The Belgravia Dispatch: Hold Forever, or Gradually Fold?: Make no mistake. Kenny Rogers aside, there are hugely serious stakes at play here. But the Iraq mission, per any reasonably broad-based assessment, has been lost. So I'm in damage control mode, not "victory" mode. Maybe I'm just a defeatist coward, however, and time spent with stolid burghers (say, the Kagan clan) might toughen me up. Or instead, perhaps, I'm grappling with reality rather than fantasy. Who knows?
But the point here is that, regardless of one's view, we should begin better gauging what the impact of a U.S. withdrawal 12-24 months out is likely to be, as it's increasingly likely given political trend-lines. Some massive al-Qaeda safe haven? I'd bet smaller than the one in Pakistan, frankly, when not being decimated by Shi'a killing squads. Genocide against more moderate Sunnis on an epic scale? Certainly odious ethnic cleansing in mixed population centers like Baghdad would pick up if the U.S. vacated such neighborhoods precipitously, but are we going to stay there so long, perhaps decades, that the scars of this conflict will have faded so that such revanchist urges will have simply vanished, wholly disappeared? Is Iraq really Korea all over again, a decades long commitment? Somehow, I doubt it, for a variety of reasons. And, last, a risk of regionalization of the conflict? Turkey may well come in whether or not U.S. forces are there, and I'm hard pressed to see a proxy Saudi-Iranian conflict actually leading to those two countries openly coming to direct blows.
In other words, if you believe, as I do, that the surge can only cause, at very best, short-term improvements to localized security conditions, rather than significantly impact the future direction of Iraqi politics, or materially mitigate sectarian hatreds, so as to convincingly help sketch out a new, long-term destiny for Iraq--one must likely conclude American soldiers are currently dying mostly in vain. Further, and (somewhat) relatedly, if you believe the ramifications of a gradual withdrawal aren't as horrific as many claim, you start thinking, to put it in the vernacular, that's it's time to fold 'em, rather than hold 'em, even if gradually over a year or two. That's, more or less, where we're at, at least in B.D's view. Let's start focusing intelligent policy-making energy on how best to accomplish an orderly withdrawal (hint: regional diplomacy with Iran and Syria are part of the puzzle...), rather than pursue 'hail-mary', chimerical visions of "victory" capital V.
Put differently, can Petraeus' men (even backed up by Ryan Crocker's Embassy) calibrate a balanced re-Baathification effort, or solve the competing claims to Kirkuk, or persuasively manage the tensions between the PKK and Turkey, or referee varied Shi'a factions fighting for hegemony in southern Iraq, or hammer out oil revenue sharing protocols, and so on? Oh, you say, be fair, don't erect cheap straw-men, these men are only meant to provide better security so as then to allow for better conditions for such compromises to take root, rather than creating them themselves. But these necessary conciliations and power-sharing arrangements will play out over decades, and we are increasingly but a passing diversion, wouldn't you say? We can't "win", per se, so shouldn't we think about how best to mitigate our losses, trying to preserve our remaining precious resources in blood and treasure now five years into a conflict that we blundered into with abject recklessness?
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