Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Rebuilding Iraq | War — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Let's be clear about matters: I am an adherent of realpolitik in terms of formulating foreign and national security policy. I believe that the primary function of American foreign and national security policy is to foster and promote American foreign and national security interests. That doesn't mean that I am not an internationalist; far from it. It just means that nation-states, in an anarchic world, are obliged to serve as the primary guardians of their own interests and the United States does not differ in this regard.

At the same time, only the obtuse would deny that there are moral and ethical issues involved in the design and implementation of foreign and national security policy. We are faced with a moral and ethical issue even now as we ponder what will be the next stage of our involvement in Iraq. To that end, note this article by Jean Bethke Elshtain, who will doubtless be excoriated as a warmongering neocon for her argument that we have an obligation to remain in Iraq until the work of reconstruction is fully finished, despite the fact that Elshtain was against the war. The following excerpt neatly lays out the basic tenets of her argument:

The Iraq War has, or bids to, become a litmus test of political identity of the sort that Americans associate with the Vietnam War. We should all be troubled by this. Those of us who opposed the Vietnam War may have called it correctly--I believe we did--but it is important to recall the fates of the Vietnamese who signed on with the United States, tens of thousands of whom we abandoned, either to prisons or flimsy rafts or refugee camps. All the more so, because American elites have not been overly burdened with complexity and nuance where Iraq and the fate of Iraqis are concerned. Ethical considerations, in particular, have barely figured in the debate over what to do next in that benighted country.

Taking seriously these considerations requires historical knowledge, a framework of evaluation, and a sober willingness to consider facts (not a given in this political season). There are, to begin with, 160,000 American soldiers in Iraq. There are also 90,000 contract workers that the United States would be responsible for evacuating. There are 40,000 armored vehicles. There are huge military bases. Michael Walzer insists--and he is right--that it will be impossible to extract these troops and equipment in the timeframe put forward by advocates of a rapid withdrawal.

There are other facts to keep in mind. We remain in Europe sixty years after the conclusion of World War II. We are still in the Korean Peninsula fifty years on from the truce that ended that conflict. Although there are real questions about whether we have at present a political culture that can sustain such a long-term effort, the notion that we would just turn about and head home, without condition and regardless of consequence, runs counter to historical precedent (Vietnam being the dishonorable exception).

Most of all, there is the imperative to forestall mass murder. Writing in the Washington Post, John Podesta and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress glibly dismiss the "doomsday scenario" of mass killings that experts fear in the event of a U.S. departure. That the distinguished New York Times war correspondent John Burns opines that up to a million Iraqis might fall prey to violence if the U.S. withdraws precipitously should give even these partisans pause. It should also raise a parallel: having gotten things so wrong during the evacuation of South Vietnam, will the United States get things any more right this time? If so, America's exit ought to proceed from an ethics of responsibility, an ethics infused with and built upon the just war tradition and guided by Washington's responsibility for the fates of Iraqis who, by the hundreds of thousands, have been conscripted into the U.S. effort.

To be sure, I don't think that we ought to remain in Iraq purely for ethical reasons. There are national security issues at stake as well--the crippling of the terrorist and insurgent movements in Iraq, the fostering of good relations with a country that can serve as a counterweight to Iran, the implementation of transparency-inducing democratic structures that will hopefully encourage further transparency throughout the Middle East and with it, a commensurate diminishment in the possibility that we will fail to correctly calculate the intentions of a Middle Eastern state because that state is opaque in its decision making habits. But it is utterly and completely impossible to ignore the ethics of the situation and even if the ethics are not enough to move you, consider the fact that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq--along the lines of what Barack Obama is proposing, as Elshtain alludes to--will serve to bring about the humanitarian calamity Elshtain plainly warns about.

How seriously do you think that Middle Eastern countries will take the United States should something so horrific happen in the wake of our precipitous withdrawal? And what do you think will come of our national security and foreign policy interests both in the region and throughout the rest of the world if we ignore the fact that when it comes to Iraq, ethics and self-interest correspond and to ignore the one is to completely undermine the other?