In the now infamous press conference in Turkey last week, President Obama laid out his case against using American ground troops in Iraq and Syria. In the course of doing so, he tossed what he surely believed to be an argument-ending rhetorical grenade: the specter of "permanent occupation" as the necessary follow-on to American ground action:
[T]here have been a few who suggested that we should put large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground. And keep in mind that we have the finest military in the world and we have the finest military minds in the world, and I’ve been meeting with them intensively for years now, discussing these various options, and it is not just my view but the view of my closest military and civilian advisors that that would be a mistake—not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before, which is, if you do not have local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremes, that they resurface—unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.
That word, "occupation," serves multiple purposes for the president. For his liberal and international audiences, it triggers thoughts of Israel's presence in the West Bank and, until 2005, in Gaza. Since Israel is right up there with Republicans in competition for this crowd's Public Enemy No. 1, suggesting that American military action would in any way resemble Israel's approach signals the end of the argument.
For domestic audiences, the president is suggesting that the defeat of the Islamic State on the ground would subsequently require something like the full blown counterinsurgency tactics that the U.S. military used until recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans don't like terrorism, but after years of grinding warfare, they also don't much like the idea of young soldiers and Marines standing on every Iraqi or Syrian street corner, adjudicating disputes and slowly building a state apparatus.
For Obama, we can either use no ground troops at all, or order a deployment so significant and costly that few Americans would want to sign up for it. By arguing in this manner, the president strengthens his record as a leader who depends with remarkable frequency on logical fallacies to persuade American voters. In this case, the fallacy is that of the "false choice"—there is, Obama tells us, no middle ground.
But of course there is a middle ground. Even those calling for the use of ground troops against the Islamic State agree that "local partners" must be in the lead where possible. They also believe that the requirement to defeat the Islamic State is so important that, if partners cannot be found, the United States must lead. After the caliphate is gone, Iraq will need our continuing support, but Iraqi troops and the Sunni tribes must take the lead at the local and district level. Indeed, if instead of leaving Iraq, we had maintained our bases and a modest number of troops there in 2011, and been more assertive in Syria at the same time, there would be no Islamic State today.
No one can confidently describe what a post-Islamic State Syria should look like, because the outcome will now depend upon what happens with Assad and his Russian sponsors, and whether or not a viable Sunni coalition can be cobbled together in the east, among other factors. It is unlikely to be worthwhile for American troops to remain in large numbers where there is no viable partner for them to work with, and where the risks outweigh the rewards. The same reasoning applies to, for example, the current situation in Somalia: prudence and local factors must dictate our longterm policy.
But to suggest that American troops should never stay on in a long-term capacity to help an ally is just as foolish and ideologically driven as to argue that every country troubled by international terrorist networks needs an American infantry company in each of its districts.
The president's argument against "occupation" runs into trouble with examples like Iraq's recent near-collapse. Would it really have been a "permanent occupation" in the sense Obama means for 20,000 American troops or so to have guaranteed the security of a friendly Baghdad government, and to have been on hand in case of a crisis? The presence of American bases for the long run have produced positive results for American policy before. The two countries that host the greatest number of U.S. troops to this day are nations we defeated and subsequently occupied after the Second World War: Japan, in which about 50,000 American servicemen are based, and Germany, with about 40,000. After that is South Korea, which hosts about 30,000 troops.
Japan and Germany regained their sovereignty after the war and continued to accept a U.S. presence as a defense against threats from their neighbors, threats that still exist to this day. South Korea, a once-authoritarian state that in no way can be said to have been "committed to inclusive governance" when the U.S. came to its assistance in the '50s, has since become a thriving democracy.
There is not only a case to be made for the positive consequences of our bases in these countries: the case is definitive. These commitments of American troops, the protests of the left aside, are not "neo-colonial," in the sense of being aimed at resource exploitation or the like, but liberal, and they have had liberal outcomes. Compare those outcomes to the countries we have abandoned, like South Vietnam or Iraq, or nearly abandoned, like Afghanistan. (Indeed, in the case of Afghanistan, our earlier loss of attention after the end of Soviet occupation contributed greatly to the civil war of the '90s and the subsequent rise of the Taliban.)
The countries where we have remained have become part of an international order devoted to the rule of law, economic growth, and human rights. The countries we have abandoned have been overrun by communism or Islamic extremism, harming that order.
Some would suggest that Muslim countries pose a special problem, and are allergic to an American military presence in the way that European or East Asian states are not. There may be some truth to this—but if having troops in the Middle East isn't always a pretty picture, just look at what pulling troops out is like!
Despite Obama's centrist instincts on some issues (like, refreshingly, political correctness) he is suspicious of a global order guaranteed by a nation such as ours, where, in his view, citizens are irrationally persuaded of their country's exceptional character while living in a land plagued by under-regulated industry, racism, and a host of other ills. For Obama and his second-term advisers, the deployment of American ground troops causes terrorism and global instability. America's global withdrawal and military drawdown makes both America and the world a better place, and the main problem posed by terrorism is that it causes fearful Americans to want to use the military, even though they should know better. America can be kept safe enough by a vigilant defense of drone strikes and limited, micromanaged intelligence and special operations efforts.
We are currently living through a multi-year experiment in the application of this theory, and the global results are, to a significant majority of the American public, terrifying. When America departs, the result isn't development, but collapse. The vacuum isn't filled by Kumbaya, but by illiberal and extremist forces, who still want to do us harm even after we have gone. We need the bases.