Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats unveiled their most recent plan to end the war in Iraq last week. By Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s count that makes seventeen. This proposed resolution calls for President Bush to demonstrate progress in the war by July 1st or United States troops will be withdrawn and further progress by October 1st or the same result and regardless for all troops to be out of Iraq by September 2008. This plan actually encourages failure in Iraq by creating an added incentive to the insurgents to use every means possible over the next three months to create death and mayhem, so President Bush in no way would be able to give a good report. Then the United States would have to begin its withdrawal, which would all but doom the infant democracy. The truth is that most Democrats have already chalked the war up as a failure and a mistake, despite bringing down one of the most brutal regimes in recent history and establishing a democratic government in the heart of the Middle East. This Democratic push also comes at a time when initial indications are that President Bush’s troop surge strategy under his newly appointed commander General Petraeus is providing more stability: violence in Baghdad is down over eighty percent from the previous month. Speaker Pelosi derided the plan this week as just "more troops and more treasure from the American people" [wasted apparently in her eyes].
The driving need of the Democrats to get our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible represents an ignorance of what it has taken to both win the war and secure the peace afterwards. In almost every instance in which the United States fought a war during the last one hundred years a several year commitment with tens of thousands of soldiers followed. One inauspicious example when we not make this commitment was after World War I. The war ended in something of truce with a large portion of Germany left intake and unoccupied save some territory in the Rhineland near the German-French border. (There are parallels to how the first Gulf War ended, but that’s for another time.) The United States pulled its troops from the Rhineland in 1924, a little over four years after the war ended (to give perspective-the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam is almost upon us). The other Allies followed suit in 1930.
The lack of an occupation of all of Germany pretty well doomed a major provision of the peace treaty, which called for the nation to replace its military dictatorship with a democracy. During Germany’s relatively brief history of sixty years as an integrated nation, it had never been a democracy. Rival factions arose including the Nazis and the communists, many having their own militias like the Nazi SA. Thousands died in the ensuing violence. Hitler and the Nazis won the struggle in 1933, and the rest as they say is history. The Fuehrer established another military dictatorship and in his first act of defiance towards the Allies rolled his army into what was supposed to be by treaty the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936. Facing no opposition, he determined the Allies were weak and kept pushing for more territory in the years that followed until he plunged all of Europe into a Second World War. The Allies unwillingness to pay the price to secure the peace after the First World War meant a far more costly one: over two trillion in current dollars and 50 million lives lost (290,000 American servicemen in Europe, 407,000 total) instead of 200 billion dollars and the 19 million (116,000 Americans) lives claimed by World War I.
With victory in World War II, the Allies were committed to avoiding the mistakes of World War I. The biggest lessons were of course the need to occupy and to establish democracies in Germany and Japan. In Germany, the occupation began with millions of Allied troops on the ground at war’s end, because the Nazi Army still numbered in the millions. The lowest number of American troops in Germany in the years immediately following the end of the war was 135,000 two years after the surrender, which was ramped up to about 250,000 in 1950 (where it stayed until the 1980’s) in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. Germany adopted its new constitution in 1949, and the occupation ended in 1955, ten years after the close of the war. The United States still has 69,000 military personnel in Germany by invitation of that government. In Japan, the occupation force reached 350,000 by the end of 1945, which tapered off during the next few years until the start of the Korean War in 1950, when large numbers of American troops were sent to that fight. Japan adopted its constitution in 1947 and the occupation ended in 1952. There are still 47,000 American military personnel in Japan again by invitation. There are 35,000 in Korea.
For President Bush to station 155,000 troops in Iraq not even four years after the fall of Saddam and a year and a half after the people adopted a new constitution is consistent with our past experience of what is needed to secure the peace. History demonstrates that an unwillingness to pay the price in short term reaps a far greater cost down the line. Iraq like Germany and Japan had never known democracy in its seventy year history as a modern nation. There are promising signs that the Iraqi government and military are beginning to stand on their feet. Further Iraq’s economy grew by double digits according to some estimates during the last two years. There are 34,000 registered businesses versus only 8000 three years ago. It too like Germany and Japan has aggressive neighbors in Iran and Syria who would be all too willing to step in to any power vacuum created by a precipitous American withdrawal and snuff this democracy out in its infancy.
The Democrats repeated attempts to thwart President Bush’s efforts to secure the peace in Iraq and have that nation be a positive force for change in the Middle East calls to mind something Lincoln wrote in an open letter to his critics during the Civil War. The first hopeful signs had appeared on the horizon, but several battles lay yet ahead. He wrote, “I hope [peace] will come soon, and come to stay; and come as worth keeping in the future…And then, there will be some…who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye…they helped mankind on this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some…unable to forget that… they strove to hinder it.”
