President Barack Obama has a plan. He is going to pull 10,000 troops a month out of Iraq from March 2010 to September 2010, resulting in a drawdown of some 70,000 troops over a 7-month period. Obama, as have many presidents in the past, believes that his plan will be executed flawlessly. The problem is that it won't be. The violence in Iraq will start to escalate next year. You can bet on that.
Here is another early instance and what we can expect to see more of over the next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
BAGHDAD — A series of devastating car bombings rocked Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 121 people and wounding hundreds more, according to preliminary accounts by witnesses, the police and hospital officials.
Five bombs in all, including at least three suicide attacks, struck near a college, a court complex in western Baghdad, a mosque and a market and a neighborhood near the Interior Ministry in what appeared to be a coordinated assault on the capital.
If there is one thing we learned from the last administration, it is that war plans go wrong immediately. The planners of the Iraq war thought we would be out by July 2003. We are still there. And there were many other bright and optimistic ideas for Iraq that never panned out.
Now Obama thinks he will pull out of Iraq next year. But that is only if everything goes according to plan. But in war, things do not go according to plan. The violence is going to escalate dramatically next year.
The attacks were the worst in Iraq since twin suicide bombings destroyed three ministries on Oct. 25, killing at least 155 people. They fit a pattern of spectacular attacks in the capital, followed by weeks of relative calm. In August, two suicide car bombs exploded near the country’s Finance and Foreign Ministries, killing at least 122.
Those attacks became known as Bloody Sunday and Bloody Wednesday, respectively. Across the city, officials and ordinary Iraqis added the adjective to Tuesday, as well. All of them illustrated the shortcomings of Iraq’s security forces, which despite an overwhelming presence at checkpoints across the city, appear unable to stop carefully orchestrated terrorist operations.
"There is no explanation at all for such a horrible security failure," said Muhammad al-Shalam, a Sunni member of Baghdad’s Provincial Council, which met on Tuesday in a building damaged in October. "The security forces are totally responsible for all this blood."
So Iraq's security forces are unable to prevent this kind of violence, and this is when 120,000 American soldiers are still in country. When US forces start to leave next year, Iraq will just fall apart even more. There will be much more violence, and then there will be pressure on President Obama to stay in Iraq and save it. After all, if we allow Iraq to fall back into a civil war, then all of the Americans who have died there will have died in vain.
This all leads me to expect that the Iraq withdrawal will be very messy, and then the withdrawal will be halted. Obama will end up staying in Iraq. How can we leave if Iraq is not secure? If we leave while Iraq is unsecure, it will just become another breeding ground for al-Qaeda terrorists and its extremist allies. If we cannot allow safe harbor for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, then we cannot allow safe harbor for al-Qaeda in Iraq. We must stay in Iraq and keep it secure until the Iraqis are able to take over the security themselves, which might happen within 100 years.