Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Getting into Iraq was easy, a piece of cake; Saddam Hussein's legions were a bunch of bush league (no pun intended, scout's honor) warriors. Getting out of Iraq will be infinitely harder than is understood by those demanding an immediate withdrawal of American combat brigades.

There are the obvious political obstacles to any withdrawal — the neocon crazies still retain influence in the White House and the hawkish defense intellectuals (is there an oxymoron here?) in conservative think tanks in downtown Washington still dominate the foreign policy debate in the Republican Party. They constitute a formidable barrier even to talk of a troop drawdown in the GOP presidential campaign and, to some extent, among the public.

But they're the least of the problem. The heart of it lies in the time and logistical difficulties involved in withdrawing any significant part of the 160,000-member American force from a country where our troops are targets of every clan and sect in a many-sided civil war. The risk to the troops, as the Russians discovered in their bloody exit from Afghanistan, can be severe.

A withdrawal or a retreat — call it what you will — under fire is perhaps the most hazardous operation any military unit can undertake. Troops on the move through hostile country are always vulnerable, none more so than those designated a rear guard, the last units out and the least likely to reach safety.

None of this is widely appreciated by the public. Nor has it generated much discussion in Congress.

But one member, Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat who represents Philadelphia's western suburbs, thinks it's a critical consideration. He should know. Before upsetting an entrenched Republican in November's congressional elections, Sestak was a three-star admiral in command of an aircraft carrier battle group whose pilots were in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Ending this war is necessary," Sestak wrote in a recent article for the Christian Science Monitor. "But how we end it is of even greater importance for both our security and our troops' safety."

Sestak is no war hawk; he wants the troops out. The endless commitment to Iraq, he said, is eating away at the country's military capacity to meet other threats.

Unless some redeployment begins before next spring, he writes, "our Army will rapidly unravel." Iraq is consuming almost half the Army's equipment, according to Sestak, and at the moment "there is no Army unit at home in a state of readiness able to deploy anywhere another emergency might occur."

But a too-hasty, troops-out-now exit, which some liberal Democratic groups demand, could pose dangers, Sestak said in a telephone interview. It will take time.

Even withdrawal starting next spring won't bring the bulk of our troops home soon — that will take "a least a year, possibly 15 to 24 months," Sestak says, and probably more like 24 months.

As evidence, he cites the Clinton administration's experience in Somalia in 1993. Extracting 6,300 U.S. troops after the "Blackhawk Down" disaster took six months and required 19,000 more troops to protect their withdrawal.

Any withdrawal will be complicated by the time-consuming task of preparing and packing tons of military hardware and vehicles for shipment home and the closing — "amid strife," as Sestak puts it — of 65 forward operating bases, the equivalent of platoon or company-size outposts set up between opposing forces or trench lines in more conventional wars.

All of this — the troops, the trucks, tanks, artillery and other heavy equipment — will have to move down a single road, the so-called "Tampa Road," to safety in Kuwait.

At no point will U.S. forces be more vulnerable, according to Sestak's assessment.

Such a slow-moving column, strung out for miles on a vehicle-choked road, would be an inviting target for guerrillas and their improvised explosive devices.

In a worst case scenario, some isolated units might have to be airlifted out, the way Russian troops were from Kandahar as Afghan fighters closed in on the city.

Like most congressional Democrats, Sestak believes setting a "date certain" to begin redeploying American troops offers Washington the best leverage for pressuring the Iraqi government and Iraq's battling sectarian and political interests to settle their differences.

But a "date certain" seems unattainable in this divided Congress.

Instead, Sestak is pushing a bipartisan plan that would establish a departure "goal," a less rigid formula that he hopes Democrats and Republicans in Congress might embrace as a responsible bipartisan way out and an approach that might convince President Bush to bring Iran and Syria into the process as part of a regional solution that Sestak says is needed. But he knows it won't be easy.

Only getting into Iraq was easy. Getting out is going to be grim.