Marble Composition

Leaving Iraq

What will Iraq look like if American troops start pulling out? There's plenty of talk about doing just that, but almost no discussion about what it would mean to the people of that destroyed country. Mort Kondrake (Roll Call) provides us a glimpse into what it might look like, and I'm surprised he actually wrote this in a column for publication:

Roll Call executive editor and Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke writes today that if President Bush’s escalation policy doesn’t work, his Plan B should be “winning dirty,” which involves “accepting rule by Shiites and Kurds, allowing them to violently suppress Sunni resistance and making sure that Shiites friendly to the United States emerge victorious.”
[...]
"Winning will be dirty because it will allow the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military and some Shiite militias to decimate the Sunni insurgency. There likely will be ethnic cleansing, atrocities against civilians and massive refugee flows."

First off, let's leave out the whole "winning" vs. "losing" talk; It's completely counterproductive to the current discussion. Mort is actually on to something here. What he's describing here is the dirty little secret about Iraq that in more polite circles dare not be mentioned: this outcome is inevitable. Folks on the Left may be appalled, but the situation is so bad there, there are no good options left. The only options left involve the killings of massive numbers of people, and sadly, most of them will be civilians. Here's Kevin Drum on Al Qaeda in Iraq:

...namely that the fastest way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is probably for us to leave and let the Iraqis do it themselves. Republicans don't want to acknowledge this for the obvious reason: they want to stay in Iraq and this doesn't help their cause. Democrats, I suspect, also don't want to talk too much about this, but for a different reason: because it tacitly condones the reason the Iraqis can do a better job than us of stamping out AQI. It's not just that Iraqis know their own neighborhoods better than us (though that's part of it), but that when it comes to exterminating AQI Iraqis would almost certainly be far more brutal about it than Americans. That's not really a subject anyone wants to bring up in polite company.

But that doesn't make it any less true. If we leave Iraq, the country is unlikely in the extreme to become an al-Qaeda haven. Partly this is because it's rage at the American presence itself that provides a big part of the fuel for AQI's growth. Our withdrawal would eliminate that source of rage and devastate AQI's ability to continue its recruiting. Partly it's because, as we're seeing in Anbar province right now, even Sunni extremists don't like AQI. Left to their own devices they'll kill off AQI jihadists in order to protect their own tribal turf. And partly it's because once we withdraw, non-Kurdish Iraq will be free to finish its inevitable transition into a Shiite theocracy — a transition that's sadly unavoidable whether we stay or not. Yes, this transition will be bloody, but in the end Iraq will almost certainly be composed of the Kurdish north, which has no use for al-Qaeda; the remaining Sunni sheikhs, who also have no use for al-Qaeda; and the victorious Shiite central government itself, which likewise has no use for murderous Sunni jihadists on its soil. Between the three of them, AQI isn't likely to last a year.

Of all the reasons for staying in Iraq, a desire to finish off AQI is by far the least convincing. It's our presence that largely keeps AQI going, and our withdrawal is the surest way to ensure their demise. It won't happen without a lot of bloodshed, but it will happen.

Trust me, the people that advocated for this war never gave a shit about the Iraqi people in the first place, and the war's detractors need to come to terms with just how bad the situation has become. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, are going to die. Sorry, that's the bottom line whether we stay or go. Civil Wars only end when on side loses, and the American occupation of Iraq will only delay that resolution.

Much missed was this tidbit from David Ignatius' Washington Post column that appeared on Wednesday, May the 9th. In the context of U.S. - Saudi relations, Ignatius wrote:

The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 5/10/2007 05:32:00 PM