Former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker told a packed audience in Charlottesville on Friday that there are key lessons to be learned from a long war: knowing when to get in and when to get out and the ramifications of each.
“For most Americans the War on Terror started on 9/11 when the act of terrorism reached our shores,” Crocker said at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. “But for me personally, it started many years earlier.”
Crocker spent more than 30 years in government service and was a U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Pakistan, Kuwait and Lebanon. He was in Beirut, Lebanon, on April 18, 1983, when terrorists bombed the U.S. embassy there and killed more than 60 people.
In his hourlong discussion as part of the Miller Center’s public forum series, Crocker spoke on the lessons gained from America’s “long war” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He talked about the need to understand government relations through the eyes of Middle Easterners and what longtime consequences the war will have on both nations.
“History shapes the present and [is] the guidepost for the future,” Crocker said. “[The past] has created a distinctive Middle Eastern political culture of ‘Let them come and once they’re here, regroup and start fighting back and then see how much pain they can take for how long.’ The strategy [in the Middle East] has been, ‘Don’t start to fight until the West thinks they’ve won the war.’”
He said it is important that Americans understand that while war is costly and time consuming, it is a process much harder to get out of and that it can have long-lasting consequences if handled poorly.
“We have to be careful getting in and even more careful getting out,” Crocker said. “You don’t like the way it’s going in Iraq, but you just can’t walk away and turn the page [because] disengagement brings with it its own consequences.”
He said a U.S. military initiative against Iran would be even more deadly, costly and time consuming than ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“If anyone is thinking military intervention in Iran is a good idea they need to go outside and sit under one of those beautiful trees out there until the idea goes away,” Crocker said. “We need to continue with diplomacy — buying time is sometimes the best investment you can make.”
Crocker, who retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009, is now the dean and executive professor at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
On Friday, Crocker said he expects any new Iraqi government will ask U.S. officials to maintain military presence beyond 2011 and he hopes the Obama administration will listen.
“What I worry about when I look at Iraq is that we as Americans think we’ve turned a page,” Crocker said. “The American clock always runs faster than the Middle Eastern clock. We need to get those clocks synchronized.”
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