As the administration of incoming US president Barack Obama debates the pace and consequences of withdrawal from Iraq, it would do well to examine the strategic impact of other US exits in the final decades of the twentieth century. Although US commitments to Lebanon, Somalia, Vietnam, and Cambodia differed mightily, history reveals that despite immediate costs to the US’ reputation, disengagement ultimately redounded to its advantage. In all of these cases, regional stability of sorts emerged after a US military withdrawal, albeit at the cost of a significant loss of life.
The US’ former adversaries either became preoccupied with consolidating or sharing power, suffered domestic defeat, or confronted neighboring states. Ultimately, the US’ vital interests prevailed. The evidence today suggests that this pattern can be repeated when the US departs Mesopotamia and leaves Iraqis to define their own fate.
Of the four withdrawals, arguably the 1982 to 1984 US intervention in Lebanon marks the closest parallel to Iraq today. A country torn by sectarian violence beginning in 1975, Lebanon pitted an even more complex array of contestants against each other than Iraq does today.
Into this fray stepped the US and its Western allies. Their objective was to create a military buffer between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israeli forces that were then fighting in Beirut in order to promote the departure of both. The massacres in Palestinian refugee camps prompted a new commitment to “restore a strong and central government” to Lebanon, to quote then-president Ronald Reagan. But the result of intervention was that US forces became just one more target, culminating in the 1983 bombing of a US Marine barracks that killed 241 US soldiers.
A similar suicide bombing two days later claimed the lives of 58 French soldiers.
In February 1984, facing a quagmire, Reagan acceded to vice president George H.W. Bush’s recommendation to get out of Lebanon. But the withdrawal of Western forces did not stop the fighting. The civil war continued for another six years, followed by a bumpy political aftermath: Syrian intervention and expulsion (two decades later), as the Lebanese defined their own fate with the US exercising only background influence.
In 1992, the sirens of Somalia’s political collapse lured the US into another civil war to save a country from itself. The US humanitarian mission to that benighted country sought to salvage a failed UN enterprise to secure and feed Somalia’s ravaged population.
The US committed 28,000 troops, which for a time imposed a modicum of security. But ill-equipped and poorly led UN replacement forces for the US presence put the remaining US troops in the bull’s eye as they attempted to bring to justice the Somali warlord responsible for the death of Pakistani peacekeepers.
The ensuing bloodbath of US soldiers generated images that the American public could not stomach, prompting the exit of the US and then UN forces.
As unrest mounted with these military retreats, offshore US forces monitored and intercepted jihadists who sought to enter Somalia, while Kenya and Ethiopia blocked the unrest from metastasizing across the region. In 2006, the capture of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, by the Islamic Courts raised the specter of a jihadist state.
But Somalia soon demonstrated that quagmires can be a two-way street. Following Ethiopia’s intervention, the Islamists found themselves out of power.
Today, Somalia remains a dysfunctional state, as rival clans, jihadists, and an interim government with Ethiopian support compete for power. The US, now out of the quagmire, exercises limited influence from afar.
While Lebanon and Somalia remain damaged and failed states, respectively, regional and domestic factors have cauterized the consequences of the US’ retreat from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The result is the stable region that the world sees today. But the US saw things very differently in the 1960s, when the ghosts of Munich hovered over Vietnam’s jungles.
As President George W. Bush argued about the war in Iraq, US President Lyndon Johnson predicted that defeat in Vietnam “would be renewed in one country and then another.” What Johnson failed to foresee were the domestic and regional constraints that would prevent the dominos from falling in the way he predicted.
Although the US bombed northeastern Cambodia intensely throughout the Vietnam War years, it had no stomach for a ground commitment there. Still within congressional restraints, the Nixon administration attempted to bolster Cambodia’s military government. But, despite modest material support, the US could not sustain a government that could not sustain itself.
Rather than the dominos falling following the US’ retreat from Saigon in 1975, a Vietnam-Cambodian War ensued. This in turn stimulated China’s unsuccessful intervention in North Vietnam. The withdrawal by all of these invading armies to the recognized international boundaries demonstrated that nationalist forces were dominant in the region, not communist solidarity.
None of these American exits was without consequence. But, while the US suffered costs to its reputation around the world, the supposed advantages from this for the US’ opponents proved illusory.
The US’ departure from Mesopotamia will likewise put the burden of problem solving onto Iraqis and other regional players, leaving the US offshore to assist when and where it deems appropriate. History suggests that, in fits and starts, Iraq, like Vietnam and Lebanon, will find itself able to sort out its own affairs.
Bennett Ramberg served in the US State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs during the George H.W. Bush administration.
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