A must read article on "How to Leave Iraq".
There's been a lot of discussion on the need to leave Iraq, the politics of leaving Iraq, etc. Token imaginary troop withdrawals aside, there has been little talk of what it will actually take to leave Iraq.
Let's just imagine that Congress were to receive the required number of Cahones(just make something up, organ donations or mail order from China) to stand up to the very lamest of lame duck presidents and voted to bring the troops home immediately.
It would take 2 years and cost at least 104 billion dollars and 1200 troops lives.
This is due to the logistics of a withdrawal. Logistics defines the military. People think of the military as fighting forces but the truth is that the military is mostly logistics forces. Logistics is what wins wars. Rarely have wars been lost because the soldiers lost their will. Wars are lost because a country cannot support their soldiers logistically. If you picture the military as a spear, the fighting forces are the point, the logistics forces are the shaft that support the point.
(A quick aside: Let us also imagine Sadam had WMD. It really wouldn't have mattered, he didn't have the logistics to deliver them. Militarily, a WMD tipped scud is more of a liability than a weapon. The most important thing to remember about a nuclear warhead is that it needs to be far away when it goes off. Oh yeah also remember that the winner is the guy who fires the last missile, not the first one. Having one nuclear warhead is an invitation to anihilation. Of course, he could have snuck a WMD into the US in a shipping container. We probably should do something about that.)
A quick, drop everything, toss a grenade in the humvee, push H-60s off the fantail, etc. type pullout could be accomplished in 6 months maybe but, we are not talking about that.
We are talking about an orderly pullout of the 160,000 troops and 9 million tons of equipment that the US has shipped to Iraq.
Indeed, in the first Gulf War in 1991, Operation Desert Storm, preparations and combat lasted six months. But it took roughly 18 months to get troops, equipment and supplies out, Diamond says. That force was larger (there were about a half-million U.S. troops in Desert Storm, more than three times the number in Iraq now), but didn't have to travel as far because they never had to go beyond Kuwait. And, he adds, in any withdrawal, "The enemy always has a vote."
It only took 18 months because we never really withdrew. We left sizable forces in Kuwait and always had a carrier there enforcing the no fly zone.
An actual withdrawal would take longer. It will also cost lives and money.
I estimated the 1200 soldiers killed by assuming that the number of deaths is proportional to the number of soldiers and that the withdrawal would be relativly linear. The actual number would likely be higher.
I think we can safely assume that the violence will continue unabated and perhaps escalate as we are not addressing and cannot address the source of the violence. The violence cannot be addressed by bringing democracy to Iraq.
The problems in Iraq are not caused by the lack of democracy, rather, the lack of democracy in Iraq is a reflection of the problem in Iraq. The first requirement of a democracy is that its participants agree to be bound by the rules of a civil soceity. A democracy cannot exist when anyone can veto progress with a gun or car bomb.
A democracy can only come from the people. Only an idiot would think you can deliver democracy at the point of a gun. Unfortunately, we have an idiot readily available.(we even have a replacement idiot just in case.)
As noted in the article, in a withdrawal, the enemy always has a vote and it is likely that the casualties in a two year withdrawal will be higher. Delaying the withdrawal will not change this as the violence in Iraq has not been decreasing. We will just continue to lose soldiers until we decide to withdraw.
I also estimated the cost of the withdrawal using the current 2 billion dollars per week and assuming it was proportional to the number of troops. Once again this is likely to be a minimum cost.
First off, not all of the equipment will return. A lot of it will be left behind and need to be replaced. This was experienced during the Desert Storm withdrawal.
Second, large amounts of the equipment will have to be overhauled and replaced. Equipment that is currently operational in Iraq will not pass post deployment inspections and will have to be repaired. As an example, an armored up humvee (hillbilly armor) will have to be sent to depot where it will be overhauled and all of the extra steel plates the troops added will be removed. The desert environment is extremely harsh on equipment. Troops will continue to use equipment that is not up to spec and report it as operational because having it is better than having nothing.
At this point I don't think that we can say we are accomplishing anything in Iraq. The GAO reports that the violence is not decreasing. We will know Iraq is a democracy when it is an ally of Iran and can seriosly threaten Saudi Arabia and Israel. We need to leave.
Our continued presence in Iraq is compromising our ability to counter real threats now and in the future. It is destroying our military and the national credibility we need for our defense. We need to leave.
The bad news is that even if we start today the withdrawal will take years and cost billions and troops lives.
The really bad news is that there is no sign of that shipment of Cahones that Congress desperately needs.