Sunday, January 25, 2009
Opinion

Why we must stay in Iraq

The only legacy worthy of the fallen is lasting peace in Iraq.

By Stephanie Ramage

Since I was a kid, I have been praying for the safety of some family member in combat, searching the news footage of war for a face as familiar as my own, watching my mother spring from the dinner table to answer the phone and shout over the static of a transatlantic call, “Sugar, I love you. Be careful.”

Though my father, who served in World War II and then in the reserves for the Korean War, had finished his military career by the time I was born, my oldest brother served in the Marines in the Vietnam era. My other brother began his Army career in Grenada in the early 1980s. He went on to serve in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He returned from his Afghanistan tour of duty last year. My nephew served in the Iraq invasion force. His father, the aforementioned Marine, is in Iraq now, as he has been for about two years, as part of the State Department’s humanitarian and reconstruction efforts. My niece, a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is also a Marine.

My family, and many other Southern families, black and white, have carried most of the weight of defending this nation since before the dawn of the previous century. At present, active military personnel make up less than 2 percent of the American population. Combined with veterans, the percentage is still less than 10 percent. We, their families, make up a tiny minority who shoulder a disproportionately large burden.

Our numbers are so small that many Americans think our beliefs are negligible. To them, the fact that our family members voluntarily swore an oath to defend this country with their very lives is a myth made up by Republicans to shame them into supporting war. They do not understand anyone’s willingness to die for something; they do not understand how such willingness makes life itself worth living.

Swooning over the flowery and empty words of a 27-year-old presidential speechwriter, they cannot comprehend how reverence for life and death can make the streets of Baghdad more real to our soldiers than the streets of Washington. Many of the anti-war people are fops and dandies for whom life is a series of purchases and petty triumphs in a social scene as vacuous as their souls.

On Jan. 22, as I write this, President Barack Obama is entertaining a plan for “giving Iraq back to its people,” as he said in his inaugural speech, apparently unaware that already, last summer, in a series of legal agreements signed at solemn ceremonies, we turned over Iraq to its people, one province at a time. Today, more intent upon a fashionable exploitation of grief than upon honoring the sacrifice of those who have fallen, groups like CodePink—which was allowed to operate out of Obama’s Senate office during his campaign—are agitating for a swift withdrawal from Iraq. Today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard, which hearkens less to him than to a fundamentalist notion of violent righteousness, are assessing how soon it might be possible to expand the boundaries and influence of Iran into Iraq.

We have been here before.

In 1948, the American occupation force in Berlin found itself in a tense standoff with its former allies, the Soviets, who wanted the Americans gone so that the Kremlin could take over Germany. By the time World War II had ended, three years earlier, more than 400,000 American military personnel had died, most of them in combat. Our European allies were even more battered. Here at home there were those, then as now, who demanded an end to our occupation of a foreign country. Europe’s fate, they said, was its own problem.

Washington instructed Gen. Lucius Clay, a native of Marietta, to offer the Soviets a concession—the delay of the introduction of the Deutschmark into the market. Clay refused and replied, “We must sweat it out, come what may. If Soviets go to war, it will not be because of Berlin currency issue but because they believe this is the right time. Certainly, we are not trying to provoke war. I can only say that our remaining in Berlin means much to our prestige in Germany, in Europe, and in keeping high the courage of Western Europe. To retreat now is to imply we are prepared to retreat further.”

Our occupation had gotten off to a rocky start. In 1947, a State Department survey showed that only 44 percent of Germans believed Americans were a helpful presence in the reconstruction. But we stayed and proved that we were there to rebuild, not to enrich ourselves.

We have kept a substantial force in Germany for more than 60 years. At this time, about 60,000 American troops serve there. There has been no more ethnic cleansing in Germany since our invasion of it in 1945, and nearly everyone in Europe, the Germans most of all, would laugh at the thought of such a thing. We stayed and we built peace in Western Europe for my generation, for my son’s generation and, I hope, for his children’s and their children’s. We stayed and we built a thing more precious than any other: a lasting peace.

Peter Mansoor, a former executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus, has recommended, as he wrote in the New York Times in late November, that 20,000 to 25,000 troops “could be withdrawn [from Iraq] in 2009, which would provide reinforcements for the war in Afghanistan. Withdrawals should then accelerate … with half the remaining combat forces and their associated support withdrawn in each of the following two years. By the end of 2011—subject to Iraqi concurrence, of course—some 20,000 to 40,000 troops would remain for an extended period.”

It is my hope that Obama will listen to Mansoor and others like him and will build the only legacy worthy of the fallen: lasting peace in Iraq. SP

To learn more about the American occupation of post-WWII Germany, read Andrei Cherny’s book, “The Candy Bombers.”
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.