By David French
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
In Tuesday night’s debate, Democratic vice-presidential
nominee Tim Kaine defended the indefensible — a strategic retreat from Iraq
that threw away the fruits of American military victory, helped enable a
terrifying genocide, and empowered America’s enemies. Even worse, he did so
while spouting a pack of deceptions and half-truths that exhibited a child’s
understanding of American strategic interests.
Where to begin? First, it was stunning that Kaine brought
up as an accomplishment America’s
dramatically reduced overseas deployments — as if the only measure of strategic
success is the number of Americans in harm’s way. He said it was a “very, very
good thing” that instead of 175,000 deployed, we now have only 15,000.
Well, yes, if
America’s enemies were defeated or contained. Instead, American retreat created
power vacuums that our enemies filled. Jihadists control more territory, have
more men under arms, and are more effectively attacking America and American
allies than when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. Those are facts
that make American withdrawal look less like an accomplishment and more like an
inexcusable retreat.
Moreover, we didn’t have to maintain 175,000 troops in
the field to hold on to our hard-fought gains. Kaine made the choice binary —
maximum or minimum. Yet our defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq (the precursor to ISIS)
was so comprehensive that the presence of only a small number of American
combat troops could have prevented the kind of blitzkrieg we saw in 2014, when
ISIS overran large parts of Iraq and Syria. There was never a question of
keeping massive numbers of troops in the field. The question was whether we’d
keep any troops in Iraq, and the
Obama administration said no.
And that brings me to Kaine’s central deception. He still
clings to the old, discredited line that America had no choice but to pull
troops out of Iraq because the Bush-era “status of forces” agreement mandated
their removal. Yet comprehensive reporting in the New York Times and The New
Yorker magazine tells a very different story — of an administration that
was unwilling to commit the roughly 10,000 to 16,000 (not 175,000) troops
needed to maintain stability and of an Iraqi government that was unwilling to
risk political capital at home for the sake of a merely nominal American
presence. In other words, both sides
blundered, badly.
As any number of strategic thinkers have noted, the
results weren’t just predictable, they were predicted — by President George W.
Bush himself. Speaking in 2007, Bush said that if troops were withdrawn before
commanders said Iraq was ready, then:
It would mean surrendering the
future of Iraq to al-Qaeda.
It would mean that we’d be risking
mass killings on a horrific scale.
It would mean we allow the
terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in
Afghanistan.
It would mean we’d be increasing
the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to
confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.
All of these things happened. All of them. ISIS has
committed genocide. It blitzed through Iraq, threatening Baghdad and even
Kurdistan, and it has created a nation-sized jihadist terror state, one that is
shrinking only because — yes — American troops have returned.
The idea that Tim Kaine could look the American people in
the eye and declare that any part of this represents anything less than
catastrophic failure is astounding. In one of the most important parts of the
debate, Mike Pence, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, reminded
Americans of the human cost of this disaster — telling the story of Lance
Corporal Scott Lubowski, who fell in Fallujah in 2005. He gave his life in a
long struggle, a struggle that by 2009 had been largely won. Then Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton squandered that victory.
Those of us who deployed to Iraq remember many more names
of fallen brothers, and we also remember the other profound costs in our lives
— the physical and psychological wounds, the fear, the lost time with families
— that most civilians can’t imagine. Obviously a nation shouldn’t make a
strategic mistake simply to honor soldiers’ sacrifices, but when a strategic
mistake also undermines those sacrifices, it compounds the injury all the more.
I’m not naïve. I know that Tim Kaine wasn’t going to own
Hillary’s failure. I know that he was going to spin — in much the same way that
Pence spun or denied Donald Trump’s manifold deficiencies — but neither Clinton
nor Obama can be permitted to escape responsibility. They failed, and the human
and strategic cost of that failure is staggering. Our soldiers won the war. Our
politicians lost a fragile peace. They can’t be permitted to boast about their
blunders.
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