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Saving face: a cautionary tale
By JUSTIN LOGAN
Special to the Star-Telegram


The Bush administration has shifted from forcefully defending the war in Iraq to emphasizing the suspected downsides of withdrawing.

Ever since his State of the Union address, the president has focused on two negative consequences: a loss of U.S. credibility, and the prospect that withdrawal would precipitate a sort of reverse domino effect, propping up the authoritarian governments that Bush's Iraq policy was intended to undermine.

These claims bear a strong resemblance to the arguments of Lyndon Johnson, who argued against cutting our losses in Vietnam.

The issue of credibility was so central to America's Vietnam policy that tens of thousands of Americans died in the pursuit not of victory, but of saving face.

But the wiser voices inside the Johnson administration were arguing as early as the mid-1960s that the costs of defeat were manageable.

On Sept. 11, 1967, the intelligence community issued a secret memo titled "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam." The authors considered the many dire predictions if the United States were to withdraw from Vietnam. The memo concluded that the perils would be "probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated."

When the memo was written, fewer than 20,000 Americans had died in Vietnam.

The Bush administration argues U.S. allies would broadly question America's commitments, concluding that when the going gets tough, America bails out.

This argument is partially true, as it was in Vietnam.

Al Qaeda will indeed attempt to link our withdrawal to a larger narrative that includes President Reagan's retreat from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and our departure from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident. But unless our national leadership allowed our failure in Iraq to call into question other commitments, this damage certainly could be mitigated.

Any administration extricating U.S. troops from Iraq would have to send the message that the U.S. military would refocus its full attention on al Qaeda. As for other commitments, why would we allow anyone to conclude that our failure in Iraq had any bearing on them?

In withdrawing, the United States should answer questions of credibility loudly and clearly.

The other protest from war supporters is that withdrawal would sound a death knell for the prospect of liberal democratic reform in the Middle East -- a reversed version of the domino theory. But that objection implies that liberal democracy could sweep across the Islamic world if U.S. forces are kept in Iraq.

In every location in which elections have been held in the Muslim world since the Iraq war something close to the worst possible result has emerged.

Elections predating significant social change have done little to advance either America's interests or the cause of liberalism itself. Similarly, the naïve assertion peddled by neoconservatives that liberal democratic change was a workable solution to America's terrorism problem has been a blight on U.S. grand strategy. Reform in the Islamic world cannot be precipitated -- or even hastened in a meaningful way -- by pressure from America.

All this said, withdrawing from Iraq will indeed represent a U.S. defeat.

It should be taken as a cautionary tale about the perils of nation building and the inadvisability of foreign-policy adventurism in general.

But in the end, we face the same question as we did in Vietnam: Can the United States end the war and emerge with its fundamental global position unchanged?

The 1967 memo offered the almost heretical view that "it seems unlikely that in the end an unfavorable outcome in Vietnam would greatly alter the present pattern of [power] relationships."

We should at least consider whether the same is true of Iraq.


Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.


http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/16739362.htm
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