ID:48431
 
Keywords: politics
Recently on this very blog we've seen skeptical comments about us having stayed in Iraq, and the idea that we should have just gotten out a long time ago due to the death toll on American soldiers.

Perhaps we shouldn't have gotten into this war. But I'm so glad we didn't leave after we got involved.

First, a bit of history...there was once a war in Vietnam which the U.S. waged badly and often incompetently, seemingly not willing to do what it would take to win, losing public support over time and just making the gorilla opposition stronger (sound familiar?).

So we finally gave up and left. And what happened then?

Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese officials, particularly ARVN officers, were imprisoned in reeducation camps after the Communist takeover. Tens of thousands died and many fled the country after being released. Up to two million civilians left the country, and as many as half of these boat people perished at sea.

On July 2, 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was declared...

Vietnam began to repress its ethnic Chinese minority. Thousands fled and the exodus of the boat people began.


A lot of people died... Massive numbers of people. Unimaginable numbers.

We can't know the difference if we'd stayed, but we can guess that a lot fewer people would have died and that Vietnam wouldn't have been the economic basket case it became for decades and more or less still is.

Unfortunately, those so concerned about the death toll while we were in the war largely ignored the death toll after we left. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why that might be, but here is the opinion of one person who was around at the time.

Thankfully, we stayed in Iraq past the tough times, in spite of those like Obama who insisted that we pull out and leave the country to its fate and that nothing we could do would make any difference. We stayed, we poured more troops in, and we turned the corner.

Per the New York Times:

Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm

At first, I didn't recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I'd forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan's Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead...

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene -- impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago...

Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes -- one-sixth of all Iraqis -- are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still.


It's not over, and we need to tread carefully to ensure we don't lose this amazing but fragile peace either by pulling out completely too soon or by having too much presence. I encourage you to read the whole article.

You will also see in that article that, as of the Surge, we did in fact have a plan, based on the idea that common Iraqis wanted a better life and would reject the extremists, and that plan has worked.

For those who continue to believe we should have pulled out before the Surge, it is for you to reconcile what it would have meant to deprive the Iraqis of this chance, and to have potentially subjected them to the even greater horrors of a power vacuum being filled by Very Bad People, as we saw in Vietnam.
I'm not sure what it means when we stop debating whether the end justifies the means, and start arguing whether the terminator-style hypothetical alternate universe storyline justifies the means instead.


Not to say I don't somewhat sort of agree with you (though just as you can post a positive account of post-invasion Iraq, I imagine I could find a horrific one), but it's just a bit worrying when we reach that (obviously exaggerated) point.
The biggest, and most obvious, difference is that when the US left Vietnam, there was still a massive amount of warfare going on, and an entire army was able to be mounted for the Ho Chi Mihn campaign. While there are still firefights and bombings, they aren't massive, large scale, coordinated attacks by an overwhelming number of soldiers.
Elation wrote:
(though just as you can post a positive account of post-invasion Iraq, I imagine I could find a horrific one)

I kind of doubt you could find one written recently, at least by a non-Al Queda sympathizer or nutso anti-Bush person.

The significance of the NY Times providing this story should not be overlooked -- the Times is no friend of Bush or the war, yet their own staunch anti-war writers have repeatedly reported the positive progress in Iraq in recent times.

For the paper that could only find people with bad things to say about Sarah Palin in a state where she has over 80% approval ratings, that's saying something.
Just a clarification, but Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia STOPPED the genocide, and China's invasion is generally seen as a result of the Vietnam-Cambodia war.
Yeah, it was iffy to get into the war and we were lied to to start it, but leaving is no longer an option. Although it was long and hard, it appears to have been successful so far. Probably more-so than Afghanistan.
Elation wrote:
I'm not sure what it means when we stop debating whether the end justifies the means, and start arguing whether the terminator-style hypothetical alternate universe storyline justifies the means instead.

To me the important point here is that a decision to stay or go in this kind of war can lead to serious post-war casualties, and that potential must be considered when making decisions.

The "end" is not just when we leave, it's what happens after we leave, and when determining whether the end justifies the means, we must take full account of what the end might be.

This same argument can be leveraged against the Bush administration for entering the war -- in the Rumsfeld era, the administration believed you could do some kind of surgical war where you get in, hit the target, and leave shortly thereafter.

The naysayers at the time kept saying, "You may win the war but lose the peace", and it seems history proved them right. Bush/Rumsfeld figured we could just win the war and split, but that did not take the full measure of "the end" into account.

We can only shake our heads over what might have happened had Bush had responsible military leadership when invading both Afghanistan and Iraq -- as with the American Civil War, if the President had started with the wise military leaders he ended the war with, we might have cut years and thousands of deaths out of the equation.
Vexonater wrote:
Just a clarification, but Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia STOPPED the genocide, and China's invasion is generally seen as a result of the Vietnam-Cambodia war.

Yes, I initially debated whether to include that text because it might confuse, and I probably made the wrong decision, so I've edited the post to remove that.

Thanks for the note!

I'm not so sure whether the analogy between Vietnam and Iraq is justifiable, given - as Pop mentioned - that there's not really so much of an organised opposition any more.

But I find myself sort of agreeing with you on this point - now that we've gone in and destroyed Iraq, we have a responsibility to put it back together.

Ultimately, it comes down to what the Iraqis want. Until we know that, though, a peacekeeping presence and teams for infrastructure development are damn well required, if nothing else.
Jp wrote:
I'm not so sure whether the analogy between Vietnam and Iraq is justifiable, given - as Pop mentioned - that there's not really so much of an organised opposition any more.

Of course, if we had left pre-Surge, there would have been such an opposition, so that fits into the benefits of us having stayed up to now, which is a separate question from whether we continue to stay.

I don't mean to make too direct a connection to Vietnam in any case -- my point is more to say that we can't pretend that pulling out has no consequence. In the case of Vietnam, pulling out proved those who were predicting disaster right, and had we done some equivalent of a Surge in Vietnam, it's conceivable that Vietnam would have ultimately been a success.

Another interesting historical analogue is Korea...we committed ourselves to protecting South Korea, and they are now a wealthy successful country making a positive contribution to the world; we gave up North Korea, and they are a tragic state to a degree possibly unique in human history.

Now, in that case I can't say we should have taken over North Korea...we were playing with fire with the Chinese there, and perhaps there was no better solution. But the impact on the people we leave behind in such a case is massive and cannot be ignored in our calculations.
Someone sent me some pair of interesting articles about the Troop Surge, and it's effects on stabilizing the area were as much as they seem to be. I disagree with the article that the troop surge did nothing to help, but I do think it wasn't the only factor in the decrease in violence. Ethnic cleansing, eh?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080919/sc_nm/iraq_lights_dc
http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a41200

I guess it puts some perspective on an article I read a while back about Iraqis getting fed up with al Qaeda.