The Consequences of Withdrawal

I hope the people who count are reading this article:

The case for adding troops in Iraq -- and keeping them there -- rests on one basic assumption: As bad as things are now, they would become catastrophic if the United States leaves....

Not everyone is convinced. Some analysts say the apocalyptic scenarios of U.S. withdrawal mirror arguments the administration and many others made for the U.S. invasion in 2003....

"If we get run off, there's no reason to say it would be a positive thing, OK?" said retired Gen. William Nash, U.S. commander in Bosnia from 1995 to 1997. "But just think of the dire predictions that were made in 1975 when the helicopters were leaving the embassy grounds of Saigon and everybody thinking that the dominoes would begin to fall. Lo and behold, the dominoes not only didn't fall, but a number of the regional actors started taking some responsibilities for some things."

....Terrible things cannot be ruled out, said Michael Mandelbaum, head of the foreign policy program at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies. "But the relevant question for American foreign policy is, would they be terrible for us? Would we be worse off than we are now? And I don't think that goes without saying."

Many of the dark scenarios sketched as future prospects already exist, even critics of a withdrawal readily acknowledge....

But there is no reason to automatically assume, many experts said, that the situation will improve if U.S. troops stay -- or get worse if they leave.

Read the whole thing for more detailed (and fairly persuasive) analysis.

Make no mistake: withdrawal will have negative consequences. The question is whether those consequences will be worse than the consequences of staying.

Things have gotten so bad now that the only way the dead-enders can justify staying in Iraq (much less escalating the conflict) is to spin outrageously apocalyptic scenarios--scenarios that don't stand up to rational scrutiny. It's good to see someone in the press applying that sort of scrutiny; we haven't seen much of it up to now.

[That's all, folks]