Leaving people behind

IN AUGUST, WHEN IRAQI Vice Pres. Adel Abdul Mahdi visited Washington, he was asked what his country needed most. He replied, "Time--that is it. A nation like Iraq needs time. The elections for a permanent government happened eight months ago. We have been in office a few weeks. The people who we have in office have never governed. These people come from oppression and a bad political system.... Our options as Iraqis are that we don't have an exit strategy or any withdrawal timetable. We simply go on.... It is a process and, brick by brick, we are working on it."

Clearly, Mahdi is counting on the U.S., and one would like to think that America will keep its promise to Mahdi and so many other Iraqis. In most cases, when the U.S. pledges to help a weak and threatened ally or a beleaguered people, it does precisely that. During the Cold War, the U.S. had mutual security obligations with more than 40 nations. In Article V of the NATO pact, the language is unambiguous: "An attack on one [is] an attack on all." This did not mean that Luxemburg would come to the rescue of the U.S. in the event of an attack; rather, that Luxemburg's security, along with all the other NATO allies, depended upon the solemn pledge of America to defend it in the event of a Soviet attack. Such action never was needed, though, largely because of our pledge and the military force to back it up.

During the four-plus decades of the Cold War, democracy and peace came to Western Europe. The same was true of Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. Had these nations doubted the sincerity of America's pledge, their policies and history could have been quite different--and not for the better. Neutralism would have been the watchword of their foreign policies and, eventually, their communist parties (certainly in France and Italy) would have grown in influence and power. Moreover, the militarism and fascism that had bored deeply in to the politics and culture of Germany, Japan, and Italy were eradicated.

The U.S., however, has not always had a record of steadfastness and determination to stay the course with those who have counted on its pledge. In 1877, for instance, the country, led by the Republican Party, ended Reconstruction and turned its back on the American Negro. The anti-slavery Republicans of Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, and Edwin Stanton, with their idealism and fervor, had become corrupt and besotted with power. They no longer really cared about the newly-freed slaves and were content to leave them at the mercy of their former masters. We know what ensued: Jim Crow laws, lynchings, penury, and general misery. The condition of most Southern black people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not much of an advancement over slavery, if any. The social system slavery had spawned could not be eliminated without a long-term commitment. The North had lost interest in black folks and found its own exit strategy.

The second mark of shame came during the Vietnam War years. One can dispute the wisdom of the American military intervention in that country in 1965, as this writer did at the time, but few can be proud of the conditions of our departure. It is something most Americans would rather not remember. On March 10, 1975, the North Vietnamese, in blatant violation of the Paris Agreement, launched a major offensive into South Vietnam. While the U.S. technically had no legal obligation to assist the South Vietnamese government, whose army had received no replacement equipment for two years, its moral obligation was another story.

As Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, prevented by Congressional law to provide any significant help, put it at the time, "Should [people] in their hour of extremity be told by the United States that, while they want to continue fighting, the United States would no longer help them." In Cambodia that stone year, the Khmer Rouge began an offensive against the capital city of Phnom Pehn. When it was finished, as many as 2,000,000 Cambodians had been murdered. Congress did nothing and, in April 1975, days before Phnom Pehn fell, The New York Times featured a story headlined, "Indochina without Americans: For Most, a Better Life."

Americans gave up on Reconstruction and left the blacks to suffer almost another century of misery. Cambodia became the worst example of mass extermination since the Holocaust of World War II; Vietnam still suffers under Communist rule and pales behind the progress of its Southeast Asian neighbors such as Thailand and Singapore. Opponents of the Iraqi war frequently refer to it as "another Vietnam." They may be fight, but not for the reason they believe. A legislative mandate cutting off all funds to Indochina left the U.S. helpless to assist our friends in South Vietnam or Cambodia. Those who support a deadline for the withdrawal from Iraq should remember 1877 and 1975.

No one expects progress in Iraq to be easy or the outcome to be clear. What should be clear are the stakes involved. If Congress follows the pattern of our policy in Vietnam and mandates another withdrawal, who in the volatile Middle East would ever stand with the U.S. again? What would we say to Mahdi and the other Iraqis we would leave behind to the mercy of the murderous Sunni and Shia Militias and the Al Qaeda remnants?