Bring them home!

I keep hearing this in reference to our men and women of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and certainly I want them all to come home safely … with their mission accomplished.

History, however, tells those that care to listen that these things are never easy … they take time, and lots of it … not a couple of years. In this age of computers and instant gratification it seems that it is hard for people to come to grips with the fact that there are things that still take time.

The situation in Iraq in particular is one that we should have known going in was going to last, in all likelihood, a decade or so … in fact I believe something along those lines being mentioned back at the start of the war with Iraq but I can’t find a specific quote so that I can properly cite a source, and time.

“Well we certainly got out of ‘Nam fast enough” … yeah … and that is widely regarded as having been a ‘bad move’ on our part. Even aside from what happened in Vietnam as a result of our withdrawal the effect on the troops who were brought home in defeat … not to the enemy but to their own countrymen … was terrible. Placing that aside, however, ‘Nam was a different story … while it was a guerrilla war we were not there occupying Vietnam and establishing a new ruling body as we are with Iraq.

And make no mistake … that was our goal in Iraq … to remove a ruling body that was hostile toward the United States and our allies. To remove a leader who had openly stated hostility toward the US, had attacked neighboring countries, had used weapons of mass destruction (if he had them or not at the time of the invasion is the discussion of another rant … he HAD used them previously on Iran AND on his own people) and was known to have ties to terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda (there was evidence of this before the war, and more evidence has been handed over by the provisional government).

You can’t walk in, remove a leader, and walk out … or else you are just leaving the door open to the possibility of the situation getting worse instead of better. If you are going to remove the leadership of a country you have to be prepared to either take over the country as part of your government or establish a new government … the Bush administration and advisors understood this and laid plans, even before the war, to help the Iraqi people establish a new … free … government.

So … how should we have known it would take time and that there would be problems? When was the last real, post war, occupation of a country by the US Military? Post WWII … Germany specifically. Can you tell me how long we occupied Germany after WWII? How long did we have a military government in that country to keep the peace?

The occupation lasted from roughly 1944-1955 … “with the Army as the executive agency for military government until 1949, and the Army continued to provide the occupation force until 1955” (Army Historical Series: The US Army in the Occupation of Germany) and it wasn’t a ‘smooth occupation’ either with Time Magazine publishing an article titled “Americans are loosing the Victory in Europe” in their Jan. 7, 1946 issue. (Life: Jan 7, 1946) and a guerrilla war against the Werewolves, a group of NAZI SS troops that fought actively into 1947 and some believe into 1949-50 primarily out of the Black Forest and Harz mountains regions.

James Rolleston of Duke University wrote this of post-war Germany, “… In such total flux no regulation could be immutable and no preconceived plan ... could be acted on. All was improvisation ….” (Excepted from a Talking Proud article which also enumerates several points of similarity between the occupation of Germany after WWII and the current occupation of Iraq) and I believe that the same quote could equally be applied to post-war Iraq, though I believe that we are at a better point in our occupation of Iraq now, than the Army was in their Occupation of Germany in the same time frame, which I believe can be attributed to learning from the mistakes of the German occupation.

We’re making progress, but it isn’t going to be over this year … or next. If we pull our troops out and make Iraq ‘stand or fall on their own’ we’re running a grave risk … at best they stand on their own but likely have some bitter feelings of abandonment toward the US … at worst they fall and the region destabilizes further complicating our problem with terrorism. I don’t believe that is a gamble we can take … I hate that our men and women are dying over there … but they are dying to make things better … for us and for the people of Iraq … and those of us back home, who are relatively safe and secure due to their efforts, need to sit back and let them do their jobs … let them finish the mission before them and come home in victory.