Oh, I Wish...

Carpetbagger (channeling Yglesias) is certainly right to suggest that Rumsfeld lost it in his fit of table-pounding. But he segues from there to “most voters agree with the Dems that we should get out of Iraq” (I quote myself).

He may be right in fact but it sidesteps the issue. From the fact that the GOP has screwed up in Iraq, it does not follow that we can walk away. Indeed, a large part of the calamity is precisely that we cannot walk away: that the Frat Boy has created a mess that the rest of us will be unraveling for the rest of our lives.

I must say I don’t profess to hold any glib answers here. But the defect with “get out” is that it is simply not possible. We can, of course, pack the troops up and send them back to Fort Hood, or wherever. But that doesn’t mean we are “out.” It’s a small world and one way or another, we remain entangled. The useful debate is: okay, so we ship the troops home, then what? Can we in fact expect a Shi’ite takeover of Iraq? Can we live with that? Can we expect a Shi’ite-Sunni conflagration? Can we live with that? Can we expect a Turko-Iranian takeover of Kurdistan? Are we ready to live with that? And are we ready to live with the consequences that each of these may bring in turn?

I hope it is obvious that these questions are rhetorical. One way or another, the Middle East will set off reverberations to which we will have to respond (and a good many of them will be more difficult or intractable as a result of what we have done since 2003). How will we respond to them? This is the debate that we must have now, as much (or even more) if we "go home" as if we don't.

Cut and run? Oh, I wish…

Fn: For a far more subtle exploration of the implications of withdrawal, see Abu Aardvark.