Iraq Exit Strategy

Goodbye, Vietnam Iraq

By Tom Milstein

11/20/05

To get out of Iraq, first we must first know why we are in Iraq.

We did not invade Iraq to find Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We did not invade Iraq to establish democracy in the Middle East.

We invaded Iraq to deter Saudi Arabia and its client, Islamic Fascism, from staging more 9/11
attacks on the United States.

We invaded Iraq because Iraq shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and has a history of military
antagonism to the United States. We are in Iraq for much the same reason we remained in West
Germany during the Cold War: to establish a base of operations for the maintenance of
deterrence against a perceived threat to the security of the United States. The scope and scale of
the Saudi threat are of a different order than that of the Soviet. But the strategic principle is the
same.

Of course deterrence only works when it can be sustained. We sustained deterrence against the
Soviets not just by declaring the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” but also by maintaining a
stable and supportive base of operations in Western Europe. The Germans – as well as the
French, the British, and the rest of Western Europe – might detest their subordinate status to
the American superpower, but the prospect of Soviet domination was a sobering antidote to all
such “Yankee go home” emotions.

We have no such stable base of support in Iraq. The Middle East is not about to flower into civil
society, Enlightenment, and free enterprise – not even with a NeoCon Marshall Plan. The Middle
East is not Europe, and democracy is not a charismatic idea in the Middle East. Jihad is.

The invasion of Iraq has deterred further 9/11’s, but it has not succeeded in institutionalizing
itself the way America’s presence in Europe institutionalized itself through NATO, as a
permanent and legitimate form of deterrence called “containment.” We have for the time being
deterred Islamic Fascism from launching another attack on the U.S., by threatening the Saudi
border, but we have not truly contained the Saudi menace the way we successfully contained
Soviet menace to Europe in the Cold War, and the whole world can see why – we cannot
“NATO-ize” our mission.

Our achievement in Iraq therefore lacks credibility, durability, and legitimacy. Nor is it ever
likely to attain these things. The gap between what America represents and Islamic political
culture is too great.
America has a wolf by the ears in Iraq. We cannot let go without risking future 9/11’s, and we
cannot hold on in the face of declining support both domestically and internationally.
So a different means of sustaining deterrence must be found – a model not based on the
Eurocentric Cold War against the Soviets, but rather on the Sino-American rapprochement,
which split the Communist bloc and led the way forward from deterrence, through and beyond
containment, to eventual victory over Communist totalitarianism.

The Sino-American rapprochement also grew out of a failed war – the war in Vietnam. That war
too was rooted in noble, but contradictory, objectives. On the one hand, we wished to promote a
Western-oriented, democratic South Vietnam against the totalitarian depredations of the
Communist North. On the other, we sought to extend the deterrence and containment model
from Europe to Southeast Asia, establishing a balance of power against the threat of Communist
expansion into and throughout the region. Based on our European NATO model, we thought
that each of these aims depended on the other. But we found to our dismay that we could not
establish a regime in South Vietnam with enough democratic vitality to win effective support
either from its own people or the American people.

We therefore could not sustain our Vietnam intervention (just as we cannot sustain our current
deterrence mission in Iraq). And because it could not be sustained, our Vietnam-era policymakers
were led to consider what the consequences might be, both regionally and globally, of a
North Vietnamese Communist victory in the South.

Out of this consideration came the decision to realign international politics by pursuing
rapprochement with China, a policy which had been verboten for American policy-makers since
the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. Maoist China was conventionally perceived to
be the more ideologically radical and dangerous of the two rival Communist states, the more
anti-American and internally the more totalitarian. But it was also much the weaker of the two,
and our diplomatists calculated that China’s extremism was actually rooted in its isolated and
disadvantaged position internationally relative to its Soviet rival.

The truth of this calculation yielded a diplomacy whose success shocked the world and
effectively neutralized the negative geopolitical consequences of defeat in the Vietnamese War.
Indeed, the new US-China relationship brought real peace to Southeast Asia and ushered in an
amazing burst of economic and social development. On the political front, the end of the Cold
War and the downfall of the Soviet Union can be traced directly to this courageous initiative by
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The Middle Eastern equivalent to Nixon and Kissinger’s master stroke may already be underway.
American policy seems to be reaching out to the Shi’a branch of Islam in order to create a
majority government in Iraq that has real popular support. Such a government will by the force
of circumstance have strong ties to Iran, the world center of Shi’a Islam. So empowered, Iraq’s
new government will need correspondingly less support from the U.S. Further attempts by the Saudi-sponsored Al Qaeda-based insurgency to disrupt Iraq will become Iran’s problem, not
America’s.

America’s role in the Middle East can then recede from active military engagement to one of
managing the balance between Islam’s two great branches, just as in an earlier era it did
between the Chinese and Russian Communist states. The threat of future 9/11’s from the
Saudis can be countered by the deterrent prospect of a Shiite conquest of Mecca and Medina,
instead of requiring the U.S. Army on the Saudi border.

Wahabi-dominated Sunni Islam, instead of enjoying the luxury of being able to single-mindedly
indulge its passion against America and modernity, will find more pressing problems to occupy
its attention. Who knows? Perhaps out of this stalemate within Islam can come the Middle East
equivalent of Europe’s great compromise between the formerly warring Protestant and Catholic
princes – a second Treaty of Westphalia.

America’s exit strategy from Iraq needs to rooted in America’s exit strategy from Vietnam: pingpong
diplomacy leading to rapprochement with Mao’s China. Perhaps it already is.