The Current Discussion: The Obama administration has finally set a date for withdrawing U.S. troops for Iraq. If ethnic strife returns there, raising again the specter of civil war, should the U.S. send troops back in?
Nations make mistakes, some bigger than others. They can either compound those mistakes, or put a stop to them and live with their consequences. Invading Iraq in 2003 was obviously a mistake, and President Obama now has to decide whether to compound it by staying in Iraq, or cut the losses, withdraw, and let Americans live with the legacy of yet another war defeat.
A comparison with Vietnam is inevitable.
The United States went to war in Vietnam in the 1960s -- some Americans still argue today that it was with the best of intentions -- only to realize more than a decade later that it was a mistake, and pulled out in 1974, come what may.
It took years for Americans to realize that it was a war they could not win. Nixon and Kissinger agonized over whether to cut the country's losses and leave Vietnam, or stay and maintain America's integrity, pride and international standing.
In the end, it was public opinion in America that forced the United States government to swallow the bitter pill of defeat. It was not so much the thought of the Vietnamese death toll as the rising death toll of young Americans drafted into the military that turned the public opinion against its own government.
Americans suffered the humiliation of a war defeat as it never had before. One would expect that that trauma and scar would have been enough to prevent the United States from launching another war in a foreign land. Bush and Cheney did not read history well, and they took America to another war some 40 years later, which is where we are today: a war America cannot win, and an ethnic war just waiting to erupt as soon as American troops pull out.
The real question to ask is not whether the United States should send the soldiers back if ethnic strife returns in Iraq. The problem of Iraq is for the Iraqis to solve, and for its immediate neighbors to help. Unless Americans are still thinking of controlling Iraq's oil, they really have no business meddling in Iraqi politics.
The real question that Americans and their leaders should be asking themselves is whether they can live with the legacy of another war defeat and the humiliation that comes with it. This is something that Americans alone can answer.
They can take comfort that after the Vietnam defeat, the United States remained a global power, and its standing in Southeast Asia did not suffer after the 1970s. Its interests in the region were actually better served through its "soft powers" - from trade, investment and foreign aid to American pop culture.
Sure, Iraq is no Vietnam, and the Middle East is no Southeast Asia, and the geopolitics of today is nothing like the 1970s, so they are no comparison.
But is there really an alternative but to withdraw and cut the losses? I doubt it. Americans will sooner or later have to accept the legacy of another war defeat. They just have to try to get over their humiliation.
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