General Batiste: 'We need a better plan to get out than what we had to get in' David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Wednesday July 11, 2007 Print This Email This ABC News reported Wednesday on the tension between "the building pressure on the White House to withdraw US troops from Iraq" and the White House's instance that to withdraw now would be to invite disaster. Senior National Correspondent Claire Shipman cited the interim progress report on Iraq which is due out this week, saying "word is there won't be much, if any progress detailed at all. This is a huge problem for an administration under siege." "But what would a quick withdrawal actually look like?" continued Shipman. "How realistic is a speedy pullout?" Lawrence Kolb, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, told ABC that a pullout would probably take a year or more and that hurrying would increase the risks. ABC then spoke to Major General (ret.) John Batiste, formerly a commander in Iraq and now "an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's management of the war." Batiste agreed that the worst-case scenarios of a bloodbath in Baghdad, a resurgence of al Qaeda, or a regional conflagration are all possible, but insisted that only means "we need a better plan to get out than what we had to get in." "Our all-volunteer military cannot sustain the current cycle of deployments," said Batiste, concluding that withdrawal in some form in unavoidable. He would like to see the issue addressed in the context of "a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East" that considers the full spectrum of US interests in the region and includes the "diplomatic, economic, and political hard work that is fundamentally important." When challenged again with the "nightmare scenario" of a full-blown civil war breaking out as the US leaves Iraq, Batiste acknowledged "it is a tough problem, there's no question about it." However, he saw no alternative to solving that problem and expressed his opinion that the most effective approach would be a diplomatic effort to develop a regional and worldwide coalition of other nations to assure Iraq's stability as the US pulls out. The following video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast on July 11.





