Looking for the exit

AS AMERICA'S THIRD summer in Iraq wears on, with a fragile, squabbling National Assembly in Baghdad and an unflaggingly murderous insurgency, talk in Washington has turned to exit strategies. Representative Walter Jones Jr., Republican of North Carolina, has introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for a troop withdrawal starting in October 2006. Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, has introduced a similar measure. And as reported last week, the latest in a series of leaked top-secret British memos reveals that the United States and Britain have drawn up plans, at least on the level of contingency, for cutting combined forces in Iraq from the current 160,000 to 66,000 by early next year.

As Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, told the Globe two weeks ago, ''The case for an exit strategy is only growing stronger every day."

Like ''mission creep" and ''quagmire," the use of the term ''exit strategy" tends to rise as public frustration with an overseas military intervention increases. And indeed, the case for an exit strategy would seem to be commonsensical. As Aesop said, ''Affairs," and not only of the romantic kind, ''are easier of entrance than of exit; and it is but common prudence to see our way out before we venture in."

Yet there are those who question what kind of strategy, exactly, an exit strategy represents. Is setting a timetable for withdrawal a strategy at all? Or, as some suggest, is it a euphemism for retreat? For many foreign policy scholars and analysts, an undue focus on when and how we'll leave can undermine an intervention, even undoing its gains. The idea of an exit strategy, they argue, is at best meaningless--and, at worst, dangerous.

. . .

The term ''exit strategy" is a recent coinage, minted not by diplomats or generals but by businessmen. The earliest appearance that shows up in periodicals databases is a 1979 article in the Harvard Business Review explaining that manufacturers should carefully plan ''both the entrance and the exit strategies" when considering expanding into a new market. In the 1980s venture capitalists started using the term to describe their plans to liquidate investments: Getting bought out was an exit strategy, so was going public.

But the concept of building expiration dates into foreign interventions is not without a history of its own. Gary J. Bass, a Princeton political scientist writing a book on the origins of the humans rights movement, points out that, in the heyday of European colonialism, the Great Powers would impose cut-off dates on the interventions of others. In 1860, France was permitted by its European rivals to intervene to stop the massacre of Maronite Christians in Syria only on the condition that it limit its stay to six months. ''The Brits, and Austrians, the Russians," says Bass, ''were afraid that otherwise this was going to be imperial, that it was going to be a land grab."

But the term itself didn't find its way into military and political circles until the early 1990s, as humanitarian intervention--whether in Haiti, Somalia, or Bosnia--emerged as the major foreign policy issue of the immediate post-Cold War era. In April of 1993, with pressure building to intervene in the Bosnian war, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher promised the Senate that he would never advise sending American troops abroad without first answering the question, ''Is there an exit strategy?"

The term quickly attached itself to the so-called Powell Doctrine, named for its progenitor, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell (though it was essentially a restatement of principles first publicly laid out by Reagan administration defense secretary Caspar Weinberger). To avert messy, protracted wars of the Vietnam variety, Powell maintained, the United States should send its military into harm's way only when vital national interests were at stake, when overwhelming force could be brought to bear, and when the goals--and therefore the exit strategy--were clear. When 18 Army Rangers were killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, in an intervention widely criticized as open-ended and insufficiently thought through, US public officials of every stripe became even more fervent in their devotion to the exit strategy.

Until recently, however, public officials calling for an exit strategy in Iraq were a decided minority. ''The Bush administration wasn't under much pressure to establish exit strategies in Afghanistan, or for that matter in Iraq, until a couple of years after the intervention," says James Dobbins, a former diplomat, now at the RAND Corporation, who has served as US special envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Public support for both endeavors minimized such talk. ''The concept is only making a comeback," he continues, ''as the difficulties in Iraq mount."

Despite its popularity, however, many scholars and military policy analysts remain skeptical of the very idea of the exit strategy. ''It's a nice ideal to throw out there," says Conrad C. Crane, a historian at the US Army War College, ''but it's been hard to apply historically." The objection is partly pragmatic: Announcing a timeline may only encourage your opponents to wait you out, a point that the Bush administration has made repeatedly when pressed on Iraq.

But there are deeper, less tactical objections as well. ''An exit strategy assumes a base level of foreign policy in which you're not engaged abroad," says Gideon Rose, who served as director of the Council on Foreign Relations's Study Group on Exit Strategies and American Foreign Policy, and is now managing editor of Foreign Affairs. ''It gauges the level of success based on how quickly we can bring all our boys home and go back to living our own life and cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world."

That assumption, Rose argues, is unrealistic and counterproductive. ''If you're against exit strategies it doesn't mean you're into squandering our blood and treasure abroad. The alternative is thinking about real strategies--what are our goals in intervening, how are we going to achieve them, what's necessary to achieve them?"

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the CFR and author of ''The Savage Wars of Peace" (2002), a frankly hawkish history of America's numerous lesser-known foreign interventions, argues that it makes little sense to measure the success of an intervention by when we leave. American troops are still deployed to Kosovo and Bosnia, he points out, where their presence has thus far guaranteed stability. Indeed, he adds, given that US troops remain in Germany and Japan, ''One could say we still haven't found an exit strategy from World War II."

Boot's point, in effect, is the same one made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this spring, when he told American troops in Iraq, ''We don't really have an exit strategy. We have a victory strategy."

Rose makes the distinction a bit differently: The Bush administration's problem in Iraq, he says, ''is not that it doesn't have an exit strategy, it's that it doesn't have a strategy per se."

. . .

For strategists and scholars alike, the trouble with an exit strategy is that it is not a military concept but a political one. Timothy Kane, a former Air Force intelligence officer and a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, calls it ''a politically correct term for retreat." Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that exit strategies distort strategic thinking so that leaving becomes the predominant consideration. ''Rather than asking the question, 'When is the environment appropriate for us to leave?,' Campbell says, it's, 'We need to leave, tell us why the environment will allow us to."'

Still, politics do ultimately matter. As Princeton's Gary Bass argues, ''the problem is that in a democracy you're playing to two different audiences. On the one hand, there's what might strategically make sense in Kosovo and Bosnia or whatever. On the other hand, you have to make sure you maintain sufficient domestic support." Unlike France in 1860, the Bush administration feels it can brush off the demands of other nations. It can't, however, ignore its electorate.

Jonathan D. Pollack, a professor in the Naval War College's Strategic Research Department, goes further, ascribing strategic value to the pressure that an exit srategy brings. ''We may make overly optimistic assumptions going in," he says, and the obligation to leave can help clarify not only what we'd like, but what we'll settle for. ''What are the kind of political and military conditions [on the ground]," as he puts it, ''that allow the US to withdraw without doing any damage to US credibility?"

Whatever one chooses to call it, these are the decisions the Bush administration is even now working out. ''If the insurgency wants to go on forever then the war will go on forever," says John Mueller, a national security specialist at Ohio State who has written books on American public opinion during the Korean, Vietnam, and the first Persian Gulf wars. ''And eventually we may have no choice but to just pull out and hope, to set up a government and a police force and hope it all holds together. I don't know if that's an exit strategy, but it's an exit."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.