To this blogger, it means just one thing: Americans don't want to happen to their troops today what happened during and after the nightmare of Vietnam. When support for the Vietnam War itself began to erode in the late 1960s, the bubble of moral/psychological support for those who were over there fighting got quickly pricked. The GIs came home to epithets, scorn, and widespread indifference ... if they came home at all. And somehow that was more wounding to a lot of them than anything they had experienced in 'Nam.
To put your life on the line, to stand ready to kill in order to protect someone or something, to actually do some killing and to see your buddies die ... and then come home to find no one cares, no one approves, no one supports what you did, no one wants to shake your hand. That's what happened after Vietnam.
No one wants the "Support Our Troops" bubble to be pricked this time, that's for sure. Not if it leads to Vietnam-like trauma, déjà vu all over again.
So many Americans are quite understandably afraid of anything that, however reasonable-seeming on its face, might turn into a pin to prick the "Support Our Troops" bubble.
It's accordingly no surprise that when on Jan. 27, 2005, just three days before the Iraqi elections, Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts made an address calling for a troop withdrawal beginning post haste and finishing in early 2006 (see news articles here and here; see text of address here), it was reviled by some as if, just possibly, it were an incipient pinprick:
Republican National Committee spokesman Brian Jones criticized Kennedy's timing. "It's remarkable that Senator Kennedy would deliver such an overtly pessimistic message only days before the Iraqi election," said Jones. "Kennedy's partisan political attack stands in stark contrast to President Bush's vision of spreading freedom around the world."
Kennedy had made what seemed like a reasonable case for starting the troops on their way home now:
"There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us, but there will be much more violence if we continue our present dangerous and destabilizing course," said Kennedy. "It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin."
Yet there was not a lot of GOP or bipartisan support for Kennedy. Some Democrats such as Massachusetts Congressman Marty Meehan applauded, but by and large Americans held their collective breath and hoped the Kennedy rhetoric wouldn't morph into a pin to burst the "Support Our Troops" bubble.
oldstyliberal agrees with Kennedy to this extent: We need an exit strategy, and its implementation must begin now — now that the elections have taken place in Iraq, that is. In truth, though, the quickest exit strategy from Iraq runs through "building a competent and well-equipped Iraqi [security] force," in the words of Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution defense analyst, in this article from The Baltimore Sun.
Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar is cited in the article as holding out hope that:
... by the end of the year or in early next year there will be 200,000 Iraqis in a security force controlling the cities and countryside. At that point the Americans would provide a "peripheral presence," Lugar said, and there would be talks about a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals.
Another expert, retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, Jr., a Vietnam War veteran and former commandant of the Army War College, is quoted as citing as a parallel case:
... the British effort to defeat a Communist insurgency in Malaysia, beginning in the late 1940s. Over time, the British abandoned large-scale military attacks in favor of small raids, rebuilding the Malayan Army and eventual elections. But it took 12 years to subdue the insurgency and create the beginnings of democracy there, Scales said.
Our military commitment in Iraq will accordingly not end all that soon. Yet, as Scales points out, there's a big danger of "running out of Army and Marines before the job is done in Iraq. The clock is ticking."
To keep that time bomb from ever exploding, we're trying to put Iraqis more and more on lead in the counterinsurgency effort. Instead of having American troops running the show, as now, our guys will increasingly act in support and advisory roles — which may put them at greater risk in the short run but will be aboslutely necessary if they are to start coming home in 12 months rather than 12 years.
So here we are in a war that was originally justified under false assumptions — nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, nonexistent support for al-Qaeda on the part of Iraq's tyrannical dictator. It is, as Vietnam was, an undeclared war. The U.S. Congress' authorizing resolution gave the President carte blanche to launch it, but he never asked Congress for an official declaration of war. He flirted with trying to get U.N. support for the invasion, then pressed ahead with a tiny "coalition of the willing" at his side. His Defense Secretary did a poor job of running the original invasion. It succeeded anyhow at toppling Saddam Hussein ... but the President's glowing "mission accomplished" speech was premature. There were a lot more U.S. deaths to come. And there was the gross embarrassment of Abu Ghraib still in the offing.
Yet the Democratic challenger, whose true views on the war were murky at best, couldn't unseat Bush in the American elections in November, 2004. As the post-election polls showed support for the war slipping slightly from levels that weren't particularly high in the first place, at the very same time the "Support Our Troops" bumper ribbons proliferated. Now we're challenged by the need to consider exit strategies while at the same time not undercutting the thrust of the President's "no justice without freedom" inaugural address, nor pricking the fragile bubble of home-front support for our brave troops overseas.
No one said it's easy being an American ...
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