The war in Iraq isn't over. The main events may not even have happened yet.

By Thomas E. Ricks
WashPost
Sunday, February 15, 2009

In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East.

To the south, the Arch of Titus, completed in 81 A.D., honors victories in Egypt and Jerusalem. To the north, the Arch of Septimius Severus, built 122 years later, celebrates triumphant campaigns in Mesopotamia. The structures brought home a sad realization: It's simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East.

It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean -- following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British. For thousands of years, it has been the fate of the West's great powers to become involved in the region's politics. Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French influence suffered a major reduction, it has been the United States' turn to take the lead there. And sitting on that wall, it struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East, the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it.

President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

(More here.)

TM Comment, from the Washington Post website:

tmaertens wrote:
It is entirely plausible that the Iraqis will settle matters militarily after we leave. We will have facilitated that likely event by having organized the ex-Baathist Sunni militias in the west and arming all three main factions.

Ricks seems to have adopted the views of his sources, mostly apologists for an indefinite occupation of Iraq, without questioning their assumptions. Why is it in America's interests to stay indefinitely? Will that bring democracy? It is our role in the Middle East to spread our preferred ideology, and could we do it even if we determined that it was desirable? Can we prevent an Iraqi civil war, and at what cost? If a civil war results in the splintering of Iraq into the old three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, how does that damage our interests? (One of those three, the western, mostly Sunni part, has virtually no oil.)

Ricks cites the historical precedent of Rome, Britain and others, but what lesson should we take away from them? Did they benefit, long-term from their involvement in the Middle East? If so, what benefit(s) accrued to them? If historical precedents are worth studying, perhaps we should study the foreign experience in Afghanistan, "The Graveyard of Empires," before committing more troops. Or should we imitate the British experience, exemplified by the calamitous 19th century Retreat from Kabul, or the disastrous 10-year Russian experience?

If you are doing a cost-benefit analysis of the occupation of Iraq, it is necessary to analyze the costs and benefits of staying, and the costs and benefits of leaving. Ricks does only one of the two, using Bush-era apologists for staying.
2/15/2009 7:28:57 AM