Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - Is 2005 the year the United States pulls its military forces out of Iraq and leaves that country to struggle through a civil war, no matter who wins the presidential election in November?
There are some signs that this may be true.
President Bush can only say "stay the course" in a war that has hardly gone the way he and his principal advisers thought it would go.
Sen. John Kerry, the Democrat nominee, voted for the war, but has said that the way the Bush administration handled the invasion created a crisis and made the United States less secure. Kerry said he would take steps toward bringing U.S. troops home within four years, including getting more help from other nations and providing better training for Iraqi security forces.
We have prosecuted the war and the counter-insurgency war that followed with too few soldiers on the ground and seemingly no strategy for victory. Today, there are three options:
We double the number of boots on the ground, from today's 150,000 troops to 300,000, and pursue a much more vigorous attack on the foreign and domestic guerrillas. To double the force would require a major buildup in our Army and Marine troop strength, which no one seems prepared to pursue.
We continue as we are now, holding defensive positions and taking a steady stream of casualties while the insurgents get stronger and bolder.
We get out.
A suggestion in one of my recent columns that we begin the withdrawal by establishing American enclaves on the Iraq borders has gained some traction and is being discussed by Army planners, we are told.
An American withdrawal short of victory would leave the Iraqis to sort things out on their own, and that likely means a civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites while the semi-autonomous Kurds in the north try to stay out of it.
Withdrawal would end the Republican neo-conservative dreams of establishing democracy, and an American foothold, in the Middle East. An end to their dreams of frightening Syria and Iran into behaving much better.
It would be a bitter pill for the Bush administration to swallow and one they are unwilling to discuss until the November election is out of the way. But if they win another four years, swallow it they must or see the war and the American casualties drag on endlessly without resolution.
A withdrawal from Iraq would allow us to reinforce and re-energize the effort in Afghanistan and bolster our ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan,
as he and his army pursue a bloody campaign to clean out pockets of foreign terrorists in Waziristan on the Afghan border.
The United States needs to bolster security and reconstruction in Afghanistan and prevent the overthrow of Musharraf and the rise to power of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power. Think of Osama bin Laden with his hands on a nuclear bomb. Now that would be a very real threat to the United States and its people.
