A reader sums it up pretty well, I think:
Sorting through your blog entries and the readers’ emails you’ve posted yields the following five Iraq options:
(1) If we pull out now, it will be a disaster.
(2) If we keep going indefinitely the way we’re going now, it will be a disaster.
(3) If we keep going until January 2009 the way we’re going now, the new President will have no choice but to pull out quickly, which will be a disaster.
(4) Have faith that this administration will be more competent from now to January 2009 than it has been so far.
Andrew, I am through putting any faith in this administration. No significant policy they have advanced has turned out like they said it would – the budget, the environment, the cost of Medicare D, torture, WMD, Saddam-Al Qaeda, rebuilding Afghanistan, funding No Child Left Behind, global warming (remember Christine Todd Whitman promising the EPA under Bush would do something about it?), etc. ad nauseam. Have they not practically eliminated funding for civilian rebuilding in Iraq? (Gotta have that estate tax cut.)
How is the military supposed to maintain its present deployment levels for two and a half more years? Stop-loss orders?
One more option:
(5) Have faith that the new Iraqi government will be able to make up for the deficiencies of the Bush administration, if it continues to receive Bush administation help.
Is this faith justified? This seems to me where our inquiry must focus. I confess I don’t have enough information to give a reasonable answer, though the reports of rampant corruption and atrocities by people in police and army uniforms are ominous. But we must realize that, if we stay, it’s because we have confidence in the new Iraqi government. If we don’t have that confidence, we should get out now. We have asked far too much of our military already. If we are to continue stop-loss for two and a half more years, we better have a damn good reason. Faith in the Bush administration is nowhere near good enough.
Agreed. Hence my persistent attention to developments in Baghdad. But if we do pull out too soon, and Maliki is too weak to survive, we will have to deal with the Jihadist-riddled failed state that may emerge (and already has emerged in an embryonic form) in Iraq. Those forces will not decide to leave us alone because we have left. if anything, the reverse is true. They will claim victory and press the war further onto our shores and elsewhere. The one thing we have to keep in mind is that, however screwed up the Iraq policy has become, the enemy has not gone away. Withdrawal from Iraq would not mean that this existential struggle is over. It would mean that the enemy has been strengthened and ready to take the war against the West (and "heretical" Islam) to a more lethal stage.
The Dish 