Knock me over with a feather

I'm on record as favoring rapid withdrawal from Iraq, and I maintain that position, but I'm a pretty cheap date when it comes to good news coming from there. I've followed that whole debacle from the beginning with almost my full attention. After all, I was there for 6 months, and I have a pretty good grasp of both the military and military history. As they say, the best lack all conviction; all that I know is that I don't know.

However, I do have the sneaking suspicion that all sides are wrong:

• The hawks are wrong: the consequences of withdrawal are not that great for the United States.
• The moderates are wrong: leaving "just enough troops to lose" is not a good strategy.
• The doves are wrong: the war is not "lost." I'd like to talk about that today.
  

In spite of all the mismanagement (at all levels), etc., I'm always conscious of the possibility of pulling a pyrrhic victory out of this mess. What does that mean? Just that Iraq turns out to be a decent country, for an absolutely unreasonable cost. Maybe there are free and fair elections, although formation of genuine liberal-democratic institutions are probably out of reach.

The general consensus seems to be forming that by purely military measures, the war is going pretty well relative to the recent past. General Petraeus has produced our first halfway decent counterinsurgency strategy, violence is declining, and Al Qaeda is not doing so hot (haven't heard about a big car bomb in a while, have you?)

But none of that really matters if the politics collapses. Skeptics point to the total lack of progress at the national level, and project that forward. But political progress isn't linear, or even monotonic (math term). I have no idea what might be possible in the next few months, or years.

What's more promising is the apparent emergence of a group of post-Saddam leaders at the community level, as represented by the various Awakening fronts. Real democracy comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. In our haste to get out of there, one of our many cardinal sins was to get this backwards.

I'm curious to see what the next Iraqi election (knock on wood) will produce. It seems like the extremist parties have lost credibility; I think we might be pleasantly surprised by the result, if it's allowed to happen.

Whether that outcome is worth another 300 American lives and $300 billion or so is not at all clear to me. But I wish everyone in this debate wasn't so damn sure of themselves.

Strategies in the War on Terror

1) Play Defense. Do some police work to catch some bad guys, but essentially accept that you'll get hit every now and then, until the Islamic world sorts itself out. I would characterize this as the center point of Democratic Party opinion.

2) Surrender. Stop supporting Israel, pull all troops out of the Middle East, and look the other way when quasi-fascist regimes take over places that are far away. This is the "far left" solution.

3) Reform the Middle East. Find the most vulnerable nasty regimes, and replace it with something better. Decent regimes should drain the swamp of rage that creates terrorism. This is the Bush administration policy. How's that working out?

4) Kill'em All. The drunken-frat-boy approach to foreign policy.

5) Divide and Conquer. If the Shiites and Sunnis are at each other's throats, will they have time to worry about the Palestinians, much less us?

We tried (3) but it's dead. We may have an opportunity to do (5), a less ethical, but possibly quite effective, option. We can set the region ablaze (and maybe make our problems go away) by pulling out of Iraq now.

There's Plenty of Blame to Go Around

In Slate today, Timothy Noah refutes the notion that we should blame the Iraqis for our failure to build a nation there that we can be proud of. I think he sets up a straw man in attacking assertions that it's "their" war, that Iraqis are "ungrateful," or that they are simply "uncivilized." While some may make these claims, in fact, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Obviously, the mistakes of the administration, and the Army, have made the chances of success lower than they might otherwise have been. Those have been well documented by hundreds of experts. I don't want to absolve us of blame, but it's important not to assume the Iraqis are a blank canvas on which we played out our policies; there were many players in this game. Here are some decisions that various groups in Iraq might have reasonably made, resulting in a different outcome in Iraq:

• Sunnis: Vote in the first election. This might have resulted in a Constitution and governmental structure less stacked against them.
• Shiites: Don't vote for Muqtada Al-Sadr. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the dynamic changing from a patient Shiite leadership attempting to contain an insurgency into inter-ethnic slaughter.
• Sunnis: Don't make common cause with Muqtada Al-Sadr. Perhaps if Sunni insurgents had a laid off us a bit while Sadr was causing trouble in April 2004 -- and possibly even given us a bit of political cover -- we might have taken care of him then. Everyone would have been a lot better off.
• Sunnis: Don't invite Al Qaeda in. Besides really irritating the occupying power, these guys immediately started trying to foment the inter-ethnic struggle that has now begun: a struggle in which the Sunnis are at a distinct disadvantage.
• Shiites: Rely on the Army rather than the militias. If Shiites control the Army, and the Army is focused on defeating the insurgency, why take the law into your own hands? It's that the Army's freedom of action is restricted, but doing so may have avoided the chaos that is now upon us.
  

Iraq: What to Do

I was an initial supporter of the invasion of Iraq. I believed Saddam's behavior was consistent with someone hiding a WMD program; that radical reform of the Middle East was the only long-term strategy for throttling Islamic terror; and that the existing strategy of "containment" and sanctions was unsustainable from both a diplomatic and a humanitarian perspective.

Up to now, I've been an advocate of patience; reform takes time and is likely to meet significant resistance. Many reasonable military/political approaches had yet to be tried, and we were right to try them.

But none of them worked. I honestly don't know if we were doomed by poor decision making, or doomed regardless; incredibly poor choices by the Sunni community certainly didn't help. Either way, the fiscal and intangible costs of the invasion have spiraled well beyond whatever benefits we might have attained.

I believe that the least bad option is to promptly withdraw.

The advantages of this are obvious: fewer dead Americans, less money spent, less direct responsibility for the nightmare that is Iraq, and the gradual repair of our nation's reputation with time.

There also some arguments against doing this, and they are very much worth addressing.

1. Leaving is handing Iraq to Al Qaeda. I disagree. At best, the lack of the American crutch will force resourceful politicians to cut deals, improving the situation. At worst, we're handing it over to the Mahdi Army. Al-Sadr is a horrible guy, but he doesn't pose the existential threat to America that Al Qaeda does. Al Qaeda is really unpopular in Iraq, as they're most responsible for the current sectarian mess. Still, I'm not above dropping some bombs or doing a little raid if Al Qaeda finds a haven in the chaos.
2. We have a moral responsibility to Iraqis. Of course we do. If things do devolve into full-scale civil war, the inevitable consequence is mass slaughter of Sunnis. However, there are realpolitik, moral, and practical reasons to run for it.
• As much of a human tragedy as that slaughter would be, it has little to no impact on the long-term interests of the United States.
• The Sunnis have resisted us violently from the beginning, at times making common cause with the very Al-Sadr now butchering them. The support of a substantial minority of Sunnis for Al-Qaeda brought about the Samarra mosque bombing that widened the inter-ethnic warfare. At what point does their total refusal to cooperate, record of violent resistance to us, and utter failure to behave responsibly as a minority absolve us of a responsibility to protect them?
• If such a confrontation truly is inevitable, which is better: getting it over with now, or leaving 150,000+ troops there for two years, and then letting it happen?
3. The disintegration of Iraq will draw its neighbors into a wider regional war. This is a favorite chestnut of foreign-policy expert types who think every year is 1914. What's not clear is by what mechanism such a thing might occur. It's not at all clear to me that, having witnessed America's experience in Iraq, Iraq's neighbors will excited to repeat that experience with their own troops. Indeed, if Iran chose to stick their arm in the meat grinder the way that we have, that's about the best thing that could happen for our Middle Eastern policy!

It pains me to be on the same side as the knee-jerk left, but it's time to cut our losses.