September 22, 2012, by Michael Gordon (the article was adapted from The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, a book by Michael R. Gordon and retired Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor):
“In a June 2 [, 2011,] videoconference with Mr. Maliki, the president emphasized that any agreement would need to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament. But not everybody in the American camp agreed with this stipulation.
Brett H. McGurk, a former Bush administration aide whom the Obama administration had asked to return to Baghdad to help with the talks, thought that a bruising parliamentary battle could be avoided by working out an understanding under an existing umbrella agreement on economic and security cooperation – an approach Mr. Maliki himself suggested several times. But the White House wanted airtight immunities for any troops staying in Iraq, which American government lawyers, the Iraqi chief justice and James F. Jeffrey, the American ambassador in Baghdad, insisted would require a new agreement that was endorsed by the Iraqi Parliament.
The negotiations were complicated by the Americans’ failure to broker a power-sharing arrangement. With Iraqi leaders jockeying for influence and Mr. Allawi [an Iraqi Shiite leader] still out of the government, neither Mr. Maliki nor his rival wanted to stick his neck out by supporting a continuing American military presence, no matter how small.
The White House, meanwhile, wanted to avoid any perception that it was chasing after a deal to keep troops in Iraq after promising that combat forces would be brought home. By August, White House aides were pressing to scale back the mission and to reopen the issue of how many troops might be needed.
Mrs. Clinton and Leon E. Panetta, who succeeded Mr. Gates as the defense secretary, argued that talks should continue and that the goal, as before, should be to keep a force of up to 10,000. [Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary Gates had originally wanted 16,000 troops.]
On Aug. 13, Mr. Obama settled the matter in a conference call in which he ruled out the 10,000 troop option and a smaller 7,000 variant. The talks would proceed but the size of the force the United States might keep was shrunk: the new goal would be a continuous presence of about 3,500 troops, a rotating force of up to 1,500 and half a dozen F-16’s.
But there was no agreement. Some experts say that given the Iraqis’ concerns about sovereignty, and Iranian pressure, the politicians in Baghdad were simply not prepared to make the hard decisions that were needed to secure parliamentary approval. Others say the Iraqis sensed the Americans’ ambivalence and were being asked to make unpopular political decisions for a modest military benefit.
On Oct. 21, Mr. Obama held another videoconference with Mr. Maliki – his first such discussion since the talks began in June. The negotiations were over, and all of the American troops would be coming home.”
In a lengthy article in the April 28, 2014, issue of The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins said this:
“The leaders of all the major Iraqi parties had privately told American commanders that they wanted several thousand military personnel to remain, to train Iraqi forces and to help track down insurgents. The commanders told me that Maliki, too, said that he wanted to keep troops in Iraq. But he argued that the long-standing agreement that gave American soldiers immunity from Iraqi courts was increasingly unpopular; parliament would forbid the troops to stay unless they were subject to local law.
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis – like how many troops they wanted to leave behind – because the Administration had not decided. ‘We got no guidance from the White House,’ [U.S. ambassador to Iraq James] Jeffrey me. ‘We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, “I don’t know what I have to sell.”’ At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. ‘The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,’ Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.”
So, could we have stayed? President Obama says no. Other people looking at these excerpts might wonder if a president more willing to stay and better versed in the diplomatic arts might have been able to work with the Iraqis, and his own people, to find the basis for an agreement that would have been acceptable to both sides.
2.
But President Obama seems to think it wouldn’t have mattered, even if we had stayed:
“Having said all that, if in fact the Iraqi government behaved the way it did over the last five, six years, where it failed to pass legislation that would reincorporate Sunnis and give them a sense of ownership; if it had targeted certain Sunni leaders and jailed them; if it had alienated some of the Sunni tribes that we had brought back in during the so-called Awakening that helped us turn the tide in 2006--if they had done all those things and we had had troops there, the country wouldn't be holding together either. The only difference would be we'd have a bunch of troops on the ground that would be vulnerable.”
The important point here is whether the President is right in what he assumes in his “if” clause: that the Iraqi government would have behaved the same way, whether we were there or not.
In April of 2011, former Ambassador to Iraq (and other places) Ryan Crocker spoke to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He talked about our role in the future of Iraq, among other things. I reported on what he said here. Here is some of what he said about Iraq (in my words):
“The U.S. has a critical role to play in Iraq’s future. …
We need to stay in Iraq because we are the one player that all Iraqis trust. We are assurance. You can really see it between the Arabs and the Kurds, but it is also true with other Iraqi groups, too. The Iraqis have learned to give in to us on things. They need to learn to give in to each other. But it will take time. Ambassador Crocker said that early in his time in Iraq, when major issues were discussed, he had to be in the room to get things agreed to. By the end of 2008, he would be available by phone, but he did not need to be in the room. While we can’t play this kind of mediating role forever, he doesn’t think we will be able to get it done by the end of 2011.
The Iraqis, with our help, have come to the point that a stable, sustainable, pluralistic democracy is possible – if we stay involved.
The U.S. needs strategic patience and a willingness to continue to provide resources to help the Iraqis. It will be fewer resources than we have provided in the past, but we still need to provide some. …
Ambassador Crocker concluded that while we have turned the page in Iraq, it was only the end of an early chapter in the book. What happens now will depend in how engaged we will stay, how intelligent we will be.”
Here is what Dexter Filkins said in his New Yorker article on this issue:
“Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos – not by fighting but by providing training, signals intelligence, and a symbolic presence. ‘If you have a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be cooperating with you, and they would become your partners,’ Askari [an Iraqi member of parliament] told me. ‘But, when they left, all of them left. There’s no one to talk to about anything.’
Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national-security advisor, told me that Obama believes a full withdrawal was the right decision. ‘There is a risk of overstating the difference that American troops could make in the internal politics of Iraq,’ he said. ‘Having troops there did not allow us to dictate sectarian alliances. Iraqis are going to respond to their own political imperatives.’ But U.S. diplomats and commanders argue that they played a crucial role, acting as interlocutors among the factions – and curtailing Maliki’s sectarian tendencies.
‘We used to restrain Maliki all the time,’ Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January 2011, told me. … Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing for an agreement. ‘You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,’ he said. … There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said ….”
Did we have a legal obligation to stay in Iraq after 2011? No, we didn’t. Should the Iraqis have been to handle things on their own? Theoretically, yes. But realistically, no. The Iraqis weren’t ready to run a multi-sectarian democracy on their own. The invasion had been less than nine years before. The Iraqis still needed training and guidance. They needed a mentor. We did that in Korea (and Germany and Japan). It took a long time, but we stayed, and we helped, and it worked.
We didn’t stay in Iraq. President Obama says that we could not have stayed and that it wouldn’t have mattered even if we did. Others disagree.
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