If We Exit
By Victor Davis Hanson
From the May/June 2007 Issue
The costs, economic and otherwise, of staying in Iraq are terrible. The costs of leaving are much, much worse.
A national debate rages about the probable aftermath of a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq. Supporters of the current war insist that a catastrophe would result: mass murder, open sanctuary for al-Qaeda terrorists in the north, an Iranian protectorate in the south, and a beleaguered neighboring Kurdistan subject to invasion threats from Turkey.
If we leave, they say, Shiite Iran would be emboldened to accelerate its acquisition of nuclear weapons, threatening the oil-producing Gulf sheikdoms and Israel. Reform from Lebanon to Libya would halt, as leaders wisely downsized their relationships with a weakened America.
The war’s opponents have a different view of what they call American “redeployment” from Iraq. They insist that the damage that would follow would be no worse than that entailed by staying the course, which will cost us tens of billions of dollars and thousands more U.S. lives.
Both sides agree that the reference point is Vietnam, 1975. But they disagree on what that history means. Supporters of continuing in Iraq point to the millions of Vietnamese refugees and boat people, the hundreds of thousands sent to reeducation camps or murdered. They see three decades of misery in Vietnam as foreshadowing a similar human disaster in Iraq. In their view, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the holocaust in Cambodia, the seizure of U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran, and the rise of Islamic terrorism all ensued from the perception of American impotence after Vietnam. Abandoning Iraq could be worse.
Those who now want out of Iraq counter that Vietnam eventually liberalized its economy and ended up on the right side of history. After Vietnam, America also turned out fine with the passage of time, and will again—but only when Baghdad becomes as distant a memory as Saigon is now.
While speculating about the immediate political and security results of a departure from Iraq may be difficult, predicting the long-term economic effects is a good deal easier.
Unlike the past tribal chaos in Afghanistan and Lebanon, the sectarian violence that would inevitably be unleashed in Iraq would play out atop the source of the world’s second-largest known oil reserve—close by the largest reserve and the third largest. The power of our enemies to exploit these reserves would threaten the American economy far more than any consequences of our defeat in Vietnam.
Iran, with oil-rich southern Shiite Iraq as its protectorate, would be in a far better position to ignore United Nations sanctions, pressure the Gulf sheikdoms to curtail their oil production, increase aid to Hezbollah, and threaten tanker traffic across the Strait of Hormuz. If Iraqi oil production were shut down, or if a large portion of it came under Iranian control, Tehran might enjoy increased prices, capacity, or both—a reprieve and an incentive for more aggression for a regime now facing economic problems that threaten to destabilize the government and its costly nuclear and terrorist operations.
Most prominently, Russia and China would deal with whatever tribes or dictator ended up with the oil of Iraq—Russia selling weapons for Iraqi petrodollars obtained by oil sales to China. Europe is already Iran’s largest trading partner. Both would gain power—military and economic—at the expense of the United States and world stability in general. At any rate, the best guess is that oil prices would rise significantly, with potentially devastating effects on the American economy and on less-developed nations at large.
But, whatever economic scenarios one can conjure, the common denominator in an age of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and tight petroleum would be that America’s enemies would be able to sell more oil and buy more weapons without political, much less ethical, constraint. Iraq’s oil would serve the same terrorist purposes as Afghanistan’s opium—only without the outrage connected with the proliferation of heroin.
The promotion of Middle East democracy would, of course, be a dead letter. Instead, we would go back to past policies of “realist” appeasement. Prior to 9/11, we dealt with antagonists with missile strikes that lost no Americans and had little effect on terrorists. Did such conduct increase the likelihood of our being attacked at home in 2001? After pulling out of Iraq, would a reversion to these policies ensure another 9/11?
As America withdrew in defeat from Iraq, leaders in Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf sheikdoms would face critical choices. Should they trust an untrustworthy United States that once promised it would never abandon Iraqis and their new democracy? Or should these leaders instead ask America to keep at arm’s length as they make arrangements of convenience with victorious neighboring terrorists and other enemies of the U.S.? Our commercial, financial, and military responsibilities well beyond the Middle East are built on a trust that, likewise, would be irreparably harmed by our flight from the few thousand insurgents of Iraq.
Finally, consider the effects of defeat on the U.S. military. Our infantry forces would be vulnerable to the charge that America can only win conventional ground struggles such as the first Gulf War but is unable to achieve victory in messy wars of counterinsurgency, whether in Mogadishu or Baghdad.
Our enemies and friends would come away with two lessons: the United States is highly unlikely to intervene in any landscape replete with terrorists, and, if it does, the American media, politicians, and populace will tire once losses mount.
Yes, there are terrible costs in the present effort to secure a democratic Iraq, but they pale in comparison with the long-term expense of defeat, both to the United States and to the world at large.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classics scholar and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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