No Exit Strategy?
- 04.08.2008 - 3:12 PMThe line of the day, as Democratic Senators grilled General Petraeus, was that he was presiding over a fight with “no exit strategy.” This is a telling turn of phrase, and a meaningful one. Obviously, a nation doesn’t need an “exit strategy” when it fights a war it wins; the exit strategy in such a war is victory. When a nation wins a war, what it exits from is the violence of that war. The war’s end means an end to military violence. The question that follows a victory is not how to exit, but rather what the nature of the victor’s engagement will be. By calling for an exit strategy after nine months of progress toward victory, Democrats are doing nothing less than demanding that Petraeus frame his entire mission in Iraq through the prism of defeat.
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April 8th, 2008 at 3:32 PM
“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.” –Texas Governor George W. Bush, April 9, 1999, on the US intervention in Kosovo”
so yeah, ANYWAY
April 8th, 2008 at 3:35 PM
Hillary has no exit strategy either—for herself!
April 8th, 2008 at 4:26 PM
Victory is indeed exit strategy, and the Bush administration declines to define “victory” or, indeed, to define the enemy. (At the moment the “enemy” of choice appears to be Sadr, whose cease-fire curbed violence in Iraq after the failed Petraeus surge succeeded in driving the violence up.)
Since Iraq is in a civil war - or rather two civil wars, Sunni vs. Shi’ite and two groups of Iranian-backed Shi’ite thugs (and of course we are supporting the less legitimate of the two Iranian-backed groups of thugs, the Maliki “government”), America has no “enemy” to “defeat,” and therefore no “victory” is possible. Which isn’t unusual; many if not most wars have no clear victory and leave all sides worse off than they were before.
The point remains, then, that while America cannot “win” in Iraq, America still has a choice: stay in Iraq and continue fueling the civil war, or leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Petraeus stands for American defeat and defines “victory” as continuing to help the Maliki government kill other Iraqis; people who are serious on national security want America to find an exit strategy, and thereby avoid the defeat and humiliation to which Bush and Petraeus and Crocker are committed.
Only people who are totally unserious on national security, like McCain, think that war is a video game where you either “win” or “lose” and there’s nothing in between. In the real world, if America stays in Iraq, that is a defeat for America and a defeat for the Iraqis.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I disagree with this post. The exit strategy in state/state formal wars is either a formal surrender, an armistice, or a peace treaty (Korean War, WWII, WWI, etc.) But limited wars often will require an exit strategy. For example, in the first Gulf War, the exit strategy was to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and then withdraw most troops while leaving a residual force in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
For the third category of insurrection / foreign civil wars, it is certainly clear that an exit strategy is needed. For example, America was tied down to the PhillipenesIt is still unclear what our exit strategy is in Iraq. My best guess is that it appears to be a pacified Iraqi resistance and a functioning Iraqi government. I agree that these goals are worth pursuing. Still, it is worth questioning whether the cost of quelling a foreign insurgency is worth the gain. For example, in retrospect America should have let the Philippines become independent in the early 20th century rather than conducting an internecine counterinsurgency. In this case, the exit strategy was victory, but the exit strategy should have been a cost-effective restoration of order, or American troops would depart. I think Iraq is a similar situation, though the gain from a stable Iraq to America is considerably greater in 2008 than was the gain of a quiescent Philippine colony in 1900.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:55 PM
Why would a sane government want to leave Iraq? After so much treasure, and so little blood, a base has been secured providing for the successful denoument with Iran. That is the obvious conclusion for those chess players who can think a few moves ahead.
Iran is our mortal enemy, and the fountainhead of global terrorism. It is the spiritual and financial leader of Islamofacism, and a direct, continuing and growing threat to American interests. The global economy cannot function without Persian Gulf oil. Access to that oil is absolutely essential to our survival and prosperity.
Last time I looked at a map, Iraq and Afganistan sit on the borders of Iran, and afford excellent military bases for the inevitable confrontation, coming sooner rather than later, as nuclear ambitions of the Mullas get closer to fruition. No world power can permit Iran to dominate the principle resource needed fo our survival, and wars have been justly fought for less compelling reasons. War with Iran is inevitable, and must be won. Everything else is tactical.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:27 PM
Forgeting exit strategy for a moment. Does anyone know what “victory” is supposed to look like? Victory is apparently not the same as progress. It is also not the same as creating a tenable situation or a viable government. Instead it exclusively means that there cannot be a single act of violence anywhere in Iraq. If on the other hand US troops suffer a single casualty this is “defeat”. Now has anyone stopped to ponder how truly insane these definitions are? A term such as defeatism cannot do it justice. Yet this is not an exaggeration of the “debate” as it is currently framed. Literally the merest fact that someoine is shooting back is defined as failure. I guess adversity kills where there is weakness to be killed.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:08 PM
Nothing but bumper stickers, as far as the eye can see. JPod is correct that the Democratic senators were using “exit strategy” as a stick to beat Petraeus with, rather than investing it with a serious meaning. But on the other hand, “exit strategy” doesn’t mean “a strategy to get out of a conflict without winning it.”
There are times when it does (e.g., “Peace with honor” in Vietnam), but “exit strategy” — for the military — means a method of measuring the attainment of objectives, and transitioning from decisive force to a new phase: one that may even involve military presence, but does not involve objectives still hanging in the balance and being unattained.
“Exit strategy” has not been a particularly popular term since Gulf I redefined political-military expectations about conflict (until then they had centered on Vietnam). In military planning we are more likely now to talk about “end state” — that is, the sum of the objectives we are to achieve.
For those who are interested, the objectives of our operation in Iraq are outlined at this website:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html
Arm up!
April 8th, 2008 at 10:15 PM
Wow. People really think the Iraqis are going to let us use their country as a base to fight Iran? Lets call Sistani and see how he feels about this.
Steve
April 10th, 2008 at 6:40 PM
Dr. Herbert Rubin, you have just outed yourself as a man who has never served in a military capacity. The neoconservative “chess” analogy, and the lack of concern for the thousands of Americans injured.
Not to mention the volume of Iraqi life lost, and the possibility of PTSD for the thousands more American servicemen who do not have physical injuries.
Why is it that the chickenhawks are always loudest when someone else’s life is on the line?
April 10th, 2008 at 11:30 PM
the exit strategy in such a war is victory
As I have said previously:
“Victory” is not a strategy. Technically, in fact, it is not even a goal. Victory is the state of having met your goals. Therefore, saying that “our strategy is victory” is like saying “our strategy is to meet our goals,” which is meaningless, as strategy is the proccess by which we hope to achieve our goals. Saying that “our goal is victory” is similarly tautological, amounting to “our goal is to meet our goals.”
Any reasonable definition of victory is going to be one that allows us to remove most of our troops from Iraq (and let the ones who remain not be engaged in day-to-day security operations, which will be handed over to the Iraqis). So what we are really asking when we ask for an exit strategy is “how are we going to achieve an Iraq that we won’t have to wet-nurse anymore, and what will it look like when we do so?
Please, spare me talk of “victory,” which is a nebulous term in situations such as this, and tell me where you see things going in Iraq and when it will be able to achieve what level of independence (read: U.S. Force reductions) withou falling apart.