Forward Observer: Homeward Bound?

Some day soon I expect to hear President Bush announcing that he will begin withdrawing U. S. troops from Iraq in 2006.

He almost certainly will stress that he is not cutting and running, just complying with the request of the sovereign government of Iraq. His wordsmiths will recommend that Bush say something like this once the new Iraqi government and its constitution are in place:

"Today I am announcing the first withdrawals of American troops from Iraq. I am doing this at the request of the duly elected government of Iraq and with the full support of our own Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thanks in large part to the efforts of our magnificent military, the elected president of Iraq tells me that his army and police forces are ready to take over more of the security of their own country.

"Let me emphasize that we are not abandoning Iraq. We are standing down as Iraqi forces are standing up. This has been my objective all along. American military forces, including our air power, will be on call if the newly elected Iraqi government should need them as we execute the phased withdrawals recommended by our military commanders.

"This is a great day for democracy; a bad day for terrorists the world over. Thanks to our steadfastness in Iraq, to our men and women in uniform who paid the ultimate price helping Iraq achieve its freedom while making us all safer here at home, and to the American people who held firm and would not settle for anything less than victory over the terrorists in Iraq, we have brought a brighter day to the world."

Such a speech might disarm Democrats, at least for a while, before the crucial congressional elections in November. But that calculation assumes the bad guys in Iraq will behave and not make more headlines with their bombings; that Iraqi forces will be up to pacifying their nation's cities and securing their oil fields; that Congress will keep financing the unpopular and costly war at a time popular domestic programs are short of money and the deficit is soaring.

All those and other assumptions make the withdrawal scenario a gamble for Bush and the Republican Party. Given Iraq's turbulence and the U.S. experience in Vietnam, the Bush gamble must be classified as a long shot.

I happened to be in Saigon as a combat correspondent in 1968 and asked South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu whether the United States had trained and equipped his army to the point that American troops could start withdrawing. He said this was, indeed, feasible, but he didn't sound or look like he meant it.

The next year, newly elected President Nixon gave Thieu no choice as he started pulling out U.S. troops. Nixon's government promised many of the same things for Vietnamization that Bush is expected to promise for Iraqization, such as keeping the native army in arms and ammunition and coming to its rescue if necessary.

Easier said than done, a number of U. S. generals told me back in 1969 as troop withdrawals began. "Once we take our troops out of there," said one general of South Vietnam, "no way in hell we'll ever get them back in there." The political dynamic is no different today. Once Bush begins withdrawing American troops from Iraq, the egg is out of the chicken.

Vietnam dramatized another political dynamic that has to be worrying White House operatives as they sift through withdrawal scenarios: Once our troops leave a foreign country, politicians lose interest in sending money to that country. Nixon's Defense secretary, former Rep. Melvin Laird, R-Wis., said this dynamic doomed Vietnamization as Congress cut off money for the South Vietnamese military, making it easy for North Vietnam to win.

"The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget," Laird wrote in the November/ December 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, "is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own."

"Over the four years of Nixon's first term," Laird continued, breaking his decades-long silence on Vietnam, "I had cautiously engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces while building up South Vietnam's ability to defend itself ... Without U. S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year, and in the process doomed South Vietnam."

Laird said he still believes that with adequate outside help, "South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now." The shameful lesson, he wrote, "is not that we were there in the first place, but that we betrayed our ally in the end."

To keep history from repeating itself in Iraq, Laird warned that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld "must continue to show more deference to Congress. To do otherwise will endanger public support and the funding stream for the Iraq war and its future requirements. A sour relationship on Capitol Hill could doom the whole effort."

The question, looking ahead to congressional elections next November, is whether Bush, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice have the skills to make Iraqization succeed where Vietnamization failed.

I doubt it.