President Barack Obama faces split opinions within the military on whether to make the speedy withdrawal from Iraq he championed on the campaign trail.
Obama's top generals in Baghdad are pressing for an elongated timetable, while some influential senior advisers inside the Pentagon are more amenable to a quicker pullout.
This article, while pretty good, could leave the impression that the military is divided over the question of whether it is safe for the future of Iraq to withdraw most combat forces faster or slower. The title especially--"even military split over Iraq pullout"--conveys this message.
While there is certainly a degree of this debate, most of the debate is caused by comparing the views of officers responsible for different matters.
That is, commanders in Iraq are responsible for fighting the campaign there and want the troops there longer. Quite natural.
Commanders in Afghanistan want more troops and for the moment, they must come from Iraq. Again, natural.
CENTCOM commander has responsibility for both Iraq and Afghanistan and is so pulled in a couple directions, though certainly as the larger fight that has cost the most to get us to this point, Iraq probably pulls stronger on the scales.
Army commanders responsible for providing trained and equipped troops for the commander in chief want fewer brigades deployed overseas or more brigades. Drawing down in Iraq a bit faster seems a prudent risk given they don't have responsibility for fighting the wars--they have to provide the forces.
And other commanders with other regional or even global views worry about the availability of Army and Marine ground forces (and select resources from the Navy and Air Force that are in high demand) for other non-Iraq and non-Afghanistan contingencies.
There is no right or wrong side of the debate here when you look at it from this perspective. It's all about accepting risks: In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in South Korea, in the Taiwan Strait, in the Western Hemisphere, or wherever else leaders have to ponder how we'd use our military in response to a crisis.
Personally, given the price we've paid in Iraq to get this far, I'm less willing to accept risk by drawing down our forces too fast. I lean toward Odierno's views on Iraq troop levels. For many of the other potential crisis spots, I think our Navy and Air Force cover the most critical.
Further, I doubt our country is ready for a commitment to another significant land campaign that could cause us to endure heavy casualties, so why pretend we need free Army brigades in case another war pops up? I'm not so certain we are ready as a nation to endure the casualties that the Afghanistan campaign will require.
And if we are ready to fight a major land campaign that because the nation rallies to a major threat, we have yet to fully mobilize our ground forces reserves for the duration and seriously expand our ground forces for a major conflict. We still have that in our kit bag.
So don't pretend that disagreements over the pace of withdrawal from Iraq mean that a faster or slower withdrawal is an academic question with no right or wrong answer, so you can advocate a faster withdrawal secure in the knowledge that someone in the military agrees with you.
The people in the military giving different answers about the pace of withdrawal are answering different questions. President Obama has to answer all the questions with one decision--and bear the responsibility for all the consequences for all the questions.
