Another Call For Withdrawl And Impeachment

Any good chess player knows that the threat of military response is infinitely more powerful than military action. Once committed, weaknesses become obvious and a calculated response is limited. Bush and the Neo-cons demonstrated their lack of strategic sophistication. I'm no military expert, but I am a fair chess player. The disaster in Iraq was predictable from the beginning.
Another hawk with impeccable credentials as a military expert in Israel has seconded Murtha's call for withdrawal. He goes one big step further however, calling for impeachment and trial for Bush and "all the president's men."
Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest notes:

Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, "the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers."

At Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal points out that there is something we are not hearing about conditions in Iraq.

...van Creveld [appears to be] hearing things about the White House--through his own military-academic and Israeli-security networks--even more terrifying and devastating than I am hearing through my networks.


The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine.

And now the man of the day, Martin van Creveld in Forward Newspaper Online

What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.


Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists. Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.


Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.


Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.


Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.


Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.


Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.


[...]For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins. MORE

Finally someone has said it. Since my expertise in military history isn't very deep, if I could see the debacle we were headed for as we sent our troops to Iraq, then it must be a huge one. But for an noted military historian to say that nothing in 2000 years has been an equivalent military folly is stunning. How could all those "experts" in the US stand-by and let it happen? Of course many stood up, many were tossed from their jobs for doing so, but many more in the public eye have relatively immunity to the massive retaliation for which the Bush Administration is noted. Most notable is Powell. It's the Powell Doctrine that first predicted disaster for Gulf War II. Loyalty is more important than thousands of deaths, a defeated and demoralized military, loss of prestige and credibility world-wide? And all that excludes losing the war against Islamic extremists and empowering Iran to go nuclear. A strong presence in Afghanistan with the threat of response would have had a chance to contain Iran's ambitions.
I think we may still have some capability to influence conditions in the Middle East and yes, even contain Iran. But the window to influence events is closing rapidly as our military continues to deteriorate on the ground. I'm convinced that this is the compelling truth that has moved Murtha and van Creveld to step up and call for withdrawal. Van Creveld, I suspect, rightly notes the folly of pursuing any war without support of voters and the absolute unforgivable sin of destroying the functioning ability and reputation of the US Army and Marines. No, history will not think well of Bush and the Neo-cons.